Tribus et territoires d’Arabie, d’après les inscriptions antiques et les généalogies d’époque islamique

Abstract

Two main sources allow us to understand how the ancient Arabs envisioned the territorial structuring of the Peninsula, especially at the dawn of Islam. The first of them is comprised of the countless inscriptions, rich in information about the kingdoms of Sabaʾ and Ḥimyar (1st-4th centuries ad). They shed some light on the Jawf at the dawn of the Southarabic civilisation, on the kingdom of Qatabān (1st century bc - 1st century ad), and on the kingdom of Ḥimyar, which extended over the whole Arabia, as well as a small amount of scattered data for the region of Najrān-Qaryat al-Faʾw, the northern Ḥijāz and the Gulf kingdoms, especially for the periods before the Christian era. These inscriptions reveal a diversified society. The terminology of each political-tribal entity has its own particularities. The Sabaic inscriptions use different terms to refer to the social groups of Southarabia and to other populations considered as foreign, the Arabs and Abyssinians. The terminology is also characterised by a certain ambiguity: all the Southarabic groups, regardless of their size, are named by the same word, shaʿb, except at Maʿīn in the area of Najrān-Qaryat al-Faʾw. Henceforth it is possible to reconstruct with accuracy the tribal map of the Yemeni mountains for the first centuries of the Christian era. The scholars who work on the time of Muḥammad, son of ʿAbd Allāh, the founder of Islam, are primarily interested in the Arab tribes from western and central Arabia, which played a major role in the early decades of Islam. Due to the lack of ancient data, they rely on Islamic sources, above all on geographical treatises describing Arabia, written several centuries later, or on genealogies that were supposed to contain information of great antiquity. These sources are rich in reliable data for the period in which they were written, but it is obvious that they do not allow us to go back in time. Between the Southarabic time, known from the epigraphic sources, and the Islamic period, more than four centuries later, the tribal society underwent profound changes, as can be seen from the obvious changes in the tribal map. Also remarkable is the change of the tribal society from a hierarchical and non-egalitarian model to a genealogical pattern, as revealed by the new terminology. The genealogies preserved the memory of only a small portion of the people and tribes preceding Islam. An illustration of this would be the lists found in the epigraphic texts from the 6th century: only a few names are inscribed in the genealogies from the 9th century or later. Therefore, one may not rely on the genealogies in order to reconstruct the Arabic society of the time of Muḥammad or earlier periods. The genealogies nevertheless contain reliable information on the ancestry of people who had a high rank in the Islamic empire, and a significant part of the material collected by genealogists seems trustworthy as the names mentioned in the genealogies are related to those inscribed in pre-islamic rock inscriptions in the region of Najrān.