The Sarāt

The name

From the root s-r-w (س-ر-و). In Lisān al-ʿArab the sarāt of a thing is its back and its highest part: the sarāt of a horse is its back, the sarāt of a road its raised middle, and sarāt al-nahār the height of the day. The range is named for exactly that — it is the raised back of western Arabia. The plural the geographers use is al-sarawāt.

The range

Al-Hamdānī treats the Sarāt in Ṣifat Jazīrat al-ʿArab and describes one continuous chain running from the south northward, divided into named sarawāt, each known by the people settled on it. Yāqūt gives the same picture: mountains extending from near Yemen toward the north, cold, wooded and watered where the rest of the Peninsula is neither.

Against Tihāma

The old division of western Arabia rests on this range. West of it the ground falls to the hot coastal plain of Tihāma; east of it the country rises into the interior. Ḥijāz and Sarāt name much the same country from two directions — ḥijāz for what it does, barring one side from the other, and sarāt for what it is, the high back.

In genealogy

The sources locate a great many groups by the Sarāt rather than by a town: Ghāmid and Zahrān in the country around al-Bāḥah, Shahrān, Balqarn and Banī Shihr in the ʿAsīr highlands, Khathʿam across the southern sarawāt, and al-Azd is placed in this country as well. These are associations of place — where a group is recorded as living — and nothing follows from them about any family's descent.