he endeavoured to prove that the Christian Messiah reappeared in the
person of Hamza.

It is possible, even probable, that the segregation of the Druses as a
people dates only from the adoption of Hamza's creed. But when it is
recalled that other inhabitants of the same mountain system, e.g. the
Maronites, the Ansarieh, the Metawali and the "Isma'ilites," also
profess creeds which, like the Druse system, differ from Sunni Islam in
the important feature of admitting incarnations of the Deity, it is
impossible not to suspect that Hamza's emissaries only gave definition
and form to beliefs long established in this part of the world. Many of
the fundamental ideas of Druse theology belong to a common West Asiatic
stock; but the peculiar history of the Mountain is no doubt responsible
for beliefs, held elsewhere by different peoples, being combined there
in a single creed. Some allowance, too, must be made for the probability
that Hamza's system owed something to doctrines Christian and other,
with which the metropolitan position of Cairo brought Fatimite society
into contact.

_History_--There is good reason to regard the Druses as, racially, a
mixture of refugee stocks, in which the Arab largely predominates,
grafted on to an original mountain population of Aramaic blood and
Incarnationist tendencies. The latter is represented more purely by the
Maronites (q.v.). The native tradition regards an immigration of Hira
Arabs into S. Lebanon, under Khalid ibn Walid in the 9th century, as the
beginning of Druse distinctiveness and power; but it also accepts
Turkoman and Kurdish elements in the original Druse state. About the
same time, or a little later (in the reign of Saladin), it believes that
Hermon was colonized by a population of 15,000 Hira and Yemenite Arabs,
who had sojourned awhile in Hauran. The name Druse is met with first in
Benjamin of Tudela (c. A.D. 1170), and its origin has been much
disputed. Some authorities see in it a descriptive epithet, derived from
Arabic _darasa_ (those who _read_ the Book), or _darisa_ (those in
_possession_ of Truth) or _durs_ (the _clever_ or _initiated_); but more
connect it with the name of the first missionary, Ismael _Darazi_.

As soon as we begin to know anything of the Druses they were living in a
feudal state of society, as village communities under _sheikhs_,
themselves generally subordinate to one or more amirs. In the time of
the first crusades the main power was in the ha