Antar: A Bedoueen Romance

Transcriber’s Note: The page numbering in the original book was misprinted: page numbers 177-180 were omitted, but no pages are actually missing.
ANTAR, A BEDOUEEN ROMANCE.
TRANSLATED FROM THE ARABIC.
BY TERRICK HAMILTON, ESQ. ORIENTAL SECRETARY TO THE BRITISH EMBASSY AT CONSTANTINOPLE.
LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE-STREET. 1819.
London: Printed by W. Bulmer and Co. Cleveland Row, St. James’s.

The Translator of “The History of Antar” being out of England, it is not in the Editor’s power to give to the reader much preliminary information on the contents or nature of the Epic Tale, which is now for the first time in part submitted to the European Public.
Antar is no imaginary personage. He was the son of an Arab Prince of the tribe of Abs, by a black woman, whom his father had made captive in a predatory excursion: and he raised himself by the heroic qualities which he displayed from his earliest youth, and by his extraordinary genius for poetry, from the state of slavery in which he was born, to the confidence of his king, and to a preeminence above all the Chiefs of Arabia. He flourished during the close of the sixth, and the early part of the seventh century, of the Christian æra; there is, consequently, little or no allusion to the customs or institutions of Islamism throughout the work; though the Hero is frequently designated as “He by whom God organized the earth and the world for the appearance of the Lord of slaves.”
The following Romance, as it may be called, was first put together, probably from traditionary tales current at the time, by Osmay, one of the eminent scholars, who adorned the courts of Haroun-al-Raschid, and of his two learned successors, Al-Amyn, and Al-Mamoun; and it still continues to be the principal source whence the story-tellers of the coffee-houses in Egypt, Syria, and Arabia, draw their most interesting tales: but, notwithstanding, its general circulation in the Levant, the name of Antar is hitherto only known to us in Europe, as that of the Author of one of the seven poems, suspended in the temple of Mecca, and from that circumstance called, The Moallakat .