Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography Volume I Part 1.djvu/190

 174 ASABIA. with one in the Hiatoriee (Agrippinenses, iv. 28), Aome have condoded that the Ara Ubionim is Cologne. Bat Cologne was not a Roman fbundation, at least under the name of Colonia Agrippinensb, until the time of Caudius, a. . 51 ; and the iden- tity, or proximity, of the Civitas IJhiontm, and of the Ara Ubiomm, in the time of Tiherins, seems to be established by the expressions in the Annals (i. 37, 39) ; and the Ara Ubiomm is near Bonn. [6.L.] ARABIA (^ *Apa€ia: Eth, "AH'; 'Apaffior, Her. ; ''Apa^or, Aesch. Pert. 318, fem. *Apd6t<raaj Tzetx. ; Arabs ; pi. *Apa€9Sf 'ApdSioi^ "ApaSoi, Ar&bes, Ar&bi, Arabii: Adj. 'ApdSios^ *ApaiSiK6st Arabus, Arabios, Arabicus: the A is short, but forms with the A long and the r doubled are also found: native names, Bddd-^l-A raby i. e. Land of the Arabs, Jeei- rat- el- Arab f L e. PemnmUa of the Arabt ; Persian and Turkish, ArabistAn : Arabia)^ the westernmost of the three great peninsulas of Southern Asia, is one of the most imperfectly known r^ons of the civilized world; but yet among the most interesting, as one of the earliest seats of the great Semitic race, who have preserved in it their national cliaracteristics and independence from the days of the patriarchs to the present hour ; and as the source and centre of the most tremendous revolution that ever altered the condition of the nations. I. Names. — The name by which the country was known to the Greeks and Romans, and by which we still denote it, is that in use among the natives. But it is important to observe that the Hebrews, from which we derive our first information, did not use the name Arabia till after the time of Solomon : the reas(m may have been that it was only then that they became acquainted with the count^ properly so called, namely the peninsula itself, S. of a line drawn between the heads of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. The notion that the whole coun- try was assigned to Ishmael and peopled by his de- scendants is a mere misunderstanding of the lan- guage of Scripture. (See below, § IV.) It was only in the N. part of Arabia that the Ishmaelites settled; and it is to that portion of the country, almost exclusively, that we must apply those pas- sages of the Old Testament in which it is spoken of as Eretz-Kedem or Kedemah^ i. e. Land of the East, and its people as the Beni-Kedemy i. e. Sons of the East; Uie regicxi, namely, immediicitely East of Palestine (Gen. xxr. 6; Judges, vi. 3 ; Jobj i. 3; 1 Kings iv. 30; Isaiah, xi. 14: comp. ^ dyaroKii, Matt. ii. 1). When the term Ziscfem seems to refer to parts of the peninsula more to the S., the natural explanation b that its use was extended indefinitely to regions adjoining those to which it was at first applied. The word Arab, which first occurs after the time of Solomon, is also applied to only a small portion of the country. Like such names as Moab, £dom, and others, it is used both as the name of the coun- try and as the collective name of the people, who were called individually Arabi, and in later Hebrew Arbiy ^LArbim and Arbiim. Those denoted by it are the wandering tribes of the N. deserts and the commercial people along the N. part of the E. shore of the Red Sea (2 Chron. ix. 14, xvii. 11, xxi. 16, xxii. 1, xxvi.7; Isaiah, xiii.20, xxi. 13; Jer. iii. 2, XXV. 24; Ezek. xxvii. 21 ; Neh. ii. 19, iv. 7). At what time the name was extended to the wholo peninsula is uncertain. As to the origin of the word Amh, various opinions have been broached. The common native tiaditiwi ARABIA. deduces it from Yarab, the son of Joktan, the an- cestor of the race. The Ute Professor Bosea derived it from the verbal root yaraba (Heb. araf).), to tet or go down {as the sun), with reference to the pod. tion of Arabia to the W. of the Euphrates and th« earliest abodes of the Semitic race. Others seek its origin in arabah, a desert, the name actually em- ployed, in several passages of the Old Testament, to denote the region £. of the Jordan and Dead Sea, as lar S. as the Aelanitic or £. head of the Bed Sea; in fact the original Arabia, an important part of which district, namely the valley extending from tie Dead Sea to the Aelanitic Gulf, bears to this day the name of Wadg-el-Arabah. The Greeks received the name firom the Eastern nations ; and invented, according to their practice of personifying in such cases, an Arabia, wife of Aegyptus. (Apollod. ii. 1. § 5.) II. Situation, Boundaries, Extent, and Dtci- sions. — The peninsula of Arabia, in the stricter sense of the word, lies between 12^ and 30^ N. lat., and between 82° and 59^ £. long. It is partly within and partly without the tropics; being divided into two almost equal parts by the Tropic of Cancer, which passes through the city of Muscat, about 1° N. of the £. promontory, and on the W. nearly half way between Mecca and Medina. It projects into the sea between Africa and the rest of Asia, in a sort of hatchet shape, b«ng bounded on the W. by the Arabicus ^us (^Bed Sea'), as far as its southernmost point, where the narrow strait of Bab-el-Manddf scarcely cuts it off from Africa; on the S. and SE. by the Sinus Paragon ((7W/o/ Oman), and Erythraeum Mare {Indian Ocean)-, and on the NE. by the Pendens Sinus {Persian Gulf). On the N. it is connected with the conti- nent of Asia by the Isthmus, extending for about 800 miles across from the mouth of the Tigris at the head of the Persian Gulf to the NW. extremity of the Red Sea, at the head of the Sinus Aelaniti- cus ((r. of Akabah). A line drawn across this Isthmus, and coincidmg almost exactly with the parallel of 30° N. lat., would represent very nearly the northern boundary, as at present defined, and as often understood in ancient times; but, if Ubed to represent the view of the ancient writers in general, it would be a limit altogether arbitrary, and often entirely false. From the very nature of the country, the wandering tribes of K. Arabia, the children of the Desert, always did, as they do to this day, roam over that triangular extension of their deserts which runs up northwards betweoi Syria and the Eu- phrates, as a region which no other people has ever disputed with them, though it has often been as- »gned to Syria by gec^raphers, both ancient and modem, including the Arabs themselves. Generally, the ancient geographers followed nature and fact in assigning the greater part of this desert to Arabia; the N. limits of which were roughly determined by the presence of Palmyra, which, with the surround- ing country, from Antilibanus to the Euphrates, »s far S. on the river as Thapsacus at least, was always reckoned a part of Syria. The peninsula between the two heads of the Red Sea was also reckoned a part of Arabia. Hence the boundary of Arabia, on the land side, may be drawn pretty much as follow?: from the head of the Gulf of Heroopolis ((?. of Suez), an imaginary and somewhat indeterminate line, run- ning NE. across the desert Isthmus of Suez to near the mouth of the " river of Egypt" (the brook El- jirwA), divided Arabia from Egypt: Uience, tumii.g