The Uḥjiyyat al-ʿArab ('riddle-poem of the Arabs') is a qaṣīda by the early eighth-century CE poet Dhū al-rumma containing the earliest substantial collection of Arabic riddles, thought to have been influential on later Arabic verse riddlers,[1] and perhaps on Arabic ekphrastic poetry more widely.[2]

Content

Nasīb

Like most qaṣīdas, the poem begins with a nasīb (lines 1–14). Here Dhū al-rumma describes himself surveying the desert by night and day, yearning for Mayya, his beloved. In the summary of Abdul Jabbar Yusuf Muttalibi, Dhū al-rumma goes on (in lines 7–14) to describe

a gazelle grazing amongst sands which the heavy rain of the morning has dressed with rich green leaves. Seeing a human being at that isolated place, it comes forward, yet shows in her behaviour nothing but panic. This panic-stricken gazelle amidst that green pasture is not more beautiful than Mayya on that evening when she tried to wound your heart with a face as pure as the gleaming sun, as though the sight of it were to re-open the wound in this heart. And with an eye as though the two Babylonians (Harut and Marut) had set a charm upon your heart on the day of Marqula, and with a mouth of well-set teeth like lilies growing in a pure sandy plain neither close to saline land nor to the salt of the sea. And with a white neck and upper breast, pure white when not yellowed from the sprinkling of saffron.[3]: 176–77 

Raḥīl

The nasīb is followed by a description of travel through the desert (lines 15–26). Muttalibi in particular notes the imagery of lines 20 and 22:[3]: 142 [4]

Riddles

Finally, the body of the poem constitutes a number of enigmatic statements (lines 28–72). As would be usual in the praise-poetry that often constitutes this section of a qaṣīda, each statement begins with the exclamatory syllable known in Arabic as wāw rubba.[5]: 19  The poem includes no solutions to these riddles, and different manuscripts include slightly different material and in different orders; thus they have been the source of scholarly discussion since as early as Abū Naṣr Aḥmad ibn Ḥātim al-Bāhilī (d. 846 CE), who wrote a commentary on Dhū al-rumma's work that may have been particularly prompted by Dhū al-rumma's riddling.[6]: 43  One example of these riddles, on the egg, is as follows:[7]

In the line-numbering of ʿAbd al-Qaddūs Abū Ṣāliḥ, giving the solutions offered by Nefeli Papoutsakis and Carlile Henry Hayes Macartney, the riddles have been thought to have the following solutions:

lines[7] Papoutsakis[5]: 19 n. 85  Macartney[8]
28–36 fire produced by the friction of two pieces of wood (zandān) from the same tree fire-stick
37–38 ant-hill ant-hill
39 bread baked under the ashes cake of bread
40 the liver of a slaughtered camel forge-bellows
41 heart the heart of a sheep slain for guests
42 water-skin the camel butchered for food
43–44 lizard the Umm hubayn or Qaṭā
45–46 night or the swallow night (or sand-martin, or bat)
47 'apparently' the firmament —
48 wine-skin —
49 egg egg
50–51 the peg of the hand-mill tent-peg
52 a girl's mouth thunder-shower or lady's mouth
53 tongue well-bucket
54 roasting-fork spit
55 wine-jar wine-flask
56–59 colocynth shrub colocynth shrub
60 sandgrouse sandgrouse
61–62 the sun the sun
63–64 quiver quiver
65–67 javelin and flag javelin
68 tent-pins tent-skewer
69 eye eye
70 notch of an arrow notch of an arrow
71 truffle truffles
72 tongue —

Editions

References

  1. ↑ Carl Brockelmann, History of the Arabic Written Tradition, trans. by Joep Lameer, Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 1: The Near and Middle East, 117, 5 vols in 6 (Leiden: Brill, 2016–19), III (=Supplement Volume 1) p. 88 [trans. from Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1943–49) and Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur. Supplementband, 3 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1937–42)].
  2. ↑ Ewald Wagner, Grundzüge der klassischen arabischen Dichtung, Grundzüge, 68, 70, 2 vols (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987-88), II 135.
  3. 1 2 Abdul Jabbar Yusuf Muttalibi, 'A Critical Study of the Poetry of Dhu'r-Rumma' (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, SOAS, University of London, 1960).
  4. ↑ ʿAbd al-Qaddūs Abū Ṣāliḥ (ed.), Dīwān Dhī l-Rumma. Sharḥ Abī Naṣr al-Bāhilī, riwāyat Thaʿlab, 3 vols (Beirut 1994), pp. 1411–50 [poem 49].
  5. 1 2 Nefeli Papoutsakis, Desert Travel as a Form of Boasting: A Study of Dū r-Rumma's Poetry, Arabische Studien, 4 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009).
  6. ↑ David Larsen, 'Towards a Reconstruction of Abū Naṣr al-Bāhilī’s K. Abyāt al-maʿānī,' in Approaches to the Study of Pre-modern Arabic Anthologies, ed. by Bilal Orfali and Nadia Maria El Cheikh, Islamic History and Civilization: Studies and Texts, 180 (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 37-83 doi:10.1163/9789004459090_004, ISBN 9789004459083.
  7. 1 2 ʿAbd al-Qaddūs Abū Ṣāliḥ (ed.), Dīwān Dhī l-Rumma. Sharḥ Abī Naṣr al-Bāhilī, riwāyat Thaʿlab, 3 vols (Beirut 1994), pp. 1411–50 [poem 49].
  8. ↑ Carlile Henry Hayes Macartney (ed.), The dîwân of Ghailân Ibn ʿUqbah known as Dhu ’r-Rummah (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919), pp. 169–83 [poem 24].
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