Dahm

Overview

Dahm — written دهم — is entered among the Hamdānī groups, and the lists that divide Hamdān into Ḥāshid and Bakīl commonly place it on the Bakīl side, though they are not uniform in how they arrange it. Its country is the open ground north-east of Sanaa: al-Jawf, the broad depression that runs down toward the sands, and the marches beyond it. Al-Hamdānī, whose book is a survey of exactly this country and these peoples, names Dahm in it. This page describes a historical tribe as the old books record it, and makes no claim about any modern family.

The country

Al-Jawf is not mountain country. It is a wide open floor between the high plateau on one side and the edge of the sands on the other, watered by seasonal courses coming down from the highlands, and holding the ruins of the old Yemeni kingdoms along its length. Al-Hamdānī's method is to name a district by the people who hold it, and his survey of the north-east reads as a list of such districts, one after another. That is an association of place, not a record of descent, and a district keeps its name long after the people in it have changed.

Dahm and Wāʾilah

The reports regularly name Dahm and Wāʾilah together as neighbours in this same north-eastern country, and later writing sometimes treats the pair as one unit. The old books name them separately, and this reference keeps them as separate entries. Where they are counted — within Bakīl, or alongside it — the lists differ, and the difference is theirs, not this page's to resolve.

The name

The root d-h-m carries blackness and multitude. Ibn Manẓūr gives al-adham for the black, and al-duhmah for that blackness; al-dahm and al-dahmāʾ for a great crowd of people; and dahamahu for a thing that comes upon a man suddenly and in force. The lexicographers record the root and record the tribal name; they do not say the one was taken from the other, and this reference does not supply the connection for them.

On lineage

This page describes a historical tribe as the classical sources record it, and makes no claim about any modern family. Branch lists and affiliations are given as reported by the genealogists, who themselves disagree. Nothing here 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.