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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    the two tribes can mean nothing else than that Bakr and Taghlibwere themselves brothers. But, this being so, two cases are possible. Either the genealogists knew by historical tradition that two brothers Bakr and Taghlib, sons of Wail, had actually lived, or on the other hand the logic of their theory led them to infer the existence of two such brothers from the fact that in historical times the two tribes spoke of each other as “our brethren5' (Harith, Moall. 1. 16). The latter beyond all question is the real case. Arabic tradition has nothing to tell about the personalities of Bakr and Taghlib that is not obviously mere fable. A story told in the Aghdni about Bakr and Zaid Manat ibn Tamim I condense in a note as a fair sample of wbiat the Arabs used to relate of their mythical ancestors(3). About Taghlib on the other hand I find only a notice in Wiistenfeld, the authority for which I have not traced, that his true name was Dithar, and that once in his boyhood, having repelled an attack on his father’s house, he was greeted with the cry Taghlib, “ thou art vic- torious.” But according to all Semitic analogy the name derived from such an incident should have been in the third person masculine, Yaghlib “the victorious,” like Yadhkor, Yashkor and the like in Arabic, or Jacob “the supplanter,” Isaac “the laugh- er,” and so forth in the Bible. And beyond doubt Taghlib must be taken not as the second person masc. but as the third person feminine impfct. of ghalaba—
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