Banū Ṣakhr

Overview

Banū Ṣakhr — written بنو صخر — is reported as a tribe of the country east of the Jordan, about the Balqāʾ, the plateau south of it and the desert margins running east. Later tradition connects it with Ṭayyi', as such traditions often do for the tribes of that country, but the connection is a report and is given here as one. This page describes a historical tribe as reported, and makes no claim about any modern family.

A common name, borne more than once

Ṣakhr is an ordinary Arabic personal name — Ibn Manẓūr enters the root ṣ-kh-r for rock and hard stone — and the classical genealogical books contain several men called Ṣakhr and more than one grouping of sons of Ṣakhr, in different tribes and different regions, unrelated to one another and to the tribe of this page. This is worth saying plainly, because a search of the old books will turn up the name and it is easy to mistake such a find for documentation of the tribe reported today. It is not: the old entries record other people who happened to share a very ordinary ancestral name.

The country

Yāqūt describes the Balqāʾ, its towns and its country, as one of the districts of the Levant, and the desert that runs east and south of it. That description is of the place, and this reference cites it as such. Where a tribe is reported in a place the classical geographer describes, the geographer supports the place and not the tribe, and the citation notes below say so.

On sources

The classical works this reference cites do not document Banū Ṣakhr as a tribe under this name in this country. The tribe's present shape is later than all six of them by centuries, and what is reported about it — including its reported connection with Ṭayyi' — comes from oral tradition and from modern writing outside the sources this reference is permitted to use. The page therefore records the name, the reported country and the reported affiliation as report, and records no descent.

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.