CHAPTER V. Character, Manners, and Customs of the Ancient Arabs. Two Classes of Arabs-The Bedouins, or Pastoral TribesTheir Mode of Life-Their Love of Freedom-The Agricultural and Mercantile Classes-Commerce of the Ancient Arabs-Their early Intercourse with India-Wealth and Luxury of the Sabæans-Exaggerated Accounts of the Greeks and Romans-Neither Gold nor Silver Mines in Arabia-Principal Articles of Trade-Frankincense-Myrrh -Coffee-Vines-Sugar-Chief Marts on the Coast-Caravans-Propensity of the Arabs for Robbery and War-Their Quarrels and Revenge-Their sacred Months-Their Hospitality-Fire-signals-Liberality of Hatim Tai-Fondness of the Bedouins for Eloquence and Poetry-The Moallakat, or Seven Poems of the Kaaba-Origin and Copiousness of the Arabic Language-Learning and Morals of the Ancient Arabs -Their Division of Time-Their Superstitions-CharmsSortilege-Divination by Arrows-Worship of the Stars and Planets-Popular Idols and Images-Planting of Christianity in Arabia-Labours of Origen-Bishops' Sees-Schisms and Heresies in the Arabian and Eastern Churches. THE distinction of two great classes is as strongly marked in the character and habits of the Arabs as in their genealogical descent. The natives of the desert, who follow a pastoral and predatory life, consider themselves as a separate race from the inhabitants of cities and towns, who live by tillage and commerce. The former have a variety of names by which they designate themselves, all expressive of their peculiar mode of life. They are called Ahl el Hajr, or the People of the Rock; Ahl el Wabar, the Dwellers in Tents; Bedawiyun (Bedouins), the Inhabitants of the Desert, &c. All the other classes who are fixed in local habitations, or engaged in the pursuits of industry, they stigmatize as Ahl el Madar, the Dwellers in Houses made of clay. Through all antiquity this characteristic distinction has remained inviolate; and it continues in force at the present day, as strongly marked as it was three or four thousand years ago. The Scenite or Nomadic tribes held in contempt the peaceful and mechanical arts; and had any of their number abandoned their erratic habits for the occupations of agriculture, they would have been considered as degraded, and fallen from the primitive nobility of their birth. Their grand employment was the tending of their flocks, which constituted their principal wealth, and supplied all their domestic necessities. They held little intercourse and had few connexions with the world around them; but their habits of sobriety raised them above the artificial wants of more refined and civilized nations. It was their constant boast, that little was required to maintain a man who lived after the Bedouin fashion. Their chief nourishment was dates and milk. The camel, the most common and the most valuable of their possessions, was of itself a storehouse of useful commodities. The flesh of the young was tender, though reckoned conducive to a hot and vindictive temperament; the dung was consumed as fuel; the long hair, which fell off annually, was manufactured into curtains for their tents, and various articles of dress and furniture. While food and raiment were thus supplied by the spontaneous gift of nature, they envied not the tenants of the more fertile and industrious provinces. Their love of liberty was stronger than the desire of wealth; and the passion for foreign luxuries, which has proved so fatal to other countries, has not yet changed the patriarchal manners of the roving shepherds of Arabia. As all travellers have remarked, the modern Bedouin differs but little from his ancestors, who, in the age of Moses and Mohammed, dwelt under similar tents, and conducted their flocks to the same springs and the same pastures. It is in the lonely wilderness and the rugged mountains that his attachments centre; because it is there he can live without ceremony and without control. The very wildness of this inhospitable scenery constitutes in his eyes its principal charm; and were these features destroyed, the spell would be broken that associates them in his mind with the romantic freedom of his condition. The tent he regards as the nursery of every noble quality, and the desert the only residence worthy of a man who aspires to be the unfettered master of his actions. He cannot imagine how existence can be endured, much less enjoyed, except in a dwelling of goats' hair, which he can pitch and transplant at pleasure. These are privileges which he would not exchange for rubies. His steril sands are dearer to him than the spicy regions of the south; and he would consider the security of cities but a poor compensation for the loss of his independence. It was an ancient proverb, of which the Arabs made their boast, that God had bestowed on their nation four precious gifts. He had given them turbans instead of diadems, tents in place of walls and bulwarks, swords instead of intrenchments, and poems instead of written laws. This state of uncontrolled existence has in all ages been the object of their wishes and their pride; and it never has been renounced without profound regret. Abulfeda has preserved a very lively trait of this feeling in the complaint of Maisuna, an Arab lady married to one of the caliphs of Damascus. The pomp and splendour of an imperial court could neither reconcile her to the luxuries of the harem, nor make her forget the homely charms of her native wilderness. Her solitary hours were consumed in melancholy musings; and her greatest delight was in singing the simple pleasures she had enjoyed in the desert. The modern Bedouins decline the shel ter of houses when business calls them to visit crowded cities. They are seen passing the night in the gardens or public squares of Cairo, Mecca, and Aleppo, in preference to the apartments that are offered for their accommodation.* These local attachments seem strongest in the inhabitants of mountainous countries. The Scottish Highlander, wherever he roams, thinks with pleasing regret on his dark hills. The exiled Swiss pines for his bleak Alps, and the wild melody of his native songs. The Laplander has fixed the site of the terrestrial paradise amid his own dreary wastes. The boatmen on the Nile lighten the cares of bondage or banishment by singing "Nubia is the land of roses!" The Druse on the rugged summits of Lebanon looks down with indifference on the blooming valleys of the Jordan, that spread their enchanting beauties at his feet. The same feeling glows with more than ordinary warmth in the bosom of an Arab; and in preferring the rude simplicity of his paternal solitudes to the comforts and luxuries of more refined society, he yields only to a common but a kindly instinct of human nature. In some parts of the northern deserts there were migratory tribes not entirely addicted to the pastoral life. Whether from the advantages of a less steril soil, or the vicinity of Palestine and Syria, or the example of the emigrants from Yemen, they were distinguished from their central brethren by their residence in towns, and their application to the arts. * Abulfed. Annal. Moslem, a Reiske, vol. i. p. 116. Reynier, de l'Economie Pub. et Rur. des Arabes, p. 25. Prot. Carlyle has translated this fragment in his Specimens of Arabian Poetry, p. 31. The same feeling inspired other royal bosoms than Maisuna's. "Nebassar's queen, Fatigued with Babylonia's level plains, Sigh'd for her Median home, where Nature's hand Had scoop'd the vale, and clothed the mountain's side Some of them were entirely occupied in agricul ture, while others added to the toils and pursuits of a sedentary life a taste for pillage; and divided their number so, that while one part attended to domestic labours, the others were engaged in war and plunder. Such was their condition until overrun by the Romans, whose dominion effaced the last vestiges of their industry, laid their cities in ruins, and reduced their territories to a state of desolation from which they have never recovered. Though these half-civilized tribes shared with their wild clansmen in the interior the same warlike propensities, they had not the same facilities of withdrawing from danger; consequently their liberty was more precarious. When assailed by the neighbouring nations, they could purchase security only by submission or tribute,-which was always exacted, whether the sovereigns of the East or the West were their masters. Among the nations that paid this ransom to Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, are mentioned the Arabs-evidently the pastoral tribes of which we are speaking-who paid annually 7700 sheep, and as many goats (2 Chron. xvii. 11). It was the danger or the necessity of yielding to the mercenary power of tyrants, that confirmed the nomadic Arabs in their dislike of settled habitations. The Chevalier D'Arvieux observes, that their attachment to the wandering life proceeded from their notion that it was more congenial to liberty; since the shepherd who ranges the desert with his herds will be far less liable or likely to submit to oppression than the proprietor of houses and lands. A passage in Diodorus shows how ancient and deeply rooted was this mode of thinking among the Bedouins. "The Nabathæans," as he calls them, were prohibited by their laws from sowing, planting, drinking wine, and building houses. Every violation of this statute," he adds, 66 was punishable by death." The same was the case with the Rechabites, an Arab tribe men 66 |