136 
C. J. Lyall —Translations from the Hamaseh . 
[No. 2, 
allied with Temim, among whom the}* - dwelt. There is another longer 
poem by the same author, quite in the spirit of this, at pp. 274-6 of the 
Hamaseh. I have not been able to ascertain when he lived, but it must have 
been in the days of the Ignorance. 
v. 1. “ Camel,” bdzil , properly a she-camel nine years old, when she 
is strongest and fittest to bear fatigue. Khabab means a quick trot. 
v. 3. “ Statue-like,” ka-d-clumd : this comparison is found more than 
once in the poems of Imra’-el-Qeys. There is a strangeness about it in the 
mouth of a Desert Arab. Imra’-el-Qeys was a prince who had travelled and 
seen strange lands, and among them probably the sculptures of the Greeks. 
The Dabbi, who had a taste for the pleasures of the town, may also have 
seen Greek statues in Syria, though his poem at pp. 274-6 shews him as a 
genuine Bedawi. 
v. 7. Tasm was one of the old lost races of Arabia, who dwelt, with 
a sister tribe named Jedis, in a valley called el-Jaww in el-Yemameh, in 
southern Nejd. A quarrel broke out between Tasm and Jedis, in which 
the latter tribe massacred the whole of the former, except one man named 
Riyah, who escaped and invoked the aid of Hassan son of As‘ad, the Tubba‘ 
of el-Yemen. This king led an army against Jedis, and exterminated the 
whole race (see the Ilimyerite Qasideh, vv. 79-80). Nothing certain is 
known of the date of this event, and Tasm to an Arab was but the name of a 
people that perished long ago. Of Ghafti of Bahm also nothing is known 
but his name: he seems to have been a prince of Irem, of the race of ‘Ad, 
another lost people, and is mentioned together with Luqman and Bu Jeden 
in a verse cited by el-Jauhari: 
Tau ’annani Jcuntu min e Adin wamin ’Iremin 
Ghadiyya Tahmin wa-Tucpndnan wa-T)d Jedeni. 
“ If I had been a man of the race of ‘Ad and of Irem, 
GhaSi of Bahm or Luqman or Bu Jeden.” 
Bu Judun probably stands for Bu Jeden, the surname of a king of 
Himyer whose name was ‘Alas son of el-Harith. The Arabs say that 
Bu Jeden was so named from his beautiful voice, and that he was expert 
in song. The name is however, like all the names of Himyer compounded 
with T)d, a local one, Jeden being the city or fortress after which the 
Prince was called. The name Bu Jeden is found in Halevy’s Ilimyerite 
inscriptions: see Major Prideaux’s Edn. of the Himyerite Qasideh, p. 58. 
There was another Bu Jeden called el-Akbar, the greater, whose name was 
‘Alqameh, of much older date, a cousin of Bilqis the Queen of Seba, whom 
Arab legend makes the contemporary of Solomon. 
v. 8. Of the race of Jash we likewise know nothing, and the com¬ 
mentator does not help us. Freytag suggests that the right reading is 
Hash, given in the Qamus as the name of a place in el-Yemen. 
