Miṣr (Egypt)

The name

Miṣr is an Arabic common noun before it is the name of a country. In the lexicon a miṣr is the boundary between two things, and then the large settled town that gathers a population: to maṣṣara a place is to make a town of it, and the amṣār are the towns founded in that way — al-Baṣra, al-Kūfa and Fusṭāṭ among them. Yāqūt also reports an eponymous derivation, as the geographers habitually do for very old names; it is reported, not documented.

Position

Egypt is where the world of the Peninsula meets the Mediterranean and the African shore. Yāqūt describes the pilgrim road running down to ʿAydhāb on the Red Sea and crossing from there to Jeddah, and that crossing carried scholars, goods and families in both directions for centuries — which is why a nisba formed on one shore is found settled on the other.

In genealogy

Fusṭāṭ was laid out in khiṭaṭ, quarters allotted to the tribal contingents that settled it, and its men were entered in the dīwān under their tribes; tribal names accordingly became the names of quarters. Egypt is also the road west: the sources record Banī Hilāl moving through it toward Ifrīqiya and the Maghrib, the best known of the westward accounts and, like the rest, transmitted narrative rather than documented movement. Ibn Khaldūn treats the founding of the amṣār and the settling of tribes in them as a subject in its own right.