The Australian historian Ball records in his writings how the Roman conquest of the Middle East accelerated the movement of Arabs towards the Mediterranean and Europe. A movement which began with the Phoenician colonization of the first millennium BC according to him.

1. And which culminated with the invasion of Europe (Iberian Peninsula) by the Arabs in the eighth century AD. He adds that the domination by the Arabs of the very heart of Rome is underestimated, this domination being established in particular with the emergence of Arab families who gave rise to Roman Emperors in the third century. We then understand that he highlights here the logical continuity between the Phoenicians and the Arabs, who would later merge. [Ball, W. (2000). Rome in the East: The transformation of an Empire. London: Routledge. Psychology Press. P.404.]
2. To continue in the direction of this link between the Phoenicians and the Arabs, Rossi says that the country called Phoenicia is nothing other than a province of Canaan which became Palestine and which was long before Athens, a powerful Greco-Arab home.

According to him, Greek is as much an Arabic language as Arabic is a Greek language, with this difference, a significant difference, that Greek was only a language of transposition; the substantial cultural, scientific, religious contribution having been provided by the Arabs. He therefore advises not to reverse the roles and not to make the Greeks, who are only heirs, the fathers of their spiritual ancestors, the Arabs. And as Ball later wrote, he made the link between the Punic Wars and the wars subsequently waged by the Arabs under Islam in Europe in the eighth century AD, for him the “Punic Wars” were not nothing other than “Arab Wars”. To support this on the question of where the Phoenicians came from, Herodotus (Greek Historian and Geographer of the classical period) says that they would have emigrated from the Persian Gulf in the third millennium BC.

1. This tradition was so alive that during his visit, to punish the city of Tire for its resistance, Alexander the Great thought of “sending the Phoenicians home” that is to say to Bahrain. Strabo (Greek historian and geographer of the classical period) and Persian historians also agreed that the Phoenicians originated in Arabia. [Rossi, P. (1976). La cité d’Isis – Histoire vraie des Arabes. Nouvelles Editions Latines. p.58.60.] [Elayi, J. (2018). The History of Phoenicia. Atlanta Lockwood Press. p.7.]

“The story of Rome is a story of a fascination for the East, a fascination that amounted to an obsession.” Arabs were part of this East and contacts with them, especially the Emesene dynasty, largely influenced Rome, politically, religiously and artistically.