A New Approach to the Genealogy of Banu Rabi'ah

Jamharah al-Nasab, a monumental work of Arab's genealogy written by Hisham b. al-Kalbi (d. 204/819), contains not only descriptions of the paternal lineages but also the names of women who gave sons for their husbands, so that we can find more than 800 cases of marriage among the ancient Arab people including 560 cases in which both of the two were from the northern Arab. In this article, I analyzed these cases of marriage especially focusing on the generational relationships between the couples and got the following results:1) Some sahabah from Banu Rabi'ah had GN over 25 although all the sahabah from Banu Tabikhah and Qays 'Aylan had GN which did not exceed 24.2) Banu Rabi'ah can be classified into two groups. The first group is (a) the upper Rabi'ah which had GN under 10, and the second is (b) Bakr b. Wa'il & Taghlib which had GN over 12. When a member of the first group married one from a non-Rabi'ah group, the latter always had GN equal to the former's or bigger. On the contrary, when a member of the second group married one from a non-Rabi'ah group, the latter always had GN much smaller than the former's.3) Some cases of marriage for the second group are contradictory to the generational relationships between Rabi'ah and non-Rabi'ah which the cases for the first group indicates.On these grounds I have come to the conclusion that the genealogy of the second group, Banu Bakr b. Wa'il & Taghlib, had been independent from the first's, the upper Rabi'ah, before the two got combined into one genealogical tree. It was this period in which the genealogies of sahabah and the cases of marriage between Rabi'ah and non-Rabi'ah were fixed.GN: Generation Number of the northern Arab counted from 'Adnan.