601 years; and to the same period extends the statement of Mejânishi,[1] who, in his topography of the Ka'be, says that between the conquest of Mekka by Ta'lebe and the rule of the Kosî in this city was 500 years. On the contrary, however, Ibn Jusef[2] informs us that this dynasty began “earlier” than 400 years before Islamism. With this statement accord all those numerous accounts, according to which the “rupture of the dyke” (sêl el-‛arim), the supposed cause of the Jemanic emigration, took place rather more than 400 years before Islamism. If therefore, to content ourselves with an approximate calculation, we make Islamism to begin about 615 (the year of the “Mission” was 612 a.d.), and the Gefnide dynasty, with the addition of the “earlier,” 415 years previous, then the commencement of the reign of Gefne I would have been 200 a.d., and the erection of the Monastery shortly before 250.
When the tribe whose king later on built the Monastery migrated from Jemen into Syria, the Trachonitis was in the hands of a powerful race of the Kudâ'ides, which had settled there in the first century of our era, having likewise come out of Jemen, and become tributary to the Romans. This race had embraced Christianity from the natives; and some historians maintain that it permitted the Gefnides to settle and share in the possession of the country, only on the condition that they likewise should embrace Christianity. In those early times, these tribes, of course, with the new religion received the tradition of Job also from the first hand, from the Jews and the Jewish Christians, who, since the battle of the Jewish people with the Romans, will have found refuge and safety to a large extent in Petraea, and especially in the hardly accessible Trachonitis. The Nukra also, as the most favoured region of Syria and Palestina, will have had its
Page:03.BCOT.KD.HistoricalBooks.B.vol.3.LaterProphets.djvu/1869
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