The reader can now appreciate the value of the argument that the Greeks possessed an explosive between the seventh and thirteenth centuries, _because_ Marcus Græcus describes one; and he can understand why Marcus was not summoned in Chap. iii. to give evidence for the Greeks. A suspicion may be raised by the Arabic origin of the _Liber Ignium_, that the people who approached so nearly to the manufacture of gunpowder may have ultimately reached it. We pass, therefore, to a consideration of Arabic incendiaries in the following chapter. CHAPTER V THE ARABS Although the Arabs had had relations with the Greeks, Romans, and Persians for centuries, and were acquainted with the details of the siege of Jerusalem, 70 A.D., the earliest allusion to their use of machines is the tradition that Jodhaimah, King of Heerah, constructed manjánik in the third century A.D.[182] The scarcity of timber in Arabia may partially explain the lateness of their introduction, and the position of Heerah, in the north-east province of Arabian Irak, raises a suspicion that the Arabs learned the use of machines from the Persians, who got them from the Greeks. When the Prophet besieged Tayif in 8 A.H. (630 A.D.), the defenders had recourse to heated projectiles.[183] We may safely assume that they were the balls of hot clay spoken of in the 11nth Sura of the Qur’an, in describing the destruction of the Cities of the Plain: “we rained upon them stones of baked clay.”[184] Half a century afterwards, 683, during the siege of Mecca, the Ka’aba was burned down by incendiary compositions, discharged, not by Arabs, but by Syrians, who doubtless understood the manipulation of naphtha and the other combustibles used.[185] In 712 the howdah in which sat Dahir, King of Alor in Scinde, was set on fire by a fire-arrow shot by a Moslem naphtha-thrower[186]—the same nature of projectile that had been used by the Persian archers at the taking of Athens, 480 B.C. In speaking of the capture of Alor, both Mir Ma’sum Bhakkari, in his “History of Scinde,” and Haidar Razi, in his “General History,” mention the employment of _atish bazi_, or fire-throwing machines, “which the Moslems had seen in use with the Greeks and Persians.”[187] Stones were discharged from machines to so little purpose at the siege of Heraclea, 805, that Harun er-Reshid urged his generals to fasten incendiaries to them. This was done with such effect that the resistance of the besieged at once collapsed, the inhabitants being terror-stricken at the sight of the flaming naphtha.[188] There is no trace of an explosive here, yet a French Arabist would have us believe that muskets were in use during this Caliph’s reign.