ABSTRACT
THE desert highways were not monopolized entirely by commercial caravans, nor were merchants the only travellers to make use of them. It is true that the commercial motive was primary and impelling; but trans-desert traffic was consistently increased by numbers of civil servants, diplomats and dispatch-bearers of various nationalities; as well as by a great number of miscellaneous wayfarers whose chief impulse to travel arose from curiosity. The place of these last is relatively important in the history of desert travel. It is true that without the merchant caravans, there would have been neither commerce nor the "highways" exacted by that commerce, between Syria and Mesopotamia. But on the other hand, it is the individual travellers who have given us pictures of this desert crossing, and it is through their eyes that we see the great caravans and their complex organization. An outline, therefore, of the most outstanding of these voyagers should serve as a collective prologue to the stories of their own personal experiences, as well as to their description of desert ways.
