As Alfonso X owes his prodigious learning chiefly to the study of the Arabs, it would be scarcely possible to doubt that, for this book as for all his works, he borrowed from them a science already formed and even then committed to writing by Al-Farabi, Abul-Faraj, etc., and which Alfonso might very well have understood with the help of the Muzarabs of Seville. This supposition, which would attribute to the Arabs a notable share in the creation of modern music, has all the more the appearance of truth since the first instruments adopted by the Spaniards, the French, and the other nations of Europe were named moresques in all languages. To this day the chirimia and dulzaina of the Moors, so often mentioned by Cervantes and his contemporaries, are still used in the country of Valencia. As to the modern stringed instruments, they all had as model the lute (al-aoud, whence laud in Spanish) of the Arabs, who have also given Spain the kitara (guitarra), since become the national instrument of the people whose masters they were in all things.
Several theorists, J. J. Rousseau amongst others, have proposed to write music in figures, assuredly without suspecting that the Arabs had already practised that mode of notation. Kiesewettern calls attention to the fact that, the Arab scale having seventeen intervals, the Arabs were able to write and actually did write music with their figures, employing the numbers one to eighteen for the first octave, one to thirty-five for two octaves, and so on. May it not be from this ancient use of the Arab figures in musical writing that the employment of the same figures for the figured bass, in which a simple number denotes a chord, came into vogue? It is possible and very probable.
The old Spanish music, that which is preserved in Andalusia under the name of cañas, rondeñas, playeras, etc., differing greatly from the boleros of comic operas and eluding the modern notation, is certainly of Arab origin. Who are they who have preserved it in the tradition of this country? An eastern race, a nomadic race, that of those Bohemians who, coming from Egypt about the fourteenth century, and perhaps before that from India, spread themselves throughout Europe and were called gitanos in Spain, zingari in Italy, gipsies in England, zigeuner in Germany, and tzigani in Russia, whilst naming themselves pharaons.
These nomads, with their immutable customs, who are still to-day not only in Spain but in Russia the same in physique and moral character as Cervantes has depicted them, have carried and retained everywhere the ancient songs of their problematic country. As the musicians of the people, formed into troupes of singers and dancers, they have everywhere spread the form and sentiment of their antique melodies. “It was through them,” concludes Viardot, “that, in Russia as in Spain, popular music took or kept the oriental character; it was from them that in Moscow, at the foot of the towers of the Kremlin, I listened to the same songs as in the gardens of the Alhambra of Granada. In both places I had heard from their lips a living echo of the Arab music.”m
CHAPTER XI. TRIBAL LIFE OF THE EPIC PERIOD
Specially Contributed to the Present Work
By Dr. JULIUS WELLHAUSEN[41]
Professor in the University at Göttingen
People who are unlearned in the law, are apt to assume that it executes itself; or at least they think it absolutely necessary that law and the execution of law should go hand in hand. But in the primitive stages of human society it was not so. The law existed long before there was any magistracy to carry it into effect, and even after magisterial authority had been established, it frequently left, not only the pursuit, but the execution of law to the parties concerned. An instructive picture of such a state of things is found in the copious literature that has been preserved with regard to the Epic Period of the ancient Arabs, i.e., the period immediately preceding their amazing irruption into the world’s history through the gate of Islam.
The desert has imprinted its stamp upon the Arabs. They are particularly interesting for this very reason, that by the desert they have, so to speak, been arrested at what is in many respects a very primitive stage of development. Yet we must not imagine them roving about it like wild animals, gathering together for temporary ends and dispersing just as they please. As a matter of fact, they have no settled abodes, they are not tied to the soil nor linked with one another by a fixed domicile, and consequently they are not organised on the basis of locality, according to districts, towns, and villages. But they have instead an inner principle of association and organisation, of union and distinction, inherent in the very elements of race. It is the principle of consanguinity, of kinship. For the Arab, his political genus, his differentia specifica, are innate as indelible characteristics. He knows the clan to which he belongs, and the stock to which his clan belongs; the tribe or nation of which the stock is a part, and the larger group that includes the tribe or nation. Associations are regarded by them as natural units, founded on consanguinity, and they stand in a close and natural relationship, one to another, corresponding to nearer or remoter degrees of consanguinity (by the father’s side) so that their statistics assume the form of a genealogy.
Among the ancient Hebrews this form survived even after they had settled in towns and villages; Isaac was the father of the nations of Israel and Edom, Israel the father of twelve tribes, Judah the father of five lineages, and each lineage in its turn father or grandfather of clans and families. Such a principle of organisation is equally serviceable for settlement or migration, for war or peace; and being independent of all conditions of fixed localities, it makes the tribe as mobile as an army. For an army, too, must possess an organisation adaptable to every place, and as suitable to a hostile country as to its own. But an army is broken up into artificial divisions; the men may be put into one branch or another at will, and the place of the individual in the whole scheme is notified by artificial marks of distinction. With the Arabs, on the other hand, the form is indistinguishable from the substance, they are born into their cadres, and their uniform is, as it were, innate to them. The closer or remoter circles of kindred, from the clan to the nation, are their companies, battalions, and regiments, which include not only the fighting men, but their wives and children also, though the latter take no direct part in any fight.
The two most important stages of the political affinity are the highest and the lowest, the two poles, as it were, of the system; the intermediate stages are less important, because they assume the qualities of one pole or the other, according to circumstances. The highest association, which we call the tribe, includes all the families which migrate together regularly, i.e., which make the circuit of certain hunting-grounds, often great distances apart, according to the season of the year. One tribe will not contain more than a few thousand souls; if it exceeds that number, it becomes too large for common migration and pasturage and is obliged to divide. The lowest is the clan, which consists of families within the nearest degrees of kinship, which invariably pitch their tents close together in a common quarter (dâr).