Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ Jeffery1938, 56-57: »[In the Qurʔān, w]e find the word only in the combination ʔasāṭīr al-ʔawwalīn ‘tales of the ancients’, which was the Meccan characterization of the stories brought them by Muḥammad. Sprenger, Leben, ii, 396 ff., thought that the reference was to a book of this title well known to Muḥammad’s contemporaries, but this theory has been combated in Nöldeke-Schwally, i, 16 ff.,¹ and its impossibility becomes clear from a passage in Ibn Hišām, 235, where Naḍr b. al-Ḥāriṯ is made to say "By Allah, Muḥammad is no better a raconteur than I am. His stories are naught but tales of the ancients (ʔasāṭīr al-ʔawwalīn) which he writes down just as I do." – The Muslim authorities take it as a form ʔafāʕīl from √SṬR ‘to write’, considering it as a pl. of ʔusṭūraẗ or ʔ˅sṭāraẗ (Sijistānī, 10), or the pl. of a pl. (LA, vi, 28). The verb saṭara, however, as Fraenkel has shown (Fremdw, 250), is a denominative from saṭr, and this itself is a borrowing from Aram ŠṬRā, Syr šṭārā (Nöldeke, Gesch. d. Qorans, 13). It is possible but not probable that ʔaṣāṭīr was formed from this borrowed saṭr. – Sprenger, Leben, ii, 395,² suggested that in ʔasāṭīr we have the Grk historía, a suggestion also put forward by Fleischer in his review of Geiger (Kleinere Schriften, ii, 119), and which has been accepted by many later scholars.³ The objections to it raised by Horovitz, KU, 70, are, however, insuperable. The word can hardly have come into Ar directly from the Grk, and the Syr ʔ˅sṭūriyā occurs only as a learned word (PSm, 298). The derivation from Syr ʔṣṭrā suggested by Nöldeke-Schwally, i, 16 n., is much more satisfactory. ʔŠṬRā (cf. Aram šəṭārā) is the equivalent of the Grk cheirógraphon ,⁴ and is a word commonly used in a sense in which it can have come into Ar. It was doubtless borrowed in this sense in the pre-Islamic period,⁵ for in a verse of the Meccan poet ʕAbdallāh b. az-Zibaʕrā, quoted in ʕAynī, iv, 140, we read ʔalhā Quṣayyan ʕan-i ‘l-maǧdi ‘l-ʔasāṭīrᵘ "the stories have averted Quṣay from glory". – In SAr, as D. H. Müller points out (WZKM, i, 29) we have ʔsṭr meaning an ‘inscription’, and sṭr is the usual verb for ‘scripsit’ (Rossini, Glossarium, 194), so it is not impossible that there was SAr influence on the form of the word.«
▪ Rolland2014: »Peut-être - comme l’avance prudemment Kazimirksi - du Grk ἱστορία [historía] ‘recherche, information; récit; histoire’. Mais ce mot est plus probablement un simple dérivé de la racine SṬR, dont l’un des sens est ‘raconter des histoires’.«
▪ …

1. See also Hirschfeld, New Researches, 22, 41 ff., on Sprenger’s Ṣuḥuf theories. 2. Vide also his remarks in JASB, xx, 119, and see Freytag, Lexicon, sub voc. 3. Vollers, ZDMG , li, 312. See also Künstlinger in OLZ, 1936, 481 ff. 4. Cf. [Syr] ʔŠṬRā ḏ-????? ‘cheirographum dubium’, as contrasted with ʔŠṬRā ŠRīRā ‘cheirographum validum’. 5. So Mingana, Syriac Influence, 89.

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► ʔusṭūriyyaẗ, n.f., mythologism: neologism, coined on the f. nisba pattern in -iyyaẗ.

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