time." They were preserved during hundreds of years by oral tradition, as we shall explain elsewhere, and were committed to writing, for the most part, by the Moslem scholars of the early ‘Abbásid age, _i.e._, between 750 and 900 A.D. It is a noteworthy fact that the language of these poems, the authors of which represent many different tribes and districts of the peninsula, is one and the same. The dialectical variations are too trivial to be taken into account. We might conclude that the poets used an artificial dialect, not such as was commonly spoken but resembling the epic dialect of Ionia which was borrowed by Dorian and Æolian bards. When we find, however, that the language in question is employed not only by the wandering troubadours, who were often men of some culture, and the Christian Arabs of Ḥíra on the Euphrates, but also by goat-herds, brigands, and illiterate Bedouins of every description, there can be no room for doubt that in the poetry of the sixth century we hear the Arabic language as it was then spoken throughout the length and breadth of Arabia. The success of Muḥammad and the conquests made by Islam under the Orthodox Caliphs gave an entirely new importance to this classical idiom. Arabic became the sacred language of the whole Moslem world. This was certainly due to the Koran; but, on the other hand, to regard the dialect of Mecca, in which the Koran is written, as the source and prototype of the Arabic language, and to call Arabic 'the dialect of Quraysh,' is utterly to reverse the true facts of the case. Muḥammad, as Nöldeke has observed, took the ancient poetry for a model; and in the early age of Islam it was the authority of the heathen poets (of whom Quraysh had singularly few) that determined the classical usage and set the standard of correct speech. Moslems, who held the Koran to be the Word of God and inimitable in point of style, naturally exalted the dialect of the Prophet's tribe above all others, even laying down the rule that every tribe spoke less purely in proportion to its distance from Mecca, but this view will not commend itself to the unprejudiced student. The Koran, however, exercised a unique influence on the history of the Arabic language and literature. We shall see in a subsequent chapter that the necessity of preserving the text of the Holy Book uncorrupted, and of elucidating its obscurities, caused the Moslems to invent a science of grammar and lexicography, and to collect the old Pre-Muḥammadan poetry and traditions which must otherwise have perished. When the Arabs settled as conquerors in Syria and Persia and mixed with foreign peoples, the purity of the classical language could no longer be maintained. While in Arabia itself, especially among the nomads of the desert, little difference was felt, in the provincial garrison towns and great centres of industry like Baṣra and Kúfa, where the population largely consisted of aliens who had embraced Islam and were rapidly being Arabicised, the