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 pre-Islamic era; 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.
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