Here, then, was a land of marvelous opportunity for the right man. Ruled by rigid taboos and certain patriarchs of exceptional prowess, yet actually without a ruler; devoutly religious as religion goes, yet without a unifying religion; containing an enormous amount of military valor, yet wasting her strength in inter-tribal battles--Arabia, in the seventh century, stood in dire dearth of some commanding personality. The consecutive dominions of Egypt, Assyria, Persia and Greece--nations that had once been supreme in regal splendor--had disintegrated in rapid succession; and Rome, the mightiest of them all, was now nearing her eclipse. Neither Syria nor Persia was of much account any longer, Africa was weak, the Christians had forgotten Christ in their absorption in the more thrilling pursuit of schismatic squabbling, and the Jews too often bartered their sacred phylacteries for the products of Pagan ingenuity. Meanwhile, during the kaleidoscopic evolution and disruption of world-conquering empires, Arabia had dragged out only a ghostly existence; she was a nation that had either been carelessly forgotten or contemptuously disregarded; she had won no place in the sun. The general decadence of nations and faiths at this time offered an unparallelled chance to the mythical Arab who, by evolving a religious and political system based upon the common elements that formed the solid foundation of every Arabian tribe, should fuse the emotional and economic strength of the land into an indivisible unity, and--who knew?--perhaps carry on the torch recently dropped by the expiring Roman Empire. Now, as careful students of history are well aware, great men, whether warriors, statesmen or prophets, have a way of bobbing up at the precise moment when they are most needed. So it happened that, in the city of Mecca, probably in August in the year 570, Mohammed, the Prophet of Allah, was born. II For centuries before the birth of the Prophet, Mecca had been the most populous and influential city in Arabia. She owed this eminence to two very different things: to her geographical situation, and to some pretty legends that sought to explain her divine origin.