From the period of which I am speaking, a lapse of nearly two hundred years occurs before we again find the Axomites noticed, when, from the complete command they had gained in the Red Sea, they began to take a lead in the general scale of politics, which makes them the subject of repeated mention both in the Greek Arabian authors, whose accounts in general are extremely consistent, though, from the variation in the names and other obscure passages, much difficulty has hitherto been experienced in reconciling them to each other. At length, however, from a close comparison of the narratives in different authors, I have been enabled to establish two points, in which the Byzantine historians agree so precisely with the statements in the native chronicles, that it in a great measure removes the obscurity which has hitherto attended the subject; a circumstance which appears to me of considerable importance to general history, as connected with the Roman, Persian, and Arabian transactions of this period.[1]
The points to which I allude are "the arrival of some holy men from Egypt, who came to settle the faith, and the expedition of one of the Abyssinian monarchs against Dunowas, a Jewish king who had persecuted the Christian traders in Arabia." The former event has always hitherto, without any satisfactory reason, been supposed to have occurred within the years 426-80;[2] and the latter has been attributed to the Emperor Caleb,[3] who must have reigned as late as 570—whereas it now appears that the two events were intimately connected together, and that the conquest of Arabia took place prior to the arrival of the holy men from Egypt.
For the purpose of illustrating these facts, I shall lay before the reader the separate accounts of these transac-
- ↑ Gibbon himself remarks, after giving an account of these affairs in his history, "this narrative of obscure and remote events is not foreign to the decline and fall of the Roman empire. If a Christian power had been maintained in Arabia, Mahomet must have been crushed in his cradle, and Abyssinia would have prevented a revolution which has changed the civil and religious state of the world."
- ↑ Vide Tellez; p. 91. Geddes' Church History of Ethiopia, p. 14, and Ludolfi Comment. p. 283.
- ↑ Vide the same author, Ludolf fixes the date of Caleb's reign at 522.—Lib. II. c. 4. Geddes at about 530, p. 15.—and Murray at 511, p. 438, Vol. VII, of Bruce.
