Page:The Celebrated Romance of the Stealing of the Mare.djvu/9



HE "Stealing of the Mare" is one of a cycle of tales forming the celebrated Mediaeval "Romance of Abu Zeydj" which has remained popular in Egypt and North Africa for, it is affirmed, over 800 years. Of its author, as of Homer, nothing but his name, Abu Obeyd, is known. He is said to have lived in the third century of Islam, say the tenth of our era, a little after the events which the main portion of the Epic describes, and there is sufficient internal evidence to suggest that he was a native of Cairo, both in the Egyptian dialect used, and in the numerous allusions made to the Nile and to Egyptian customs and superstitions.

As an historic document the romance of Abu Zeyd would seem to be of no great value, hardly more than are the "Songs of Roland" and the "Morte d'Arthur" of contemporary Europe; that is to say, it rests on a thin basis of fact so overlaid with imaginative episodes, that the truth is impossible now to distinguish from the fiction. All that can be said to be historically certain is, that the Tribe of the Beni Helal, whose adventures it records, did through stress of famine migrate, about the end of the ninth or the beginning of the tenth century, from Central Arabia to Egypt; that it besieged and captured Belbeis, a frontier town of the Delta, and remained in the Eastern Egyptian desert for upwards of a generation, and that then it once again marched