Page:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu/115

 should smell the pot. The hungry gnawing of the Arab’s stomach is lessened by the coffee-cup and the ceaseless ‘tobacco-drinking’ from the nomad’s precious pipe.” (Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, p.157.)

“Thou shalt call his name Ishmael; because the Lord hath heard thy affliction. And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.” (Gen. XVI, 11–12.)

20. Carnaites.—These wild tribes are called in the text Canraites, which cannot be identified with any other contemporary record. Some commentators would change the name to Cassanites; and Fabricius, following Sprenger, substitutes Cananites. Glaser’s suggestion is certainly preferable (Skizze, 165–6). He thinks that the n and r should be reversed, making Carnaites; Karna being one of the northern settlements of the ancient kingdom of the Minaeans, to which the neighboring Beduin tribes were nominally subject. Pliny (VI, 32) and Ptolemy both mention this place as a city of the Minaeans; whom Pliny describes as the oldest commercial people in Arabia, having a monopoly in the trade in myrrh and frankincense, through their control of the caravan-routes from the producing regions. He refers doubtfully to their legend of the relationship of the Minaeans and Rhadamaeans to Minos of Crete and his brother Rhadamanthus. Pliny need not have doubted, and is to be thanked for preserving this evidence of early Arabian trade in the Mediterranean. Ptolemy adds his testimony to the wide extent of this early Arabian trade, when he describes the “people called Rhamnae who dwelt in the extreme east near the banks of the Purali, and who planted their capital at a place called Rhambacia.” From Crete to the borders of India was no mean sphere of activity. Compare Ezekiel XXVII, 22: “The merchants of Sheba and Raamah, they were thy merchants: they occupied in thy fairs with chief of all spices, and with all precious stones, and gold.”

Strabo also (XVI, III, 1) describes “the Minaei in the part toward the Red Sea, whose largest city is Carna; next to them are the Sabaeans, whose chief city is Mariaba.”

At the time of the Periplus the term “Minaean” was no longer limited to the southern traders, but had been exteneded to include the nomadic Ishmaelites over whom their settlements along the caravan-routes exerted a varying measure of authority.

The Minaean kingdom had long since lost its identity, having been conquered by the Sabaeans. When Saba fell before Himyar its allegiance was transferred likewise; but we may assume that at the