As a result of its exemption from foreign dominion, no other country has preserved the integrity of its customs, its language, and the personality of its inhabitants to such a degree as Arabia. It alone still presents a picture of the government and the domestic economy of patriarchal antiquity. Its manners are those which prevailed centuries before the time of Abraham. The wonderfully sonorous and flexible idiom of the Koran was already formed before the Bible or the Iliad was written. The absolute immobility of the Arabian in his native haunts, contrasted with his ready adaptation to diametrically opposite conditions elsewhere, is one of the most striking anomalies of human character. The influence of Greece and Rome, whose taste in art and maxims of government have left their traces wherever either the valor or the enterprise of those nations has been able to obtain a foothold, is not perceptible in the political or domestic history of Arabia. No ruins of any majestic structure raised by the master-hand of the Athenian or Roman architect have ever been discovered in the great Peninsula, the accounts of whose commercial wealth were matters of popular faith and wonder throughout the ancient world. And, what is probably a more conclusive indication of the permanent absence of foreign influence than any other, however plausible, no name with a Greek or Latin termination has survived in the dialects of those Arabian settlements most intimately associated with the trade of Europe for many centuries.