Al-ʿUqayr

Overview

Al-ʿUqayr stands on the Gulf shore south of the al-Khaṭṭ coast, below the oasis country of al-Aḥsāʾ and inland of it. It is a landing place on an open shore rather than a town of the palm belt, and it belongs to the same seaboard the geographers call al-Baḥrayn.

The name

Al-ʿUqayr is the diminutive of *al-ʿaqr* / *al-ʿuqr*, and that word is one of the busiest in Arabic place-naming. Ibn Manẓūr gives *ʿuqr al-dār* for the heart of a dwelling — the original ground a house stands on — and *al-ʿaqr* for a built place, a palace or a fortified building, as well as the plain sense of the root ʿ-q-r, to hamstring or to wound. Yāqūt's dictionary carries a long series of places called al-ʿAqr and its diminutive, in Iraq, in Arabia and elsewhere, told apart only by what is added to the name.

The lexicon therefore explains the word thoroughly and the place-book locates a great many places built on it. Neither of them settles which of them, if any, is this shore.

In the sources

The classical works this reference cites — Yāqūt, Ibn Manẓūr, Ibn Ḥazm, al-Qalqashandī, al-Hamdānī and Ibn Khaldūn — do not identify a port of this name on this coast. Where they describe the seaboard they describe it under al-Baḥrayn and al-Khaṭṭ, and where they name its landing places they name Dārīn. This page therefore records the name, its derivation as a word, and the country it stands in. It does not record a history, and nothing here should be read as one.