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 the Asabi in Oman, §35, and his grandson (surnamed Abd-es-Shems) is said to have founded the city of Marib, and to have begun its great dam, on which the irrigation of the vicinity depended. The Sabaeans are thus connected with this Saba, a descendant of Jerah, and not with Sheba, son of Joktan, who is referred rather to Central Arabia; whom Glaser and Hommel would make a colony from Yemen, while Weber would reverse the process, having the Sabaeans migrate southward for the conquest of the Minaeans.

According to Arab accounts the dam at Marib was finished by a certain King Zul Karnain, suggesting the primacy of the Minaean dynasty at that time; but from about the 7th century B. C. the Sabaeans were supreme in all southern Arabia, controlling the caravan-routes, and forcing the wild tribes into caravan service. Colonies and resting-stations were established at intervals along the routes. We learn from the Koran (Chap. XXXIV) that the journey was easy between these cities, and travel secure by night or by day; the distances being so short that the heat of the day might be passed in one, and the night in the next, so that provisions need not be carried. The number of such settlements may be inferred from Strabo's statement that the caravans took seventy days between Minaea and Aelana; and all the Greek and Roman writers, from Eratosthenes to Pliny, testify to the value of the trade, the wealth of those who controlled it, and their jealous hindrance of all competition.

The entry of the fleets of the Ptolemies into the Red Sea, and their establishment of colonies along its shores, dealt a hard blow to the caravan-trade. If we sift fact from homily in the same chapter of the Koran, we find that the result was abandonment of many of the caravan-stations, and a consequent increase in the cost of camel-hire and of the provisions which now had to be carried; impoverishment, dispersion and rebellion of the dwellers in the stations, so that finally and a few years later than the Periplus, Marib itself, stripped of its revenues and unable to maintain its public works, was visited with an inundation which carried away its famous reservoir-dam, making the city uninhabitable and forcing the dispersion of its people. Many of them seem to have migrated northward and to have settled in the country southeast of Judaea, founding the kingdom of the Ghassanids, which was for generations a bulwark of the Roman Empire at its eastern boundary.

The great expedition against Sabaea by the Romans under Aelius Gallus, (Strabo, XVI, IV, 22–4; Pliny, VI, 32) never got beyond the valley of the Minaeans; turning back thence, as Vincent surmised