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Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry (or simply pre-Islamic poetry) refers to the corpus of Arabic poetry composed in pre-Islamic Arabia roughly between 540 and 620 AD. Traditional Arabic literature called it al-shiʿr al-Jāhilī, "poetry from the Jahiliyyah". Surviving works largely originate from Najd (then defined as the region east of the Hejaz mountains up to present-day Iraq), with a minority coming from the Hejaz.[1]
Pre-Islamic poetry constitutes a major source for classical Arabic language both in grammar and vocabulary, and as a reliable historical record of the political and cultural life of the time. A number of major poets are known from the time period, perhaps most prominent among them being Imru' al-Qais.[2] Other prominent poets included Umayya ibn Abi as-Salt, Al-Nabigha, and Zayd ibn Amr.