Arab came out; it was here that his raging passion for dicing and his thirst for wine were most prominent. In the desert there was no great opportunity for indulging in either luxury, but in a town which often welcomed a caravan bringing goods to the value of twenty thousand pound such excesses were to be looked for. Excited by the songs of the Greek slave-girls, and the fumes of mellow wine, the Mekkan would throw the dice till, like the German of Tacitus, he had staked and lost his own liberty. But Mekka was more than a centre of trade and of song. It was the focus of the religion of the Arabs. Thither the tribes went up every year to kiss the black stone which had fallen from heaven in the primeval days of Adam, and to make the seven circuits of the Kaaba, naked,--for they would not approach God in the garments in which they had done their sins,--and to perform the other ceremonies of the pilgrimage. The Kaaba, a cubical building in the centre of Mekka, was the most sacred temple in all Arabia, and it gave its sanctity to all the district around. It was built, saith tradition, by Adam from a heavenly model, and then rebuilt from time to time by Seth and Abraham and Ishmael, and less reverend persons, and it contained the sacred things of the land. Here was the black stone, here the great god of red agate, and the three hundred and sixty idols, one for each day of the year, which Mohammad afterwards destroyed in one day. Here was Abraham’s stone, and that other which marked the tomb of Ishmael, and hard by was Zemzem, the God-sent spring which gushed from the sand when the forefather of the Arabs was perishing of thirst. The religion of the ancient Arabs, little as we know of it, is especially interesting inasmuch as the Arabs longest retained the original Semitic character, and hence probably the original Semitic religion; and thus in the ancient cult of Arabia we may see the religion once professed by Chaldeans, Canaanites, Israelites, and Phœnicians. This ancient religion “rises little higher than animistic polydaemonism; it is a collection of tribal religions standing side by side, only loosely united, though there are traces of a once closer connection.” The great objects of worship were the sun, and the stars, and the three moon-goddesses,--El-Lāt, the bright moon, Menāh, the dark, and El-´Uzza, the union of the two--whilst a lower cultus of trees, stones, and mountains shows that the religion had not quite risen above simple fetishism. There are traces of a belief in a supreme God behind this pantheon, and the moon-goddesses and other divinities were regarded as daughters of the Most High God (Allāh ta´āla). The various deities (but not the supreme Allāh) had their fanes where human sacrifices, though rare, were not unknown; and their cult was superintended by a hereditary line of seers, who were held in great reverence, but never developed into a priestly caste.