Crossword-Solution: CAABA 5 letters, 11 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 9

Before the time of Mohammed, the Caaba was an idolatrouse temple, but it has since been the chief sanctuary and object of pilgrimage of the Mohammedan world.

The genuine antiquity of the Caaba ascends beyond the Christian aera; in describing the coast of the Red Sea, the Greek historian Diodorus 45 has remarked, between the Thamudites and the Sabaeans, a famous temple, whose superior sanctity was revered by all the Arabians; the linen or silken veil, which is annually renewed by the Turkish emperor, was first offered by a pious king of the Homerites, who reigned seven hundred years before the time of Mahomet.

The tribe of Koreish, by fraud and force, had acquired the custody of the Caaba: the sacerdotal office devolved through four lineal descents to the grandfather of Mahomet; and the family of the Hashemites, from whence he sprung, was the most respectable and sacred in the eyes of their country.

Each tribe either found or introduced in the Caaba their domestic worship: the temple was adorned, or defiled, with three hundred and sixty idols of men, eagles, lions, and antelopes; and most conspicuous was the statue of Hebal, of red agate, holding in his hand seven arrows, without heads or feathers, the instruments and symbols of profane divination.

Was the Sicilian more knowing than the Egyptian? Or was the Caaba built between the years of Rome 650 and 746, the dates of their respective histories? (Dodwell, in Dissert.