NATURE 



529 



THURSDAY, APRIL 8, 1886 



KINSHIP AND MARRIAGE IN EARLY 



ARABIA 



Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia. By W. 



Robertson Smith. (Cambridge: University Press, 1885.) 

 TT is almost, if not quite, an act of presumption to 

 attempt to review Prof. Robertson Smith's book. 

 The subject (the development of the family in early 

 Arabia) is exceedingly obscure. The evidence is mainly 

 drawn from books whose very names I never heard of 

 before. In matters of Greek and Roman antiquities the 

 evidence is handy, and may be estimated by one who 

 only knows the usual classical tongues. In matters of 

 early India, we have, at least, the German translations of 

 the Veda and Mure's Sanskrit texts to help us, and Prof. 

 Max Miiller's English works, and all that Bergaigne, and 

 Whitney, and Barth have written. But Prof Robertson 

 Smith's Arabian writers are wholly inaccessible to the 

 ordinary anthropologist. He cannot presume to criticise 

 the sources and testimonies, and I make no such pre- 

 tension. One has to take the author's statements as he 

 gives them, with the confidence inspired by his great 

 renown as an Orientalist, and by the assent which, it is 

 understood, other famous Eastern scholars give to his 

 method and conclusions. 



The thesis maintained by Prof. Robertson Smith is 

 that in Arabia, as elsewhere, the Patriarchal family, where 

 it existed, grew slowly out of a system, commonly called 

 the Matriarcha/e, in which women were the acknowledged 

 permanent element in the household. Such families are 

 familiar to readers of Mr. McLennan's books, and Prof 

 Robertson Smith, on the whole, is chiefly occupied here 

 in extending the sphere within which Mr. McLennan's 

 opinions hold good. A period of promiscuity, or at least 

 of brief informal unions, was succeeded by an age of 

 polyandry, and consequent doubtfulness about male 

 parentage in each case. This condition was gradually 

 modified, for example, by brothers sharing the same wife, 

 till the patriarchal family emerged from the confusion- 

 Stocks of kindred were not so much gentes, like those of 

 Rome, but totem kindreds, with relationship and the 

 totem and family name descending through the woman, 

 and, of course, with the exogamous prohibition against 

 marriage between a man and woman of the same totem. 



These, roughly, are the conditions whence, in early 

 Arabia, Prof Robertson Smith thinks that marriages and 

 families with the husband and father for recognised 

 centre were evolved. In many savage lands it is certain, 

 in some civilised lands it is probable, that affairs have 

 taken this course. But there is a very strong disposition 

 to resist this conclusion among scholars who had it put 

 before them rather late in life, when new ideas are dis- 

 tasteful. The existence of an older generation of doubters 

 is most profitable to science. They exercise a constitu- 

 tional check, and demand that proofs shall be very clear 

 and unmistakable before they give up their old opinions. 

 I do not expect Prof Robertson Smith to make converts 

 among the devotees of an original primjeval patriarchal 

 family. On the other hand, in my own case, he is 

 " preaching to a proselyte." I am convinced that the 

 Vol. XXXIII. — No. 85S 



order of development in which he believes has been very 

 common if not universal. I think his theory colligates a 

 great number of curious facts, and explains them at one 

 stroke ; whereas, if his theory is not accepted, I fail to 

 see any one hypothesis, on the other side, that meets all 

 the cases. These old survivals of customs will have to 

 receive each its separate solution, or to be left unex- 

 plained as mere sports and curiosities. But, if Prof 

 Robertson Smith is right, they all fall into their proper 

 strata, venerable fossils left by the tide of social progress, 

 e.xamples of laws known to have worked elsewhere to 

 similar results. This appears to be an argument in favour 

 of Prof Robertson Smith's hypothesis. 



When the Prophet started on his career, the unit of 

 Arab society was the local group, feigned by genealogists 

 to be a patriarchal tribe with a common ancestor. But 

 the common ancestor's name often shows him to have 

 been a fiction. " Many tribal names are plainly collectives." 

 Some are plural animal names — Panthers, Dogs, Lizards — 

 exactly such as we find in America, Africa, Australia, and 

 India. Now, in these countries, the groups bearing such 

 names are demonstrably «<</ patriarchal, and demonstrably 

 did grow up through exogamy and female kinship. If 

 the similarly-named Arab tribes grew up differently, grew 

 up on patriarchal lines and male kinship, the presence of 

 beast na'nes, like totem names, is a very curious coin- 

 cidence. On the other view. Leopard, Wolf, Lizard was the 

 name of the original or ideal ancestor. Now animal 

 names as Christian names (so to speak) for individuals 

 are common among savages. The personal name of a 

 Red Indian whose totem and family name is " Crane," 

 may be Wolf or Lizard. But as far as I know the 

 personal name — the Christian name as it were — is always 

 accompanied by an epithet, " Spotted Dog," " Sitting 

 Bull," and the like, while the family or totem name is the 

 beast, or plant, or another name sa?is phrase. For tliiis 

 reason I am disinclined to share Mr. C. J. Lyall's doubts 

 {Academy, March 6, 1886). I think when an individual 

 man has a personal name derived from a beast, it is a 

 name with a qualification, as a rule. To a kindred call- 

 ing themselves " Spotted Dogs," I would allow their claim 

 to descend from a gentleman named " Spotted Dog," but 

 a tribe called " Dogs" have a very totemistic air. How- 

 ever, so far, there is no certain demonstration. Arab 

 tribes have many other names, divine or local, which 

 cannot be derived from an actual ancestor. For these 

 and similar reasons, Prof Robertson Smith rejects the 

 patriarchal origin of the several tribes, as conventionally 

 given by genealogists. That explanation naturally oc- 

 curred to men living in a state of male kindred, and the 

 patriarchal family, but that explanation explains nothing. 

 It does not, e.g., explain tribes which refer their origin to 

 a female eponym, an eponymous heroine. Nor does it 

 explain why the Arab technical term for clan means 

 "belly," just as, among aboriginal tribes of India, the 

 native name for clan means " motherhood." 



If we now examine marriage law, we find that by the 

 prevalent type a woman goes to her husband's kin, and 

 her children are reckoned of his blood, and take the side 

 of his clan. But there are proofs that the opposite, the 

 anti-patriarchal system, once existed. The man went to 

 the woman's people (either permanently or on visits), and 

 his children were reckoned to her blood, and took the 



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