Max Beer

“ The physical and economic geography of the Arabian Peninsula controlled in a, decisive manner the primitive social stages of its inhabitants and produced the Semitic type.
Arabia exhibits a great and contrasting variety of physical conditions, partly favouring a rapid increase of population, partly compelling migration and emigration. The south-western, southern, and central highlands possess a healthy climate, and in many parts a rarefied and bracing air, a fertile soil, yielding to a moderate amount of labour rich harvests of subtropical products. ”

“ The Yemen, the Hadramaut, and Nejd, the nurseries of the race, with their agricultural and commercial conditions, afforded them the well-being, the repose, and the moderate activity necessary to the formation of healthy and shapely bodies. Their migrations and caravan leading through desert tracts, their Bedouin life, turned them into hardy athletes, resourceful leaders of men, and determined warriors ”

“ The waves of emigration followed the trade routes. Some moved towards the north-east and pitched their tents on the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, founding there the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires and civilisations which grew in the same measure as the exchanges between the northern regions of India, the Middle East, Cathai, and the Mediterranean countries increased. ”

“ Such were the physical, mental, moral, and social characteristics of the Hebrew tribes when they finally emerged from the Arabian deserts and entered the populous and cultivated Mediterranean regions in order to look for settlements. There exists, it is true, a dim tradition that they first migrated to Mesopotamia ”

“ Those areas were, however, limited in extent; beyond their narrow confines arid plains and torrid deserts prohibited the normal expansion of a rapidly growing population, and their technique was too primitive to allow an intensive cultivation. Migrations to the numerous small oases with which the desert regions are sprinkled, nomadic shepherd life, became a necessity, and finally emigration to foreign lands. ”

“ There is nothing inherently improbable in the Biblical record of the sojourn of Hebrew tribes in the eastern regions of the Nile Delta and of their conspiracy against the onerous duties imposed upon them by the centralised, despotic Government of Egypt. ”