im as a
descendant of the Arab tribe of Ad, who, on account of his piety and
wisdom, was saved when the rest of his family perished by Divine
wrath. According to another story he was an Ethiopian slave, noted
alike for bodily deformity and a gift for composing fables and
apologues. This account of Lokman, resembling so closely the
traditional history of AEsop, has led to an opinion that they were the
same individual, but this is now generally supposed not to be the
case. The various reports agree in ascribing to Lokman extraordinary
longevity. His extant fables bear evident marks of modern alteration,
both in their diction and their incidents. They were first published
with a Latin translation of the Arabic by Erpenius (Leyden, 1615).
Galland produced a French translation of the fables of Lokman and
Bidpay at Paris in 1724, and there are other editions by De Sacey,
1816, Caussin de Perceval, 1818, Freytag, 1823, and Rodiger, 1830.'

Burton, in a footnote to page 118, of Volume X. of his 'Arabian
Nights,' however, says that 'There are three distinct Lokmans. The
first, or eldest Lokman, entitled Al-Hakim (the Sage), and the hero of
the Koranic chapter which bears his name, was son of Ba'ura, of the
children of Azar, sister's son to Job, or son of Job's maternal aunt;
he witnessed David's miracles of mail-making, and when the tribe of Ad
was destroyed he became king of the country. The second Lokman, also
called the Sage, was a slave and Abyssinian negro, sold by the
Israelites during the reign of David or Solomon, and who left a volume
of proverbs and exempla, not fables or apologues, some of which still
dwell in the public memory. The youngest Lokman, of the Vultures, was
a prince of the tribe of Ad, who lived 3,500 years, the age of seven
vultures.'

This accounts for the different ideas as regards the tradition of one
Lokman in the preceding paragraph.

Before the era of the Prophet poetry had attained some degree of
excellence. At the annual festival of Okatz the poets met and made
public recitations, and competed for prizes. Of prose literature there
was none, and the irregular, half-rhythmical, half-rhyming sentences
of the Koran were the first attempts in the direction of prose.

Passing over the host of pre-Islamitic poets, the disputed time and
order in which they appeared, as well as the ranks they respectively
occupied, it will only be necessary here to describe the Arabic idyll
or elegy (Kasida), and to