intercourse between the east Jordanic country and the west of the Arabian peninsula in the period between Christ and Muhammed. Hundreds of men from Mekka and Medina came every year to Bosrâ; indeed, when it has happened that the wandering tribes of Syria, which were, then also as now, bound for Hauran with the kêl, i.e., their want of corn, got before them, and had emptied the granaries of Bosrâ, or when the harvests of the south of Hauran had been destroyed by the locusts, which is not unfrequently the case, they will have come into the Nukra[1] as far as Nawâ, sometimes even as far as Damascus, in order to obtain their full cargo.
If commerce often has the difficult task of bringing together the most heterogeneous peoples, and of effecting a reciprocal interchange of ideas, it here had the easy work of sustaining the intercourse among tribes that were originally one people, spoke one idiom, and regarded themselves as all related; for
- ↑ The remarkable fair at Muzêrîb can be traced back to the earliest antiquity, although Bosrâ at times injured it; but this latter city, from its more exposed position, has been frequently laid in ruins. It is probable that the merchants of Damascus pitched their tents for their Kasaba, i.e., their moveable fair, twice a year (in spring and in autumn) by the picturesque lake of Muzêrîb. If, with the tradition, we take the Nukra to be the home of Job, of the different ways of interpreting Job 6:19 there is nothing to hinder our deciding upon that which considers it as the greater caravan which acme periodically out of southern Arabia to Hauran (Bosrâ or Muzêrib). Têmâ with its well, Heddâg (comp. Isa 21:14), celebrated by the poets of the steppe, from which ninety camels (sâniât) by turns raise a constantly flowing stream of clear and cool water for irrigating the palms and the seed, was in ancient times, perhaps, the crossing point of the merchant caravans going from south to north, and from east to west. Even under the Omajad Cahlifs the Mekka pilgrim-route went exclusively by way of Têmâ, just as during the Crusades so long as the Franks kept possession of Kerak and Shôbak. An attempt made in my Reisebericht (S. 93-95) to substitute the Hauranitish Têmâ in the two previously mentioned passages of Scripture, I have there (S. 131) given up as being scarcely probable.
