Tanukh
The confederation was led around this time by its king Jadhima, whose rule is attested by a Greek–Nabatean inscription and who plays an epic role in the traditional narratives of the pre-Islamic period.
Tanukhid tribesmen later settled in the Gharb area outside Beirut in Mount Lebanon and in the 11th century, they became one of the leading tribal groups to embrace the new Druze faith.
A Tanukhid family of the Gharb, the Buhturids (commonly called after their parent tribe 'Tanukh'), held the area almost perpetually throughout Crusader, Ayyubid and Mamluk rule and produced one of the major religious thinkers of the Druze, the 15th-century al-Sayyid al-Tanukhi.
Their influence gave way to an allied Druze clan in Mount Lebanon, the Ma'ns of the Chouf, but they continued to locally dominate the Gharb well into the Ottoman era in the 16th and 17th centuries.
The early Islamic tradition, particularly the works of the Kufan historian Ibn al-Kalbi (d. 819), claim that the Tanukh was a confederation of migrant Arab tribes formed in Bahrayn (eastern Arabia).
[1] The traditional narratives describe the constituent tribes' migration from the Tihamah (the western Arabian coastlands of Mecca to Yemen (southern Arabia)) to Bahrayn.
[2][3] While modern historians question or dismiss the historicity of the migration from Tihamah, there is general acceptance that the Tanukh was forged or present in Bahrayn by the 2nd century CE.
[6] Their presence in Iraq is supported by a late 3rd-century Sabian inscription mentioning the Himyarite king Shammar Yuharish's dispatch of ambassadors to the capitals of the Sasanian Empire (which succeeded Parthia) and the "land of Tanukh".
[19] From the time of Mu'awiya's governorship, the Quda'a, led by the Banu Kalb tribe, had been the military mainstay of the Umayyad state and held a privileged place in government over the other Syrian tribal groups.
The Qays, which was established in northern Syria and Upper Mesopotamia, where they had migrated during Mu'awiya's administration, launched a series of damaging raids against the Kalb in revenge for their losses at Marj Rahit over the next few years.
[26][27] During the Fourth Muslim Civil War (811–837), the Tanukh of Qinnasrin gave allegiance to the self-proclaimed caliph Abu al-Umaytir, an Umayyad who had ousted the Abbasid governor from Damascus in 811.
[28] As a result of the raids by the Qaysi rebels, Tanukhid settlement shifted from Aleppo and Qinnasrin southwestward to Ma'arrat al-Nu'man and the mountain range running east of Latakia toward Homs in the south.
According to the historian Thierry Bianquis, at that time the area of Maarat al-Nu'man was the "fief" of the Tanukhids, while the Bahra' and groups of Kurds inhabited the coastal mountains.
[30] Although they were largely concentrated in Ma'arrat al-Nu'man,[31] the 10th-century geographer al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Muhallabi noted that the Tanukh (along with the Quraysh) were one of two chief descent groups of the Arabs living in Aleppo city at that time.
[13][b] The final stage of the Tanukh's history was in Mount Lebanon, specifically the Gharb district lying southeast of Beirut, where the tribe "suddenly appeared", in Shahid's words.
[35] A family of the Tanukh in the Gharb, the Buhturids (commonly referred to in the sources simply as the 'Tanukh'), became a local buffer force straddling the domains of the Muslim rulers of Damascus and the Crusader lords of Beirut in the 12th and 13th centuries.
[38] Under Mamluk rule, the Buhturids served as their own unit in the army, charged with protecting the harbor of Beirut from seaborne raids and assigned practically hereditary iqtas.
