The Arab genealogical literary tradition of the 8th and 9th centuries has long been suspected of containing a large amount of historically accurate data, but the density and complexity of the information has meant that modern scholarship has only been able to treat it in a piece-meal fashion. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that basic techniques and technologies used in the digital humanities allow us to overcome the challenges presented by the source material. It will be shown that by drawing on anthropological and sociological studies related to genealogical memory we can hypothesise that certain elements of the nasab tradition are less susceptible to historiographical distortion than others. These elements are then extracted from the literature and compiled in the form of a database which can then be subjected to different forms of prosopographical analysis. These include analyses of the data on tribal, generational and geographic levels. By correlating this analysis with outside sources we are in a position to confirm that the literature does indeed contain historically useful information. This then enables us to incorporate the findings into our narrative of Islam from its pre-Islamic origins to the end of the Umayyad caliphate. Some elements of the traditional narrative will find concurrence in the statistical findings, but other elements will not fare so well. It will be argued that the pre-Islamic Quraysh were not as pre-eminent amongst the Arab tribes as later authors would make them out to be, and discrimination against the children of non-Arab women was not as widespread as commonly thought. Also discussed in this paper will be two important side-effects of the application of these methodologies. The first is that the prosopographical approach works very well as a means of structuring the narrative of Islamic origins; by focusing less on the individual, we may get a better insight into the way the actors saw themselves operating according to their conflicting familial, tribal and ethnic loyalties. The second side-effect is that by atomising the genealogical literature we are forced to consider the nature of genealogical authorship itself, in particular the politics of structuring and coverage.