ABSTRACT
The faith of the Arabs is a decidedly meagre and very dry branch of Chaldaism.1 It will easily be understood that in ages past the men of the desert had neither the leisure nor a taste for launching themselves into all the philosophical research of the Mesopotamian schools, but neither did they have the intellectual capacity to seek their religious opinions elsewhere. By commerce, by the caravans, by politics, even by their depredations, the Bedouins of those times, just like those of Late Antiquity, just like those of today, were in too constant a contact with the most cultivated peoples of their blood and their race to have been able to isolate themselves, and they neither did nor wanted to do so. Their ways were necessarily different from those of the Assyrian or Babylonian towns, different in the sense of an austerity that poverty and their war-like ways maintained; but, speaking a dialect of the same language, seeing many things through the same eyes, often paying tribute to the same kings, the Arab of the desert who wanted to believe in something had, from the most distant Antiquity, to turn to the priests and scholars of the large towns to inform himself.
