Maʿadd ibn ʿAdnān (Arabic: مَعَدّ ٱبْن عَدْنَان) was a mythic Arab ancestor, traditionally regarded as the son of Adnan and the forefather of several northern Arab tribes, including Quda'a, Mudar, and Rabi'ah. He is considered a key figure in Adnanite genealogy, linking the northern Arabs to Ishmael ibn Ibrahim (Ishmael, son of Abraham) through Adnan. While Maʿadd eventually became an individual ancestor in Islamic genealogies, the term is first known from pre-Islamic inscriptions where it refers to a group of nomadic and semi-nomadic groups occupying central Arabia, beyond the territorial domain of the major powers of its day: north of the direct territorial control of the Himyarite Kingdom, and south of that of the Lakhmids. Ma'addites retained independence and protected their northern and southern frontiers because they lived in remote areas and had militarized societies. From the fourth to sixth centuries, they were centered at Ma'sal al‐Jumh in the Najd. Ma'add coexisted among other regional identities, including Ghassan, Himyar, and Tayyi'. They are first mentioned in the Namara inscription (328 CE). The word "Ma'add" was used in related, but different ways, in other sources. Pre-Islamic literature beyond the peninsula composed in Greek and Syriac used it not for a peoples but for militarized camel-herding Bedouin in north Arabia beyond imperial control more generally. In pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, "Ma'add" was a communal identity and ethnonym functioning in the way that the word "Arab" does today. As such, Ma'add encompassed all peoples, including both northern and southern Arab tribes. In Islamic genealogical accounts, which were written at a time when Ma'add began to be thought of as a tribe as opposed to a central Arabian confederation, "Ma'add" could either refer to a figure named Ma'add, the eponymous ancestor of the Ma'add tribe, or to the tribe itself. The tribe was understood in genealogies to be one of several northern Arab tribes that collectively descended from Ma'add's father, Adnan. By contrast, the tribes of South Arabia traced their ancestry to Qahtan. Ma'addite may have been the Arabic dialect that pre-Islamic qasidas were composed in, and it may have a common ancestor with Hijazi Arabic. The word Ma'add underwent many semantic shifts in the Islamic era. First, the Ma'add geography transitioned from central Arabia to the Fertile Crescent as a result of the movement of peoples during the early Muslim conquests. Then, the word Ma'add went from being used as an ethnonym, to a tribe. To reassert its hegemony in the face of the spread of pan-Arab identity (and as the term 'Arab' came to adopt the communal sense of 'Ma'add' in earlier times) in the eighth century, the Ma'add tribe was traced to a founder figure (named Ma'add) who became the earliest ascertainable ancestor of the Arabs. By the ninth-century, however, Arab genealogical history was extended further back, first to Ma'add's father Adnan, and then his grandfather Udad, and eventually, Ishmael, as the ancestor of all Arabs. Yet another genealogical model then became dominant, which delineated South Arabs as a distinguished line of Arabs descending not from Ishmael or Adnan, but Qahtan. By the end of the ninth century, Ma'addite identity had become largely lost.
Pre-Islamic era
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