Last updated: April 30th, 2025 at 12:24 pm · Est. Reading Time: 2 minutes
Late Antique Arabs had a taste for inter tribal wars. It is particularly true for the Arabs residing in the Tribal Zone.
Nature of War
Enmity could linger on for generations, but the battles were essentially brief, and none of them lasted for more than a day. All of them are generally referred to as yowm (pl. Ayyām) in contemporary poetry, emphasizing their brevity.
There were established rules of war. If the enemy was routed on a battlefield, he was not pursued into his habitation. After a few battles, the affair was patched up by the payment of blood money; the number of the slain was counted, and the clan that had lost the most men received compensation from the victor. 1
Triumph was not believable unless the winner captured captives and booty. This was particularly true for those parts of Arabia where grabbing land was not the order of the day. None of the victory inscriptions are without the mention of booty and captives. 2
Equipment Used
In tribal wars, the Arabs of the sixth century wore, if they could afford, a coat of mail and a helmet and carried lances. The mailed knights of Sasanian Iran and Byzantine Rome used to wear this equipment. Most likely, the Arabs copied it from them. The Bedouins had the opportunity of learning how to use these weapons as mercenaries of the kinglets of Lakhmids and of the Ghassanids.3
Celebration of Victory
Shahid is of opinion that part of surviving pre-Islamic Arabic poetry was composed to memorialize victory and was recited during celebrations.4
Further reading
History of Islam, Social Structure of Pre-Islamic Arabs, https://historyofislam.org/social-structure-of-pre-islamic-arabs/
Footnotes
- David S. Margoliouth. Muhammad and the rise of Islam (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1905), 192.
- See Abadan 1 and the inscription of Dhu Nawas: Christian J. Robin, “Du nouveau sur les Yaz’anides. Appendice. Les Inscriptions Marfay-Abu T.awr -1 – 3,” Proceedings of the Semina of Arabian Studies, 16 (1986): 181 – 197. AND Christian J. Robin and Iwona Gajda, “L’inscription de Wadi ‘Abadan,” Raydān: Journal of ancient Yemeni Antiquities and Epigraphy 6 (1994): 113 – 37. (Abadan I).
- Warner Caskel, “The Bedouinization of Arabia,” American Anthropologist 52, no. 2, part 2, memoir no. 76 (1954): 40.
- Irfan Shahīd, Byzantium and The Arabs in The Sixth Century, Vol. 2, part 2 (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oak, 2009), 211.