ded colonies in Africa, in the modern Abyssinia, where they
built cities and introduced the culture of their former homes. Like the
Egyptians and the Babylonians, they were a literary people; their
inscriptions are still scattered thickly among the ruins of their towns,
written in the letters of the alphabet which is usually termed
Phoenician. But it is becoming a question whether it was not from south
Arabia that Phoenicia first borrowed it, and whether it would not be
more truthfully called Arabian.

The religion of southern Arabia was highly polytheistic. Each district
and tribe had its special god or gods, and the goddesses were almost as
numerous as the gods. Along with Babylonian culture had come the
adoption of several Babylonian divinities;--Sin, the Moon-god, for
instance, or Atthar, the Ashtoreth of Canaan. How far westward the
worship of Sin was carried may be judged from the fact that Sinai, the
sacred mountain whereon the law of Israel was promulgated, took its name
from that of the old Babylonian god.

In the tenth chapter of Genesis Sheba is one of the sons of Joktan, the
ancestor of the south Arabian tribes. Foremost among them is
Hazarmaveth, the Hadhramaut of to-day; another is Ophir, the port to
which the gold of Africa was brought. But the same chapter also assigns
to Sheba a different origin. It couples him with Dedan, and sees in him
a descendant of Ham, a kinsman of Egypt and Canaan. Both genealogies are
right. They are geographical, not ethnic, and denote, in accordance with
Semitic idiom, the geographical relationships of the races and nations
of the ancient world. Sheba belonged not only to south Arabia but to
northern Arabia as well. The rule of the Sabaean princes extended to the
borders of Egypt and Canaan, and Sheba was the brother of Hazarmaveth
and of Dedan alike. For Dedan was a north Arabian tribe, whose home was
near Tema, and whose name may have had a connection with that sometimes
given by the Babylonians to the whole of the west.

Such, then, was Arabia in the days of the Hebrew writers. The south was
occupied by a cultured population, whose rule, at all events after the
time of Solomon, was acknowledged throughout the peninsula. The people
of the north and the centre differed from this population in both race
and language, though all alike belonged to the same Semitic stock. The
Midianites on the western coast perhaps partook of the characteristics
of both. But the Ishmaelites we