Al-ʿAmāyir

Overview

Al-ʿAmāyir — written العماير — is reported as one of the sections named under Banū Khālid, with its country placed in eastern Arabia, in al-Aḥsāʾ and the country about it. Beyond the name, the region as reported and the tribe it is reported under, there is nothing this reference can responsibly add. This page describes a historical section as reported, and makes no claim about any modern family.

The name

Ibn Manẓūr enters the root ʿ-m-r for inhabiting and building and for long life: ʿamara al-makān is to dwell in a place and keep it peopled, and al-ʿumr is a lifetime. From the root come the personal names ʿĀmir, ʿUmar and the diminutive ʿUmayr, all of them old and very common. Al-ʿAmāyir has the shape of a plural formed on such a name, a shape that recurs across the section names of eastern Arabia. The lexicon explains the word and not the naming, and this page does not turn the one into the other.

On sources

The classical works this reference cites do not document al-ʿAmāyir. The arrangement of Banū Khālid in which the name appears is later than all six of them, and none of them lists that tribe's sections. What is reported about al-ʿAmāyir comes from oral tradition and from modern writing outside this reference's permitted sources. Yāqūt can be cited for al-Aḥsāʾ as country — the place, not the section — and that is the whole of what is citable here. Later writing also attaches to the sections named under Banū Khālid the political history of al-Aḥsāʾ and particular houses and families; this reference records none of that, and attaches no family to any name on this page.

On lineage

Branch lists and affiliations here are given as reported, and the genealogists differ among themselves. Nothing on this page establishes any living family's descent: a shared name may reflect descent, alliance (ḥilf) or clientage (walāʾ), and the sources usually say which only when they know.