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, but supporting the Parthians against Rome as occasion offered. This conflict of interests was terminated in 105 A. D., when Trajan reduced them to subjection (Dio Cassius, LXVIII, 14). After that time Petra declined; the ship of the desert was blanketed by the ship of the sea; and when the overland trade revived, toward the end of the 2d century, it was Palmyra which reaped the advantage.

19. Malichas.—The mention of this king of the Nabataeans is important in fixing the date of the text. Ordinarily the name might be accepted as a transcription of the Arabic word malik—Hebrew melech, king, which appears in such Hebrew names as “Abimelech” and “Melchizedek;” but according to the writings of Josephus, who as a Jew would have been likely to distinguish between the name and the title, there were kings having that name in what he called the “country of Arabia,” which was certainly the same as that of the Nabataeans. In his Antiquities of the Jews (XIV, 14, 1) he mentions Malchus, King of Arabia, who had befriended Herod and who had loaned him money just before his case was taken up by Mark Antony, and the Roman Senate agreed to make him King of the Jews. This occurred in the year 38 B. C. This same Malchus loaned cavalry to Julius Caesar for his siege of Alexandria (Aulus Hirtius, Bell. Alex., I, i); and subsequently sent auxiliaries to Pacorus, the Parthian emperor, for which Mark Antony compelled him to pay an indemnity.

This Malchus can not, of course, be the one mentioned in the Periplus. But Josephus (Jewish War, III, 4, 2) mentions a King of Arabia, Malchus, who sent a thousand horsemen and five thousand footmen to the assistance of Titus in his attack upon Jerusalem. These events were in the year 70 A. D., and this King Malchus can hardly be other than the Malichas mentioned in text. See also Vogüé, Syrie Central, who quotes inscriptions of this Malichas or Malik, and of his father Aretas Philodemus, or Hareth, a contemporary of Tiberius and Caligula.

19. Small vessels from Arabia.—Strabo (XVI, IV, 24) has the following account of this trade: “Merchandise is conveyed from Leuce Come to Petra, thence to Rhinocolura in Phoenicia near Egypt, and thence to other nations. But at present the greater part is transported by the Nile to Alexandria. It is brought from Arabia and India to Myos Hormus, and is then conveyed on camels to Coptos of the Thebais, situated on a canal of the Nile, and to Alexandria.”

The policy of the Ptolemies, in seeking to free Egypt from commercial dependence on Yemen, and to encourage direct