Al-Dimashqi

Overview

Al-Dimashqi (al-Dimashqī) is the nisba to Dimashq, Damascus, which Yāqūt enters as the seat and chief town of al-Shām. He reports the name as foreign and relays the stories told of who built the place and why it was so called, giving them as reports rather than as findings. Lisān al-ʿArab knows dimashq as an Arabic word too — of a she-camel, the swift and light one — and damshaqa of work is to do it quickly.

A city inside a country

The nisba to the city and the nisba to the region stand one inside the other. Al-Shāmī places a family in the whole country between the Euphrates and Egypt; al-Dimashqī places it in the one town. A family of a single origin may be written either way, in different documents or in different generations, and finding both in a family's papers is not evidence of two origins. Neither form is more exact about descent than the other; the difference between them is only the size of the place named.

Names easily confused

Because damshaqa and its derivatives are ordinary words for speed and lightness, a byname on that sense is possible and is written exactly like the place-name. Nothing on the page distinguishes the two.

Bearing the name

A toponymic family name records a place an ancestor was attributed to — born there, settled there, known by it — as the name was applied to him, not a lineage. It attaches to no tribe, and two families bearing it need have no connection to one another beyond the place itself.