[47] For our present knowledge of the government, population, cities and villages of Nejd we are chiefly indebted to the following travellers: Captain G. F. Sadlier, of the English army, who was the first European to cross the Arabian Peninsula. (1819) George Wallin, a learned young Swedish Arabist, travelling in 1845 and 1848 as a Mohammedan doctor of law, passed through the northern desert from Jauf to Hail and visited Medina. William Gifford Palgrave, a Jesuit Roman Catholic, of English birth and scholarly tastes made his celebrated journey across Arabia from west to east in 1862-63. In 1864 the bold Italian traveller Guarmani went from Jerusalem straight to Jebel Shammar and Aneyza. In 1865 Colonel Pelly, the British Resident at Bushire made an important journey, in company with Dr. Colville and Lieutenant Dawes, from Kuweit through southeastern Nejd to Riadh, returning by Hassa to Ojeir and Bahrein. Then Charles M. Doughty (_facile princeps_ among all authorities and travellers Arabian) made his long, arduous, zigzag journeys through northwestern and northern Arabia from November, 1876, to August, 1878. Our other authority for Nejd is Lady Ann Blunt who with her husband visited the capital of Ibn Rashid’s country from Bagdad in 1883. [48] If we remember that Palgrave compares Feysul’s mud brick palace to the Tuileries of Paris, states that the great mosque of Riad can accommodate 2,000 worshippers, and gives the Wahabi ruler a standing army of 50,000, we deduct a little from the poetical description to have a balance of net facts. [49] In our chapter on the Arabic language we shall see that the golden age of Arabic literature was just before the birth of Mohammed. [50] “Mohammedanism had owed much to the Jewish kingdom of Sâba. The rule of the Sabean kings had extended over Mecca, and Jewish ideas and beliefs had thus made their way into the future birthplace of Mohammed. The fact is full of interest for students of the history of Islam. The epigraphic evidence which Dr. Glaser has presented to us shows that the rise of Mohammedanism was not the strange and unique phenomenon it has hitherto been thought to be. It had been prepared for centuries previously. Arabia had for ages been the home of culture and the art of writing, and for about two hundred years before the birth of Mohammed his countrymen had been brought into close contact with the Jewish faith. Future research will doubtless explain fully how great was his debt to the Jewish masters of Mecca and the Sabean kingdom of Southern Arabia.”—Prof. A. H. Sayce in the _Independent_. [51] Koelle’s Mohammed, p. 5. [52] Het Matriarchaat bij de onde Arabieren (1884), and _Supplement_ to the same, in answer to critics, (1885). The Hague. [53] Smith’s “Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia,” pp. 100, 104. [54] Palmer’s Introduction to the Koran, p. xv.