introduction of negro slaves purchased at Mecca by pilgrims and retailed at Maʾan.
The settled Arabs are of more mixed descent than the Beduin, and form the link between these and the Syrians, by whom we understand the descendants of all those peoples, other than the Jews, who spoke Aramaic at the beginning of the Christian era. Some of these have retained their Christianity, but the majority have in the course of ages embraced Islam. The Aramaic language, after holding its ground for a considerable time in Palestine and Syria, ultimately gave place to Arabic (though surviving among the Samaritans and, as regards Syrians, in three villages north-east of Damascus), and this process was facilitated by the continuous replenishment of Palestine and Syria from the tribes of the Arabian Desert. This Arab infiltration has created and maintains the specific racial character of the population. The distinction between the Arabs and the Syrians is now not so much racial as cultural. The Syrians are agriculturists and dwellers in towns, civilized, industrial, and of peaceful inclinations; the Arabs are a pastoral people organized in tribes and with a natural tendency towards inter-tribal warfare. Palestine and Syria offer, on their eastern border, examples of every stage of transition from the nomad Beduin to the settled fellahin; the Arab conquest of the eighth century was only the flood-tide of a continuous overflow from the desert into the cultivated land of the West.
§ 4. Circassians, Bosnians and Magharbeh.
Circassians.—The Russian conquest of the Caucasus in the sixties of the last century caused many Moslem tribesmen of the Caucasus range and adjacent provinces, unwilling to live under Christian rule, to seek refuge in a Moslem land. The Treaty of Berlin in 1878 gave an added impetus to this movement, and ʾAbduʾl Hamid cleverly made use of the circumstances to plant colonies of these virile and truculent fighting races on the desert fringes and marches of his empire. He established a number of colonies of these
