ABSTRACT
The word ‘Arab’ is documented in written sources as a term for groups of people in the Middle East continuously from the ninth century Bc until this day. The enormous outburst of political, military and ideological energy from the Arabian peninsula, which resulted in the birth of Islam and the rise and fall of the Umayyad empire, events that transformed the Middle East and whose reverberations are still with us today, chronologically lies almost exactly in the middle of this period. For the Islamic Middle Ages, the history of the tribes stretched only one century back from the time of the Prophet. 1 This century was called the Ǧāhiliyya, ‘the Ignorance’. For modern Arabs and Muslims in general, it deserves to be pointed out that the history of groups designated as Arabs goes much further back than was known to the Muslim medieval scholars. Before the activities of the Islamic Prophet there lie almost 1,400 years of history in which ‘Arabs’ appear in historical sources. A mapping of the use of the word ‘Arab’ in the period from the time of the Neo-Assyrian empire until the sixth century Ad is a prerequisite to understanding its meaning when it appears in the Arabo-Islamic sources and then later through the Middle Ages into our own time.
