Al-Khaṭṭ

Overview

Al-Khaṭṭ is the classical name of this coast. In Yāqūt the word is the seaboard of al-Baḥrayn — the shore itself and the landing places along it, on the eastern side of Arabia — and he writes it khaṭṭ ʿAbd al-Qays, the Khaṭṭ of ʿAbd al-Qays, after the tribe the genealogists settle on it. The towns of the shore are towns of the Khaṭṭ, al-Qaṭīf among them. So a source that places a man *bi-l-Khaṭṭ* has placed him on this coast, and not in any one town on it.

The name

Ibn Manẓūr enters *al-khaṭṭ* under kh-ṭ-ṭ with its plain sense first — a line drawn — and then gives the sense that matters here: *sīf al-baḥr wa-marfaʾuhu*, the shore of the sea and its mooring. One report in the lexicon goes further and makes the word general: every shore is a *khaṭṭ*, and this coast is *the* Khaṭṭ only because it is the one the Arabs meant. The same root gives *khiṭṭa*, a piece of ground a man marks out and settles — whence *ikhtaṭṭa dāran*, "he marked out a house for himself", and the *khiṭaṭ* of a town, its quarters as they were first laid out. A coast is a line, and Arabic uses one word for both.

The Khaṭṭī spears

The best-known thing in Arabic about this place is not the place. The spears the poets call *khaṭṭī* — *al-rimāḥ al-khaṭṭiyya* — are named from al-Khaṭṭ, and the lexicographers and the geographers both take trouble to explain why, because the obvious inference is the wrong one. Ibn Manẓūr says it flatly: the spears are attributed to al-Khaṭṭ, and it is not that the cane grows there; it is carried to it, and straightened and dressed there. Yāqūt gives the same account — the shafts came by sea from India, were worked up at the Khaṭṭ ports and went out again under the coast's name.

So *khaṭṭī* is a trade name from a market, in the way that a cloth or a blade elsewhere carries the name of the town it was finished in rather than the country it was grown or mined in. In verse it hardened until the adjective could stand alone: a poet who says *khaṭṭī* means a spear, with no word for spear beside it. The nisba to the place is Khaṭṭī.

More than one Khaṭṭ

The word is ordinary and the name is not unique. The lexicon names another Khaṭṭ in al-Yamāma, and the geographers write *khaṭṭ* of ground in more than one country. This coast is the one the spears are named from and the one meant when the name is written without qualification — but al-Khaṭṭ on its own is a word before it is a location, and a bare occurrence proves nothing about where a man was from.