ew poet
was known to all Arabia; the news of all the tribes circulated, and
foreign ideas and doctrines were also to be heard. In proportion as
the face of nature was hard and forbidding, social life was bright
and gay; wine, women, wit, and war provided the themes of poets and
the ordinary aims of life.

The Old Religion.--It has generally been said that the Arabs before
Islam were irreligious. They themselves contrasted the sternness of
the new period with the gaiety of the old one. The truth is, as
Wellhausen has admirably shown,[1] that the working religion of the
country had become before the period of Islam entirely effete. Arab
religion was based on the ideas and usages which have been described
in chap. x. of this book; it is mainly from Arabia, indeed, that the
original character of Semitic religion is known to us. Each tribe had
its god, whom it regarded as a magnified master or ruler, and with
whom it held communion by sacrifice, the blood being brought in
contact with the god and the victim devoured by the tribesmen. The
god is represented sometimes by a tree, generally by a stone; a piece
of fertile land belongs to him, within which the plants and animals
are sacred; the religious meeting can be held in no other spot. Hence
the Arabs are said to be stone worshippers; but the phrase is an
awkward one: what they worshipped was not the stone but a god
connected with it. And the early gods of Arabia are a motley company;
it is only in their relations to their worshippers and in the order
of the worship paid them that they have some uniformity. The greatest
and oldest deity of the Arabs is Allat or Alilat, "the Lady." Like
the female deity found in all primitive Semitic religions, she is a
stately and commanding lady. She is not the wife of a god, nor are
unseemly ideas connected with her. She belongs to the early world in
which motherhood was synonymous with rule, since the family had no
male head; she has a character but no history: mythology has not
gathered round her. Arabia has also certain nature-gods. The stellar
deities are mostly female; there is a male sun-god Dusares. Heaven is
worshipped by some, not the blue but the rainy heaven, which is a
source of blessings. There are no gods belonging to the region under
the earth. The serpent is the only animal that receives worship.

[Footnote 1: _Reste Arabischen Heidenthums_, p. 188.]

But the gods of Arabia belong mostly to another class than that of
na