traditions as follows: “Thirty years after his decease shall last the true and legitimate khalifat, and then be succeeded by tyranny.” [547] After Moaviah’s death, A. D. 679, Yazid, his son, assumed the khalifat, but Hosain, another son of Alí, still lived, and was invited by the inhabitants of Kufa to their town for receiving their oath of allegiance. Yielding to their invitation, he set out from Mecca, where he had concealed himself, with thirty-two horsemen and forty men on foot. Not far from Kerbela, in an arid tract of country in Jrak Arabi, he was encountered by five or ten thousand men, sent by Yazid to destroy him. The son of Alí bravely fought this superior force during one-half of the day, but at last fell, with four of his brothers, as many of his own sons, and all his surrounding friends, seventy-two in number. The survivors, his women, were conducted to Damascus, where Hosain’s head, severed from his body, rejoiced the savage eyes of Yazid, now fixed in the khalifat. Hosain’s relics (as mentioned vol. I. p. 48) lie buried at Kerbela. The anniversary of his death, the 30th September, A. D. 680, is still celebrated by the Shiâhs, with every imaginable demonstration of grief about the fate of Alí’s posterity, and of execration of their oppressors. [548] Ommiah, according to Herbelot (_sub voce_) is the name of a respectable personage among the Arabians, who was the son of _Abd-ul-shems_, and whose posterity bears the title of _benu Ommiah_, “the children of Ommiah.” But their celebrity begins with the before mentioned Moaviah; he was the first of fourteen khalifs of this family, who reigned in succession ninety-one years. The last of them was _Mervan Muhammed ben Mervan, ben Hakem_, and after him there remained of this family but _Abd-ur-rahmen_, who escaped from the hands of the Abbasides, and later (in 756 A. D.) established the dynasty of the Ommiades in Spain, where fifteen of them held successively the government during nearly two hundred years, until 986 A. D., when the Alides seized the sovereignty of that country. * * * * *