The Uḥjiyyat al-ʿArab ('riddle-poem of the Arabs') is a qaṣīda by the early eighth-century CE poet Dhū al-rumma containing the earliest substantial collection of Arabic riddles, thought to have been influential on later Arabic verse riddlers,[1] and perhaps on Arabic ekphrastic poetry more widely.[2]
Content
editNasīb
editLike most qaṣīdas, the poem begins with a nasīb (lines 1–14). Here Dhū al-rumma describes himself surveying the desert by night and day, yearning for Mayya, his beloved. In the summary of Abdul Jabbar Yusuf Muttalibi, Dhū al-rumma goes on (in lines 7–14) to describe
a gazelle grazing amongst sands which the heavy rain of the morning has dressed with rich green leaves. Seeing a human being at that isolated place, it comes forward, yet shows in her behaviour nothing but panic. This panic-stricken gazelle amidst that green pasture is not more beautiful than Mayya on that evening when she tried to wound your heart with a face as pure as the gleaming sun, as though the sight of it were to re-open the wound in this heart. And with an eye as though the two Babylonians (Harut and Marut) had set a charm upon your heart on the day of Marqula, and with a mouth of well-set teeth like lilies growing in a pure sandy plain neither close to saline land nor to the salt of the sea. And with a white neck and upper breast, pure white when not yellowed from the sprinkling of saffron.[3]: 176–77
Raḥīl
editThe nasīb is followed by a description of travel through the desert (lines 15–26). Muttalibi in particular notes the imagery of lines 20 and 22:[3]: 142 [4]
طواهن قول الركب: سيروا إذا اكتسى * من الليل أعلى كل رابية خدرا |
They [the camels] have become lean through their riders' saying 'Move on' when the brow of every hill appears, because of the dark night, like a tent. |
وأرض فلاة تسحل الريح متنها * كساها سواد الليل أردية خضراً |
And many an empty land whose surface the wind scores is clothed by the blackness of night in dark green garments. |
Riddles
editFinally, the body of the poem constitutes a number of enigmatic statements (lines 28–72). As would be usual in the praise-poetry that often constitutes this section of a qaṣīda, each statement begins with the exclamatory syllable known in Arabic as wāw rubba.[5]: 19 The poem includes no solutions to these riddles, and different manuscripts include slightly different material and in different orders; thus they have been the source of scholarly discussion since as early as Abū Naṣr Aḥmad ibn Ḥātim al-Bāhilī (d. 846 CE), who wrote a commentary on Dhū al-rumma's work that may have been particularly prompted by Dhū al-rumma's riddling.[6]: 43 One example of these riddles, on the egg, is as follows:[7]
ومَيِّتَةِ ٱلْأَجْلَادِ يَحْيِا جَنِينُهَا * لِأَوَّلِ حَمْلٍ ثُمَّ يُورِثُهَا عَقْرَا |
so, a whole body, dead; her foetus lives, * at first an embryo, he then makes her inherit barrenness. |
In the line-numbering of ʿAbd al-Qaddūs Abū Ṣāliḥ, giving the solutions offered by Nefeli Papoutsakis and Carlile Henry Hayes Macartney, the riddles have been thought to have the following solutions:
| lines[7] | Papoutsakis[5]: 19 n. 85 | Macartney[8] |
|---|---|---|
| 28–36 | fire produced by the friction of two pieces of wood (zandān) from the same tree | fire-stick |
| 37–38 | ant-hill | ant-hill |
| 39 | bread baked under the ashes | cake of bread |
| 40 | the liver of a slaughtered camel | forge-bellows |
| 41 | heart | the heart of a sheep slain for guests |
| 42 | water-skin | the camel butchered for food |
| 43–44 | lizard | the Umm hubayn or Qaṭā |
| 45–46 | night or the swallow | night (or sand-martin, or bat) |
| 47 | 'apparently' the firmament | — |
| 48 | wine-skin | — |
| 49 | egg | egg |
| 50–51 | the peg of the hand-mill | tent-peg |
| 52 | a girl's mouth | thunder-shower or lady's mouth |
| 53 | tongue | well-bucket |
| 54 | roasting-fork | spit |
| 55 | wine-jar | wine-flask |
| 56–59 | colocynth shrub | colocynth shrub |
| 60 | sandgrouse | sandgrouse |
| 61–62 | the sun | the sun |
| 63–64 | quiver | quiver |
| 65–67 | javelin and flag | javelin |
| 68 | tent-pins | tent-skewer |
| 69 | eye | eye |
| 70 | notch of an arrow | notch of an arrow |
| 71 | truffle | truffles |
| 72 | tongue | — |
Editions
edit- ʿAbd al-Qaddūs Abū Ṣāliḥ (ed.), Dīwān Dhī l-Rumma. Sharḥ Abī Naṣr al-Bāhilī, riwāyat Thaʿlab, 3 vols (Beirut 1994), pp. 1411–50 [poem 49, with commentary pp. 2044ff]
- Carlile Henry Hayes Macartney (ed.), The dîwân of Ghailân Ibn ʿUqbah known as Dhu ’r-Rummah (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919), pp. 169–83 [poem 24]
References
edit- ^ Carl Brockelmann, History of the Arabic Written Tradition, trans. by Joep Lameer, Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 1: The Near and Middle East, 117, 5 vols in 6 (Leiden: Brill, 2016–19), III (=Supplement Volume 1) p. 88 [trans. from Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1943–49) and Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur. Supplementband, 3 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1937–42)].
- ^ Ewald Wagner, Grundzüge der klassischen arabischen Dichtung, Grundzüge, 68, 70, 2 vols (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987-88), II 135.
- ^ a b Abdul Jabbar Yusuf Muttalibi, 'A Critical Study of the Poetry of Dhu'r-Rumma' (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, SOAS, University of London, 1960).
- ^ ʿAbd al-Qaddūs Abū Ṣāliḥ (ed.), Dīwān Dhī l-Rumma. Sharḥ Abī Naṣr al-Bāhilī, riwāyat Thaʿlab, 3 vols (Beirut 1994), pp. 1411–50 [poem 49].
- ^ a b Nefeli Papoutsakis, Desert Travel as a Form of Boasting: A Study of Dū r-Rumma's Poetry, Arabische Studien, 4 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009).
- ^ David Larsen, 'Towards a Reconstruction of Abū Naṣr al-Bāhilī’s K. Abyāt al-maʿānī,' in Approaches to the Study of Pre-modern Arabic Anthologies, ed. by Bilal Orfali and Nadia Maria El Cheikh, Islamic History and Civilization: Studies and Texts, 180 (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 37-83 doi:10.1163/9789004459090_004, ISBN 9789004459083.
- ^ a b ʿAbd al-Qaddūs Abū Ṣāliḥ (ed.), Dīwān Dhī l-Rumma. Sharḥ Abī Naṣr al-Bāhilī, riwāyat Thaʿlab, 3 vols (Beirut 1994), pp. 1411–50 [poem 49].
- ^ Carlile Henry Hayes Macartney (ed.), The dîwân of Ghailân Ibn ʿUqbah known as Dhu ’r-Rummah (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919), pp. 169–83 [poem 24].