Tribal ties around the cooking fire in South Arabia: Some ethnographic lexical notes

Abstract

This paper reflects on some Arabic terms, previously noted by scholars, of small-scale monument types, which have a symbolic and semantic conflation of ‘cooking fire’ and ‘permanent occupation’, such as raḍfa, jamara, ʾaṯfiya and rabaʿa. The paper discusses more terms that confirm this conflation and widen it to include the concept of tribal protection, as a parallel with the pre-Islamic practice of the ‘fire of alliance’, described by classical Muslim writers and alluded to in Ancient South Arabian inscriptions. The association of fire terminology with tribal protection concepts appears to be related to the idea of food-sharing alliances.