Places

Historic families and tribes of towns and regions.

• Kuwait City

  The capital of Kuwait on the Gulf coast, grown from an eighteenth-century port town around its old kut (fort).

• Manama

  The capital of Bahrain, on the island the classical geographers called Awal — a historic pearling and trading centre.

• Maʾrib

  The ancient Sabaean capital and the site of the great dam whose collapse is a fixed point in Arab tradition.

• Mecca

  The holiest city of Islam, in the Hijaz; site of the Kaaba and destination of the Hajj pilgrimage.

• Medina

  A historic city in the Hijaz region of western Arabia, long a center of settlement and scholarship and home to many tribes and families.

• Miṣr (Egypt)

  An ordinary Arabic word before it was a country — a miṣr is a boundary, then a great settled town — and Fusṭāṭ was one of the amṣār, laid out quarter by quarter

• Musandam

  The mountain peninsula closing the mouth of the Gulf — limestone falling straight into deep inlets, and the recorded country of al-Shiḥūḥ.

• Muscat

  The capital of Oman, a natural-harbour port on the Gulf of Oman attested in the classical geographies.

• Najd

  The central plateau of Arabia — the high interior, and the homeland of many of the Peninsula's largest tribes.

• Najran

  An ancient oasis city of southwestern Saudi Arabia near the Yemeni border, with deep pre-Islamic history.

• Nizwā

  The historic interior capital of Oman, at the foot of the Jabal al-Akhḍar.

• Riyadh

  A city in the Najd plateau of central Arabia; today the capital of Saudi Arabia. Its name means 'the gardens/meadows'.

• Ṣafwā

  A village of the Qaṭīf oasis. Its name sits on a root that gives both clear water and smooth rock — the lexicon does not say which is meant here.

• Sanaa

  The ancient capital of Yemen in the northern highlands, one of Arabia's oldest continuously inhabited cities.

• Sanābis

  A village of the Qaṭīf oasis on the Khaṭṭ coast. The name is borne by more than one settlement on this coast and beyond it, and the lexicon supplies no derivati

• Sayhāt

  A village of the Qaṭīf oasis on the Khaṭṭ coast. The name has no derivation the lexicon accounts for, and the classical works cited here do not record it.

• Sharjah

  A Gulf emirate and old port, long a centre of trade and today of publishing and heritage work.

• Tabūk

  The northwestern gateway — an oasis on the old road between the Hijaz and the Levant.

• Taif

  A highland town in the Hijaz, known for its temperate climate, orchards, and long association with surrounding tribes.

• Tārūt

  The island off the Qaṭīf shore. The classical works this reference cites do not name it; the page records the name and where it stands.

• The Arabian Gulf

  The gulf along Arabia's eastern coast — baḥr Fāris in the classical geographies, and the diving sea whose ports the same family names run along.

• The Hijaz

  The western region along the Red Sea, holding Mecca and Medina — so named because it separates Najd from the coast.

• The Maghreb

  The Arab west — the lands beyond Ifrīqiya, and the far end of the westward migration accounts the genealogists record.

• The Red Sea

  The narrow sea along Arabia's western shore — called the Sea of al-Qulzum in the classical geographies, and a crossing rather than a boundary.

• The Rubʿ al-Khālī (Empty Quarter)

  The great sand sea of southern Arabia — the largest continuous desert of sand on earth.

• The Sarāt

  The mountain range running the length of western Arabia — the high back of the Peninsula, dividing Tihāma from the interior.

• Tihāma

  The hot coastal lowland along the Red Sea, running from Yemen up to the Hijaz — the counterpart to highland Najd.

• Umm al-Ḥamām

  A village of the Qaṭīf oasis on the Khaṭṭ coast, and an example of the umm- compound, one of the commonest patterns in Arabian place-names.

• Umm al-Sāhik

  A village of the Qaṭīf oasis on the Khaṭṭ coast; another umm- compound, its second element from a root the lexicon uses of a scouring wind.

• Unaizah

  A historic town in the Qassim region of Najd, known for its old families, trade, and agriculture.

• Wādī al-Dawāsir

  A broad valley of southern Najd gathering the drainage off the Sarāt — and taking its present name from the group settled along it.

• Yabrīn

  An oasis south of al-Aḥsāʾ, and the classical name of the great sands that run south of it — what is now called the Rubʿ al-Khālī.

• Yanbuʿ

  A Red Sea port of the Hijaz whose name means 'it springs forth' — for the water that made it.

• Zabīd

  A historic town on Yemen's Tihama, for centuries a centre of learning and the birthplace of algebra's teaching tradition.

• Ẓafār (Dhofar)

  The far south of Oman — frankincense country greened by the summer monsoon; and a name the classical sources give to more than one place.

• ʿAnak

  A village of the Qaṭīf coast. A short name easily confused in writing with others, and the classical works cited here do not record it.

• ʿAsīr

  The southwestern highlands — terraced mountain country between Tihāma and the Yemeni border.

• ʿUmān (Oman, the region)

  The southeastern corner of Arabia as the classical geographers describe it — from Musandam to the borders of Mahra, wider than the modern state, and not the sam