Al-ʿIqd al-Thamīn fī Dawawīn al-Shuʿarāʾ al-Sitta al-Jāhiliyyīn

Six early Arab poets: new edition and concordance

Edited with an introduction by

Prof. Albert Arazi and Dr. Salman Masalha

1,357 + 21 pp., 1999

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Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry is one of the greatest cultural achievements of the Arabs in the early period of their history. For several centuries it was considered the only model of poetic perfection. It is the earliest literary corpus in classical Arabic and a major part of Arab cultural heritage.

The present volume consists of a concordance of al-ʿIqd al-Thamīn fī Dawawīn al-Shuʿarāʾ al-Sitta al-Jāhiliyyīn, in the edition of William Ahlwardt. It also contains a preface in Arabic and English, a new critical edition with numerous emendations of Ahlwardt's text, and a full concordance of the poetry of Imrūʾ al-Qays, Zuhayr b. Abī Sulma, Ṭarafa b. al-ʿAbd, ʿAlqama b. ʿAbada al-Faḥl, ʿAntara b. Shaddād, al-Nābigha al-Dhubyāni and a few poems by four minor poets. The book holds almost 1,400 pages and contains more than 33,000 entries.

The concordance will serve as an essential tool for the study of classical Arabic poetry and for the study of classical Arabic in general. In addition to the concordance of nouns, verbs and particles, it includes separate sections on proper names, geographical names, names of horses and camels.

The work on the Concordance started a few years after the Hebrew University was established in 1925. More than 2,000,000 cards were prepared before the project was computerized in the eighties.