Note 295 — Chapter VII · PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE (A) HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES

So little is known as to these events by British (or any other) students that a brief record may be useful. The original Himaryites or Homerites, a people of the south-west angle of Arabia, had displaced the Sabæans in control of South Arabia in the second century B.C. The Himaryite hegemony was overthrown by invaders from Axum over the water about A.D. 300, and the Axumite rulers were, inter alia, kings of Hadramaut—hence the mention in the text of the Persian Gulf. But a Himaryite opposition continued, and, adopting Judaism as a counter-religion, it succeeded for a time in throwing off the Abyssinian rule. Axum, however (aided, as a Christian state, by Rome), reasserted her dominion in 525 and held it for fifty years, till an attack of Sassanid Persians displaced them again. Thereafter southern Arabia fell into the swaying chaos in which the coming of Mohammed found it.—Tr.