poets. His exact date cannot be determined; but probably
the best part of his career fell within the midst of the 6th century.
He was a scion of the royal house of the tribe Kinda, which
lost its power at the death of King Ḥārith ibn ‛Amr in the year
529.[1] The poet’s royal father, Ḥojr, by some accounts a son
of this Ḥārith, was killed by a Bedouin tribe, the Banū Asad.
The son led an adventurous life as a refugee, now with one
tribe, now with another, and appears to have died young. The
anecdotes related of him—which, however, are very untrustworthy
in detail—as well as his poems, imply that the glorious
memory of his house and the hatred it inspired were still comparatively
fresh, and therefore recent. A contemporary of
Amra’al-Qais was ‛Abīd ibn Abraṣ, one poem of whose, as we
have seen, is by some authorities reckoned among the collection.
He belonged to the Banū Asad, and is fond of vaunting the
heroic dead of his tribe—the murder of Ḥojr—in opposition
to the victim’s son, the great poet.
The Mo‛allaqa of ‛Amr hurls defiance against the king of Ḥīra, ‛Amr son of Mundhir, who reigned from the summer of 554 till 568 or 569, and was afterwards slain by our poet.[2] This prince is also addressed by Ḥārith in his Mo‛allaqa. Of Ṭarafa, who is said to have attained no great age, a few satirical verses have been preserved, directed against this same king. This agrees with the fact that a grandson of the Qais ibn Khālid, mentioned as a rich and influential man in Ṭarafa’s Mo‛allaqa (v. 80 or 81), figured at the time of the battle of Dhū-Qār, in which the tribe Bakr routed a Persian army. This battle falls between A.D. 604 and 610.[3]
The Mo‛allaqa of ‛Antara and that of Zuhair contain allusions to the feuds of the kindred tribes ‛Abs and Dhobyān. Famous as these contests were, their time cannot accurately be ascertained. But the date of the two poets can be approximately determined from other data. Ka‛b, son of Zuhair, composed first a satire, and then, in the year 630, a eulogy on the Prophet; another son, Bujair, had begun, somewhat sooner, to celebrate Mahomet. ‛Antara killed the grandfather of Aḥnaf ibn Qais, who died at an advanced age in A.D. 686 or 687; he outlived ʽAbdallāh ibn Ṣimma, whose brother Duraid was a very old man when he fell in battle against the Prophet (early in A.D. 630); and he had communications with Ward, whose son, the poet ‛Orwa, may perhaps have survived the flight of Mahomet to Medina. From all these indications we may place the productive period of both poets in the end of the 6th century. The historical background of ‛Antara’s Mo‛allaqa lies somewhat earlier than that of Zuhair’s.
To the same period appears to belong the poem of ‛Alqama, which, as we have seen, Ibn Khaldūn reckons amongst the Mo‛allaqāt. This too is certainly the date of Nābigha, who was one of the most distinguished of Arabic poets. For in the poem often reckoned as a Mo‛allaqa, as in many others, he addresses himself to No‛mān, king of Ḥīra, who reigned in the two last decades of the 6th century. The same king is mentioned as a contemporary in one of ‛Alqama’s poems.
The poem of A‛sha, sometimes added to the Mo‛allaqāt, contains an allusion to the battle of Dhū Qār (under the name “Battle of Ḥinw,” v. 62). This poet, not less famous than Nābigha, lived to compose a poem in honour of Mahomet, and died not long before A.D. 630.
Labīd is the only one of these poets who embraced Islam. His Mo‛allaqa, however, like almost all his other poetical works, belongs to the Pagan period. He is said to have lived till 661, or even later; certainly it is true of him, what is asserted with less likelihood of several others of these poets, that he lived to a ripe old age.
The seven Mo‛allaqāt, and also the poems appended to them, represent almost every type of ancient Arabian poetry in its excellences and its weaknesses. In order rightly to appreciate these, we must translate ourselves into the world of the Bedouin, and seek to realize the peculiar conditions of his life, together with the views and thoughts resulting from those conditions. In the Mo‛allaqa of Ṭarafa we are repelled by the long, anatomically exact description of his camel; but such a description had an extraordinary charm of its own for the Bedouins, every man of whom was a perfect connoisseur on this subject down to the minutest points; and the remaining parts of the poem, together with the other extant fragments of his songs, show that Ṭarafa had a real poetic gift. In the Mo‛allaqāt of ‛Amr and Ḥārith, for the preservation of which we are especially grateful to the compiler, we can read the haughty spirit of the powerful chieftains, boastfully celebrating the splendours of their tribe. These two poems have also a certain historical importance. The song of Zuhair contains the practical wisdom of a sober man of the world. The other poems are fairly typical examples of the customary qaṣīda, the long poem of ancient Arabia, and bring before us the various phases of Bedouin life. But even here we have differences. In the Mo‛allaqa of ‛Antara, whose heroic temperament had overcome the scorn with which the son of a black slave-mother was regarded by the Bedouins, there predominates a warlike spirit, which plays practically no part in the song of Labīd.
It is a phenomenon which deserves the fullest recognition, that the needy inhabitants of a barren country should thus have produced an artistic poetry distinguished by so high a degree of uniformity. Even the extraordinary strict metrical system, observed by poets who had no inkling of theory and no knowledge of an alphabet, excites surprise. In the most ancient poems the metrical form is as scrupulously regarded as in later compositions. The only poem which shows unusual metrical freedom is the above-mentioned song of ‛Abīd. It is, however, remarkable that ‛Abīd’s contemporary Amra’al-Qais, in a poem which in other respects also exhibits certain coincidences with that of ‛Abīd (No. 55, ed. Ahlwardt), presents himself considerable licence in the use of the very same metre—one which, moreover, is extremely rare in the ancient period. Presumably, the violent deviations from the schema in ‛Abīd are due simply to incorrect transmission by compilers who failed to grasp the metre. The other poems ascribed to ‛Abīd, together with all the rest attributed to Amra’al-Qais, are constructed in precise accord with the metrical canons. It is necessary always to bear in mind that these ancient poems, which for a century or more were preserved by oral tradition alone, have reached us in a much mutilated condition. Fortunately, there was a class of men who made it their special business to learn by rote the works either of a single poet or of several. The poets themselves used the services of these rhapsodists (rāwī). The last representative of this class is Ḥammād, to whom is attributed the collection of the Mo‛allaqāt; but he, at the same time, marks the transition of the rhapsodists to the critic and scholar. The most favourable opinion of these rhapsodists would require us to make allowance for occasional mistakes: expressions would be transposed, the order of verses disarranged, passages omitted, and probably portions of different poems pieced together. It is clear, however, that Ḥammād dealt in the most arbitrary fashion with the enormous quantity of poetry which he professed to know thoroughly. The seven Mo‛allaqāt are indeed free from the suspicion of forgery, but even in them the text is frequently altered and many verses are transposed. The loose structure of Arabic poems was extremely favourable to such alterations. Some of the Mo‛allaqāt have several preambles: so, especially, that of ‛Amr, the first eight verses of which belong not to the poem, but to another poet. Elsewhere, also, we find spurious verses in the Mo‛allaqāt. Some of these poems, which have been handed down to us in other exemplars besides the collection itself, exhibit great divergences both in the order and number of the verses and in textual details. This is particularly the case with the oldest Mo‛allaqa—that of Amra’al-Qais—the critical treatment of which is a problem of such extreme difficulty that only an approximate solution can ever be reached. The variations of the text, outside the Mo‛allaqāt collection, have
