1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Luqmān
LUQMĀN, or Lokman, the name of two, if not of three (cf. note to Terminal Essay in Sir Rd. Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights), persons famous in Arabian tradition. The one was of the family of ʽĀd, and is said to have built the great dike of Mārib and to have received the gift of life as long as that of seven vultures, each of which lived eighty years. The name of the seventh vulture—Lubad—occurs in proverbial literature. The name of the second Luqmān, called “Luqmān the Sage,” occurs in the Koran (31, 11). Two accounts of him are current in Arabian literature. According to Masʽūdī (i. 110) he was a Nubian freedman who lived in the time of David in the district of Elah and Midian. According to some commentators on the Koran (e.g., Baidāwī) he was the son of Bāʽūrā, one of the sons of Job’s sister or maternal aunt. Derenbourg in his Fables de Loqmân le sage (1850) identifies Bāʽūrā with Beoi, and believes the name Luqmān to be a translation of Balaam. The grave of Luqmān was shown on the east coast of the lake of Tiberias, also in Yemen (cf. Yāqūt, vol. iii. p. 512).
The so-called Fables of Luqmān are known to have existed in the 13th century, but are not mentioned by any Arabian writer. They were edited by Erpenius (Leiden, 1615) and have been reprinted many times. For the relation of these to similar literature in other lands, see J. Jacobs’s edition of Caxton’s Fables of Aesop, vol. i. (London, 1889). The name of Luqmān also occurs in many old verses, anecdotes and proverbs; cf. G. Freytag’s Arabum Proverbia (Bonn, 1838–1843) and such Arabian writers as Tabarī, Masʽūdī, Damīrī and the Kitāb al-Muʽammarīn (ed. by I. Goldziher, Leiden, 1899). (G. W. T.)