oss the Arabian
Peninsula and throughout the Mohammedan world. In time these deeds, like
the Homeric legends, were recorded in a literary form and therein is found
that Antar, the son of an Abyssinian slave, once a despised camel driver,
has become the Achilles of the Arabian Iliad, a work known to this day
after being a source of wonder and admiration for hundreds of years to
millions of Mohammedans as the "Romance of Antar." The book, therefore,
ranks among the great national classics like the "Shah-nameh" of Persia,
and the "Nibelungen-Lied" of Germany. Antar was the father of knighthood. He
was the champion of the weak and oppressed, the protector of the women, the
impassioned lover-poet, the irresistible and magnanimous knight. "Antar" in
its present form probably preceded the romances of chivalry so common in
the twelfth century in Italy and France.[7]

This national classic of the Arabian world is of great length in the
original, being often found in thirty or forty manuscript volumes in
quarto, in seventy or eighty in octavo. Portions of it have been translated
into English, German and French. English readers can consult it best in a
translation from the Arabic by Terrick Hamilton in four volumes published
in London in 1820. This translation, now rare, covers only a portion of the
original; a new translation, suitably abridged, is much needed. The fact
that its hero is of Negro blood may have chilled the ardor of English
translators to meet this need.

The original book purports to have been written more than a thousand years
ago--in the golden prime of the Caliph Harun-al-Rashid (786-809)--by the
famous As-Asmai (741-830). It is in fact a later compilation probably of
the twelfth century. The first Arabic edition was brought to Europe by an
Austro-German diplomat and scholar--Baron von Hammer Purgstall--near the
end of the eighteenth century. The manuscript was engrossed in the year
1466. The verses with which the volumes abound are in many cases
undoubtedly those of Antar.

One enthusiastic critic of this romance has said: The book in its present
form has been the delight of all Arabians for many centuries. Every wild
Bedouin of the desert knew much of the tale by heart and listened to its
periods and to its poems with quivering interest. His more cultivated
brothers of the cities possessed one or many of its volumes. Every
coffee-house in Aleppo, Bagdad, or Constantinople had a narrator who, night
after nig