The reclaimed provinces of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt with their predominating Monophysitic population again brought to the fore the painful and highly significant question of the government's attitude toward the Monophysites. We must also keep in mind that the lasting and persistent struggle of Heraclius with the Persians, in spite of the brilliant final outcome, was bound to weaken temporarily the military power of the Byzantine Empire because of the heavy losses in man-power and the exceedingly heavy financial strain. But the Empire did not get the much-needed period of rest because, soon after the end of the Persian war, there appeared a formidable menace, entirely unexpected and at first not fully appreciated: the Arabs, who opened up a new era in the world's history by their attacks upon the Byzantine Empire and Persia.

Gibbon speaks of this advance of the Arabs in the following manner: "While the Emperor triumphed at Constantinople or Jerusalem, an obscure town on the confines of Syria was pillaged by the Saracens, and they cut in pieces some troops who advanced to its relief; an ordinary and trifling occurrence, had it not been the prelude of a mighty revolution. These robbers were the apostles of Mahomet; their fanatic valor had emerged from the desert; and in the last eight years of his reign Heraclius lost to the Arabs the same provinces which he had rescued from the Persians."12

The Arabs. Muhammed and Islam.-Long before the Christian era the Arabs, a people of Semitic origin, occupied the Arabian peninsula and the Syrian desert which lies to the north of it and stretches as far as the Euphrates River. The peninsula of Arabia, embracing an area equal to approximately one-fourth of Europe, is surrounded by the Persian Gulf on the east, the Indian Ocean on the south, and the Red Sea on the west; in the north it runs gradually into the Syrian desert. Historically, the best-known provinces of the peninsula were (1) Nedjd, on the central plateau; (2) Yemen, or Fortunate Arabia, in the southwest of the peninsula; and (3) Hidjaz, the narrow strip along the coast of the Red Sea, extending from the north of the peninsula to Yemen. The arid land was not everywhere habitable, and the Arabs, who were a nomadic peo

12 Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. xlvi (near the end).

ple, occupied chiefly central and northern Arabia. The Bedouins considered themselves the pure and genuine representatives of the Arabian race and the true bearers of personal dignity and valor. Besides these nomadic Bedouins there e were also the settled inhabitants of the few cities and hamlets, whom the Bedouins treated with arrogance and even with contempt.

The most advanced province of the Arabian peninsula was Yemen. Here had flourished in remote pre-Christian times the kingdom of the Sabaeans (Saba), connected with the legend of the Queen of Saba, who presumably had visited King Solomon. At the end of the second century B.C. this kingdom became the kingdom of the Sabaeans-Himyarites. Commerce and navigation were the principal occupations of its population. Evidence of the might and pros- / perity of this kingdom is found in numerous surviving ruins and inscriptions.

The Roman Empire was inevitably bound to come into collision with the Arabian tribes on its eastern Syrian border, and was forced to adopt measures for the protection of the latter. For this purpose the Roman emperors erected a line of border fortifications, the socalled Syrian limes which resembled, on a small scale, of course, the famous limes romanus on the Danubian border, erected for the defense against the Germanic attacks. Some ruins of the principal Roman fortifications along the Syrian border have survived until our own times.

As early as the second century B.C. independent states began to form among the Arabs of Syria. They were strongly influenced by the Aramean and Greek civilizations; hence they are sometimes referred to as the Arabo-Aramean Hellenistic kingdoms. Among the cities, Petra became particularly wealthy and important because of its advantageous position at the crossing of great commercial routes. The magnificent ruins of this city attract the attention of historians and archeologists even today.

From a cultural and political point of view the most important of all Syrian-Arabic kingdoms in the epoch of the Roman Empire was Palmyra, whose hellenistically educated and valiant queen, Zenobia, as the Roman and Greek writers call her, formed a large state in the second half of the third century A.D. by conquering

Egypt and the major part of Asia Minor. According to B. A. Turaev,13 this was the first manifestation of the reaction of the East and the first breaking up of the Empire into two parts, eastern and western. The Emperor Aurelian restored the unity of the Empire, and in the year 273 the conquered queen had to follow the triumphal chariot of the conquerer when he entered Rome. The rebellious Palmyra was subjected to destruction. Its imposing ruins, however, just as those of Petra, still attract scholars and tourists. The famous epigraphic monument of Palmyra, the tariff of Palmyra, engraved on a stone of enormous size and containing very valuable information about the trade and finance of the city, has been transferred to Russia and is now kept at the Hermitage in Petrograd (Leningrad).

Two Arabian dynasties stand out very distinctly during the Byzantine period. One, the dynasty of the Ghassanids in Syria, Monophysitic in its religious tendencies and dependent upon the Byzantine emperors, became particularly powerful in the sixth century under Justinian, when it aided the Byzantine Empire in its military undertakings in the East. This dynasty probably ceased to exist in the early seventh century, when the Persians conquered Syria and Palestine. The second Arabian dynasty, the Lakhmites, centered in the city of Hira on the Euphrates. Because of its vassal relations with the Persian Sassanids it was hostile to the Ghassanids and ceased also at the beginning of the seventh century. In the city of Hira Christianity, in its Nestorian form, had a body of adherents, and even some members of the Lakhmite dynasty accepted it. Both dynasties had to defend the borders of their kingdom: the Ghassanids on the Byzantine side and the Lakhmites on the Persian. Apparently both vassal states disappeared at the beginning of the seventh century, so that at the time of Muhammed's advance there was not a single political organization within the confines of the Arabian peninsula and the Syrian desert which could be called a state. As was pointed out elsewhere, there existed, since the end of the second century B.C., the kingdom of the Sabaeans-Himyarites (Homerites), where Christianity began to spread by the middle of the fourth century A.D. and found a strong opponent in Judaism,

13 B. A. Turaev, History of the Ancient East (2d ed., Petrograd, 1914), II, 373 (in Russian).

which also found many adherents in this kingdom. In the first half of the sixth century the king of the Himyarites (Homerites), who favored the followers of Judaism, began severe persecutions against the southern Arabian Christians. To the aid of the latter came the Christian Abyssinian (Ethiopic) king, who was victorious in the ensuing struggle with the Judaic king. He occupied Yemen and became actively engaged in restoring Christianity to its former height. He notified the Alexandrian patriarch and the Byzantine emperor, Justin I, of his victory over Judaism. The successor of Justin I, Justinian the Great, sent an embassy to Axum, the capital of the Abyssinian kingdom, and to the Homerites, with the aim of getting these distant states interested in his military schemes and commercial projects. These attempts did not lead to any military or trade alliances, but with regard to religious matters Byzantine influence spread during Justinian's reign among the Abyssinians as well as in the land of the Homerites, and both kingdoms asked the Emperor to send them bishops. About the year 570 Yemen was conquered by the Persians.14

Before the time of Muhammed the ancient Arabs lived in tribal organizations. Blood relationship was the only basis for common interests, which were confined almost exclusively to compulsory principles of loyalty, protection, aid, and revenge upon enemies for insults suffered by the tribe. The least occasion sufficed for starting lasting and bloody struggle between tribes. References to these ancient times and customs have been preserved in old Arabic poetry, as well as in prose tradition. Animosity and arrogance were the two predominant elements in the mutual relations of different tribes of ancient Arabia.

The religious conceptions of the ancient Arabs were quite primitive. The tribes had their own gods and sacred objects, such as stones, trees, springs, etc. Through them they aspired to divine the future. In some parts of Arabia the worship of stars prevailed. According to one expert in Arabic antiquity, the ancient Arabs in their religious experiences hardly rose above the feelings of a fe

14 Excerpta e Theophanis, Historia (ed. Bonn., p. 485); see T. Nöldeke, Geschichte der Perser und Araber zur Zeit der Sasaniden (Leyden, 1879), p. 249–50.

tishist before the worshiped object.15 They believed in the existence of friendly, and, more frequently, unfriendly, forces which they called the djinn (demons). Among the Arabs the conception of the higher invisible power of Allah was characterized by vagueness. Prayer as a form of worship was apparently unknown to them, and when they turned to the deity, their invocation was usually an appeal for aid in revenging some injury or injustice suffered from an enemy. Goldziher asserts also that "the surviving pre-Islamic poems do not contain any allusions to a striving toward the divine even on the part of the more sublime souls, and give only slight indications about their attitude to the religious traditions of their people."16

The nomadic life of the Bedouins was naturally unfavorable to the development of distinct permanent places for the performance of religious worship, even of a very primitive form. But there were, besides the Bedouins, the settled inhabitants of cities and hamlets which sprang up and developed along the trade routes, mainly on the caravan road leading from the south to the north, from Yemen to Palestine, Syria, and the Sinaitic peninsula. The richest among the cities along this route was Mecca (Macoraba, in ancient writings), famous long before Muhammed's appearance. Second in importance was the city of Yathrib, the future Medina, situated farther north. These cities were convenient stopping-points for the trade caravans traveling from the north and south. There were many Jews among the merchants of Mecca and Yathrib, as well as among the population of other portions of the peninsula, such as northern Hidjaz and Yemen. From the Romano-Byzantine provinces of Palestine and Syria in the north, and from Abyssinia, through Yemen, in the south, many Christians penetrated into the peninsula. Mecca became the central gathering-point for the mixed population of the peninsula. From remote times there existed in Mecca the sanctuary Kaaba (the Cube) which was originally of a distinctly non-Arabic nature. It was a cube-shaped stone building, about 35 feet high, concealing the main object of worship, the black stone. Tradition claimed that this stone had been sent down from

15 Goldziher, Die Religion des Islams, p. 102 (Die Kultur der Gegenwart, ed. by P. Hinneberg, Die Religionen des Orients [1913], III, 1. 2. Aufl.).

16 Goldziher, p. 102.