Travels through Arabia and Other Countries in the East

One thing I had the opportunity to observe myself seems to support the same hypothesis. A Dutch renegade original: "renegado"; a person who has deserted their religion or country, often used in this period for Europeans who converted to Islam who had traveled through Arabia several times showed me, at Mocha original: "Mokha"; a major port city on the Red Sea in Yemen, famous for its coffee trade, a copy of an inscription in strange and unknown characters that he had found in a province far from the sea coast. I was in poor health at the time and neglected to copy it. However, the unusual form of the characters—which consisted entirely of straight lines—made such an impression on my memory that, upon my return, I recognized that the inscriptions at Persepolis An ancient ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire, known for its extensive cuneiform inscriptions were written in the same alphabet (E) Likely a reference to cuneiform, which Niebuhr was one of the first Westerners to accurately copy and help decipher. A tradition prevails throughout Persia that the conqueror who founded Persepolis was originally from the vicinity of Samarkand A historic city in modern-day Uzbekistan. Thus, it appears that both the Arabs and the Persians had sovereigns from the same nation who spoke the same language, or at least used the same characters for writing.

Whatever the origin of those conquerors may have been, many circumstances combine to prove that, in ancient times, the Arabs played an important role on the stage of human affairs, even though the memory of the political shifts original: "revolutions" that occurred among them has not been passed down to future generations. There can be no doubt that they conquered Egypt at a time before the beginning of Greek history.