chapter 3

Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity

A narrowing of focus will allow us now to consider in some detail one

overarching theme of this book, that of the late antique conditions for the
emergence of Muh.ammad’s movement. We shall be dealing with Arabs,1
and conditions for the genesis of Paleo-Islam, an Arab religion, and even-
tually of Islam, a religion of œcumenical vocation and ambition. This
chapter starts by thematising the location of the Arabs in the late antique
imperial system, and especially in relation to conditions at the fringes of
empires, factors without which the history of the Arabs in Late Antiq-
uity cannot be understood:2 emphasis in scholarship is usually placed on
Arab involvement with empire, but little is generally said about imperial
involvement in shaping the political and social constitution of the Arabs
themselves – including conditions that made for the use of Arabic as a
literary and administrative language and the development of Arabic script,
a development coeval with the rise of a whole range of languages and scripts
across the empire, such as Gothic, Coptic, Palestinian Aramaic, Armenian
and Georgian.3

1 Anglo-Saxon and more specifically British scholarship seems generally to have a problem with
employing the name ‘Arabs’, with reluctance, of varying intensity, to use the name at all, and with
myriad caveats, inverted commas and evasive locutions even when such a nomination is manifestly
apt. While it is advisable to eschew anachronism, primordialism and perennialism, the fact remains
that the late antique Arabs, for all their multiple contemporary designations, came from the third
century ad to leave a clear and distinct epigraphic record, and left literary traces in genealogies
which, for all their legendary materials, retained a remarkable accuracy often confirming what was
inscribed in stone, as in the genealogies of the Lakhm (Hoyland, ‘Arab kings’, 380, 389 f., and
passim), in addition to language, alliance and territorial networks. This chapter is concerned with
Arab ethnogenesis, and makes no primordialist assumptions. The fullest bibliography of sources and
modern studies (including theses) for late antique Arabs is ‘Abd al-Rah.mān, Maktaba.
2 Hoyland (‘Arab kings’, 374) expresses envy at the scholarship on Roman interaction with western
Barbarians, which has shown how this led to the ethnogenesis of Franks and others, and their
eventual transformation into conquerors. That the Arabs’ relations with empire was an integral part
of their history had already been underlined by Miquel, Islam, 35, and noted very long ago by Pliny
(Natural History, 6.162).
3 This point was well made by Hoyland, ‘Arab kings’, 375.

100
 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity 101
This will entail a discussion of the degree to which and the way in
4
which the Arabs, especially those of Arabia, and particularly the H . ijāz,
constituted a part of this system, and were subject to transformations
as a consequence of its dynamics. Their history in the period preceding
Muh.ammad was subject to the vagaries of these shifting dynamics, both
geo-political and religious. The pressures of the international imperial
system upon Arab societies and polities in place will be considered, with
the purpose of writing the Arabs into Late Antiquity, a period which saw
considerable inter-imperial turbulence with determinate consequences for
inner Arabia, leading to very frequent internal changes and realignments,
political as well as religious.
The following discussion will also consider the relative isolation of the
H. ijāz within this system, despite impressions conveyed by the intensity
of Meccan commerce, a rather late phenomenon, and the way in which
this isolation constituted a stubbornly polytheistic and, to a certain extent,
ethnographic reservation in which more archaic forms of polytheism per-
sisted for long. The aim is to prepare the ground for discussion of the
emergence of Paleo-Islam that will follow in later chapters.
Ultimately, this volatile pagan reservation, surrounded, at some dis-
tance, by empires and imperial religions, was convulsively squeezed out
of the Peninsula, duly transformed along imperial models, under the twin
impact of internal transformations brought about by Muh.ammad, Allāh
and their people, and external pressures and the opportunities provided
by the fragility and exposure of areas north of the Peninsula resulting
from the last Persian–Roman wars (602–628). A patchwork of shifting
alliances, continually made and unmade, marked the history of this as well
as previous periods, and reflected to a certain extent the unstable balances
obtaining from a fragile human existence in a hard environment, with only
the slightest of changes in climatic patterns having at times calamitous
consequences.
Arab ethnogenetic development took place at more or less the same
time as the Germanic, at the other periphery of the Roman empire; as the

4 This region is understood throughout in much the same way as defined by ‘Umar b. al-Khat.t.āb,
being the region of western Arabia whose northern extremity is located at Taymā’ (WAQ, 711),
and whose main axis of communication led to southern Syria and to coastal Palestine at Gaza. This
corresponded roughly with the Roman frontier and with the early Nabataean frontier (Sartre, Etudes,
30; Lammens, Arabie, 310 ff.). Its southern extremity is the region between al-T.ā’if and Najrān, on
which see Robin, ‘Nağrān’, 48 f. (53 ff. for its internal organisation), the latter being the obligatory
point of passage between Yemen and central Arabia. The coastal region is normally called Tihāma
(as is the Yemenite coastal region) and was not always considered an integral part of the region, on
which see the invaluable description of ‘Arrām b. al-As.bagh, Asmā’. See also ‘Tihāma’, EI.
102 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
former were being brought into the ambit of Late Antiquity, the latter were
receding from its purview.5 Arab polities, and the internal developments
of Arab society, polity and culture, that arose in tandem with ethnogenetic
development, were part of a broader and longer history that saw the effects
of the late antique imperial system within the desert and the steppe.
Late Antiquity witnessed the progressive incorporation of the Fertile
Crescent, hitherto Seleucid and in part independently Aramaean or oth-
erwise, into the ambit of Romanity, frequently contested by the Parthians
and, later, the Sasanians. This not only occurred in the fertile and urban
heartlands of the region abutting the imperial limes, but also extended
in different ways and measures to the depths of the Syrian desert and its
natural geographical and ethnological extensions into the Arabian Penin-
sula. The situation was such that the area was not merely a desolate desert
frontier region between Rome and Persia, but an increasingly articulated
zone lending varying measures of cohesion and the incorporation to Arabs,
pastoralists and otherwise.6 This extended elements of the normative polit-
ical and religious orders of empire even to the remotest areas, in varying
measures of depth and incidence, of permanence and evanescence. This
was particularly the case in the Syrian desert and along a line connecting
its southern and south-eastern reaches to the energetic polities of Yemen
through the Najd plateau.
One major point being made in this chapter is that empires and other
ambient polities had a determinate effect arising from the networks across
the desert occasioned by war, trade and the extraction of natural resources.
Peoples of the desert, and especially nomadic peoples but also the trans-
humants who are central to this discussion, act as sailors and sailing peoples
do on the sea. Thalassocracies are, in effect, like networks of nodes in the
desert and the steppe of strategic or commercial relevance and a certain
permanence largely prescribed by topography and geography, networks
that bind, cumulatively with time, and aid the spread, homogenisation
and consolidation of political, material-cultural, mythical, linguistic and
other elements of ethnological commonality. In this, networks of nodes
of commerce and war, themselves facilitating the intensification of flows,
and giving ‘strength to weak ties’, may acquire explanatory rather than
5 Heather (Empires, 380), having described in considerable detail the effect of Rome on the internal
constitution (and migration) of Germanic groups in Europe and the formation of Germanic polities
between the first and fourth centuries, makes the point, alas all too briefly, of a certain parallelism
between these and the formation of steadily growing Arab polities at the two fringes of empire
between the fourth and sixth centuries. We shall see that the development of Arab populations under
the effects of empire was earlier than Heather assumes.
6 Fowden, Barbarian Plain, 65 f.
 Al-‘Arab al-‘Āriba and al-‘Arab al-Musta‘riba 103
simply descriptive value, as recently well demonstrated by the example of
Magna Graecia.7 By analogy, the various routes that traverse Arabia might
be seen like wadis that dry up for various periods, but which leave a seam
through which communications will continue to flow and networks will
be consolidated with time.

Al-‘Arab al-‘Āriba and al-‘Arab al-Musta‘riba8

There is clearly no need to relate here the history of Arab involvement
with empire from Neo-Assyrian times, of Arab trading kingdoms in north-
west Arabia such as Lih.yān,9 or of the various principalities established by
families of arguably Arab stock along the arc of the Fertile Crescent and in
its folds, in Edessa, Emesa, Palmyra, Chalcis, Hatra, Petra and elsewhere
following Seleucid domination and before the Roman conquest. The story
is well known in outline and, in many cases, in not inconsiderable detail.10
The important issue is the modalities and extents of political Romanisation.
This will be followed by a discussion of the political reconfiguration of the
region from the early third century, with the formation of Arab ‘buffer’
polities, or at least of dominions of relatively short duration, with a variable
geometry extending into desert areas, in the context of the struggle between
Ctesiphon and New Rome, and of the sponsorship by the Sabaean and,

7 Malkin, Greek World, 27 and 10, 17, 21, 38, 209 and passim. I was unfortunately unable to make full
use of this work, which appeared after this chapter was written.
8 The first term, meaning roughly ‘Arabising Arabs’, implying ‘the most Arab of Arabs’, or perhaps
‘primeval Arabs’, is generally applied in classical Arabic historical writing with reference to ancient
and/or legendary Arabs, such as ‘Ād, Thamūd, T.asm and Jadı̄s, dwelling in an indefinite past
and possibly representing figures of ancient aetiological myths (Rodinson, ‘Espace’, 19 f., 21 –
see especially the account of Ju‘ayt., al-Kūfa, 184 ff.). These preceded those who were later to be
placed in Arab genealogies, who came to speak what became Arabic, and who were known to
outsiders as Saracens or Tayyāyē. The second term means ‘Arabised Arabs’. Both are used here
somewhat schematically, and for chronological purposes, in part following the locus classicus of this
periodisation of Arab history which is Ibn Khaldūn’s Tārıkh, used here in a version which excludes
his genealogical interpretation: see the sketch of al-Azmeh, Ibn Khaldūn, 16 f. Robin (‘Inscriptions’,
543) is one scholar who has seen merit and cogency in this classical Arabic historiographical division,
and interprets it in terms of the development of what was to become the Arabic koine among the
more advanced groups, associated with the Yemenite expansion northwards, the whole matter based
upon hypothetical extrapolation from the epigraphic distribution of the definite article al-. Hoyland
too (Arabia, 233, 236) finds merit in this division of the Arabs, also in a certain connection with the
distribution and use of the al-, with Tanūkh and Kinda, for instance, classified as ‘Arab ‘Āriba.
9
. ad.āra, 86 ff., and 89, 90 f., on Lih.yānid royalist, administrative and military organi-
Al-Ans.ārı̄, al-H
sation. Impressive colossal statues of their kings have been excavated: Routes d’Arabie, nos. 106, 107,
111–15.
10 Rodinson, Arabs, 54 f.; Hoyland, Arabia, chs. 1–3; Retsö, Arabs in Antiquity, chs. 7, 9, 14; Sartre,
Etudes, ch. 3, passim.
104 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
11
later, H. imyarite kingdoms of similar Arab allied or client polities. This
entailed the formation and nominal solidification of tribal groupings and
confederations, under what became dynastic leadership, fairly rapidly and
not always short-lived. It led to the crystallisation of tribal names under
whose signature such groupings, whatever their composition, might be
active and might stake claims to territorial mastery,12 control not so much
over territory, but over routes and resources. It should be emphasised that
sovereignty and control are relational notions, and did not involve the
drawing of stable and precise boundaries: control at the edges of domains,
grand or slight, tended to blur, and depended on relations between groups,
irrespective of size, that tended to look in all directions for security. Spatial
configurations of territory reflected hierarchical relations of power, based
on ever-changing tributary relations.
Associated with this ultimately ethnogenetic development is the use of
the Greek terms Sarakēnoi and Skēnatai (tent dwellers)13 and the Syriac
Tayyāyē for the Arabs, and the near-disappearance of the territorially vaguer
word ‘Arab’ from Greek and Syriac works, a term that had been retained
occasionally for archaising literary flourish.14 This change is associated with
more precise reference by Greek and Syriac authors to people with whom
they were coming into direct contact, now that the old client city-states on
the fringes of empires and deserts were gone,15 and perhaps under admin-
istrative influence, with the use of the name Arab confined to inhabitants
of the Roman province of Arabia.16 The name remained associated, how-
ever, with standard expressions of loathing for these ‘wolves of the desert’,17

11 Very pertinently, Piotrovskii (al-Yaman, 123 ff.) spoke of the H . imyarisation of Arab genealogies
during this period, in relation to the formation of confederations. For his part, Robin (‘Langues’, 124)
spoke of Arabic (and H . imyarite) impact on the syntax and lexicon of epigraphic Sabaic, appearing
between the fourth and sixth centuries to have become a dead language used for epigraphic purposes
only.
12 Hoyland, Arabia, 234 ff.; ‘Arab kings’, 384.
13 There have been many interpretations of the provenance of the term Saracen, which first appears in
Ptolemy’s Geography in the second century, reviewed critically by Macdonald (‘Quelques réflexions’,
93 f.), who argues convincingly (at 95) that the term should be seen to have been connected with
the Ancient North Arabian root s2 -r-q, with the word sharq, then as now, meaning ‘east’, verbal and
nominal forms of which have been used to convey the idea of seasonal movement into the desert.
14 Retsö, Arabs, 521. 15 Hoyland, Arabia, 235. 16 Robin, ‘Antiquité’, 85.
17 Retsö, Arabs, 520 f., 585; Hoyland, Arabia, 235 f., 238 f.; Mayerson, ‘Saracen’, 283 ff.; Segal, ‘Arabs’,
89 ff.; Fisher, ‘Ghassān’, 313. One theme that emerges in late antique writings on the Arabs is their
nakedness or otherwise savage and unkempt, barefooted appearance. Crone (‘Barefoot and naked’)
teased out of literary and pictorial sources the rudimentary dress that they may have worn in Syria,
south Arabia, central Arabia and the H . ijāz, and contrasted the loin-cloths, bits and pieces acquired
from neighbours or victims, other rudimentary vestments worn by desert Arabs, and their long hair
(sometimes plaited), with the somewhat more elaborate clothing of their settled Arab neighbours.
On Arabs in late antique and Hellenistic sources, Macdonald, ‘Arabes en Syrie’, 313 ff.
 Al-‘Arab al-‘Āriba and al-‘Arab al-Musta‘riba 105
despite the other image of the Arab in Greek letters of the time, that of
a merchant.18 Desert and steppe dwellers, like seamen, habitually have an
ambivalent reputation, at once as conveyors and predators. The exception
to this shift in nomenclature was in Yemen, where H . imyarite royal titula-
ture from the middle of the fifth century stated that the king reigned over
the Arabs of the High Country, presumably Najd.19
Finally, at more or less the same time, the name Ma‘add came to be
used in Epigraphic South Arabian, in North Arabian epigraphy and in
Arabic poetry, as well as in Syriac (Ma‘addāyē) and Greek (Maddenoi).
A detailed recent study of this theme yields the conclusion that there is
no evidence in this usage of reference to identifiable groups,20 but that it
referred rather to amorphous, far-ranging collectivities in central and west-
central Arabia characterised by what was perceived as lawlessness and the
lack of a proper political constitution, in all probability to camel-herding
transhumants, ‘high nomads’.21 This would indicate that, to the minds of
the Arabs themselves, a distinction was being made between those among
their number who entered into federations and systems of dominance
and relations to empire, and those who remained outside this system, a
distinction that was later to be taken up by Muh.ammad himself, with clear
antipathy to the Bedouin.
The Aramaicised and Hellenised groups of Arab stock ruling the princi-
palities at the edges of the steppe are likely to have regarded themselves as
quite distinct from the Arabs of the steppe, many of whom had been urged
to settle and reclaim land.22 The late Roman empire saw some ethnic Arab
upper-crust elements drawn from the steppe gradually incorporated into
the higher ranks of imperial service, particularly under the Severans, and
the territories they ruled were in a variety of ways incorporated into the
late Roman colonial system.23 Their cultures were highly Hellenised and
Romanised, at least in their official expression, although Parthian influences
on dress, iconography and, in the case of Palmyra, political titulature are
evident. There is onomastic, religious and linguistic evidence of Arabic in
a language such as that used in Palmyra,24 a phenomenon noted elsewhere
18 Macdonald, ‘Arabes en Syrie’, 318. 19 Beaucamp et al., ‘Chrétiens de Nağrān’, 74.
20 Indeed, prior to the composition of systematic genealogies, they were not designated as a genealogical
group: Szombathy, Genealogy, 91.
21 Zwettler, ‘Ma‘add’, 254, 256, 284 f., and passim. 22 Pentz, Invisible Conquest, 17.
23 Hoyland, Arabia, 82; Briquel-Chatonnet, ‘Arabes’, 42 f.; Drijvers, Cults and Beliefs, 10 ff.; Chad,
Dynastes d’Émèse, passim. Teixidor (‘Antiquités’, 717) stresses the statement that dynasts of Emesa
regarded themselves as Aramaeans, not as Arabs, and that this distinction is also made in the sources,
despite confusions to which Cicero, among others, was party.
24 Gawlikowski, ‘Arabes’, who notes (at 108) that it cannot be excluded that some nomads spoke
Aramaic.
106 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
as well.25 From 269/70 Vhaballatus (Wahb Allāt), the master of Palmyra,
‘Sparta among the cities of the Orient’,26 in a bid for imperial rank after
the Palmyrenes had taken Syria, Egypt and much of Anatolia, had coins
struck with the legend imp[erator] c[aesar] vhaballatus aug[ustus].
Before the expansion of his ambitions and those of his mother Zenobia,
who held effective control, coins struck by him in Antioch bore the leg-
end re[x] im[perator] d[ux] r[omanum]; thereafter, he had Zenobia
declared Augusta and himself Augustus (on coins). His father Odenathus
(Udhainat), having saved the eastern frontier for Rome after the Sasanians
had captured the emperor Valerian at Edessa in 260, was declared cor-
rector totius orientis; in a Palmyrene inscription, he had himself entitled
additionally King of Kings, after the Sasanian fashion.27
Palmyra was in many ways a spectacular exception, certainly in terms
of ambition, but also in terms of prodigious wealth accruing from trade
along the Euphrates and the Tigris, down to the Arabian Gulf and on to
India, and in the existence of a wealthy commercial class of international
connections.28 This class left behind the elaborate funerary architecture still
to be seen, and sponsored the building of the temples for which the city
is famous. For the rest, the princes of these polities were normally termed
arabarchos and strategos, locally known in Syriac as māryā or shallı̄t.ā, the
terms that designate local lords and chiefs, or Lords of the Arabs, rb d‘rb.29
At that time, and in earlier centuries, a number of tribal entities con-
nected by Ancient North Arabian languages had made their appearance,
without bequeathing elements of continuity that were built upon by later
generations. Some were evanescent; others may have been of greater con-
temporary moment, but have left only traces inscribed upon rock. Whether
Nabataea, al-S.afā or, for that matter, Dedan or Thamūd was Arab, and
according to what definition,30 seems to matter little in the perspective
of the present discussion, quite apart from languages used.31 At all events,

25 Briquel-Chatonnet, ‘Arabes’, 39 ff. 26 Shahid, Rome and the Arabs, 38.

27 Millar, Roman Near East, 172, 334; Bowersock, Roman Arabia, 134; Dignas and Winter, Rome and
Persia, 159 f. Earlier, as the Nabataean Aretas (al-H
. ārith) took Damascus in 82 bc, he saw himself as
the successor to the Seleucids, a matter reflected in coinage, and described himself as a Philhellene
(Bowersock, Roman Arabia, 25).
28 See, for instance, Dussaud, Pénétration, 74, 74 n. 2; Yon, ‘Remarques’; Starcky, Palmyre, 53 ff.
29 Drijvers and Healey, Syriac Inscriptions, d5, d7, d51, d101; Segal, ‘Arabs’, 93 – in a moment of
especial self-confidence, the lords of Hatra, in the first century, adopted, in Aramaic, the title King
of the Arabs (malka dhi ‘Arab) and, having warded off an attack by Trajan in 117, added the epithet
zakkaya, the Conqueror: Bosworth, ‘Iran’, 596.
30 Macdonald, ‘Arabes en Syrie’, 316 f.
31 The spoken language of the Nabataeans is disputed. Some maintain this to have been Arabic (for
instance, Briquel-Chatonnet, ‘Arabes’, 39), others a dialect of Aramaic (Macdonald, ‘Reflections’,
 Al-‘Arab al-‘Āriba and al-‘Arab al-Musta‘riba 107
not least given the limited content of inscriptions from northern Arabia,
the variety of Ancient North Arabian languages would appear to be largely
an epigraphic phenomenon, distinguished by little apart from alphabets;
that they were early and related forms of Arabic is beyond doubt.32 What
cannot be doubted is that these languages formed a continuum with what
was to become standard Arabic in all its varieties, literary and dialectal.
The earlier situation involving peoples who were, for future reference,
to be evanescent, or inscribed into the register of aetiological myths, is
exemplified by the tribes of al-S.afā, mainly in the region corresponding to
what is today south-central Syria and northern Jordan, who had dealings
with the Nabataeans and are most likely to have had some connection with
the regime of Palmyrene hegemony. In the thousands upon thousands
of inscriptions, mainly graffiti, left by them,33 one gains an impression
of rudimentary territorial claims marked by primitive herms, cairns or
rough stelae, commemorative inscriptions, and votive, supplicatory and
other religious formulae, indications of internal conflicts, and conflicts
with the Nabataean and Roman military,34 including participation in an
anti-Nabataean revolt at Madā’in S.ālih..35 One finds reference to urban set-
tlements or desert political centres with which they had dealings, includ-
ing Bus.ra and al-Namāra.36 One can also reconstruct from the plentiful
onomastic information on these inscriptions the picture of a tribal config-
uration with three major groupings, H . awālat, D
. ayf and ‘Awdh, along with
some idea of their geographical distribution and seasonal movements.37
But these peoples disappeared almost without trace, except for the odd
cairn and what was incised on rock surfaces. Although some of the ono-
masticon was to persist in Arab names, some tribal names in evidence there
seem only to have resurfaced with Abbasid antiquarianism, but located in
different geographical regions;38 whether this indicates ethnological conti-
nuity cannot be ascertained. It is unlikely that there was ever among them
a durable form of organisation, unlike the situation in the region of Dedan
and the constellation of settlements at the northern extremity of the H . ijāz,
involved in international trade from the eighth century bc, and disposed of
47 f.), and yet others an indefinite form of ‘North Arabic’ (Negev, ‘Obodas’, 60). In this regard, the
transformation of the Nabataean rather than another alphabet into the Arabic alphabet, meticulously
traced by Nehmé, ‘Glimpse’, is not insignificant.
32 See the discussion of Robin, ‘Langues’, 122.
33 On whom see, in general, ‘Alı̄, al-Mufas..sal, 3.150 ff.
34 Al-Ah.mad, al-Mujtama‘, 118 ff., 152 ff.; Harding, ‘Tribes’, 20; Graf, ‘Saracens’, 5 f.
35 Graf, ‘Saracens’, 6. 36 ‘Alı̄, al-Mufassal, 3.150.
..
37 Harding, ‘Tribes’, 20; Macdonald, ‘Seasons’, 9 and passim.
38 Harding, ‘Tribes’, 22 – see the genealogical chart on p. 24. It is noteworthy that unrelated groups
with identical names were very common: Szombathy, Genealogy, 152, 152–3 n. 397.
108 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
a capacity for administration, defence, flood control, and a small measure
of irrigation.39 The Babylonian King Nabonidus resided at Taymā’ for a
decade (c. 553–543 bc).
The people who left us Safaitic inscriptions left no legacy to later Arabs,
unlike the later people of Thamūd, whose legacy is memorialised in Arab
and, later, Qur’ānic legends. This may have had something to do with
geographical contiguity, and perhaps with ethnological affinity as well. But
crucially, it had to do with a relatively greater historical consistency result-
ing from the actions of empires, now taking a more methodical interest
in tribal affairs, commencing with the Antonine period and ultimately
moulding arrangements that, in an elementary way, could be considered as
a step towards the Phylarcate arrangement. It might be stated at the outset
that use of the term Phylarchos in the sources need not imply an official
administrative title designating an office, but was also a generic and hon-
orific term used very widely and not restricted to imperial confederates.40
The Thamūd had already been mentioned in an inscription of Sargon
II (721–705 bc), and appear in a number of classical and late antique
sources, including Ptolemy.41 Later Arabic sources speak of them across
areas bounded by Syria, the H . ijāz and the Red Sea, probably the Gulf of
‘Aqaba.42 A small number of inscriptions mentioning tmd or h-tmd are
spread from northern H ¯ ¯
. ijāz to Jabal Shammar, from the neighbourhood of
43
Taymā’ to the vicinity of today’s H . ā’il, and some have been found very
far to the south, in ‘Ası̄r and between Mecca and al-T.ā’if.44 In 166–169, a
small temple was erected at al-Rawwāfa, some 75 km SSW of Tabūk and
75 km from the Red Sea, on the sandy western reaches of the lava fields
45
of the H . arra, but possessing underground water almost all year round.
This marked the formation of what the Nabataean inscription called šrkt
tmdw, rendered in the parallel Greek inscription as thamoudenōn ethnos,
¯the Nabataean expression above followed by qdmy šrkt.46 This reference

39
. ad.āra, 86 ff. (Dedan), 105 ff. (Dūmat al-Jandal), 108 ff. (Taymā’); Bawden, ‘Khief
Al-Ans.ārı̄, al-H
el-Zahra’; Macdonald, ‘Reflections’, 42.
40 See Mayerson, ‘Phylarchos’, 291 f., 293 f. and 295 where the author argues ex silentio that the term
made no inroads into Syriac, which continued to refer to Arab chiefs and princes as rı̄šē or malkē.
Cf. Hoyland, ‘Arab kings’, 381. A pagan female Saracen phylarch is recorded in a Greek inscription
dated 319/20 south-east of Aleppo: Hoyland, ‘Arab kings’, inscription no. 11.
41 Beaucamp, ‘Rawwafa’, col. 1470.
42 Al-Masūdı̄, Murūj, § 929 – the author probably confounds them with the southern reaches of
Nabataean domains, mentioning the necropolis of Madā’in S.ālih. as their abode, in line with
Muslim legend, and probably pre-Islamic Arabian legend as well.
43 Beaucamp, ‘Rawwafa’, col. 1471.
44 Al-Rası̄nı̄ et al., ‘Mash.’, 162, 165, 167, 181, 183 and pl. 92; At.lāl, 17 (1435/2002), pls. 6.2b, 6.4.
45 Beaucamp, ‘Rawwafa’, col. 1467.
46 See the texts with a French translation in Milik, ‘Inscriptions’, 55 f.
 Al-‘Arab al-‘Āriba and al-‘Arab al-Musta‘riba 109
to the builders of the temple, through the good offices of the Roman
legate Antisius Adventus, was combined with due praise given to Marcus
Aurelius, here apparently uniquely given the epithet mtm[kyn] l [k]l [‘]lm’
(rendered in Greek as Cosmocrator).47
This commemorative inscription has been taken to signal the formation
of a Thamūdic confederation (šrkt), governed by chiefs or elders (qdmy).48
On the argument that šrkt is never used in a sense indicating a tribe
or any congenital identity, Macdonald proposed that the term be taken to
designate voluntary entry into the Roman military-administrative system,49
which Graf and Macdonald have suggested might be considered to be
the formation of a Thamūdean regular unit within the imperial army.50
Another scholar saw in this no more than an informal recognition of empire
rather than evidence of extensive Roman presence or hegemony.51
Whatever the interpretation, it is clear that we have here the first instance
of the formation of a tribal group with a coherence imparted by a common
name, used in all likelihood operationally rather than for genealogical
reclamation, however durable this formation may have been. Moreover,
this came to be under the impact of the Roman empire, in which the
incorporation of territories and human groups within the imperial system
of defence led to the emergence of operational inter-tribal articulation,
buttressed by the imperatives of empire.
This Thamūdean formation may have been one among other, similar
arrangements, traces of which have disappeared or are yet to be found.
In the early third century, as this particular frontier was disrupted, and as
Arabs started moving into Sinai from where Roman military presence was
being withdrawn, with Palmyra incorporated into the empire, these limes
became the last line of defence in the region.52 There is evidence of resultant
lines of fortification and other defensive structures, including a fortress at
al-Namāra,53 which, as indicated above, has a longer history; this was where

47 Bowersock, ‘Bilingual inscription’, 515, and passim. The fuller portion of the Greek text reads
kosmokratōn sebastōn megı̄ston. It should be noted that this is not the only inscription to mention
Marcus Aurelius in the region: one dated 175–177 at Madā’n S.ālih. salutes the emperor as well, in
Latin, most probably indicating Roman military authorship: Routes d’Arabie, no. 121.
48 Graf, ‘Saracens’, 11 f. After considering a variety of possibilities, the author suggests (15 f.) that the
name Sarakēnoi, Saracens, may derive ultimately from ŠRKT interpreted as the equivalent of ethnos,
duly generalised.
49 Macdonald, ‘Quelques réflections’, 98; ‘Literacy’, 99 ff., 100 n. 173.
50 Macdonald, ‘Quelques réflections’, 100 f.; Graf, ‘Saracens’, 11 f. 51 Fisher, ‘Ghassān’, 313.
52 Sartre, Etudes, 132 f. A general account of the Arabs and the south and south-east Roman frontiers
between the second and the sixth centuries is given in ibid., ch. 3, and Graf, ‘Saracens’.
53 For the strategic importance of this site, and its ecological characteristics, see ‘Namāra’, EI, 7.944b.
The toponym seems originally to have been the name of the Numāra section of the Lakhm – see
Caskel, ‘Inschrift’, 370.
110 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
Imru’ al-Qays b. ‘Amr,54 ‘King of the Arabs’, may have been born, and where
he may have been buried in 328 possibly as indicated by his famous funerary
stele. These points were manned and organised, one would presume, by
Arab principalities. We have a mention of ‘Awdh, already encountered
among the people of al-S.afā.55 This period also witnessed the appearance
in the sources of the personal names of Arab chiefs, the likes of whom had
previously been anonymous.56
The third century saw the extinction of Palmyra in 272 (by the Romans)
and Hatra in 241 (by the Sasanians), following the annexation of the
Nabataean polity by Rome over two centuries earlier. It also saw the full
insertion of Edessa within the imperial system as a colony. Crucially for
the purposes of this discussion, the resulting vacuum in the steppe caused
Arab groups to gravitate towards the Roman borderlands.57 It gave rise
to Arab steppe principalities, to the use of the term Saracen to designate
them, and to the earliest documentation of tribal names that were to persist
genealogically and to be recorded in Arab traditions that have come down
to us.58 These principalities gradually adopted Arabic as their language of
public expression, and ultimately Christianity as a religion. The use of
Arabic as the language of official expression has been correlated directly
with the fall of the Palmyrene regime and with its consequences,59 and we
shall see that these were of momentous significance for Arab ethnogenesis.
Such polities were born of the exigencies of imperial polities on both
sides of the Barbarian Plain. A different regime was gradually put in place,
at more or less the same time as the change in the nomenclature of the
Arabs mentioned above. This regime eventually became the Phylarcate
at its western edges,60 repeating in the East a policy of subsidies and
clientage instituted by the late Roman and Byzantine empires in Europe.61
If in the early fourth century Imru’ al-Qays (d. 328) – King of the south
Arabian Kinda,62 but originating from the B. Asad in north-east Najd, and
therefore not actually Kindite but a chief over Kindites – was considered
in Constantinople as a faraway Barbarian, matters changed considerably

54 Note that Arabic sources speak of up to twenty-five persons with this name from the period we
are dealing with (‘Imru’ al-K.ays’, EI): many poets, including Imru’ al-Qays b. H . ujr (d. c. 550), the
most celebrated of all poets, and at least two ‘kings’.
55 Graf, ‘Saracens’, 13, 16. 56 Sartre, Etudes, 134. 57 Cf. Butcher, Roman Syria, 408 f.
58 Cf. Retsö, Arabs, 585. 59 Cf. Dussaud, Pénétration, 63 f.
60 For the ranks and titles of Jafnids, see Nöldeke, Umarā’, 13 ff., and Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs
in the Sixth Century, 1.1.109 ff.
61 Cameron, Mediterranean, 47, 195.
62 But it must be borne in mind that the genealogies of Kinda are various (Ma‘add, Rabı̄‘a, Qah.t.ān),
obscuring ultimate origins: Szombathy, Genealogy, 93 n. 230.
 Al-‘Arab al-‘Āriba and al-‘Arab al-Musta‘riba 111
by the sixth century.63 The same could be said of the earlier attitude
64
of the Sasanians towards the Nas.rids of al-H . ı̄ra. The result of these
developments was the appearance of principalities allied to empires and
south Arabian polities, acting as nodes that worked to weld the domains
of the Arabs into an interconnected web. The system, and it was a system,
may have operated fitfully, and may at times convey an amorphous image,
but was yet cumulative.
This system covered almost the entire surface of Arabia and its north-
ern extensions. Of the two principalities formed under the dominance of
the ruling house of Kinda,65 the First Kingdom, most likely with a base
at Qaryat al-Fāw (Qaryat Dhāt Kāhil), a commercial town flourishing
between the fourth century bc and the fourth century ad, was centred at a
bottleneck on the road between Yemen and north-east Arabia. The precise
identity of the dominant powers within it, and its association with Kinda
and other groups, cannot always be identified with certainty. Its history
is bound to that of Yemenite kingdoms; in the period of concern here, it
was first under the hegemony of Sabaeans in the 220s, and then of the
H. imyarites who annexed Saba’ in 275. Later, in the late third and early
fourth centuries, this polity of Kinda was based probably somewhere west
of today’s Riyadh.66 Later still, from the late fifth century, the H . ujrids,
hailing from further north, took the lead as the ruling house – this was a
dynasty without much of a tribal base, and was not a ‘martial tribe’, but
was a noble house that relied on alliances and private corps of bodyguards,
with princes of the ruling family exercising their authority from a variety
of settlements.67 This was not entirely unusual, and was to be the case with
the Nas.rids at al-H . ı̄ra and with the Quraysh at Mecca. The H. ujrid dynasty
was a ‘harbinger of things to come’,68 and was regarded by one scholar as a
prefiguration of the early Muslim polity.69 H . ujrid Najd was an obligatory
corridor of passage between south-west and north-east, a most important
axis in late antique Arabia.
Its client relation to the south-west notwithstanding, the First King-
dom of Kinda, or, earlier until the beginning of the third century, with
groups that came to be known generically as Qah.t.ān70 – and we know
63 Kawar, ‘Patriciate’, 78 and passim, and see Olinder, Kings, 114 f.
64 65 Al-Ansārı̄, al-Hadāra, 101 ff., 126 ff.
Al-H. illı̄, al-Manāqib, 516. . . .
66 Olinder, Kings, 51 ff. 67 Caskel, ‘Quellen’, 339 f. 68 Hoyland, Arabia, 240.
69 Robin, ‘Royaume hujride’, 665 ff., 671. See also Olinder, Kings, 51 ff.; Simon, Meccan Trade, 28 ff.
Wellhausen (‘Mohammedanism’, 545) had already regarded this polity as ‘an epic prelude to the
true history of the Arabs’, and Whittow (Making, 36) claims Zenobia’s Palmyra to have been their
precedent.
70 Robin, ‘Two inscriptions’, 169.
112 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
the names of two of the city’s kings, Mu‘āwiyat b. Rabı̄‘at (who may have
flourished c. 100),71 King of Madhh.ij and Qah.t.ān who conquered the city
from Qah.t.ān, and Rabı̄‘at b. Mu‘āwiyat (fl. c. 220), King of Kinda and
Qah.t.ān72 – felt sufficiently confident to mint her own coins stamped with
the name of Kahl, who appears to have been a chief or a chiefly deity.73
Moreover, notwithstanding this south-west orientation, material evidence
shows a very intense connection with the north-west as well: the presence
of a bronze appliqué funeral bed in Graeco-Roman form, statuettes of
Harpocrates, Heracles, Artemis and Isis-Tyche, and many other objects
excavated there recently, betoken this connection.74
This northern connection cannot have operated without a system of
political and commercial alliances and, by extension, imperial connections.
Details are forthcoming for the H . ujrids, heavily implicated in the north,
with connections to what is referred to as the nominal confederation of
Tanūkh – how it was that the Lakhmid Nas.rids, who were not of the
Tanūkh, established themselves as lords of al-H . ı̄ra in southern Iraq, in
nominally Tanūkh territory, is still obscure.75 The Nas.rids, even more
than the H . ujrids, were a ruling family whose dominance was based upon
alliances, and enforced by retinues and private armies, rather than somehow
‘emerging’ from tribal relations and chieftaincy, and betoken decided social
differentiation. Earlier, Imru’ al-Qays b. ‘Amr’s famous funerary inscription
of 328 at al-Namāra in southern Syria declares his bearing the crown, and
his dominion, whatever this may have implied, over regions stretching to
Najrān at the borders of Yemen,76 prior to the H . imyarite push northwards.
There is some dispute as to whether the northern alliance was officiated
under Roman or Sasanian patronage;77 the likelihood is that it was under
both, simultaneously or in alternation in a way that was not unusual, the
78
northern empires, unlike the H . imyarites, desirous more for means of
negotiating control, auxiliaries, and military and commercial stability in
the steppe than for annexing territory.
In all events, Kinda fell victim ultimately to the Nas.rid-H . imyarite bids
for the extension of control into the Peninsula,79 but did, later, establish a
71 Robin, ‘Antiquité’, 95. Al-Ans.ārı̄ (Qaryat al-Fāw, 31) places him in the third century.
72 Robin, ‘Antiquité’, 95; Hoyland, ‘Arab kings’, inscription no. 1. 73 Hoyland, Arabia, 50.
74 Routes d’Arabie, nos. 154, 155, 158, 159, 165, 169. For a preliminary overall consideration of foreign
imports and influences on metalwork at Qaryat al-Fāw, see Sinān, al-Funūn, 367 ff.
75 Cf. Rothstein, Laḫmı̂den, 41; Sartre, Etudes, 137; Hoyland, ‘Arab kings’, inscriptions nos. 5, 6.
76 RCEA, no. 1.
77 Al-H. illı̄, al-Manāqib, 107; Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, 31 ff.; Bowersock,
Roman Arabia, 138 ff.; Robin, ‘Royaume hujride’, 666 f., 674; Hoyland, Arabia, 49 f.; al-Ans.ārı̄,
. ad.āra, 136.
al-H
78 See Robin, ‘Antiquité’, 86. 79 Cf. Simon, Meccan Trade, 28.
 Al-‘Arab al-‘Āriba and al-‘Arab al-Musta‘riba 113
dominion based in Palestine towards the end of the fifth and the beginning
of the sixth centuries. The system of alliances they controlled, in alliance
with Anastasius (r. 491–518), seems to have foundered rapidly after the death
of al-H . ijr in 569/70. That Kinda appears at different times
. ārith b. ‘Amr b. H
in different places before a final retrenchment in northern H . ad.ramaut in
the course of the later sixth century might be interpreted either as migration
or as the rise and fall of polities set up in their name involving sections
from within them.
Imru’ al-Qays’ northern sphere of influence in southern Syria and into
northern Arabia was taken over for a brief period by the Christian Queen
Māwiya in the 370s, whose tribal affiliation is uncertain but who seems
to have been connected to Tanūkh, and whose rule might be regarded as
the ancestor of the later Phylarcate.80 She was in all probability succeeded
by the Salı̄h.ids, phylarchs of Rome, whose control seems on epigraphic
evidence to have stretched all the way down to Madā’in S.ālih. in the fifth
century.81 Thereafter a fairly constant, often fractious and fitful, and not
always stable system was established under the Nas.rids (commonly but
misleadingly known as Lakhmids) in the east and the Jafnids (commonly
but inappropriately known as Ghassānids) in the west, who overpowered
the Salı̄h., a system that resembled the role that Palmyra had earlier played
in the steppe.82 The Jafnid al-H . ārith b. Jabala (d. 569/70) was declared
phylarch and patrikios by Justinian in 530. Thus was a political structure
elaborated, no matter how shifting its day-to-day patterns, controlling the
lines of communication, military as well as commercial, between south-
western, central and north-eastern Arabia (and Iraq), veering westwards
into the Syrian desert, the southern extension of the Fertile Crescent’s
steppe, marking territories being articulated with an increasing density
of exchanges and relations of alliance, control, mutual recognition and
contestation.
This period, with a decided intensification in the course of the sixth cen-
tury, saw the induction of Arabs of the steppe, the oases and limitrophic
settlements into the system of empire, increasingly as players, sometimes
wayward players. This system had been conceived originally at once as
defensive and offensive border maintenance, but it resulted in intensi-
fied regular communication between Arab groups that had hitherto been

80 Bowersock, ‘Mavia’, passim; Hoyland, ‘Arab kings’, 381. Her territories are difficult to identify, but
they are likely to have been the fringes of the province of Palestine (Hainthaler, Christliche Araber,
40, 40 n. 31). It should be noted that the name Māwiya was not uncommon among the Nas.rids
and groups related to Tanūkh: al-H . illı̄, al-Manāqib, at Index.
81 Nehmé, ‘Eléments’, 52. 82 Cf. Bowersock, Roman Arabia, 142; Sartre, Etudes, 161.
114 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
relatively separated from one another, not yet having felt the imperatives of
building large-scale territorial networks, alliances and exchanges. It is not
unnatural that it led to some relative degree of homogeneity as to its internal
workings. This took the form of large-scale polities relative to local condi-
tions, of varying duration and extent, and of the introduction of royalist
and quasi-royalist norms, enforced and reinforced by outlying empires in
search of clients.83 Internal means of communication, beyond commerce
and resettlement or other kinds of transhumance, were reinforced and
further organised with some regularity by the spread of imperial postal
systems, a network of command and control, official communications and
espionage.84 The regime under discussion constituted a considerable, qual-
itative change over conditions that prevailed previously, not least as they
were to accumulate and ultimately to constitute a heritage and a vectorial
direction in the context of which setbacks and disturbances were followed
by reassertions and reconstitutions of the networks in place, not infre-
quently by self-propulsion, and not only at the instigation of surrounding
forces. This cumulativeness accounts for the distinction between al-‘Arab
al-‘Āriba and al-‘Arab al-Musta‘riba: the former the bearers of memories of
vague names, an indefinite past, and often a mythical geography, the latter
fully named and placed, presaging later developments, in a continuity that
can be considered to have been fully ethnogenetic. In other words, this
period marks a critical period, a ‘phase transition’ when the lines connect-
ing the network become systemic vectors cumulatively binding together
discrete local networks into durable and mutually recognisable traits.85

Al-‘Arab al-Musta‘riba: alliances of late antique empire

This period witnessed the gradual consolidation of a structural pattern
of dominion attendant upon the formation by the Arabs of large-scale
alliances or confederations of varying size, often unstable. These traced
the spatial pattern of a network, along lines running from southern
Syria/Jordan to southern Iraq, and then along a line leading from there
through central Arabia to H . imyar. Another line followed the Euphrates
northwards along the edge of the steppe, and yet another connected

83 Fisher, ‘Ghassān’, 312, 333 f.

84 Silverstein, Postal Systems, 43 ff., 46 n. 226, 49 – the term later to become standard, barı̄d, was
already in use, on evidence of Arabic poetry and of a South Arabian inscription from the time of
Abraha: ibid., 47. See the account of al-Jāh.iz., al-Bighāl, 66 f., where the author also quoted poetry
by Imru’ al-Qays mentioning his use of the Roman postal service for travelling to Constantinople.
85 Cf. Malkin, Greek World, 38, 45.
 Al-‘Arab al-Musta‘riba: alliances of late antique empire 115
Syria, with extensions along the western edge of the steppe, with northern
H. ijāz. Altogether, this pattern was supported by Romans, Sasanians and
H. imyarites, and defines the period between the dissolution of south and
south-east Roman defences and, some four centuries later, the end of the
sixth century. This induction of Arabs into the imperial system of Late
Antiquity might be seen to have been defined not by the geographical lines
indicated alone – and territorial control had a variable geography – but
by pathways of trade, and exactions, the extraction of natural resources,
and warfare and dominance inside the steppe and the desert itself, artic-
ulated by nodes and hubs of communication and control whose size was
commensurate with the demography of the region. What remains to be
sketched in the paragraphs that follow is the consolidation and solidifica-
tion of this system in Arab domains before it started to fray in the sixth
century, making way for its definitive reanimation under the auspices of
the imperial state of the Paleo-Muslim Medinan Caliphate and, later, the
Umayyads.
Mention of al-Namāra above may now be brought in to highlight the
pertinence, not only of the lines of fortification associated with it, but of
associated facts as indices of an emergent regime of tribal consolidation in
alliance with empire, perhaps prefigured by Thamūd at al-Rawwāfa.86 The
picture that emerges until we move into the sixth century is complex and in
many details uncertain. What does seem to emerge is a pattern of regional
systems of hegemony, sometimes of outright domination, reinforced by
attempts at consolidation and expansion under imperial impulse, in all
cases under royalised chiefly lineages with a tendency towards dynasticism,
and with customary rights to exaction and the accumulation of wealth,
bearing the title malik, positions of dominance often ratified by outlying
imperial powers.
Three territories are of relevance to this pattern. Broadly considered,
one comprised the Roman Palestines, with extensions up the Syrian desert
to the east of Damascus and up to the Euphrates. Another was centred
at al-H . ı̄ra, extending to north-east Arabia, often including coastal parts of
it, and, somewhat fitfully, up the desert fringes of the west bank of the
Euphrates. The third struck a path from southern Iraq through central
Arabian Najd down to Yemen, often incorporating the northern reaches of
H. ijāz and areas around Wādı̄ al-Qurā, on the road to Syria.
Thus from the middle of the third century, particularly during the reign
of Shāpūr (r. 241–272), sections of the Tanūkh (with due regard to the
86 Cf. Fisher, ‘Ghassān’, 314.
116 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
contemporary reality or unreality of this appellation) migrated from east-
ern Arabia and installed themselves in southern Iraq. Al-H . ı̄ra, under the
leprous King Jadhı̄ma al-Abrash,87 was made into the capital of an Arab
polity based on alliances and something like a standing army enforced
by Persian cavalry.88 A series of wars which may initially have involved
conflict with Palmyra, and attempts at asserting control over the road
to Syria and north-east Arabia, led eventually to the definitive installa-
tion of the long reign of the Nas.rid line over Lakhm in southern Iraq.
Related tribal sections, under the name of Kinda, acquired hegemony89
over an arc connecting southern Syria with the northern tip of the Persian
Gulf, at one time, as we have seen, dislodged by the Nas.rids of al-H . ı̄ra
(c. 525–528). The contestation was such that at one point, during the same
period, al-H. ārith the Kindite did install himself in al-H. ı̄ra itself for a
brief period, after which the Byzantines installed him over a dominion
in Palestine and southern Syria.90 Hegemony over the north-east Arabia–
Najd–Yemen axis, the original centre of power of the Kindites, over the
Ma‘add, Madhh.ij, Nizār and other peoples, was exercised in tandem with
91
the vigorous and expansive H . imyarites.
It would be unreasonable to regard Kindite hegemony – the so-called
Second Kinda – in the fifth and a good part of the sixth century as a
unitary polity. There were clearly distinct principalities, one centred in
the south of Syria, with waxing and waning influence over the north-
east up to the Euphrates, and another in central Arabia,92 although this
does not exclude occasional overall hegemony which seems to have been
particularly the case under Imru’ al-Qays, whose influence seems to have
extended to al-Jazı̄ra, and to the irrigated agricultural region of Najrān
in the south. The famous inscription on his cenotaph or funerary stele
declared the extent of his dominion,93 calling him King of all Arabs, at the
time that the Nas.rids were consolidating their hold over al-H. ı̄ra. In all, the
Kindites, individually and collectively, entertained shifting alliances with
the Byzantines and the Sasanians; their inner-Arabian alliance with the
H. imyarites showed more signs of durability, despite frequent Kindite-led

87 On the settlement of Arab tribes in Mesopotamia, and their settlements, land holdings and markets
under Sasanian oversight, see Morony, Iraq, 216 f.
88 Cf. Jandora, March, 14.
89 A particularly good treatment is in Sartre, Etudes, 156 ff. See also ‘Kinda’, EI. For an excellent map
of Kindite domains and areas of influence, Tübinger Atlas, b.vi.7.
90 Rothstein, Laḫmı̂den, 87 ff.; Olinder, Kings, 65.
91 Piotrovskii, al-Yaman, 70 ff.; Smith, ‘Events’, 444 ff.; Gajda, Royaume, 77 f.
92 Cf. the comment of Caskel, ‘Inschrift’, 371. 93 Musée du Louvre, Inv. ao4083.
 Al-‘Arab al-Musta‘riba: alliances of late antique empire 117
rebellions against the Yemenites.94 At certain points in time the imperial
balances of power worked to the advantage of these polities; the Kindites
under Imru’ al-Qays clearly benefited from the Sasanian–Roman treaty of
297, disadvantageous to the Persians, and consolidated their dominions
with the assent of both parties.95
To a certain extent sedentarised, or at least basing their activities at per-
manent military and trading hubs – al-Namāra, and the commercial towns
of al-Hajr, Thāj and the earlier Qaryat al-Fāw96 – the Kindites and similar
principalities were neither ‘Bedouin polities’ nor geographically indistinct.
The Arabs had a continuous tradition of settlement in nodes of communi-
cation, which is little appreciated.97 Their dynasticism betrayed marks of
quasi-royalist social differentiation with its privileges and customary rights.
It should be pointed out that, contrary to the impression one gains of desert
and steppe polities involving primarily transhumant dominion over trans-
humant tribes, the picture that emerges upon scrutiny – and Beeston’s
interpretation of H . ujrid/Kindite dominion is, in this respect, exemplary –
is one of command from settled locations, including agricultural settle-
ments, from where military expeditions were sent forth to areas of interest,
and tribute exacted.98 With a backward glance from Paleo-Islamic polity,
this seems to be one of several dress rehearsals of Arab tribal polities with
moorings in permanent centres, consisting of networks of such centres
which still require proper study, facilitating the production of a potentially
pan-Arab koine memorialised in the repertoire of poetry, as has been noted
by Shahid.99
Kindite dominions in Syria had been gradually whittled away by the
Salı̄h. under the ruling lineage of al-D. ajā‘ima, who entered the Byzantine
system around 400, fought with the Byzantines against the Sasanians in
421–422 and 440–442, and joined them against the Vandals in Africa in
468. Having adopted Christianity, this house remained loyal to Rome (their
remnants fighting with them against the Paleo-Muslim armies), but had
already in the early sixth century started to founder before the Jafnids of
Ghassān and the Nas.rids, who emerged eventually as the mainstays of a

94 See Sartre, Etudes, 136 ff.; Kawar, ‘Byzantium and Kinda’; Caskel, ‘Inschrift’, 377 ff.; Bowersock,
‘Bilingual inscription’, 522; Fisher, ‘Ghassān’, 317 f.
95 Beeston, ‘Nemara and Faw’, 6.
96 On the latter in relation to the Kindites, see al-Ans.ārı̄, ‘Ad.wā’ jadı̄da’, 8 f.
97 Outlined in convincing detail by Ju‘ayt., al-Kūfa, 203 ff.
98 Beeston, ‘Namara and Faw’, 4 f., who also notes that Imru’ al-Qays set up his sons in control over
various settlements he subdued and used as centres of command. A concordant reading of this
. ad.āra, 135.
inscription is adopted by al-Ans.ārı̄, al-H
99 ‘Kinda’, EI, 5.119a.
118 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
more distinct imperial order among the Arabs.100 The disintegration of
the order imposed by Kinda in central Arabia made way for direct Yemeni
incursions, and a greater involvement of al-H . ı̄ra in the affairs of the region.
Not much purpose will be served by narrating the political history of
this system of hegemony over steppe and desert achieved by the Jafnids and
the Nas.rids. What needs to be retained from their wars, raids and relations,
often rough, with their sponsoring empires are elements that constituted
their legacy to what was to come, ‘foreshadowing events that were still, in
580, unthinkable’.101
The Jafnids, preceded by the Nas.rids, had established themselves in
the regions dividing the Romans from the Sasanians by the time of the
Sasanian–Roman treaty of 562. This treaty can be seen to mark the con-
solidation of a system of limitrophic control, as it gave official mutual
recognition by the two empires of their client polities, and sought to estab-
lish a more stable situation by specifically stipulating that they refrain from
mutual raiding.102
This Jafnid/Nas.rid system functioned not without disturbance. The
Jafnids tried to cement relations with the Sasanians just as, in line with
imperial policy of keeping allies on a short leash by sustaining their enemies,
the Romans subsidised the Nas.rids on occasion.103 It persisted until both
Arab parties to this arrangement started corroding, in good measure due
to the policies of their imperial sponsors. Constantinople lost a crucial ally
with the treacherous arrest and exile to Sicily of the Jafnid al-Mundhir
b. al-H. ārith in 581 who had, in 578, succeeded in conquering al-H . ı̄ra
104
and holding it briefly. This Christian dynasty and Byzantine Phylarcate
disappeared definitively after the Byzantine defeat by the Sasanians in 614,
and persisted thereafter only as part of the Byzantine army, while furtively
and uncertainly ruling their former domains, until their final defeat by the
Arab successors of Muh.ammad in 628,105 after which time many scions of
the family joined Mu‘āwiya and the Damascene Arab elite.106 Indeed, the
whole system, military as well as economic, with an important emphasis on
trade routes and access to Arabian natural resources, had begun to collapse
in the third quarter of the sixth century,107 as the Sasanians experienced
100 Sartre, Etudes, 146 ff.; ‘Salı̄h.’, EI. 101 Fisher, ‘Ghassān’, 334.
102 Kawar, ‘Peace treaty’; Fisher, ‘Ghassān’, 327; Mitchell, Later Roman Empire, 394.
103 Smith, ‘Events’, 437 f.; Fisher, ‘Ghassān’, 326, 331.
104 Shahı̂d, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, 1.398; on the official imperial designations
of this polity, ibid., 1.109 ff. For an exploration of the reasons behind this Roman volte-face, Fisher,
Between Empires, 174 ff.
105 On which: Nöldeke, Umarā’, passim; Sartre, Etudes, 162 ff. 106 Kennedy, ‘Syrian elites’, 195 f.
107 For a very clear description, see Smith, ‘Events’, 467 f. and passim.
 Al-‘Arab al-Musta‘riba: alliances of late antique empire 119
a grievous internal crisis, and the Romans were internally exhausted by
events surrounding the abdication of Justinian II in 578. It might be added
that this breakdown was exacerbated by the social consequences of unusual
climatic conditions, plagues and seismic activity that marked this period,
matters only infrequently indicated, and even less directly investigated.108
As for the Nas.rids, they had become ascendant in north and east Arabia
from around the 530s. Al-Mundhir b. al-Nu‘mān was crowned and declared
King of the Arabian Arabs by Anōsharwān (r. 531–579), with dominion over
Oman, Bah.rayn, al-Yamāma and south-west to the vicinity of al-T.ā’if.109
Later, al-Nu‘mān b. al-Mundhir, having been crowned by Hormizd IV (r.
579–590), fell out with the Sasanians, who were clearly trying to assert
more direct control over eastern Arabia, and was captured and executed
by Khusrō II Parvez in 602, Sasanian patronage now being extended to
110
the B. H. anı̄fa in al-Yamāma. It has been claimed that the Sasanians had
an official representative overseeing inner Arabia, marzubān al-bādiya or
marzubān Zārā.111
Yet soon thereafter Sasanian armies and their Arab auxiliaries were
defeated by the Arabs under the leadership of B. Bakr b. Wā’il (of the
Kinda) at the Battle of Dhū Qār (of uncertain date, c. 611) near what was
to become al-Kūfa in southern Iraq. This battle later assumed almost leg-
endary status – on hearing of this, Muh.ammad is reported to have said that
this was the day on which the Arabs had obtained justice over the Persians
(al-‘Ajam).112 It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that it was the very same
Bakr b. Wā’il, under the leadership of al-Muthannā b. H . āritha, that initi-
ated a further push, ultimately successful, into Iraq following the failure of
the initial Paleo-Muslim Arab raids, first led by Khālid b. al-Walı̄d, by the
Persian counter-attack at the Battle of the Bridge, after which al-Muthannā
took over command of the Arabs, his predecessor having perished in the
course of the battle.113 This formed part of a series of events, the Arab
conquests, which had, with Dhū Qār, become perhaps less unthinkable
than it was in the 580s.114
The vacuum resulting from these events and lasting for half a century,
and, in eastern and central Arabia, from the earlier collapse of Kinda
and their attempted replacement by the Nas.rids in contest with H . imyar,

108 Korotaev et al., ‘Origins’, 245 ff., 263 ff. 109 Simon, Meccan Trade, 332.
110 Cf. Simon, Meccan Trade, 30; Lecker, ‘Taxes’, 112, 115.
111 Simon, Meccan Trade, 333. 112 TAB, 291. See the details in AGH, 24.35 ff.
113 See the discussion of Morony, Iraq, 220.
114 See ‘Dhū Kār’, EI, for a useful account of the battle and its uncertainties.
120 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
encouraged continued south Arabian interest in Arabia as a whole, includ-
ing its western part, and increasing direct imperial intervention in its affairs.
It could also be said that this, along with the consequences of some eco-
nomic and strategic policies of Justinian, brought about the end of the
relative isolation of south Arabia from the imperial systems in place, and
115
eventually to the end of H . imyarite independence, unlocking Arabian
terrains in which they had been very active. These events were to have an
116
impact on Mecca and the H . ijāz – it is not known if the south Arabians
had a bardic tradition, but what is clear is that this break from isolation
gave rise to a plentiful lore of royal legends recorded by ‘Ubayd b. Sharyah.
Ma‘dı̄karib Ya‘fur, King of H . imyar (r. 519–522), had already sent an
expedition into central Arabia, and possibly further, up to the Euphrates,117
against al-Mundhir the Lakhmid, possibly as part of a Roman campaign
against the Sasanian Kavādh (r. 488–531) – although recent work encourages
us not to overestimate the pertinence of the proxy model for the interpre-
tation of Aksumite, and, by extension, H . imyarite military campaigns prior
to the time of Justinian.118 Like his predecessor Abı̄karib As‘ad, he added
to his titulature his status of King of the Arabs of the High Country,
presumably the Najd plateau, and of the coast of H . ijāz, a practice con-
tinued by the Ethiopian general Abraha.119 Under Abraha (r. c. 535–565),
the Ethiopian King of Yemen who used H . imyarite titulature and pressed
H. imyarite claims, recorded in Sabaic inscriptions, an expedition was sent
to central and western (presumably north-western) Arabia, and a revolt of
120
Kinda in H . ad.ramawt was suppressed. Abraha had already subjugated
the nebulous Ma‘add, Kinda’s erstwhile central Arabian mainstay who,
albeit early on dwelling to the west of al-Yamāma, had come to control the
eastern shores of the Arabian Gulf, probably in the context of their alliance
with Kinda, in the course of a campaign in 544.121
It has been plausibly conjectured that Abraha tried to sponsor the cemen-
tation of a confederation to replace Kinda, based on Khath‘am or Khuzā‘a,
until the landing of a Persian maritime expedition in Yemen in 576–577,
leading ultimately to direct Persian rule in 599.122 In Arabia as a whole
115 Smith, ‘Events’, 463; Gajda, Royaume, ch. 4. 116 Gajda, Royaume, 53 ff.
117 Gajda, Royaume, 77 f. 118 Hatke, ‘Africans’, 405 f., 414 f., 417.
119 See Beaucamp et al., ‘Persécution’, 74, 78.
120 Beaucamp et al., ‘Persécution’, 75, 79. On H . imyarite titulature, Gajda, Royaume, 188 ff.
121 Gajda, Royaume, 137 ff.; Smith, ‘Events’, 428, 435. The pertinence of import levies to military
activity in this region is well brought out in ibid., 442.
122 Piotrovskii, al-Yaman, 80; TAB, 267; Gajda, Royaume, 152 ff. and ch. 5. Piotrovskii (al-Yaman, 82,
148 ff.) proposes a convincing picture of tribal alliances in central Arabia during this period. For
an overall picture of the Persian intervention based on what may be reconstructed from Arabic
sources, see Daghfous, Yaman, 139 ff.
 Al-‘Arab al-Musta‘riba: alliances of late antique empire 121
during this period that followed the collapse of Kinda, one might speak
of a foundering of larger supra-tribal structures in favour of polities with
softer structures,123 which may perhaps contribute to explaining why it
was that surrounding polities took on a more active, direct role in Arabian
affairs, uncertain for reasons not unrelated to external powers.
The Jafnids had already made their presence felt in southern Syria and up
the steppe to the Euphrates along the fringes of the desert east of Damascus;
the establishment of an Arab confederate (feodus) of the emperor was, in
effect, an act of recognition of power in place;124 we know little of direct
incursions of the New Rome in inner-Jafnid politics, but it would be fair to
assume that they were not negligible. Al-H . ārith had already been elevated
by Justinian around 530, and the system of subsidies was already in place.125
In 523–529, an Arabic inscription at Jabal Usays, some 100 km east of
Damascus, in a slightly southerly direction, had declared that its author,
Qutham b. Mughı̄ra al-Awsı̄ (Ibrāhı̄m b. Mughı̄ra according to another
reading), had been sent there on what appears to have been a military
126
mission by al-H . ārith al-Malik (the King).
In fact, there were grounds apart from vainglory or Roman ratification
that caused chiefs of Jafnids to assume royal titles and prerogatives. As with
Kinda and the Nas.rids, we have here an instance of quasi-royalist social
differentiation, made possible by the formation of relatively large-scale
polities facilitated by imperial politics, which had a transformative effect
on the Arabs, as it had on the Germans.127 The transition between chief-
dom and kingship takes place when sufficient wealth is accumulated, in
part through privileges and exactions, and spent to purposes of patronage,
subsidy, sponsorship and paying retainers, on ostentatious display (includ-
ing processions), itself a visible adjunct of royalty. Unlike a chief, a king
draws upon political authority and military might, over and above social
and ‘tribal’ mechanisms of control. He also receives a particularly lofty,
even a transcendent consideration in panegyric poetry.128
In addition to his and his family’s (officially Miaphysite) Christianity, al-
Mundhir b. al-H . ārith (r. 569–582) adopted certain practices of the Roman
elite. In any case, conversion to Christianity provided opportunities for

123 Korotaev et al., ‘Origins’, 248, offering an explanation in terms of a socio-ecological crisis.
124 Sartre, Etudes, 164 f.; Fisher, ‘Ghassān’, 333. 125 Fisher, ‘Ghassān’, 318 f.
126 Robin and Gorea, ‘réexamin’, 507 and passim, with facsimiles at figs. 1–3; for the reading *Ibrāhı̄m,
Grohmann, Paläographie, 2.16 f.
127 On these transformative effects, and their mechanisms, including the emergence of royalty, on
Germanic peoples, Heather, Empires, ch. 2, passim.
128 Al-Nu‘aymı̄, al-Ust.ūra, 83 ff.
122 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
advancement through imperial recognition and the emergence of elites
framed in imperial terms, quite apart from leading to settlement and its
use by the Romans against Ctesiphon.129 Al-Mundhir may well have had
a general administrative role and obtained a reduced imperial tax burden
that may help explain the clear prosperity of core Ghassānid territories.130
These territories, centred at al-Jābiya south of Damascus and stretching
across the fertile H . awrān (including Bus.ra and Dar‘ā) have left plentiful
archaeological records of prosperity both rural and urban.131 The security
they maintained over the easterly stretches of the desert and steppe is
signalled by the absence of evidence of defensive structures, including
towers, characteristic of other regions.132 The Jafnids’ reach sometimes
stretched all the way south to Taymā’ at the borders of H . ijāz, and indeed
possibly, on occasion, to the region of Yathrib (henceforth Medina).133
More durably, this dominion stretched north along the edge of the steppe
east of Damascus to al-Rus.āfa (Sergiopolis), where the Jafnids maintained
a ‘fortress-shrine’,134 and constructed an audience hall with an inscription
proclaiming, in Greek, al-Mundhir’s Victory and Fortune, nikā hē tychē
alamoundarou. There, the Jafnids held court at the annual fair and pil-
grimage at the shrine of St Sergius on 15 November, and welcomed and
entertained the B. Taghlib and other Arabs of the desert and the steppe.135
At both al-Rus.āfa and al-Jābiya, but in Bus.ra where there was also a shrine
for St Sergius,136 and in desert palaces,137 and possibly also in monasteries
around and in between,138 they held court, projected authority and received
their panegyrists, the greatest among whom was al-Nābigha al-Dhubyānı̄
(d. c. 604),139 who was to be so important to the canon of Arabic poetry.
If prefiguration there was, it could be said with justice that the Jafnids
prefigured the Umayyads. This might at least be said with reference to the

129 Fisher, Between Empires, 39 ff.

130 Sauvaget, ‘Ghassanides’, 121; Fisher, ‘Ghassān’, 321 f., 325. These territories of course shifted over
time: Nöldeke, Umarā’, 44, 51 f.
131 Foss, ‘Syria in transition’, 240 ff., 250 f.; Sartre, Etudes, 178 ff.
132 Foss, ‘Syria in transition’, 247, 252. This is in contrast to the limes fortifications further north-east:
Sauvaget, ‘Ghassanides’, 122.
133 Sartre, Etudes, 187. 134 Fowden, Barbarian Plain, 77 ff.; Sartre, Etudes, 172.
135 Sauvaget, ‘Ghassanides’, 120, 127 ff.; Sartre, Etudes, 181 f.; Fowden, Barbarian Plain, 149 ff.
136 Wood, We have no King, 238 f. 137 See now Fisher, Between Empires, 206 f., 208.
138 Sartre, Etudes, 182 ff. On Jafnid buildings, ibid., 177 ff. It is interesting to note that the Jafnids
reflected a complex pattern of local Hellenisation, characterised by a ‘structured detachment’.
With one extant exception, they used Greek as an epigraphic language (Fisher, Between Empires,
57 f., 64; Genequand, ‘Some thoughts’, 78 ff.), a ‘default’ language, but not Syriac (Hoyland,
‘Arab kings’, 130 ff.). But they had no distinctive architectural style (Genequand, ‘Some thoughts’,
80 and 78 ff.).
139 On these panegyrics, Montgomery, Vagaries, 147 ff.
 Al-‘Arab al-Musta‘riba: alliances of late antique empire 123
Umayyads’ earlier phase prior to their having stepped into the shoes of
their Roman predecessors, while they were still Arabian lords (see Fig. 1).
The imperial, Umayyads’ home base was that of the Ghassānid House of
Jafna, ‘to some extent, familiar territory’,140 and they were allied with the
same, initially Christian, tribes of Kalb, Judhām and others.
For their part, the Nas.rids left multiple legacies. One was administrative,
of which there is little surviving evidence from the Jafnids, who seem,
unlike them, to have had itinerant capitals,141 reminiscent of Kinda in
moments of greater unity and extension. The Nas.rids seem to have had
the institution of ridāfa, inherited within the clans of Yarbu‘ of Tamı̄m,
Sadūs of Shaybān, and D . abba and Taym Allāt of Taghlib, which was to be
duly transformed later into the vizierate of the Abbasids. The Nas.rids were
of course a lineage, not a tribe, not unlike the Umayyads, but had little
intrinsic military capacity or local genealogical connection, no matter how
these were sculpted and when in order to bring Mud.ar within the ambit
of their dominion.142
143
There are also indications of internal urban organisation at al-H . ı̄ra,
of which we have little that has survived in the sources concerning the
Jafnids. Their armies consisted of mercenaries, independent tribal levies
having been used on some occasions.144 In the final analysis, the legacy of
al-H. ı̄ra was cultural and ceremonial, but also organisational; it seems to
have been felt in Mecca more than that of the Jafnids, although it was the
latter who showed the Umayyads the way on their Syrian home-ground,
and who, in many ways, helped give shape to the earlier Umayyad period
in Syria. It was not for nothing that later Arabising traditions, when they
sought to defend pre-Islamic Arabs against detractors who charged them
with barbarism, and insisted they ate disgusting things like rodents or
blood pudding, bandied about a dish called al-Ghassāniyya.145
Finally, it must be said that the legacy bequeathed by both the Jafnids and
the Nas.rids was a certain political and cultural notion of Arabism, based
upon what had by then been at least a century of intense articulation,
incessant wars over control of its routes and nodes being indicative of its
intensity. What appears to be a foundation legend for al-H . ı̄ra was expressed
in the second half of the sixth century by one of their major court poets,

140 Fisher, Between Empires, 210. 141 Nöldeke, Umarā’, 26.

142 Ibn H abı̄b, al-Muh abbar, 204, 253; Ibn Durayd, al-Ishtiqāq, 352 (both sources, along with others,
. .
are quoted by Kister, ‘Al-H. ı̄ra’, 149 f.); Morony, Iraq, 220.
143 Piotrovskii, al-Yaman, 168 ff. 144 Kister, ‘Al-Hı̄ra’, 165 ff.
.
145 Ibn Qutayba, Fad.l, 78; Ibn Sa‘ı̄d, Nashwa, 2.792. No ingredients are specified, and no recipe is
mentioned.
Fig. 1 Ghassānid figure. The western mosaic panel above the nave at the upper Kaianos church, Mount Nebo, Jordan. Upper part
showing a man (presumably a Ghassānid warrior) leading a camel. Sixth century. Now at the Mount Nebo rest house.
Text: + [invocative cross] hyper anapauseōs Theodōr/t(?) [= Theodoros or Theodotos, the rest illegible] Tou presbyterou.
Translation: ‘For the repose of Theodor/t . . . the presbyter.’
Person on the left: Phi-dos, followed by a flowery ornament, then Iō-annēs.
 Al-‘Arab al-Musta‘riba: alliances of late antique empire 125
146
‘Adı̄ b. Zayd, claiming for al-H. ı̄ra succession to Palmyra and Zenobia.
Arguably the most significant of Arab cities in the three centuries preceding
Islam,147 al-H. ı̄ra was ruled by a royal house one of whose descendants
reportedly refused a marriage proposal from Muh.ammad on the grounds
that ‘a queen does not give herself to a tradesman’,148 and instituted rites
of royalty on the Sasanian model.149
This articulation was in many ways expressed in overarching genealogies,
which call for a brief comment. These may or may not have been actually
‘remembered’, but were deployed according to what political circumstances
required, genealogies themselves often being an expression of social rela-
tions at a given moment in time.150 There is little doubt that overarching
Arab genealogies were organised along lines reminiscent of an ancient eth-
nological lore prevalent in the steppe and desert, going back to the second
millennium bc, including the division between southern and northern
Arabs, material that was later to be related in Biblical genealogies.151
But operative genealogies were of much shorter duration; only a certain
notional coherence was required by Imru’ al-Qays’ famous inscription
mentioned above.152 It is of course unsurprising that references to biblical
genealogies, and to the relation of the Arabs to them, a genealogy of the
very upper and remoter reaches, should abound in Arabic legends and
in ancient Arabic poetry, especially that produced within the Christian
environment of the courts of the Jafnids and Nas.rids,153 sometimes by
Christian poets. The view that genealogies reflected only alliances of the
moment or that they were mere rationalisations of later events is belied
146 Toral-Niehoff, ‘Gestaltung’, 240. 147 ‘al-Hı̄ra’, EI. 148 SH, 3.454.
.
149 Al-H. illı̄, Manāqib, 107; ‘Athamina, ‘Tribal kings’, 30, 32.
150 Cf. Goody and Watt, ‘Consequences’, 31.
151 Finkelstein, ‘Genealogy’, 116 f., 117 n. 86. Yet such genealogies need not be interpreted as Biblical
interferences although these certainly existed in certain milieux (Millar, ‘Hagar’), nor need they
be seen merely as a literary attribution by outsiders such as Eusebius or Sozomen (Sozomenos,
Historia, 6.38.10; Brock, ‘Syriac views’, 15; Fisher, Between Empires, 162 ff.). Biblicism there may
have been in some such genealogies, but one would need to consider the figures of Abraham and
Ishmael here outside the Biblical paradigm, and perhaps beyond it, as heroes, not as prophets.
Ishmael, Ismā‘ı̄l, does not occur in pre-Islamic onomastics, inscriptions or genealogies (Dagorn,
Geste, chs. 2 and 3, passim, and Rodinson’s Preface to ibid., xxii–xxiii, where it is argued that, in
Thamūdic and H . ijāzi onomastics, theophoric names with an imperfect verb construction are rare).
But one needs to consider the occurrence of the name Ysm‘l in Safaitic inscriptions (al-Ah.mad,
Mujtama‘, 258, 285). There are some fifty such occurrences (but none in other Ancient North
Arabian inscriptions), and some occurrences in Ancient South Arabian, especially Minaic (M.
Macdonald, personal communication). The name Adam seems to occur in Safaitic inscriptions
(Littmann, Safaitic Inscriptions, nos. 70, 85).
152 For instance, Millar, Roman Near East, 513 f.; Dagorn, Geste, chs. 2–3, passim. This is reflected in
Arabic panegyric poetry, which makes little of distant origins and connections: Rūmı̄ya, al-Qas.ı̄da,
35.
153 Hirschberg, Lehren, ch. 2.
126 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
by empirical evidence, where inner-tribal conflict of a given moment is
reflected in historical narratives in a way that tends to preserve, not skew,
the fullness of actual conflictual relations at the lowest levels at which they
operated. Such actual relations do not seem to have accommodated the
requirement that conflicts of the moment be transposed into the register of
genealogical distinctions,154 and the concordance and mutual confirmations
between genealogical works and ancient Arabic poetry are remarkable.155

Al-‘Arab al-Musta‘riba: mechanisms of control

It has been suggested that the imperial ratification of the Jafnids and
Nas.rids in their regions of hegemony was in effect a recognition of a
system in place. It must be stressed that, for all that is commonly said
about the egalitarianism of desert and steppe Arabs, there existed a very
decided reality to hierarchy and social differentiation, to the prerogatives
of noble lineages and, within these lineages, of their chiefs.156 An attitude
of near-veneration seems to have been had towards chiefly lineages, to the
extent that their blood was widely believed to cure rabies.157 A primus inter
pares asserted authority by wielding superior wealth and force unsentimen-
tally. Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry is replete with a vocabulary of hierarchy,
dominance and superordination, as it celebrated feats at arms.158
Alliances were forged between lineage segments, not ‘tribes’, and, for
all the genealogical lore deployed by poets and by chiefs, for praise or
for symbolic and genealogical appeal, the higher ranges of genealogical
trees, real or fictitious, served the political functions of expressing ideally
military mobilisation and integration only at levels of state or quasi-state
polities, rather than the concrete purposes of alliance.159 In other words,

154 See, for instance, the discussion of this matter with regard to ‘Abd Manāf and ‘Abd al-Dār within
Quraysh: Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, 5.
155 Nöldeke, Review of Robertson-Smith, Kinship and Marriage, 117.
156 Long ago, Goldziher had already commented negatively on Caetani’s notion of an Arab democratic
ethos, noting that they were a ‘durch und durch aristokrastischer Volk’ (letter to Nöldeke, 16 May
1907: Simon, Goldziher, 298).
157 Al-Mufad.d.aliyyāt, 35.14 (‘Awf b. al-Ah.was, c. end of the sixth century); AGH, 15.215 – this belief
persisted into Islamic times, mentioned in a letter from ‘Abd al-Malik b. Marwān to al-H . ajjāj
(al-Drūbı̄ and Jarrār, Jamhara, no. 36.1.
158 Al-Shāyi‘, Mu‘jam, 97 ff.; ‘Alı̄, al-Mufas..sal, vol. 4, ch. 47.
159 Cahen (‘Notes’, 83 f.) discusses the question of legitimation in the context of Arabic historiogra-
phy. Arab historians and geneaologists had developed an inconsistent and imprecise vocabulary to
distinguish various levels of genealogical segmentation (sha‘b, jadhm, h.ayy, jumhūr, qabı̄la, ‘imāra,
bat.n, fakhdh, raht., fas.ı̄la, ‘ashı̄ra: Szombathy, Genealogy, 160 ff.). For this, and use for the clas-
sification of Arab groups, see especially al-Hamadānı̄, ‘Ujāla, 6 f.; al-Nuwayrı̄, Nihāya, 2.284 f.;
al-Sam‘ānı̄, al-Ansāb, 1.18; al-Maqrı̄zı̄, al-Nizā‘, 57; Szombathy, Genealogy, 60 ff. To what extent
 Al-‘Arab al-Musta‘riba: mechanisms of control 127
genealogies must be treated as quite other than operative kinship ties,160
which are often as conflictual as they are binding. Tribes, as suggested, result
from politics, and do not emerge from nature, catalysed by military force
and formed under the pressure of external circumstances and actors,161 in
our case state or quasi-state polities galvanised by imperial sponsors. These
act upon separate segments and facilitate their more durable crystallisation:
segments which might resort to altering their genealogies under determi-
nate conditions, as Arab historians were very well aware,162 considering
the notion that ties of clientage and alliance are as effective practically as
relations of blood.163 At the Battle of Dhū Qār, for instance, it was not
Bakr b. Wā’il as such who waged war on the Sasanians, but certain leading
clans of B. Shaybān belonging to them; some of these later recomposed
their relations with the Persians, and were initially reluctant to join the
Paleo-Muslim armies, while during this celebrated battle many sections of
Bakr b. Wā’il fought on the other side.164 Similarly, during the Battle of
the Camel in 656, we are told that the Yaman of Bas.ra defeated the Yaman
of al-Kūfa, and the Rabı̄‘a of Bas.ra that of al-Kūfa.165
The common model of acephalic segmentary kinship organisation is
not of much use to the historian; it appears to be rather ideological than
operative, not least as we are now discussing leadership, not clan recom-
position at lower levels resulting from a variety of political and ecological
circumstances.166 Segmentation represents distinctiveness and often enmity
at lower levels, and alliance at higher levels. For all the emphasis by the
Arabs on the inviolability of honour (‘ird.),167 nobility (‘izza) and repute
(sı̄t.), and for all the acute sensitivity to dishonour (dhilla), these notions
related primarily to congenital collectivities of immediate relevance, in the

and in what ways this corresponded to early Arab usage is a matter for investigation, as is the extent
and the settings in which it may have been deployed by this early usage.
160 Lindner, ‘Nomadic tribe’, 690 ff.
161 Lindner, ‘Nomadic tribe’, 699, and cf. Kasdan and Murphy, ‘Parallel cousin marriage’, 26.
162 Al-Ya‘qūbı̄, Tārı̄kh, 1.235 f. The confusion and conflation of genealogies is a topic that claimed
the attention of medieval Arabic historical writing: see, for instance, Ibn Khaldūn, al-Muqaddima,
1.211 ff. and al-Hamadānı̄, al-Iklı̄l, 3 f.
163 Al-Jāh.iz., Rasā’il, 1.15 ff. At 1.11, the author calls h.asab, relations resulting both from ties of marriage
and from effective alliances rather than alliances of genealogical connections, as ‘a new birth’
resulting in conduct ascribed to that resulting from blood ties, reminiscent of Ibn Khaldūn’s
famous discussion of blood ties real and virtual. See the comments of Bourdieu, Esquisse, 88.
164 Donner, ‘Bakr b. Wā’il’, 28, 37. Similarly, the history of B. Asad, generically defined, is inadequate
for historical consideration, requiring emphasis on separate segments and territorial relations
(Landau-Tesseron, ‘Asad’, 4 and passim).
165 Sayf b. ‘Umar, Ridda, § 259. 166 Cf. the discussion of Lindner, ‘Nomadic tribe’, 692 ff., 700.
167 Contra Goldziher, who famously spoke of muruwwa: Farès, Honneur, 30 f.
128 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
context of which the individual was derivative.168 As if to underline this,
women not infrequently joined their menfolk in battle mounted on a dha‘n
on camelback, with frame drums, with hair loosened, chanting encourage-
ment in rajaz mode, their presence a token of their disgrace in case of
defeat.169
Individual honour, ferocious as it may have been, being dependent
upon the collectivity, was, by some perennial covenant, deposited in the
chief, the sayyid. Chieftaincy in a lineage segment is reproduced at progres-
sively higher levels as well, and it was at each of these levels that alliances
were constructed. Certain sections of clans were more equal than others;
in the prevalent regime of power relations among tribes, often reflected
in alliances, weaker parties were treated unequally in respect to liability
for diyya, blood-wit, not unusually by a multiple of two.170 Distinction
could be achieved by generosity, hence the epithet mut.‘im,171 Provider,
not unnaturally in a redistributive economy, and particularly important in
times of dearth,172 using the lots of the maysir,173 as a matter of ‘covenantal
obligation’.174
But generosity, for all its importance, was by no means alone the dis-
tinctive mark of chieftaincy. This was marked by a number of prerogatives
and customary rights, not the least of which was the exaction of tribute,175
including a fourth of the booty captured by subaltern sections, often deliv-
ered, in kind, once a year at ‘Ukāz.,176 and, one would assume, at other
markets and fairs as well. This fourth, called al-mirbā‘, was a particu-
lar category of the more general understanding of tribute, itāwa. H . ujr,
the father of Imru’ al-Qays the king, extracted tribute from sections of

168 Farès, Honneur, 110 ff. and chs. 2 and 3, passim. It is pertinent to note that, among the Arabs, suicide
(‘afd, i‘tifād) following improvidence by individuals was practised in order for the individual not to
appear to be needy: ‘‘-f-d’, LA; al-Suyūt.ı̄, al-Durr, 6.397 ff.; and see Heck, ‘Arabia without spices’,
562.
169 See the discussions among the Quraysh about bringing out the dha‘n to the Battle of Uh.ud in
WAQ, 202, 206, 208, TAB, 389 ff. In some cases, women of uncertain status would also promise
sexual favours to the victors of their own people, in rajaz: AGH, 24.54 f. Lammens (‘Culte’, 50 f.)
likens the role women played in these battles to that of the Vestal Virgins of Rome, both repositories
of collective honour. This aspect of warfare is represented in Arabian rock images: Macdonald,
‘Goddesses, dancing girls’, 283 ff.
170 For instance, AGH, 13.148, 154, 156 (twice the amount for B. al-H . ārith b. Zahrān than for B. Daws
and their associates).
171 ‘Alı̄, al-Mufas..sal, 4.580. See the list in WAQ, 128, 144 f., and Ibn Sa‘d, T . abaqāt, 1.72.
172 See the praise of Umayya b. Abı̄ al-Salt. (Dı̄wān, 7.1) of such persons in times of need.
173 Ibn Qutayba, al-Maysir, 43, 53, 77. 174 Jamil, ‘Playing for time’, 64.
175 For instance, AGH, 11.56 (Zuhayr b. Jadhı̄ma al-‘Absı̄, exacting a tenth of the wealth of Hawāzin
before they attained this capacity in their turn).
176 For instance, AGH, 5.17, 11.56. See in general, ‘Alı̄, al-Mufas..sal, 4.266. Interestingly, chiefly lineages
in al-H . ı̄ra under the Nas.rids would also claim this (Morony, Iraq, 220).
 Al-‘Arab al-Musta‘riba: mechanisms of control 129
B. Asad, collected by special agents annually sent out.177 Of captive women
enslaved in the course of raids or wars, chieftains had the right of first choice
among them, entirely at their discretion (s.afāyā), a portion reserved and
excluded from the overall booty to be distributed.178
The same H . ujr, we are told, employed h.ujjāb, which should probably
be taken to mean personal bodyguards rather than chamberlains, recruited
from the progeny of Khaddān b. Khanthar of the B. al-H . ārith b. Sa‘d,
who had been under his protection since his reprieve,179 presumably after
having been taken captive and about to be put to death – a relationship of
patronage and fealty which, one would assume, involved an oath. Kulayb
b. Rabı̄‘a, a leader in the Basūs war, controlled access to pasture, water
and the hunt, and required permission before any raiding took place in
territories under this control.180
Control of territory and declarations of territorially inviolable protected
pasture (h.imā), a private turf, were also chiefly prerogatives, individually
and on behalf of the collectivity they led, acquired and defended with force
against infraction.181 It cannot be emphasised sufficiently that transhumant
Arabs did not quite conform to the image of nomads wandering about
randomly and raiding opportunistically, although this latter did occur.
Paths and locations of encampments, grazing grounds and underground
water were coveted, and needed to be staked, acquired and protected.
Territorial control was a chief concern and, apart from livestock, was the
chief economic good; tribal and clan identities make little sense without
indications of territory,182 and its mineral and, in certain parts, agricultural
produce.
As a correlate, chiefs and chiefly lineages had the capacity to accord
protection to individuals (ijāra, implying direct and continuous protection
in the physical vicinity of the protector and his clan, or in his territory),
and to allied groups. This relationship involved the workings of a code
of honour, and can be correlated to a specific tie of personal allegiance
and dependence called walā’.183 Interestingly but unsurprisingly given the
above emphasis on territory, the relationship of protection was officiated
through a term, ijāra, connoting neighbourhood.184

177 AGH, 9.62. 178 ‘Alı̄, al-Mufassal, 4.266; Jacob, Beduinenleben, 215 f.
..
179 AGH, 9.63. 180 AGH, 5.24. 181 ‘Alı̄, al-Mufassal, 4.267 ff.
..
182 Cf. Morony, Iraq, 215, and Beeston, ‘Kingship’, 260, with a comparison with Anglo-Saxon England.
183 It has been suggested that this tie is analogous to the paranomē (essentially a labour arrangement)
as elaborated in Roman provincial law, and that the Arabian arrangement may have its origin in
this law, or was an archaic version thereof (Crone, Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law, 88, 99).
184 See the semantic consideration by al-Shāyi‘, Mu‘jam, 21 f.
130 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
This code of honour was one in which preying upon the weak served
only to increase glory and sonorous renown, celebrated in poetry, serving as
the material-moral basis of honour.185 Preying upon weaker parties served
to enhance patrimony in slaves, livestock and territory, nobler captives
promising commensurate ransom. Raiding (ghazū) is more complex than a
proclivity for marauding, or armed robbery arising from need in the bleak
ecological conditions. The power to subjugate is a correlate of the power
to grant protection, and protection offered to men was continuous with
inviolability offered to deities to whom sacred territory (h.aram) is allocated.
Inviolability is an elementary notion, in which the interface between the
sacred and the profane is not always distinct.186
Not unlike the territorial reservation of a h.imā, sacred territory, h.aram,
was set up under a regime of control and inviolability by both men and
gods, and a similar set of rules applied to both. No hunting was allowed in
such locations, and a number of other restrictions applied, including the
inviolability of fugitives.187 Often enough, land was allocated to the deity
or deities, where animals could pasture freely, on which we have epigraphic
details from south Arabia, using the term h.mt, cognate with the Arabic
h.imā.188 That such locations were declared and demarcated (very likely
with cairns) in situations where the groups undertaking to identify and
protect them were claiming territorial dominance and allied prerogatives
is indicated by many reports that we have. The B. Baghı̄d. of Ghat.afān of
Tihāma, for instance, at a date close enough to the time of Muh.ammad
to have been remembered, declared themselves busul, like Quraysh, and
instituted a system of trucial months and, in competition with Mecca, in
the third quarter of the sixth century, tried to establish a h.aram. They were
thwarted by a prompt military operation led by Zuhayr b. Janāb of the B.
Kalb.189 This incident is unlikely to have been the first in Arabia.
A h.aram referred to the combination of sacred character and spatial
boundary,190 delimited and guaranteed by a controlling instance. Its spatial

185 This is all well reflected in panegyric poetry: Rūmı̄ya, al-Qas.ı̄da, 30 f., 35, 50.
186 This is fully supported by the vocabulary employed, with derivatives of h.-r-m used for both. One
instance is the ijāra of the notorious al-H . ārith b. Z.ālim who, having fled al-H . ı̄ra following a
murder he committed while a guest of al-Nu‘mān the king, was offered protection by a succession
of individuals, one of whom ‘built a qubba over him’, until he was admitted to the protection of
Qatāda b. Maslama al-H . anafı̄’s fortress, who declared that al-H . ārith had sought his protection,
reportedly using the expression ‘tah.arrama bı̄’. Such a person with rights to inviolability was
designated basl. Al-H . ārith was then armed by his protector and given leave to practise highway
robbery at a particular location, and later obtained protection from Quraysh, until he eventually
joined the court of the Jafnids: AGH, 11.74, 80, 81 ff. and 19.16 (for basl). See ‘h.-r-m’, LA.
187 For instance, AGH, 19.15, with reference to Mecca. 188 Frantsouzoff, ‘Sacred pastures’, passim.
189 AGH, 19.15 f.; Kister, ‘Mecca and Tamı̄m’, 42 ff. 190 Gawlikowski, ‘Sacred space’, 301 f.
 Al-‘Arab al-Musta‘riba: mechanisms of control 131
delimitation was signposted by various marks of enclosure, often involv-
ing the consecration of surrounding spaces (especially ravines, creeks and
heights) for which there is archaeological evidence from the Negev and else-
where, and which accord with reports in Arabic literary sources.191 Often,
if not invariably, sacred locations included wells and trees.192
Such indicators of dominion were of course multiplied as the range
of domination expanded, and as we approach quasi-state polities. The
Nas.rids deployed much the same mechanisms of extracting tribute and
of cementing alliances using the usual combinations of inducement
and menace.193 But, like the Jafnids, the Nas.rids were kings. The title
had been adopted by a number of lesser chiefs;194 but, with them, it
implied additionally formal recognition by neighbouring empires.
Lesser kings than those of the Lakhm and the Ghassān also appeared
wearing crowns, tı̄jān (sg. tāj), but we have no way of telling what materials
these were made of, how they were designed and according to what norms,
if any, or how they may have been improvised, although the assumption
that these kings emulated kings of more consequence would naturally come
to mind. They held court dressed in fine textiles, in a qubba, a canopy of
tanned leather, generally red, and widely regarded as a sign of wealth and
nobility.195 The receipt of delegations from subaltern lineages was a regular
occurrence during which allegiance and subordination were affirmed and
reaffirmed196 – the receipt of such wufūd (sg. wafd) was to be a significant
feature in Muh.ammad’s affirmation of his authority, and the recognition
of this authority.

191 Nevo, Pagans and Herders, 84 f., 127, 129, 129 n. 20; Krone, al-Lāt, §§ 7.1.1–2 and p. 389; Trombley,
Hellenic Religion, 2.178.
192 ‘Alı̄, al-Mufas..sal, 6.405 f. 193 Donner, Conquests, 45 ff.; Kister, ‘al-Hı̄ra’, 153 ff., 157 ff.
.
194 For instance, ‘Amr b. al-It.nāba al-Khazrajı̄ in Medina (AGH, 11.85 f.), and Ukaydir b. ‘Abd al-Malik
al-Kindı̄, who controlled Dūmat al-Jandal during the time of Muh.ammad, before submitting to
Khālid b. al-Walı̄d (WAQ, 1025).
195 Ibn Sa‘ı̄d, Nashwa, 1.286; al-A‘shā, Dı̄wān, 1.56, 4.46, 38.24, 76.8; al-Mufad.d.aliyyāt, 10.9 (Bashama
b. ‘Amr, c. late sixth century); Ibn Qutayba, al-Shi‘r, 1.106, 159. Lammens, Arabie, 103 f., 111 ff.;
see AGH, 16.51; 9.63 (on the red qubba of H . ujr mentioned above); 11.86, 88. Mu‘āwiya b. Abı̄
Sufyān received the allegiance of his followers in a qubba at S.iffı̄n, and received the Banū Hāshim
in a similar structure (TAB, 888, 901). See Wellhausen, Reste, 130; Farès, Honneur, 100, 163–4
n. 2. Lammens (‘Culte’, 65 ff.) ascribes to all qibāb a sacral character, in an unnecessary extension
of the fact that the Arabs carried their deities in such structures – these were multi-purpose canopies,
used variously as reception halls, temporary prisons, for sleeping and dalliance and, when a person
seeking protection was lodged in it, as a space inviolable except at the risk of war (AGH, 6.99;
9.65, 74; 16.244). It was also a mark of honour: when al-Nābigha al-Dhubyānı̄ came to ‘Uqāz., he
was put up in a qubba (AGH, 11.6). There were many kinds of such qibāb, the most prized being
called a .tirāf (Tabrı̄zı̄, Sharh., 100 n. 53).
196 Marsham, Rituals, 33.
132 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
Dress was also appropriately coded.197 In addition, persons of noble
status received lighter treatment for misdemeanours than others.198 Indi-
cations are also that one of the marks of distinction for such royalising
persons as of others of honourable or noble status, once captured at the
losing end of a battle, and provided their captor was well disposed, was that
they be put to death by having their akh.al vein – indicating those running
inside the forearm and the leg – bled.199
Receptions in red leather canopies and preferential methods of execu-
tion are of course no substitute for reception halls and palaces. Nor are
they comparable to the special manners of address, coronations, insignia of
power, including pendants, thrones, splendid attire, lavishly caparisoned
mounts, ostentatious use of gold and precious stones, processions, pane-
gyric poets, and other marks of royalty, continuing down generations.200
All such tokens of kingship or aspirations to kingship were imitated or
emulated with less material elaboration and within the limits of means
available, financial as well as ecological and technical, in manifestations of
stark splendour. The difference between these grades of kingship did indeed
lie in the disparity of means, itself reflecting the crucial aspect of chieftaincy
and its various gradations, namely, territorial control,201 entailing various
degrees of power to command and coax, and of access to resources.
But the difference between kingship and its lesser assumptions does not
reside in the availability of material resources alone. At a certain point in
the widening of territorial dominion, however unstable, hegemony moved
from a regime of alliance between groups that are presumed, however fic-
tively, to be equivalent, to one of allegiance, in which a particular lineage
is very decidedly and durably more equal than others, and within each

197 This was later folklorised under the Umayyads. When al-H . ajjāj commanded the poets Jarı̄r and
al-Farazdaq to appear before him in the attire of their forefathers in the Jāhiliyya, they did so, with
their dress and the use of the qubba duly put on display, the one as a prince, the other as a warrior
(AGH, 8.56 – for Bedouin dress, AGH, 1.129).
198 For instance, the young Abū Lahab in Mecca, caught pilfering the Ka‘ba treasury while drunk,
escaped the severe punishment (including banishment in one case) meted out to others; a role in
establishing due punishments and exonerations seems in this case to have involved the lines of
division between the Ah.lāf and the Mut.ayyibı̄n – Kister, ‘Strangers’, 116 f. Medinan Jews may have
applied the penalty of stoning for adultery to commoners, but not to nobles: Mujāhid, Tafsı̄r,
§ 337.
199 Ibn Sa‘ı̄d, Nashwa, 2.622 and passim.
200 See in general ‘Alı̄, al-Mufas..sal, 4.207 ff.; ‘Athamina, ‘Tribal kings’, 30. The standard manner of
addressing a king appears to have been, quite uniformly, the apotropaic abayta l’la‘na (‘may you
counter malediction) – not infrequently interpreted in a rationalising ethical manner (for example,
al-Nu‘aymı̄, al-Ust.ūra, 86).
201 This is properly highlighted as crucial by ‘Athamina, ‘Tribal kings’, 33.
 Networks of articulation 133
of which one man is more equal than other men.202 This is also a transi-
tion from an unsteady regime of exactions and violent dominion needing
continuous renewal by the deployment or display of force, to one of for-
mal obeisance and a habitus of routinised obeisance. In this, an individual
and his descendants in formal positions of authority implied a very special
understanding of alliance, h.ilf, one in which assumptions of parity between
contracting parties, however differential de facto but nevertheless asserted
de jure for all parties concerned, are removed.
Here, the leading individual is offered homage and an oath of obeisance,
normally called bay‘a, signalled by a handshake: a bay‘a for war, a promise
of obedience, or a bay‘a unto death (‘alā l-mawt) in conclaves of war.203
The arrangement is a reciprocal but unequal commitment.204 Vertical
hegemony, and a differential degree of reciprocity between contracting
parties (including its expression in violent conflict), thus paved the way for
super-alliances whose hinge was the superior individual contracting with
every component of the alliance individually, indicating the achievement of
kingship. This social differentiation and social stratification was particularly
signalled by the Jafnids and the Nas.rids. We shall see later that this was
to be Muh.ammad’s expression of supremacy, later reinforced by military
conquest and, in time, duly transformed into a fairly stable arrangement
by his successors once they established dominion over erstwhile imperial
territory.205

Networks of articulation
These alliances comprised a crucial military aspect, but also a more elab-
orate use of the Arabs as suppliers and conveyancers, as sailors of the
desert, with habitual trade routes and trading settlements and seasonal mar-
kets serving international demand and increasingly exigent local demand,
including for luxury items consumed by the ruling houses and other ele-
ments of the upper crust, and for precious metals, in what amounted to
micro-regional networks articulated with larger ones. Relative isolation in
difficult terrain with limited resources but of military relevance works to
encourage communication; and the greater the distances involved and the
demand of outlying areas, the more valuable would the wares transported

202 This point has been clearly brought out by Marsham, Rituals, 34 f.
203 See Pedersen, Eid, 56 f. 204 Marsham, Rituals, 55.
205 Heather (Empires, 43 f., 59 ff., 64 ff., 92, 150) sketches comparable developments among the
Germanic peoples on the fringes of and inside the empire, and warns against the assumption of
some kind of ‘primeval bliss’ among them before kingship.
134 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
need to be in relation to size and weight.206 Demand from the imperial
territories surrounding the desert and steppe played a crucial role in sus-
taining trade.207 To this must be added gold and silver mining in Arabia,
some going back to the Late Bronze Age,208 of interest to both local actors
and surrounding powers, and conducive to fairly complex relations of
exchange and the growth of organisational ability; the importance of min-
ing resources is only just beginning to be appreciated.209 Of interest to local
actors must also be added some agricultural products (especially wheat and
dates) and artisanal production, particularly from north and south H . ijāz,
al-Yamāma and Yemen, and livestock and animal hides – these last sugges-
tively likened by Crone to petroleum today, supplying the colossal demands
of the Roman and Sasanian armies and of the Jafnids, with opportunities
for significant war profiteering important to the Meccans.210
Commercial and mining operations had, by the fifth century, become
more than entrepot and cabotage operations linking enclaves of maritime
trade extrinsic to their region. They involved not only local individuals but
local communities who struggled over the control both of resources and of
the conveyancing and purveyance of such resources as well as of imports
and transit goods and the exaction of duty. In al-Yamāma, for instance,
mining was controlled by sections of Bakr b. Wā’il.211 The appropriate
model for describing these activities and their impact would seem to be
one of the political control by local and trans-local chiefly lineages, in a
context that involved both contestation and the building of alliances, very
often supported by interested outside powers.
The production of perfumes, tanned leather, textiles, wool and jew-
ellery would have been destined largely, but not exclusively, for the local
or inner-Arabian markets. Yemen was particularly prominent in the pro-
duction of textiles and perfumes; tanning and jewellery important in the
212
H. ijāz, the latter activity involving Jews in particular. Al-Yamāma, with a
206 Pentz, Invisible Conquest, 21. That Arabian commerce was a ‘constant’ of history was perceived by
Miquel, Islam, 32 ff.
207 It should be noted that the demand for a variety of goods by the Roman armies in Europe was a
decided stimulus for wealth accruing to Germanic chiefs and kings: Heather, Empires, 72 ff.
208 Heck, ‘Gold mining’, 381.
209 Its importance had been signalled by Morony, ‘Late Sasanian’, 37, who suggested it was mining
rather than trade that may have accounted for economic expansion, which continued through the
Paleo-Muslim period.
210 Crone, ‘Quraysh’, 65, 66 ff., 75, who suggests that this need for leather for tents, scabbards, shields,
kit bags, horse armour, water and wine skins, and much else, was driven by declining supplies from
Syria.
211 Makin, Representing the Enemy, 127.
212 ‘Alı̄, al-Mufas..sal, 7.530 f. (dyeing), 534 ff. (gum arabic), 537 ff. (tanning), 540 ff. (wine), 561 ff.
(jewellery), 587 ff. (leatherware), 594 ff. (textiles); Heck, ‘Arabia without spices’, 566 ff.
 Networks of articulation 135
functioning irrigation system, produced leather goods, wheat and dates
for export, and some jewellery.213 Also for local consumption were agricul-
214
tural products, particularly in northern and southern H . ijāz – mention
of this particular region is due to the fact that, for agriculture as well as for
manufacture, this is the region for which we have the most information.
Not unnaturally, such trade involved the use of weights and measures,
quantities and magnitudes. These were normally expressed in very local
denominations, and those about which we have information are, again,
mainly of H . ijāzi provenance, which seem largely to have followed Syrian
and Iraqi norms and practices.215
Weights and measures were of course particularly important in mone-
tary and quasi-monetary operations,216 and Arabia seems to have been an
important source of precious metals.217 Gold and silver were denominated
in weights equivalent to Roman gold and Sasanian silver currencies, with
some use and equivalence for waraq, which may refer to Yemeni coins.218
There are indications that money was indeed the ultimate measure of mea-
sures, forming the basis of weights overall, at least among the Meccans.219
But by and large, it was uncast bullion rather than coins that underwrote
transactions not directly attainable through barter, and whatever coins cir-
culated were reckoned by correspondence to bullion weights.220 Clearly,
the extraction of, and trade in, precious metals was not only a major source
of wealth, apparently traded with Syria and subject to duties imposed
by Ghassān.221 It also required, and in consequence inculcated, skills of
organisation and accountancy, some on a wide scale, and may safely be
assumed to have encouraged exactions of excise and tribute. Mines have

213 Al-Askar, al-Yamama, 51 f. 214 Heck, ‘Arabia without spices’, 565 f.

215 ‘Ali, al-Mufas..sal, 7.627 ff.; ‘Measurement’, EQ.
216 On which see the material in ‘Alı̄, al-Mufas..sal, 7.489 ff.
217 See the excellent map of gold deposits and mines in Tübinger Atlas, a.ii.2, showing locations in the
H. ijāz (the environs of Medina and areas to the north and north-east), near al-H . ı̄ra, and elsewhere.
Heck (‘Gold mining’, 367 ff., 371 ff., 384) provides a compendious picture, based on archaeological
remains as well as literary sources, of mining for precious metals in the H . ijāz, Najd and al-Yamāma,
and of the involvement of local as well as outside interests (Montgomery, ‘Empty H . ijāz’, 45, berates
a certain imprecision in Heck, but nevertheless finds his indications plausible; this is clearly just a
beginning). Al-Askar (al-Yamama, 50 f.) provides details of mining for gold and some silver and
the extraction of salt in al-Yamāma. Piotrovskii (al-Yaman, 80) spoke of an invigoration of silver
mining in the Yemen immediately after the Persian conquest following 570.
218 Heck, ‘Gold mining’, 370; ‘Arabia without spices’, 556; ‘Money’, EQ; ‘Alı̄, al-Mufas..sal, 7.498,
501; al-Bukhārı̄, S.ah.ı̄h., 3.98. There is a possibility that Aksumite coins may also have been a
point of reference; wrq, in Ge’ez, refers to gold, in ESA possibly to silver (G. Hatke, personal
communication with reference to S. Hay, ‘Madhariba hoard of Aksumite and late Roman coins’,
Numismatic Chronicle, 1989, 83–100).
219 ‘Alı̄, al-Mufas..sal, 7.500. 220 Heck, ‘Arabia without spices’, 555 f.
221 Heck, ‘Gold mining’, 556.
136 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
left a lasting physical imprint excavated by archaeologists: smelters, tools,
wells, fortifications, quarries and entire mining villages.222
The complex interplay of local territorial interests and claims, and the
interests of outside parties, would have been negotiated in terms of the
long-range networks of trade, of the external and internal interests and
provenances of the caravaneers and traders in bulk. These had military
and political implications, including the security of sites and passage, and
the forms of commercial cooperation devised to cope with these complex
interactions. Nat.āt Khaybar seems to have acted as a node of monetary
regulation and exchange, a rudimentary banking clearing house avant
la lettre.223 The operations of mud.āraba and qirād. – commenda, broadly
understood – seem to have been the principal fiducial mechanisms used,224
and a certain level of accountancy practice by a khāris. or a h.āsib is indicated
in the case of Medina, the latter person doubling as a land surveyor.225 There
is also evidence of various forms of credit and usury.226
The impact of these networks on the habituation of those who mattered
among the Arabs of Arabia to extra-local relations and certain forms of
organisation cannot be denied. Less formal, but no less considerable, skills
will have been required for the organisation of seasonal local markets, of
which there were very many in Arabia.227 They can be classified into two
different types, those offering goods for local needs, and others carrying out
emporium trade serving a variety of local needs as well as long-range and
international trade. A variety of techniques of negotiation and bargaining,
some of them bizarrely coded,228 were used. We have information on the
negotiating and bargaining techniques specific to many such markets, as
well as on the commodities traded.229 Some such markets had an association
with cult. But in general they provided what would normally be available on
such occasions, such as clairvoyants and various entertainments, including

222 Heck, ‘Gold mining’, 379, 386. We have no idea of the labour regimes employed, but the use of
slave labour would not be an unreasonable assumption. Heather (Empires, 79, 134 f.) underlines
the importance of, among other products, the local, northern Polish and wider infrastructures of
the trade in amber in the first two centuries ad.
223 Al-Afghānı̄, Aswāq, 356.
224 The Commenda was to become a fundamental element in classical Muslim commercial law (on
which see Udovitch, Partnership and Profit), and is today used as the ostensible basis of ‘Islamic
banking’.
225 SIH, 3.231; WAQ, 721. 226 Al-Afghānı̄, Aswāq, 60 ff.
227 A general catalogue of these was compiled by al-Afghānı̄, Aswāq, 226.
228 Al-Afghānı̄, Aswāq, 46 ff. Some of these techniques – described in a manner that brings to mind the
coded gestures of stock exchange traders today – were later to be rationalised, and some prohibited,
by Muh.ammad on grounds of unfairness: ibid., ch. 5, and al-Bukhārı̄, S.ah.ı̄h., 3.91 f.
229 Al-Marzūqı̄, al-Azmina, 2.161 ff.; al-Afghānı̄, Aswāq, 236, 241, 278, 292 ff., 297 ff.
 Networks of articulation 137
trained monkeys, and prostitution, usually of slaves procured by their
masters, diviners, scribes, mediators, physicians, and others.230
It can safely be assumed that all ritual elements connected with alliance
and conflict were conjugated with the concrete economic, social and politi-
cal control over markets and the socio-geographical relations they sustained.
We are told, for instance, that the seasonal market at Dūmat al-Jandal was
‘owned’ by named chiefs from segments of Kalb and the Jadı̄la of T.ay’,
masters of the territory.231 But of course this, like other reports, contains no
chronological elements, and the turmoil of the Arabian Peninsula in the
second half of the sixth century was such that control would have varied
ebulliently with time; it is reported that the Jafnids ran this particular show
on unspecified occasions.
Moreover, a form of monopoly was in operation whereby no commerce
was transacted by individuals until the goods sent by the king or controlling
chief had been sold.232 A similar arrangement is unlikely to have obtained
for the goods sent for sale by the Nas.rids (by annual caravan called the
lat.ı̄ma) to ‘Ukāz. and at markets in Yemen, this transaction overseen by the
233
representative of al-H . ı̄ra there. The famous ‘Uqāz. itself was in the middle
234
of nowhere; archaeological excavations of its possible site indicate no
settlement of any kind preceding the Umayyads,235 and its precise location
within a roughly defined territory was clearly a negotiated affair that varied
over time. The market at al-Mushaqqar was controlled by the segment of
B. ‘Abd Allāh b. Zayd of Tamı̄m, who oversaw it on behalf of the Sasanians,
the latter receiving 10 per cent of the fees and levies collected.236
No levies were reported to have been imposed upon transactions at
‘Ukāz., and no overall control seems to have been in operation beyond
what will have emerged from negotiations at this location, held by local
interests distant from centres of royal or imperial authority. Yet the market
was said to have ‘belonged’ to Qays ‘Aylān and Thaqı̄f, and the land to
B. Nas.r, though in what sense we cannot tell. One report names an individ-
ual, S.uls.ul b. Aws b. Mujāshin of Tamı̄m, as being in charge of arbitration
at this market, and it is not clear if such a function, whatever its specific

230 Al-Afghānı̄, Aswāq, 236, 281. The Qur’ānic injunction against procuring is stated at Q, 24.33.
231 Al-Marzūqı̄, al-Azmina, 2.161; al-Ya‘qūbı̄, Tārı̄kh, 1.313. 232 Al-Afghānı̄, Aswāq, 236 f., 244.
233 AGH, 22.42, 24.39. It may be noted that not all such caravans had safe passage, and some may
have been raided: Ibn H . abı̄b, al-Munammaq, 428 f.
234 The location is described in ‘Arrām, Tihāma, 79 f.; on the uncertainties of its location, and the
possibility that it may have been an extended territory across which market activities moved,
al-Afghānı̄, Aswāq, 286 ff., and al-Ans.ārı̄, al-H
. ad.āra, 166.
235 Al-Muaikel, ‘‘Ukaz’, 2, 16. 236 Al-Marzūqı̄, al-Azmina, 2.162; Ibn Habı̄b, al-Muhabbar, 265.
. .
138 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
definition, ran in a lineage.237 Traders there were of the Quraysh, Hawāzin,
Ghat.afān, Qud.ā‘a, al-Must.aliq and Meccan Ah.ābı̄sh, without specification
of segments.238 The market of Rābiya in H . ad.ramawt, inaccessible without
properly armed escort, was organised by Quraysh in agreement with the
B. Ākil al-Mirār of Kinda and B. Masrūq.239 Journeying from Yemen and
the H . ijāz to the market at Dūmat al-Jandal used a system of alliances
concluded by Quraysh and Tamı̄m with groups whose territories were
to be traversed, to which was added transit and protection payment to
groups not party to these alliances.240 Needless to say, markets close to
imperial territories were directly controlled, quite apart from the levies
at customs stations. In southern Syria, at Bus.ra, Dar‘ā and Dayr Ayyūb,
annual and more permanent markets were taxed and controlled directly
by the Jafnids.241 At al-Mushaqqar, the Sasanians ensured that the market
would not operate when Tamı̄m tried to take control of transactions.242
As always in such circumstances, crucial to the enracination and spread of
common conventions and habits was the existence of hubs of hegemonic
elaboration. In this sense, the so-called ‘buffer principalities’ discussed
above were in transition under conditions of vectorial accumulation: both
as elements in imperial systems, and as points of ‘phase transition’ from
the short-lived arrangements of Arab politics to durable polities at a higher
level of organisation and reach.
In this context of the overarching theme of Arab ethnogenesis, markets
can be seen to have acted not only as nodes for the distribution of goods and
services, but, like the courts of the Nas.rids and the Jafnids, as nodes of accu-
mulating familiarity, skills, negotiations, knowledge of imperial domains
and Arab dynasties further north, and broadening knowledge horizons.
These included knowledge of distant genealogies and of Arab mythical,
legendary and aetiological lore of various geographical provenances, and
its elaboration into parallel and, ultimately, shared or coordinated narra-
tives which, one may also assume legitimately, will have compacted the
various redactions of events in an indefinitely distant past into a shared,
ethnogenetic aetiological past.
In all cases, crucial to our considerations are the forms of control over
these markets, of which one important aspect is timing. The Arabs had
approximate chronological frames which will be discussed in some detail

237 Ibn H. abı̄b, al-Muh.abbar, 182; al-Marzūqı̄, al-Azmina, 2.166.

238 Al-Afghānı̄, Aswāq, 291. 239 Al-Marzūqı̄, al-Azmina, 2.165.
240 Ibn H. abı̄b, al-Muh.abbar, 264 f; al-Marzūqı̄, al-Azmina, 2.162. This material was put to very good
use by Kister, ‘Mecca and Tamı̄m’, 128 f., 134.
241 Al-Afghānı̄, Aswāq, 362 ff., 372 f. 242 aL-Afghānı̄, Aswāq, 242.
 Networks of articulation 139
in the next chapter. The accounts we have in the sources speak of a fairly
precise set schedule for each market according to the months of the Hijra
calendar and, in some cases, as a result of astronomical computations,243
which is most likely to be a later organisation of the material available.
As might be expected, chronological reckoning had a highly local char-
acter, with the likelihood that the Nas.rids and the Jafnids followed imperial
calendars in place,244 as did other Arab groups before them (the funerary
inscription at al-Namāra is a clear example), with H . imyarite Yemen hav-
ing its own well-organised calendar of months and years.245 For the rest,
we have chronological reckoning by major events. But overall, it seemed
necessary practically to bring the annual lunar cycle into some form of
synchrony with the solar, which regulated the rhythms both of agriculture
and of transhumance, and of the markets as well.246 In all cases respecting
the Arabs, however, a counting of the moons was a main way of deter-
mining an approximate schedule. We have a very clear case of calendrical
synchronisation in Greek inscriptions and bilingual Arab–Greek papyri
showing that, in Palestine, at least as early as seventy-seven years before the
Hijra, a dating system by months katā arabas was used, enmeshed with the
Roman calendar of months and indictions.247
There is no case for postulating the existence of an overarching instance
that controlled synchronisation. At the local level, at least that involving the
movement confined to local groups, synchronisation is likely to have been
one that coordinated lunations with the rhythms of social time, the time of
seasonally determined transhumance, itself on occasion associated, as we
shall see, with a cultic calendar, more or less like an almanac. Lunation is,
after all, the more evident measure of the passage of time, marked nightly
by shifts in position of the moon unmatched by the much slower shifts in
the regularity of the sun’s position above the horizon. The timing of more
important markets, particularly major ones such as the famous ‘Ukāz., those
on the borders with Syria, and those located at maritime emporia in east
and south Arabia, will have followed the rhythms of the monsoon winds
and those of east Mediterranean time reckoning.
Nevertheless, a habit of synchronisation will have grown out of the
circumstances described, no matter how uncertain its workings, leading

243 Al-Marzūqı̄, al-Azmina, 2.161 ff.; al-Bı̄rūnı̄, al-Āthār, 291.

244 Note that an ecclesiastical letter (Simeon’s New Letter), estimated to have been dated July 519 and
written at the Jafnid al-Jābiya, used the Seleucid/Alexandrian calendar: Shahid, Martyrs, 54, 63,
236.
245 ‘Alı̄, al-Mufas..sal, 8.518 ff., 446 ff.; Rodinson, ‘Espace’, 47 f.
246 Rodinson, ‘Espace’, 25 ff., 28 ff., 35. 247 Meimaris, ‘Arab era’, 178 ff., 184.
140 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
to a common regime of time as a horizon. Pan-Arab markets and fairs
were the affair of those elements involved in long-distance commerce, a
level of pan-Arabian integration which might be seen as a higher level of
integration among elites which were also active at lower, more local levels.
Whatever the mechanism of synchronisation, a far more important fea-
ture was actual territorial control, and the rights to the exaction of charges
on transactions. Local markets were venues of shifting inter-group nego-
tiation and networking, and doubtless the issue of timing and synchroni-
sation formed part of this. Control seems to have involved a combination
of territorial claims, forms of local domination, often contested, alongside
negotiation and alliances. The major local markets – ‘Ukāz. being the best
known to posterity – were more than opportunities for trade. They were
the occasions for contracting and declaring alliances, declarations of war,
adoption, the acknowledgement of paternity, genealogical amalgamations
and false genealogical claims,248 as well as the collection of tribute, imposts,
and gifts due to superordinate individuals or segments from weaker ones,
the sale of captives or manumission of slaves, and the collection of ransom
paid for persons seized in the course of raiding. They were locations for
the public announcement of peace between warring parties, sometimes
with outside intervention or mediation.249 They were also occasions for
the exaction of vengeance or the payment of compensation in cases of
homicide,250 or for public declarations of protection, asylum, adoption or
ostracism.251 The choice of a particular place to conclude a pact, declare
paternity and so on, in the public domain, would depend, one would sup-
pose, on the relevance of such actions and declarations to parties present,
who would not only witness but also draw the consequences.
In short, seasonal fairs and markets were par excellence the occasions
for Arabian socio-political transactions, and these needed to be publicly
declared in order for them to carry proper force. The pact ending the
Basūs war, events which took place at locations very far distant from
where the pact was declared, is an index of the extent of internal Arabian
concatenations and of external involvement in this. The formal declaration
248 On adoption, paternity, genealogical amalgamations and false genealogical claims, many of whose
features are not entirely clear and the image of which is confused in scholarship, see Landau-
Tasseron, ‘Paternity’.
249 For instance, the peace between Bakr and Taghlib at the end of H . arb al-Basūs, concluded at Dhū
al-Majāz near Mecca, mediated by the Lakhmid king ‘Amr b. Hind (r. 554–570), who received
hostages from both parties as guarantee: AGH, 11.29 f. On the notoriously cruel ‘Amr, see Rothstein,
Laḫmı̂den, 46 ff.
250 Jacob (Beduinenleben, 144 f.) noted long ago that not all blood requited blood, and that long-
running vendettas were not a primary feature of the vengeance system among the Arabs.
251 Al-Afghānı̄, Aswāq, 278 ff.
 Networks of articulation 141
of the outcomes of negotiation was expressed in, and affirmed by, a formal
vocabulary, resulting from the formality of oaths accompanying them.252
This was an elaborate matter, studied in detail by Pedersen, who divides
oaths among the Arabs into two broad categories, the promissory and the
assertoric. The former, which fall under the general category of alliance (h.ilf,
also involving muwāda‘a, ‘aqd and ‘ahd),253 involved oaths and, most often,
written documents254 – the availability of scribes and writing materials at
markets has already been mentioned,255 and the use of seals is attested.256
There is also evidence from Yemen of standard epistolary formulae, and of
a variety of commercial documents, and lists of personal and clan names.257
The other category, assertoric oath, included qasāma later to become
formalised in classical Muslim law as a method of proof or denial in cases
of murder: bearing oath as witness, of guilt or innocence, of paternity or
illegitimacy, and quite a number of other matters.258 The qasāma category
of oath, used as an instrument in adjudication, is anthropologically a most
interesting phenomenon, being connected to conceptions of quasi-judicial
proof that used magical practices of mutual imprecation (mubāhala and
mulā‘ana), expressed in the perfect tense,259 involving elements compa-
rable to ordeals,260 in a sublimated form, and hypothetical curses used
concomitantly to confirm or confound accusations made.261 It might be
appropriate to note that mubāhala was used by Muh.ammad as a challenge
252 See, in general, ‘Oath’, ERE, 9.430–8. Arabic vocabulary appears to have been the richest among
Semitic languages in this respect: Pedersen, Eid, 6 ff.
253 Pedersen, Eid, 21 f., 27 f.; Qat.āt., al-‘Arab, 216 ff.
254 Pedersen, Eid, 7 f., 11, 188 ff.; al-Asad, Mas.ādir, 65 ff. Marsham (Rituals, 26 ff.) translates and
comments upon one such document (Ibn H . abı̄b, al-Munammaq, 90 f.) supposedly between ‘Abd
al-Mut.t.alib b. Hāshim and Khuzā‘a, and discusses alliances as they are portrayed in Arabic poetry
(at 29 ff.).
255 See Ibn H . abı̄b, al-Muh.abbar, 475 and ‘Alı̄, al-Mufas..sal, 7.291 ff. The Qur’ān enjoins people to put
loan contracts in writing (Q, 2.282), which cannot have come from nothing. For writing materials,
see al-Asad, Mas.ādir, 80 ff., and, especially, Maraqten, ‘Writing materials’, who uses what material
evidence is extant in addition to literary sources. During the Paleo-Muslim period, under the
Umayyads, St John of Damascus stated that Muslims used witnesses for marriage, purchase and
the acquisition of property (text in Sahas, John of Damascus, 768a), highlighting old habits which
he clearly found extraordinary. Al-Jāh.iz. (al-H . ayawān, 1.69) quotes poetry by al-H . ārith b. H
. illiza
al-Yashkurı̄ (d. c. 570) relating to the peace concluded at Dhū l’Majāz mentioned above (note 249)
as involving written documents as well as witnesses and guarantors. This gives us a vivid picture
of procedure, though the poet wonders if agreements inscribed on delicate and expensive sheets of
cloth associated with Sasanians (mahāriq) will ever serve to diminish the force of passions. Indeed,
the ‘folia of the Persians’ (mahāriq al-Furs) was a fairly standard topos in ancient Arabic poetry
conveying the sense of evanescence and passage. See for instance, al-Mufad.d.aliyyāt, 25.1 (al-H . ārith
b. H. illiza al-Yashkurı̄), and ‘h-r-q’, LA.
256 Al-Asad, Mas.ādir, 75 f. 257 Al-Ansārı̄, al-Hadāra, 146. 258 Pedersen, Eid, 179 ff.
. . .
259 Pedersen, Eid, 86 f. Mulā‘ana was to constitute part of later Muslim divorce law, as an accusation
of adultery. We cannot tell if it had been thus used in pre-Islamic times.
260 ‘Mubāhala’,EI. 261 Pedersen, Eid, 103 and ch. 5, passim.
142 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
to prove the authenticity of his divine commission and that of the Qur’ān
(Q, 2.94, 3.61). Assertoric oaths were also related to divinatory techniques
involving games of chance, including divinatory arrows (istiqsām) or ‘cups’
(aqdāh.).262
Crucial to all these operations from the perspective of this discussion
is their public character. Also publicly declared was ostracism,263 an emi-
nently political act which disarmed individuals, by removing them from the
protection of congenital social moorings, rendering them liable to enter
under the protection of a different group, with implications for inter-
segmental relations. The island of H . ad.ūd.ā off the coast of H
. ijāz seems
to have been used on occasion for the confinement of such individuals,
although under what conditions, under whose auspices and involving what
category of delinquents is unclear.264 Such persons so ostracised as were
unable to arrange for protection were condemned to a life of wandering,
flight and robbery to which we have extraordinary poetical testimony by
Ta’bbat.a Sharran, ‘Urwa b. al-Ward and other such .sa‘ālı̄k.265 These seem
to have constituted a specific category of individuals coalescing together in
bands of brigands, active in regions to which they staked claims, or joining
chieftains as bodyguards or militias.266
Vows were also declared at markets, but not exclusively in such locations
unless they were considered to have public political implications. Not
unnaturally, there were ritual and other symbolic elements involved in such
public declarations, with the use of fire,267 often at sacred locations, appeal
to deities and oath formulae deployed.268 The famous h.ilf al-mut.ayyibı̄n of
Mecca, the Alliance of the Perfumed Ones, was not the only one involving
the immersion by contracting parties of their hands in perfume in sealing
their compact.269 Immersion of the hands in liquids, including blood, and

262 Pedersen, Eid, 12, and see, very suggestively, the more general and comparative discussion in
Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 76, 79, 81, 83 f.
263 Pedersen, Eid, 77 – a person thus removed from congenital social relations is termed khalı̄‘ or
.tarı̄d – in later Arabic usage, the former term came to be applied to libertines. On the various
categories of ostracism, Khulayf, al-Shu‘arā’, 91 ff. See also AGH, 22.42.
264 AGH, 19.5 f.; Yāqūt, Mu‘jam, s.v.
265 On this poetry, Khulayf, al-Shu‘arā’, passim, and 257 ff. for formal considerations and, in shorter
compass, Wagner, Dichtung, 1.135 ff.
266 Khulayf (al-Shu‘arā’, 55 f., 76 ff., 108 ff., 116 ff., 131) describes the categories of persons in such bands
(ostracised persons, rebellious sons of black slaves, and paupers), and the geographical distribution
of their activities in regions of relative wealth and the proximity of markets.
267 Al-Mih.āsh was the special term used for those concluding an agreement around a fire: al-Shāyi‘,
Mu‘jam, 51.
268 Pedersen, Eid, 143, 151 f., and ch. 9 and 10, passim; Qat.āt., al-‘Arab, 216 ff.
269 Al-Tabrı̄zı̄, Sharh., 129 n. 18.
 Networks of articulation 143
sacrifices of various kinds, are also attested in the context of contractual
agreements, as is the conclusion of contracts at cultic settings.270
Vows, particularly vows of revenge, involved the entry of vowing individ-
uals into a condition in many ways analogous to the ih.rām upon entering
sacred ground, as has long been realised.271 This involved abstentions that
may well reflect different regional or cultural practices, from wine, sex,
meat, and from trimming, greasing and washing hair.272 The sacrifice of
hair among the Arabs following pilgrimage (during which, it seems, hair
had been matted)273 is well known, to which might be added that this
seems also to have been practised following success in revenge, as part of
mourning rites, and when deciding upon war.274
Related to the public character of these transactions were performances,
generally of a poetical character, which involved slanging matches between
various segments present. These, the mufākhara and munāfara between
lineages, were widespread,275 in evidence in ancient Greece and among
the Germanic peoples as well, and designed to confirm and reconfirm
boundaries between collectivities.276 It might be added that there was
a pacific form of inter-tribal poetry, the muns.ifāt, which highlighted the
excellence of all parties in a verbal duel, and whose relatively restricted areas
277
of prevalence, H . ijāz and Tihāma, may reflect certain conditions of the
region in the period immediately preceding Muh.ammad. Such contests also
served, in the context of vengeance, to establish social parity determinant
of the choice of victims in cases of blood revenge.278 It would be useful to
mention here what was called futyā al-a‘rāb, in which participants competed
in answering linguistic riddles.279
A kind of virtual warfare in peace-time, such munāfara and mufākhara
poetry may have been seen as metaphorical arrows launched by the jinn
270 Wellhausen, Reste, 128; Pedersen, Eid, 26 f.; Bonte, ‘Sacrifices’, 50.
271 Cf. Wensinck, ‘New year’, 24, and Pedersen, Eid, 120 f.
272 AGH, 9.66, 10.230, 13.15 and cf. Goldziher, Muslim Studies, 30. 273 Al-Bukhārı̄, Sahı̄h, 2.213.
. . .
274 Wellhausen, Reste, 124; Morgenstern, Rites, 84 f., 104 ff., whose general explanation in terms of
analogies between the sacrifice of a new-born infant’s hair and circumcision (58 f.) is not entirely
clear to me; Chelhod, Sacrifice, 131 f., 133 ff. In a proleptic sign of ultimate victory, warriors of B. Bakr
shaved their heads before entering the famous war of al-Basūs, the day duly being memorialised
as yawn al-tah.āluq (AGH, 24.54). Shaving as part of mourning rituals persisted thereafter into
Paleo-Muslim times; members of the S.ufriyya Kharijites shaved their heads when visiting the grave
of their leader S.ālih. b. al-Musarrih. (Ibn Durayd, al-Ishtiqāq, 217). Pursuing comparisons between
Arabs and pagan Nordic peoples, note that it is said of King Harald that he vowed not to cut his
hair or comb it until he had conquered all of Norway: Sturluson, Heimskringla, 61, 78.
275 Ibn H. abı̄b, al-Munammaq, 103 ff.; ‘Alı̄, al-Mufas..sal, 4.589 ff.; Farès, Honneur, 40 f., 42, 185 ff., who
compares these to religious ceremonies.
276 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 68 ff., 84. 277 Agha, ‘Verse’, n. 50.
278 Stetkevych, Zephyrs, 63. On ‘blood equivalence’ in this context, see Proksch, Blutrache, 10.
279 See ‘Alwān, Mu‘taqadāt, 7 f.
144 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
inspiring the poet at his collective adversaries.280 Relating great deeds of
heroism in a duelling Sitz im Leben, poetry was declaimed by women
in the energetic mode of rajaz, described as Augenblickspoesie;281 this is
tantamount to a duelistic performance in which the poets act out a virtual
battle between lineages. Conflictual or conciliatory, these poetic contests,
often publicly judged as competitions in verbal dexterity, were important
elements in creating a confluence of human elements together celebrating
themselves in the form of what later became al-ayyām.
One should also stress that this will have involved elements of Arab
genealogical, aetiological and legendary lore that was thereby spread and
elaborated, connected, and made into common ethnogenetic knowledge.
It is also well to note that, along with poets, storytellers and orators also
held forth in prose on these occasions.282 More important in view of
long-term developments is the formality of the setting in which poets
proceeded to declaim poetry to a great degree stylised. Formality, of which
ritual is one extremity, identifies, confirms and memorialises positions and
relations, and correlative memories, in a manner appropriate for retention.
Formal performance of this kind stores information in transmissible and
cumulative forms, of which Arabic prosodic forms were but one.
This will have led to a greater elaboration of mutual awareness among
various Arab groups of disparate provenances, now circulated in the form
of sagas and legends, poetical and doubtless prosaic as well. It might also
be said that these contests represented the local manifestations of the wider
reach of the poetry patronised and produced by the Arab principalities of
Jafna and Nas.r.283 These courts acted further to professionalise poetic pro-
duction and make it into a gainful activity, which would have contributed to
greater elaboration and skill in poetic composition.284 In addition, oratory
at these markets, a topic yet requiring basic research, and quite apart from
the gnomological content of some of these which may have contributed
to a common Arab fund of proverbs and a common moralising horizon,
was also used for the conveyance of information and of lore, including
the delivery of ayyām. The documentary style of the latter survived long

280 Zwettler, ‘Mantic manifesto’, 79.

281 Wellhausen, ‘Poesie’, 594 f. – the term is, of course, reminiscent of Usener’s Augenblicksgötter.
282 Jones, ‘Language’, 37. For linguistic and stylistic aspects of this oratory, particularly assonance and
parallelism (synonymous, antithetical and synthetic), see Beeston, ‘Parallelism’, 134 f. followed by
Jones, ‘Language’, 44 f.
283 Cf. al-Asad, Mas.ādir, 109 f., 112 ff.
284 Particularly with al-A‘shā and al-Nābigha al-Dhunbyānı̄: Rūmı̄ya, al-Qas.ı̄da, 68, 79 f., 167. Noto-
rious instances of covetousness involving al-A‘shā are related in AGH, 9.89, 93.
 Networks of articulation 145
(discussed in ALS), and is reflected in certain portions of the Qur’ān and
in the Constitution of Medina, discussed below.285
Like orators and storytellers, poets were public voices for their peoples,
declaiming heroism and honour according to a template of public pro-
nouncement, whose prosodic structures were yet another mark of mutual
recognition.286 Equally important, poets also seem to have been charged, at
fairs such as ‘Ukāz., with the dissemination of information, and relating the
deeds of their people in the previous year,287 beyond private word of mouth,
clearly for the public record. Be it information or poetry, this practice was
ubiquitous, and is comparable to the Greek panı̄giris, to which a special
edge is added by panegyrics and elegies. What emerges from this picture is
that the poet performed a social role, and a political one, arising from the
social control over poetry and of what it disseminated and memorialised.288
Poetical declamation of personal and collective deeds is, after all, a con-
stituent component of collective honour, which needed to be declaimed
sonorously; renown (sı̄t.) is, after all and as conveyed by the connotations
of the word, a sonorous phenomenon, and the declamation of repute.289
As has been suggested, it was not only tribal deeds that were memori-
alised. The Arab legendary role was memorialised and circulated around
the Peninsula in a variety of forms prosaic as well as poetic. References to
what were later known as al-‘Arab al-‘Āriba, to ‘Ād of Iram and to Thamūd,
as well as to other legendary peoples and figures, were legion, related by
poets who hailed from and circulated their words way beyond the locali-
ties mythogeographically indicated by these legends.290 They were clearly

285 Jones, ‘Language’, 42 f. 286 Cf. Wellhausen, ‘Poesie’, 600.

287 Al-Marzūqı̄, al-Azmina, 2.170; Ibn H . abı̄b, al-Muh.abbar, 263 ff.; AGH, 11.36 (on ‘Amr b. Kulthūm
of Taghlib) and passim.
288 Cf. Detienne, Invention, 57 n. 36.
289 Cf. the discussion of the archaic and ancient Greek klēos, which means very much the same thing,
as ‘sonorous renown’: Svenbro, Phrasikleia, 8, 20.
290 By way of example: ‘Ād are mentioned by Zuhayr b. Abı̄ Sulmā, T.arafa b. al-‘Abd and al-Nābigha
al-Dhubyānı̄ (Arazi and Masalha, Early Arab Poets, s.v. ‘Ād in Index), as well as by Laqı̄t. b. Ya‘mar
al-Iyādı̄ (Tabrı̄zı̄, Sharh., 284 n. 49), and are alluded to by the reference to Iram by al-H . ārith b.
H. illiza in his mu‘allaqa (Tabrı̄zı̄, Sharh., l.68 and 288 n. 68). Iram is also mentioned by Imru’
al-Qays, as was Thamūd (Arazi and Masalha, Early Arab Poets, 157). Details of the story of Qudār,
the villain of Thamūd, are ascribed to ‘Ād by Zuhayr b. Abı̄ Sulmā, which would betoken some
confusion of registers unless one accepts the identification of Thamūd with ‘Ād al-Akhı̄ra, the
Second ‘Ād (Tabrı̄zı̄, Sharh., l.32 and 133 n. 32), an identification which Bell (Commentary, 2.321)
held to have been an attempt to evade the difficulty presented by the interpretation of the First ‘Ād
in the Qur’ān. T.asm are mentioned by al-H . ārith b. H
. illiza (Tabrı̄zı̄, Sharh., l.49). On the myth of
Thamūd (poetic evidence for which is plentiful: Bin S.arāy, al-Ibil, 105 ff.) and the figure of Qudār,
with cross-cultural parallels and a consideration of possible relations to the genesis of this legend
become myth under conditions of Nabataean hegemony over northern H . ijāz, see Stetkevych,
Golden Bough, ch. 6.
146 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
disseminated in south Arabia as well; Wahb b. Munabbih has a detailed
account of the destruction of ‘Ād.291 The extensive and fascinating myth of
Luqmān b. ‘Ād and his seven birds of prey, prompted by a voice to try fate
at the Meccan heights, related by ‘Ubayd b. Sharyah during the reign of
Mu‘āwiya in Damascus, had already been the subject of poetical treatment
by Labı̄d b. Rabı̄‘a, al-Nābigha al-Dhubyānı̄ and al-A‘shā.292 In the context
of ethnogenesis, this common fund of representation will have been the
result of local and regional lore coordinated through the variety of agencies
and processes discussed in the two centuries preceding Muh.ammad.
So it was clearly the case that there was a pan-Arab mythical, tribal
and poetical lore that was circulated across Arabia very widely indeed,
percolating from the nodes of connection that were the seasonal markets
and royal courts. Much of the above found its way into the Qur’ān in a
manner so terse as to lead to an assumption of implicit knowledge. Of
events transfigured by mythical redaction, that of Abraha’s alleged attack
on Mecca, at the Battle of the Elephant, repulsed by a heavenly host figured
as birds, may well have developed into a full-fledged myth by the time it
found its way into the Qur’ān.293

The Arab tongue294

The above discussion of late antique Arabs focused on a variety of mech-
anisms of internal social, political and cultural articulation among them
and across very wide territories, and on their habituation to intercon-
nections resulting from the interests of surrounding empires and lesser
states, a system into which local interests, including Meccan local interests,
were incorporated. It is suggested not that the Arabs of the time regarded
themselves as a potential unified polity, but that there was cumulative
development towards ethnogenesis. The designator ‘Arab’ occurs hardly at
all in poetry, and the Qur’ān does not refer to the Arabs as an ethnic group.
But it does refer to ‘an Arabic Qur’ān’ and to the Arabic language (Q,
12.2, 39.28, 41.3, 42.7, 43.2); and substantive ‘Arab’ starts occurring with

291 Wahb b. Munabbih, al-Tı̄jān, 51 ff.

292 Akhbār, ‘Ubayd b. Sharyah, 380 f. The myth itself is related in ibid., 369 ff.
293 This had already been suggested by Bell, Origin, 74. The battle to which the Qur’ān refers seems
indeed to have taken place, with only temporary gains, but in all likelihood somewhere around
Turāba, some 300 km distant from Mecca: Gajda, Royaume, 144, 142 ff.
294 ‘Tongue’ (Lisān) is often used in Arabic as a synonym for language, as in older English usage and,
of course, in French. Lisān al-‘Arab is also the title of the colossal Arabic dictionary by Ibn Manz.ūr
(d. 1311/12), often used in this book.
 The Arab tongue 147
increasing frequency in Paleo-Muslim poetry.295 It can be said that it was
the Tongue of the Arabs that came to define those peoples who were to
become Arabs. It was language that encapsulated in symbolic register the
ethnogenesis of al-‘Arab al-Musta‘riba; it rendered them, with time and
very rapidly, Arabs, both to themselves and to others.
If the Arabs had no sense of emergent common political identity, the
Arabic language as it developed in the centuries before Muh.ammad was
nevertheless to be of great moment, by developing a koine that comple-
mented the growing network of communication and mutual awareness
and recognition in the steppe and desert,296 at the same time as surround-
ing populations came to designate them as Sarakēnoi and Tayyāyē. Both
fostered eventually a sense of distinctiveness of the kind that, given a crys-
tallising political agent, could become ideologically emblematic for certain
types of political and cultural action. It was this sense of an emergent socio-
cultural definition that caused the Paleo-Muslim Arabs to decide to take
their language beyond scripture and the vernacular of the ruling military
caste, and make it into the language of imperial administration and culture,
as they had earlier with the abandonment of prestige scripts and the use
of an Arab script. That the Umayyad ‘Abd al-Malik made this decision
cannot legitimately be taken to be self-explanatory, nor does the sanctity
of the Arabic Qur’ān itself explain the adoption of Arabic as an imperial
language in areas where this language was not spoken. History is replete
with instances in which a sacred language is made doubly sacred by limits
on its use or is otherwise disengaged from the vernacular; the Umayyads
discouraged the teaching of Arabic by Christians.
Much was done to foster the spread of a trans-dialectal Arabic by the
principalities of Kinda, B. Nas.r and Āl Jafna, and by the conditions of
communication they gave rise to and, of course, by the use of Arabic as
the language of court and, possibly, of certain administrative and other
purposes.297 Ancient Arabic poetry provides evidence of written treaties,

295 Farrukh, Frühislam, 129; ‘Arabs’, EQ.

296 It would not be superfluous to note the existence of a trans-dialectal koine in contemporary Arab
Bedouin poetry: Monroe, ‘Oral composition’, 13.
297 Macdonald (‘Reflections’, 59) suggests, tentatively, that the court at al-H
. ı̄ra may have been literate
in Arabic by the fourth century, writing in Nabataean script, presumably cursive Nabataean.
Ferguson (‘Arabic koine’, 616 f., n. 4, 617, and passim), maintaining that Kindite and H . ı̄ran origins
are still to be demonstrated, proposes a differentiation should be made between the koine that
was to develop into Classical Arabic and an unwritten one which lies at the origin of Arabic
dialects as they developed. The distance between the two ‘did not exceed the usual measure’, with
diglossia emerging in Arab settlements following the conquests (Blau, ‘Beginnings’, § 6, 6.3). These
arguments require further geographical specifications.
148 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
alliances, safe-conducts, testaments and records,298 and Arabic legal phrase-
ology is in evidence from first- and second-century ad papyri from the
Nabataean region south of the Dead Sea.299 A bilingual Nessana papyrus
dated 687 (a document of release from labour contract) shows Arabic for-
mulary to have been independent of the Greek, corresponding to other
Arabic documents of the same age, and betokens documentary templates
brought in by the Arabs as they invaded Palestine.300
Based on the confluence of evidence that is dispersed but nevertheless
cumulatively compelling, it is clear that the move to write Arabic in Arabic
script rather than prestige scripts in the centuries preceding Muh.ammad
and to allow for it to evolve from late Nabataean Aramaic was in the broad
sense a political act and a deliberate choice.301 The resulting uniformisation
and the development of a specifically Arabic script were concomitant with
this, and it may be noted that the earliest Arabic inscriptions found so far
are consistent with areas associated with the Jafnids, which may indicate
incipient administrative and bureaucratic traditions.302 Let it be mentioned
at this point that the diglossia model does not do justice to the complexity
of the history of Arabic; there were parallel developments of the spoken
and written forms, neither of which can be said to have been the original
model, and what is seen as the all-important poetical koine itself developed
in parallel with administrative and military Arabic.303
The earliest indisputably Old Arabic document to survive is the inscrip-
tion of ‘Jl bn Hf‘m (*‘Ijl b. Haf‘am/*‘Ijl b. Hūfi‘am) at Qaryat al-Fāw,
written in Sabaic musnad monumental script and dating from the end of
the first century bc.304 Also used at Qaryat al-Fāw were Sabaic, Minaic

298
. ayawān, 1.69 f.
Al-Jah.iz., H
299 Rabin, ‘Beginnings’, 27, 31; Hoyland, Arabia, 242; ‘Epigraphy’, 57.
300 Khan, ‘Pre-Islamic background’, 204, 206.
301 Cf. Hoyland, Arabia, 242; Macdonald, ‘Reflections’, 58.
302 Fisher, Between Empires, 148; Hoyland, ‘Arab kings’, 131 f.
303 Blau, ‘Beginnings’, §§ 3.5, 5.1, 6; Larcher, ‘Moyen arabe’; Wagner, Grundzüge, 41 f.
304 Macdonald, ‘Reflections’, 50, and see Robin, ‘Inscriptions’, 545 ff. The inscription is well reproduced
in Routes d’Arabie, no. 130. Throughout, I am adopting the categorisation of Arabic languages into
Ancient North Arabian (henceforth ANA: Safaitic, Thamūdic, Dedanitic, Hasaitic, and varieties
of Oasis North Arabian used in Taymā’ and Dūmat al-Jandal), and Arabic (Old Arabic, Middle
Arabic and Classical Arabic): Macdonald, ‘Ancient North Arabian’, 490; ‘Reflections’, 28 ff.; ‘Old
Arabic’, Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, 470 ff. This is a more exact classification
than vaguer ones in terms of Arabic and Proto-Arabic or North Arabian Epigraphic Arabic. ANA
and Arabic share many phonological features, and an overlapping onomasticon (without complete
overlap). The distinguishing features seem to be the definite article, al- in the case of Arabic and h-
or hn- in ANA (Macdonald, ‘Ancient north Arabian’, 517 ff; Rabin, ‘Beginnings’, 34). The earliest
attested occurrence of the hn- in ANA comes from a fifth-century bc Aramaic inscription at Tall
al-Mashūt.a in the Nile Delta dedicating a silver bowl to hn ’lt (Macdonald, ‘Reflections’, 41, 41 n.
85), which may indicate a historical-linguistic and geographical context which is little understood.
 The Arab tongue 149
and, to a minor extent, Nabataean and Thamūdic scripts and languages.
Later, the Nabataean script was used to write Arabic, most famously in
the Namāra funerary inscription of Imru’ al-Qays, dated 328. In all cases,
we have inscriptions in a language that is recognisably Arabic, using the
definite article al-, in addition to some other features.305 There is also epi-
graphic evidence for Arabic, written in Nabataean script, antedating the
Namāra inscription. It has been maintained that one inscription could be
dated to 267,306 and that two lines of poetry in what has been estimated by
Bellamy controversially to have been recognisably classical Arabic metrical
form in an inscription from the Negev dated before ad 150, possibly as
early as ad 6–9.307
More assuredly, it does seem that some Arabic poetry in the classical
modes, available in literary sources, could be dated to the third century.308
In addition to lines of poetry discussed by Bellamy, one might mention dis-
tantly but pertinently a hymn of supplication for rain in a somewhat inde-
terminate or hybrid South Arabian language – possibly spoken H . imyarite of
the first century ad – discovered recently, that uses an ending monorhyme
(qāfiya), a regular diction and a scannable structure.309 This would
place standard poetic diction in the context of developments, discussed
above, related to cross-Arabian connections, correlatively providing a sketch
of its conditions of emergence in terms of the development of a koine. It
would be unreasonable to place the emergence of poetry in such elabo-
rate metrical and motifemic form, structure and verbal variants, not to

On the hypothetical development of the Arabic definite article from the demonstrative particles
hā or hal, see the discussion of Voigt, ‘Artikel’, 229 ff., who also reviews material and scholarship
overall. The history of the l is a difficult theme on which there has been much work. It is possibly
correlated to the weakening of the *h, and performed both an article function and an asseverative
function. Even in classical Arabic, the l- as an affirmation of nominals designating the definite
form in a nominal sentence was more a tendency than an absolute rule: Testen, Parallels, 55 ff.,
135 ff., 142 ff., 181. The suggestion, based on one epigraphic testimony, that the al- dated from the
third century bc has been negated by Macdonald, ‘Decline’, 21 n. 22.
305 Robin, ‘Plus anciens monuments’, 116 f.; Robin, ‘Inscriptions’, 545, 548. Of these additional
features, the primary ones are the use of the perfect mud.āri‘ tense in the form af‘ala, the formation
of third person pronouns by /h/ (huwa, humma, hiya, hum, hunna), and the existence of only two
sibilants, the /s/ and the /š/. The most complete description of the distinguishing features of Arabic
is by Ba‘albakı̄, ‘Huwiyya’, 31 ff. and passim.
306 Healey and Smith, ‘Jaussen-Savignac 17’, 79 ff., 82, who adjudge the Aramaic and Nabataean
elements in this inscription to be insufficient to show that the text is Aramaic. This seems to
beg the socio-linguistic and historical-linguistic question of connections between Arabic and
Nabataean, beyond ‘Arabisms’ in the one and ‘Aramaicisms’ in the other.
307 Bellamy, ‘Arabic verses’, 73, 78 f. – see the sceptical comments of Beeston, ‘Arabic verse’, and
Ambros, ‘Zur Inschrift’, 90, 92.
308 Furayjāt, al-Shu‘arā’, ch. 3 and passim; Jamāl, ‘‘Umr al-shi‘r’, 306 and 293 ff.
309 ‘Abd Allāh, Tadwı̄n, 21 f., 26 – text at 27 ff.; Macdonald, ‘Epigraphy and ethnicity’, 181; ‘Reflections’,
30 f.
150 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
speak of its volume, as a sudden irruption ex nihilo in the sixth century;
Renan recognised the problem, and maintained enthusiastically that Arabic
poetry had simply had no archaic condition.310 The point has been made
that Arabic poetry, with case and modal inflections, may have been driven
by prosodic rather than syntactical imperatives, and that it represents a
form asymmetrical with the uninflected Arabic in use, written as it was
spoken with a syntactic structure (topic/comment) that rendered final case
inflections redundant. If this is accepted, one would then agree that what
was to become classical Arabic was a classicisation in terms of this Old
Arabic correlative with the developments of later times.311
All these considerations lead one to assume the existence of levels of
linguistic homogeneity operative in demotic, public and official uses of
Arabic, with the centuries immediately preceding Muh.ammad indicating
features of linguistic homogeneity across a very wide geographical expanse,
from Qaryat al-Fāw to northern Syria, both before and after the use of
Arabic script.312 This spread of the vehicular koine, of a sociolect becoming
an ethnolect, is reflected in Arabic inscriptions in southern Syria written
in the Greek alphabet, which display a vowel system and some morpho-
logical features identifiable in classical Arabic grammar.313 Arabic names
with al- occur in Karshūnı̄ – Arabic in Syriac letters – at S.adad, north-east
of Damascus, in Christian inscriptions.314 That an increasingly standard
Arabic was used in north and central Arabia, and in the Fertile Crescent as
well, from the third or fourth centuries has been attributed to the decline
of Palmyra, where Aramaic was used as an epigraphic language. It was
also, and perhaps more saliently, ascribed to the ascendancy of the Nas.rid
315
al-H. ı̄ra, who had already inscribed at least one monument, at Umm
al-Jimāl in today’s Jordan, in a transitional Nabataean–Arabic script.316
Yet some use of ANA inscriptions did survive alongside this develop-
ment, especially in areas to the north of H . ijāz which had a weak and
only a relatively late connection with poetic output.317 These territories do
not, nevertheless, seem to have been linguistically homogeneous, and were
enfolded into territories where Arabic came to use al- as a definite article
(central and north-eastern Arabia). Territories where Nabataean continued
in use had their point of demarcation at Taymā’, with Madā’in S.ālih., a

310 Renan, Histoire générale, 342, describing it (at 341) as poetry ‘barbare sur le fond, et pour la forme
d’un extrème délicatesse’.
311 Larcher, ‘In search’, 107, 109 and passim. 312 Beeston, ‘Languages’, 183.
313 Westenholz, ‘Note’, 393 ff. 314 Littmann, Syriac Inscriptions, nos. 65.2, 65.8, 65.13, 65.23, 65.24.
315 Dussaud, Pénétration, 63 f. 316 Littmann, Nabatean Inscriptions, no. 41.
317 Rabin, ‘Beginnings’, 34.
 The Arab tongue 151
short distance to the south-west, being a Nabataean enclave within this lin-
guistic territory.318 Two interpenetrating linguistic groups therefore seem
to have coexisted as the use of ANA alphabets declined after the third
century,319 at a time that saw the expansion of a language that was to
become classical Arabic. Perhaps correlatively, one needs to study another
possible index, that of the use of the Arabic bn rather than the Aramaic
br as the patronymic indicator, a feature which pre-dates the time we are
discussing and occurs commonly in Safaitic inscriptions.320 In all cases, it
does seem that the use of what is recognisably Arabic is probably related
to migrations of Arabs of southern origin to the north, particularly Kinda,
making their dialect dominant by virtue of political success, and leading
correlatively to the near-obliteration of genealogies pertaining to al-‘Arab
al-‘Āriba recorded in ANA inscriptions.321
The linguistic map presents us with loose threads, a chequered map
of dialectal islets and isolated remnants of migrations.322 Old Arabic, the
basis of the koine, may have been spoken not only in regions described,
but in the region of Madā’in S.ālih. as well.323 The koine possessed features
which were distinct from the dialectal features of the regions where it was
cultivated – the Euphrates region up to al-Anbār, territories of Tamı̄m in
eastern and central Arabia, and parts of central Arabia bordering on the
H. ijāz. It is a language distinct from epigraphic Arabic which had strong
connections with North-West Semitic and Ethiosemitic,324 and also from
the dialects mentioned by later Arab philologists.325
Be that as it may, the writing of Arabic in metropolitan prestige scripts –
Sabaic, Nabataean, Greek or Aramaic – persisted until Arab political for-
mations were becoming durable structures, following the withdrawal of
Roman garrisons. Significantly, the shift from Aramaic to Arabic script
seems to have occurred on parchment before it did on monuments, imply-
ing its use in Jafnid territories,326 for documents and administrative records,
one would assume. Earlier, ANA writing, by all accounts entirely epigraphic
and for the most part graffiti, and spoken until the late fifth or early sixth
318 Winnett and Reed, Ancient Records, 88 f., 131 f.; Moritz, Sinaikult, 42 f.
319 Macdonald, ‘Decline’, 17. See the linguistic typology suggested by Beeston, ‘Languages’, 184 f.,
based on the distribution of definite articles.
320 Harding, Index, 118 ff. This is suggested despite the institutional habit of the reading of br rather
than bn in the Arabic inscription of al-Namāra, written in the Nabataean script. Epigraphists have
had the habit of regarding br as the default reading, as in the inscriptions at H . arrān, Zabad and
Jabal Usays – see the critical comments of Robin, ‘Réforme’, 331 f. (Zabad inscription at 337), and
Robin and Gorea, ‘Réexamin’, 508.
321 Hoyland, ‘Arab kings’, 384, 386 f., 391. 322 Rabin, ‘Beginnings’, 29, 35.
323 Macdonald, ‘Burial’, 298. 324 Ba‘albakı̄ (‘Huwiyya’, 13 ff.) takes this up in detail.
325 Wagner, Grundzüge, 34. 326 Hoyland, ‘Mount Nebo’, 35.
152 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
century, was used by societies that were, for all practical purposes, illiterate,
who would have otherwise projected themselves outwards using scripts of
prestige.327
The transition to the developing Arabic was clearly deliberate, and a
deliberate fostering of Arabic as an emergent literate language rather than
just a vernacular. It can be considered as a defining moment for what was
later to come, following the waning of the Nabataeans and others, and the
formation of Arab principalities. This period also saw linguistic Arabisation
farther afield: in Yemen in the sixth century, especially in the language of
trade and among the military,328 and following the influence of Kinda,329
in Palestine,330 and, one would expect, in areas where ANA dialects were
spoken. Not unnaturally, the earliest monuments of Arabic script came
from the more literate territories to the north. In addition to inscriptions
already discussed, one might mention the transitional Nabataean–Arab
inscription at Allāt’s temple in Jabal Ramm of c. 328–350, which shows
some long development behind it.331 But most important of all was the
inscription at Zabad, on which more will be said later.
One assumption has been that literacy in Arabic stood in a causal nexus
with Christianisation.332 A correlation might well be there. But clearly, the
overarching context is that of the creation of principalities that encouraged
Arabic and the development of Arabic script. Their Christianity (in the case
of the Jafnids), or patronage of Christianity and ultimate Christianisation
(in the case of the Nas.rids), would also have caused them not to tamper
too much with the epigraphic output of a religion expressed in Greek or
Aramaic, the former, at least south of the Euphrates and more particularly
south of H . ims., dominant as the monumental language, in a region that
largely spoke Aramaic.333
As suggested, the decision to adopt a recognisably Arabic script for
inscriptions is itself significant, not least as this was in many respects less

327 See the discussion, and the comparative material, in Macdonald, ‘Literacy’, 71 f., 77, 78 n. 105,
86 ff. Dedanitic was the only Ancient North Arabian dialect used in monumental inscriptions,
employed by a sedentary society eclipsed in the first century ad, using word divisions, written
unidirectionally, with matres lectionis (Macdonald, ‘Reflections’, 36; ‘Ancient North Arabian’, 492;
‘Literacy’, 79 f., 80 n. 98). Indirect ‘practical use’ of ANA and other forms of Arabic will be taken
up below.
328 Piotrovskii, al-Yaman, 131. 329 Shahid, ‘Authenticity’, 6 ff. and passim.
330 Griffith, ‘Aramaic to Arabic’, 21.
331 Grohmann, Paläographie, 2.15. See now, far more fully, Hoyland, ‘Mount Nebo’.
332 Sachau, ‘Arabische Inschrift’, 188. The role of clerics in the spread of Arabic script is highlighted
by Robin, ‘Réforme’, 326 ff.
333 Gatier, ‘Inscriptions’, 146; Millar, Roman Near East, 504, 521; ‘Paul of Samosata’, 5 ff.
 The Arab tongue 153
suitable for conveying Arab phonetics than ANA scripts available,334 or
South Arabian musnad.335 What this betokened might be termed a declara-
tion of epigraphic independence, the parties declaring this independence
reclaiming an endogenous linguistic self-sufficiency correlative with other
fields, including that of official documents. This also marked indepen-
dence of written languages which, though not Arabic, included syntactical
Arabisms and a heavy Arabic lexical influence, without corresponding mor-
phological intrusions that suggested that these languages, such as Aramaic,
were not native to the scribes. The prestige scripts, it must be remembered,
did not replace native ANA scripts functionally. In view of the argument
for linguistic homogenisation made above, the chronological gap of about
two centuries between the inscription at al-Namāra and those in Arabic
script might well be accounted for by the vagaries of time, including the
wide use of spolia,336 and one may expect that further archaeological finds
will, with time, close the gap.
Whatever the mechanisms, and be the origins of this orthographic devel-
opment to be found in Nabataean or Aramaic,337 a provisional picture
emerges which awaits further systematic attention from the perspective of
social geography. Various schemes of possible articulation across the steppe
and desert emerge from linguistic indices, all of which yield lines connect-
ing Nabataea, Zabad, al-Anbār and al-H . ı̄ra, further connected with Dūmat
al-Jandal and Madā’in S.ālih., possibly leading to the H . ijāz, where sources
report a Meccan script.338
In sum, territories that contained inscriptions in Arabic (as distinct
from these earlier forms of the language) come from Nabataean areas in
northern Arabia, the Negev and Syria.339 Scanning the rough map of Arabic
around 500,340 one would note a geographical pattern of distribution –
again corresponding largely with the distribution of the definite article –
suggesting territories connected by a band along routes of trade, military
movements and transhumance very likely to have been set first under the
auspices of Kinda, using the koine which had become fairly consistent
in the sixth century. Features of this koine are also identifiable alongside,
and to the east of, the ancient line of communication from Yemen to
the north-east. In this picture, west-central Arabia, the H . ijāz, remains
334 Macdonald, ‘Reflections’, 60.
335 Robin, ‘Ecritures’, 128. 336 Abbott, North Arabic Script, 13.
337 The latter is still argued for by Briquel-Chatonnet, ‘De l’Araméen’, 138 ff. In general, on the
Nabataeanist thesis, Gruendler, Arabic script, 1 ff, and the later overview in ‘Arabic Script’, EQ,
137 ff. The transition between Nabataean and Arabic is demonstrated in detail by Nehmé, ‘Glimpse’.
338 See Abbott, North Arabic script, 5 ff., 9 f. and the map on p. 3.
339 Hoyland, ‘Epigraphy’, 55 f. 340 Robin, ‘Inscriptions’, 539 ff.; Beeston, ‘Languages’, 183 ff.
154 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
again somewhat indeterminate.341 In all, we have the makings of a relative
linguistic homogenisation across territories under the influence of Arab
principalities.

The H
. ijāz unfurled
It has been suggested that Justinian’s economic and strategic policies
brought an end to the isolation of Yemen342 and to her independence
as well: a world set apart from the Romans and the Sasanians by substantial
distances, despite maritime connections across the Red Sea and farther
343
afield, and H. imyarite forays into Central Arabia. It might be added that
it was much the same conditions that brought about the rise to prominence,
and perhaps the very constitution, of a hitherto rather obscure collection
of small lineages known to posterity as Quraysh, and the rise of that con-
fluence of arid and rough crags and gorges that was Mecca, where they
settled or were constituted as a definable group, probably around 500.344
To the system of inner-Arabian articulation, therefore, the H . ijāz (rep-
resented cartographically and socially with its relevant environment of
networks on Map 2), or more accurately central H . ijāz, was a relative new-
comer, a matter well reflected in an incidence of foreign, imperial religions
so scant as to allow us to consider the region as a fiercely conservative
polytheistic reservation, persisting until swept away by Paleo-Islam which,
on this score alone, could be considered as a movement of acculturation
into Late Antiquity. It is not surprising that, for all their commercial con-
nections, the Quraysh were only able to mobilise local groups (Kināna,
Ghat.afān, certain groups from Tihāma) against Muh.ammad’s polity.345
There is much historical material to sustain this view of Mecca and
her environs. This runs counter to the conventional picture of Meccan
centrality presented in historical scholarship, building upon the classical
Muslim historical tradition, in which much is made of the commercial
importance of the city, most notably of the Quraysh to which Muh.ammad
belonged, and of its axial role in the religious and political life of the
Peninsula, in times so indeterminate as to appear perennial. But Mecca
was a barren and remote set of mountains and ravines whose location
seems to have been excentric to the more natural and better-established
routes of north–south and east–west commerce. It does not seem to have
341 Beeston, ‘Languages’, 185. 342 Ju‘ayt, al-Kūfa, 196; Hatke, Africans, 414 f.
.
343 Hatke (Africans, 413) maintains that Sasanians were hardly aware of Aksumite/Yemenite warfare,
Red Sea events impelled by Ethiopian interests.
344 Cf. Sa‘ı̄d, al-Nasab, 105 f.; Noth, ‘Früher Islam’, 15, 17. 345 Noted by Ju‘ayt, al-Kūfa, 194.
.
 The H
. ijāz unfurled 155

f Dūmat al-Jandal

20
a w

0
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M Ā l i j
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HĀ Tabūk
Bājar
a m N a f ū
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TA
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( a
M

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50
ASA D
Taymāʾ
( )

20 5 0 0 10
0 00 al-Ḥijr / Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ a l

1000
ṬAY’ - D
al-ʿUlā (Dedan) al-Fals a

a l -
h
al-Yaʿbūb n
Ruḍā ā
ḤA ’
JU

Y a
Khaybar / Naṭāt Khaybar N
HA
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ĪF
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m
ā

A
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m
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G H AṬ AF Ā N a Ḥajr
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Suwāʿ N a
a

Nuhm j d
l -
KH U Z Ā

al-Jār Ḍamād
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AY
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Rābigh
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III al-Ṭāʾif ( )
‘A

UZ

Saʿd I IV Mount Thawr

N

al-Juḥfa
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M
5) W ĀZ
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10 0 0

Manāf 2 1 al-Ghabghab
3 Majanna 1 Dhāt Anwāṭ
Jidda
HU DH 2 Nakhla al-Yamāniyya
ʿUkāẓ AY
II L
QU

3 al-Ḥudaybiya
al-Shu‘ayba RA IV III THAQ (al-Samura)
YSH Jiḥar ĪF
al-Lāt 4 Hubal
Ba

5 al-Kaʿba
100

KI Tabāla
ḥr

N
0

Dhū al-Khalaṣah Qaryat al-Fāw

ĀN
al

AZD
A
-Q

Dhū Sharā
AL
ul

KINDA
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UR

ĀH Ḥubāsha
m

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100

Jurash
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Nasr
500

m 100 200
ā
200

a 0 0
Najrān

Port Contour (height in metres: 200, 500, 1000, 2000)

For more signatures, see maps 1 and 2.

0 100 200 300 400 500 km Design: Aziz Al-Azmeh, Islam Dayeh
Cartography: Martin Grosch

Map 2 West and central Arabia, c. 600

156 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
lain athwart known transit routes;346 the topographically more likely routes
would have skirted the settlement and run closer to the eastern edge of
the central desert separated from H . ijāz by rough mountainous terrain,
along relatively smoother terrain that would have been more suitable for
camel traffic.347 That Mecca may for long have had a sanctuary or that
it may have been mentioned by Pliny (as Macoraba) does not in itself
necessarily project an importance in respects other than the religious.348 It
is not very unusual for sanctuaries to be located in difficult and remote
terrain requiring special effort for access (one need think only of Delphi),
and commercial importance may well have followed religious importance.
Clearly, for Mecca’s sanctuary, if this is what it had indeed been, to
acquire significant trans-local importance, the region itself would have
needed to be drawn into a broader network of relations and movements.
These, as suggested, need to be correlated with the consequences of Jus-
tinian’s policies and the resultant break of Yemen from its relative isolation,
apart from her involvement along the Yemen–east Arabian military and
ethnographic axis. Meccan trade seems rather the result than the cause of
Mecca’s prominence.349 It appears to have fallen into the hands of Quraysh
‘by default’,350 all of which resulted from the situation of Arabia in the
sixth century described above.
Important in this regard was the opening of central H . ijāz to the south,
betokened by the interest of Abraha in this region,351 and arising from
the indeterminate, shifting and diminishing conditions of imperial control
resulting from the problems of Arabian principalities sketched above.352
Perhaps paradoxically, this opening to the south was the route that inducted
central and southern H . ijāz into the regimes of Late Antiquity further
north. Rising tariffs exacted by the Sasanians, alliances between Yemen

346 Crone, Meccan Trade, 157 ff. This view has been challenged recently, with some considerations
from topography (Bukharin, ‘Mecca’, 121 f.). But the jury is still out.
347 Al-Saud, ‘Domestication’, 131.
348 This had already been noted by Wellhausen (Reste, 91); Yāqūt (Mu‘jam, 4.616) mentions Ptolemy’s
Geography, along with a number of other names under which the settlement was known to the
Arabs. Dostal (‘Mecca’, 194 n. 1) suggests that the name Macoraba may better correspond to
Sabaic *Mukariba, designating a holy place or a temple, while Crone (Meccan Trade, 134 ff., 137),
conceding that etymologies of Mecca’s name may be unsound, considers this to be less relevant
than silence about the settlement in late antique Greek and other sources.
349 Thus contra Wolf, ‘Social organization’, 392, representing a view widely held.
350 Heck, ‘Arabia without spices’, 558.
351 Signalled perhaps also by the wider use of Yemeni textiles, now used to cover or otherwise decorate
the qubba canopies and the Ka‘ba, noted by Lammens, ‘Culte des betyles’, 62. Simon (Meccan
Trade, 41) suggests the possibility of Yemenite reach over Mecca.
352 Cf. Korotaev, ‘Origins of Islam’, 250 f.
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and Ethiopia,353 and, later, the disruption of Sasanian commerce with the
Ethiopian occupation of Yemen,354 all contributed to an emerging situation
which made room for a more distinctive profile of the central H . ijāz region,
now that its boundaries, hitherto buffeted by outside interests and squeezed
inward, had become less definite. If we had available systematic work on
the social geography of the region, a more elaborate and less sketchy picture
would emerge of the unfurling of the H . ijāz after it had been largely enfolded
upon itself.
These conditions were conducive to a form of consolidated territorial
integrity responding both to pressures and possibilities, not least the induc-
tion of Quraysh into emporium trading activities. All the while, it must be
stressed, the orientation of northern H . ijāz had been quite distinct, more
routinely integrated with the life of northern agricultural and trading set-
tlements, many Jewish, like the region of Medina (about 300 km distant
from Mecca), and at the outer reaches – but within reach – of Jafnid
interests.355
Of the external pressures mentioned, note might be taken of the possibil-
ity that, during the third quarter of the sixth century, Medina (Yathrib) and
Tihāma may have been in some respects answerable to a Sasanian marzubān
of the desert, and that the reach of the Nas.rids may have extended to
Medina and al-T.ā’if,356 in the former under alternating Jewish and pagan
lineages.357 This needs to be treated as a fitful rather than a durable regime
of control, like the direct influence attributed to H . imyarites, a question
still open.358 It was with the waning of the influence of al-H . ı̄ra in the 570s,
and the furtive unravelling of its control by the Sasanians, that oppor-
tunity called, and that the significance of Quraysh, hitherto local, would

353 The full measure and nature of Arabian connections with Ethiopia (apart from Yemen) is a matter
that still awaits research.
354 Heck, ‘Arabia without spices’, 558 f.
355 The Jafnids are said to have mounted a campaign against Taymā’ and Khaybar under al-H . ārith,
and a Jafnid branch was established at Medina (Caskel, Ğamhara, 2.529 ff.), which seems to have
been in subordinate alliance with the Jewish clan of Tha‘laba b. ‘Amr (Serjeant, ‘Constitution’,
28).
356 Simon, Meccan Trade, 332 f.; Lecker, ‘Taxes’, 112 f., 115, 123. Kister (‘Al-H . ı̄ra’, 145, 146 ff.) affirms
that this marzubān set up the Jewish tribes of B. al-Nad.ı̄r and B. Qurayz.a of Medina over the
polytheistic al-Aws and al-Khazraj, and considers questions of plausibility. Whether it was control
or ambition, Sasanian imperial interest was well expressed in a Middle Persian geographical work
of the sixth or seventh century which incorporated Mecca and Medina into Ērānshahr (Daryaee,
‘Changing image’, 104).
357 Lecker, ‘Taxes’, 110 f., 123. One result of this was the cementing of an alliance between the Aws,
temporarily driven out of Yathrib to Mecca, and the Quraysh (Ibn H . abı̄b, al-Munammaq, 271), a
matter that had some consequence for problems faced by Muh.ammad at Medina.
358 Robin, ‘H . imyar et Israël’, 870.
158 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
have gained energy and significance.359 It was also during this period that
Quraysh can be seen as having become party to a treaty arrangement called
the Īlāf guaranteeing safe passage for the famed annual Two Journeys, of
summer and winter,360 a term that needs to be seen as shorthand for the
seasonal rhythms of trade rather than taken literally.
Details are uncertain, but commercial involvement cannot be
doubted.361 The Īlāf of Quraysh had a close connection with the crystalli-
sation of Quraysh362 as a settled clan group, internally differentiated, with
territorial claims sufficient for it to establish protected and sacred ground
indicated by the so-called mawāqı̄t, boundaries at which, in appropriate
seasons, visitors needed to come into a state of ritual purity (ih.rām).363
It involved Qurayshi traders acquiring charters of safe passage from tribal
leaders and from rulers in outlying regions as well, pacts of security, and a
system of payments and the distribution of shares among various parties
concerned.364
This required, of course, some form of authority operative locally, and
all indications are that the constitution of Quraysh, and within Quraysh
the dominance of B. ‘Abd Shams (and within those of B. Umayya b.
H. arb), involved a considerable amount of internal conflict. This position
of primacy had been reached after the settlement had been dominated,
successively, by B. Hāshim (to whom Muh.ammad belonged) followed by
an interregnum under B. Makhzūm.365 It was also expressed in internal
factional alliances among the Quraysh al-Bit.āh. that have already been
mentioned – between al-Mut.ayyibūn (‘Abd Shams, with Asad, Zuhra,
Taym Allāt, al-H . ārith b. Fihr) and al-Ah.lāf (‘Abd al-Dār, with Makhzūm,
Sahm, Jumh., ‘Adı̄), later H . ilf al-Fud.ūl (c. 605), most likely a continuation
of al-Mut.ayyibūn.366 These alliances seem to have yielded a reconfiguration

359 Cf. Rothstein, Laḫmı̂den, 116 f.; Ju‘ayt., Sı̄ra, 2.130 ff.; Kister, ‘Mecca and Tamim’, 113 f.
360 See Reinert, Recht, 21 f.
361 Crone (‘Quraysh’, 77) now concurs to the genuineness and importance of this institution. The
sources speak of a variety of possible destinations, including Yemen, Syria and Ethiopia (usefully
tabulated by Crone, Meccan Trade, 205 f.) – see also WAQ, 197; al-Mas‘ūdı̄, Murūj, § 971; Rubin,
‘Īlāf’, 170 ff. Simon (Meccan Trade, 64 ff.) attempts a chronology.
362 Cf. Sa‘ı̄d, al-Nasab, 104 ff., 165.
363 I would agree with the relatively late date for this arrangement (Simon, Meccan Trade, 69 ff.)
rather than the earlier assumption of Ju‘ayt., Sı̄ra, 2.129 ff. Establishing an absolute chronology is
not possible, and the matter needs to rest on external indices and external developments.
364 Ibn H . abı̄b, al-Muh.abbar, 162 f.; Birkeland, Lord, 106 f.; Kister, ‘Mecca and Tamı̄m’, 117 ff.
365 See the overview in Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, 32.
366 See, among others, Ibn H . abı̄b, al-Muh.abbar, 167 f. The sources are more silent than one would
expect about Hāshim b. ‘Abd Manāf. No information is available concerning any marriages he may
have contracted with the clans that composed Quraysh; his relations seem to have been largely
in Medina (including Muh.ammad’s great-great-grandmother Salmā bint ‘Amr, of the Khazrajite
 The H
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of internal relations from one in which Makhzūm had belonged together
with ‘Abd Shams to a group opposed by ‘Abd al-Mut.t.alib b. Hāshim.367 It
will be remembered that this association of B. ‘Abd Shams and Makhzūm
was to be succeeded by the two parties belonging to opposing sides of the
Mut.ayyibūn/Ah.lāf divide.
This followed their establishment in Mecca, under the generic name of
Fihr,368 accompanied by alliances with Kināna (especially the Ah.ābı̄sh)369
and Qud.ā‘a, and by their ejection, subordination and absorption of the
local population, known to the sources by the name Khuzā‘a and B. Bakr,
who had in their turn displaced the obscure Jurhum.370 Clearly, the picture
emerging is one of rapid change and of rapid shifts in alliances. In all cases,
and whoever may have been dominant, the communal affairs of Mecca
seem to have been negotiated by a ‘genealogical-plutocratic’371 oligarchic
assembly (al-mala’) meeting in Dār al-Nadwa where, among other things,
local rites of passage were performed.372

B. al-Najjār/Taym Allāt) and in Syria, underlining a division between central and southern H . ijāz
on the one hand, and its northern part where Muh.ammad built up his authority initially, on the
other, and one can speak of course for other kinds of division within Quraysh (Sa‘ı̄d, al-Nasab,
passim, esp. 78 ff. 116 ff., 129 ff., 442, 521 ff.). As suggested, the origins of Quraysh, probably from
the region west of Mecca, are obscure; their constitution as a clan occurred c. 500, when they
acquired their name, following a period of leadership under Qus.ayy b. Kilāb, often referred to by
the hypocoristic al-mujammi‘ (the Gatherer), a possibly legendary figure, who bequeathed to the
Umayyads his war standard called al-‘Uqāb (the falcon) – see TAB, 310, 313; Ibn Sa‘d, T . abaqāt, 1.51,
53; SH, 1.15, 27; AGH, 22.43. One way to investigate the formation of Quraysh may be through
studying the names of Qus.ayy’s wives as they occur in the sources, names that are at first sight
quite unusual given the standard Arab onomasticon, and the names of their fathers (TAB, 312 f.).
367 Watt (Muhammad at Mecca, 14) proposed that Abraha’s interest in Mecca may have been invited
by local differences, in the course of which ‘Abd al-Mut.t.alib sought Yemeni support against the B.
‘Abd Shams, Makhzūm and Nawfal.
368 For genealogies of Quraysh, see al-Nuwayrı̄, Nihāya, 2.352 ff. and Caskel, Ğamhara, 1.128, table 4.
369 It is sometimes assumed that these were a community of Ethiopian stock, clients of the Kināna.
But here – as in other cases – the ‘seductive pastime’ of etymology does not seem to be of much
help, and it is difficult to determine whether this was an appellative or a gentilic derived from
Jabal H . ubshı̄ where an agreement of jiwār was concluded between them and the Quraysh. See
Wansbrough, ‘Gentilics’, 203, 206, 210.
370 TAB, 310 ff.; al-Fāsı̄, Shifā’, 1.363 ff., 2.48 ff. 371 Rotter, Umayyaden, 248.
372 One such was the social confirmation of puberty, called tadrı̄‘, whereby the maiden’s cloak, the
dir‘, was ‘split’ (shuqqa ‘alayhā). This splitting may indicate that a dir‘ was tailored, implying that
such a garment was adopted at puberty to cover the maiden’s hitherto bare chest; before this
she would have worn a loin-cloth. Following the ceremony, the pubescent girl, and one would
assume this applied to the noble lineages, was then consigned by her folk to a regime of modest
dress and perhaps also of movement (h.ajabūhā). One superintendent of this rite was identified
as a member of B. ‘Abd Manāf, and a certain ‘Āmir b. Hāshim b. ‘Abd Manāf was known as a
muh.ayyid., a certifier of menstruation (al-Azraqı̄, Akhbār Makka, 66; Ibn Sa‘d, T . abaqāt, 1.52). For
dir‘, see LA, s.v.; Jacob, Beduienenleben, 45; Dozy, Dictionnaire, 176 f. It is interesting to note a
famous Palmyrene bas-relief, and other evidence indicating that covering the heads of women may
have been common; the bas-relief in question illustrates a ritual religious context (de Vaux, ‘Sur
160 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
This internal establishment of dominion was consolidated by domi-
nance in the immediate vicinity, accomplished by the four-year war of
al-Fijār, a very chequered affair, in which Muh.ammad is reported to have
participated as a boy or a young man. This war confirmed the primacy
of Quraysh over central and southern H . ijāz, having subdued or at least
neutralised Thaqı̄f, masters of al-T.ā’if who had taken the side of Abraha
in the course of his northern campaign. This relative dominance took the
usual form of an alliance which inducted Thaqı̄f into the Meccan cultic
association (the H . ums), and led to the unusual marriage of women from
the endogamous Quraysh into Thaqı̄f. It also enabled Quraysh to pur-
chase land in Wajj, controlled by Thaqı̄f, and involved both in common
commercial and in military activities.373 This alliance had been preceded
by inner-Meccan struggles, in all probability over cultic prerogatives and
its attendant authority and wealth, the two major factions being the Ah.lāf
and the Mut.ayyibūn, who finally seem to have reached a compromise.374
It seems to be the case that these events crystallised following the open-
ing of central H . ijāz as Abraha prosecuted his military campaigns north
and north-east.375 Although the historicity of reports concerning the two
376
campaigns of Abraha against central H . ijāz has been doubted, we have
seen that campaigns did take place in the vicinity, although his alleged
attempt to impose Christianity upon the Meccan region or his definitive
control over Mecca and al-T.ā’if is dubious.377 Whatever the truth of the
matter, into the chaotic situation which allowed the unfurling of central
H. ijāz needs to be factored the Persian intervention in Yemen in the years
following 570.
Belonging to the same international geo-strategic context was the
attempt by the Meccan ‘Uthmān b. al-H . uwayrith b. Asad b. ‘Abd al-‘Uzzā
b. Qus.ayy, apparently a Christian, to persuade the Jafnids or Constantino-
ple (or both, in tandem) to set him up as king over Mecca. This affair seems
to have been related to differences within Quraysh, including a section of
his own B. Asad, and to a certain unclear challenge that ‘Uthmān posed
to Quraysh interests in Syria, as a result of which he is reported to have

la voile’, passim). It would not be unreasonable to conjecture that other rites of passage, such as
the naming of infants to be discussed below, may also have taken place in a similar or in the same
setting. This could also be said of the circumcision of pubescent males, if that was indeed the time
at which circumcision was performed, or younger ones. On rites of passage, see Bell, Ritual, 94 ff.
373 374 SIH, 1.121 f., 125 ff.
Ibn H . abı̄b, Munammaq, 280 f.; Kister, ‘Mecca and Tamı̄m’, 157 ff.
375 On this correlation, see the comments of Heck, ‘Arabia without spices’, 559, and Kister, ‘Some
reports’, 75 f.
376 Simon (Meccan Trade, 337, 337 nn. 59, 60) confined Abraha’s interests to the north-east.
377 Smith, ‘Events’, 434, 463.
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been poisoned at their instigation while there.378 Details are obscure and
inconstant, but the outcome is clear, and there is little reason to doubt
the veracity of this report in its bare essentials, which are indicative of a
possible attempt by the Romans to gain a foothold in Arabia following
direct Sasanian presence in Yemen.379
In all events, the combination of local dominance and the growth of
the legend that the gods had protected Mecca from Abraha’s armies estab-
lished a position for Quraysh both military (albeit based on alliances,
as Quraysh themselves were neither numerous nor particularly martial)
and diplomatic, placed under divine protection and proceeding peaceably
through a network of alliances both cultic and commercial,380 and all the
while deploying the h.ilm (sagacity, discernment, acuity, soundness) con-
stantly ascribed to them in the sources, probably as a shorthand for their
canny organisational and diplomatic abilities. The Quraysh were laqāh.,
like the B. H. anı̄fa of al-Yamāma, lineages without great numbers and mil-
itary prowess but nevertheless independent and not liable to exactions.381
Quraysh traders were probably held to be inviolate while frequenting the
proximate markets of ‘Ukāz., Dhū l-Majāz and Mijanna, attended con-
secutively for obscure reasons possibly related to social topography and
the micro-configuration of alliances and to what might be described as
the desert equivalent of cabotage trade, in a state of ih.rām.382 This serves
to underline a very special position, a token of inviolability they carried
with them – a special term, basl (pl. busul), designated a person claiming
inviolability, as we have seen.383 This inviolability was clearly recognised
as reaching beyond their own sacred domains, where they were able to
exact a levy on materials brought in for small-time trading, and portions of
animals sacrificed,384 the latter possibly to be considered as heave offerings.
Quraysh thus moved from a local commercial role peripheral to trans-
local ones to a greater reach in the context, first, of the treaty of 560 and,

378 US, no. 7; Ibn H . abı̄b, al-Munammaq, 42; Ibn H. azm, Jamhara, 52; al-Fāsı̄, Shifā’, 2.108 f.; Ibn
H. ajar, al-Is.āba, 3.97; Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, 15.
379 The chronology is uncertain: Restle, ‘Hauran’, 966; Nagel, Mohammed, 77 and 74 ff.
380 See Rubin, ‘Īlāf’, 168 ff., 179. Crone (Meccan Trade, 181 ff.) finds the holiness attaching to Quraysh
in the sources to be not implausible, but nevertheless unlikely.
381 ‘L-q-h.’, LA; Kister, ‘Struggle’, 23.
382 Ibn H . abı̄b, Munammaq, 196, 275; al-Azraqı̄, Makka, 132; al-Marzūqı̄, Azmina, 164 ff. (for the
sequence). One might also mention the possible existence of another, minor fair, at Badr (WAQ,
387).
383 AGH, 19.16. Basl in classical Arabic has an interesting and polyvalent semantic field, belonging
to the class of ad.dād, homonymous opposites, and can indicate both sacral inviolability and
profanity – ‘b-s-l’, LA.
384 A special term (h.arı̄m) referred to these portions: Ibn Durayd, al-Ishtiqāq, 1.90.
162 Arabia and Arab ethnogenesis in Late Antiquity
later, of the chaos that followed turbulence in Yemen and the breakdown
of the system overseen by the northern principalities of the Jafnids and
the Nas.rids.385 They moved into emporium trading, using local goods and
supplying local needs in an apparently ever expanding circle, from Syria
(including Gaza) to Yemen,386 an arrangement which persisted until the
conquest of Mecca by Muh.ammad in 630.387 Quraysh not only prospered
at ‘Ukāz., but also frequented the distant market of Rābiyat H . ad.ramawt, an
emporium which made available commodities not found elsewhere, such
as swords, saddles and horses.388 That this market took place at the same
time as ‘Ukāz. bespeaks an elaborate differentiation in Meccan commercial
dealings. It is indeed time to re-examine the conventional interpretations
of the slight measure of Meccan trade, and assumptions of the lack of
trading and transactions in precious metals, an interpretation that had
overshot as scholars sought to challenge untenable assumptions about the
spice trade.389 Mining, gold and silver have already been mentioned, and it
is eloquent testimony to their salience that Muh.ammad bestowed mining
franchises, or possibly grants, qat.ā’i‘, to some of his followers, 20 per cent of
whose revenue was allocated to the public purse at Medina.390 A suggestion
has been made recently for the export of wine from the al-T.ā’if region to
India.391
The claim that it made little sense for the Meccans to trade in humble
commodities of low unit value (hides, agricultural produce, some textiles,
392
wool) in and out of the H . ijāz can be countered by an argument from
standard economic theory which brings in differentials of price, demand
and quality, not to speak of the demands of the pilgrimage season, and
other relevant factors.393 Crone has recently made the point that, at the
time when she questioned the importance of trade to Mecca a quarter of a
century ago, it was not well appreciated how colossal the demand by Roman
and Sasanian armies for leather in fact was, and that on this score alone

385 Ju‘ayt., Sı̄ra, 2.130 ff. 386 Heck, ‘Arabia without spices’, 560.
387 Ju‘ayt., Sı̄ra, 2.129. 388 Al-Marzūqı̄, Azmina, 165.
389 Heck, ‘Gold mining’, 389 – the Yemeni spice trade did in fact become wholly maritime by the first
century ad, and the Roman market collapsed in the third century, never to recover (Crone, Meccan
Trade, 17 ff., 99 ff. and chs. 1 and 3, passim). The conventional view of the local nature of Meccan
trade – oddly enough, not excluding the possibility that Quraysh dominated the distribution of
Syrian and Egyptian goods in Arabian markets – is well represented by Crone, Meccan Trade, 114,
153, 157.
390 Heck, ‘Gold mining’, 372. 391 Bukharin, ‘Mecca’, 129 f.
392 See the comments of Wansbrough, review of Crone, Meccan Trade.
393 Heck, ‘Arabia without spices’, 553, 558, 563, 572 f.
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. ijāz unfurled 163
trade needs to be reinstated as a major factor in the history of Quraysh.394
That terms related to the marketplace were used metaphorically in the
Qur’ān some 370 times, distributed more or less evenly across the text, and
that the text includes a vocabulary of reckoning by weights and measures
and of the account-book,395 speaks volumes for a lively commercial ethos.
Further, that the cream of Quraysh had, by the time of Muh.ammad’s divine
commission, durable relations with outlying territories is signalled by land
holdings in southern Syria and a commercial presence there,396 and by
indications of the possible use by the Qurayshi aristocracy of the Roman
postal system.397
We shall see how the unfurling of the H . ijāz repeated, in much broader
compass and greater historical consequence, the earlier polities of Kinda,
Jafna and Nas.r. Like these earlier polities, the H . ijāz under Quraysh, and
particularly the Umayyads of B. ‘Abd Shams after a brief Medinan interreg-
num, carried forth a familiar form of polity among the Arabs and transposed
it from the local to the universal, once Syria had been subdued. It must be
said, however, that, like the Kinda, Jafna and Nas.r, the horizons of expec-
tation and ambition of the Arabs of the H . ijāz are unlikely to have aspired
to imperial rule;398 unlike the Germanic peoples in relation to Rome, they
did not migrate into imperial territory, and remained external players.
However, once the imperial road was opened, and ambitions fortified, they
garnered the elements discussed above: experience of states and empires,
skills of negotiation and command, a language increasingly homogeneous
and other elements of an ethnogenetic consciousness, and the opportuni-
ties afforded by the relative disorientation and uncertainty of empires to
the north. In addition, they carried one other element that facilitated their
replacement of their imperial predecessors, namely, a scripturalist religion
conjugated with a state structure.

394 Crone, ‘Quraysh’, 65, 86, 88. She is sceptical about the importance of gold, but wisely considers
the points brought about by Heck to be worthy of serious consideration.
395 Torrey, Commercial-Theological Terms, 3 f., 46 f., 9 ff. and passim, summarised with some supple-
mentation in ‘Trade and commerce’, EQ.
396 Simon, Meccan Trade, 92 ff.; de Prémare, Ta’sı̄s, 87 ff. ‘Umar I and others are said to have made
their fortunes in Gaza (Crone, ‘Quraysh’, 80, 80 n. 89).
397 Silverstein, Postal Systems, 47 f.
398 Cf. the remarks of Sa‘ı̄d, al-Nasab, 78 f., on the lack of a historical horizon on the part of Quraysh
that might have completed and complemented the ı̄lāf arrangement.