The Uḥjiyyat al-ʿArab ('riddle-poem of the Arabs') is a qaṣīda by the early eighth-century CE poet Dhū al-rumma containing the earliest substantial collection of Arabic riddles, thought to have been influential on later Arabic verse riddlers,[1] and perhaps on Arabic ekphrastic poetry more widely.[2]
Like most qaṣīdas, the poem begins with a nasīb (lines 1–14). Here Dhū al-rumma describes himself surveying the desert by night and day, yearning for Mayya, his beloved. In the summary of Abdul Jabbar Yusuf Muttalibi, Dhū al-rumma goes on (in lines 7–14) to describe
a gazelle grazing amongst sands which the heavy rain of the morning has dressed with rich green leaves. Seeing a human being at that isolated place, it comes forward, yet shows in her behaviour nothing but panic. This panic-stricken gazelle amidst that green pasture is not more beautiful than Mayya on that evening when she tried to wound your heart with a face as pure as the gleaming sun, as though the sight of it were to re-open the wound in this heart. And with an eye as though the two Babylonians (Harut and Marut) had set a charm upon your heart on the day of Marqula, and with a mouth of well-set teeth like lilies growing in a pure sandy plain neither close to saline land nor to the salt of the sea. And with a white neck and upper breast, pure white when not yellowed from the sprinkling of saffron.[3]
The nasīb is followed by a description of travel through the desert (lines 15–26). Muttalibi in particular notes the imagery of lines 20 and 22:[4]
Finally, the body of the poem constitutes a number of enigmatic statements (lines 28–72). As would be usual in the praise-poetry that often constitutes this section of a qaṣīda, each statement begins with the exclamatory syllable known in Arabic as wāw rubba.[5] The poem includes no solutions to these riddles, and different manuscripts include slightly different material and in different orders; thus they have been the source of scholarly discussion since as early as Abū Naṣr Aḥmad ibn Ḥātim al-Bāhilī (d. 846 CE), who wrote a commentary on Dhū al-rumma's work that may have been particularly prompted by Dhū al-rumma's riddling.[6] One example of these riddles, on the egg, is as follows:
In the line-numbering of ʿAbd al-Qaddūs Abū Ṣāliḥ, giving the solutions offered by Nefeli Papoutsakis and Carlile Henry Hayes Macartney, the riddles have been thought to have the following solutions:
| 28–36 | fire produced by the friction of two pieces of wood (zandān) from the same tree | fire-stick | |
| 37–38 | ant-hill | ant-hill | |
| 39 | bread baked under the ashes | cake of bread | |
| 40 | the liver of a slaughtered camel | forge-bellows | |
| 41 | heart | the heart of a sheep slain for guests | |
| 42 | water-skin | the camel butchered for food | |
| 43–44 | lizard | the Umm hubayn or Qaṭā | |
| 45–46 | night or the swallow | night (or sand-martin, or bat) | |
| 47 | 'apparently' the firmament | — | |
| 48 | wine-skin | — | |
| 49 | egg | egg | |
| 50–51 | the peg of the hand-mill | tent-peg | |
| 52 | a girl's mouth | thunder-shower or lady's mouth | |
| 53 | tongue | well-bucket | |
| 54 | roasting-fork | spit | |
| 55 | wine-jar | wine-flask | |
| 56–59 | colocynth shrub | colocynth shrub | |
| 60 | sandgrouse | sandgrouse | |
| 61–62 | the sun | the sun | |
| 63–64 | quiver | quiver | |
| 65–67 | javelin and flag | javelin | |
| 68 | tent-pins | tent-skewer | |
| 69 | eye | eye | |
| 70 | notch of an arrow | notch of an arrow | |
| 71 | truffle | truffles | |
| 72 | tongue | — |