141

OF MOSLEM TRADITIONS

every individual of note among the contemporaries of Mahomet and their followers to its family in some one of the Arab tribes, but they affiliated every tribe to its proper stem, and gave the name of every progenitor through whom step by step each tribe was connected with one or other of the great races which peopled the Peninsula. This vast genealogical web was woven tip to the earliest epoch: but it is only the lower threads of it that we can count upon with certainty. The warp and woof of the ancient portion is almost entirely pure invention. Certain great ancestral names were current in Arabia as the patriarchs of the various affiliations of tribes, and constituted, we might say, the ethnological symbols of the nation. These were laid down as the ruling pattern. Upon it again was delineated the position of every tribe, in accordance with the popular tradition of descent, the received symbols of ancient ethnological division, or the mere fancy of the genealogist. The outline was enriched with sketches of battles, inter-tribal rivalries, or personal incident, grounded no doubt for the most part on legends current among the Arabs; some of them, perhaps, like the episode of Antar, adopted from the recitations of Bedouin rhapsodists, or based on the remains of ancient poets; but excepting for recent periods, all equally fabulous. The details are given with the greater freshness and confidence the farther the scene is shifted back into the depths of the past; for there imagination had the freest scope.1 

The Bedouin nation exhibits a phase of society ever restless, ever changeful. A tribe would divide itself in search of pasture or in consequence of some dispute or other trivial cause, and the branches would wander far from each other, separated probably ever after, and forgetful of their common origin. The fortune of war sometimes exterminated a whole clan, or forced it into combinations which gave a new colour to the genealogical traditions. On the other hand, success in war, or a 


1 An article on the Tribe Poets of the Arabs, by Goldzihet, has just appeared in the Asiatic Society's Journal, illustrating the vast number of these poetic Deivans, April 1897, p. 325.