The Lāmiyyāt al-‘Arab (the L-song of the Arabs) is the pre-eminent poem in the surviving canon of the pre-Islamic 'brigand-poets' (sa'alik). The poem also gained a foremost position in Western views of the Orient from the 1820s onwards. The poem takes its name from the last letter of each of its 68 lines, L (Arabic ل, lām). Notwithstanding its fame, the poem contains a large number of linguistic obscurities, making it hard to understand in Arabic today, let alone to translate reliably. The major philological study of the work was by Georg Jacob.