Hadat is the eponymous progenitor invoked in the folk traditions of the Hadendoa, the most numerous of the Beja confederations. Some accounts make her a daughter of a medieval ruler of Suakin, from whom the tribe took both its name and its chiefly descent. Scholars are divided on the tradition: the philologist E.M. Roper analysed the tribal name Haɖanɖiwa as simply 'lion clan', from haɖa, 'lion', and (n)ɖiwa, 'clan', so that the ancestral Hadat may be a later personification of the name rather than its source. She stands here for the ancestress-legends by which the Beja groups explain their own names and identity.