were the chief people near the Greek and Roman colonies in Syria and Mesopotamia. Classical writers use the term both in its local and general sense. The Arabs to-day occupy, besides Arabia, a part of Mesopotamia, the western shores of the Red Sea, the eastern coast of the Persian Gulf and the north of Africa. The finest type of the race is found in south Arabia among the Ariba Arabs, among the mountaineers of Hadramut and Yemen and among the Bedouin tribes roaming over the interior of central and northern Arabia. The Arabs of the coasts and those of Mesopotamia are hybrids, showing Turkish, Negroid and Hamitic crossings. The people of Syria and Palestine are hybrids of Arab, Phoenician and Jewish descent. The theory that early Arab settlements were made on the east coast of Africa as far as Sofala south of the Zambezi, is without foundation; the earliest Arab settlement on the east coast of Africa that can be proved is Magadoxo (Mukdishu) in the 10th century, and the ruined cities of Mashonaland, once supposed to be the remains of Arab settlements, are now known to be of medieval African origin. On the East African coast-lands Arab influence is still considerable. Traces of the Arab type are met with in Asia Minor, the Caucasus, western Persia and India, while the influence of the Arab language and civilization is found in Europe (Malta and Spain), China and Central Asia.
The Arabs are at once the most ancient as they in many ways are the purest surviving type of the true Semite. Certainly the inhabitants of Yemen are not, and in historic times never were, pure Semites. Somali and other elements, generally described under the collective racial name Ethnology.of Hamitic, are clearly traceable; but the inland Arabs still present the nearest approach to the primitive Semitic type. The origin of the Arab race can only be a matter of conjecture. From the remotest historic times it has been divided into two branches, which from their geographical position it is simplest to call the North Arabians and the South Arabians. Arabic and Jewish tradition trace the descent of the latter from Joktan (Arabic Kahtan) son of Heber, of the former from Ishmael. The South Arabians—the older branch—were settled in the south-western part of the peninsula centuries before the uprise of the Ishmaelites. These latter include not only Ishmael’s direct descendants through the twelve princes (Gen. xxv. 16), but the Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites, Midianites and other tribes. This ancient and undoubted division of the Arab race—roughly represented to-day by the universally adopted classification into Arabs proper and Bedouin Arabs (see Bedouins)—has caused much dispute among ethnologists. All authorities agree in declaring the race to be Semitic in the broadest ethnological signification of that term, but some thought they saw in this division of the race an indication of a dual origin. They asserted that the purer branch of the Arab family was represented by the sedentary Arabs who were of Hamitic (Biblical Cushite), i.e. African ancestry, and that the nomad Arabs were Arabs only by adoption, and were nearer akin to the true Semite as sons of Ishmael. Many arguments were adduced in support of this theory, (1) The unquestioned division in remote historic times of the Arab race, and the immemorial hostility between the two branches. (2) The concurrence of pre-Islamitic literature and records in representing the first settlement of the “pure” Arab as made in the extreme south-western part of the peninsula, near Aden. (3) The use of Himyar, “dusky” or “red” (suggesting African affinities), as the name sometimes for the ruling class, sometimes for the entire people. (4) The African affinities of the Himyaritic language. (5) The resemblance of the grammar of the Arabic now spoken by the “pure” Arabs, where it differs from that of the North, to the Abyssinian grammar. (6) The marked resemblance of the pre-Islamitic institutions of Yemen and its allied provinces—its monarchies, courts, armies and serfs—to the historical Africo-Egyptian type and even to modern Abyssinia. (7) The physique of the “pure” Arab, the shape and size of the head, the slenderness of the lower limbs, all suggesting an African rather than an Asiatic origin. (8) The habits of the people, viz. their sedentary rather than nomad occupations, their fondness for village life, for dancing, music and society, their cultivation of the soil, having more in common with African life than with that of the western Asiatic continent. (9) The extreme facility of marriage which exists in all classes of the southern Arabs with the African races, the fecundity of such unions and the slightness or even total absence of any caste feeling between the dusky “pure” Arab and the still darker African, pointing to a community of origin. And further arguments were found in the characteristics of the Bedouins, their pastoral and nomad tendencies; the peculiarities of their idiom allied to the Hebrew; their strong clan feeling, their continued resistance to anything like regal power or centralized organization.
Such, briefly, were the more important arguments; but latterly ethnologists are inclined to agree that there is little really to be said for the African ancestry theory and that the Arab race had its beginning in the deserts of south Arabia, that in short the true Arabs are aborigines.
Mahommedans call the centuries before the Prophet’s birth waqt-el jahilīya, “the time of ignorance,” but the fact is that the Arab world has in some respects never since reached so high a level as it had in those days which it suits Moslems to paint in dreary colours. Writing was a fine art and poetry flourished. Eloquence was an accomplishment all strove to acquire, and each year there were assemblies, lasting sometimes a month, which were devoted to contests of skill among the orators and poets, to listen to whose friendly rivalry tribesmen journeyed long distances. Last, that surest index of a people’s civilization—the treatment of women—contrasted very favourably with their position under the Koran. Women had rights and were respected. The veil and the harem system were unknown before Mahomet. According to Nöldeke the Nabataean inscriptions and coins show that women held a high social position in northern Arabia, owning large estates and trading independently. Polyandry and polygamy, it is true, were practised, but the right of divorce belonged to the woman as well as the man. Two kinds of marriage were celebrated. One was a purely personal contract, with no witnesses, the wife not leaving her home or passing under marital authority. The other was a formal marriage, the woman becoming subject to her husband by purchase or capture. Even captive women were not kept in slavery. Arabic wealth and culture had indeed thus early reached a stage which justified Professor Robertson Smith in writing, “In this period the name of Arab was associated to Western writers with ideas of effeminate indolence and peaceful opulence . . . the golden age of Yemen.” But long before Mahomet’s time this early Arab predominance was at an end, possibly due in great measure to the loss of the caravan trade through the increase of shipping. The abandonment of great cities and the ruin of many tribes contributed to the apparent nationalization of the Arab peoples. Though the traditional jealousy and hostility of the two branches, the Yemenites and Maadites or Ishmaelites, remained, the Arab world had attained by the levelling process of common misfortune the superficial unity it presents to-day. The nation thus formed, never a nation in the strict sense of the word, was distinctively and thoroughly Semitic in character and language, and has remained unchanged to the present day. The sporadic brilliancy of the ancient Arab kingdoms gave place to a social and political lethargy, the continuation of which for many centuries made the uprise of Saracenic empires seem a miracle to a world ignorant of the Arab past. The Arab race up to Mahomet’s day had been in the main pagan. Monotheism, if it ever prevailed, early gave place to sun and star worship, or simple idolatry. Professor Robertson Smith suggests that totemism was the earliest form of Arabian idolatry, and that each tribe had its sacred animal. This he supports by the fact that some tribal names were derived from those of animals, and that animal-worship was not unknown in Arabia. What seems certain is that Arab religion was of a complex hybrid nature, not much to be wondered at when one remembers that Arabia was the asylum of many religious refugees, Zoroastrians, Jews,
