Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  Turning to Arabic itself, its origins are in a ‘dialect bundle’ of the branch of Semitic called North Arabian. Those languages of the graffiti – Safaitic, Thamudic and various other ‘-ics’ – form another bundle of now-dead twigs springing from that same North Arabian branch. All these North Arabian tongues would have been mutually intelligible, probably with ease. South Arabian, on the other hand (or, on the other branch) included the languages of the settled peoples of the southern and western peninsula – Saba/Sheba, Himyar and so on – and would not have been intelligible to North Arabian speakers. Most of the South Arabian branch withered and died with the creeping arabization and arabicization that took place well before Islam. But a few new South Arabian languages appeared in far-off corners – the Gaelics of Arabia, spoken today by several tens of thousands of people in Yemen and Oman. Listening to their speakers, for example to mountain-men in the Island of Socotra off the Horn of Africa, as an Arabic-speaker I wiggle my ears in perplexity, feeling I ought to understand but picking up only the odd gist of a cognate word.

  When it comes to classifying the different ‘-ics’ within the same branch, things are not so clear. The distinguishing feature of Arabic is usually said to be its ‘al-’ definite article; Safaitic and its sisters, in contrast, have ‘h-’ or ‘hn-’ as the definite article. One of the earliest appearances of ‘al-’ is in the fifth century BC in Herodotus, who says that ‘Alilat’ – al-Ilat, otherwise written as al-Lat or simply Lat (who appears in the graffito of the grieving S1lm above) – is the deity of the Arabs; compare her masculine counterpart, Alilah, al-Ilah or Allah, the God. But in reality, classifying languages by their definite articles is rather like grouping screwdrivers not by the shape of their heads, but by the shape of their handles. In present-day Yemen, for example, many Arabic speakers use ‘am-’ as the definite article; even the Prophet Muhammad, the Arabic-speaker par excellence, was known to switch to ‘am-’ when conversing with those who used it.

  An illustration of how thorny are the problems of classification, even within the wider Semitic family, is one of the earliest supposedly echt-Arabic texts, a tomb inscription of AD 267 from Hegra/Mada’in Salih that heaps curses on anyone desecrating or trying to re-use the sepulchre. Formerly said to be Nabataean, it is now classed as Arabic with Nabataean touches. And as an illustration of just how hybrid linguistic practices could be, what is now thought to be the oldest known Arabic inscription – a three-line prayer of thanks for delivery from a suppurating wound, found at En Avdat in the Negev and dated to the first century AD – is embedded in an otherwise Aramaic text.

  To sum up, one has to admit there was no such thing as Arabic, singular; rather there were – and still are – many Arabics. ‘Arabic’ was never a neatly espaliered sub-branch of Semitic or a homogenous collection of shoots, but a gnarled and multiply engrafted outgrowth bearing some very old and very odd features. The very diversity of the ‘dialect bundle’ that became Arabic reflects the sense of ’arab as a mixed bunch, a genetic and linguistic omnium gatherum, and one that had been absorbing new members regularly from very early times. This is all crucial evidence about the earliest era of Arab history. That old ‘wave’ theory of emigration from the peninsula tells only part of the story: not only is it clear that ripples of people kept flooding in – a perennial human undertow from the Fertile Crescent; also, that admittedly rough date suggested above – 4000–5000 BC – for when the oldest traits of their language separated from the proto-Semitic rootstock, may give a clue to when the ripples began, and to the true age of our earliest ’arab.

  Solid home-grown evidence to support this is hard to find. But the Arab mythic memory may confirm this linguistic and genetic diversity, as well as a settled origin in the Fertile Crescent for Arabs and their tongues. One story, for example, tells how, after the debacle at Babel and the proliferation of tongues, ten original Arabic speakers fanned out from Mesopotamia: each headed for a different part of the peninsula with his family and followers, each uttering a poem about himself as he went. ‘All of them . . . were badw, and they spread out across the land.’ This and other similar accounts have the unreality of dream; but like dreams they may emerge from long-stored memories of waking fact.

  ARABS HAVE A WORD FOR IT (AND OFTEN VERY MANY WORDS)

  All the early and subsequent diversity and accretiveness of Arabic mean that the lexicon is embarrassingly rich. Multiple synonyms include 80 for ‘honey’, 200 for ‘beard’, 500 for ‘lion’, 800 for ‘sword’, and 1,000 for ‘camel’. The last figure seems if anything rather low: an old saw among Arabists that says every Arabic word means three things – itself, its opposite, and a camel – is not entirely untrue. There are precise terms for such things that one would never imagine needed a precise term, like the droppings of bustards as opposed to ostriches, and different types of farts, categorized by loudness, and the sound of locusts eating, and the spaces between the fingers, each space having its own term.

  Ancient diversity is one of the reasons why no fewer than fifty Arabic dialects, not to mention eight foreign languages, have been listed as contributing to Qur’anic vocabulary. It is also a reason why qamus – an arabicization of Greek okeanos, ‘ocean’ – has become a synonym for ‘dictionary’. ‘The Arab tongue,’ wrote the great eighth- and ninth-century scholar al-Shafi’i, ‘is the widest-ranging of tongues, and the most copious in vocabulary. We are aware of no person who can encompass a complete knowledge of it, unless that person be a prophet’. Al-Shafi’i’s contemporary, al-Jahiz, went further: no one can know all the possibilities of Arabic, he said, ‘but He who knows the number of droplets in the rainclouds and of the particles of dust, and that is Allah who knows what was and what shall be’.

  If Charles de Gaulle could question the governability of a people – the French – who make 246 varieties of cheese, then the same question might be posed about people who have 1,000 names for the camel. Less flippantly, that apparent diversity in the very beginnings of their language – the dense dialect bundle growing from the North Arabian branch – begs an important question: did the earliest ’arab have any sense of their own unity?

  SEARCHING FOR A UNIFIED VOICE

  Their neighbours in the early first millennium BC certainly gave ’arab a sort of unity by giving them that name, whether or not ’arab was what the people concerned called themselves. And, from around 750 BC to 400 BC there is evidence for the existence of that multi-tribal grouping called Qedar – a polity of some sort, if not exactly a unity. Seeming unity, of course, can often be in the beholder’s, the outsider’s eye. But for ’arab, a shared and mobile lifestyle – camel husbandry, the pursuit of pasture, the camel-borne carrying trade – meant that their paths criss-crossed and must have woven at least a tentative sense of shared identity, of cultural if not political oneness.

  Language was probably as important in this respect as lifestyle: the very fact that all those ‘-ics’ are so hard to classify shows how close they were. Robert Hoyland sees language as linking and distinguishing ’arab even in that first millennium BC, and as the most important condition of ’arab identity. This is long before the emergence of the unified ‘high’ language, the ’arabiyyah, that would become, and still remains, the supreme totem of Arab unity.

  At the same time, the voices of the desert stones – all that Safaitic vox pop – suggest diversity, plurality: they are the voices of people, not a people; of individuals in a loose and segmenting society, following the forking paths of their own ever-lengthening patrilines. Words were mutually comprehensible for users of the various ‘-ics’; but their word, in its wider, political sense, was still far from gathered. We can only guess at the dialectics at work between dialects, can only imagine what shibboleths may have divided them.

  As for the broader currents of history, ’arab had only dipped their toes in them as mercenaries for and carriers between settled peoples. Life as it appears from the graffiti was pastoral and parochial. But as the first millennium BC drew to a close, n
ew perspectives were opening up. An improved type of camel saddle was developed, enabling riders to travel much longer distances. And outside involvement in the region increased: Rum, ‘Romans’, begin to appear in the graffiti. ’Arab begin to appear regularly in the formal inscriptions of the South Arabian kingdoms. And the graffiti themselves begin to appear in unforeseen places – in what is now Lebanon and even on a corridor wall in a theatre in Roman Pompeii. The camel herds of the Arabian fringe were moving on to new pastures.

  CHAPTER TWO

  PEOPLES AND TRIBES

  SABAEANS, NABATAEANS

  AND NOMADS

  ‘WHEN IN ZAFAR . . .’

  In Yaqut’s geographical dictionary, the entry on Zafar includes the following anecdote about the ancient south-west Arabian city:

  It was the seat of the kings of Himyar, and the origin of the saying, ‘When in Zafar, speak as the Himyaris speak’. According to al-Asma’i, an Arab man arrived for an audience with one of the Himyari kings. The king, who happened to be up on a high roof terrace of his palace, said to the man, ‘Thib!’ [Arabic for ‘Jump!’] So the man jumped off and was dashed to pieces. At this, the king said, ‘We have none of that Arabickt here. When in Zafar, one must speak as the Himyaris speak’. In the Himyari tongue, ‘thib’ means ‘be seated’.

  The source of the story, al-Asma’i, was a respected and generally reliable eighth-century antiquarian; thib is from a genuine ancient South Arabian verb meaning ‘to sit’; the king’s pronunciation of ’arabiyyat for ’arabiyyah (imitated above in ‘Arabickt’) is authentically archaic too. But the tale has a strong whiff of later, Islamic urban legend.

  Whether or not the death-leap really took place, the setting is right. The hilltop city of Zafar, royalty, a multi-storey palace, would have been alien to an Arab visitor who only knew stony steppelands, homespun chieftains and hair tents; out of his social and linguistic context, he would indeed be dizzied and disorientated. The royal reaction feels right, too: one can picture the ruler looking down from his parapet and uttering the punchline with a shake of the head. Even if the Arab hadn’t taken him at his word, the comment is still de haut en bas, urbane host to barbarian guest.

  This hauteur of a civilized south towards a nomadic north rears its head again in the Islamic age: ‘If a Tamimi [Arab] comes and boasts that he is better than you,’ said the poet Abu Nuwas, al-Asma’i’s contemporary, addressing an audience of South Arabian origin,

  then say to him, ‘Enough, you lizard-muncher!

  You dare to boast before the scions of kings, you fool,

  you filthy piss-a-leg?

  Let noble people vie in noble deeds; and as for you – take up your stick

  and shoo your goats, you whose mother got the runs and shat herself!

  We ruled the world both east and west

  while your old chieftain was a droplet in his father’s loins.

  As we shall see, the theme of civilized versus nomadic, of a North–South divide, was exacerbated by the politics of Islamic times. But it does arise from ancient realities. As the story of Zafar shows, the people of Arabia were joined by a landmass but separated by language; Semitic roots united them, but semantic ramifications divided. At the sociological level, the differences went even deeper. The groups called ’arab would give their name to the ethnic compound who would be known to history as ‘Arabs’; but they were only one part of this compound, alongside the Sabaeans, the Himyaris and other settled peoples of the Arabian subcontinent who are the main subject of this chapter. It is important to see at this early stage how settled and nomadic Arabians differed from each other, and how they began to come together. Then it will become clear in later times – the brief time of unity brought about by Islam, and during the multiple disunities that arose after it – how the old differences have given Arabs their extraordinary strengths and their fatal weaknesses.

  To recap what we know about the nomadic groups early on: ’arab were numerically few, probably of mixed origins, and were characterized – at least by outsiders, from the early first millennium BC – by the way they eked out a life from the less promising parts of the landscape. We don’t know how they defined themselves to begin with, or even if they saw themselves as a group at all. But by the time we begin to hear the earliest authentic ’arab voices, scratched on desert stones towards the end of that first millennium BC, there are plenty of forces in place that could create a nucleus of ethnicity: shared lifestyle and constantly crossing paths; an interest, sometimes an obsession, in lineage; closely related languages.

  The nomad tribes seemed entirely different from the settled peoples; as different as the meanings of ‘jump’ and ‘sit’. But over the early AD centuries, things would begin to change. That special, ‘high’ language of prophecy and poetry developed among the tribal ’arab. Together, the new poetic tongue and the old mobile lifestyle would become the two main ethnic markers – essential items of ’arab ‘national dress’. The metaphor is doubly apt: like clothes, ethnicity has changing styles; like clothes, too, fashions can spread and become trends far from their origin. Along with this apparel, ’arab would begin to sport the label by which others had been calling them for so long: in a sense, they would become Arabs with a capital A. And the strangest part of it is that other Arabian societies, avowed non-Arabs, radically different in lifestyle and language, would, from the third century AD or so, not only take on these pieces of Arab dress, slipping into Arab costume and custom, but would also eventually, in the seventh century with Islam, adopt the label ‘Arab’ – and even end up claiming that the label and the language were their very own to start with. As an ethnic fashion statement it was surprising, coming from the settled, civilized peoples of the south – the Sabaeans and their neighbours, including the Himyaris. Even in Zafar of the high palace and haughty Himyari king, they would exchange their ancestral tongues for the ‘Arabickt’ of the hair-tent-dwelling herdsmen. They would join the growing sociopolitical mix that was Arabdom, and wear the Arab national dress with pride.

  A later but literal example of this ethnic cross-dressing is that of the islamized Himyari king Dhu ’l-Kala’, who visited the first Islamic Caliph Abu Bakr, ‘accompanied by a thousand slaves . . . [He was] wearing a crown and the sort of striped garments and other robes that we have described’, that is, of brocade heavy with gold; in contrast, the ascetic Abu Bakr was clothed in the simplest Arab style: ‘and when the king saw what he was wearing, he took off his finery and dressed in the caliph’s manner. He was even seen one day in one of the suqs of Medina with a sheepskin on his shoulders.’ There is something in this of the twentieth-century bourgeois revolutionary donning a Mao suit. Naturally, the story is given a high moral gloss: one can only show obedience to Allah if one shows humility in this world, the shabby-chic but pious king concludes. Then again, obedience to Allah was, by this time, another part of becoming Arab.

  All this, however, was in the future; the details of how Arab style dressed a whole peninsula will unfold in the coming chapters. To start with, as the story from Zafar shows, for the southerners and especially for their paramount polity of Saba, ’arab were anything but chic. Gnawing roasted lizards and sharing vermin with their scabby flocks, they were beyond the pale – almost beyond the lofty palace-purview – of the settled, civilized southern kingdoms.

  THE ORIGINAL ARABS (BUT NOT JUST YET)

  Like ’arab, the Sabaeans, whom we have already glimpsed as the best-known South Arabians, may owe at least some of their origins to the Fertile Crescent; so too may other South Arabian groups like the Himyaris. Unlike ’arab, the Sabaeans may have been a reasonably cohesive group. Looking at the Sabaic language for clues about their beginnings and comparing it with other branches of Semitic, it has been suggested that ‘the proto-Sabaeans should have left the fringes of Syria-Palestine well after 2000 BC’. Linguistic evidence is supported by alphabetic: the South Arabian script ‘is the survivor of a Proto-Canaanite alphabet which had died out in Palestine around 1200 BC’.
(In turn, a descendant of the South Arabian script survives in Ethiopia, where it is used to write Amharic and related languages.) Other analyses, however, place Sabaean origins further east in the Fertile Crescent. But in either case, the subsequent course and chronology of the supposed migration of early Sabaeans to South Arabia is unknown.

  Then again, archaeology has thrown a spanner (or rather, a trowel) in the linguistic and epigraphic works. As we have seen, organized irrigation was in place in the region as early as the fourth millennium BC; the great Marib Dam, already mentioned, was the culmination of a long period of evolution in the harnessing both of water and of human resources. Exactly how the Sabaeans and other groups related to and interacted with extant local people is still not fully understood, and some scholars give much more weight to the indigenous beginnings of South Arabian civilization. What is clear from the evidence on the ground, however, is that the Sabaeans developed a flourishing settled civilization in the south, as did other settled peoples of similar language, the Minaeans, Qatabanians, Hadramis and later Himyaris. Together, over time, these peoples formed their own ‘Fertile Crescent’ in South Arabia.