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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    not, I believe, likely to be shaken, but it is premature to attempt more than the most provisional sketch of the way in which they operated under the special historical con- ditions existing in the Arabian peninsula. The collection of the evidence on which my arguments rest has occupied me at intervals since the autumn of 1879, when I put together a certain number of facts about female kinship and totemism in a paper on “ Animal worship and animal tribes among the Arabs and in the Old Testament,” which was published in the Journal of Philology, vol. ix. At that time I had access to no good library of Arabic texts, so that I could only pick up what lay on the surface of the unsearched field; but the results of this pro- visional exploration appeared so promising that it seemed desirable to publish them and to invite the cooperation of scholars better versed in the early literature of Arabia. Several orientalists of mark responded to this invitation; in particular Prof. Th. Noldeke sent me some valuable observations, which have since been incorporated in his review of Prof. G. A. Wilken’s book, Het Matriarchaat
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