As far as extant literature is concerned--and at this time there was only a spoken literature, which was preserved by oral tradition, and first committed to writing long afterwards--the _Jáhiliyya_ or Pre-islamic Age covers scarcely more than a century, from about 500 A.D., when the oldest poems of which we have any record were composed, to the year of Muḥammad's Flight to Medína (622 A.D.), which is the starting-point of a new era in Arabian history. The influence of these hundred and twenty years was great and lasting. They saw the rise and incipient decline of a poetry which most Arabic-speaking Moslems have always regarded as a model of unapproachable excellence; a poetry rooted in the life of the people, that insensibly moulded their minds and fixed their character and made them morally and spiritually a nation long before Muḥammad welded the various conflicting groups into a single organism, animated, for some time at least, by a common purpose. In those days poetry was no luxury for the cultured few, but the sole medium of literary expression. Every tribe had its poets, who freely uttered what they felt and thought. Their unwritten words "flew across the desert faster than arrows," and came home to the hearts and bosoms of all who heard them. Thus in the midst of outward strife and disintegration a unifying principle was at work. Poetry gave life and currency to an ideal of Arabian virtue (_muruwwa_), which, though based on tribal community of blood and insisting that only ties of blood were sacred, nevertheless became an invisible bond between diverse clans, and formed, whether consciously or not, the basis of a national community of sentiment. [Sidenote: Origins of Arabian poetry] In the following pages I propose to trace the origins of Arabian poetry, to describe its form, contents, and general features, to give some account of the most celebrated Pre-islamic poets and collections of Pre-islamic verse, and finally to show in what manner it was preserved and handed down.