Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/277

HISTORY.] ARABIA 257 Expedition prefect of Egypt, undertook a military expedition against Yemen -<Eliu3 itself, with the view of annexing that region, which report enriched Callus. with immense treasures, to the Komaii empire. With an army composed of 10,000 Roman infantry, 500 Jews, and 1000 Naba- theans, he crossed the Red Sea in 210"galleys, and landed at Moilah, or Leuce Come, in 25 3 N. lat., near the modern Yambo. After some delay, the consequence of disease and disorganisation among his troops, he marched southward until he reached the inland district and city of Nejran, on the nearer frontier of Yemen . The town of Nejran he is said to have taken by assault, as well as a few neighbouring places, probably mere villages, of little note. Meanwhile a large force of Arabs had assembled to oppose him, but Callus easily defeated them, and advanced to March itself, then, we may suppose, the capital of Yemen . But the Roman soldiers, unaccustomed to the heat of the tropical climate, and much reduced in numbers, were incapable of laying siege to that town ; and their general found himself thus forced to retreat, and recrossed the sea to Egypt without having effected any permanent settlement on the Arab side. Later attempts made by Roman governors or generals under Trajan and Severus were restricted to the neighbourhood of the Syrian frontier ; and the ruined cities of Bosrah and Petra yet indicate the landmarks of the extreme southerly limits reached by imperial dominion over Arab territory. Lbyssinian More serious, and more lasting in its consequences, was the great nvasion of Abyssinian invasion of Yemen in 529, when Aryat, son or lieutenant Temen. of the king of Abyssinia, landed in Aden with an army of 70,000 men, to avenge his co-religionists, the Christians, who had been cruelly persecuted by Dhow-Nowas, king of Yemen, himself a proselyte to, and an ardent propagator of, the Jewish code. The expedition was successful ; Dhow-Nowas perished ; Christianity was proclaimed ; and for seventy-six years the Ethiopian conquerors retained subject to their rule the southern and richer half of the peninsula. Their king Abraha even advanced, in 569 A. p., the year of the birth of Mahomet, as far as Mecca ; but beneath its walls suffered a repulse, which has been magnified by the Koran and Mahometan tradition into the proportions of a miracle. Persian assistance, furnished by the great Chosroes, ultimately enabled the Arabs under Seyf, son of Yezen, the last direct lineal descendant of the old kings of Sanaa, to liberate their territory from its dusky usurpers, 605 A.D. Era of The 7th centuiy had now commenced, and before long the lahomet. wonderful successes of Mahomet, or, in more correct orthography, Mohammed, 622-632 A.D., while they closed in one great centralis ing effort the era of Arab progress and development within the land, opened a marvellous phase of new activity and almost bound less extension without. The story of the great prophet and of his book, the obstacles he encountered and overcame, his labours, his reverses, his wars, his final and decisive success, belong to the separate article that bears his name. Here it may suffice to state that at his death, 632 A.D., the eleventh year of the Islamitic era of the Hejrah or flight, which he himself had founded, Mahomet left the entire Arab peninsula, with the sole and transient exception of the tribe of Tameem, and a few Yemenite clans, who for a short while preferred the revelations of his rival Moseylemah, the "false prophet" of Nejd, united under one sceptre, and in one creed. Election of After the disputes which might naturally be expected from a Lbu-Bekr. general election and turbulent electors, and which, fomented by the ambitious and intriguing Ali, nephew and son-in-law of the prophet, ran so high between the " Ansar," or chiefs of Medinah, and the "Mohajireen," or those of Mecca, as to threaten the pre mature disruption and extinction of the Islamitic empire, Abu- Bekr, father of Ayeshah, the favourite wife of Mahomet, was chosen to be the great man s caliph, " Khaleefah " is the Arab wovd or successor. His reign lasted only two years ; but it sufficed for the subjugation of the rebel tribes of Nejd and Yemen, the conquest of Damascus, and the commencement of the long career of victory that carried the arms, the language, and the institutions of Arabia over half the old world, from the banks of the Indus to the shores of the Atlantic, and from the burning sands of the mid-African desert to the green vineyards of pleasant France. These events we will now pass in cursory review. all of Syria, distracted by long sedition and the bitter rivalry of ecclesi- )aiuascus. astical sects, fell a first and comparatively easy prey to the hardy invaders. Led by Khaled, the boldest and most talented among the early Mahometan generals, the Arab troops occupied Bosrah, overran the region of Hauran, and advanced against Damascus. The Byzantine army.hurriedly sent by the Greek emperor Heraclius to the relief of the besieged town, was defeated with tremendous slaughter on the plains of Eznadin, where fifty thousand men are said to have fallen on the Christian side alone ; and Khaled, following up his victory, instantly invested the capital of southern Syria. After a seventy days siege, and in spite of the brave defence made by the Christian garrison under the leadership of Thomas the patrician, son-in-law of the emperor himself, Damascus was taken, half by storm, half by capitulation, on the 3d of August, 634 A.D., 13 A.II. ; and amid all the vicissitudes of succeeding centuries has remained ever since, not only a Mahometan, but an Arab city. Heraclius, who, unaware at first of the importance of the crisis, Battle of had hitherto remained almost inactive in Antioch, his north-Syrian Famook. residence and capital, now, roused to exertion, collected an army of 80,000 men, the greater number of whom, reinforced by 20,000 auxiliaries from among the Ghassanide Arabs, were led at first by the emperor himself, then by Manuel, a tried Byzantine general, to meet the ever-advancing Mahometans. These last, under the standard of Khaled, had already added Horns or Emesa, Baalbec or Heliopolis, and Kama, the Hamath of Scripture, to their list of conquests. They now fell back on a strong position behind the windings of the Yermook or Hieromax, a small stream issuing from the southern slopes of Mount Hermon, which now bears the name of Jebel-esh-Sheykh. The battle, in which Manuel took the offensive, Khaled the defensive part, raged for several days, and ended in the total defeat of the Greeks, 636 A.D., who are said to have lost upwards of 100,000 men, including Manuel himself, while at least 5000 of the victors remained on the field. Syria was now open to the Arabs; and Jerusalem, which, Conquest of with the difficult and mountainous district of south-eastern Pales- Palestine, tine, had hitherto been prudently neglected by Mahometan strategy, Syria, and capitulated, 637 A.D., to the caliph Omar, who, apprehensive lest Mesopo- Khaled, if left to himself in Syria, should establish a semi-inde- taniia. pendent principality of his own, came thither in person to receive the keys of the holy city. Aleppo, and Antioch itself, soon followed last the sea-coast, with Jaffa, Beyrout, Tripoli, and its many othei towns and ports, was overrun ; and within six years from the death of Mahomet the entire Syrian region, from Mount Taurus to the Red Sea, had become what, so far as language and usages are con cerned, it has never since ceased to be, an Arab province. Within a short time after, Mesopotamia underwent the same fate ; and the conquests of Tarsus and Diar-Bekr brought the Arabs in immediate contact with the uplands of Armenia and Koordistan, which for all succeeding times remained the ultimate limits of their permanent occupation. With so much fighting on their hands to the west of the Euphrates, Conquest of the Arab conquerors had for awhile refrained from attacking the Persia. great Persian empire to the east of that river, except by a few desultory and for the most part unsuccessful raids. Nor did the battle of Hira, in which the Arab armies under Jereer destroyed a large body of Persian troops, and avenged the previous losses of their countrymen, more than restore the apparent balance between the two empires. But Yezdegird, the last of the Persian monarchs, rashly provoked the extreme chances of a decisive Avar by sending his best general, Rustum, across the Euphrates with an army of 120,000 men, to offer battle to the Arabs, then commanded by SaaJ, a native of Yemen, in the open plains of Kadeseeyah or Cufa, not far from the site of ancient Babylon. After four days hard fighting, the Persians gave way, having lost the greater number of their men, besides the imperial standard, once the apron, so tradition said, of an Ispahan patriot blacksmith, and for many ages the palladium of Iran. The Arab general, profiting by the utter discomfiture of his opponents, crossed the Euphrates and the Tigris, took possession, almost without resistance, of the royal capital of Medain or Ctesiphon, where spoils of immense value were found, and pushed on to the more ancient metropolis of Susa, in Chusistan. But the completion of the work of conquest was reserved to his successor in the field, Nooman Ebu-Mekran, who in the battle of Mahavend, 641 A.D., near Ecbatana or Hamadan, destroyed the last hopes of Persian independence. Yezdegird fled, to fall soon after by the hand of an obscure assassin ; and his daughter, carried away captive, was taken in marriage by Hasan, the son of AH an ill-omened marriage, that, by its dower of Persian pretensions and sympathies, contributed not a little to the disunion and subsequent downfall of the Arab empire. The whole of Persia, from the Caspian and the Euphrates to the Indian Ocean, now re ceived the religion and the rule, though not the language, of Arabia ; Khorasan, Kerman, Mekran, Seistan, and Balkh, were next subdued, and for a while the Oxus became the eastern limit of Arab dominion. Thus before a century had elapsed the entire region west of the Indus obeyed the Arab and Mahometan caliph of Damascus. Westerly the first Arab conquest was Egypt. This important Conquestof acquisition was made by Amroo, a man alike distinguished as a Egypt find general and a statesman, during the reign of the caliph Omar. Africa. Farmah, or Pelusium, the easterly key of Egypt, was first reduced, and the conquerors, proceeding inland, assured their communica tions with Arabia and the Red Sea by the occupation of the Delts and Cairo. Thence, after much hard fighting, they reached and invested the city of Alexandria, and a fourteen months siege was rewarded by the capitulation of that city, December 22, 640 A.l>. No further resistance was offered; the Coptic population gladly exchanged the polished but heavy Greek yoke for the barbarous but lighter rule of the Arabs; and Egypt, like Syria, has remained socially, though not politically, a dependency of Arabia to the pre sent day. The subjugation of northern Africa, including Trijioli, Carthage, Tangier, and the entire coast from the Nile to the

Atlantic, occupied sixty years more ; but in the battle of Utica,