William Jones was one of the great Orientalists of all time. His academically and intellectually informed Orientalism began with his translation of ancient Arabian poetry, especially The Muallakat, which he found to be both beautiful and sublime. To him, the natural, as opposed to imitative and artificial, description of ancient Arab tribes and their tribal conflicts and loyalties, and their normal ways of life including love and duty, and horses and camels against the backdrop of a dry and dreary landscape was deeply rhapsodic and expressive. More specifically, it was the desert plains and stony Arabias that Jones found beautiful as well as sublime. Following Edmund Burke, who is credited to have popularized those aesthetic notions/categories after the middle of the 18^th century, Jones, about a decade later, applied them in his study of ancient Arabian poetry containing fresh descriptions of man and nature and recommended the Eastern models including the Persian and the Indian to instill new life into what he thought was the stale and hackneyed condition of European literature.

Sir William Jones was one of the most well-known 18^th century English linguists and Orientalists. He knew many languages and pioneered the scholarly study of many Eastern languages and literatures such as Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit, paving the way for comparative linguistics and comparative literature. While still a boy he started reading from the Arabian Nights and Shakespeare as much as natural history, which was recommended to him by his parents. Having noticed his great abilities as a child prodigy, the master of his school, Harrow, Dr. Thackeray remarked that "he was a boy of so active a mind that if he were left naked and friendless on Salisbury Plain, he would nevertheless find the road to fame and riches." Dr. Thackeray surely did not have any idea at that time that his remark about Jones's talent was going to be strikingly true with the only difference that the English Salisbury Plain would be replaced by the plains in the Arabian desert in the discovery of whose beauty and sublimity, through ancient Arabian poetry, he was literally alone and metaphorically `naked and friendless'.

According to Alexander Chalmers, "Oriental literature presented itself to his mind with unusual charms as if the plan of his future life and the avenues to his future fame had been regularly laid down before him." Early on, Jones realized that "greater advantages were to be reaped from seven ancient Arabic poems of the highest reputation, popularly known as the Muallakat, so named after their being suspended on the wall of the House of God in Makkah. A discussion of these prize poems forms the main part of this article, but before that, let us take a brief look at Jones's theoretical and aesthetic ideas about poetry and other fine arts such as music and painting and he believed that one could learn more from [Eastern] languages than from the more popular treasures of Greece and Rome." During the early 1780s, he undertook to translate an Arabian poem on the Mohammedan law of property inheritance with the intention of obtaining a job as a Supreme Court judge in India. About the same time he translated seven ancient Arabic poems of the highest reputation, popularly known as the Muallakat.

English Studies Journal, Ancient Arabian Poetry, William Jones, European Literature, Arabian Desert, Aesthetic Ideas, Druid Religious Ceremonies, Despotic Governments, Ancient Arabic Poem, Nomadic Arabs, Sublime Passages, Desert Mountains, Metaphorical Description, Pastoral Elements, Eastern Allegory, Eastern Traditions.