The customs of the Arabs before Prophet Muhammad are pretty accurately known to us; we have also a mass of information about the affairs of Mecca at the time when the Prophet arose; but no trace of this or anything like it is found in really good and ancient authorities.
•
No better is the variant of the legend, which we find, at a much later period, in the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun, who tells us that the poets themselves hung up their poems on the Ka'ba (ed. Paris iii. 357).
•
The name means The Suspended Odes or The Hanging Poems, the traditional explanation being that these poems were hung on or in the Ka'ba at Mecca.
•
For this reason, we may suppose, he not only received into the collection a poem of the famous poet Tarafa, of the tribe of Bakr, but also that of another Bakrite, Harith, who, though not accounted a bard of the highest rank, had been a prominent chieftain; while his poem could serve as a counterpoise to another also received the celebrated verses of Harith's contemporary 'Amr, chief of the Taghlib, the rival brethren of the Bakr.
The elder Muraqqish was the great-uncle of Tarafa of Bakr, the author of the Mu'allaqat, and took part in the long warfare between the sister tribes of Bakr and Taghlib, called the war of Basus, which began about the end of the 5th century CE.