As early as the dynasties of the Shepherd Kings and while the Israelites were still in Egyptian bondage, the Phœnician merchants had accumulated great wealth and great power and were literally the masters of the seas. The Phœnicians were a commercial and maritime people and the Egyptians were, in fact, dependent upon them for all their foreign supplies. These conditions leave hardly a doubt that Egypt’s first supply of horses came through the Phœnicians. But upon the establishment of the eighteenth dynasty under the old Thebans, the spirit of war and conquest revived, and under Thutmosis I. and Thutmosis III., notably, numerous and successful campaigns were made against Northern Syria and then extending eastward across the Euphrates into the borders of Armenia and Assyria. And from the number of horses and chariots captured in battle and collected as tribute, the careful student cannot avoid the conclusion that this kind of spoil was the chief incentive to the various campaigns. “Besides the usual species,” Maspero informs us, “powerful stallions were imported from Northern Syria, which were known by the Semitic name of _Abiri_, the strong.” This is the first mention in history of an improved type of horse noted for his strength.
Whatever may have been the precise period in which the Patriarch Job lived, he was the author of the grandest panegyric on the war-horse that ever was written. Yet it seems strange that he owned seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred she asses, but did not own a horse. To draw his picture of the war-horse he must have seen him in action, on the field, and it is not improbable in his younger days he witnessed, or possibly participated in, some great battle between the Babylonians and the Persians, north of the latitude and country in which he lived. It is now generally conceded, I think, among learned men that the “land of Uz” was in the southeastern portion of Arabia Deserta, bordering on the Persian Gulf, where the horse is a useless luxury. Job was a very rich man, he certainly did not lack in admiration of the horse, and if he had thought that horses would add to his comfort and enjoyment he could easily have obtained them from the great herds in the north. But the camel is the great beast of service and utility in Arabia; it was so in Job’s time, it is so to-day, and it always will be so because it is suited to the environment.