Memoirs of Celebrated Characters Volume 3

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1856 Excerpt: ...Asia Minor. These latter have beheld passing around and amidst them the Medes, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Romans, the Crusaders of Europe, without being engulfed in the current of opposing civilizations, or in the destruction of successive empires. These tribes gave birth to Mahomet, the restorer of the unity of God throughout a quarter of the globe. They were the first who acknowledged his moral code, his earliest followers in the campaigns against idolatry; and having subjected all the capitals of the East and the Indies to the religion of their prophet, they returned peaceably and unambitiously to their pastoral avocations and their enduring encampment in the desert. Such are the peasants, and sometimes the warriors, of the three Arabias. This widely-spread territory, anciently divided into three distinct regions, the Happy, the Stony, and the Deserted, occupies the wide tract which extends from Egypt and Syria, between the mountains of Libanus and Palestine, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Damascus and Bagdad are in the present day the two most important capitals which advance the furthest within the boundless domain of the Arabian shepherds, and carry on the greatest intercourse with their different tribes. Mecca, the metropolis of Islamism; Medina, the burial-place of the Prophet; and Djidda, the principal sea-port, rear aloft their holy structures, peopled by stationary Arabs, and separated from each other by vast intervals, entirely abandoned to the nomadic races. With the exception of the immediate neighbourhood of these towns, and some few spots of productive land in Yemen--the cultivated portion of Arabia Felix--the desert extends over all the remaining part. During the forty days' march between Damascus and Bagdad, as in the sixty betwee...