Ẓafār (Dhofar)

More than one Ẓafār

The name has to be read carefully, because the geographers use it of more than one place. One Ẓafār is in the Yemeni highlands, the seat of the kings of Ḥimyar — the Ẓafār of the proverb the lexicographers record, 'whoever enters Ẓafāri, let him speak Ḥimyarī', cited as evidence that the speech of Ḥimyar was not the Arabic of the north. The other is Ẓafār on the ocean coast in the far south, the frankincense port, and that is the Dhofar of modern usage. Yāqūt keeps the two apart, and notes that the name is treated as indeclinable in the Ḥijāzī manner, like Qaṭāmi and Ḥadhāmi.

The southern Ẓafār

Dhofar today is the southern province of Oman, and it is unlike the rest of the Peninsula: the summer monsoon breaks on its mountains and turns them green for a season, and the frankincense tree grows on the slopes behind the coast. The frankincense of al-Shiḥr and Ẓafār is named in the geographies as the best of it, and the ports of this coast carried it north and east for as long as the trade lasted.

Setting

Behind the mountains the ground gives way to sand, so Dhofar's inland limit is the edge of the great southern desert. West along the coast lies Ḥaḍramawt, and the same littoral runs on into Yemen.

In genealogy

The country between Ḥaḍramawt and Ẓafār is recorded as that of al-Mahrah, and the tongues spoken in it — Mehri on the plain, and the speech of the Ẓafārī mountains — are sisters of Arabic rather than dialects of it. As elsewhere here, this is an association of place; nothing in it bears on any family's descent.