The Kaʿbah, or Holy House, in the mosk at Meccah is said to have been built by Adam himself, on the model of a similar structure in heaven. It would seem as if no earthly foundation, or threshold, could have been earlier than that; indeed, the Qurân declares: “The first house appointed unto men to worship in was that which was in Beccah [or Meccah];”[468] yet there is a tradition that Adam erected a place of prayer even before he built the Kaʿbah. In the Deluge the Holy House was destroyed; but Abraham was directed to rebuild it, and on digging beneath the surface of its site he discovered the original foundation, and the Kaʿbah was newly built up on that.
According to Muhammadan traditions, it was while Hagar was near the site of the Holy House, with her famishing son Ishmael, that a spring of water gushed forth with its life-giving stream from beneath that holy site. And that spring is the well Zemzem, or Zamzam, whose waters are deemed sacred and life-giving to-day.
Mount Arafat, a holy hill near Meccah, is another place of pilgrimage, and its sacredness dates from even an earlier day than the laying of the first foundation of the Holy House at Meccah by Adam. When our first parents were cast out of their heavenly paradise, Adam lighted in Ceylon, and Eve in Arabia. Seeking each other, they met on Mount Arafat, or the Mount of Recognition, and therefore that spot of their reunion and new covenanting is a place of pilgrimage and worship for the faithful of all the world at this time.[469] Adam is said to have built a _madaa_, a place of prayer, on Mount Arafat, before he built the Kaʿbah.[470] The religion of Islam thus teaches its subjects to worship at the earliest threshold laid by our first parents in their primal covenanting, and all other religions recognize the importance of a similar idea.
Darmesteter’s translation of _Zend Avesta_, in “Sacred Books of the East,” IV., 12, note.
De Coulange’s _Ancient City_, pp. 32–35, 46 f.
Compare Friedrich Delitzsch’s _Assyrisches Handwörterbuch_, s. v. “Êkallu.”
Wilkinson’s _Egyptians in the Times of the Pharaohs_, p. 141.
Erman’s _Life in Ancient Egypt_, p. 279 f.
Guhl and Koner’s _Life of the Greeks and Romans_, p. 297.
Perrot and Chipiez’s _Hist. of Art in Persia_, pp. 240–254.