Though cast here as an Arab hero, Sayf in fact belonged to an ancient Hadramite family who would certainly not have considered themselves as Arabs (ancient south Arabian inscriptions draw a clear distinction between Arabs and native peoples of Yemen). But by Asma‘i’s day there existed a very clear conception of Arab identity and it was applied retrospectively to all the inhabitants of pre-Islamic Arabia. There is some awareness that they may nor all have possessed the same racial origins, but none doubted that they had come to form a single ethnic (socio-cultural) community: