d the castle wells were rendered unserviceable by rolling blocks
of rock into them. Thence he set out in the summer of 690 for Syria,
to regulate its affairs.

State of Syria

It is difficult to present a clear view of the state of disorganization
which then prevailed in the Syrian provinces. It is true
that in consequence of the attacks of Lucullus the Armenian governor
Magadates had evacuated these provinces in 685,(7) and that the Ptolemies,
gladly as they would have renewed the attempts of their predecessors
to attach the Syrian coast to their kingdom, were yet afraid to provoke
the Roman government by the occupation of Syria; the more so,
as that government had not yet regulated their more than doubtful
legal title even in the case of Egypt, and had been several times
solicited by the Syrian princes to recognize them as the legitimate heirs
of the extinct house of the Lagids. But, though the greater powers
all at the moment refrained from interference in the affairs
of Syria, the land suffered far more than it would have suffered amidst
a great war, through the endless and aimless feuds of the princes,
knights, and cities.

Arabian Princes

The actual masters in the Seleucid kingdom were at this time
the Bedouins, the Jews, and the Nabataeans. The inhospitable
sandy steppe destitute of springs and trees, which, stretching
from the Arabianpeninsula up to and beyond the Euphrates, reaches
towards the west as far as the Syrian mountain-chain and its narrow belt
of coast, toward the east as far as the rich lowlands of the Tigris
and lower Euphrates--this Asiatic Sahara--was the primitive home
of the sons of Ishmael; from the commencement of tradition we find
the "Bedawi," the "son of the desert," pitching his tents there
and pasturing his camels, or mounting his swift horse in pursuit
now of the foe of his tribe, now of the travelling merchant. Favoured
formerly by king Tigranes, who made use of them for his plans half
commercial half political,(8) and subsequently by the total absence
of any master in the Syrian land, these children of the desert
spread themselves over northern Syria. Wellnigh the leading part
in a political point of view was enacted by those tribes,
which had appropriated the first rudiments of a settled existence
from the vicinity of the civilized Syrians. The most noted
of these emirs were Abgarus, chief of the Arab tribe of the Mardani,
whom Tigranes had settled about Edessa and Carrh