e of Khalil ibn Ahmad in the 8th
century. Two other features of Arabian poetry are probably connected
with the necessity for aiding the memory. The first of these is the
requirement that each line should have a complete sense in itself; this
produces a certain jerkiness, and often led among the Arabs to
displacement in the order of the lines in a long poem. The other
feature, peculiar to the long poem (_qasida_, elegy), is that, whatever
its real object, whatever its metre, it has a regular scheme in the
arrangement of its material. It begins with a description of the old
camping-ground, before which the poet calls on his companion to stop,
while he bewails the traces of those who have left for other places.
Then he tells of his love and how he had suffered from it, how he had
journeyed through the desert (this part often contains some of the most
famous descriptions and praises of animals) until his beast became thin
and worn-out. Then at last comes the real subject of the poem, usually
the panegyric of some man of influence or wealth to whom the poet has
come in hope of reward and before whom he recites the poem.

_Poetry._--The influence of the poet in pre-Mahommedan days was very
great. As his name, _ash-Sha'ir_, "the knowing man," indicates, he was
supposed to have more than natural knowledge and power. Panegyric and
satire (_hija'_) were his chief instruments. The praise of the tribe in
well-chosen verses ennobled it throughout the land, a biting satire was
enough to destroy its reputation (cf. I. Goldziher's _Abhandlungen zur
arabischen Philologie_, i. pp. 1-105). Before Mahomet the ethics of the
Arabs were summed up in _muruwwa_ (custom). Hospitality, generosity,
personal bravery were the subjects of praise; meanness and cowardice
those of satire. The existence of poetry among the northern Arabs was
known to the Greeks even in the 4th century (cf. St Nilos in Migne's
_Patrologia Graeca_, vol. 79, col. 648, and Sozomen's _Ecclesiastical
History_, bk. 6, ch. 38). Women as well as men composed and recited
poems before the days of the Prophet (cf. L. Cheikho's _Poetesses of the
Jahiliyya_, in Arabic, Beirut, 1897).

The transmission of early Arabic poetry has been very imperfect. Many of
the reciters were slain in battle, and it was not till the 8th to the
10th centuries and even later that the earliest collections of these
poems were made. Many have to be recovered from grammars, dictionaries,
&c., where single li