Excerpt from The Celebrated Romance of the Stealing of the Mare: Translated From the Original Arabic

HE Stealing of the Mare is one of a cycle of I tales forming the celebrated Medimval Ro mance of Abu Zeyd, which has remained popular in Egypt and North Africa for, it is afiirmed, over 800 years. Of its author, as of Homer, nothing but his name, Abu Obeyd, is known. He is said to have lived in the third century of Islam, say the tenth of our era, a little after the events which the main portion of the Epic describes, and there is sufiicient internal evidence to suggest that he was a native of Cairo, both in the Egyptian dialect used, and in the numerous allusions made to the Nile and to Egyptian customs and superstitions. As an historic document the romance of Abu Zeyd would seem to be of no great value, hardly more than are the Songs of Roland and the Morte d'arthur of contemporary Europe; that is to say, it rests on a thin basis of fact so overlaid with imaginative episodes, that the truth is impossible now to distinguish from the fiction. All that can be said to be historically certain is, that the Tribe of the Beni Helal, whose adventures it records, did through stress of famine migrate, about the end of the ninth or the beginning of the tenth century, from Central Arabia to Egypt; that it besieged and captured Belbeis, a frontier town of the Delta, and remained in the Eastern Egyptian desert for upwards of a generation, and that then it once again marched westward to the conquest of Tunis, Where it finally estab lished itself, and where its descendants may still be found. The main fact of this march of the Beni Helal is at any rate a living event in Arab tradition. When crossing the Great Nefud of Northern Arabia in 1879, the translators of the present work had pointed out to them a track locally known as the Road of the Helalat; and further west, in 1881, they found a similar tradition in regard to the group of hills lying between Gaza and Suez, and which has for its name the Jebel Helal. More over, the Howeytat Bedouins of Eastern Egypt, whose district adjoins Belbeis, have constantly affirmed to them their kinship with the historic tribe, though their claim is not admitted by other Bedouins, who give them a much less noble pedigree.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.