Al-Tawwash

The word

In the usage of the Gulf coast al-ṭawwāsh is the pearl-merchant: the man who bought pearls from those who brought them up and sold them on. The written form looks like a faʿʿāl of ṭ-w-sh, the pattern of trade names, but the look of a pattern is not a derivation. Lisān al-ʿArab does not record al-ṭawwāsh as a dealer in pearls; the sense is regional and later than the dictionaries this reference cites. Accounts of where the word came from circulate, none of them is attested in those sources, and this page adopts none of them.

What the lexicon does carry is the thing he dealt in: al-luʾluʾ, the pearl, and al-durr, which it gives as the large pearl, a single one being durra. The page can therefore say from the classical sources what the ṭawwāsh sold, even where it cannot say how he came by his name.

A dealer, not a diver

Al-ṭawwāsh and al-ghawwāṣ stand at two ends of one trade, and the names are not interchangeable: the diver brought the shell up; the ṭawwāsh bought what it held. Nor is the name simply al-tājir. The tājir of Lisān is the one who buys and sells, whatever the goods; the ṭawwāsh on this coast was the merchant of one commodity only.

Bearing the name

An occupational family name records what an ancestor did, 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 word itself.