forward the dialect of the North established an almost universal supremacy and won for itself the title of 'Arabic' par excellence.10

The oldest monuments of written Arabic are modern in date compared with the Sabæan inscriptions, some of which take us back 2,500 years or thereabout. Apart The oldest specimens of Arabic writing. from the inscriptions of Ḥijr in the northern Ḥijáz, and those of Ṣafá in the neighbourhood of Damascus (which, although written by northern Arabs before the Christian era, exhibit a peculiar character not unlike the Sabæan and cannot be called Arabic in the usual acceptation of the term), the most ancient examples of Arabic writing which have hitherto been discovered appear in the trilingual (Syriac, Greek, and Arabic) inscription of Zabad,11 south-east of Aleppo, dated 512 or 513 a.d., and the bilingual (Greek and Arabic) of Ḥarrán,12 dated 568 a.d. With these documents we need not concern ourselves further, especially as their interpretation presents great difficulties. Very few among the Pre-islamic Arabs were able to read or write.13 Those who could generally owed their skill to Jewish and Christian teachers, or to the influence of foreign culture radiating from Ḥíra and Ghassán. But although the Koran, which was first collected soon after the battle of Yamáma (633 a.d.), is the oldest Arabic book, the beginnings of literary composition in the Arabic language can be traced back to an earlier period. Probably all the Pre-islamic poems which have come down to us belong to the century preceding Islam (500-622 a.d.), but their elaborate form and technical perfection forbid the hypothesis that in them we have "the first sprightly runnings" of Arabian song. It may be said of these magnificent odes, as of the Iliad and The Pre-islamic poems. Odyssey, that "they are works of highly finished art, which could not possibly have been produced until the poetical art had been practised for a long time." They were preserved during hundreds of years by oral tradition, as we shall explain elsewhere, and were committed to writing, for the most part, by the Moslem scholars of the early ‘Abbásid age, i.e., between 750 and 900 a.d. It is a noteworthy fact that the language of these poems, the authors of which represent many different tribes and districts of the peninsula, is one and the same. The dialectical variations are too trivial to be taken into account. We might conclude that the poets used an artificial dialect, not such as was commonly spoken but resembling the epic dialect of Ionia which was borrowed by Dorian and Æolian bards. When we find, however, that the language in question is employed not only by the wandering troubadours, who were often men of some culture, and the Christian Arabs of Ḥíra on the Euphrates, but also by goat-herds, brigands, and illiterate Bedouins of every description, there can be no room for doubt that in the poetry of the sixth century we hear the Arabic language as it was then spoken throughout the length and breadth of Arabia. The success of Muḥammad and the conquests made by Islam under the Orthodox Caliphs gave an entirely new importance to this classical idiom. Arabic became the sacred language of the whole Moslem world. This was certainly due to the Koran; but, on The Koran. the other hand, to regard the dialect of Mecca, in which the Koran is written, as the source and prototype of the Arabic language, and to call Arabic 'the dialect of Quraysh,' is utterly to reverse the true facts of the case. Muḥammad, as Nöldeke has observed, took the ancient poetry for a model; and in the early age of Islam it was the authority of the heathen poets (of whom Quraysh had singularly few) that determined the classical usage and set the standard of correct speech. Moslems, who held the Koran to be the Word of God and inimitable in point of style, naturally exalted the dialect of the Prophet's tribe above all others, even laying down the rule that every tribe spoke less purely in proportion to its distance from Mecca, but this view will not commend itself to the unprejudiced student. The Koran, however, exercised a unique influence on the history of the Arabic language and literature. We shall see in a subsequent chapter that the necessity of preserving the text of the Holy Book uncorrupted, and of elucidating its obscurities, caused the Moslems to invent a science of grammar and lexicography, and to collect the old Pre-Muḥammadan poetry and traditions which must otherwise have perished. When the Arabs settled as conquerors in Syria and Persia and mixed with foreign peoples, the purity of the classical language could no longer be maintained. While in Arabia itself, especially among the nomads of the desert, little difference was felt, in the provincial garrison towns and great centres of industry like Baṣra and Kúfa, where the population largely consisted of aliens who had embraced Islam and were rapidly being Arabicised, the door stood open for all sorts of depravation to creep in. Against this vulgar Arabic the Arabic in the Muḥammadan Empire. philologists waged unrelenting war, and it was mainly through their exertions that the classical idiom triumphed over the dangers to which it was exposed. Although the language of the pagan Bedouins did not survive intact—or survived, at any rate, only in the mouths of pedants and poets—it became, in a modified form, the universal medium of expression among the upper classes of Muḥammadan society. During the early Middle Ages it was spoken and written by all cultivated Moslems, of whatever nationality they might be, from the Indus to the Atlantic; it was the language of the Court and the Church, of Law and Commerce, of Diplomacy and Literature and Science. When the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century swept away the ‘Abbásid Caliphate, and therewith the last vestige of political unity in Islam, classical Arabic ceased to be the κοινή or 'common dialect' of the Moslem world, and was supplanted in Arabia, Syria, Egypt, and other Arabic-speaking countries by a vulgar colloquial idiom. In these countries, however, it is still the language of business, literature, and education, and we are told on high authority that even now it "is undergoing a renaissance, and there is every likelihood of its again becoming a great literary vehicle."14 And if, for those Moslems who are not Arabs, it occupies relatively much the same position as Latin and Greek in modern European culture, we must not forget that the Koran, its most renowned masterpiece, is learned by every Moslem when he first goes to school, is repeated in his daily prayers, and influences the whole course of his life to an extent which the ordinary Christian