In Our Time - Antarah ibn Shaddad

Episode Date: February 28, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, works, context and legacy of Antarah (525-608AD), the great poet and warrior. According to legend, he was born a slave; his mother was an Ethiopian slave, his father an elite Arab cavalryman. Antarah won his freedom in battle and loved a woman called Abla who refused him, and they were later celebrated in the saga of Antar and Abla. One of Antarah's poems was so esteemed in pre-Islamic Arabia that it is believed it was hung up on the wall of the Kaaba in Mecca. With James Montgomery Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic at the University of CambridgeMarlé Hammond Senior Lecturer in Arabic Popular Literature and Culture at SOAS, University of LondonAnd Harry Munt Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of YorkProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, almost 15 centuries ago, Antara Ibn Shad was fighting on the Arabian Peninsula and composing poems he hoped would long outlast him, and they have. He stands out not only for his military excellence, but for his story.

He was born to an Ethiopian slave and a powerful knight and was himself a slave until he won his freedom in battle. When Islam arrived later and the Arabic language spread, he became famous as the great warrior poet, a model for others and the inspiration for the mighty epic of Antaan Abla, which is still being recited today. We meet to discuss the poetry of Antara Ibn Shad, James Montgomery, Sir Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic

at the University of Cambridge, Marley Hammond, senior lecturer in Arabic popular literature and culture at Soas University of London and Harry Munt a lecturer in medieval history at the University of York. James Montgomery, let's separate the myth from the history. What do we know about the man himself? Antir Ebn Shad was a character

who created an enormous legend around himself. It's very difficult to untangle the legend from the historical figure, but most versions of the legend converge around certain key points. So we know that. that he lived roughly around 600 AD, that he lived in Arabia in a region called Najd,

which is the Highland Plateau, sort of 100 miles northwest of Riyadh in modern Saudi Arabia, that he was a poet, that he was a warrior, that he was black and born to a slave mother, which meant that he himself was a slave. And beyond that, it's very difficult to say anything with any conviction. But what is said about him with a great deal of conviction

by a lot of people ever since? It's said that he was the mightiest warrior, possibly that Islam and Arabic civilization has ever encountered, that he was one of his greatest poets, that his quest for recognition and his attempt to win his freedom in battle became the stuff of stories around campfires

and persisted for centuries afterwards. Given it was an oral culture, legends can often carry real stories forward. Yes, indeed. A very long time. How much greetings do you give to what you've just said? I think it's the best version of events that accounts for the literary remains that we have

in front of us today. We talk about him being a warrior and an elite warrior, what does that mean? Yeah, so an elite warrior in this time would, in Antara's case in specific, would be a northern Arab cavalryman. So horseback warfare is what we're talking about. These warriors specialised in raiding at dawn, and so they would travel through the night to the tribal. they were about to raid, they would wait for dawn and raid first thing in the morning.

So in order to do that, you needed certain pieces of equipment. And those pieces of equipment were expensive and not available to everyone. So for a start, you needed a horse, obviously, and a very good horse. But you also needed a camel because the horse was taken alongside the camel across the desert to not tire the horse out before combat the following morning. You needed body armour and that would comprise a helmet It would comprise a coat of mail

Either of a tunic length to about the knee Or to foot length And that would be made of Pieces of iron Welded and nailed together You needed a sword A shield A lance

Probably made with bamboo imported from India A spear Short spear What sometimes is referred to as an assy guy for hand-to-hand combat, a dagger, possibly a bow and arrow, and your horse may also have been fitted with some bits of armour. So that's a fairly expensive set of kit that means that not everyone could afford it, and that only those who were the tribal elite would have access to such accoutrements.

What would the swords like? The swords? So there were two types of swords. One, which is referred to in the source as a Yemeni sword. So that's a long blade straight blade, probably ridged in the middle. And then there's an Indian

sword, which is probably curved. And those were the two particular swords that the hunter, as poetry mentions, regularly. So they'd come out of the night, attack another tribe. We'll maybe talk about those attacks a little later. Marley Hammond, what was they, let's talk about him as a poet. We know, and he adopted a poetry form of the

cassida. What was that and why was it important? Right. So, chasida in modern Arabic simply means poem, but when we're talking about classical Arabic poetry, it can mean either a poem of a certain length written in a certain meter and with monorime, or it can mean something very specific. So scholars of Arabic literature talk about the Qasida as a model or a paradigm. I like to think of it as a narrative paradigm, where the poetic persona begins by contemplating. There are different conventions that begin the Qasida.

It's called the Naseeb. and one convention is contemplating the abandoned campsite of the beloved. And another convention is watching the departing women folk of the tribe. And another convention is having the phantom of the beloved come and visit the poetic persona at night. So this is what's usually called an amatory or nostalgic prelude. And then the poetic persona kind of disengages from the beloved in something called the techallos, which means to be free of or to get rid of something. So in the techallos, the poetic persona says, forget about her, forget about the beloved.

And let's move on. And then there's usually a section including the description of a camel. And sometimes the poetic persona is a stride, a camel or a horse. And in what we call the journey section, the poetic person, poetic persona would seem to be going somewhere in space and time. And then we arrive at the purpose of the poem, the Gharad, which may be panegyric, it may be self-praise, it may be invective, it could be any theme or genre, really. So the Qasida is actually, it's very rare to find a poem that fits this description to a T, but a lot of poems seem to be engaged in a kind of

dialogue with the form. And he was supposed to be very skillful at this, and his themes were mainly war and honor. What was the status of those who could compose poetry as well as fight? If you were a great fighter, do you feel you had to be a poet as well? I don't know that you would have to be a great poet if you were a great fighter. What I think I can talk about is the hierarchies of poets. So, I mean, sometimes a poet was known specifically for being a warrior, like Antara in the book Fuhulat Aschua, he's asked, the al-Asmae, who's basically the author of the book, is asked, is Antara a stallion poet, a fah? And the most esteemed poets were called stallions.

And he said, he is the greatest Ashaar al-Foursan. He is the greatest of the warrior poets. Wasn't it important for, as I've read in the notes that you three have supplied? Yes. Wasn't it important or didn't elite troop, elite people or warriors anyway, think that they had to memorialize their life in poetry so as to be famous for ever, known forever and ever, which in the entire certainty is.

This is an important fact. Killing people in battle was one thing and making yourself immortal through verse was another. Yes. Yeah, I think. Good. Well, we've sorted better then. Right. Harry Munt, it thought that he was living in the middle of the Arabian Peninsula.

Can you describe what that place was like then? Yeah, so the middle of the Arabian Peninsula is perhaps the part of the peninsula that most resembles the popular perception of Arabia, a sort of a desert steppe plateau that extends from the centre of what's now Saudi Arabia to the north and to the borderlands in modern Jordan, Syria and Iraq, are reasonably, so I've fairly dry, place without rainfall and the kind of lifestyles of the inhabitants that go alongside that. To the west of this area, however, it gets quite different in Antara's activities, sort of border from Nejad in Central Arabia out towards a region called the Hajjurs in Western Arabia that contains the cities of Mecca and Medina.

And that's a more mountainous region, and it has these alongside the mountains and these and sort of extinct volcanic lava fields. He was before Mecca and Medina, so let's try to stick to it. He was pre-Islamic. That's one of the main points. When you say, you talk about there, was it mainly nomadic,

were there very few settlements? What was it going on? Were there small tribes? If so, how small were the tribes? So the society was principally, at least what's come down, organized tribally. So tribes are very important,

but tribes don't necessarily mean nomadic. There would have been settlement. around places where water was available and settled activity, settled agricultural activity. And then there were also various scales of nomadism, if you like, so from some fully nomadic groups who would spend all year moving around different territories to find pasture land for their animals. But then also groups that are somewhere in between and might move at particular seasons. So spend the winter season in one place, the summer season in another place,

and also undertake maybe some agricultural activities alongside animal raising as well. When we talk about battles, are we talking about tribal battles, basically? So we are often talking about tribal battles. And how many men would be involved? I think they were probably quite small, I suspect, so that we're not really talking very large numbers. A few hundred maybe on each side.

I suspect it would have been on that kind of level. We're not talking enormous armies here fighting each other, but sort of raiding of these smaller tribal groups. And which were the great powers around this region? So there were three powers that really surrounded this region and tried to exert influence the time of Antara's, roughly the time of Antara's life. So in the northwest you had the Roman Empire extending its power southwards into the Arabian Peninsula to the northeast. You had the Sasanian Persian Empire that was also trying to control its borderlands along the Arabian Peninsula. And then in the southwest of the peninsula, roughly in what's today Yemen, there was also a king of.

called the Himyarite kingdom that over the 5th and 6th century, so getting into Antaerah's lifetime, was trying to expand its own power over that Central Arabian step as well. So did his, let's call it his area, presuming he was alive and there and then when we said he was, did they feel threatened by these powers? Did these powers threaten them or just leave them alone? No, they did get involved to certain extent. So most of these groups, most of these empires and powers around the edges, they try to make use of some of the inhabitants of Arabia to expand their own power into Arabia. So a group from the tribe of Rassan were used by the Roman Empire in the 6th century

to try and expand their power. A group from the tribe of Lachm tried to do the same for the Persian. So in that sense, these imperial powers did try and expand influence among the tribes in Arabia. But do we have an idea then of constant disturbance, constant tribal warfare, almost unceasing warfare one way in another? I suppose that is an image that comes out to quite a lot of the poetry. I'm not sure it's, and there is a lot of tribal raiding is talked about in some of the other sources as well.

So, I mean, that is certainly an image that can be presented. Thank you very much. James Montgomery, assuming he was there and assuming the poems are his, which people have done for nearly 1,500 years now, and you've just translated them, and I must say I've enjoyed them in a mistake, really. And you've translated one. called Did Poetry Die? Yes. Now could you tell us about that and quote a little from it, please?

Of course. In English, if you're, or even both, I don't mind. Shall we, we can do it in both. Well, let's do it in both. That'll be a bit of fun. So, just by way of preface, this is Antara's most celebrated poem. It is. It was one of a number of poems referred to as muallatat. And that is a word that is thought to represent poems that were,

considered to be the prize poems of a particular year or a particular season were then written on cloth and suspended from the walls of the pre-Islamic catabat in Mecca. And so there's about 14 of these poems and they represent the aesthetic pinnacle of pre-Islamic poetic achievement. And Antaras is numbered as well as one of those and his poem, the one I translated as did Poetry Jada, is listed in every single version of this collection. Could you give us a taste of it? Yes. So the poem begins,

HAL Gawadrish I think from mutterdam or have I arfted

Dair after tawhm I'm Ory M'i Rasm Dari

didn't he he hatt Tullam as the same the

Aijam Al Jamm And I So that had habas to behaweila naqa, I shku, ill suffi, rawaikida, juthammy. So that's the opening of the poem.

You did that with that reference to anything. I'm very impressed. Yeah, I need to remember how I translated it. I can remember the Arabic, but I can't remember the English. You're struggling for the English, but still, we're waiting. Yeah, so I've translated this as, did poetry die in its war with the war? poets. Is this

where Abla walked? Think. The ruins were death. Refused to reply. Then shouted out in a foreign tongue. My camel tried to withdraw. I couldn't move, ranting at the charred stones. So that's how the poem begins. And that's what Mali said about starting off with ruins.

Abla has mentioned. Marley, can you tell us the part that Abla played in Antares poetry and life? Okay, well, I think one of the interesting things about the Mualaqa, about this poem, Did Poetry Die, is that the poetic persona never disengages with the beloved. So Abla keeps returning in the poem, and she isn't left behind.

Also, when she's first described in the poem, maybe I'll read a line here, Dara'an lianisset Gadi den tarfouha Ta'a la'aqa Lhidaeempsami It's quite remarkable that she's evoked

through three of the senses So I think you translated it As she has Doe eyes and A sweet smile And a soft neck Or something like that That's what I read

He's looking up He's looking in there I don't know if I had them in the right order. Anyway, can we talk a bit more about Ablachius' cousin? He fell in love with her, and that's gone from there. So in the poetry, yeah, I think it's remarkable that he keeps returning to her because lots of other poets have many beloveds, or they just dismiss them. In the legend, I think she plays a lot of interesting roles.

One thing that I find intriguing is that she herself, utters laments. So almost in sort of women's stereotypically composed laments in pre-Islamic Arabia. And at one point in the legend, she's under the impression that Antara has died. And so, you know, she utters poetry mourning him. And another thing that interests me is that she has an association with the color white. and it contrasts with his blackness. And it comes up again and again in the poetry and in the prose.

And I think at a certain point, and at least one version of the legend, they kind of switch places, and he's been wounded, and he rides in her howdudge and her litter. And she gets in his armor and mounts his horse. and she's recognized by their enemies as someone who doesn't have the demeanor of a man. And she lifts her helmet and the whiteness of her face is what identifies her as Abla, as opposed to Antara.

So I find it interesting that in this epic that celebrates a black hero, that also the contrast between her, black and white is repeatedly evoked and appreciated. It thought to be particularly beautiful, isn't it really, in many in many of context? Harry, Harry Munt, now let's go back to this war, which was one of the big things about him. He's been described as a poet of war and honour. What were these wars like? You've said there are a few hundred involved.

That's enough to sort of scatter living daylights out of most of us. but when they said they get dawn raid, at sort of midday it was all over and the body scattered, or they did they take hostages, did they go for ransom? What's going on? So I mean, I suspect given the temperature, a lot of dawn raiding is important to success. There's hostage taking.

I mean, obviously people are dying as well. There's, I suppose the warfare can be on slightly different scales. So some of the wars that we're told about were reasonably brief. They just involved a little bit of, of raiding over a short time period, but some of the wars we're told about are said to have gone on for, you know, many years, perhaps even decades. So the war that Antara is famously associated with, called the War of Dergis and Al-Gabra, is said to have gone on for decades, I think. So in that sense, these were sort of back-and-forth conflicts that could go on for a very

long time. And when you won, what did you win? Well, I suppose one of the things you won was tribal honour, and that's the thing that they were very interested in celebrating through the poetry. Obviously there was captives to be taken and therefore money to be made from ransoming them back as well and strategic position. And so lots of wars are, of course, ultimately over the leadership of the tribe

and all the wider confederation, which subunits has control over the wider confederation and the access to the power that that brings. James Montgomery, In the notes that I've read and in there's a great deal about the importance of time. Yes. And obviously because of a warrior, the importance of death. Yes.

Could you open those up for us in regard to this particular man in epoch? Yeah. So, excuse me, the cosmos that the pre-Islamic poets and Antra in particular thought themselves as inhabiting as particularly stark. So effectively you have man the individual, possibly also his family, the tribal unit, the clan associated with him, and you as that unit are pitted against this overwhelming force that they identified as time or fate might be a better way of describing it. and fate would bring about at some point in the course of a hero or a warrior's life some form of disintegration, disunity, disruption to that unit, be it the person or be it the extended person in the form of the tribe or the family. And so they saw themselves effectively as pitted against this anonymous.

force of fate that would somehow at some point in the course of anyone's life bring about a disintegration of everything that you felt was important. Did the way that, did fate operate through chance? Was chance a big factor? Yes. Well, how the individual responded to fate was to see life as effectively determined by chance. So fate was going to happen in illuptu. it was going to bring about disruption at some point to you.

But how you responded to it as a poet or as a warrior was to see that the human universe as opposed to the cosmic one was dominated by chance. And so you have the popularity of a sort of a game of gambling, which was known as Miser, and that was where a camel was taken, was slaughtered and headless and fleshless arrows were thrown and drawn and whoever pulled the arrow got the biggest slice of meat. So that sort of game of chance sums up how the poet saw his relationship to time. But the way in which you really, really completely took on time was on

the battlefield, I think, because that is where you chanced everything. You chants your life. You chants your horse, your prized possession, you chance the vulnerability of your family back home. If you're defeated, then that tribe can carry on and raid your own tribe in return. And if all the warriors are out and defeated, you've lost everything. And so chance becomes the sort of crucible

in which you protect and preserve your honour against the depredations of time. So a human honour had to be preserved against the attack of time. And Andrew was regarded as an outstanding warrior in the legends anyway which you can track back back you think to the 6th century.

He certainly I'm happy to believe that he won his freedom on the battlefield which is no mean feat through recognition by his father for his valour one day and single-handedly saving the tribe from attack. So if you have a group

of anything from 20 to 100 Raiders attacking and you are the one last person that's preventing that attack from taking place. You have to be pretty skillful, I would expect. Yes, Molly, you mentioned Abla's lamentations.

And can you, because women did have their place in poetry, in the making of poetry. Could you just develop that, please? Yes, okay. So women are associated especially with elegy for the dead. There's evidence that they composed in many other genres as well. So, Hezal Azouche, they composed invectives, they composed praise poetry.

But the poems that were preserved for posterity are mainly elegies. But within these poems, I mean, in some ways they're like the chasida, because just as the chasida contains different themes and genres within it, the woman's elegy also contains different different genres and themes. So you find, for example, in the Hamasat anthologies from roughly the 10th through the 12th centuries, you find women's elegies are extracted in those anthologies, but they're put in different genres.

So you'll find some verses by Al-Han-Sat in the praise chapter. You know, you find love poetry and all manner of themes and genres. Yes, so women are. especially associated with allergy for the dead or lamentation, but we do believe that they composed in many other genres as well. Were these poems by women taken in any way seriously as the poems attributed to men? Yes, especially the poet Al-Hansat, who was a mujadrama,

so her lifespan the pre-Islamic and the Islamic eras. But she was regarded very highly, and in medieval times there were, something like 13 commentaries on her Diwan or her corpus circulating. James. Just to pick up on that point that Marley was making, it's one thing to die a noble death on the battlefield. That death only really has meaning if there's someone to actually sing.

It's celebrated in song. And a lot of the elegies that Marley has been referring to that have survived. are in fact poems by women for lost loved ones on the battlefield that are there to perpetuate the memory of those who have died and therefore continue this sense of honour in the face of time. Harry, Harry Month, can you tell us when Antara's works came to be celebrated and why do you think it happened when it did? So also after his lifetime moving into the...

now into the Islamic period, and we start to see traces of evidence that Antaura's poetry was being celebrated maybe a couple of hundred years after his death, late 8th, early 9th century. Was there only resistance in the Islamic period to poetry for a pre-Islamic period? The Quran has a famous polemical verse about poets and their false boasting. So in that sense, yes, there was a... Can we have more of that? What did the...

I talk about poets, just very briefly about poets who move through the... valleys talking about things that they don't do. So in that sense, there is a sort of backlash against poetry. But that said, pre-Islamic poetry became one of the most popular genres of Arabic literature in the centuries after Antara's death. I think partly that's because the same tribal context that Antara was active in himself, of course, didn't disappear with the emergence of Islam and the Arabians who went out and conquered outside of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century, they also came from these tribal

backgrounds and a lot of them from these tribal communities that also sought to continue the memorialisation of their deeds on the battlefield through poetry as well. So in that may have given the sort of situation in which all these pre-Islamic tribal boasting poetry's kept going and of course new poems are being composed as well to commemorate the new feats of these tribes. Moving slightly further forward into the second half of the eighth century with the foundation of the new capital at Baghdad, we start to see there an interest in collecting pre-Islamic poetry in Iraq to facilitate other academic sciences, basically. So a lot of philologists, linguists, grammarians, and then Quranic scholars as well start to become interested in Arabic poetry for the evidence it provides

for the language. There's a famous quote from a critic about how if you don't understand something in the Quran then look at what the poets have to say using that language. So poetry began to be seen as an ancillary subject for discipline for helping

understand these other areas as well. To come back to Antara when did he begin? He was in an oral culture which many of the early poem would believe the Homer was and so and so and that was what went on. But he could go on and carry on and it had a substance and had a sort of valid continuity as people have expressed in this program over

years and in their own books and far better. When did it enter into literature, into writing at least if not literature? So we have sources from the early 9th century that provide a bit of biographical detail about Antara and quote some of his poetry at the same time. So a 9th century scholar called Imkotabur gives a sort of a bit of the biography that James was mentioning earlier and then he also has some extracts from Antara's verses that he sort of, yeah, this is a particularly good one, or there's one way he criticises it.

Antara went too far in this passage. So you can see evidence there of it's starting to be collected together. And then from there it goes forward. Antara's poetry keeps coming up in works that are collecting larger law from the pre-Islamic, about the pre-Islamic periods, to go with a lot of the narratives of these battles that were fought, went with lots of accompanying poetry,

Antara will of course have provided some of that as well. And then over into the 10th century and then you start to see the collections that survive of people bringing his poetry together from the 11th century. James James Montgomery, what would have been thought distinctive about Antara's verse? So there's two ways to answer this. First to pick up on something that Harry was saying there.

the interest in the Baghdad based culture in Antara was that pre-Islamic poetry was seen as a sort of model of chivalric and heroic virtues and this was a society that was very interested in breeding and in lineage and parentage and Antara broke all the rules.

But we're entering into the great period of Arabic civilization they are on all fronts, but four or five hundred years of magnificent achievements in intellectual arts. And this sense that Antara was someone who overcame all the odds remains persistent all the way into the epic that Marley was discussing earlier. And I think

that has a bearing on the poetry itself. So what's distinctive about it is this voice of absolutely no compromise. There is no compromise in Antara's poetry whatsoever, whether it be the way he positions himself against the rest of the world or against his opponents, or whether it be the way he positions himself against the tradition of the Qasida that Marley was discussing earlier.

So that's what's really distinct about him. But what I find particularly fascinating about Antara and unique, and that I don't see or hear in other pre-Islamic poets, is an attention to detail that is in the imagery that is quite simply. staggering. So here's an example. And I'll give you the Arabic first. So he's describing the moment where he

leaves his beloved and he is remembering the way that her teeth shone and the darkness, the fragrance that was coming from her and is compares her to a water

soaked field of flowers just after heavy spring rain in the desert. And we have this amazing long image, a big extended simile in which the flowers and everything are described. And right at the end, you hear this. Fattara, fatura, a thubaba byha yu gna gna dihae yvani whatah. Fattura byha, a thubaba you ghanni wahthah. Kaffa'i'i'i'i'i'i'i' charibe al mutterannimi.

ghariddan Yesunnu thirahue by thirai'i F'le al-zinaid al-a-jad al-a-jzimi And so I'll just turn briefly to my translation and explain So we have this field of flowers, rain-soaked field of flowers

And he zooms right in on this tiny, tiny detail He says, And the lone hopper, he's describing an insect, And the lone hopper, look, screeches its drunken song scraping out a tune leg on leg like a one-arm man

bent over a firestick now I have pondered that image for the last seven years when I was working on this translation it still baffles me but what I think is unique about Antara is this almost cinematic close-up focus that he zooms in on this detail and in the middle of all this beauty

you have this sort of grotesque pain also of this fly which is screeching, it's like a cicada screeching away and he compares it to a one-armed man bent over a fire stick. I mean, for me that's just poetry at its best. Marley, Molly, Mani Hammond, can you ask you on the medieval epic of Antar and Abla, how it developed? Okay, well, as Harry said, we have reports or Akbar about Antar and his life

from the 9th and 10th centuries, and they appeared in Ashao Shura, as Harry mentioned, and also in Kittab al-Agani of Abul Farage al-Azvahani. And then Peter Heath has kind of a history of the Antara epic in his book, The Thirsty Sword. So he mentions that in the 12th century, we find references to the Sira-Auntar. So we don't have versions of it yet in book form, but we have references in books to the fact that it existed. And I think he gives the example of biographical dictionary of physicians, where one of the physicians was nicknamed Al-Auntari, because in his spare time he copied the stories or a hadith of Antara Absi.

So then in the 15th century, we start to find manuscripts of the Sira. But I think they're still relatively rare until the 19th century. And partly the renewed interest in Siret, Antar, in the 19th century, had to do with the European discovery of Antara in the early 1800s. So this is, it seems, sounds rather fragmented and occasional to me, but this was a steady regarded love affair going through the centuries. I think that we don't know as much about the history as we could

because the manuscripts aren't there until the 15th century. So we don't really know how it evolved from the time of the Akbar mentioned in Ibn Qutaiba and Isfahani. And, you know, what happened between that stage and the manuscripts that are from the 15th century. One of the things that's very interesting about the early stratum of this Antar and Abla love affair is that in the sources that Marley was referring to

Abla doesn't play a role at all and yet by the 15th century this great epic love story this romance erupts Harry Arabic began to be spoken more and more widely the civilization was enormous for hundreds of years how did that affect his standing I think it's the spread of Arabic

and more people starting to use Arabic as a spoken and written language meant that so on the one hand it meant that Arabs came into contact with other cultures and started to think seriously about what it was that distinguished Arabic culture and made it particularly important and poetry was the thing they sort of picked on most heavily there's a famous saying that poetry is the Duan of the Arabs it's the archive of the Arabs and the records of their activities and white and their cultural success. And so Anandah's deeds and renown and his poetry played an important part in that.

It also, of course, meant that just different regions of the world started to use the Arabic language and to get interested in the history of a culture that sort of got, they had to trace back to Arabia and pre-Islamic Arabia. And it's quite interesting in some ways and maybe remarkable that the earliest surviving collections of Antoer's poetry come from Al-Andalas. from the 11th century, which was a time of sort of remarkable interest there in pre-Islamic Arabian history and poetry and literature. So Antares, the collection of Antara's poetry fitted alongside that activity

and his renown spread in that sense with Arabic language and literature. How does he compare with other pre-Islamic poets, James? So the thing that is remarkable and unique about Antara's poetry, in addition to this obsession with the small detail, if we compare him with perhaps the most famous pre-Islamic poet of all, a man called Imbru al-Qais, who was from much further south in Arabia. His poetry is inflected with Himyarite,

as Harry was mentioning earlier, the South Arabian kingdom of Himyar, of Himyarite notions of kingship. In fact, he is thought to have lost the three when his father was killed and he spent the rest of his life wandering around in Arabia as far as Constantinople trying to regain his throne. So his is a much more regal and less everyday type of poetry, just to give you one example. Harry, why do you think his legacy has endured for so long? I think it's partly because of all the unique aspects of his poetry that James has been talking about.

and the way that he was able to be a model for a particular kind of warrior and courageous and also generous person and a tribesman as well. It's also, of course, partly the response of much wider historical phenomenon such as the creation of an empire by Arabian tribesmen from the desert that could take his poetry and those ideas with them throughout the lands that they conquered and established new society. in as well. Is there any way finally, Marley, of assessing what his reputation is now? He's still a very popular figure that informs popular culture. There have been films made about him and

television serials. He's a very exciting figure and he still has his appeal today. And you would endorse that, James, I think. Yes, very much so. He's the classic figure of the underdog who succeeds against all the odds. And that is as relevant today as it was. was 1,500 years ago. Well, thank you very much, Chertoon Gommery, Mani Hammond and Harry Munt. Next week, it's William Sessel, Lord Burley, the most powerful man at the Court of Elizabeth I.

Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I wanted to ask James about his translation of the first line of the Mualaha. Did poetry die? because it's a very bold translation and he interprets the line differently than it has been interpreted

for hundreds if not thousands of years. So the line is normally translated something like this and I'll need to remind myself. I love the way you look up the English but spot up the Arabic after seven years of reading

I've been reading this poem by Antara for 30 years plus. It's the poem that I go back to time and time again, and it sort of lives with me on a regular basis, unlike my English. It normally means have the poets left any piece of poetry unpatched? In other words, in view of all the decades and all the number of poems that have been composed, is there anything that I could possibly say that hasn't been said before?

And that interpretation, which is a very valid one, concentrates on the most difficult word in the line which only occurs in this poem. It doesn't occur anywhere else. When I was translating it, I focused on all of the words that I could know and that I did know and that are common in the rest of the corpus. And so the key word there is the second word, which means to leave someone, dead and unburied on the battlefield. And so in that basis, I went from have the poets left poetry

unburied on the battlefield. And I thought, this is a war poet. I'm hearing him as a war poet. I'm understanding this whole poem as a poem about war. It's a response to the challenge that the two brothers of the father that Andorah has just killed have issued. And so rather than focus on this more image that is more concerned with poetic creativity, I focused on the battle context. But

in order to really explain it, the narrative context here I think is that Antara has just been on a raid. There's just been a battle and he's on his way home and he comes across these traces and he said the battle was so awful

did poetry itself die in the mele, in the carnage. And so he's trying to resurrect, revivify poetry in the course of the next 85 lines. And that was why I plumbed for the translation that I did. Well, I just think it's... I mean, the first time I read the translation, I thought, well, that's very different from what I normally think the line means.

What do you normally think the line means? Well, like he quoted before. So there's this word mutaradami. and it means well apparently it only means this because of the way Antara's poem is interpreted but people

usually take it to mean a tear or or sort of unpatched or something like that right? Right. Patched up rather patched up So people have interpreted the line to mean something like

have the poets left anything unsung song. I think I'm probably quoting a translation there, not accidentally. Do you have a comment on this? I'm happy to let these experts of poetry argue it out.

Was there anything you'd like to have said that you didn't? One thing we didn't cover too much, as you were mentioning, someone was mentioning, I think, Mali, the sort of the European discovery of Antaer in the 19th century as well. And that seemed quite an interesting. I mean, again, that he as a character was picked up in the 19th century and European, circles as well of the many characters available from this period of well seem like it seemed a sort of

interesting topic. European visitors to Cairo hear this epic being recited in the cafes, this epic of Antar and Abla. And because they are possibly looking for the origins of Homer or whatever, they get very excited about the presence of this ancient epic and the interest in it sort of stems from this misguided notion that somehow this could help explain the emergence of the Homeric epics. I'm very interested in the epic as a kind of counter-narrative. Rantara was black and is celebrating himself as being that. And also in the epic, his mother is described as being very beautiful. And so I... I don't know. I kind of think of it as like a black panther of its day.

It's celebrating blackness in a way that's refreshing. Is there any comment about his blackness other than the fact that he is black? Well, it is the source of injustice. I mean, he has lines, and I'm sorry, I'm not in a position to quote them, but he has lines where he talks about how people mistreat him and abuse him because he's black. So, yeah, I do sort of read it as. a counter-narrative in that sense. In the one poem, which is one of his most quoted poems that Marley is referring to,

he says, one half of me is from the best of the tribe. It's from the aristocrats of the tribe. The other half, which is descended from the sons of Ham, one of the sons of Noah, thought to be the ancestor of the black people, I defend with my sort. this defiance we're reading back into the poetry but this defiance seems to

then create one of his most enduring and popular lines and comes to be the cornerstone of this enormous narrative that's constructed on this one half of me is the best of the tribe the other half I defend with my sort

I assume antarous situation of I think his mother was Ethiopian or Ethiopian slave something like that, I assume that's not, that wasn't unique and that there would have been, there would have been other, there were other people around, I mean, so Ethiopia actually is quite closely connected culturally with the southwest corner of the Arabian Peninsula, and so that would have, that could have created links across, across the Red Sea between Arabia

and Africa as well, and there would have been people from the empires to the north as well, in Arabia as well, there would have been other people around. The kingdom of Axum, which is the kingdom that Harry is alluding to from Eritrea and and Ethiopia had very, very close ties with the South Arabian kingdom of Himyar. And there's significant interference from the side of Axum in the affairs of Himmya, together with military occupation and so on, in the half century or so running up to when we think Antara was alive. And so there would have been naturally eretrains, Ethiopians, in modern parlance present in the peninsula. Well, thank you very much for attempting to disentangle legend from his here's the producer who's going to offer you something wonderful.

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