The larger part of northern Arabia, however, was the home of the Ishmaelites.  They lived, it is said, “from Havilah unto Shur,” like the Amalekites or Bedawin.  But whereas the Amalekites were the wild, untamable natives of the desert, the Ishmaelites came of a cultured ancestry, half Babylonian, half Egyptian, and the traditions of it were never forgotten.  They lived a settled life in fenced villages and fortified castles, as their descendants still do to-day.  Like the Israelites, they were divided into twelve tribes, the eldest and most important of which were the Nabatheans, who spread from the frontiers of Babylonia to Petra in the far west.  Kedar was another powerful tribe; in the days of the later Assyrian empire its kings contended in battle with the armies of Nineveh.

The name of Ishmael is met with in Babylonian contracts of the age of Abraham.  It is a name which belongs to Canaan rather than to Babylonia or Arabia.  The Ishmaelite tribes, in fact, spoke dialects in which Canaanitish and Arabic elements were mingled together.  They are the dialects we term Aramaic, and represent a mixture of Arabic with Canaanitish or Hebrew.  As we go northwards into Syria the Canaanitish element predominates; southward the Arabic element is the more pronounced.

The Ishmaelites were merchants and traders.  They lived on the caravan-road which brought the spices of southern Arabia to Canaan and Egypt, and the trade was largely in their hands.  In the history of Joseph we hear of them carrying the balm of Gilead and the myrrh of the south on their camels to Egypt, and in the second century before the Christian era the merchant princes of Petra made their capital one of the wealthiest of Oriental cities.  It was not until 105 A.D. that the Nabathean state was conquered by Rome, and the Ishmaelites of northern Arabia transformed into Roman subjects.  They have left their tombs and inscriptions among the rocks of Petra, while the cliffs of the Sinaitic Peninsula are covered with the scrawls of Nabathean travellers.

Southward of the Ishmaelites came the Midianites.  Midianites and Ishmaelites were alike of the same blood.  Both traced their descent from Abraham; it was only on the side of the mother that their origin was different.  While the Ishmaelites claimed connection with Egypt, the Midianites were more purely Arabic in race.  The name of Keturah their ancestress means “incense,” and points to the incense-bearing lands of the south.  Midian was properly the district which stretched along the western coast of the Gulf of Aqaba towards Mecca, if not towards Yemen.  But Midianite tribes had also pushed northwards and mingled with the descendants of Ishmael.  “Ishmaelites” and “Midianites” seem convertible terms in the story of Joseph, and the Midianites who swarmed into the north of Israel in the days of Gideon, along with the Amalekites and “the children of the East,” must have been as much Ishmaelite as Midianite in descent.