Page 68 - A Hand book of Arabia Vol 1 (iii) Ch 3

tribes of the central south 75

2. The Dawasir.

The nomadic DAWASIR are Wahabite and more or less under
Ibn Sf*‘ud. Half-settled, they have villages in the Wadi Dawasir,
which they inhabit during the summer. They breed camels, though
not in such large quantities as the Qahtan. The Qashn dealers
do not come as far south as the Dawasir, but the latter bring
their camels into the Hasa and dispose of them there to the
Qusman.
i
The Dawasir have overflowed into the easterly provinces of
Southern Nejd, and now form a considerable settled element in
Afiaj, where they are the chief owners of land, worked by men of
the fellah tribe of Beni Khadhlr. To a less extent they are found
also ii! Hariq and ‘Aridh, where they contribute a proportion of the S
village* and even the town population. Small parties of their
:
nomads wander between Nejd and Hasa and trouble the routes.
A considerable body is settled in Bahrein. Indeed, so small a
proportion of the Dawasir is in any sense Bedouin, that the tribe
hardly comes within our purview here ; for the settled clans see
Chap. XVI, pp. 604 ff.

D. Tribes of the Central East

1. The Shammar

The SHAMMAR are northern Arabs. They do not spring from
a single ancestor, but account for themselves by saying that they
are a mixture of Taghlib, ‘Abs, and Hawazin, the first a constituent
"f Rabi‘ah, the two last of Mudhar. The Ja'far, to which the ruling
family of the Rashid belongs, is a sub-tribe of ‘Abdah, and the ‘Abdah
riaini descent from the ‘Abidah, apait of the settled Qahtan: they
^(mld, therefore, be Yemenites. Beyond these vague traditions, the
Shammar are ignorant of their own history before they established
themselves in Jebel Shammar, * the two mountains of Tayy ’ fre­
quently mentioned in pre-Mohammedan literature, where they dis-
P aced (and probably partly incorporated) the ancient Tayy nation,
\ )rail°h of the Qahtan. About the middle of the seventeenth
unmiry they began to stretch their frontiers into the Syrian Desert,
10re theY encountered, and, after a brief struggle, defeated, the