It is conceded on all hands and by all men who have gone beneath the mere surface, that the literature of the ages furnishes no evidence that there were horses in Arabia before the fourth or fifth century of our era. General Tweedie, by far the ablest writer on the Arabian horse that we have examined, concedes the pertinency and force of the absence of all literary evidence, until the fifth century is reached, and as a reply he says: “The several Roman invasions of Arabia, in the reigns of Augustus, Trajan, and Severus, must have left foreign horses behind them.” This is, in fact, conceding the accuracy of Strabo’s representations and that there were no horses in Arabia at the beginning of the Christian era. The truth of the historical allusion is that the Romans never overran nor conquered Arabia. They could skirmish around the border and capture a few towns or cities, but the death-dealing desert was too much for them. Trajan at last made it a Roman province by his proclamation, and not by his sword, and for the excellent reason that “the game was not worth the candle.” What a strange fact it is that Arabia, instead of the first, should have been the last country in all the old world to be supplied with horses!
It is very difficult to comprehend or even imagine the changes that may be wrought in a thousand years by a strong, enterprising, and aggressive people, colonized in a rich country occupied by semi-barbarians and savages. This was the condition in Northern Africa, when the Phœnician colonies were planted there, a thousand years before the Christian era. The colony at Utica in Algeria was planted about eleven hundred years before the Christian era, which was contemporaneous with the reign of Saul as king of Israel. The colony of Carthage, that afterward contested with Rome for universal dominion, was planted in the same country, about two hundred years later, and was contemporaneous with Jehu. The whole southern shore of the Mediterranean was dotted with Phœnician colonies, from Egypt westward.
The oldest of the Phœnician colonies so far from home was probably Gades, now called Cadiz, on the Atlantic coast of Spain and outside of the Pillars of Hercules. This colony was planted about fifteen hundred years B.C. and was contemporaneous with Moses and the forty years’ journeying of the Israelites in the wilderness. The more recent scholarship seems to have developed the fact that still north of Gades and extending from the mouth of the Guadelete to that of the Guadiana, there was a very large and flourishing colony planted by the Phœnicians, possessing within itself many of the requisites and functions of statehood, and that this was the ancient “Tarshish” of scripture. This plantation became a secondary Tyre, and the “ships of Tarshish” not only made their voyages back and forth through the length of the Mediterranean, but extended them northward, up the European coast and to Britain, and southward along the African coast for a great distance, establishing trading posts wherever the products of a country promised profitable exchange.