Middle East

22 Pages 5620 Words

t that Herodotus, who is widely accepted as the first historian, could not paint an accurate picture of of even the landscape of this region leaves little hope that the culture could have been accounted for totally.
Part of what we know comes from the fact that many of the people that live in that part of the world today show very small variance with that of the people who lived there long ago. Herodotus does help us to learn the type of people that we are dealing with and their loyalties to one another:
When two men desire to swear an oath of friendship, a third stands between them, and he cuts the palms of their hands near the base of the thumb with a sharp stone; then he takes a little tuft of wool from their clothes, dips it in their blood and smears the blood on seven stones lying between them, all while invoking the names of Bacchus and Urania (Payne 4).
To Herodotus there were no people on earth who respected oaths more than the Arabs and this sort of loyalty to each other would make for a formidable opponent for any force. The Islamic religion at its core is revolves around the city of Mecca and the stone that was found there long ago (Payne 4). The stone is said to have fallen from the sky and was worshiped long before Muhammad, the prophet of the Islamic religion ever lived (Payne 4).
The Muslim religion, the religion of the Arabians, is the third and most modern of the three monotheistic religions (Hitti 4). It is really an offshoot of Christianity and the Jewish faith and therefore the God of each are essentially the same. The people of the Muslim faith can find much of the same teachings and beliefs as that of the teachings in Christianity with few scruples to complain about (Hitti 4). Much of what we believe today to be Jewish traits like the prominent nose are in all actuality the traits that differentiate Jews from the Arabs themselves, almost as much as their religion does. The Islamic religion focuses mainly on...