Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography Volume II.djvu/300

 2S4 JIAKSYABAE. of Leuce Come with El-IIaura, proposed by D'An- ville, to the Mollah of Gossehn and Vincent. In common with D'Auville and Vincent, he finds the town of Ariagrana (which lie writes " la ville des Ne'granes ") in the modern Nedjran, and doubtingly fixes JIarsyabae at Mureh in Yemen. The Manitae of Ptolemy he identifies with the Rhamanitae of Strabo, — suggesting an ingenious correction to Ja- manitae = the people of Yemen (^L'Univers. Arahie, pp. 58, 59). 6. Jomard, one of the highest autho- rities on Arabian geography, has offered a few valu- able remarks on the expedition of Gallus, with a view to determine the line of march. He thinks the name Marsyabae an evident corruption for Mariaba, which he assumes to be " that of the Tank," the capital of the Minaei, now Mareh. Negranes ex- actly corresponds with NeJjrdn or Negrdn, nine days' journey NV. of Mareh. He fixes Leuce Come at Moilah, and Negra or Nera opposite to Coseyr, in the 26th degree of latitude. His argument for de- termining the value of a day's march is ingenious. The whole distance from Mareh to the place indi- cated would be 350 leagues of 25 to a degree. From Mariaba to Negra was 60 days' march : Negran, therefore, which was nine days from Mariaba, is ^ths of the whole march, and Wady Nedjran is 52 leagues NW. of Mareh. The distance of the Seven Wells, eleven days from Negran, = ggths of the march= 1 1 7 leagues from Mariaba : and the same analogy might have been applied to Chaalla and the river Malothas, had Strabo indicated the distances of these two sta- tions. The troops, in order to reach the sea, on their retreat must have traversed theprownceof^«^r, a dis- trict between Yemen and the //efZ;a3(whosegeography has been recently restored to us by JI. Jomard), and one of the elevated plains which separate the moun- tain chain of Yemen from that of the Hedjaz. " The road," he says, " is excellent, and a weak body of troops could defend it against a numerous army." Having thus disposed of the fine followed in the retreat, he briefly considers the advance; — "The country go- verned by Aretas, and the nest mentioned, Ararene, correspond with Thamoiid and Nedjd, and the south- ern part of the latter province approaching Nedjran has always been a well-peopled and cultivated dis- trict. Asca, on the river, and Athrulla, the last- named station before ^Mariaba, cannot be exactly determined, as the distances are not stated ; and the line between Nedjran and Mdreb is still but httle known." (Jomard, ap. Mengin. Histoire de VEgypte, cfc, pp. 383 — 389.) 7. Mr. Forster has investi- gated the march with his usual diligence, and with the partial success and failure that must almo.st necessarily attach to the investigation of so difficult a subject. To take first the three main points, viz., Leuce Come, the point of departure ; JIarsyabae, the extreme limit ; and Nera, the point at which they embarked on their return. He accepts D'Anville's identification of Haura as Leuce Come, thinking the coincidence of name decisive ; Marsyabae he finds in Sabhia, the chief city of the province of Sabie, a dis- trict on the northern confines of Yem^n, 100 miles S. of Beishe, the frontier and key of Yemen ; and Nera, in Yemho, the sea-port of Medina. The line of march on their advance he makes very circuitous, as Strabo intimates ; conducting them first through the heart of Nedjd to the province of El-Aksa on the Persian Guff, and then again through the same pro- vince in a SV. direction to Yemen. On their re- treat, he brings them direct to Nedjran, then due west to the sea, which they coast as far north as MAFvSYABAE. Yemho. To be more particular : he thinks that " a difference in distance in the advance and retreat, commensurate, in some reasonable degree, with the recorded difference of time, i.e. as 3 to 1, must be found ; that the caravan road from Eaura by Me- dina and Kasyni, into the heart of Nedjd, was the line followed by Gallus (the very route, in fact, traversed by Captain Sadlierin 1819 : Transactions of Lit. Sac. of Bombay, vol. x. pp. 449 — 493), and thence by one of the great Nedjd roads into Yemen, the description of which in Burckhardt agrees in many minute particulars with the brief notices of Strabo. He further finds nearly all the towns named by Pliny as taken by the Romans, on this hneof march : Mariaba of the Calingii in Merab, in the NE. extremity of Nedjd, within the province of Ilagar or Bahrein — in the former of which names he finds the Ararena or Agarena of Strabo. Caripeta he identifies, as Gosselin had done, with Cariatain in Nedjd ; but he does not attempt to explain how Pliny could call this the extreme limit of the expe- dition, — " quo longissime processit." The Tamma- cus of Pliny = the Agdami of Ptolemy = the well- known town of Tayf. Magusa (Ptolemy's Magulaba) presents itself in Korn el-Maghsal, a place situated about half-way between Tayf and Nedjran, which last is with him, as with all preceding writers ex- cept Gosselin, the Anagrana of Strabo, the Negra of Pliny. " Labecia is the an.agram, with the shghtest possible inversion, of Al-Beishe ;" and this is called by the northern Bedouins " the key of Yemen" — the only pass, according to Burckhardt, for heavy-laden camels going from Melcka to Yemen, " a very fertile district, extremely rich in date-trees." The river at which the battle with the Arabs was fought is the modern Sancan, '' which, taking its rise in the Hedjaz mountains near Korn el-Maghsal, after a southern course of somewhat more than 100 miles, is lost in the sands of the Tehamah, to the westward of the mountains of Asyr." The Asca of Strabo, the Nesca of Pliny, are " obviously identical with. Sancan, the present name of a town seated on the Sancan river, near its termination in the sands." Athrulla, next mentioned by Strabo, is again Labecia, i. e. Beishe ; and this hypothesis " implies a counter- march," of which there is no hint in the authors. Lastly, " if Amnestus may be supposed to have its representative in ]hn Maan (the Manambis of Pto- lemy), a town about half-way between Beishe and Sabhia, all the cities enumerated by Pliny occur on the route in question." As to the retreat of the army. From Marsyabae to Nedjran, a distance of from 140 to 160 miles, was accomplished in nine days; thence to the Seven Wells, eleven days from Nedjran, brings us to El- Hasha (in Arabic " the Seven "), a place about 1 50 miles due west of Nedjran, and then to Chaalla, the modern Chaulan (according to Forster as well as D'Anville, the chief town of the province of the same name), and thence to Malotha, situated on a river, the same as that crossed on the advance, i.e. the 5o«care. The Malotha of Strabo is plainly identified, by its site, with the Tabala of Burckhardt, a town on the Sancan, at this point, on the caravan road to Hedjaz, a short day's march from El-Hasha. From Malotha to Nera Come, i. e. through the Tehamah, there are two routes described by Burckhardt; one along the coast, in which only one well is found between Djidda and Leyth, — a distance of four days ; another more eastern, somewhat mountainous, yielding plenty of water, five days' journey between the same two