Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/785

Rh whose s plied on the. The other Biblical books do not mention the Sabæans except incidentally, in to their  in  and s,  and, , , and costly  (Jer. vi. 20; Ezek. xxvii. 15, 20, 22 sq.; Isa. lx. 6; Job vi. 19). These passages attest the wealth and importance of Saba from the s of  to those of. When the prologue to Job speaks of ing Sabæans (and ) on the northern skirts of, these may be either or s, which, like the old n and  rs, combined on occasion  with. The prologue may not be ; but it is to be presumed that it deals with possibilities, and is good  thus far. The picture of the Sabæan is confirmed and supplemented by the n inscriptions. tells us that,, and (=, Gen. xxv. 4 and Isa. lx. 6) paid him  of , , and much. Similarly  in his Annals mentions the  of,  of , and of  of the land of ,  and fragrant s,  and s. The earliest of the Sabæans and other South-Arabian s are of the  Eratosthenes (–) in Strabo (xv. 4, 2) says that the extreme south of, over against , is inhabited by four great ,—the Minæans (Μειναῖοι, Mηναῖοι; Ma‘in of the inscriptions) on the , whose chief  is ; next to them the Sabæans, whose capital is  (Mariab of the inscriptions); then the Catabanes (Ḳatabán of the inscriptions), near the Straits of Báb-al-Mandeb, the seat of whose  is ; fourthly, and farthest east, the people of Ḥaḍramaut (Chatramotitæ), with their. The Catabanes produce and Ḥaḍramaut, and there is a  in these and other  with  who make the journey from Ælana (, on the ) to Minæa in seventy ; the Gabæans (the Gaba’án of the inscriptions, Pliny’s Gebanitæ) take forty  to go to Ḥaḍramaut. This short but important and well-informed notice is followed a little later by that of Agatharchides, who speaks in glowing terms of the wealth and greatness of the Sabæans, but seems to have less exact information than Eratosthenes. He knows only the Sabæans and thinks that Saba is the of their capital. He mentions, however, the “happy s” beyond the, the station of the n (§103). Artemidorus, quoted by Strabo, gives a similar account of the Sabæans and their capital , of their wealth and , adding the characteristic feature that each receives the wares and passes them on to its neighbours as far as  and. The accounts of the wealth of the Sabæans brought back by rs and travellers excited the cupidity of, and entrusted with an expedition to South Arabia, of which we have an authentic account in Strabo (xvi. 4, 22). He hoped for assistance from the friendly ; but, as they owed everything to their position as middlemen for the South-Arabian, which a direct communication between  and the Sabæans would have ruined, their  , who did not dare openly to refuse help, sought to frustrate the ’s scheme by craft. Instead of showing the the  route, he induced them to  from  to, and then led them by a circuitous way through less regions, so that they reached South Arabia too much weakened to effect anything. But the expedition brought back a considerable knowledge of the and its products, and the  leader seems to have perceived that the best entrance to South Arabia was from the havens on the. So at least we may conclude when, a hundred later (, as Dillmann has shown), in the Periplus of an anonymous contemporary of Pliny (§23) we read that Charibael of, “the legitimate  of two , the  and Sabæans,” maintained friendly relations with  by frequent  and gifts. Pliny’s account of Yemen, too, must be largely drawn from the expedition of, though he also used of travellers to , like the Periplus Maris Erythræi just quoted. improvements, and the discovery that the south-west gave sure  at certain, increased the connexion of the West with South Arabia, but also wrought such a change in the  as involved a revolution in the state of that. The hegemony of the Sabæans now yields to that of a new, the Homerites or Himyar, and the henceforth bears the  “ of the Himyarites and Sabæans.”  expeditions from  and  to the n s brought back the information on which Claudius Ptolemy constructed his , which still surprises us by its wealth of  s. Sabæan in  have been already mentioned. That was  South Arabia is proved by  and ; but the difference between the two s is such as to imply that the settlement was very early and that there were many centuries of separation, during which the  were exposed to foreign influences. New, however, seem to have followed from time to time, and, according to the Periplus (§16), some parts of the n were under the  of the Sabæan s as late as the Sabæo-Himyaritic period; the district of  was held for the Sabæan  by the  of  (Ma‘áfir), and was exploited by a Sabæan. Naturally difficulties would arise between and the Sabæan power. In the inscription of  the  of  claims to have made  in  from  to the land of the Sabæan. And the were not without successes, for on the  inscription of  (c. the )  calls himself “ of the ites, the Homerites, and, and of the ns, Sabæans, and .” More serious was the conflict under  (Dhú-Nuwás of the ) in the ; it ended in the overthrow of the Himyarite  and the subjugation of Yemen, which was governed by a  of the ite , till (about ) the conquerors were overthrown by a small band of n adventurers (see ,  ). With the exception of what the South-Arabian Hamdání relates of his own observation or from authentic tradition, the accounts of South Arabia and Sabæa are of little worth. The great event they dwell on is the bursting of the of, which led to the  northwards of the Yemenite s. We may be sure that this event was not the cause but the consequence of the decline of the. When the inland fell away and the traffic of the  s took the  route, the ancient metropolis and the numerous inland emporia came to ruin, while the many  in the north were broken up and their population dispersed. To this the Koran alludes in its style, when it speaks (xxxiv. 17) of well-known  which  appointed as  stations between the Sabæans and the  He had blessed ( and ), and which He destroyed because of their s.

