of the 8th/14th century, many mamlu ¯k descendants also played important military as well as increasingly political and socio-economic roles in Egypt and Syria, as h ˙alqa troopers, as amirs of varying ranks, and as iqt ˙a ¯ʿ-holders. Especially the reigns of the Qala ¯wu ¯nid sultans al-Na ¯s ˙ir H ˙asan (r. 1347-51, 1354-61) and al-Ashraf Shaʿba ¯n (r. 1363-77) tend to be considered the heyday for these descendants' political and socio-economic participation, as demonstrated by extant prosopographical as well as socio-economic data. From the end of the 8th/ 14th century onwards, however, their socio-political and military participation has been demonstrated to have receded substantially, giving way in the 9th/15th century to their primary appearance in contexts of the management of varyingly composed family estates. 3 Despite this strong scholarly consensus that awla ¯d al-na ¯s references in contemporary sources inform about a collectivity of mamlu ¯k descendants and its rich social and cultural histories, some fundamental challenges to this common assumption were formulated in a survey chapter of awla ¯d al-na ¯s studies, published in 1998 by the German historian Ulrich Haarmann . Haarmann explained that "when exactly this designation awla ¯d al-na ¯s began to be used and how it was delineated in the course of the decades after 1250 has not been 3 See especially Abraham N.