In commerce and navigation the Arabians of the south-west of the peninsula occupied, if no longer the place of supremacy, at any rate a prominent position throughout the whole imperial period. After the destruction of Adane, Muza became the commercial metropolis of this region. The representation formerly given is still in the main appropriate for the time of Vespasian. The place is described to us at this time as exclusively Arabian, inhabited by ship-owners and sailors, and full of stirring mercantile life; the Muzaites with their own ships navigate the whole east coast of Africa and the west coast of India, and not merely carry the goods of their own country, but bring also the purple stuffs and gold embroideries prepared according to Oriental taste in the workshops of the West, and the fine wines of Syria and Italy, to the Orientals, and in turn to the western lands the precious wares of the East. In frankincense and other aromatics Muza and the emporium of the neighbouring kingdom of Hadramaut, Cane to the east of Aden, must always have retained a sort of practical monopoly; these wares, used in antiquity very much more than at present, were produced not only on the southern coast of Arabia, but also on the African coast from Adulis as far as the “promontory of spices,” Cape Guardafui, and from thence the merchants of Muza fetched them and brought them into general commerce. On the already mentioned island of Dioscorides there was a joint trading settlement of the three great seafaring nations of these seas, the Hellenes, that is, the Egyptians, the Arabians, and the Indians. But of relations to Hellenism, such as we found on the opposite coast among the Axomites (p. 283), we meet no trace in the land of Yemen; if the coinage is determined by Occidental types (p. 287 f.), these were current throughout the East. Otherwise writing and language and the exercise of art, so far as we are able to judge, developed themselves here just as independently as commerce and navigation; and certainly this co-operated in producing the result that the Axomites, while they subjected to themselves the Homerites in a political point of view, subsequently reverted from the Hellenic path into the Arabic (p. 283). [Sidenote: Land routes and harbours in Egypt.]