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Originally published in 1984.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691640785 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Modern Classics in Near Eastern Studies , #688 |
| Pages: | 228 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Arabic Book
By Johannes Pedersen, Robert Hillenbrand, Geoffrey French
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1984 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-10148-4
CHAPTER 1
Writing and Books in Arabia before Islam
The Arabic book owes its origin to Islam, and this has given it a character that it has retained. This does not mean, however, that written records were unknown in the Arabian peninsula before the coming of the Prophet around the year 600 (his emigration from Mecca to Medina, the starting point of the Muslim calendar, took place in A.D. 622). From information brought back by Niebuhr's expedition from Yemen, where it had sojourned in 1762-1763, it was known in Europe that there were inscriptions with a distinctive script in southern Arabia. During the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, a large number of these became known in Europe, partly through squeezes. The south Arabian characters, which are monumental and symmetrical in shape, are derived from an adaptation of the oldest Semitic alphabet writing, which originated with the Canaanitic people. This south Arabian script was called in the Arabic tradition musnad — "supported" — probably because of its stiff, pillar-like form.
The language is a branch of the Arabic family of languages, differentiated into various dialects but quite distinct from the north Arabic language, which later became classical Arabic. The inscriptions, most of which are incised in stone, are largely dedications and building inscriptions, but they also include laws, documents, and expressions of religious feeling; they give an impression of the rich culture that flowered in these regions that conducted trade both with India and with the Mediterranean lands. Most of the inscriptions are from the first millennium B.C., but there are some from later centuries; a couple of long inscriptions, dealing with the collapse of dams, date from 449-450 and 542-543.
In the later Arabic tradition, southern Arabia plays a large role as a starting point for popular movements in Arabia, and it would not be remarkable if the impulse for the writing activities of the Arabs had come from here, the more so since commercial intercourse brought the southern Arabs into continuous contact with their northern kinsmen. We do have evidence, in fact, that the south Arabian script spread beyond its own boundaries. This was of greatest significance in a country beyond Arabia, namely, Abyssinia, the leading language of which is close to Arabic, probably because the ruling people had migrated thither from southern Arabia. A script derived from the south Arabian one is still used there today, but with the important improvement that it can depict vowels. The oldest inscriptions extant in this script date from the fourth century A.D.
But offshoots of the south Arabian script have also been found in northern Arabia. At the oasis of al-'Ula, which lay on the caravan route leading from southern Arabia via Mecca and Medina to the countries of the Mediterranean, purely south Arabian (Minæan) inscriptions, originating from a south Arabian colony, have been discovered. Other inscriptions have been found at the same place, but with a more cursive adaptation of the south Arabian script called Lihyanic, after the people among whom it originated. A number of inscriptions, often scratched graffiti, have been encountered, in a script also derived from the south Arabian one, but showing a greater degree of modification. These are all comprehended under the description "Thamudic." A third group, closely related to these with regard to both script and language, composes the Safaitic, which are found as far north as Safa, a place situated in the Hauran mountains southeast of Damascus. Most of these inscriptions are incised in rock walls and on the remains of ancient buildings. They are not very informative, but they do constitute evidence of the expansion of the south Arabian script in the period between the second century B.C. and the third century A.D.
Nevertheless, it was not the southern Arabs whose script came to furnish the basis for the Islamic book. The south Arabian alphabet and its offshoots did not achieve any widespread dissemination in northern Arabia beyond peoples of the southern Arabian type. The script that became of historical world importance throughout Islamic literature came into existence as an offshoot of Aramaic.
The Aramaic script came into existence in close association with the north Semitic type, which was used in the Canaanitic region and has strong affinities with the later Hebrew script. It was in use during the centuries before and after the start of our era over virtually the whole of the Near East, where Aramaic had become both the universal popular idiom and an international second language. It goes without saying that over such a vast region local variations would occur in both language and script. Thus, one characteristic subgroup consists of inscriptions from the busy trading settlement at the oasis of Palmyra; the Nabataean inscriptions form a second. The latter are of particular interest in this context, for they stem from Arabs who in the Hellenistic age had pushed into the region of the dominant culture and had adopted the language and script of the host population. Therefore they wrote Aramaic, but their Arabic mother-tongue shines through clearly, especially in the names. From about 100 B.C. to about the third century A.D., the Nabataeans controlled the northern section of Arabia's western caravan and trade routes, from the oasis of Mada'in Salih via Petra and southeast of the Dead Sea northward to Damascus. Their inscriptions have been found in this region, and others not very different from them are met with in the Sinai peninsula.
Once the Arabs had gone this far, it was but a short additional step for them to use the same alphabet for writing their own language. This step is taken in an epitaph to the Arab King Mar' al-Qais found at al-Namara, southeast of Damascus, dated 328 in our chronology. This is the oldest inscription in the north Arabic language so far known. The inscription proclaims the deceased to have been king of all the Arabs enumerates various northern Arabian tribes subdued by him, and includes even Najran in southern Arabia; it says also that he set his sons over the tribes and sent them on missions to the Persians and the Byzantines.
This inscription shows Mar' al-Qais to have been a powerful Bedouin chieftain, who gathered the northernmost tribes of Arabia around him and made contact, like so many later great Arab chieftains, with the imperial civilizations of East and West. Thus, the first genuine Arabic inscription comes from the Bedouins. Such use of the Nabataean-Aramaic script led to the development of a distinctive Arabic script. We find this in three inscriptions from the pre-Islamic era, all of them from Syria. The oldest is from Zabad, in northern Syria, and is dated A.D. 512; it contains a Syriac, a Greek, and a short Arabic text, the latter consisting mainly of proper names. The second, at Harran in the province of al-Laja, southeast of Damascus, is to be found together with a Greek translation, dated A.D. 568, on the lintel over the portal of a now-ruined church. The third is from Umm al-Jamal, and likewise dates from the sixth century. The new script differs from the Nabataean in its more rounded shapes, in its predilection for giving the last letter of the word a distinctive form, and in general in its simplification of the more monumental lines of the Nabataean characters. It may be presumed to have sprung up in the period between the Namara inscription and the Zabad inscription, namely, in the fourth or fifth century A.D., somewhere in northern Arabia or neighboring Syria. It is worth noting, perhaps, that it resembles the Sinai inscriptions more than the other inscriptions of Nabataean origin. In the same way as it spread northward to the outermost margin of the Arabic-language region, as the Zabad inscription shows, so also it moved southward, reaching at least as far as Mecca, where it attained its historic significance with the emergence of Islam. That it was this and not the south Arabian type that prevailed results from the fact that the inhabitants of al-Hijaz, the territory in which Mecca and Medina are situated, had close linguistic affinities with the northern Arabian tribes.
No Arabic script other than those just noted has survived from the pre-Islamic era. Before Islam, the Arabs had innumerable stories of the lives and exploits of the tribes, and they also had a highly developed poetry bound by fixed rules of rhythm and construction, but both the stories and the poems were handed down orally. The tribes had their special reciters and narrators. A narrator, or khatib, needed to command every shade of meaning of which his language was capable in order to uphold the honor of his tribe when recounting its heroic deeds, and he had to have a large fund of knowledge that others could inherit from him. Poets did recite their poetry themselves, but a prominent poet would have his transmitter, a rawi or rawiya, who knew all his poems by heart and who was master of the fine art of recitation. Such a rawi was a living edition of the great poetry collections, and naturally he had pupils, who represented new editions of the poems. Such a mode of transmission could ensure the survival of the poems for no more than a few generations, as a rule; the oldest poems to have come down to us date back no further than the first century before Islam.
These same poets, however, do furnish evidence of the use of writing in the late pre-Islamic age. A major poem usually begins with descriptions of a deserted campground where the loved one had tarried with her tribe; the black markings etched into the white sand by the refuse of the camp evoke in the poet's imagination the shapes of letters twisting and turning across the white pages of a book. One of these older poets, Imru' al-Qais, begins one of his poems thus: "From whom stem the campground's traces, so painful to mine eye, resembling the writing in a book of Yamani palm-bark?" In another poem he likens the campground's traces to "the lettering in the books of monks." Other poets speak in the same way of "lettering on parchment." And Labid, who lived to see the coming of Muhammad, is reminded by the remains of the loved one's camp both of weathered inscriptions on stone tablets and of "books whose pages are filled afresh by the reed pens." He mentions also a gold-striped table on which missives are placed, both sealed and open (that is, when they are to be delivered to a prince). Thus, Labid is acquainted with rock inscriptions, parchment books, and missives, and it seems as if he has in mind parchments used for a second time, i.e. palimpsests. When he speaks of "characters like those written by a Yamani slave," and we compare this with the mention by Imru' al-Qais of "a book of Yamani palm-bark," this suggests that the southern Arabs did produce other written works than the inscriptions — quite monotonous for the most part — that they incised in stone.
In fact, the frequent stress laid in the northern Arabic poems upon Yamani writing surely constitutes evidence that their authors saw something alien in it, and this is borne out by their special mention of Jewish and Christian books. We have seen that Labid's thinking on the subject of writing and books is bound up with the ideas of southern Arabia and of monks. Al-Shammakh, a Bedouin poet of the time of Muhammad, says of the campground traces that they are "like unto the lines dashed off by a Jewish scholar in Taima writing Hebrew with his right hand." There is no doubt that Jews and Christians coming in from the north helped make the use of books and writing known in Arabia.
The Arab tribes in the pre-Islamic period penetrated farther and farther northward into Syria and Mesopotamia, as indeed the finding of the inscriptions noted above also testifies. The Byzantines and Persians saw how important it was for them to obtain friends among these tribes in order to secure tranquillity on the frontiers, and in place of some great Arab prince such as Mar' al-Qais, whose tomb is found in al-Namara and who held the balance between the two great powers, they each created in the sixth century their own Arab buffer states. In the western part of the Syrian desert the Byzantines had the Ghassanid dynasty as their — somewhat troublesome — vassals, while the Persians had the Lakhmid dynasty in Hira a little to the west of the lower course of the Euphrates. Christendom little by little extended its sway over these peoples, and a number of religious houses were established. In Syria east of Damascus in the sixth century there were 137 monasteries for monks for the Monophysite confession, whereas their Christian opponents, the Nestorians, who stressed the distinction between the divine and the human natures of Christ, had a bishop in Hira. Monks and anchorites of both groups spread southward into Arabia. In Najran, a province northeast of Yemen, there was a Christian community having close links with Hira. A fearful persecution launched against the community by a Jewish king in Yemen named Dhu Nuwas in the year 523 is described in accounts in the Syriac tongue, including a letter from bishop Simeon of Hira written the year after the events in question.
All this leads us to understand that the Christians must have been important in introducing the use of writing into Arabia; and if we can believe a report that Khusrau, the Persian king, appointed the Christian poet Adi ibn Zayd to his chancellery at al-Mada'in with the duty of drafting letters in Arabic, then it would seem that Arabic was already being employed in administrative correspondence in Iraq as early as the sixth century. It would be remarkable if the Meccans, whose soil is quite barren and who therefore have to depend upon what they can earn from outside through trade, had been able to dispense with the aid afforded to business life by writing. Tradition has it that writing was used in the entourage of the Prophet. In the tenth century, Ibn al-Nadim states in his book al-Fihrist ("Index" [of Books]), written in Iraq, that the caliph al-Ma'mun (813-833) had in his library an I.O. U. in the sum of 1,000 silver dirhams, inscribed on leather, owed by a certain Himyarite living in Sana' to the Prophet's grandfather 'Abd al-Muttalib, and that it was written in the latter's hand.
The veracity of this story may be doubted, but that agreements were committed to writing in the Mecca region is shown by a poem of al-Harith ibn Hilliza composed in the time of King 'Amr, in Hira (554-568 or 569). Al-Harith, lamenting a breach of the peace between his own and another tribe, says: "Remember the oath sworn at Dhu'l-Majaz, the obligations entered into and the hostages exchanged so as to avert broken words and violations; unbridled fancy surely cannot revoke what stands in the parchments." This is an allusion to a reconciliation between the Bakr and Taghlib tribes brought about through the mediation of the king of Hira. It is of interest that a pact between these northern Arabian tribes was concluded at a holy place close to Mecca, whose central significance was acknowledged even before Islam, and that the agreement was inscribed on parchment. Nu'man ibn al-Mundhir, a king of Hira who reigned about 580-602 — that is, immediately prior to the coming of the Prophet — is said to have had a collection of poems that had been composed in his praise by various poets. On the face of it there is nothing improbable in this, but we have no traces of this kind of pre-Islamic writing. All we have are the few rock inscriptions mentioned above.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Arabic Book by Johannes Pedersen, Robert Hillenbrand, Geoffrey French. Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. v
- List of Illustrations, pg. vii
- Introduction, pg. xi
- One. Writing and Books in Arabia before Islam, pg. 1
- Two. The Qur'ān and Arabic Literature, pg. 12
- Three. Composition and Transmission of Books, pg. 20
- Four. Scribes and Booksellers, pg. 37
- Five. Writing Materials, pg. 54
- Six. Arabic Script; Calligraphers, pg. 72
- Seven. Book Painting, pg. 89
- Eight. Bookbinding, pg. 101
- Nine. Libraries, pg. 113
- Ten. Printed Books, pg. 131
- Bibliography, pg. 143
- Index, pg. 161
- Illustrations, pg. 176