Book VIII. _Concerning the castles, cities, and tombs of the Ḥimyarites; the extant poetry of ‘Alqama,_[40] _the elegies, the inscriptions, and other matters._ Book IX. _Concerning the proverbs and wisdom of the Ḥimyarites in the Ḥimyarite language, and concerning the alphabet of the inscriptions._ Book X. _Concerning the genealogy of Ḥáshid and Bakíl_ (the two principal tribes of Hamdán). [Sidenote: Nashwán b. Sa‘íd al-Ḥimyarí († 1177 A.D.).] [Sidenote: ‘Abíd b. Sharya.] [Sidenote: Ḥamza of Iṣfahán.] The same intense patriotism which caused Hamdání to devote himself to scientific research inspired Nashwán b. Sa‘íd, who descended on the father's side from one of the ancient princely families of Yemen, to recall the legendary past and become the laureate of a long vanished and well-nigh forgotten empire. In 'The Ḥimyarite Ode' (_al-Qaṣìdatu ’l-Ḥimyariyya_) he sings the might and grandeur of the monarchs who ruled over his people, and moralises in true Muḥammadan spirit upon the fleetingness of life and the futility of human ambition.[41] Accompanying the Ode, which has little value except as a comparatively unfalsified record of royal names,[42] is a copious historical commentary either by Nashwán himself, as Von Kremer thinks highly probable, or by some one who lived about the same time. Those for whom history represents an aggregate of naked facts would find nothing to the purpose in this commentary, where threads of truth are almost inextricably interwoven with fantastic and fabulous embroideries. A literary form was first given to such legends by the professional story-tellers of early Islam. One of these, the South Arabian ‘Abíd b. Sharya, visited Damascus by command of the Caliph Mu‘áwiya I, who questioned him "concerning the ancient traditions, the kings of the Arabs and other races, the cause of the confusion of tongues, and the history of the dispersion of mankind in the various countries of the world,"[43] and gave orders that his answers should be put together in writing and published under his name. This work, of which unfortunately no copy has come down to us, was entitled 'The Book of the Kings and the History of the Ancients' (_Kitábu ’l-Mulúk wa-akhbáru ’l-Máḍín_). Mas‘údí († 956 A.D.) speaks of it as a well-known book, enjoying a wide circulation.[44] It was used by the commentator of the Ḥimyarite Ode, either at first hand or through the medium of Hamdání's _Iklíl_. We may regard it, like the commentary itself, as a historical romance in which most of the characters and some of the events are real, adorned with fairy-tales, fictitious verses, and such entertaining matter as a man of learning and story-teller by trade might naturally be expected to introduce. Among the few remaining Muḥammadan authors who bestowed special attention on the Pre-islamic period of South Arabian history, I