The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Institute of Asian and African Studies
Max Schloessinger Memorial Foundation
The concordance of the Diwans
of the six early Arab poets
1999
Edited with an Introduction
by
Albert Arazi and Salman Masalha
Price: US$ 290 + US$ 10 postage
Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry is one of the greatest cultural achievements of the
Arabs in the early period of their history. For several centuries it was considered the
only model of poetic perfection. It is the earliest literary corpus in classical Arabic
and a major part of Arab cultural heritage.
The present volume consists of a concordance of “al-„Iqd al-thamin fi
dawawin al-shu„ara‟ al-sitta al-jahiliyyin”, in the edition of William Ahlwardt. It also
contains a preface in Arabic and English, a new critical edition with numerous
emendations of Ahlwardt‟s text, and a full concordance of the poetry of Imru‟ alQays, Zuhayr b. Abi Sulma, Tarafa b. al-„Abd, „Alqama b. „Abada al-fahl, „Antara b.
Shaddad, al-Nabigha al-Dhubyani and a few poems by four minor poets. The book
holds more than 1400 pages and contains more than 33,000 entries.
The concordance will serve as an essential tool for the study of classical
Arabic poetry and for the study of classical Arabic in general. In addition to the
concordance of nouns, verbs and particles, it includes separate sections on proper
names, geographical names, names of horses and camels.
The work on the Concordance started a few years after the Hebrew
University was established in 1925. More than 2,000,000 cards were prepared before
the project was computerized in the eighties. Special software was developed in
order to facilitate the processing of the material.