Qisat Sarhan mae Shamma [The story of Sarhan and Shamma, or, a portion of the Sirat Bani Hilal].

Bound as an oblong 4to, but text is to be read with the spine at the top, and the pages flipped up, notebook style (230 x 160 mm). 43 ff. Arabic manuscript on watermarked paper. Contemporary limp leather. A manuscript of rousing prose and poetry telling the stories of Muslim conquests in North Africa, including a section of the Chronicle of the al-Hilalis: the epic poem traditionally committed to oral memory which records the history of the Bedouin Bani Hilal tribe as they made their way from the Nejd to what is now Tunisia and Algeria, by way of Egypt. - Of the four texts in the manuscript (written in two interspersed hands), the two longest are, first, a partial copy of a prosimetric tale involving the Arab knight and poet Amr ibn Ma'adi Yakrib (d. 642), and second, the Sirat Bani Hilal. The particular tale collected here is titled in Arabic "The Story of Sarhan with Shamma", referencing King Sarhan, leader of the Bani Hilal before the birth of the hero Abu Zayd, and his wife Shamma. Shamma is mentioned often at the beginning of Sirat Bani Hilal, as both she and the future mother of Abu Zayd are barren, and it is in fact through Shamma's suggestion that the two women voyage through the desert to the sea, where Abu Zayd is finally conceived. - Sirat Bani Hilal is a major part of Arabic folk tradition, written down only relatively recently and in diverse versions. This copy, while it has some gaps due to missing leaves, is an addition to this culturally significant oeuvre. - All of the texts follow this military, martial theme, and tend to be focused on Egypt and North Africa, pointing to a potential Ottoman Egyptian origin of the manuscript. Egypt today remains the area where epics like Sirat Bani Hilal are still performed orally, and is the centre of efforts to preserve both the poems and the tradition. - Some toning and soiling, annotation in later pen; occasional loss of leaves (evidenced by unmatched catchwords), including the beginning of the first text.