ART. II.-The Historical Geography of Arabia; or the Patriarchal Evidences of Revealed Religion. By the Rev. CHARLES FORSTER, B.D. London: Duncan and Malcolm. 1844.

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THE main object, with which this work was undertaken, was to establish the correctness of the Mosaic account of the peopling of Arabia and if some of the brilliant visions which presented themselves to the author, as it was passing through the press, shall, -to borrow an illustration from the country to which they relate -be found, as we fear they will, to be as unsubstantial as those of the gardens and palace of Shedad, or as the mirage of the desert; it will be some consolation for him to know, that, so far as this object is concerned, he has not laboured in vain. The work was commenced, as he tells us, under the auspices of the late excellent Bishop Jebb, whose "daily companion and own familiar friend" it is well known that it was his privilege to be. In the appendix to a former work, "Mahometanism unveiled," he had brought forward a variety of proofs of the descent of a portion of the Arabs from Ishmael; and the importance which was justly attached to these proofs, by those who were most competent to judge of their value, encouraged him to extend his enquiries to all the tribes of Arabia; in the expectation of being able to show, that all existing evidence bearing on the subject, was in favour of their having had that patriarchal origin, which was attributed to them by Moses.

Mr. Forster seems fully aware, that such a laborious investigation as that of which he has here given us the result, is not likely to be appreciated in the present age; which he describes, with but too much justice, as one "of feverish excitement, restless activities, and high pretensions to proficiency in 'knowledge, falsely so called;" as, in a word, "a confessedly non-reading, and, therefore, unreflecting age." He anticipates, however, that,

"The day will yet return, when England, the first of the nations,' awakened and herself once more, will learn, as of old, to cherish and honour in her sons, neither that 'heady setting forth of extremities,' which the true father of the Anglican reformation, the good and great Bishop Ridley, declared, with his latest breath, 'he did never love;' nor the pursuit of ephemeral controversies, and questions and strife of words;' but those patient and silent labours of the closet and the

desk, which (under the guidance and blessing of the Divine Head of the Church) gave birth to her illustrious worthies of the olden time,' and from which future Lightfoots and future Pococks can alone arise."

In that day, we feel confident that the modest anticipations of our author in behalf of his work will be much more than realized; and, even in the present age, we trust that there are some, however few they may be, who will follow him with pleasure and profit in his investigations, and will know how to value the truths which he has established, as well as to excuse the errors into which he may have fallen.

Mr. Forster has divided his work into two parts. In the former of these, he treats in succession of the five great patriarchal stocks, by which it appears from the Old Testament that Arabia was peopled; namely, those of Cush, Joktan, Ishmael, Keturah, and Edom; and by the joint consideration of passages, which he has collected from Greek and Roman, from Oriental, and from modern European sources, he has endeavoured to determine the part of Arabia, in which each of their descendants, who is mentioned by Moses as the father of a tribe, was located. In the latter part, he treats of those tribes, which are mentioned by the Greek and Roman geographers, but not by Moses; settling the several positions of them and of their towns, by comparing the accounts of those writers with the statements of the oriental geographers and of modern travellers and mapmakers; and referring them in many cases to the tribes mentioned in the first part, of which they were branches or subdivisions. Each of these parts is illustrated by a map, in which, while the permanent geographical features of the country are laid down according to the best modern authorities; the names of the tribes and cities, mentioned in Scripture, and by Greek and Roman authors, are placed in those situations, which our author's investigations have led him to assign to them. In the first map, containing the scriptural names of tribes, five different kinds of capital letters have been used, indicating at once to the eye the stock from which each tribe was derived. The more usual method of distinction, by colours, would in this case have been difficult, if not impossible, from the manner in which the tribes belonging to the different stocks were intermingled in the process of colonization.

Of course, it was not to be expected that a work, which required such various and extensive research as that before us, and which contains so much information, gathered from so many different sources, should be free from error, or what reviewers will consider to be error. Defects we think it has; and we feel

it our duty, before we go further, to point out some of a general

nature.

We wish, in the first place, that Mr. Forster had undertaken to prove less. It was not à priori probable, that the names of all the tribes mentioned by Moses, should be identified with those noticed by Greek and Roman writers, and still less with those at present in existence; and we wish that he had contented himself with proving that some tribes of each stock were clearly identified; leaving out of consideration those, in which the identification, which he thinks that he has made, depends on certain etymological processes, which will, we suspect, carry conviction to the minds of but few of his readers. We allude, in particular, to the use that he has made of "the Anagram," which he considers to be a peculiar characteristic of the Arabic idiom. It may be so; but even if he could convince Arabic scholars of the justice of his anagrammatic identifications, we think that it would have been better to omit them for the sake of ordinary readers, who will be far more likely to regard them as weakening than as strengthening the general argument. We confess, however, that we have great doubts as to the existence of anagrammatic changes in names, such as Mr. Foster assumes to have been made. The examples, which he has brought forward by way of authority for it, are to us any thing but satisfactory. The greater part of them are instances of an initial vowel being removed to a position after the first consonant; and we cannot admit this as a precedent for what appears a totally different thing, a transposition of the consonants themselves. We were surprised to find him quoting Major Rennell for such an instance of "a double anagram" as "Ascanias, Nicæa, Isnik." The Major could never have thought of such a construction being put on his words. "The lake Ascanias is," he says, 66 now called the lake of Isnik or Nicæa," from the adjacent city of that name; but that the name of the city was derived from that of the lake, by anagram or otherwise, we are sure never entered into his head. received origin and etymology of the ancient name are far too well established to admit of such an hypothesis with respect to it; and the modern name is plainly corrupted from this, in the same manner as Isnikmid is obtained from Nicomedia, by curtailing it and prefixing the syllable Is, representing the Greek preposition sic. There is nothing in the whole process bearing the slightest resemblance to the anagram.

The

We wish also that Mr. Forster had adopted some uniform mode of representing Arabic words in European characters; so far, at least, as the consonants and semivowels are concerned. It was, perhaps, out of his power to procure the peculiar types

used to express Arabic characters in the publications of the Royal Geographical Society, and in the present article. Supposing, however, that he could command no other types than those in general use; the doubling, or italicizing, the letters h, s, d, t, and z, in order to represent the peculiar modifications of sound, denoted by the 6th, 14th, 15th, 16th, and 17th letters of the Arabic alphabet; the use of an apostrophe, with the vowel, to mark the presence of the 18th, and the distinguishing the 21st from the 22nd by writing it c or q, would have caused but little trouble, and would have removed much uncertainty and confusion. The careless manner in which the letter j has been used is still more inexcusable. It is at times to be sounded as in English (dzh), at other times as in French (zh), and at other times as in German (y). Mistakes of this kind are naturally accounted for by the circumstance that the writers, from whom different statements were taken, belonged to different nations; but our author should have been aware of the consequence which might be expected to result from this; and should have guarded against it, for his readers' sake, even if it was not necessary for his own.

Having made these general observations, we will proceed to notice some particular points. The colonization of Arabia by the descendants of Cush is first considered. It has been generally admitted that the first inhabitants of Arabia were of this stock: Mr. Sale, however, was of a different opinion; appealing to the authority of local tradition, which referred the lost tribes, as they were called, who inhabited the country before the time of Joktan, to a Semitic origin. Of tribes which traced their descent from Ham, the oriental authors take little or no notice, according to Mr. Sale's statement; and he says that, "strictly speaking, the Cushites did not inhabit Arabia, properly so called, but the banks of the Euphrates and the Persian gulf, whither they came from Chuzestân, or Susiana, the original settlement of their father." In opposition to this, it had been shown by Niebuhr, from the analogy which he observed between the names of the descendants of Cush, mentioned in Gen. x. 7, and those of the existing Arab tribes, that the prevailing opinion was correct, and that Cushites were to be found in all parts of the peninsula. Mr. Forster has strengthened this argument by producing additional names, in which a like analogy is observable; some of them from the Greek and Roman geographers, and others from oriental writers and books of travels. He has also noticed the important fact, that the existing tribes, whose names indicate a Cushite origin, possess, in a great degree, the swarthy skin and tall stature which are the well-known physical characters of that On the whole, we think he has placed it beyond a doubt,

race.

that the course of Cushite colonization was from the banks of the Euphrates, where Nimrod hunted and reigned, along the shores of the Persian gulf and the Indian ocean, and, finally, across the straits of Babelmandeb, into Africa. The sons and grandsons of Cush, who are mentioned in Gen. x. 7, appear to have been those only, who, separating themselves from their father, became heads of tribes, and settled in different parts of the Arabian peninsula. We have every reason to believe that, in addition to these, he had a numerous family of children, who either remained with Nimrod in their primitive seat, or accompanied their father to his final dwelling-place in Africa. Where it is not expressly stated by the sacred historian, that all the children of a patriarch are enumerated (and such a statement is only made in the case of Noah himself), we have a right to presume that there were others unnamed, whose posterity swelled the numbers of the tribe, that bore the name of their father or of some of their brothers. There is no other supposition, on which we can explain the admitted fact of the peopling of the world in the course of a few generations.

But here we must enter our protest against an extreme opinion of Mr. Forster's. While he admits (in vol. i. p. 30) that the African Ethiopians were descended from Cush, he maintains that the name Cush is, in the Hebrew Scriptures, exclusively applied to Arabia. In support of this opinion, he refers to the arguments and authority of Dr. Wells, author of "The Historical Geography of the Old and New Testament;" but these arguments are only conclusive, when adduced in proof of the name being occasionally applied to this region. That it was also applied to the African Ethiopia, and, indeed, that this was its most common acceptation, we cannot entertain the slightest doubt. It is alleged, by Dr. Wells and Mr. Forster, that Tirhakah (2 Kings xix. 9) must have been an Arabian king :

"Since the kings and armies of the African Ethiopia could reach Judea only after a long, hazardous, and, probably, hostile march through the powerful interposing kingdom of Egypt; . ... an expedition obviously feasible to great conquerors only; whereas the kings and warlike tribes of Arabia lay immediately on its borders, or possessed ready access to Palestine; and were ready and at hand, consequently, for every occasion, whether of friendly succour, or of hostile inroad."

But, in reply to this, it is sufficient to state that Tirhakah was an Ethiopian sovereign of Egypt, as appears from the list of Manetho, who places him in "the twenty-fifth dynasty of three Ethiopians;" and that the seat of his original kingdom was the African Ethiopia is manifest from the circumstance of his name

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