Ballasmar

Overview

Ballasmar — written بللسمر — is reported as a tribe of the south-western highlands of Arabia and the slopes descending from them toward Tihāmah, in the mountain country south of the Sarāt passes. This page describes a historical tribe as reported, and makes no claim about any modern family.

The name is a contraction of Banū al-Asmar

The most useful thing this page can explain is the shape of the name. In the speech of the south-western highlands and the Tihāmah below them, the phrase banū al- before a name is contracted in pronunciation and then in writing, so that بنو الأسمر becomes بللسمر — the nūn of banū assimilating and the article's lām carrying over, leaving a single word. The same contraction produces بلحارث from بنو الحارث, بلقرن from بنو القرن, and بلعبيد and بلخزمر and others besides; it is a regional habit of the tongue, not a separate kind of name. Readers meeting بللسمر for the first time should read it as banū al-asmar and expect the same rule wherever a south-western tribal name begins with bal-. Al-asmar in Arabic is the brown or dusky in colour, and Ibn Manẓūr enters the root s-m-r for that shade; what the lexicon does not say — and this page will not invent — is why the tribe carries a colour adjective as a name.

On sources

The classical works this reference cites do not document Ballasmar under that name. Al-Hamdānī describes the Sarāt and the mountain country of the south-west at length and is the best of them for that region, but he is describing the country and its peoples of the fourth century of the Hijra, and the contracted form belongs to a later stage of the language and of the tribe's arrangement. What is reported about Ballasmar therefore comes from oral tradition and from modern writing outside the permitted sources, and this reference does not attach the tribe to a parent it cannot cite. Where al-Hamdānī and Ibn Manẓūr are cited here, they are cited for the country and for the word, and the citation notes say so.

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.