inities), as the name sometimes for the ruling class, sometimes for
the entire people. (4) The African affinities of the Himyaritic
language. (5) The resemblance of the grammar of the Arabic now spoken by
the "pure" Arabs, where it differs from that of the North, to the
Abyssinian grammar. (6) The marked resemblance of the pre-Islamitic
institutions of Yemen and its allied provinces-its monarchies, courts,
armies and serfs--to the historical Africo-Egyptian type and even to
modern Abyssinia. (7) The physique of the "pure" Arab, the shape and
size of the head, the slenderness of the lower limbs, all suggesting an
African rather than an Asiatic origin. (8) The habits of the people,
viz. their sedentary rather than nomad occupations, their fondness for
village life, for dancing, music and society, their cultivation of the
soil, having more in common with African life than with that of the
western Asiatic continent. (9) The extreme facility of marriage which
exists in all classes of the southern Arabs with the African races, the
fecundity of such unions and the slightness or even total absence of any
caste feeling between the dusky "pure" Arab and the still darker
African, pointing to a community of origin. And further arguments were
found in the characteristics of the Bedouins, their pastoral and nomad
tendencies; the peculiarities of their idiom allied to the Hebrew; their
strong clan feeling, their continued resistance to anything like regal
power or centralized organization.

Such, briefly, were the more important arguments; but latterly
ethnologists are inclined to agree that there is little really to be
said for the African ancestry theory and that the Arab race had its
beginning in the deserts of south Arabia, that in short the true Arabs
are aborigines.

Mahommedans call the centuries before the Prophet's birth waqt-el
jahiliya, "the time of ignorance," but the fact is that the Arab world
has in some respects never since reached so high a level as it had in
those days which it suits Moslems to paint in dreary colours. Writing
was a fine art and poetry flourished. Eloquence was an accomplishment
all strove to acquire, and each year there were assemblies, lasting
sometimes a month, which were devoted to contests of skill among the
orators and poets, to listen to whose friendly rivalry tribesmen
journeyed long distances. Last, that surest index of a people's
civilization--the treatment of women--contrasted very favour