A violent persecution was directed against the Christians of Yemen, avenged by the Ethiopian conquest of the country and the removal of its capital to San'a. The intervention of Persia in the struggle was soon followed by the appearance of Mohammedanism upon the scene, and Jew, Christian, and Parsi were alike overwhelmed by the flowing tide of the new creed. The epigraphic evidence makes it clear that the origin of the kingdom of Sabâ went back to a distant date. Dr. Glaser traces its history from the time when its princes were still but Makârib, or 'Priests,' like Jethro, the Priest of Midian, through the ages when they were 'kings of Sabâ,' and later still 'kings of Sabâ and Raidân,' to the days when they claimed imperial supremacy over all the principalities of Southern Arabia. It was in this later period that they dated their inscriptions by an era, which, as Halévy first discovered, corresponds to 115 B. C. One of the kings of Sabâ is mentioned in an inscription of the Assyrian king Sargon (B. C. 715), and Dr. Glaser believes that he has found his name in a 'Himyaritic' text. When the last priest, Samah'ali Darrahh, became king of Sabâ, we do not yet know, but the age must be sufficiently remote, if the kingdom of Sabâ already existed when the Queen of Sheba came from Ophir to visit Solomon. The visit need no longer cause astonishment, notwithstanding the long journey by land which lay between Palestine and the south of Arabia. ... As we have seen, the inscriptions of Ma'in set before us a dialect of more primitive character than that of Sabâ. Hitherto it had been supposed, however, that the two dialects were spoken contemporaneously, and that the Minæan and Sabæan kingdoms existed side by side. But geography offered difficulties in the way of such a belief, since the seats of Minæan power were embedded in the midst of the Sabæan kingdom, much as the fragments of Cromarty are embedded in the midst of other counties. Dr. Glaser has now made it clear that the old supposition was incorrect, and that the Minæan kingdom preceded the rise of Sabâ. We can now understand why it is that neither in the Old Testament nor in the Assyrian inscriptions do we hear of any princes of Ma'in, and that though the classical writers are acquainted with the Minæan people they know nothing of a Minæan kingdom. The Minæan kingdom, in fact, with its culture and monuments, the relics of which still survive, must have flourished in the grey dawn of history, at an epoch at which, as we have hitherto imagined, Arabia was the home only of nomad barbarism. And yet in this remote age alphabetic writing was already known and practised, the alphabet being a modification of the Phœnician written vertically and not horizontally. To what an early date are we referred for the origin of the Phœnician alphabet