It has been usually recognized that rhymed prose was first used among the Hebrews in the Liturgy by Jannai, who flourished in the seventh century. Metre was introduced in the tenth century by Dunash ben Labrat. Both these poets followed Arabic models. Saadyah, the Hebrew philosopher, blamed Dunash for having ruined the beauty and naturalness of the Hebrew language for poetry. Even Jehudah HaLevi, the great national poet who used Arabic meters, regretted, in his philosophical work, _Hacuzari_,[105:A] that these foreign Arabian influences should prevail among the Hebrew poets.
The oldest Arab poetry was also in prose. The earliest pattern for poetry among the Arabians was the Saj (cooing), or rhymed but unmetrical prose. Goldziher calls the Saj the oldest form of poetic speech; it continued to exist even after the regular metres were established, the Koran, for instance, being in Saj. At first it was unrhymed, as Goldziher says; the earliest Arabic poetry was in unmetrical prose.
From Saj arose Rajaz (trembling), which is partly metrical, and forms the transition to the artificial Arabic meters.
The earliest surviving Arabic poetry, the seven poems of the _Muallaqat_, composed before Mohammed, are so perfect in form that all Arabic scholars assume they were produced after a long period extending through many years of poetic practice. They were not rude products, but had an historical background, as did the _Iliad_. They are written in perfected and complicated metres, but the Saj is older than these.
We have two other proofs that poetry was in early times written in rhythmical prose, or at least in a rhythm that makes only a slight approach to metre. These are to be found in two of the oldest Aryan literary monuments extant, the _Rigveda_ of India and the _Avesta_ of Iran.
Two-fifths of the hymns of the _Rigveda_ are composed in a metre called trishtubh, the most frequent measure in the _Veda_. It is made up of stanzas of four lines, each of eleven syllables, the last four of which only have to follow a pattern, this consisting of two iambuses or an iambus and a spondee. This requirement left a good deal of liberty to the poet. Here is an example of it, in the _Hymn to Dawn_, in MacDonnels' _Sanskrit Literature_ (P. 83):