Arabs Read online

  What is more, the South Arabians arabized themselves, as we shall see, to the extent that they completely rebranded themselves as the original Arabs. More sophisticated historians would always remember the distinction between Arabs proper and South Arabians. Ibn Khaldun, for example, lists three main groups of ‘Semites’: ‘From Sam [Shem] are descended the Arabs, the Hebrews and the Sabaeans’ – meaning by ‘the Sabaeans’ the South Arabians in general. The Arab–Hebrew rift haunts history. North–South Arabian distinctions are, however, now dead and all but forgotten; but their ghosts may be raised from time to time – for example by propagandists in the conflict outside my window, which in some interpretations is between southern and northern Arabs. As one commentator has said of the ancient North–South divide, ‘It may be useful for political scientists to have this additional insight into why Arab unity is so hard to achieve’.

  That realization is the tip of an iceberg of insights. Looking north, for example, the originally non-tribal settled agriculturalists of the northern Fertile Crescent would take far longer, as we shall see, to be accepted into Arabdom in early Islamic times than had their southern counterparts. Moreover, the acceptance was grudging, and incomplete. The lurking disunity tends to be expressed – as in present-day Iraq – in sectarian, Sunnah–Shi’ah terms.

  So much for what early Arabs were not. For insights into who or what these marginal and elusive people actually were, we must look to the terse but eloquent records left by themselves. For persons of no fixed abode and no obvious pretensions to a written culture, they left a surprisingly large amount of writing.

  ‘S1LM WAS HERE’

  Littered across the stony deserts of modern Syria, Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia, where the peninsula is mortised into the Fertile Crescent – that is, in precisely the area where those earliest Arabs roamed with their herds – are scores of thousands of graffiti, pecked into the boulders that dot the landscape. The main script used is Nabataean, the precursor of Arabic script. The date is quite a lot later than those early Assyrian and biblical references to Arabs – probably from the end of the last millennium BC on; but before the appearance of Nabataean in the final third of that millennium, the writers probably had no letters in which to express themselves. The language is not quite Arabic as we know it, but it is close – closer, perhaps, than Anglo-Saxon is to English. Bending the linguistic taxonomy a little, it wouldn’t be far out to say that these are our first authentic Arabic documents. And, even if the word ‘Arab’ doesn’t appear in them, there is little doubt that they are our first home-grown Arab documents.

  One might well be surprised: surely ancient nomadic Arabs, whose very arabness subsisted in living ‘far away in the desert and who know neither overseers nor officials’, as the Assyrians had put it, are the last people who would have a use for writing? Yet it seems they did, and the most plausible explanation is that it was all a game, a pastime. If you are sitting in the lee of a rock watching camels graze all day long, the temptation to pick up a pebble and peck away at the rock will be irresistible. To depict on the rock what you can see in this minimalist landscape – camels – may be artistically satisfying, and pictures of camels are indeed frequent. But the pleasure of portraying camels eventually palls, and to write your name, and almost invariably your lineage, is even more pleasing: it is both a proclamation of individuality and a declaration of membership, of family, of tribe. If this means importing letters from your Nabataean neighbours, it is no different from importing other products of settled society like spearheads and knife blades. (It is not entirely different from importing Sudokus along with Sony.) M.C.A. Macdonald makes a useful analogy with modern-day Tuareg nomads, who ‘have their own writing system, the Tifinagh, which they use purely for amusement’. But writing of any sort is rarely pure amusement, and in proclaiming, ‘I was here,’ Kilroys over the ages are making the archetypal statement of history.

  The language of the graffiti is termed ‘North Arabian’, and it comes in several varieties. The most common variety in what the Assyrians called ‘the land of the Aribi’ is known as ‘Safaitic’, after ‘al-Safa’, the Arabic name of the lava-strewn steppe where most of them are found. About 18,000 Safaitic graffiti are known. Most of them are names, and most of the names have lineages – ‘A son of B son of C . . .’ Sometimes the lineages extend back an extraordinary fifteen generations and more (how many generations of your ancestors can you remember?); extraordinary and, in the cases where with luck and scholarly patience they can be cross-checked with other graffiti, consistent. The present-day equivalent would be to remember one’s pedigree back to the time of Shakespeare or the Pilgrim Fathers.

  But the graffiti-writers were not just walking family trees. There are everyday glimpses such as that of a herdsman who ‘spent the [early spring] on this [plain] and fed on truffles’, and more poignant records like that of one S1lm (there are no vowels, so he might be Sālim, Sallām, Salīm, Aslam etc.) son of Mn son of S1lm son of Bdr son of Ḏn of the ʾl ʿbs2t clan or tribe, who ‘helped the goats bring forth [their young] and so O Lt [the goddess Lat] [grant] security. And he mourned for Mn’l, his son, who had died, distressed, overshadowed’. The grief is audible even now. But there is fun too: another informal epigrapher wrote that ‘he was very love-sick . . . for a maiden, and had joyous sex with her’. And there is ribaldry, as when graffiti writers add ‘something rude’ to the inscriptions of their rivals. There are also plenty of scratched heads among the present-day interpreters of these ancestral voices: does the verb ’tm, for instance, mean to mourn, to finish, or to fuck? Graffiti being what they are, the context is often as minimal as the landscape.

  What is perhaps most remarkable, however, is the social context and its continuity. Patterns of pastoral migration that can be teased out of the graffiti repeat themselves not just in the past, ‘this is his camping place year after year’, but also down to the present. So too, do figures of speech: in one graffito, the writer records that ‘a torrent made him flee in [the season of] Suhayl’, that is, in late August, when the star Suhayl or Canopus rises. In the same area 2,000 years later, in the twentieth century, the Rwala bedouin proverb warns, ‘When Suhayl’s overhead, trust not the torrent-bed’. And there is another theme, mentioned in words and prayers and shown in pictures, one that will repeat itself with catastrophic regularity and which ‘clearly played a part in both the culture and economy’: raiding other people’s herds.

  Herding and raiding took these people to the steppelands, kept them on the move, and ensured they remained politically disunited. And the pattern all began long before these earliest authentic voices, before the Assyrians and Genesis.

  BORN OF THE RIMTH BUSH

  There is a very old myth that claims the camel was created from the rimth bush. Al-Jahiz, who mentions the story, is suitably sceptical but says the unappetizing rimth, a highly saline plant, features in it because only the camel can eat it. Then again if, as the saying goes, we are what we eat, there is a grain of truth among the many grains of salt: after all, the camel is par excellence the domesticated animal that can survive where, and eat what, no others can.

  The history of the camel has been much written about. The consensus seems to be that it was domesticated for milking at some time in the third millennium BC, probably in the south-east of the Arabian Peninsula; the use of camels for transport developed over the following millennium. What is in no doubt is that by the early part of the first millennium BC, when camel-borne nomads begin to appear in the written records of their neighbours, the employment of camels as pack and riding animals had developed to a high degree and had spread to the north of the peninsula. By the time of that first datable mention of Arabs – 853 BC – camels were big business, given that Gindibu the Arab could hire out as many as a thousand beasts (he presumably didn’t lend them for love). Soon after this the Assyrians, as we have seen, were lifting camels in their tens of thousands, although one should perhaps beware of zeros.

  The centrality of
the camel to ancient Arab life is clear from its significance in the rites that followed ancient Arab death; such rituals can be glimpsed in mentions by poets of the sixth century. If the deceased was a warrior, a riding camel would be immobilized by his grave and left to die there, or sometimes slaughtered and buried with its owner. Like dead Mongols and their horses, and dead Vikings and their ships, dead Arab warriors presumably needed vehicles to make them posthumously mobile. Of the innumerable uses of living camels, the ancient female orator Hind bint al-Khuss – said to belong to a remnant of that archaic tribe of Ad – neatly summed up the most important three as, ‘bearers of men, stanchers of blood, buyers of women’. Camels were carriers, but they were also currency to pay the price of blood and thus stanch feuds, and to pay the bride price. However, it was as a vehicle of transport that the camel would play its most important part. It would eventually be a hemiglobal role: when the second caliph of Islam, Umar, warned conquering Arab generals not to go anywhere he couldn’t reach by camel, that meant in practice no less than most of the Afro-Eurasian landmass.

  The beginnings of this history of mobility were more modest, of course. Yet it was the camel that enabled the people who would be called Arabs to uproot themselves from the Fertile Crescent, to head beyond the fringe of civilization and make for the savage south, the Wild West of the settled Semites: it was the camel, in a sense, that made people Arabs in the first place. The attractions of the wilderness may have seemed limited to most of those settled peoples, but they were explained by an Arab to the sixth-century AD Persian ruler Khusraw Anushiruwan:

  [Arabs] own the land without it owning them. They are secure from the need to fortify themselves with walls: their whetted blades and pointed spears suffice for armour and citadels. To own a spot of earth there is tantamount to owning all of it.

  And there were other attractions, that might be called psychosomatic:

  [Arabs] weighed up the matter of cities and buildings, and found them not only wanting but also harmful . . . for places suffer illness as do bodies . . . So they dwelt in the far-spreading lands . . . which are free from pollution, full of fresh air, and insulated from plagues.

  And, of course, healthy minds belong to healthy bodies, for ‘where fresh air is generated, so too are reason and perception’. The call of the desert is no mere Western Orientalist topos.

  As for the identity of the people who answered that summons of the wild, we can only surmise that their origins, like those of North American cowboys and frontiersmen, were from among the farmers and traders of the settled populations. Being Arab might well have been, to begin with, a question of choice, or of necessity, not of birth: one became Arab. And the people drawn to a home on the Arabian range were probably, like their American counterparts, a rag-tag bunch.

  ARABS OR ’ARAB?

  There is a possibility, implicitly accepted by the earliest Arab historians, that ‘rag-tag’ is what ’arab may imply in its earliest, etymological sense. Arabic lexicographers, too, give one of the meanings of ’arab as ‘[disparate people] joined or mixed together’. If this is indeed so, then inherent disunity, and an attempt to unite, are implicit from the start. Certainly, many other long-enduring names of Arabian groups originate in words that contain a sense of ‘to join, to unite, to ally’. These groups include the great southern confederations of Hashid (hashada, ‘to collect people together’) and Bakil (bakala, ‘to mix’), and the Prophet Muhammad’s tribe, Quraysh (taqarrasha, ‘to come together, gather’), and perhaps even the important South Arabian people, Himyar (Sabaic hmr, a ‘type of pact, alliance between communities’). Admittedly, Semitic etymology is perilous territory: it is a wilderness of meaning haunted by fascinating mirages, and it is easy to make things mean what one wants them to mean. But such a coincidence of sense in these names goes beyond chance or fancy.

  Another long-accepted view is that ’arab originally meant ‘desert people, nomads’. In other words, badw, bedouins, and ’arab are the same thing. This was certainly the case in the early inscriptions, both Assyrian and South Arabian. It was also certainly the meaning later on, and until recent times: well into the twentieth century, most of the sort of people who are proud to be called ‘Arabs’ nowadays would have been less than pleased at being classed as ’arab, bedouin bumpkins. Whether it was the ‘original’ sense, however, is debatable, and much debated. Yet another meaning of ’arab – ‘speakers of Arabic’ – is without doubt not early. Some scholars would put its date well into the Islamic period; but, as will become clear, Arab self-consciousness as an ethnic group, part of whose ethnicity depended on shared language, began much earlier.

  There are further possibilities. Looking at cognate words, ’arab could conceivably mean ‘from the west’ – presumably of the peninsula. And possibilities congregate: one fervent Arabologist, Jan Retsö, has surveyed at length all the available early material and concluded that ’arab were marginal communities, led by heroic leaders, dwelling in tents, protecting cultic centres, and famous as soothsayers and border guards, and that in particular they are ‘those who entered into the service of a divinity and remain his slaves or his property’. This is all doubtless ungainsayable. But as a definition, it seems simultaneously too wide and too narrow: too wide in that the terms are too many, too narrow in that many people regarded anciently as ’arab would not have ticked all those boxes.

  I incline – for linguistic reasons set out in the following section – towards the first possible sense of ’arab above: that of mixture or union. But in the end, to be honest, we don’t and perhaps can’t really know the original significance of the word. The Egyptian intellectual Taha Husayn put it more strongly: we are ‘in utter confusion’ over the meaning. It seems that when you try to draw meaning from the very bottom of the semantic well, it comes up muddy.

  Altogether, there hardly seems a good basis for writing a history of Arabs if we don’t even know what their name means. So perhaps it is better not to stare down semantic wells, but instead to look over the horizon and say not what exactly or who precisely Arabs had been, but whom they resembled and how they fitted into the wider human environment. A useful comparison comes from further east in Asia: ‘It is doubtful whether the term arya was ever used in an ethnic sense’, says the Indian historian Romila Thapar of the Aryans – and she might have said the same about ‘the Arabs’, or rather, about ’arab, in italics and lower case. And there are further resemblances. Both infiltrated subcontinents; both are mobile, migrating, plundering pastoralists (of cows/camels); both, early on, have classes of seers and supernatural experts (risis/kahins); importantly, both develop a strong linguistic self-definition, in distinction to those who do not speak their languages (mleccha/’ajam), and both develop early on a remarkable oral literature that was put in writing many centuries later (Vedas/pre-Islamic poetry); both develop a prestigious and often cryptic sacral speech that becomes widespread as the language of written culture (Sanskrit/high Arabic) but eventually fossilizes.

  These are all no more than rough parallel lines drawn between ’arab and arya; similar parallels could probably be made between ’arab and many other mobile groups, Nordic, Mongolian, Celtic and so on. But such lines may delineate something of the position of Arabs in broader human history. And, importantly, they also demonstrate the importance of language in turning what looks in origin like a common noun (arya/’arab) into a proper name (Aryans/Arabs). For – to return to that idea of ’arab as the ‘mixed’ people – if they weren’t united by genetics, they seem to have been linked, increasingly over time, by linguistics.

  SONS OF SAM

  At least from as far back as their written records go, nearly all the diverse people of Arabia and the Fertile Crescent, settled and wandering, have used related languages, all belonging to what eighteenth-century German philologists termed the Semitic family. It takes its name from Shem son of Noah, in Arabic ‘Sam’, whom the traditional genealogists claim as ancestor of Arabs, Hebrews and other collaterally ‘related’
groups. Later philologists, by playing what could be called ‘the “proto-” game’, have constructed a family tree for Semitic languages, tracing each back to a hypothetical root version – proto-Arabic, proto-Hebrew and so on – and then to an original rootstock, proto-Semitic. In addition, by estimating rates at which language changes happen and then measuring backwards in time, one can guess, very approximately, the age of the languages concerned; in other words one can, so to speak, count the rings of the linguistic tree. Various dates have been given for the origin – almost certainly in the Levant – of proto-Semitic; what is more certain is that Arabic has preserved features that are older than those of any other Semitic language, and that some of these features may have branched off the Semitic root very early on – perhaps as early as 4000–5000 BC. Then again, perhaps that Semitic root is not in fact the rootstock, but itself belongs to a wider, ‘Afroasiatic’ family . . . Only connect.

  This is all cerebral stuff, to do with cracking codes, crunching numbers and Bayesian analysis. But as we are dealing with ancient nomadic people who, because of the way they lived, left almost no archaeological remains, the great spoil-heap of language is the Arab equivalent of Troy or Knossos. The evidence can be pleasing, and particularly that which proves ancientness and continuity. Jonathan Owens, for example, gives two verb paradigms, remarkably similar, which he labels ‘Iraqi’ and ‘Nigerian Arabic’ – only revealing afterwards that the ‘Iraqi’ is in fact Akkadian from 2500 BC, while the Nigerian example was recorded in AD 2005: continuity, geographical, over 4,500 kilometres, and chronological, over 4,500 years. And then there are those interesting bits and pieces of evidence that complicate the continuity, where the tree has undergone cross-pollination. In Arabic these include very early loan words like the names of the two weapons that always vie in might, those primal tools of civilization and its opposite number, Greek kalamos → Arabic qalam, ‘reed, (reed-)pen’, and (probably) Greek xiphos → Arabic sayf, ‘sword’. And what about Latin taurus → Arabic thawr, ‘bull’, and Greek oinos, ‘wine’ → Arabic wayn, ‘black grapes’ and South Arabian wyn, ‘vineyard’? Or should the arrows in some cases go the other way? Or both ways? Question marks are valid, as we seldom know. What is clear is that there was not only loaning very early on, but perhaps too what has been called a pre-Semitic ‘Mediterranean substratum’, shared linguistic ground that antedates and underlies the borders between ‘Semitic’ and ‘Indo-European’.