Its soil is a rich loam, containing scarcely a pebble, which yields year after year prodigious crops of grain--chiefly wheat--without manure or irrigation, or other cultivation than a light ploughing.

Philistia was the granary of Syria, and was important doubly, first, as yielding inexhaustible supplies to its conqueror, and secondly as affording the readiest passage to the great armies which contended in these regions for the mastery of the Eastern World.
South of the region to which we have given the name of Palestine, intervening between it and Egypt, lay a tract, to which it is difficult to assign any political designation.

Herodotus regarded it as a portion of Arabia, which he carried across the valley of the Arabah and made abut on the Mediterranean.

To the Jews it was "the land of the south"-- the special country of the Amalekites.

By Strabo's time it had come to be known as Idumsea, or the Edomite country; and under this appellation it will perhaps be most convenient to describe it here.
Idumasa, then, was the tract south and south-west of Palestine from about lat.