# Talk:Hyspaosines

To those who keep citing WP:PRIMARY sources from 2000 years ago;

In Pliny's Natural History we read that Arabia eudaemon begins (excurrit) from the inner part of the Persian Gulf where the town Alexandria was situated. But then he goes on to say that the town was refounded by Hyspaosines as Charax and calls it 'a city of Arabia' (oppidum Arabiae). In another notice Hyspaosines is described as king ofthe bordering arabes (jinitimorum arabum). These notices are taken by Pliny from Iuba's Arabica. Iuba in turn had his information from a work by a Mesenean native, Isidorus of Charax, which was also known to Pliny in its original form. Unfortunately we can never be sure whether Pliny copied his source correctly, and the claim that Hyspaosines was king of Arabs cannot be verified from the Plinian passage alone. Still more unfortunate is that we cannot be certain about the meaning of this notice. Even though the kings in Charax were not Arabs in any sense of the word, it cannot be ruled out that they employed, for example, Arab mercenaries. In that case, these must have come from Alesene/al-ijasa, where we know there were Arabs in the time of Eratosthenes. This cannot, however, be verified by evidence available at present, and the existence of Arabs in the Mesenian kingdom remains uncertain. It is more likely that these remarks in Pliny/luba/Isidorus ultimately go back to the idea that the people along the southern shore of the Persian Gulf were Arabs, a concept we have found originating in the last years of Alexander the Great. Charax was seen as situated on the border to Arabia eudaemon. Hyspaosines is then said to have been king of the bordering Arabs. They must be those living in the part of Arabia stretching along the Persian Gulf, deriving their Arabness from their habitat in Arabia, not from actually being Arabs. The Arabs ruled by Hyspaosines were thus Arabs to the Greeks. - p. 333, The Arabs in Antiquity: Their History from the Assyrians to the Umayyads, Routledge, Jan Retso HistoryofIran (talk) 20:14, 18 April 2024 (UTC)