Bakīl is the name of a large group of tribes in northern Yemen. Before Islam, the leading family of the Bakīl became subordinate to a dynasty from Ḥāshid named Hamdān. In the early Islamic period these names were included in schemes of genealogy. The geographer and genealogist of South Arabia al-Ḥasan al-Hamdānī (d. 334/945) gives Ḥāshid and Bakīl as two brothers descended from Hamdān, and describes the Bakīl as located largely to the east of the Ḥāshid. The distribution of tribes was in fact less well defined.