Besides the contemporary documents enumerated above (Koranic texts, rescripts and authentic traditions) many of the events were celebrated by poets, whose verses were ostensibly incorporated in the standard biography of Ibn Ishaq; in the abridgment of that biography which we possess many of these are obelized as spurious, and, indeed, what we know of the procedure of those who professed to collect early poetry gives us little confidence in the genuineness of such odes. A few, however, seem to stand criticism, and the _diwan_ (or collection of poems) attributed to Hassan b. Thabit is ordinarily regarded as his. Though they rarely give detailed descriptions of events, their attestation is at times of value, e.g. for the story that the bodies of the slain at Badr were cast by the Prophet into a pit. Besides this, the narratives of eyewitnesses of important events, or of those who had actually taken part in them, were eagerly sought by the second generation, and some of these were committed to writing well before the end of the 1st century. The practice instituted by the second Caliph, of assigning pensions proportioned to the length of time in which the recipient had been a member of the Islamic community, led to the compilation of certain rolls, and to the accurate preservation of the main sequence of events from the commencement of the mission, and for the detailed sequence after the Flight, which presently became an era (beginning with the first month of the year in which the Flight took place). The procedure whereby the original dates of the events (so far as they were remembered) were translated into the Moslem calendar--for something of this sort must have been done--is unknown, and is unlikely to have been scientific. Mahomet's conduct being made the standard of right and wrong, there was little temptation to "whitewash" him, although the original biography by Ibn Ishaq appears to have contained details which the author of the abridgment omitted as scandalous. The preservation of so much that was historical left little room for the introduction of miraculous narrations; these therefore either belong to the obscure period of his life or can be easily eliminated; thus the narratives of the Meccan council at which the assassination of Mahomet was decided, of the battles of Badr, Uhud and Honain, and the death of Sad`b. Mu `adh, would lose nothing by the omission of the angels and the devil, though a certain part is assigned the one or the other on all these occasions. We should have expected biographies which were published when the `Abbasids were reigning to have falsified history for the purpose of glorifying `Abbas, their progenitor; the very small extent to which this expectation is justified is a remarkable testimony to their general trustworthiness. RELATIVES OF THE PROHET[1]