Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

680 22c. the arabs
Arabs; settled Arabs lived as both peasants and townsmen along the
western fringes of Iraq, and al-H · īra, the focus of Arab sedentary life in the
area, was deemed an Arab town. Most were converts to Christianity, many
spoke Aramaic and Persian, and they were largely assimilated to Sasanian
culture. 14
The sources referring to the Arabs describe them in various ways. In
Greek and Syriac they were most usually called sarakenoi and t · ayyāyē, terms
which refer to their tribal origin or to their character as travellers to the
inner desert. 15 In Arabic, interestingly enough, the terms �arab and its plural
a�rāb are generally used to refer to tribal nomads. Though the settled folk
of Arabia shared much in common with the nomads, they nevertheless
drew a sharp distinction between themselves and the bedouins (and rightly
– a tribesman is not necessarily a nomad). It is true that by the sixth century
a.d. the Arabic language had spread through most of Arabia (if not so
much in the south) and engendered a common oral culture based largely
on poetry of often exceptional quality. 16 But in none of this should one see
evidence of a supposed archetype for Arab unity in any ethnic, geographical
or political sense.
The basis for Arab social organization was the tribe. 17 Genealogical
studies in early Islamic times were already elaborating the lineages and
interrelationships of the tribes in great detail. The Arabs comprised two
great groupings, northern and southern; the former were traced to an
eponymous founder named �Adnān and the latter to a similar figure called
Qah · t · ān, and both were further divided into smaller sections and subgroupings.
Ancient Arab history is routinely presented in the sources as
determined by these tribal considerations, 18 but modern anthropology has
cast doubt on this and has raised the question of whether such a thing as a
‘tribe’ even exists. While the term is problematic, it seems excessive to
resolve a conceptual difficulty by denying the existence of its object. 19 The
notion of the tribe, however ambiguous, has always been important in traditional
Arab society; in pre-Islamic Arabia there can be no doubt that
kinship determined social organization. 20 The problem can perhaps best be
formulated as revolving around the questions of how far back this was
meaningfully traced, and how stable perceptions of kinship were.
14 Charles (1936) 55–61; Morony (1984) 214–23.
15 Macdonald (1995b) 95–6. Other views: Christides (1972); Graf and O’Connor (1977); O’Connor
16 (1986). Fück (1950) 1–28; Blachère (1952–66) i.66–82; Gabrieli (1959b); von Grunebaum (1963).
17 See Caskel (1962); and for modern parallels, Musil (1928) 44–60; Jabbur (1995) 261–8, 286–306.
18 Caskel (1966) i.1–71.
19 Inter alia, Schneider (1984). Cf. the discussion in Crone (1986) 48–55;(1993) 354–63; Tapper (1990)
60–4.
20 Even with respect to Arabs from south Arabia, where Dostal’s hypotheses (1984) would lead us
to expect social organization along other lines. Note that in all three of the early Arab urban foundations
in Egypt and Iraq, the Arab conquerors – even Yemeni contingents – organized themselves
according to tribe. See Pellat (1953) 22–34; Djaït (1986) 73–135; Kubiak (1987) 58–75.
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