Banū Yarbūʿ

Overview

Yarbūʿ ibn Ḥanẓala ibn Mālik ibn Zayd Manāt ibn Tamīm is placed by the genealogists as a brother-line to Mālik, the father of Dārim. Yāqūt records a landscape under their name: al-Ḥazn, known as Ḥazn Banī Yarbūʿ, a hard stony upland remembered for its pasture, which he describes alongside al-Ṣammān and the sands of al-Dahnāʾ in setting out the grazing country of that region — the later regional name al-Qaṣīm plays no part in how the classical geographers locate them. Among the figures the sources reckon to Yarbūʿ are Mālik ibn Nuwayra and his brother Mutammim, whose elegies for him are among the best known of their kind, and the poet Jarīr, reckoned to Kulayb of Yarbūʿ. Riyāḥ is reckoned among his sons, as the genealogists report it, and has its own page here. That a tribal name is fixed to a landscape is worth a word: it records where the sources placed a group, not who lives there now. This page describes a historical section of a historical tribe and makes no claim about any modern family.

The name

Al-yarbūʿ in Lisān al-ʿArab is the jerboa, the long-hind-legged desert rodent. Naming from desert animals is ordinary in early Arabic, and the sense of the word carries no implication beyond itself.

On lineage

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