Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/562

Rh 536 M O A L L A K A T powers ; and this perpetual struggle with gods and men was not profitless, although the external catastrophe was inevitable. Moab meantime remained settled on his lees, and was not emptied from vessel to vessel (Jer. xlviii. 11), and corruption and decay were the result. This explana tion, however, does not carry us far, for other peoples with fortunes as rude as those of Israel have yet failed to attain historical importance, but have simply disappeared. The service the prophets rendered at a critical time, by raising the faith of Israel from the temporal to the eternal sphere, has already been spoken of in the article ISRAEL. Sources. The Old Testament (Ruth and Chronicles, however, being of no historical worth in this connexion), and the inscription of Mesha, on the stone of Dibon, discovered in 1868, and now in the Louvre. The Berlin Moabitica are valueless, Schlottmann himself, the unshaken champion of their genuineness, conceding that they are mere scribbling, and do not even form words, much less sentences. The literature of the subject is to be found in the commentaries on the Old Testament books, and in those on the inscription of Mesha. (J. WE.) MO ALLAKAT. Al-Mo allaMt is the title of a group of seven longish Arabic poems, which have come down to us from the time before Islam. The name signifies &quot; the suspended &quot; (pi.), the traditional explanation being that these poems were hung up by the Arabs on or in the Iva ba at Mecca. The oldest passage known to the writer where this is stated occurs in the l lkd of the Spanish Arab, Ibn Abd-Rabbih (A.D. 861-940), Bulak ed. vol. iii. p. 116 sq. We read there : &quot;The Arabs had such an interest in poetry, and valued it so highly, that they took seven long pieces selected from the ancient poetry, wrote them in gold on rolls (?) of Coptic cloth, and hung them up ( allakat) on the curtains which covered the Ka ba. Hence we speak of the golden poem of Amraalkais, the golden poem of Zohair. The number of the golden poems is seven ; they are also called the suspended (al-Jfo allakdt).&quot; Similar statements are frequent in later Arabic works. But against this we have the testimony of a contemporary of Ibn Abd- Rabbih, the grammarian Nahhas (ob. A.D. 949), who says in his commentary on the Mo allakdt : &quot;As for the assertion that they were hung up in _sic~ the Ka ba, it is not known to any of those who have handed down ancient poems.&quot; l This cautious scholar is unquestionably right in rejecting a story so utterly unauthenticated. The customs of the Arabs before Mohammed are pretty accurately known to us ; we have also a mass of information about the affairs of Mecca at the time when the Prophet arose; but no trace of this or anything like it is found in really good and ancient authorities. We hear, indeed, of a Meccan hanging up a spoil of battle on the Ka ba (Ibn Hisham, ed. Wiis- tenfeld, p. 431). Less credible is the story of an important document being deposited in that sanctuary, for this looks like an instance of later usages being transferred to pre- Lslamic times. But at all events this is quite a different thing from the hanging up of poetical manuscripts. To account for the disappearance of the Mo allakat from the Ka ba we are told, in a passage of late origin (De Sacy, Ckresto?n., ii. 480), that they were taken down at the cap ture of Mecca by the Prophet. But in that case we should expect some hint of the occurrence in the circumstantial biographies of the Prophet, and in the works on the history of Mecca ; and we find no such thing. That long poems were written at all at that remote period is improbable in the extreme. All that we know of the diffusion of Arabic poetry, even up to a time when the art of writing had become far more general than it was before the spread of Islam, points exclusively to oral tradition. Moreover, it is quite inconceivable that there should have been either a guild or a private individual of such acknowledged taste, 1 Ernst Fmikel, An-NahhtU Commentar zur Muallaqa des Imruul- Qais (Halle, 1876), p. viii. or of such influence, as to bring about a consensus of opinion in favour of certain poems. Think of the mortal offence which the canonization of one poet must have given to his rivals and their tribes ! It was quite another thing for an individual to give his own private estimate of the respective merits of two poets who had appealed to him as umpire ; or for a number of poets to appear at large gather ings, such as the fair of Okaz, as candidates for the place of honour in the estimation of the throng which listened to their recitations. In short, this legend, so often retailed by later Arabs, and still more frequently by Europeans, must be entirely rejected. 2 The story is a pure fabrication based on the name &quot; suspended.&quot; The word was taken in its literal sense ; and as these poems were undoubtedly prized above all others in after times, the same opinion was attributed to &quot;the [ancient] Arabs,&quot; who were sup posed to have given effect to their verdict in the way already described. A somewhat simpler version, also given by Nahhas in the passage already cited, is as follows : &quot; Most of the Arabs were accustomed to meet at Ok;iz and recite verses ; then if the king was pleased with any poem, he said, Hang it up, and preserve it among my treasures. &quot; But, not to mention other difficulties, there was no king of all the Arabs ; and it is hardly probable that any Arabian king attended the fair at Okaz. The story that the poems were written in gold has evidently originated in the name &quot;the golden poems&quot; (literally &quot;the gilded&quot;), a figurative ex pression for excellence. We must interpret the designation &quot;suspended&quot; on the same principle. In all probability it means those (poems) which have been raised, on account of their value, to a specially honourable position. Another derivative of the same root is ilk, &quot; precious thing.&quot; The selection of these seven poems can scarcely have been the work of the ancient Arabs at all. It is much more likely that we owe it to some connoisseur of a later date. Now Nahhas says expressly in the same passage : &quot; The true view of the matter is this : when Hammad arrawiya (Hammad the Rhapsodist) saw how little men cared for poetry,, he collected these seven pieces, urged people to study them, and said to them : These are the [poems] of renoAvn. &quot; And this agrees with all our other information. Hammad (who lived in the first three quar ters of the 8th century A.D.) was perhaps of all men the one who knew most Arabic poetry by heart. The recita tion of poems was his profession. To such a rhapsodist the task of selection is in every way appropriate ; and it may be assumed that he is responsible also for the some what fantastic title of &quot; the suspended.&quot; The collection of Hammad appears to have consisted of the same seven poems which are found in our modern editions, composed respectively by Amraalkais, Tarafa, Zohair, Labid, Antara, Ami* ibn Kolthum, and Harith ibn Hilliza. These are enumerated both by Ibn Abd- Rabbih, and, on the authority of the older philologists, by Nahhas ; and all subsequent commentators seem to follow them. We have, however, evidence of the existence, at a very early period, of a slightly different arrangement. Two of the foremost authorities in Arabic poetry are Aim Obaida and Mofaddal, men who for care and accuracy in preserving the genuine text were far ahead of their much older contemporary Hammad. Both of these inserted a poem by Nabigha and one by A sha in place of those of Antara and Harith ; 3 and, if our informant has expressed 2 Doubts had already been expressed by various scholars, when Hengstenberg rigid conservative as he was in theology openly challenged it ; and since then it has been controverted at length in Noldeke s Beitriiye zur Kenntniss der Poesie der alien Araber (Han over, 1864), p. xvii. sqq. Our highest authority on Arabic poetry, Professor Ahlwardt, concurs in this conclusion ; see his Bemerkungen ubcr die Aechtheit der alt en arabisclten Gedichte (18721, p. 25 sq. 3 The passage is cited by Noldeke, Beitriige, p. xx. sq.