The Origins of Islam a long list of different ‘‘tribal’’ names in use among them. If the surviving
evidence is at all representative, they did not devote a lot of attention to
‘‘Arab’’ customs. Nor, more important, did they have any motive to construct
a common descent for all Arabs, or to locate their origins within the frame-
work of their own mythology, as they did with so many other neighbouring
peoples. It is impossible to say that they could not have done so. Greek gene-
alogical ingenuity could easily have been extended to the Arabs. But, as it
seems, it was not until the first century..that this mode of categorisa-
tion was brought into play in relation to them. Moreover, when it was, the
mythological framework to which the Arabs were attached was not Greek
but biblical. What seems to be the earliest representation of the origins of
the Arabs by a pagan Greek writer is offered by Apollonius Molon in the first
century..As Martin Goodman points out to me, it is extraordinary that a
pagan writer should have applied biblical genealogy to the Arabs, and diffi-
cult to imagine that he could have done so without borrowing the idea from
a Jewish source. But it is extremely important to what follows that Molon’s
writings were well known to Josephus. But whether Josephus’ much more
extensive elaboration of this theme, to which he attaches meanings which,
so far as we know, were quite foreign to Molon, was directly inspired by
him, we do not know. The passage of Molon in which he gave a compressed
and confused account of the descent of the Arabs from Abraham was to be
reproduced by Eusebius as follows:
Molon, who composed the invective against the Jews, relates that the
man who survived the flood left Armenia with his sons, having been
expelled from his native place by the inhabitants of the land. Having
traversed the intermediate country, he came to the mountainous part
of Syria, which was desolate. After three generations Abraham was
born, whose name signifies the friend of the father. This man was wise
and eagerly went to the desert. He took two wives, one a local and
a relative of his, and the other an Egyptian handmaid. The Egyptian
woman bore him twelve sons, who emigrated to Arabia and divided
the country between themselves; they were the first to be kings over
the inhabitants of that country. Consequently, till our times there are
twelve kings among the Arabs who are namesakes of the sons of Abra-
ham.^14. For the passage of Eusebius,Praep. Ev. , , –, citing the passage of Apollonius
Molon quoted below, see Stern,Greek and Latin AuthorsI, no. . The passages deriving
from Josephus,C. Apionem, are nos. –.