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VIII.] recently brought to light out of the Arabic literature, claiming to be versions of Nabatean works of a very high antiquity: but they are generally regarded as literary impostures, containing only a scanty, if an appreciable, element of what is genuine and ancient. In the practices and traditions of the Mendaites and Sabians are also seen traces of an indigenous Chaldean culture.

The oldest monuments belonging to the southern or Arabian branch of Semitic speech are the inscriptions discovered in the south-western corner of the great peninsula. They represent a language very different from the classical Arabic, as the character and civilization of the Sabeans and Himyarites, from whom they come, appear to have been very unlike those of the Arabs of the desert. Their exact period is hitherto unknown. Language and civilization have alike been almost wholly supplanted, since the rise of Islamism, by the conquering Arabic, only obscure relics of them being left in the Ehkili and other existing idioms of the south. Most nearly akin with the Himyaritic is the speech of the neighbouring region of Africa, which was unquestionably peopled from southern Arabia, by emigration across the Red Sea. The ancient tongue of Abyssinia, the Ethiopic or Geëz, has a literature, wholly of Christian origin and content, coming down from the fourth century of our era: its earliest monument is a version of the Bible. As a cultivated and current language, it has been gradually crowded out of use during the past six centuries by the Amharic, another dialect of the same stock, but of a more corrupt and barbarous character.

Immensely superior in value to all the other Semitic literatures, excepting the Hebrew, although latest in date of them all, is that which is written in the Arabic tongue. Its beginning is nearly contemporaneous with the rise of the Arab people to historical importance; the Koran, collected and written down, about the middle of the seventh century, from the records and traditions of Mohammed's revelations, is its starting-point. Only a few poems, of no great length, belong to an age somewhat earlier; and the inscriptions of Sinai and of Petra, which go back nearly to, or even