All classic writers who have written upon the subject agree in attributing great wealth to Southern Arabia, a land familiar to antiquity as Saba, or Sheba. Herodotus, Strabo, and Pliny frequently allude to it as the richest country on the globe. Its agricultural resources, dependent upon a vast and intricate hydraulic system which embraced hundreds of leagues of productive territory, were the principal basis of its prosperity. Its streams were confined by massive walls of masonry of cyclopean dimensions and by great embankments. One of these reservoirs was eighteen miles in circuit and a hundred and twenty feet deep. Its stones were laid in bitumen and bolted together with iron rods. Many others, inferior in dimensions and of not less solid construction, collected and retained the melted snows of the mountains. The flow of water was regulated by sluices, and its apportionment rigidly prescribed by law. This thorough system of irrigation, applied to a soil of prodigious fertility under a tropical sun, eventually produced results rivalling those of the vaunted plantations of Babylonia. An innumerable population, distributed throughout this favored territory in hundreds of cities and villages, carried to its highest perfection the cultivation of the soil. The daily expenses of the royal household were fifteen Babylonian talents, eighty-five thousand five hundred dollars of our money. It is related that Mareb, the capital, stood in a vast expanse of perennial verdure, where the branches of the trees, touching each other, formed a vault of continuous shade over the highways, of such extent that a horseman would require a journey of two months’ duration to traverse the cultivated portion of the realm of the monarchs of Saba. One of the latter was the famous Queen Balkis, the friend and admirer of Solomon.