Al-Ṣumaydiʿ

Overview

Al-Ṣumaydiʿ — written الصميدع, commonly vowelled al-Ṣumaydiʿ — is reported of groups in al-ʿIrāq and the Jazīra. This page describes a historical name as reported, and makes no claim about any modern family.

Reported in more than one arrangement

The accounts differ over where to place the name: some arrange it under Zubayd, others place it otherwise or leave it standing on its own, and the name is borne by more than one group. Where reports disagree like this, the disagreement is the finding. This page records it and does not fix a single structure in its place.

The name

Ibn Manẓūr enters ṣ-m-d-ʿ and gives al-ṣumaydiʿ for the noble lord and for the bold and hardy man; it is used as an epithet and, like many epithets, as a personal name. That is a real and old word, and it makes the name intelligible without making it genealogical: a byname (laqab) may pass to a man's people and become their name, and nothing in that process records a descent. The lexicon explains the word; it does not mention a people of the name.

On sources

The classical works this reference cites — Ibn Ḥazm, al-Qalqashandī, al-Hamdānī, Yāqūt, Ibn Manẓūr and Ibn Khaldūn — do not document a people of this name. Its present shape is later than all of them by centuries, and what is reported about it comes from oral tradition and from later writing that lies outside the sources this reference is permitted to use. The page therefore records the name, the country it is reported in, and what the reports attach it to. It does not record a descent, and nothing on it should be read as one. The page keeps to the name and to what the classical works do and do not contain, and does not enter later history.

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.