‘I said, If I were made to live the lifetime of the lizard or the lifetime of Noah at the time of the flood.’[[776]] Marzûḳ al-Mekkî says, in a poem to Moḥammed al-Amîn: Faʿish ʿumra Nûḥin fî surûrin wa-ġibṭatin, ‘Live the lifetime of Noah in joy and comfort’ (Aġânî, XV. 67. 4); and similarly Abû-l-ʿAlâ (Saḳṭ al-zand, I. 65. v. 4.):
Fakun fî-l-mulki yâ cheyra-l-barâyâ * Suleymânan fakun fî-l-ʿumri Nûḥâ.
‘Then be in the government, O best of created beings, a Solomon, and be in length of life a Noah.’ And we also find in Ḥâfiẓ:[[777]]
Come, hand me here the gold-dust, victorious for ever; be it poured,
That gives us Ḳârûn’s treasures rich and Noah’s age for our reward.
But a collateral reason for Noah being made a special example of longevity may be found in the South-Semitic signification of the verb nôch. In Ethiopic Noah is called Nôch, and the verb denotes longus fuit. And in an Ethiopic poem (in Dillmann’s Chrestomath. Aethiop., 111. no. 13. v. 1) it is said of Methuselah’s longevity, ôzawahabkô nûch mawâʿel la-Matûsâlâ.
N. (Page [254].)
Influence of National Passion on Genealogical Statements.
The same tendency which among the Hebrews caused the origin of the Ammonites and Moabites to be referred to the incestuous intercourse of Lot’s daughters with their father, produced exactly the same result many centuries later in a different yet related sphere. It is known to students of the history of the civilisation of Islâm that the best Persians, despite their subjection to the sceptre of Islâm, strove long and actively against Arabisation, which they regarded as quite unworthy of the Persian nation, to them the more talented of the two. This reaction caused the publication of many literary documents; and produced especially one very curious and not yet fully appreciated movement, which originated in the circle of the Shuʿûbîyyâ.[[778]] In order to appear as a member of the great family of Islâm of equal birth with the Arabs, the Persians took care to weave their own early history into the legends of that religion. This was managed in two ways. First, they were anxious to trace their genealogy to a son of Abraham, so as to possess a counterpoise to the Arabs and their father Ishmael. Thus it was managed to refer the non-Arabs to Isaac, with a collateral intention of representing this descent as nobler than that from Ishmael.[[779]] And we also meet with an allegation, in the Kitâb al-ʿayn, that Abraham had another son besides Isaac and Ishmael, named Farrûch, from whom the non-Arabs (al-ʿajam) descend.[[780]] Secondly, the genealogical sacred history is perverted in a sense hostile to the Arabs. Thus, for instance, Ishmael is not allowed to be the son whom Abraham is about to sacrifice to Allâh, but Isaac the ancestor of the non-Arabs, as the Hebrew tradition has it[[781]]; and the story of the well Zemzem is put into connexion with Sâbûr the Persian king and with other reminiscences.[[782]] In the Commentaire historique sur le poëme d’Ibn Abdoun par Ibn Badroun, published by Prof. Dozy, page 7 of the Arabic text, we find various assertions relative to the derivation of the Persians. The majority of these genealogies trace the Persians back by various ways to Sâm b. Nûḥ (Shem, son of Noah); one derives them from Joseph, son of Jacob. The ethnological derivation of a nation from Sâm in the view of the Arabs certainly involves no idea of special excellence in the nation concerned; for even the enigmatical Nasnâs of the Arabic fables, a sort of monstrous half-men, half-birds (apes are also called so in vulgar Arabic), are allowed to have a Semitic genealogy.[[783]] But, at all events, no hostile intention lurks in the pedigree from Sâm. Thus the above genealogies, while possessing no tendency directly hostile to the Persians, are far from placing that nation in the foreground, and allow an unexpressed idea of the eminence of the Arabian nation to shine through. The case is very different with another derivation propounded in the same passage. This makes the Persians to belong to the descendants of Lot, their ancestors being the fruit of his incest with his two daughters. The Samaritans say the same of the Druses.[[784]] I believe this genealogy is based on intention only—like the identical story told by the ancient Hebrews of Ammon and Moab. A local tradition, existing at Jeyrûd, a village to the north of Damascus, on the road to Palmyra, speaks of a tribe of the people of Lot as having dwelt on the ground now covered by a salt lake (Memlaḥa or Mellâḥa), whose city was destroyed by the wrath of God.[[785]] This story perhaps originated in some war of the later Mohammedan population against the older inhabitants or against Beduins who had taken up an abode there. It must also be observed that Mohammedan writers exhibit a prevailing tendency to remove far to the north, to Ḥamâ and Ḥaleb (Aleppo) in Syria, the muʾtafikâ or maḳlûbâ, i.e. the Sodom of the Bible. This follows from Yâḳût, III. 59, 124. In the particular case just mentioned, no doubt the existence of the salt lake cooperated in the creation of the local tradition (in the language of the Talmûd the notion of the Yam ḥam-melach ‘Sea of salt’ is greatly generalised and becomes almost a figure of rhetoric; see the passages in the Tôsâphôth on Pesâchîm, fol. 28 a. init. ʿAbhôdath); on the lake Yammune on the north of Lebanon, see Seetzen’s Reisen, I. 229, 302, II. 338, referred to by Ewald, History of Israel, I. 314. Similarly a later Arabic local tradition localised an episode of the Sodom-story on the transjordanic shore of the Dead Sea. For it is evident that the story of the conversion of Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt is the source of the following popular tradition noted by Palmer (Desert of the Exodus, p. 483). Not far from the Dead Sea, in the former country of Moab, at a place called El-Yehûdîyyâ ‘the Jewess,’ there is a great black mass of basalt, said to have been originally a woman, who was thus changed into stone as a punishment for having denied the ‘certainty of death’—a somewhat obscure expression.