the settlements of the Greeks round the Ægean Sea. The invasion of the Promised Land from beyond the Jordan by the Beni-Israel, the Children of Israel, was probably but one of many like descents of the Bedouin. The Chaldees, from whose city of Ur on the desert border Abraham migrated along the beaten track into Palestine, were Semites who supplanted the non-Semitic Accadians in the land which became Babylonia; and the Dynasty of the Shepherd Kings in Egypt was also apparently of Semitic origin. So it came about that all the peoples of Arabia—Arabs, Babylonians, Assyrians, Syrians, Phœnicians, and Hebrews—spoke dialects of the same Semitic family of speech. To-day Arabic is the universal tongue from the Taurus to the Gulf of Aden, and from the Persian Mountains to the oases in the Sahara west of the Nile.
The Arabian tableland drops steeply to the sea shores around in all directions save one; north-eastward it shelves gradually down to the depression occupied by the Euphrates and the Persian Gulf. That depression is 1800 miles long, from the gorge by which the Euphrates issues from its source valley in the Armenian Plateau to the Strait of Ormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf; throughout
