Kinship and marriage in early Arabia / by W. Robertson Smith.

  • William Robertson Smith
Date:
1885
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Kinship and marriage in early Arabia / by W. Robertson Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    feminine (by an ordinary rule of grammar) because it. is the name of a tribe and not of a man. The gender shews that the tribal name existed before the mythi- cal ancestor was invented, and indeed, as Noldeke has pointed out, the older poets down to the time of Al-Farazdac personify Taghlib as the daughter not as the son of Wail(4). It appears therefore that the acknowledgment that two tribes are brothers does not necessarily imply any historical tradition of a common ancestor. No one indeed who was not tied by a theory would suppose that it did. Brotherhood in the Semitic tongues is a very loose word ; even covenant relations may make men brothers. Thus in ancient times Amos (i. 9) speaks of Tyre and Israel as connected by a “ covenant of brotherhood/’ and to this day the blackmail paid by Syrian peasants to their Bedouin neighbours is called khuwct, “ brotherhood-money.” In ancient Arabia it was not otherwise; a man whom one is bound to protect is akhu molidfaza, a brother in virtue of this bond (‘Alcama, ed. Socin, viii. 1). Brotherhood between tribes might therefore arise by integration as well as by differentiation, by covenant between alien stocks as well as by the division of a single stock into two, as Sprenger (Alte Geog. Ar. p. 203) has shewn by examples from Hamdani. On the other hand the conditions of nomad life must often have compelled one group to divide into two, as in the Bible story Lot parts from Abraham. But