In the face of assimilation and the seismic changes in the political structure which deprived Arab groups of their status in third/ninth-century Iraq, it is remarkable that scholarly interest in ancient Arabica paradoxically blossomed after the mid-third/ninth century. Despite urban Iraqi society's abandonment of Arab tribal affiliations (nisba) and the severance of urban Iraq from desert Arabia in the wake of the escalating Qarāmi†a crisis and the collapse of Hajj traffic, Iraqi writers produced an unprecedented outpouring of literature about Arabness and Arab history, resulting in what today constitute the ‘primary sources’ about pre-Islamic Arabia. When reading these sources, it is therefore material to reflect upon the effects of the curious context of their creation. In earlier periods, memorialising the Arab past had political ramifications: in the first/seventh century, tribal genealogy and memories of pre-Islamic battles of Arabian groups (ayyām al-ʿarab) directly impacted the reputations and relative merits of the different groups of Conquerors, and during the second/eighth century, Arab groups marshalled history to establish their heritage vis-à-vis conquered populations. Political interests and status thus exerted significant pressures on imagining the Arabs, but very few writings survive from those early periods. In contrast, the voluminous fourth/tenth-century and later compendiums emanate from a peculiar moment when, for the first time, Iraqi scholars were detached from practical ramifications of writing about Arabness and when Arabness discourses no longer impacted politically significant communities.

With the new context in mind, we need also consider that the authors of our major sources for the ayyām al-ʿarab Arabian pre-Islamic battle histories and genealogy are, intriguingly, philologists and belles-lettrists, and not specialised historians, nor partisans of particular ‘Arab’ or other groups. Books expressly intended as chronicles (tārīkh) have very little to say about ayyām al-ʿarab, and make scant attempt to integrate Arabian pasts into world history. Instead, our view into ayyām al-ʿarab relies upon poetry anthologies compiled by scholars known for their knowledge of philology, the adab encyclopedic compendium by the Andalusian Ibn ʿAbd Rabbihi (d. 328/940), and Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī's (d. 356/967) al-Aghānī, a collection of and commentary on popular songs derived from pre-Islamic and Umayyad-era poetry.