Reflections on the Linguistic Map of Pre-Islamic Arabia

Arab. arch. epig. 2000: 11: 28–79 Copyright C Munksgaard 2000Printed in Denmark. All rights reserved

ISSN 0905-7196

Reflections on the linguistic map ofpre-Islamic Arabia

M. C. A. MACDONALDOriental Institute and Wolfson College, Oxford, UK

At a workshop on ‘Civilisations de l’Arabie preislamique’ in Aix-en-Provencein February 1996, I was asked by the organizers to give a survey of the state ofour knowledge of the languages and scripts of pre-Islamic Arabia and to pro-pose a coherent set of definitions and terms for them, in an attempt to clarifythe numerous misapprehensions and the somewhat chaotic nomenclature inthe field. I purposely concentrated on the languages and scripts of the ArabianPeninsula north of Yemen, and only mentioned in passing those of AncientSouth Arabia, since these were to be the subject of another paper. Unfortunately,four years after it took place, the proceedings of this workshop remain unpub-lished. In the meantime, the contents of my paper have circulated widely andI, and others, are finding it increasingly frustrating having to refer to it as‘forthcoming’. I am therefore most grateful to the editor of AAE for allowing aconsiderably revised version of my paper to be published here. It should beseen as an essential preliminary ground-clearing for my detailed discussion ofthe Ancient North Arabian languages and scripts which will appear early in2001 in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages (ed. R.D.Woodard, Cambridge University Press) and my book Old Arabic and its legacyin the later language. Texts, linguistic features, scripts and letter-orders, which is inpreparation.

TerminologyThe epigraphy of pre-Islamic Arabia is lit-tered with labels which were misnomerseven when they were first applied (eg.‘Safaitic’, ‘Thamudic’) or have become soas research has progressed (eg. ‘Minaic’). Ishall preface this paper with an attempt topresent a more coherent taxonomy, takingaccount of what we now know, and do notknow, of the linguistic situation at variousperiods in pre-Islamic Arabia.

When suggesting new terms (1) I havetried, as far as possible, to follow system-atically the use of the ending -ic (Sabaic,etc.) for languages and scripts, and -aean/ian or -ite for peoples and cultures (Sa-

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baean, Qatabanian, Lihyanite, etc.). Thetwo cases in which this is not possible arethe terms ‘North Arabian’ and ‘South Ar-abian’, where the -ian ending is necessaryto distinguish these groups of languagesand scripts from Arabic. The use by somescholars of the terms ‘North and South Ar-abic’ for ‘North and South Arabian’ istherefore to be regretted, particularly sinceothers use the term ‘North Arabic’ to refernot to Safaitic, Thamudic, etc., but to whatis normally called ‘Arabic’ (2). In the caseof ‘South Arabic’ the term is particularlymisleading since neither the Ancient northe Modern South Arabian languages arein any sense ‘Arabic’ (3).

THE LINGUISTIC MAP OF PRE-ISLAMIC ARABIA

i) Ancient North Arabian [ANA] (nordarabique ancien, Altnordarabisch) [pre-Islamic h- (hn-) and apparently‘zero’ dialects]Oasis North Arabian [ONA]

Taymanitic [formerly ‘Thamudic A’/‘Taymanite’]Dadanitic [formerly ‘Dedanite’ and ‘Lihyanite’]Dumaitic [formerly ‘Jawfian’]‘Dispersed ONA’ [texts in the ONA scripts from Mesopotamia (formerly called ‘Chaldaean’) and other

places, which cannot be classified as Taymanitic, Dadanitic or Dumaitic]SafaiticHismaic [formerly ‘Thamudic E’; also erroneously called ‘Tabuki Thamudic’ or ‘South Safaitic’]Thamudic B, C, D, ‘Southern Thamudic’Hasaitic [?]

ii) ArabicOld Arabic (vieil arabe, Altarabisch) [pre-Islamic $l- dialects]

‘Pure’ Old Arabic texts [wholly in Old Arabic but written in the Sabaic, Nabataean, early Arabic or Greekscripts]‘Mixed’ texts: Safaeo-Arabic, [Sabaeo-Arabic], Dadano-Arabic, Nabataeo-Arabic, Aramaeo-Arabic [textswritten in the Safaitic, [Sabaic], Dadanitic, Nabataean, or other Aramaic languages and scripts but with OldArabic features]

Middle ArabicClassical ArabicModern Standard ArabicSpoken Arabic Dialects

[Appendix: Undifferentiated North Arabian](1) ‘Pure Undifferentiated North Arabian’ texts [can be in any script, but are clearly North Arabian in language

although they cannot be assigned either to Old Arabic or to a particular ANA dialect](2) ‘Undifferentiated North Arabian Mixed’ texts eg. Sabaeo-North-Arabian [formerly ‘pseudo-sabeen’: texts

written in the Sabaic (etc.) languages and scripts but including North Arabian features which cannot be assi-gned either to Old Arabic or to a particular ANA dialect]

Fig. 1.Suggested terminology for languages and scripts: I. North Arabian (nordarabique, Nordarabisch).

Languages (4)The ancient and modern languages of theArabian Peninsula fall into two quite dis-tinct linguistic groups: North Arabian andSouth Arabian. While they share some fea-tures which mark them off from most otherSemitic languages, there are many morewhich distinguish them from one anotherand it is now realized that their relation-ship is not particularly close.

I. ‘North Arabian’ (‘nordarabique’,‘Nordarabisch’) (5)The term at present in general use is a sens-ible neutral label covering:

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i) ‘Ancient North Arabian’ [ANA](‘nordarabique ancien’, ‘Altnordarabisch’) (6)which comprises the pre-Islamic h- (hn-)and apparently ‘zero’ (7) dialects:

Oasis North Arabian [ONA] viz.TaymaniticDadaniticDumaiticDispersed ONA (8)

Sw afaiticHw ismaic (9)Thamudic B, C, D, and ‘SouthernThamudic’

and possiblyHw asaitic.

M. C. A. MACDONALD

At present, we know too little about thelinguistic features of this group to makeany further subdivision.

ii) Arabicin all its forms and at all stages of its devel-opment. The earliest of these stages is:

‘Old Arabic’ (‘vieil arabe’ (10), ‘Altarab-isch’ (11)). Just as ‘Old English’, ‘OldFrench’, etc. refer to the earliest sur-viving stages of these languages, Old Ar-abic refers to the pre-Islamic $l-dialects ofwhich traces remain in a handful of textsand in names (see below).

In the Islamic period we have evidence ofother varieties of Arabic of which the prin-cipal are:

Middle ArabicClassical ArabicModern Standard ArabicSpoken Arabic Dialects

Appendix to the North Arabian groupThere are a number of texts from the pre-Is-lamic period which are wholly or partiallyin a North Arabian language but whichcannot be classed either as Old Arabic or asANA because they contain only featureswhich are common to both. I have labelledthese ‘Undifferentiated’ North Arabian,until such time as they can be classifiedmore precisely. See the discussion below.

II. ‘South Arabian’ (‘sudarabique’,‘Sudarabisch’) (12)A clear, neutral, geographical term to indi-cate both the ancient and modern non-Ar-abic, Semitic languages of the region cov-ered by modern Yemen and Oman. Withinthis overall grouping, two sub-groups canbe distinguished:

i) Ancient South Arabian [ASA](‘sudarabique ancien’‘Altsudarabisch’)is perhaps a safer term than either ‘Epi-

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graphic South Arabian’, which describes alanguage group by the materials on whichit is written, or ‘Old South Arabian’ whichimplies (incorrectly) that it is the direct an-cestor of Modern South Arabian (13). Thiscollective label covers two subdivisions.a) The Sw ayhadic (14) languages, ie. those

traditionally called ‘Epigraphic SouthArabian’, ‘Old South Arabian’, ‘Altsud-arabisch’, etc., viz.

SabaicMadabic (15)QatabanicHw adw ramitic (16)

b) The non-Sw ayhadic languages, ie. theother ancient languages of southern Ar-abia, of which so far we have only rareglimpses. Among these is the spokenlanguage of the Hw imyarites, who usedSabaic in their inscriptions. At present,this is known only from reports bywriters of the Islamic period, but ispossibly the language of the hymn tothe sun-goddess at Qaniya (17). The lan-guages of two other texts (18) which areat present incomprehensible seem alsoto fall under this heading, as wouldprobably ‘Native Minaic’, the languagespoken by the Minaeans (as opposed tothe Madhabic which they wrote), if anexample were to be found. It is possiblethat the dipinti recently discovered inDhofar (19) should be included as well,but they have yet to be deciphered.

ii) Modern South Arabian [MSA](‘sudarabique moderne’, ‘Neusudarabisch’)is the common collective term for

Batw hw arı,Hw arsusı,HobyotJibbalı,MehrıSuqutw rı (Socotri)

the unwritten, non-Arabic Semitic lan-guages spoken today, or in the recent past,


i) Ancient South Arabian [ASA] (sudarabique ancien, Altsudarabisch)Sayhadic

SabaicMadhabic [formerly called ‘Minaean’/‘Minaic’. The written language used by the Minaeans and apparently

inherited from their predecessors in the region of Wadı Madab, in the Yemeni Jawf].QatabanicHadramitic

Non-SayhadicHimyaritic [the native language of the Himyarites, of which a handful of possible examples remain]Other non-Sayhadic texts (ZI 11?, Ja 2353?)? ‘Native Minaic’ [this should be restricted to any evidence that may appear for the language the Minaeansspoke]?? The language of the Dhofar dipinti [at present undeciphered]

ii) Modern South Arabian [MSA] (sudarabique moderne, Neusudarabisch)Batw hw arıHw arsusıHobyotJibbalıMehrıSocotrı

Fig. 2.Suggested terminology for languages and scripts: II. South Arabian (sudarabique, Sudarabisch).

in Oman, southeastern Yemen and Socotra.Although the terms ‘North Arabian’ and

‘South Arabian’ are both drawn from ge-ography, the groups they describe are de-fined by very different criteria. ‘North Ar-abian’ describes a group of dialects (poss-ibly languages?) which appear remarkablyhomogeneous linguistically. For each ofthese, its phonemic repertoire, morphologyand (as far as we can tell) syntax, findcloser parallels within the group than withany language outside it.

By contrast, the term ‘South Arabian’ isbased more on geographical than linguisticcriteria. While there appear to be fairlyclose internal relationships within theModern South Arabian group, it is ques-tionable to what extent all the languageswithin the Ancient South Arabian Sayhadicgroup really belong together on linguisticgrounds. Indeed, future discoveries mayprompt a drastic regrouping and relabel-ling of all the Ancient South Arabian lan-guages. Equally, there seems to be no ques-

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tion of any lineal ‘descent’, at least from theSayhadic languages to the Modern SouthArabian tongues (20). Thus, ‘South Ar-abian’ is a geographical term which atpresent covers three quite distinct types oflanguage group, each defined by differentcriteria. ‘Sayhadic’ represents the official,written, languages of the ancient South Ar-abian kingdoms, a grouping based as muchon the fact that they are all relatively welldocumented, as on linguistic features.‘Non-Sayhadic’ is simply a Restklassenbil-dung for any language indigenous to an-cient South Arabia, which cannot be de-fined as Sayhadic; while MSA is the onlyone of the three to be defined by linguisticcriteria.

To some extent, the contrast betweenNorth Arabian and South Arabian reflectsthe extent of our knowledge of the two. Thelinguistic data available for Ancient NorthArabian is relatively sparse and it is possiblethat if we had as much material for it as wedo for Ancient South Arabian we might dis-

M. C. A. MACDONALD

cover that the group was a good deal lesshomogeneous than it appears.

ScriptsThe Arabian alphabetic tradition (21)The Arabian and the North-West Semiticalphabetic traditions are the two great al-phabetic writing systems of the AncientNear East. It is generally assumed that theystemmed from a common source in thenorth and separated some time in thesecond millennium BC. Each has its owntraditional alphabetic order (the North-West Semitic $bgd (22) and the Arabianhlhw m (23)) and both have been found atUgarit (24). This in itself, of course, is onlyevidence that both letter orders were in usebefore the beginning of the twelfth centuryBC. It seems likely that the hlhw m was notnative to Ugarit, where the local alphabeticorder ($bghd) is amply attested, the infer-ence being that it was in use elsewhere. Theonly region where it seems to have been innormal use is Ancient South Arabia, al-though the evidence is from a much laterperiod. It is true that at sites in the YemeniJawf, fragmentary inscriptions in the SouthArabian alphabet have been found in levelsdated by Carbon 14 to between the ninthand thirteenth centuries BC (25) but, whilethe juxtaposition of these unrelated frag-ments of evidence raises intriguing pos-sibilities, there is as yet no firm basis fordating the origins of the Arabian alpha-betic tradition.

The individual scripts within the Ar-abian group are as follows:

I. The North Arabian scriptsTaymaniticDadaniticDumaiticDispersed Oasis North ArabianSafaiticHismaic

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‘Thamudic’, ie. a number of differentscripts which have not yet been fullyidentified and distinguished, repre-sented in some 11,000 graffiti scatteredthroughout the Arabian Peninsula.

II. The South Arabian scriptsMonumental South Arabian of whichthere are relatively minor variations in the

SabaicMadhabicQatabanic andHadramitic inscriptions; theHasaitic script (developed from theSabaic) (26); thezabur or ‘minuscule’ scripts (27); andpossibly the script(s) of theDhofar dipinti and inscriptions.

III. The Ethiopic syllabary (or vocalizedalphabet)the only form of the Arabian alphabetic tra-dition still in use today.

New nomenclature for languages and scriptsThe different North Arabian alphabetswere related to each other and to the SouthArabian alphabets in ways that are not yetfully understood. Among the North Ar-abian scripts there are a number of sub-categories that urgently need redefinition.Because the majority of ANA inscriptionsare short, very often consisting solely ofnames, genealogies of varying lengths andintroductory particles, it is often impossibleto identify the language of the text (28). Itis therefore customary, faute de mieux, toapply the name of the script to the languagein which (it is assumed) the text waswritten, unless there is evidence to the con-trary (29). This is most unsatisfactory but atpresent unavoidable. The discussion whichfollows is therefore primarily concernedwith the taxonomy of the North Arabianscripts (for which we have ample evi-dence). The nomenclature of the languages


(on which we have much less data) will in-evitably follow that of the scripts in whichthey are habitually expressed, exceptwhere there is evidence to the contrary.

There is an increasing recognition thatthe distinction between the ‘Dedanite’ and‘Lihw yanite’ scripts is artificial and that theyrepresent the same script at different stagesof development. Moreover, the chrono-logical limits of these different stages donot necessarily coincide with the kingdomsof Dadan (see note 1) and Lihw yan, afterwhich they are named. However, if weabandon the term ‘Dedanite’ it would stillbe anachronistic to talk of ‘Lihyanite’ be-fore the kingdom of Lihw yan. It would seemto be more sensible to name the script (atall stages of its development) after the oasisin which it developed, rather than after aspecific kingdom. I would therefore sug-gest that, from now on, the labels ‘Lihy-anite’ and ‘Dedanite’ be abandoned andthe script and language throughout theirhistory be referred to as ‘Dadanitic’. Itwould then be possible to distinguish dif-ferent phases within the development ofthe script (‘early’, ‘middle’, ‘late’, etc.)without tying them to political events, thedating of which is anyway uncertain.

Similarly, I would refer to the scriptswhich developed in the oases of Tayma$

and Duma (modern al-Jawf) as ‘Tayman-itic’ (30) and ‘Dumaitic’ (31) respectively.These terms would also refer to the dialectsnormally expressed by these alphabets.

The scripts of the Early Dadanitic, Taym-anitic and Dumaitic texts, together withthose of the so-called ‘Chaldaean’ inscrip-tions (of which more below) are very closein form, and it is often difficult to assign ashort text to one or other type (see Fig. 3).It therefore seems to me useful to think interms of an ‘Oasis North Arabian’ [ONA]script, which was employed, with smalllocal variations in letter-form and ortho-graphic practice, in the three major oasis-

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towns of North Arabia: Dadan, Tayma$ andDuma, and probably also among the Arabcommunities settled in Babylonia and else-where (32). I would suggest that OasisNorth Arabian be subdivided into Dadan-itic, Taymanitic, etc. only when there isclear evidence to justify this (33).

A new name is also urgently needed forthe so-called ‘Chaldaean’ inscriptions, thebrief texts in the ONA script, on seals, pot-tery, bricks, etc. which have been found invarious parts of Mesopotamia and else-where (34). They are clearly in no sense‘Chaldaean’ (35) and Burrows’ descriptionof the script as ‘Old Arabic’ is equally mis-leading (36). While it is likely, although inmost cases unprovable, that at least someof these texts are to be associated with theArab communities settled in Babylonia,others appear to be connected with Syriaand Transjordan (37), and yet others seemto be from Arabia itself (38). They thereforedo not form a homogeneous group. Iwould suggest that this be reflected in a de-scriptive term such as ‘dispersed OasisNorth Arabian inscriptions’, failing amore concise and elegant title.

The name ‘Thamudic’ was the inventionof western scholars even though there isvirtually no evidence to connect any of thetexts gathered under this rubric with theancient tribe of Thamud (39). However, thelabel is far too well established to bechanged and its very inappropriateness,when recognized, serves to emphasize theartificiality of the category. For ‘Thamudic’is no more than a Restklassenbildung (a termI owe to E. A. Knauf, ZDPV 97, 1981; 189,n. 7), a sort of undetermined’ pigeon-holeinto which one can put everything whichdoes not fit into one of the better-definedcategories. In a field such as Ancient NorthArabian, in which so much of the evidenceis uncertain and so much work still needsto be done, this serves a useful purpose.

However, while this is, or should be,

M. C. A. MACDONALD

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34


well known to those working in the field,it is necessary to warn those less familiarwith the subject who may be misled intoassuming that the items brought togetherunder this rubric can in some way betreated as a whole. If scholars in otherfields are misled or bewildered it is largelythe fault of epigraphists such as Jammeand van den Branden who, against all theevidence, insist on ‘l’unite de l’alphabetthamoudeen’ and, in the case of van denBranden, on a connection with the tribe ofThamud (40).

In an exhaustive study (41), GeraldineKing has recently identified the distin-guishing characteristics of the script whichWinnett labelled ‘Thamudic E’, thus en-abling us to remove it from the Thamudic’Restklassenbildung. This script, and the dia-lect normally expressed in it, therefore re-quire a new name (42). The surveys con-ducted by Geraldine King and others in theHw isma (43) desert of southern Jordan,where to date at least 5000 texts have beenrecorded, suggest that this region of Jordanand northwest Saudi Arabia holds themajor concentration of these inscriptions,although naturally smaller numbers arescattered over a much wider area. In a re-cent article, Geraldine King and I havetherefore suggested that the script and dia-lect of these texts should be called ‘Hw is-maic’ (44).

‘Like Thamudic’, the term Sw afaitic is amisnomer, although for different reasons. Itrefers to the mainly barren area of extinctvolcanoes and unbroken lava flows, south-east of Damascus and northeast of Jabal al-cArab (45), which is known as the Sw afa. Itwas near the eastern edge of this regionthat the first Safaitic inscriptions were dis-covered. The name is thus a purely modernlabel which bears no relation to what theauthors of these tens of thousands of textscalled themselves or the script they used (ifindeed it had a name). Unfortunately, al-

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though these inscriptions are spread over ahuge area of desert in southern Syria,northeastern Jordan and northern SaudiArabia, the one place where they havenever been found is in the Sw afa itself. How-ever, the misnomer is far too well estab-lished to be changed, although the fact thatit is a purely conventional term needs con-stantly to be borne in mind in the face ofsuch artificial conceptions as ‘Safaitictribes’ or a ‘Safaitic name’ (46).

The term Hw asaitic (47) refers to inscrip-tions – almost entirely funerary – foundprincipally in northeast Arabia at the sitesof Thaj, Qatw ıf, etc. but occasionally furtherafield (48). Because of the small number ofinscriptions so far published and the re-petitive character of their content, little isknown of the linguistic features of Hasaitic.

It is generally held that the Hasaitic in-scriptions are written either in the monu-mental South Arabian alphabet (albeit withoccasional unusual letter-forms) or in oneclosely derived from it (49). However, avery different theory has recently been ad-vanced which claims that

‘Comme on trouve des textes en ecriture hw aseennedans le sud de l’Iraq a partir du VIIIe siecle avantl’ere chretienne, il semble vraisemblable que la re-gion du Golfe a emprunte son ecriture directementa la source, probablement dans la region Syrie-Pa-lestine ... plutot qu’en Arabie du sud.’ (50)

Unfortunately, this theory is based on sev-eral misconceptions. Firstly, the onlyHasaitic text so far discovered in Mesopot-amia is CIH 699, which Loftus found in situin an underground tomb at the foot of amound where ‘Seleucid tablets occurred’(51). The chamber had already been robbedand no dating evidence for either the tombor the inscription is known.

Secondly, the only North Arabian in-scriptions found in Mesopotamia whichmay date to the eighth century BC aresome of the Dispersed Oasis North Ar-abian texts. However, the Dispersed ONA

M. C. A. MACDONALD

inscriptions do not form a coherent corpusrepresenting one script which could beconsidered native to this region. They are arandom assortment of small finds from avery wide area, which display a consider-able range of letter-forms and clearly repre-sent a number of different varieties of theONA scripts. This suggests that they repre-sent imports rather than the products of anative form of literacy (52). It is for thisreason that I have suggested calling them‘Dispersed Oasis North Arabian’, a labelwhich I hope emphasizes their heterogen-eous character and the fact that they areunlikely to be indigenous to the placeswhere they have been found.

Thirdly, the script of the Hasaitic inscrip-tions is clearly very different from that ofany of the Dispersed ONA texts, as can beseen by comparing the relevant rows inFigure 3, and there is nothing to indicatethat the former developed from the latter(53). Moreover, if it had, one would needto explain how this supposed independentdevelopment produced a script (ie.Hasaitic) which was identical, in all but thetiniest details, to the monumental SouthArabian alphabet.

The dating of the Hasaitic inscriptions isat present uncertain. Pirenne made a tenta-tive comparison of the script of oneHasaitic text (Ry 687) (54) with elements ofher ‘Stade D2’ and ‘Stade E’, for which sheoffered rough dates of c.280 BC and 150–100 BC respectively, and more confidentlyassigned another, fragmentary and muchdamaged text (Ry 688) (55), to her ‘StadeC’, dating it to 350–300 BC (56). However,Pirenne’s dating was based on the ‘short’South Arabian chronology, which archae-ological finds in recent years have shownto be untenable (57). Furthermore, Pirenneherself admitted that ‘cette graphie duGolfe Persique ne s’integre pas exactementa l’evolution de l’ecriture sud-arabe; elleest specifique...,’ (58) the implication of

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which is surely that it may be misleadingto try to date it by fitting it into a SouthArabian palaeographical schema (59).

Thus, at present we unfortunately haveno direct evidence for either the origin orthe dating (60) of the Hasaitic script. In theabsence of such evidence, I can only sug-gest that the Hasaitic monumental script isso similar to the monumental South Ar-abian that it is highly unlikely that theycould represent parallel developmentsfrom an early period. It seems far moreprobable that, at a date unknown, theSouth Arabian script began to be used formonumental inscriptions in the northeastof the Peninsula, possibly for reasons ofprestige. Once this had begun, this al-phabet ceased to be ‘South Arabian’ be-cause it was being used at too great a dis-tance from Southern Arabia for it to main-tain the same evolutionary course as thetrue ‘South Arabian script’. Instead it be-came ‘the Hasaitic script’ in the sense thatit began its own palaeographical develop-ment. Alas, the tiny number of inscriptionsso far known and the lack of direct externaldating evidence makes any true palaeo-graphical analysis impossible at present,and we must await the discovery of muchmore evidence before this, or any other,hypothesis can be tested.

Old Arabic seems to have remained apurely spoken language until the late fifth/early sixth centuries AD (61) which means,of course, that no specific script was associ-ated with it before that period. Thus, on therare occasions when it was written, thescript associated with the local language ofprestige was used: South Arabian in thesouthern half of the Peninsula; Dadanitic inDadan; Nabataean at Hw egra, cEn cAvdat inthe Negev, and at al-Namara; a form ofeastern Aramaic at Mleiha (Malayhw a) onthe Oman Peninsula; Greek in an ecclesias-tical context in Syria (62); and early Arabic(63), again mainly in Syria. Some aspects


of the significance of this will be discussedbelow. Here I would only explain some dis-tinctions which recent studies have re-vealed and which require some refine-ments of terminology.

The documentary evidence for Old Ar-abic is of two kinds, see Figure 1: (64)(a) Texts in ‘Pure’ Old Arabic are those ex-

pressed wholly in the pre-Islamic $l-dialect(s), although written in a varietyof scripts, as outlined above.

(b) ‘Mixed’ Old Arabic texts are those ex-pressed in the language normally as-sociated with the script (eg. Safaitic,Dadanitic, Aramaic, etc.) but which in-clude some linguistic features identifi-able as Old Arabic. In order to distin-guish these from the ‘pure’ Old Arabictexts, I would suggest that these becalledSafaeo-Arabic (65)[Sabaeo-Arabic] (66)Dadano-ArabicNabataeo-ArabicAramaeo-Arabic (67).

I would only apply such a label to a text ifthe intrusive elements can clearly be iden-tified as Old Arabic as distinct from ANAor ASA. For the diagnostic criteria avail-able at present, see below.

Given the paucity of material, the inad-equacies of the scripts used and the appar-ently close similarities between the twosub-groups of North Arabian, there will in-evitably be a number of cases where it isimpossible to decide whether the intrusiveelements in a particular document are OldArabic or ANA. To avoid classifying theseincorrectly and thus creating confusion inthe future when the characteristics of thetwo groups are described, it is useful tohave a Restklassenbildung, or ‘pending’ cat-egory into which such texts can be placeduntil such time as their language can beidentified more exactly. I suggest, there-fore, that these texts be called ‘Undifferen-

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tiated North Arabian’. Within this class,subdivisions can be made to reflect thescript and basic language of each text. Thusthose Sabaic inscriptions from Haramwhich include intrusive elements from anundifferentiated North Arabian language(see below), I would call Sabaeo-North-Ar-abian, within the category of ‘Undifferenti-ated North Arabian’ (see Fig. 1).

Reflections on the linguistic map of pre-Islamic ArabiaAt the outset it is important to distinguishbetween languages and scripts, especiallysince, as mentioned above, the same labels(‘Sabaic’, ‘Safaitic’, etc.) are usually appliedto both. Any script can, of course, be usedto express any language (more or less ef-ficiently) and there is no inevitable or in-dissoluble link between a particular tongueand the written form in which it is habitu-ally expressed. The fact that certain writingsystems have become associated with par-ticular languages is no more than conven-tion and, more often than not, the scriptadopted is ill-suited to the phonological re-quirements of the language it is used to ex-press. Indeed, phonology seems seldom tohave been considered, when writing sys-tems which had been developed to expressone language (with varying degrees ofcompetence) were employed to express an-other. One need only think of Akkadianwritten in a syllabary which had evolvedto express Sumerian, or the Old Aramaicphonemic repertoire squeezed into an al-phabet designed for that of Phoenician.

The fact that the same script may be usedto write several different languages has far-reaching effects on our perception andclassification of the ancient documents westudy. To take just one example: scripts as-sociated with languages of political or cul-tural prestige, or which have become themedium of international correspondence,

M. C. A. MACDONALD

are liable to be used to express other, morelocal, languages. We are not particularlysurprised, therefore, when we find aHasaitic text in the South Arabian script, oran Old Arabic one in the Nabataean. Butwhat of the names in a graffito in the SouthArabian script, where there is no visiblegrammatical context to indicate the lan-guage; or a seal with a single name in theAramaic script? Failing any internal indi-cators, such names have traditionally beenassigned to the language usually associ-ated with the script: they become ‘SouthArabian’ or ‘Aramaic’ names (68). Then, alltoo often, we use linguistic or onomasticfeatures to define the boundaries betweencommunities. At best, these are extremelyinexact indicators – after all, most of ushave at some time written in languagesother than our mother tongue and if, bychance, such a document was the only oneto survive, future historians might, for in-stance, class me as French on the basis of aletter I had written in that language.

Similarly, we need to be extremely cir-cumspect in the way we use onomastic ma-terial. Synchronically, a name represents theperson who bears it, it does not ‘mean’ any-thing else (69). Of course, like all words,names have etymologies. But in the vast ma-jority of cases those who give and those whobear them are unaware of, and unconcernedwith their original signification. For, in mostcases, the nugget of linguistic information aname contains is a fossil, and there is no wayof relating it to a particular stage of the lan-guage in question or to a particular societyusing that stage. We therefore have no wayof knowing whether the linguistic featuresof a name can give us accurate informationabout the language used by its bearer. Rela-tively few names at any one time are coinedwithin the community which uses them,most are considerably older, and in manycases were ‘borrowed’ from another culture.Given that a man or woman’s name is the

38

most intimate of personal identifiers, thepersonal choice of the name-giver must al-most always have been paramount, andeven in societies where practices such as pa-ponymy are the norm, the unexpected is al-ways possible. We therefore need to be veryclear about what exactly we mean when wespeak of a ‘North Arabian’ or a ‘South Ar-abian’ or a ‘Nabataean’ name, and weshould avoid the temptation to use names ofany sort as evidence for the language, letalone the ‘ethnicity’ of those who bear them(70).

In what follows, I shall divide Arabiavery roughly by a northwest-southeast lineand refer to the western two-thirds of thePeninsula as ‘western Arabia’ and to theeastern one-third as ‘eastern Arabia’ (seeFig. 4).

On present evidence, eastern Arabia(both at its northern and southern ends)appears to have had a development whichis rather different from that of the culturesfurther west. This apparent difference mayin part be due to an imbalance in theamount and type of research which has sofar been devoted to the two sides of thePeninsula. The study of the ancient historyof both the northwest and southwest is stilldominated by epigraphy, and the results ofthe archaeological work of the last twenty-five years are only now beginning tochange and fill out the traditional picture.By contrast, our understanding of easternArabia is due entirely to archaeologicalwork and, with the exception of Dhofar,this side of the Peninsula has producedonly a handful of inscriptions, containingvery little information (71).

Thus for pre-Islamic western Arabia(especially the southwest) we have a greatdeal of information about those aspects oflife which are the stuff of monumental in-scriptions: social and political systems,land and water rights, religious practice,etc., whereas in the east, we are almost en-


Fig. 4.Sketch map of pre-Islamic Arabia showing the ‘east-west’ division used in this paper (map drawn by A. Searight).

tirely ignorant of these. Similarly, the ar-chaeological exploration of the Gulf coastand Oman has provided information aboutchronology, city plans, diet, burial practicesand much else, which is only slowly be-coming available in the west of the Penin-

39

sula. Nevertheless, even accepting this,there are clear differences between the tworegions, and these are worth exploring.

To the epigraphist, the most striking con-trast between them is in the use of the artof writing. In northwest Arabia there was

M. C. A. MACDONALD

a multiplicity of different native scripts, inaddition to the imported Aramaic, Greekand South Arabian alphabets. From at leastthe mid-first millennium BC, forms of theOasis North Arabian script appear to havebeen in use in the major oases of Duma,Tayma$ and Dadan and, from a period notmuch later, the nomads seem also to haveused a number of different alphabets (72).The question of the development and theinterrelationships of the different Arabianscripts is still very uncertain, but it seemspossible that most, if not all, of these NorthArabian alphabets developed in parallel tothe South Arabian scripts and not fromthem.

By contrast, the only native script to de-velop on the eastern side of the Peninsulawas that of Dhofar. Apart from this, onpresent knowledge at least, writing ineastern Arabia appears to have been funda-mentally derivative. However, I shouldemphasize that the amount of material sofar discovered is derisory. A few dozentexts in cuneiform have been found at thenorthern end of the Gulf (73), and a scat-tering of Greek texts and fragments in thesame region (74). The script of the Hasaiticinscriptions clearly derives directly fromSouth Arabian monumental, although inindividual texts there are occasional ratherodd variations in the forms of certain let-ters (75). The few Aramaic texts from theGulf are, with one major exception, shorttexts, fragments or coin legends. They dis-play a variety of forms of the script in boththe lapidary and cursive traditions andsome texts – notably the coin legends butalso others – contain letter-shapes appar-ently derived from both (76). Indeed, insome texts the scripts seem to have de-veloped in unusual directions and, for in-stance, in the one long inscription the signsfor d, r, k and c are identical, as are thosefor hw and m (77). Although certain of itsindividual features can be compared with

40

those of Hatran and Parthian (Arsacid),this particular form of the Aramaic scriptis not known from elsewhere. It is thereforepossible that it represents a local develop-ment, of which as yet we have only twoexamples (78). However, the total numberof Aramaic texts from the Gulf area is sotiny and their geographical and chrono-logical range apparently so wide that itwould be dangerous to draw any con-clusions at present.

In the south, the contrast between westand east is slightly different. In Yemen anumber of individual settled, literate cul-tures grew up and yet there appears tohave been the most extraordinary degree ofuniformity in the appearance of the monu-mental script (79). Since the palaeograph-ical work of Jacqueline Pirenne, it has beenassumed that this developed at a more orless uniform rate throughout the regionand even in outlying areas (80). The differ-ences between one inscription and anotherin the form of the monumental script aretherefore generally attributed to chrono-logical developments, rather than regionalvariations. At the same time, there are twoother types of the South Arabian script: theadapted ‘majuscule’ of the graffiti andsome of the inscribed sticks mentionedbelow, and the zabur, or ‘minuscule’ script,used on the majority of the inscribed stickswhich have been appearing in northernYemen, in their hundreds, since 1970 (81).In both cases these are groups of scripts for,in contrast to the monumental writing,there is no uniformity here and, particu-larly in the case of the zabur, there is aplethora of different script forms. Nor wasliteracy confined to the settled population,for in the deserts of southern Saudi Arabiathere are thousands of graffiti in the SouthArabian (82) and ‘Southern Thamudic’ (83)scripts, some of which may well have beenwritten by nomads, like the Safaitic and‘Thamudic’ graffiti of the north.


Thus, there is at present a very clear con-trast between eastern Arabia, wherewriting seems hardly to have taken root,and the western two-thirds of the Penin-sula where it seems to have been endemic.This said, however, there are also clear dis-tinctions between the northwest and thesouthwest in languages, scripts, the typesof document available and relations withother societies. In what follows, I shall beconcentrating on what we know of thelinguistic situation in north and central Ar-abia in the first millennia BC and AD. Ishall not deal with the languages of ancientSouth Arabia, except when they impingeon those of the north (84).

Ancient North Arabian

The hn-dialectsIn northwestern Arabia a multiplicity ofdialects developed within the group I havecalled Ancient North Arabian, which usesh- as the definite article. The earliest occur-rence of this article is in the name of thegoddess hn-$lt in the Aramaic dedicationson silver bowls found at her shrine at Tellal-Mashutw a, in the Nile delta. These havebeen dated to the late fifth century BC (85).One of the dedicators was Qaynu barGesem, king of Qedar, and it has recentlybeen suggested that this is evidence thatthis tribe could have spoken a h-/hn-dialect(86). However, this is to stretch the evi-dence too far. The other dedications foundat the shrine are also to hn-$lt. Of the twoothers which name the dedicator, one ismade by a man with an Egyptian nameand a North Arabian patronym (87), whilein the other both names are SemiticizedEgyptian (88). It seems clear, therefore, thatthe goddess of this shrine was worshippedas hn-$lt, regardless of how this epithetwould be realized in the languages of indi-vidual pilgrims, or the Aramaic of thededications. This epithet cannot therefore

41

be used as evidence for the languagespoken by the tribe of Qedar or any otherof the dedicants.

Similarly, this example should warn usthat the epithet $Alilat mentioned by Her-odotus (89) is not necessarily evidence forthe dialect of his Arab informants (whowere probably living in eastern Egypt orSinai). In ancient Near-Eastern religionsepithets rapidly became names and, oncethis had happened, the form of the namewas fixed. All we can say is that in easternEgypt in the fifth century BC both the h-and the $l-dialects were represented in theepithet ‘the goddess’ (90), but with no cer-tainty as to who was speaking these dia-lects at the time, or where they originated.

DadaniticThe one dialect of Ancient North Arabian inwhich it is certain that hn- was used was Da-danitic. The normal Dadanitic article is h-but before /$/ (91) and /c/ (92) it is hn-. Ithas been suggested that hn- is a survival ofthe original article in all members of thisgroup, but that in the other dialects it was re-duced to h- (93). It is impossible to prove ordisprove this theory, but if this were so, onewould expect the odd irregularity of usagein Dadanitic and sporadic survivals in otherdialects. In fact, however, there is only onepossible instance in Dadanitic of hn- beforea phoneme which is not a pharyngal or aglottal (94), and no certain examples (exceptin names) in the other dialects. So this fea-ture could just as well, or perhaps morelikely, be a euphonic development withinDadanitic, as a survival from an earlierperiod.

A Safaitic inscription, by an author whogives his nisba as hn-hw wly (95), provides aninteresting footnote to this discussion. It isclear from many other Safaitic texts that theHw wlt came from outside the normal mi-gration areas of the tribes east of the Hw aw-ran whose members wrote these graffiti,

M. C. A. MACDONALD

and it is likely that the Hw wlt should beidentified with the Avalitae, whom Pliny as-sociates with the oases of Duma and Hw egra(96), the latter at least being very muchwithin the Dadanitic hn- dialect area. Un-fortunately, the statement in the text – w nfrmn rm ‘and he escaped from the Romans’ –is too brief to identify its language.

Outside Dadanitic – ie. principally at Tellal-Mashutw a and in the Hasaitic inscrip-tions – the evidence for the article hn- comesentirely from names, all but two of whichare compounded with hn-$lt (97) and, asnoted above, these are not evidence for thelinguistic features of the texts in which theyoccur. This is particularly clear in the case ofthe name hn-$mlt, found in a Safaitic textfrom northern Saudi Arabia (98), since thereis ample evidence that the article in Safaiticis h- before all sounds, not hn-.

The h- and possible ‘zero’ dialects

Hasaitic (?)It is important to reiterate that the etymolo-gies of personal names are not evidence forthe language of their bearers, since Hasaitichas been classed with the hn- dialectssimply because of the presence of the ar-ticle hn- in theophoric names in the texts.Other than in names, there is as yet onlyone possible instance of the article inHasaitic, and here it is the South Arabiansuffixed -n (99). So limited is the materialyet discovered that we have no other con-texts in which the definite article might beexpected (100). It is therefore far from cer-tain what form it took in Hasaitic. It is evenpossible that it did not use a definite articleat all, or else employed one, such as a vo-calic affix as in Aramaic, which did notshow up in the purely consonantal SouthArabian script.

Despite its script, Hasaitic is classed asAncient North Arabian rather than Ancient

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South Arabian because it uses the typicallyANA expression d$l and, with the one ex-ception just quoted, lacks any characteristi-cally ASA features. This classification isprobably correct, but it is as well to beaware that it is, and can only be, based onthe tiny amount of non-onomastic materialavailable.

Oasis North ArabianThe report, in Akkadian, by the eighth-cen-tury BC governor of Suh8 u on the middleEuphrates, concerning a raid he carried outon a caravan of the people of Tayma$ andSaba$, is by now well known. This is ourearliest evidence for the involvement of theSabaeans and Taymanites in the caravantrade (101). However, there may be anotherreference to Tayma$, this time in a hiero-glyphic Luwian document also of the eighthcentury, which is by a certain Yariris, apalace official who seems to have becomeregent of Carchemish during the minority ofits king. In this inscription, Yariris boaststhat he knew twelve languages and at leastfour scripts (102). The latter were, ‘the scriptof the City’ (ie. his own hieroglyphicLuwian), and those of Sura and Assyria andfinally the Taymani script. Sura has beenidentified as Tyre and its script, therefore, asPhoenician (103). Rather more tentatively, ithas been suggested that ta-i-ma-ni-ti refersto the script of Tayma$ (104). Like the otheritems in the list, this is an adjectival form(105), and this could explain the -n-. Such aninterpretation is very attractive, not least be-cause it provides a schematic map of thetrading relationships of Carchemish at thisperiod: with Phoenicia to the west, Assyriato the east and Tayma$ and Saba$ to thesouth (106).

If this identification is correct, it providesthe earliest historical reference to a NorthArabian script. It does not seem to menecessary to assume that the South Ar-


abian script is meant here (107). The gov-ernor of Suh8 u was quite capable of distin-guishing between Taymanites and Sa-baeans and there is no reason to supposethat Yariris would have said Taymanitic ifhe had meant Sabaic. If Sass is correct indating to the eighth century BC some of theseals with Oasis North Arabian inscrip-tions found in Mesopotamia, this would fitvery well with this reference.

Although I am unconvinced by many ofSass’s arguments, unless one takes the ex-treme position that all the inscriptions onthe seals are later additions, his dating isprobably more or less correct in somecases. I would therefore suggest that wecould take as a working hypothesis theexistence of the Oasis North Arabian script,in one or more forms, by the eighth centuryBC. The way in which this was adapted toexpress the different dialects of the regionis only just beginning to be worked out.

It would appear that the Taymaniticscript had signs for all three unvoiced non-emphatic sibilants, represented by s1, s2

and s3 (see Figs. 3 and 5). It seems probablethat this s3 sign originally had a formsimilar to Monumental South Arabian s3,for a shape very close to the latter is foundon a Taymanitic seal inscription (RES 2688)(108). What appears to have happened isthat the distinction between the phonemesrepresented by s3 and s1 was retainedlonger in Tayma$ than in other places (109).Developed forms of the s3 sign appear inat least two other Taymanitic inscriptions(110), but in none of the other North Ar-abian scripts.

Similarly, it would appear that in itsearliest form, the ONA script had no signfor /d/ (see Fig. 3). In Taymanitic, whichin this case again appears to be very con-servative, the z sign was also used for /d/,while the d signs in early and late Dadan-itic look very much as if they are adap-tations of the z sign. At Duma, on the other

43

hand, a different solution was found. Theinherited z sign, with the horizontal bar setdiagonally, was used for /z/, and a signresembling the South Arabian dw was em-ployed for /d/ (in the verb cwd) (111). Atthe same time a sign similar to the SouthArabian d was used for /dw / in the N.Div.rdw w (112). This interchange of the d and dwsigns is paralleled in Safaitic and ThamudicB which also employ a sign identical to themonumental South Arabian d for their /dw /.On the other hand, in Hismaic, an iden-tical sign was used for /t/, the common tsign being used for /g/. No explanationhas yet been found for this bizarre feature.There are many other examples and a thor-ough study of the relationships betweensigns and the sounds they represent in thedifferent forms of the Arabian alphabetictradition is long overdue.

ThamudicIn the last sixty years, the study of‘Thamudic’ has progressed considerably,and thanks to the work of F.V. Winnett andGeraldine King, it is now possible to re-move from the Restklassenbildung twogroups of inscriptions, and to make a veryrough preliminary subdivision of some ofthe rest. Of the two groups which can beremoved one is Winnett’s ‘Thamudic A’which is now recognized as ‘Taymanitic’and has been discussed above. The other ishis ‘Thamudic E’ which I have suggestedshould be renamed Hismaic (113). Geral-dine King has made a detailed analysis ofthis dialect and script (114) which, it ishoped, will be published before long, andso I shall add only the few brief remarksbelow. The distinctive features of language,orthography, style and content of both Tay-manitic and Hismaic are now fairly wellknown and each constitutes a clearly de-fined type. Of course, the categories are nothermetically sealed and there are textswhich could be either Taymanitic or early

M. C. A. MACDONALD

Dadanitic, and others which could be His-maic or Safaitic, or which show a mixtureof the features of both groups. However,this is to be expected.

What is left as ‘Thamudic’ is a mass ofover 11,000, mainly short, texts scatteredover the whole of the western part of thePeninsula from Syria to Yemen (inclusive).Approximately 2,000 of these were copiedand published by early scholars and travel-lers in northwest Arabia and were ratherroughly divided by Winnett in 1937 intothree sub-groups, Thamudic B, C and D(115). In 1970 he revised the division andthe labels, calling Thamudic B ‘Najdi’ andcombining C and D under the heading ‘Hi-jazi’ (116). However, this only led to con-fusion and his original classification hasgenerally been retained (117). Of thesegroups, by far the largest is Thamudic Band it is almost certain that future workwill show that this should be subdivided.Similarly, on the basis of different signs forr and n, Geraldine King has suggested thatThamudic C should be subdivided (118).

Most of the texts are known only inhand-copies of uncertain accuracy and thiscombined with their brevity makes themextremely difficult to interpret. In addition,the values of certain signs in Thamudic B,C and D are still in doubt. An interestingfeature of Thamudic D, which is the scriptof the Thamudic counterpart of the Raqosinscription (119) and which can thereforebe dated to AD 267, is the apparently ar-chaic forms of many of its letters (see Fig.3). This is particularly clear in the case of $,b, z, s1, sw and n. This should serve as awarning to those who propose palaeo-graphical developments between onescript and another. For had we not had theRaqos text with its date, Thamudic Dwould have been classed as one of theearliest of the North Arabian scripts.

The vast majority of the known Thamudicinscriptions (some 9,000) were discovered

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by the Philby-Ryckmans-Lippens ex-pedition mainly in the southwestern part ofSaudi Arabia. As might be expected, thesedisplay many features which are very dif-ferent from the ‘Thamudic’ inscriptions ofthe north and they do not fit easily into theexisting sub-groups. They are called‘Thamudic’ simply because they are con-sidered to be North Arabian but cannot beclassified as Oasis North Arabian, Hismaic,Safaitic or Hasaitic. They are termed‘Southern Thamudic’ to distinguish themfrom the existing rough subdivisions B, Cand D. Jacques Ryckmans described some oftheir features in his article ‘Aspects nou-veaux du probleme thamoudeen’ (120)which, in my opinion, even after half a cen-tury, remains the best available descriptionof Thamudic as a category. We must awaitthe full analysis of these texts before we canknow how many more sub-groups are rep-resented in the collection and whether anyof these can be removed from the Thamudic‘pending file’ and given labels of their own.

HismaicSome years ago, E. A. Knauf tried to showthat the script and dialect which Winnettcalled ‘Thamudic E’ should be classed as asub-group of Safaitic which he suggestedrenaming ‘South Safaitic’ (121). However,as Geraldine King has shown, the script,orthography, content and some linguisticfeatures of these texts differ markedly fromthose of Safaitic and the attempt to sub-sume them under the ‘Safaitic’ rubric blursimportant distinctions, bringing confusionrather than clarification (122). For instance,no fewer than six signs have identicalshapes, but completely different values, inthe two alphabets (Fig. 3). Thus the signrepresenting g in Hismaic is used for t inSafaitic, the sign for tw in Hismaic is hw inSafaitic, and so on (123). It will thus beclear that, although geographically, andperhaps chronologically, these scripts are


Fig. 5.Sibilant shifts in Ancient North Arabian, Arabic, Nabataean and other Aramaic dialects.

close neighbours, the palaeographical re-lationship between the two is fairly distant.

Similarly, although the two dialects werealmost certainly mutually comprehensible,there are significant differences in usage.To take just one example, whereas Safaiticuses h- for both the definite article and the,much rarer, nearer demonstrative (‘this’),Hismaic uses h- before nouns so in-frequently that Geraldine King has sug-gested that when it is used it may have hada specifically demonstrative force. In mostcases where one would expect the article,and where in Safaitic it would be present,there is no visible mark of definition in His-maic. This suggests that Hismaic either hadno definite article (as in Syriac) or else em-ployed a vocalic affix (like the Aramaic em-phatic ending) which would not have beenrepresented in the purely consonantalscript. In this regard it may be significantthat affiliation to a social group is never ex-pressed by the nisba in Hismaic (124).

It is for this reason that I have tentativelydescribed Hismaic as neither a h- / hn- noran $l- dialect, but as an apparently ‘zero’dialect, as far as the definite article is con-cerned. As noted above, Hasaitic may also

45

be of this type, but as yet there is too littleevidence to tell.

SafaiticMuch progress has been made in the studyof Safaitic in the last twenty years and it ishoped that this will accelerate in the nearfuture. It is the dialect of Ancient North Ar-abian about which we know most and yetthe very nature of the texts puts a severelimit on the amount and type of infor-mation we can glean from them.

The texts were written largely by no-mads who migrated across southern Syria,western Iraq, northeastern Jordan andnorthern Saudi Arabia probably betweenthe first century BC and the fourth centuryAD. Some 20,000 inscriptions are known atpresent and there are tens of thousandsmore awaiting discovery. They thus repre-sent a very dense concentration of evidencefor a particular Ancient North Arabianscript and dialect over a considerable areaat the northern end of the Peninsula. Theextent of the material available, and in par-ticular the huge onomasticon, can some-times distort comparisons with other dia-lects which are less well represented (125).

M. C. A. MACDONALD

I have published elsewhere (126) alengthy survey of the content of these in-scriptions and I will not repeat that dis-cussion here. Instead, I would like to drawattention to a few interesting, but uncon-nected, details which may help to place thedialect in its linguistic context.

Like the other North Arabian languages,Safaitic had two unvoiced non-emphaticsibilants, represented by the letters s1 ands2 (see Fig. 5). It is clear from the loan-words, or rather ‘loan-names’, found inSafaitic that these letters did not have thesame phonetic values as their etymologicalequivalents in standard Arabic, repre-sented by the letters (sın) and (sın) re-spectively. It is for this reason that I nowuse the phonetically neutral notation forthese letters, s1 and s2 (borrowed from An-cient South Arabian), rather than the tra-ditional s and s which imply the pronunci-ation [s] and [e] respectively.

In his brilliant studies of ‘Arabian Sibi-lants’, Professor Beeston showed that inAncient North Arabian and in Arabic upto at least the eighth century AD, the twounvoiced non-emphatic sibilants, repre-sented by s1 and s2, and in Arabic by theletters (sın) and (sın), were pronouncedrespectively [e] and [c] and that there wasno ‘pure’ [s] (127). This explains why theAramaic divine name Bacal-samın was speltin Safaitic with s1 (thus bcls1mn) not s2. It isinteresting to compare this loan form withthe calque (ie. loan translation) bcls1my, alsospelt with s1, which is found in a fewSafaitic texts (128). If s1 and s2 in Safaitichad had the values of their equivalents(sın) and (sın) in standard Arabic, onewould have expected the loan form fromAramaic Bacal-samın to be spelt with s2 andthe calque bcls1my to be spelt with s1, sincewe know that the word for heaven wass1my (cf. Ar. sama$) in Safaitic. The fact thatboth are spelt with s1 suggests that this waspronounced [e].

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It follows from this that, if the name ofthe deity which we pronounce (anachron-istically) ‘Dushara’, had been pronouncedwith a [e] in Nabataean, it would havebeen spelt in Safaitic with s1, and this wenever find. Instead, it is always spelt withs2 and probably had a pronunciation ap-proximating to the ich-laut [c], which Sıba-wayhi describes for (sın), the reflex of s2,in eighth-century Arabic (129). As I explainbelow, we know that this name came toSafaitic via Aramaic because it is generallyspelt with a d rather than the etymologicald. We must therefore conclude that in theNabataean Aramaic of the Hw awran, atleast, the phonemes /s/ and /s/, whichwere represented by the same letter ( ) inthe Aramaic alphabet, were still pro-nounced differently. This maintenance ofthe distinct pronunciation of the pho-neme /s/ marks out Nabataean Aramaicfrom most of the other Middle Aramaicdialects which underwent the sound-shift[s]±[s]. Simplistic dismissals of this as ‘Ar-abic colouring’ (130) mask the really inter-esting questions which it raises (131).

In Safaitic and Hismaic, the lack of [s]obviously caused problems in the translit-eration of Latin and Greek names and titlescontaining S or S. There are a few caseswhere s1 has been used ($qlds1ΩClaudius,tts1ΩTitus) but the more usual expedientseems to have been to use the emphatic sw(qsw rΩkaisa|, grfsw Ω$Ag|ippaV, hrdsw ΩcH|dhV, flfsw ΩFilippoV, grmnqsw ΩGer-manicus, etc.). It is almost certainly for thisreason that sw was put in the place ofsemkath in the Hismaic ABC found atKhirbat al-Samra$ (132).

Nabataean (133)For many years it has been widely heldthat the Nabataeans wrote in Aramaic butspoke Arabic. This view is based on thepresence of Arabic loan-words in the Naba-taean inscriptions and on the claim that the


vast majority of the names in Nabataeaninscriptions are ‘Arabic’ (134). However, ifone excepts the Namara inscription, whichis in Old Arabic, and JSNab 17, which is inNabataeo-Arabic (see below), only a smallnumber of Arabic loan-words can be iden-tified in the Nabataean inscriptions. I havecounted a maximum of twenty-eight, six ofwhich could also be Aramaic (135). More-over, with two exceptions (136), thesewords occur only in the texts from Hw egraor Rawwafa: exactly where some Old Ar-abic and Ancient North Arabian influenceis to be expected. If these loans provide evi-dence of an ‘Arabic substrate’ in NabataeanAramaic, it is therefore only in the lan-guage used in North Arabia from the firstcentury AD onwards, not in the Nabataeanof Petra or the other parts of the kingdom.It cannot therefore be used as evidence thatArabic was the spoken language of ‘theNabataeans’ in general. This demonstratesthe danger of treating as a homogeneouscorpus all the inscriptions which we label‘Nabataean’.

Turning to the onomastic evidence, it isfirst necessary to distinguish what we meanby ‘Nabataean’ names. Generally, this istaken to mean all names found in Naba-taean inscriptions unless there is a par-ticular reason for attributing them to an-other group (eg. ‘Greek’ or ‘Jewish’ names).However, we use the term ‘Nabataean’ fortexts in a number of local varieties of the Ar-amaic script from the Hw awran to Arabia,Sinai and Egypt, and while it may some-times be helpful to use the label in this flex-ible way, we should not allow it to misleadus into assuming that the authors of all thesetexts belonged to a single homogeneousgroup, the ‘Nabataeans’.

Names which are clearly of Arabic form,eg. those containing the definite article $l, orthe word $bn ‘son’ (as opposed to Aramaicbr), or the $f cal nominal form, occur verylargely in Sinai. But the script of these texts

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from Sinai has its own characteristics andinternal development, which is distinctfrom that of the Nabataean heartlandaround Petra. It is therefore misleading torefer to them as ‘Nabataean’ and to use themas evidence for ‘the Nabataeans’. It wouldbe wiser to return to the practice of earlierscholars and refer to them as ‘Sinaitic’.

Moreover, while the vast majority of thesetexts consist simply of names accompaniedby slm, dkyr, bryk, b-tw b, etc. (137) the languageof the few statements which do occur is al-ways Aramaic, not Arabic. It seems to meprobable that someone writing a graffitowould express himself in his language ofnormal use, rather than a literary tongue(138), and therefore the case for spoken Ar-abic even in Sinai seems to me unproven.Certainly, the widespread use of nameswhich are linguistically Arabic is no evi-dence for the spoken language at the timethe texts were carved. Names have an extra-ordinary record of survival and it is usuallyimpossible to guess at the reasons for using,retaining, or discarding them in any par-ticular society at any particular period.

Just as my name ‘Michael’ has been pre-served through the survival of two re-ligions, so the popularity of certain names inSinai, or among the Nabataeans, could insome cases have been connected with theworship of deities who were also veneratedby speakers of Old Arabic. Unfortunately,however, we do not know which of thesecults, if any, were ancestral among the Nab-ataeans and which were later introductions.It is usually assumed that the Nabataeanscame from Arabia, but I know of no argu-ment for this origin that will stand scrutiny(139). In the earliest reference to the Naba-taeans, when they were nomadic, they werealready in southern Transjordan, which re-mained their heartland throughout theirhistory and I know of no clear evidence thatthey came from anywhere else. Given theirgeographical position and their involve-

M. C. A. MACDONALD

ment in the frankincense trades they nat-urally had links with peoples in northwestArabia and eventually came to rule thatarea. They worshipped many of the samedeities as their neighbours in that region.But if their chief deity, Dushara, was the godof the Petra mountains, as is generally be-lieved, this surely suggests a very old andclose attachment to this area. It is interestingthat in the Hismaic graffiti from the area ofWadı Ramm, not far from Petra, invocationsto Dushara outnumber by approximately62% to 38% those to Lt/$lt (140), despite thefact that there was a major temple to $lt atRamm (141) and that in the Safaitic graffiti,written by the nomads to the north and eastof the area, she is by far the most populardeity. Moreover, the N.Div. ‘Dushara’ inthese inscriptions is most often spelt in itsNorth Arabian form D-s2ry (142), whichcontrasts with the entirely Aramaized form(ds2r) normally found in the Safaitic inscrip-tions.

This may contribute a small piece of evi-dence to the debate on which language theNabataeans spoke. If, as is commonly be-lieved, D-s2ry/Dwsr$ means ‘He of theShara’ (the mountains, north of Petra)(143), he was presumably a local deity forthe population of the Hw isma of southernJordan, which produced the Hismaic in-scriptions. The meaning of the epithetwould have been obvious to them and itwould not be surprising, therefore, thatthey spelt it in its etymological form. Onthe other hand, it is also unsurprising thatit should appear as a loan-form in theSafaitic texts, written several hundred kilo-metres away, in an area where most peoplewould be unaware of the geographical ref-erence (144). What is significant is that theloan in Safaitic is from Aramaic. It seemsto me out of the question that ds2r inSafaitic could be a spelling pronunciation,since this would require that all thosewriters of Safaitic inscriptions who in-

48

voked Dushara as ds2r had read his namein an Aramaic text, without ever hearing itfrom a North Arabian speaker. This is obvi-ously preposterous. However, the onlyalternative is that they received the cultfrom Aramaic speakers.

It is, of course, likely that they came intocontact with the cult of Dushara in theHw awran, rather than at Petra, and it is gen-erally assumed, though there is virtuallyno evidence one way or the other, that thespoken language of the Hw awran was Ara-maic (145). But the cult of Dushara was avital and distinctive element of Nabataeancommunal identity. Other deities in Syriahad important cult centres (eg. Bacal-shamın at Sıc) but were also worshippedelsewhere (eg. Bacalshamın at Palmyra).Dushara was one of the very few to beuniquely associated with a particularpeople or state. It therefore seems likelythat Nabataeans, from the heartland,would have been involved in his cult evenin the Hw awran, indeed one might expectthem to have dominated it. If these werespeakers of Old Arabic there would havebeen no point in their communicating withthe nomads in Aramaic, since Old Arabicand Safaitic would have been mutually in-telligible. In this case, the name Dusharawould have come into Safaitic with an ini-tial /d/ and a final, consonantal /y/. In-stead, it was borrowed in its Aramaic formwith an initial /d/ and (presumably) afinal vowel, and this suggests that thoseNabataeans from whom the cult wasadopted spoke a dialect of Aramaic. Need-less to say, this is very far from being con-clusive. It is intended simply as a smallcontribution to a continuing debate.

Old Arabic

Diagnostic featuresAs I have said, Herodotus’ statement thatthe Arabs worshipped a goddess named


$Alilat, tells us that this form of the Ar-abic definite article was in use by the fifthcentury BC but, of course, gives us no otherinformation about the dialect. So we cannotassume that this is a direct ancestor of theOld Arabic attested in later texts (146).However, there is a handful of inscriptionsdating from the late first century BC on-wards which are either expressed in, or dis-play features of, Old Arabic and whichhave been found right across the Peninsula,in central, north and eastern Arabia, Syriaand the Negev.

However, since Old Arabic appears tohave been normally an unwritten languageits features are not at all well defined. Themost obvious characteristic is, of course,the use of the definite article $l-. But, evenhere it is necessary to be cautious. As I re-marked earlier, the presence of $l- in a namedoes not mean that the text in which thatname occurs is in Old Arabic. The inscrip-tion from Qaryat al-Faw, a photograph ofwhich was published by Wafik Ghoneimand which was discussed by ManfredKropp at the 1991 Seminar for ArabianStudies (147), was included in a recent listof the earliest inscriptions in the Arabiclanguage, as the first attestation of the defi-nite article $l- (148). However, the onlyclear example of $l- in this text is in thename of an ethnic group the $(a)l $l-$hw nktwhich one would expect to retain the ar-ticle in its native form, whatever the lan-guage of the text (but see below under Da-dano-Arabic). A second instance of the ar-ticle has been assumed in this text in thephrase l-lt which Robin interpreted as *li-l-lat, ‘for Al-lat’. However, we know fromthe Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions thatone of the most popular deities in NorthArabia was Lt, who is distinguished inboth theophoric names and in invocationsfrom $lt (*ilat?/Allat?) (149) – there aresometimes prayers to both in the same text(150) – and from the epithet (h)-$lt (‘the

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goddess’) (151). It is therefore unsafe to as-sume that the article $l- has been assimi-lated in this phrase, since llt could as easilyrepresent *li-Lat as *li-l-lat.

One characteristic of Old Arabic, whichhas not so far been recognized, is that the3rd. person masc. sg. of the suffix conju-gation (‘perfect’) of verbs tertiae y/w endedin/-a/ in Old Arabic, as in the later stagesof the language, thus *bana ‘he built’ (152).This is in contrast to the ANA treatment ofthis class of verbs, in which the final radicalretained its consonantal value, thus bny(presumably representing *banaya). Thisprovides us with another important dis-tinction between Old Arabic and ANA andone which is visible not only in scripts suchas Dadanitic and Aramaic which use matreslectionis for final vowels, but also in thosewhich do not. In the latter, the pronunci-ation *bana is expressed simply as bn, as inthe inscription of cIgl bn Hfcm (see below),as opposed to the regular ANA bny.

Another distinctive mark of Old Arabicis the feminine singular relative pronoun,$lt (cf. Classical Arabic $allatı), which occursin JSLih 384, see below. This is not foundin ANA, which uses dt (eg. in Safaitic andHismaic) or d$t (eg. in Hasaitic).

Other features of Old Arabic distinguishit from the Sayhadic languages, but areshared with Ancient North Arabian. Thusit has two, rather than three, unvoiced non-emphatic sibilants, although the notation ofthese in scripts which have signs for threeis sometimes unpredictable. This is a fea-ture which Old Arabic shares with all butthe oldest stages of Ancient North Arabian.The causative stem of the verb is $f cl ratherthan hf cl or s1f cl and it uses the prepositionmn rather than bn ‘from’.

Until recently, it was thought that the useof the negative particle lam plus the prefixconjugation (the ‘jussive’ in Classical Ar-abic) was a distinctive feature which couldbe used to identify Old Arabic (153). How-

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ever, this construction has recently beenfound in a Safaitic inscription from north-eastern Jordan (154), the language ofwhich, in other respects, could be eitherSafaitic or Old Arabic (155).

As explained in the section on nomencla-ture, before the sixth century AD, no onescript was associated exclusively with OldArabic and, on the rare occasions on whichit was written, a number of different alpha-bets was used. The reasons for this will bediscussed below, but the result is that,while there are relatively few inscriptionswhich are linguistically more or less ‘pure’Old Arabic, there are several others whichdisplay a mixture of Old Arabic featuresand those of the language normally associ-ated with the script in which the text iswritten: in particular Safaitic, Dadanitic,Nabataean or other Aramaic.

Texts in ‘pure’ Old ArabicThe earliest document which is indisput-ably in Old Arabic is the inscription of cglbn Hfcm, written in the Sabaic script,which was found at Qaryat al-Faw (156)and may date from the end of the first cen-tury BC (157).

This text uses the article $l- (158), the*bana, rather than *banaya, form of the 3 m.sg. of the suffix stem of verbs tertiae w/7(159), the $f cl form of the causative stem,and the preposition mn rather than bn(160). On the other hand, it has certain Sa-baic features such as the form of the 3 m.sg. enclitic pronoun -hw which alternateswith -h (161) and the sporadic attachmentof -m to the end of words, possiblyattempting to imitate Sabaic mimationwithout understanding its purpose (162).

W. W. Muller (163) has recognized thatJSLih 384 should also be classed as Old Ar-abic rather than Dadanitic, since it containsthe Arabic relative pronoun $allatı in theform $lt. The text also contains an exampleof the *bana rather than *banaya form of the

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3 m. sg. of the suffix stem of verbs tertiaew/7. Dadanitic is the only ANA script inwhich matres lectionis are employed (164)and the letter -h is used to represent final/a/ (165). Thus *bana appears in this textas bnh (166), as opposed to Dadanitic (andother ANA) bny, (ie. *banaya) (167).

The other documents which can be saidto be in more or less ‘pure’ Old Arabic arethe Namara inscription (AD 328) (168),lines 4–5 of the cEn cAvdat inscription (169)(of uncertain date) (170), both in the Naba-taean script; and the inscriptions of Ummal-Jimal (of uncertain date), Zebed (AD512), Jabal Usays (AD 528), and Harran(AD 568) all of which are in what is recog-nizably the Arabic script (171).

In addition, there are two leaves ofparchment from a Psalter found in the ge-nizah of the Umayyad mosque in Dam-ascus. They bear part of the Septuagint textof Psalm 78 (LXX, 77) with an Arabic glossin Greek transliteration, set out in parallelcolumns. Following a detailed study of thistext I am convinced that it is pre-Islamic(172). This is the most valuable text in OldArabic so far discovered since the Greektransliteration seems to have been madewith great care and consistency from anoral source, and thus is uncomplicated bythe orthographic conventions of anotherscript. It also, of course, provides thevowels and has the additional advantagethat there can be no doubt as to themeaning.

Old Arabic ‘Mixed’ textsAs described in the section on nomencla-ture, the Old Arabic ‘mixed’ texts can besubdivided into Safaeo-Arabic, Dadano-Arabic, etc. These are texts written in theSafaitic (Dadanitic, etc.) scripts, and whichare predominantly in the language nor-mally associated with that script (ie. inSafaitic, Dadanitic, etc.), but which also


contain elements which can be attributedto Old Arabic.

[Sabaeo-Arabic]At present, there are no clear examples oftexts in the Sabaic script and languagewhich contain elements clearly attributableto Old Arabic rather than ANA (173).However, when all the inscriptions fromQaryat al-Faw are published it is veryprobable that some will be found to fallinto this category.

Safaeo-ArabicThere are a handful of Safaitic inscriptionswhich appear to contain the definite article$l-. The clearest of these is C 2446 which isknown only from a hand-copy (Dn 68c).This reads

l S1cd bn Mr$ bn Nr w-wgm c[l] $h-h Nrqtl∞.±-h $1 (N)btw y mbcy ncm cwd w-dw f f-h-lt mcmn w-$lt dtn w-gd-[c](w)d w-gd-dw f t$rm-d $s1lf w-wlh kbr s1hw r cl $h-h hw bb-h l-$bd(174).

‘By S1cd son of Mr$ son of Nr and hemourned for his brother Nr (whom) the Na-bataean killed during the attack (175) on theflocks of cwd and Dw f (176). And so, O Ltmcmn (177) and goddess of Dtn (178) andGd-cwd and Gd-Dw f (179) [grant the oppor-tunity of] revenge on him who did this thing(180). And he mourned greatly s1hw r (181) forhis brother, his beloved, for ever’.

On Dunand’s copy, the first letter of (n)btw yis the same length as the previous l, as op-posed to the very short ns in the rest of thetext, so the reading is not entirely secure.However, regardless of whether the nisba isNbtw y or Lbtw y, it seems probable that the let-ters $l represent the Arabic article, ratherthan the word $l (cf. Ar. $al) meaning ‘socialgroup’, since in Safaitic this is always fol-lowed by the name itself ($l rm ‘the people

51

of Rome, the Romans’, $l dw f ‘the tribe ofDw aif’, etc.) and never by the nisba (rmy, dw fy).Moreover, in Safaitic, ‘the Nabataeans’ arealways called simply nbtw , rather than *$l nbtw .If therefore, as seems likely, $l in this con-text is the Arabic article, this text containsa record of what I have called the ‘northernOld Arabic isogloss’ (182) in which the /l/of the article is not assimilated, even beforethe sounds called by the grammariansof Classical Arabic al-hw uruf al-samsiyya or‘sun letters’.

However, other features of the text arecharacteristic of Safaitic, such as the voca-tive particle h- and the assimilation of then in the preposition mn. I would thereforeplace C 2446 among the ‘mixed texts’ as anexample of ‘Safaeo-Arabic’.

Another possible text of this type is WH589 which contains the statement $s2r∞.±ql-l-mdbr ‘and he migrated to the inner de-sert’. The two ls are clear on the photo-graph, but it is quite possible that they arethe result of dittography on the part of theauthor, who had just written, and thencrossed out, a second s2 between the r andthe q of $s2rq. In Safaitic, the word mdbr isnever used with the article (183), but it ispossible that it was referred to as *$l-mdbrin Old Arabic, cf. the place-name Rhw btwhich also does not take the article inSafaitic, but appears as al-Ruhw bah in laterArabic (184).

There are also several Safaitic inscrip-tions in which the definite article appearsas $- rather than h-. Given that in theSafaitic script the two letters are dis-tinguished only by a short side-stroke (seeFig. 3), I restrict myself to those for whichphotographs are available and where it isdifficult to suggest another explanation(other than an error by the author). ThusSIJ 37 has s1lm w-fsw yt m-b$s1 $-s1snt ‘securityand deliverance from misfortune this year’(185), and KRS 125, an unpublished in-scription from northeastern Jordan, has cwr

M. C. A. MACDONALD

l-m ycwr $-s1fr ‘blindness to whoeverscratches out the writing’ (186). In bothcases, if my analysis is correct, these wouldbe records of what I have called the ‘centralOld Arabic isogloss’ in which the /l/ of thearticle is assimilated before a sibilant (187).

However, all these inscriptions displayfeatures typical of Safaitic, as well as poss-ible examples of the Old Arabic definite ar-ticle and it is for this reason that I haveplaced them among the ‘mixed’ texts, asSafaeo-Arabic.

Dadano-ArabicThe Dadano-Arabic texts (JSLih 71 and 276)and the Nabataeo-Arabic inscription(JSNab 17) were found in the very centreof an Ancient North Arabian (ie. h- dialect)area. The two former were found at Dadanand the latter at Hw egra, c.25 km to thenorth. In JSLih 71 and in JSNab 17 we findthe name of the town in its Arabic form($)l-hw gr. This contrasts with the forms Hw gr$

in Nabataean, possibly hw gr in Safaitic (188)and the form behind Pliny’s transcriptionHaegra (189).

JSLih 71 is an honorific inscriptionwritten in the late Dadanitic script. Thename and genealogy take up the first twolines and are linguistically indeterminate,in that they could be either ANA or OldArabic, although the mater lectionis -h, re-presenting the final -a in the first name, is adistinctive mark of Dadanitic orthography(190). Line 3 gives the tribal affiliation ofthe man honoured in the form d $l hn-$hw nkt.As noted above, we cannot tell as yetwhether the expression d $l was used inOld Arabic or whether it is a distinguishingmark of ANA, therefore, at present thismust also be treated as linguistically inde-terminate. However, the situation is furthercomplicated by the fact that, although theexpression d $l is typical of other ANA dia-lects (Safaitic, Hismaic, Thamudic B and

52

Hasaitic), it has not yet been found in Da-danitic where, on the relatively rare oc-casions when affiliation to a social group isexpressed, it is usually marked simply byd π the group name (191). As a final twist,however, the name of the honorand’s socialgroup is given as hn-$hw nkt, ie. with the dis-tinctive Dadanitic definite article, eventhough the same name is found elsewherein the form $l-$hw nkt, with the Old Arabic de-finite article $l- (192).

It is customary to link these exampleswith various South Arabian texts in whichthe nisbas hw nkyn, hw nkytn, and $hw nkn arefound (193). However, this does not seemto me possible. The form of the tribal name,$hw nkt, as attested in North Arabian, wouldproduce the nisba * $hw nky in the masc. sg.,* $hw nkyt in the fem. sg. and presumably* $hw nkyn in the pl. and this would surelybe the same in Ancient South Arabian.I cannot therefore agree with Robin(and some earlier scholars) that the formshw nkyn (194), hw nkytn (195), and $hw nkn (196)are respectively the masc. and fem. sg.and the pl. nisbas from the clan/tribal name$hw nkt (197).

It is now generally accepted that lines4–10 of JSLih 71 are in Old Arabic and itis certainly true that the definite article $l-occurs at least twice in this section of thetext. However, although Professor Bees-ton’s interpretation of this part of the in-scription as ‘near-classical Arabic’ (198)was of great importance in drawingattention to its true language, I have diffi-culties both with individual details of hisreading and, more importantly, with thefact that (like all the interpretations beforeit) it did not take account of the fact thatthe ends of lines 4–9 are missing. I ampreparing a new reading of the textwhich I hope to publish in the near fu-ture. Here I will merely describe some ofits Old Arabic features.

The article $l- occurs at least twice


(199), once in b-l-hw gr (ie. ‘in al-Hw igr’), andonce, following the demonstrative particleh- (also found in Ancient North Arabianand, as a preposed ha-, in early Arabicpoetry) in the phrase h-l-mfl in line 8.Failure to recognize the demonstrativehere has led some writers to assume thathl- represents another, otherwise unat-tested, form of the definite article: thuspresupposing the use of three differentforms in the same text.

The implications of JSLih 71 are in-triguing. The inscription was set up in atown which was a centre of the AncientNorth Arabian (h-) dialect, Dadanitic, andis written in the Dadanitic script. Yet theonly part of the text which is linguisticallyDadanitic is the definite article in the nameof the honorand’s social group (hn-$hw nkt),even though this is introduced by the non-Dadanitic ANA expression d $l. The rest ofthe text is in Old Arabic. Why should thisbe? If the honorand, or the dedicator, wasa speaker of Old Arabic, as might be sug-gested by the use of this language in thebody of the text, why was the Dadaniticarticle used with his social group, particu-larly since the group’s name occurs else-where as $l-$hw nkt? Whatever the expla-nation, this text is a dramatic example ofthe close co-existence of ANA and Old Ar-abic in this area.

A second Dadano-Arabic inscription isJSLih 276. This reads

zdlh / bn / klb / d-cmrtc / f-crr / dgbt /crr / $-s1fr dh

‘Zdlh son of Klb of the lineage of cmrtc.And so, may Dgbt defile the destroyerof this writing.’

The reading $-s1fr dh is clear (200) and therecan be no doubt that the $ was intentionalsince (in contrast to their Safaitic equiva-lents) the letters $ and h have entirely dif-ferent forms in the Dadanitic script. The ex-

53

pression finds an exact parallel, but thistime with the Dadanitic article, in HE 1:

f-crr / dgbt / crr / h-s1fr/dh.

The protective formula is typically Da-danitic and for this reason I have classedJSLih 276 as Dadano-Arabic, rather thanpure Old Arabic. The treatment of the OldArabic article in this text is identical to thatin the cgl bn Hfcm inscription, ie. the as-similation of the /l/ before a followingsibilant, and this makes it a record of the‘central Old Arabic’ isogloss (201).

Nabataeo-ArabicIf we except the cEn cAvdat inscription, inwhich Aramaic and Arabic are not mixedbut are used in different sections, the onlyNabataeo-Arabic text so far identified isJSNab 17, at Hw egra/Mada$in Sw alihw , whichis composed in a mixture of Nabataean Ar-amaic and Old Arabic and written in theNabataean script (202). The interpretationof parts of the text are still disputed, but itis clear that some elements are in Aramaic(eg. br, brt, the date) and others in Old Ar-abic, and yet others could be in either (eg.w-lcn mry clm$ mn ysn$, where, apart fromthe divine name, the rest could be eitherNabataean Aramaic or Old Arabic). As inJSLih 71, the article $l- occurs twice, oncein the place name $l-hw grw (line 4) and oncebefore a common noun $l-qbrw (line 7).

The presence of these Old Arabiclinguistic features in the Dadanitic and Na-bataean Aramaic milieu suggests a degreeof multilingualism in these North Arabianoases which parallels that at Qaryat al-Faw,and possibly at Nagran (203). In each ofthese places there was a dominant writtenlanguage, respectively Dadanitic, Naba-taean Aramaic or Sabaic, but these mixedtexts suggest that speakers of Old Arabicwere also present, although, in the north at

M. C. A. MACDONALD

least, we have no way of knowing whetheror not they were residents.

Aramaeo-ArabicFinally, there is an Aramaeo-Arabic inscrip-tion, from Mleiha (Mulayhw a) in the U.A.E.,which suggests that Old Arabic was also inuse in eastern Arabia, at least in the secondcentury AD (204). The text is composed ina rather barbarous Aramaic but contains anumber of Old Arabic features includingthe use of the article $l- and the prepositionfı ‘in’, where Aramaic and Ancient NorthArabian use b- (205). It may also be signifi-cant that the deities invoked are Manat,here spelt mnt (ie. presumably with along /a/ which would not be representedin a medial position), rather than mnwtw asin Nabataean (206), and possibly Khl, theeponymous deity of Qryt dt Khl (ie. Qaryatal-Faw) (207). There are so few writtendocuments from eastern Arabia that it isimpossible to be sure what languages werespoken there at any time in the pre-Islamicperiod. However, this text from Mleihaprovides a tiny fragment of evidence tosuggest that Old Arabic may have been oneof the vernaculars.

Undifferentiated North ArabianIn addition to the texts discussed above,there are a number of others which areclearly in a North Arabian language butwhich cannot be exactly classified withinthat grouping. In some cases it is not evenpossible to decide whether they are in OldArabic or in ANA. But for the majority itis possible to exclude Old Arabic withoutbeing able to assign them to a particularANA dialect.

Since most of the latter group come fromQaryat al-Faw it is quite possible that theyrepresent the dialect of ANA spoken in thecity at one or more periods. However, thenumber of published inscriptions fromFaw is, at present, so small that it seems

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safer to refrain from classifying this as aseparate dialect until the full epigraphy ofthe site is published, after which thelinguistic situation there should become agreat deal clearer. I have therefore left thesetexts in the ‘Undifferentiated’ Restklassen-bildung for the present.

On Figure 1, I have divided the ‘Undif-ferentiated North Arabian’ documents, intotwo sub-groups: (1) ‘Pure UndifferentiatedNorth Arabian texts’ and (2) ‘Undifferenti-ated North Arabian Mixed texts’ (see theexplanations on Fig. 1 and the discussionbelow).

‘Pure’ Undifferentiated North Arabian textsThere are five such inscriptions from Qa-ryat al-Faw, and possibly two from Na-gran. These are:(i) Ja 2122 (208) which is to all intents

and purposes an ANA text. Whilemuch of the vocabulary could, ofcourse, also be Ancient South Ar-abian, the $f cl Form, $hw dt, must beNorth Arabian. In this context, thespelling bny (ie. *banaya) as opposedto *bn (209) (ie. *bana) for the verb ‘tobuild’, suggests that the language isin a dialect of ANA rather than OldArabic (see the discussion of JSLih 348under ‘Pure’ Old Arabic texts, above).

(ii) The tomb inscription of Mcwyt bnRbct (210). With the exception of theAncient South Arabian form of thenisba, qhw tw nyn, the language of this textis ‘pure’ North Arabian. Given this, Iwould classify it as ANA rather thanOld Arabic on the basis of the formbny. Kropp’s conclusion that, if theclan name at the end of line 3 is re-stored as $[hw nkt], then at least four let-ters must be lacking at the end of eachline, is not necessarily correct (211).The name is clearly incomplete, but(regardless of whether or not thename was $hw nkt) it is far more likely


that the inscription continued onto afourth line, now lost (212). The textruns perfectly from the existing endof line 1 to the beginning of line 2, asit does from lines 2 to 3. The chancesof this happening by coincidencemust be extremely remote.

(iii) Ansary, Qaryat al-Fau: 147, no. 6 isalso ANA for similar reasons, eventhough here the 3rd person masc. sg.enclitic pronoun alternates between-h and -hw. As already explained, thedivine name $l-$hw wr, while itselflinguistically Old Arabic, cannot, ofcourse, be used to identify the lan-guage of the text.

(iv) Ansary, Qaryat al-Fau: 143/2, whichreads w$l bn sw qn d $l ntn; and possibly

(v) Ja 2142 (213) which is very fragmen-tary.

Similarly, two texts from Nagran whichcontain the phrases d$t $hl and d $hl respec-tively, should probably also be classed as‘Pure Undifferentiated North Arabian’.These are(vi) Mu 2 (214)(vii) Ja 859 (215).

Undifferentiated North Arabian Mixed textsThese are texts which are basically in thelanguage normally associated with thescript in which they are written, but whichcontain North Arabian features which arenot sufficiently diagnostic to identify themclearly as Old Arabic or ANA. All thoseknown at present are in the Sabaic lan-guage and script and I suggest they betermed Sabaeo-North-Arabian.

Sabaeo-North-ArabianThe first of these is CIH 450, a stela of un-known provenance with a nine-line in-scription. It begins nfs1 w-qbr (like manyHasaitic texts) and it contains the phrasesd$t $l and d $l marking affiliation to a social

55

group (216), which are characteristic ofANA. On the other hand, its vocabulary isentirely Sabaic rather than North Arabian,including the Sabaic preposition bn ‘from’(line 8) and mimation on the first twoproper names.

Similarly, the Ghoneim inscription (217),which I have discussed above, is expressedin the conventional phraseology of a Sabaicdedicatory text. It contains the phrase d $land, once again is by a member of the $l-$hw nkt, but again this cannot help identify thelanguage of the text. The verb ‘to build’ ap-pears in the form bny which would seem toexclude its being Old Arabic (218). But it islikely that here bny is simply the AncientSouth Arabian word rather than the ANAform.

The remaining texts in this categorycome from the area of Haram, in the northof the Yemeni Jawf. In his detailed studyof the inscriptions from this area, ChristianRobin has identified eleven of the twentytexts in the Sabaic script of the Amıriteperiod as being couched in ‘une varieted’arabe avec un habillage morphologiqueinspire du sabeen’ (219), and has proposednaming this mixed language ‘pseudo-sa-been’. However, this is surely to overstatethe case. The non-Sabaic features in thesetexts are as follows: (1) the preposition mn‘from’ rather than Sabaic bn (in five texts)(220); (2) a conjunction hn ‘because’ (ineight texts); (3) the negative particle lm fol-lowed by the prefix conjugation (in fourtexts); (4) the use of s1 for s3 (in two texts);(5) the use of s3 for t (in one text); and (6)the omission of $ (in one text), and h and c

(in two texts) (221).This list does not seem particularly im-

pressive, either in the linguistic importanceof the features themselves or the regularityof their occurrence, especially when it is re-membered that the definite article is alwaysexpressed in these texts by Sabaic -n, neverArabic $l- (or, indeed, ANA h-), and the

M. C. A. MACDONALD

causative stem is always hf cl, as in Sabaic,never $f cl, as in North Arabian (222). All thissuggests to me that, rather than being co-uched in ‘une variete d’arabe avec un hab-illage morphologique inspire du sabeen’,the language of these texts is more likely torepresent imperfect attempts to write cor-rect Sabaic by non-native speakers (223).

Moreover, while these six features distin-guish the language of these eleven textsfrom standard Sabaic, they do not necess-arily all represent intrusions from the samelanguage. Only half of them (nos. 1, 3 and4) are characteristic of North Arabian, atleast as it is known at present, although theuse of lam plus the prefix conjugationmakes it very likely that the four texts con-taining this expression have North Arabianaffinities and all these also contain the par-ticle hn (feature 2) (224). However, none ofthese texts contains any feature that is ex-clusive to Old Arabic or to ANA. Atpresent, therefore, I would include theseinteresting inscriptions in the category ofUndifferentiated North Arabian MixedTexts, in the sub-category of Sabaeo-North-Arabian (225).

It will be clear from this that I cannotfollow Robin in elevating what appear tome to be the irregular features of these Sa-baeo-North-Arabian texts from Haram intoa distinct, more or less artificial, languageor dialect: ‘pseudo-sabeen qahw tw anite’ (226).However, if I have understood him cor-rectly, I am even more puzzled by his ex-planation of the development and use ofthis supposed dialect:

‘Les Arabes proches du Yemen auraientdonc utilise le sabeen pour communi-quer entre eux, mais l’auraient adaptepour en faciliter la maıtrise, reduisant lenombre des sifflantes a deux et introdui-sant subrepticement des mots et desformes propres a l’arabe. Il s’agirait doncd’une langue plutot artificielle. ...

56

‘Ce pseudo-sabeen pourrait donc etreune premiere tentative de langue com-munication (ce que les specialistes appel-leraient une koine ...) pour un certainnombre de tribus du sud-ouest del’Arabie, entre le Hw ijaz et le Yemen:Qahw tw an, Madhhw ij, Amır, cAthtar et peut-etre Kinda’ (227).

The ANA dialects and Old Arabic wouldcertainly have been mutually comprehen-sible and what little evidence we have sug-gests that all the tribes he mentions (withthe possible exception of Amır and cAthtar)spoke one or other of these North Arabianlanguages. It is therefore not clear to mewhy they should have needed to com-municate with each other in a koine basedon, and largely consisting of, Sabaic – a lan-guage which Robin himself admits theywould have had to learn – even when itwas ‘modified’ with a handful of fairlyminor North Arabian, and possibly other,elements.

Furthermore, I do not understand whyamong these tribes both at Faw and atHaram

‘il semblerait ... que les textes importantset soignes soient rediges en pseudo-sa-been et que les autres le soient en norda-rabique. Il en resulterait que la langue lo-cale [viz. a North Arabian language]s’employait pour les usages communsmais qu’une autre [viz. pseudo-sabeen’],dont le prestige devait etre plus grandou qui etait mieux comprise en dehorsde l’oasis, etait preferee pour les actes lesplus solennels’ (228).

In both Haram and Faw there are inscrip-tions in good Sabaic and, therefore, it is su-rely difficult to believe that this sort of‘pidgin Sabaic’ would have been regardedas a language of prestige to be used intentio-nally ‘pour les actes les plus solennels’.


I would therefore suggest the followingalternative explanation.

1) The texts from Haram and those fromQaryat al-Faw should be considered sepa-rately. The geographical positions, histories(as far as we can tell), social and culturallives of the two towns appear to have beenvery different. Haram, even in the Amıriteperiod, was firmly within the Sabaeancultural sphere, even if the dominant partof the population may have hailed origi-nally from northern nomad stock (229).Faw, on the other hand, was an entirelyCentral Arabian town, albeit an extremelycosmopolitan one. Certainly, there wasstrong Sabaean influence there – Saba$ wasits most powerful neighbour – but it wasonly one element among many, and I donot get the impression that it was in anyway ‘a South Arabian town’.

2) At Haram, the limited range and na-ture of the non-Sabaic elements in the Sa-baeo-North-Arabian inscriptions suggestthat they are clumsy attempts at writingcorrect Sabaic by people whose mothertongue was either a different language, or adialect of Sabaic which contained elementsfrom another language.

3) At Qaryat al-Faw, on the other hand,the situation is more complex. Here itseems very probable that at least two formsof North Arabian coexisted: Old Arabicand one or more, as yet undefined, dialectsof ANA. There are a handful of texts in OldArabic and ANA written in the Sabaicscript, but we cannot know how wi-despread this practice was until the Fawinscriptions are fully published. However,there are also texts at Faw couched in theSabaic language with only a few NorthArabian intrusions and I would suggestthat these, like the Sabaeo-North-Arabianinscriptions at Haram, are the products ofNorth-Arabian speakers trying, not enti-rely successfully, to write correct Sabaic.

4) Too few inscriptions from Nagran

57

have been published to make any realisticjudgement on the linguistic situation there,although given its geographical positionone would obviously expect there to havebeen a mixture of North Arabian and An-cient South Arabian languages. We canonly hope that more texts will appear inthe near future.

The late Pre-Islamic periodAs we have seen, there are remarkably fewdocuments in Old Arabic, and until thesixth century AD there was no single scriptassociated with it. This implies that, untilthe period immediately before the rise ofIslam, it remained a vernacular in societieswhich were either non-literate or whichwrote in other languages – Sabaic, AncientNorth Arabian, Aramaic, Greek. We canonly guess at the reasons for this and thereasons why, on occasions, Old Arabic waswritten. In the late first millennium BC andthe early first millennium AD, it was pre-sumably the vernacular of groups whichwere basically non-literate, perhaps prima-rily nomadic, which when they moved intosituations where literacy was necessary –eg. contact with settled peoples – foundwriting systems associated with other lan-guages already established. Those whowanted to write would therefore have hadto learn the rudiments of the language as-sociated with the script, or simply havehad their texts written for them by scribesand masons. Only in very special cir-cumstances would an individual have in-sisted on his text being expressed in thevernacular, and the problems that thiscaused the scribes and masons in adaptingthe orthographic conventions of one lan-guage to an unfamiliar tongue, can be seenboth in the true and mixed Old Arabic textsand in the Undifferentiated-North-Arabianinscriptions. Since several of these texts inANA and Old Arabic (or approximations

M. C. A. MACDONALD

to it) are the monumental inscriptions ofimportant people (the king of Qahw tw an,Imru$ l-Qays ‘king of all the Arabs’, etc.) itis possible that there was already a politicalimplication in using the spoken tongue ra-ther than what may, by then, have been re-garded as a ‘foreign’ written language. Ho-wever, until we have further evidence thiscan be no more than speculation.

It is interesting to compare the case of OldArabic with that of those dialects of AncientNorth Arabian used largely by nomads: Sa-faitic and Hismaic, to take the best docu-mented. I have suggested elsewhere that theart of writing was acquired more or less ac-cidentally by the nomads and served nouseful purpose within their society, since theonly readily available writing materialswere rocks and boulders (230). In addition,since they used different scripts and diffe-rent languages from the sedentaries aroundthem, literacy was of no use to these nomadswhen they came in contact with settled so-ciety. Indeed, a handful of Greek graffiti bymembers of groups which also wrote in Sa-faitic, suggests that if they needed literacy inthe settled lands then they had to learn therudiments of Greek (231). In these societies,in the desert or on its fringes, the nearestequivalent to the self-conscious use of OldArabic in monumental inscriptions, is in aburial cave in the desert of northeasternJordan, near the important Roman fort ofDayr al-Kahf. Here, the construction of thetomb is recorded in a Nabataean inscriptionfor ‘general consumption’, but the names ofthe dead are carefully inscribed on their sar-cophagi in Safaitic, presumably the scriptand ‘language’ of the deceased (232).

If this explanation for the small numberof Old Arabic texts in ‘borrowed’ scripts iscorrect, it may help to explain how Arabiccame to be written in a derivative of theAramaic alphabet, rather than in one ofthe, far more suitable, Arabian scripts. I amcompletely convinced that what we know

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as the ‘Arabic’ script was not developed orderived from either the Syriac or the Naba-taean alphabets, in any conscious way. It issimply the Nabataean alphabet in its latestform (233).

It is generally accepted that the Arabicscript originated in the region of northernArabia, southern Syria and southern Iraq.In northern Arabia and southern Syriathere had been a strong tradition of An-cient North Arabian (ie. h- dialects) writtenin forms of the Arabian script. However,these dialects and scripts were graduallydisplaced by Aramaic as the vehicle ofprestige writing in the oases of northernArabia. This probably happened first inTayma$, which came under Mesopotamianinfluence from the sixth century BC on-wards. It is noticeable that although briefTaymanitic inscriptions have been found inthe sanctuary areas which have been exca-vated, the important religious texts are inAramaic. The change took place much laterin Dadan where there was a strong localpolitical entity which survived the atten-tions of Nabonidus. It was only under Na-bataean domination, when the politicalcentre had been transferred to Hw egra (Ma-da$in Sw alihw ), that Aramaic became the ge-neral medium for public pronouncements.

The nomads probably continued to usetheir own dialects and scripts, but thesehad no prestige and were completely irrele-vant to those in the settled areas. The distri-bution in the north of the Peninsula of thepure and mixed Old Arabic texts suggeststhat speakers of an $l- dialect were presentthroughout the areas where Aramaic hadcome to be the prestige script. It was there-fore natural that when Old Arabic came tobe written in these regions, the Aramaicscript should be the chosen vehicle. Ofcourse, the late Nabataean script, whichwas the one chosen, was completely inade-quate for the expression of Arabic. Notonly did it have only twenty-two letters to


represent the twenty-eight phonemes ofArabic, but this number was effectively re-duced still further since one letter, semkath,was not used and the forms of severalothers had become indistinguishable (234).I would suggest that even if its grave ina-dequacies were considered, they werethought to be completely outweighed byits prestige.

In this context, the use of the Nabataeanscript to write the Old Arabic epitaph ofImru$ l-Qays, ‘king of all the Arabs’, ishighly significant. The date is AD 328, morethan two centuries after the annexation ofthe Nabataean kingdom, but during this pe-riod the script had clearly continued to beused and thus to develop. It seems a fair as-sumption that the inscription was couchedin Old Arabic because this was the nativelanguage of Imru$ l-qays and those whocomposed his epitaph. If so, it is scarcely cre-dible that they would have had it written ina script with which they were entirely unfa-miliar or which was associated with a com-pletely alien culture (235). It is usually as-sumed that the Imru$ l-Qays of the Namarainscription was the second Lakhmid king,although the evidence is by no means clear-cut. If correct, this would suggest that by thefourth century AD the Lakhmid court(which Arab tradition makes one of the ‘bi-rthplaces’ of the Arabic script) may alreadyhave been literate in Arabic, using the Naba-taean alphabet to write it.

Of course, the use of a script to write a‘new’ language (Arabic) does not precludeits continuing use to express the ‘original’language (Aramaic). Thus, 160 years beforethe epitaph of Imru$ l-Qays, an army unitformed from a north Arabian tribe,Thamud, declared its loyalty to the Romanemperors Marcus Aurelius and LuciusVerus in inscriptions in the prestige lan-guages of Greek and Nabataean Aramaic,at Rawwafa, in northwest Arabia (236).Thirty years after the death of Imru$ l-Qays

59

another royal epitaph in almost perfectAramaic in a late, if archaizing, Nabataeanscript, was set up in Mada$in Sw alihw (237).Thus the Namara inscription is within atradition in which Aramaic and the Naba-taean script are the vehicles for prestige pu-blic monuments of Arab polities innorthern Arabia, just as Sabaic and the Sa-baic script were at Qaryat al-Faw.

The difference between the north and thesouth lay in the fact that, in the south, Sa-baic, however imperfectly written, seemsto have remained the official language ofprestige documents until shortly before therise of Islam, whereas in the north the co-ming of Christianity appears to have pro-duced a shift in the use of written lan-guages from the mid-fourth century on-wards. In the Byzantine provinces Greekbecame the language of political statementsand Greek and Syriac (and the other Chris-tian Aramaic dialects) the languages of thechurch. Most public documents were there-fore composed in one or other of these lan-guages. It was only in exceptional cir-cumstances, and to make a clear culturalpoint, that an Arabic version was added tothe Syriac and/or Greek as at Zebed (AD512) or Harran (AD 568).

However, in southern Iraq, the Lakhmidcourt was one of a number of self-consciously Arab and Arabic-speaking po-litical entities which grew up in thenorthern part of the Peninsula in late anti-quity. In these, although the language ofthe church would have been Syriac, the po-litical and cultural language was Arabic,not Greek. Thus it seems likely that it wasin this region that Arabic first came to be aregularly written language, displacing Ara-maic as the language of prestige docu-ments for reasons of politics and ethnicpride, but continuing to use the Aramaicscript, although in a form which was notassociated either with the church (238) orthe Sasanian state. In this way, almost acci-

M. C. A. MACDONALD

dentally, Arabic came to be written in acompletely inadequate script, and in thisform eventually displaced the much moresuitable Ancient South Arabian alphabetwhich gradually fell into disuse along withthe Sayhadic languages it expressed.

It should be emphasized that, at present,all this can be no more than a hypothesisbased on the fragmentary evidence avai-lable and inferences drawn from it. Wemust hope that, in the near future, moredata will appear which will reveal whetherit is founded on rock or on sand (239).

SIGLAAMJ Hismaic inscriptions pu-

blished, with no coherentnumbering system, by W.J. Jo-bling in the preliminary re-ports of his cAqaba-MacanSurvey. G.M.H. King has col-lected them and given them acontinuous numeration underthe siglum AMJ, in KingGMH. Early North ArabianThamudic E. A Preliminary des-cription based on a new corpus ofinscriptions from the Hw ismadesert of southern Jordan and pu-blished material. Ph.D. thesissubmitted to the School ofOriental and African Studies,University of London, 1990.

ARNA Nab Nabataean inscriptions pu-blished by J.T. Milik and J.Starcky in Winnett FV & ReedWL. Ancient Records fromNorth Arabia. Toronto: Univer-sity of Toronto Near andMiddle East Series, 6: 1970:139–162.

C Safaitic and Thamudic Binscriptions published inCorpus Inscriptionum Semiti-carum. Pars V. Paris: Impri-merie Nationale, 1950–1951.

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CIH Ancient South Arabian andHasaitic inscriptions pu-blished in Corpus Inscrip-tionum Semiticarum. Pars IV.Paris: Imprimerie Nationale,1889–1932.

CIS ii Aramaic (including Naba-taean) inscriptions publishedin Corpus Inscriptionum Semiti-carum. Pars II. Paris: Impri-merie Nationale, 1889–1954.

Doughty Thamudic B, C and D andHismaic inscriptions copiedby C.M. Doughty and repu-blished with the ‘Doughty’numeration in van denBranden A. Les inscriptionsthamoudeennes. Louvain: Bi-bliotheque du Museon, 25:1950.

Ghoneim A Sabaeo-North-Arabian textedited in Kropp M. TheInscription Ghoneim AfO 27.1980. Abb. 10: A FortunateError. PSAS 22: 1992: 55–67.

H Nabataean inscriptions pu-blished in Healey JF. The Na-bataean Tomb Inscriptions ofMada’in Salih. Oxford: Journalof Semitic Studies Supple-ment, 1: 1993.

HCH Safaitic inscriptions in Har-ding GL. The Cairn of Hani$.ADAJ 2: 1953: 8–56.

HE Dadanitic, Taymanitic andThamudic B, C and D inscrip-tions in Harding GL. The Tha-mudic and Lihw yanite Texts. In:Parr PJ, Harding GL &Dayton JE. PreliminarySurvey in N.W. Arabia, 1968.Part II: Epigraphy. Bulletin ofthe Institute of Archaeology,University of London 10: 1971:36–52, 60–61.

HSIM Safaitic inscriptions in Har-


Table 1. Table of Old Arabic inscriptions and other documents.

Document Script Provenance Date

Pure Old ArabiccIgl bn Hfcm Ancient South Arabian Qaryat al-Faw 1st c. BC (?)JSLih 384 Dadanitic Dadan Pre-1st c. AD (?)cEn cAvdat lines 4–5 Nabataean cEn cAvdat, Negev (?)Namara Inscription Nabataean Al-Namara, S. Syria AD 328Umm al-Jimal Arabic Umm al-Jimal, Jordan 6th c. AD (?)Zebed Arabic Zebed, N. Syria AD 512Jabal Usays Arabic S. Syria AD 528Harran Arabic Leja, S. Syria AD 568Psalter fragment Greek Syria ? (?)

Old Arabic Mixed TextsSafaeo-ArabicC 2446 Safaitic Zalaf, S. Syria 1st c. BC–4th ADWH 589 Safaitic Burquc, NE Joran 1st c. BC–4th ADSIJ 37 Safaitic Jathum, NE Jordan 1st c. BC–4th ADKRS 125 Safaitic NE Jordan 1st c. BC–4th AD

Dadano-ArabicJSLih 71 Dadanitic Dadan Pre-1st c. AD (?)JSLih 276 Dadanitic Dadan pre-1st c. AD (?)

Nabataeo-ArabicJSNab 17 Nabataean Hw egra AD 267

Aramaeo-ArabicMleiha East Arabian Aramaic Mleiha 2nd century AD (?)

Pure Undifferentiated North ArabianJa 2122 Ancient South Arabian Qaryat al-Faw 3rd–2nd c. BC (?)Mcwyt bn Rbct Ancient South Arabian Qaryat al-Faw 2nd c. BC (?)Ansary, Fau: 147/6 Ancient South Arabian Qaryat al-Faw (?)Ansary, Fau: 143/2 Ancient South Arabian Qaryat al-Faw (?)Ja 2142 Ancient South Arabian Qaryat al-Faw (?)Mu 2 Ancient South Arabian Nagran (?)Ja 859 Ancient South Arabian Nagran (?)

Undifferentiated North Arabian Mixed TextsSabaeo-North-ArabianCIH 450 Ancient South Arabian Unknown (?)Ghoneim Ancient South Arabian Qaryat al-Faw 3rd–2nd c. BC (?)Haram 8 Ancient South Arabian Haram 2nd c. BC–1st c. ADHaram 10 Ancient South Arabian Haram 2nd c. BC–1st c. ADHaram 13 Ancient South Arabian Haram 2nd c. BC–1st c. ADHaram 33 Ancient South Arabian Haram 1st c. BC–1st c. ADHaram 34 Ancient South Arabian Haram 1st c. BC–1st c. ADHaram 35 Ancient South Arabian Haram 1st c. BC–1st c. ADHaram 36 Ancient South Arabian Haram 1st c. BC–1st c. ADHaram 40 Ancient South Arabian Haram 1st c. BC–1st c. ADHaram 56 Ancient South Arabian Haram 1st c. BC–1st c. AD

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M. C. A. MACDONALD

ding GL. Safaitic Inscriptionsin the Iraq Museum. Sumer 6:1950: 124–129.

HU Taymanitic, Hismaic and Tha-mudic B, C and D inscriptionscopied by C. Huber and pu-blished with the ‘HU’ nume-ration in van den Branden, Lesinscriptions thamoudeennes.

IIS Inventaire des inscriptions suda-rabiques. Academie desInscriptions et Belles-Lettres(Paris)/Istituto Italiano per ilMedio ed Estremo Oriente(Rome). Paris: Boccard/Rome:Herder.

Ja South Arabian inscriptionspublished by A. Jamme.

JaL Dadanitic (formerly Lihya-nite) inscriptions publishedby A. Jamme.

JSLih Dadanitic (formerly Dedaniteand Lihyanite) inscriptions inJaussen A & Savignac M-R.Mission archeologique en Arabie.(6 volumes). Paris: Leroux/Geuthner, 1909–1922.

JSNab Nabataean inscriptions pu-blished in Jaussen & Savignac,Mission.

JSTham Taymanitic, Hismaic and Tha-mudic B, C and D inscriptionspublished in Jaussen & Savi-gnac, Mission.

KJC Hismaic inscriptions edited inKing, Early North Arabian Tha-mudic E.

KRS Safaitic inscriptions recordedby the Basalt Desert RescueSurvey in northeastern Jordanin 1990. See King GMH. TheBasalt Desert Rescue Surveyand Some Preliminary Re-marks on the Safaitic Inscrip-tions and Rock Drawings.PSAS 20: 1990: 55–78.

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Lisan Ibn Manzw ur, Lisan al-cArab (15volumes). Beyrouth: DarSw ader, 1955–1956.

LivH Hasaitic inscriptions in Li-vingstone A. A Linguistic,Tribal and Onomastical Studyof the Hasaean Inscriptions.ATLAL 8: 1984: 86–108.

LP Safaitic inscriptions in Lit-tmann E. Safaıtic Inscriptions.Syria. Publications of the Prin-ceton University Archaeolo-gical Expeditions to Syria in1904–1905 and 1909. DivisionIV, Section C. Leyden: Brill,1943.

Ph Taymanitic, Hismaic and Tha-mudic B, C and D inscriptionscopied by H.St.J.B. Philby andpublished in van den BrandenA. Les textes thamoudeens dePhilby. Louvain: Bibliothequedu Museon, 39 and 41: 1956.

RES Repertoire d’epigraphie semi-tique. Publie par la Commis-sion du Corpus InscriptionumSemiticarum, Academie desInscriptions et Belles-Lettres.(8 volumes). Paris: ImprimerieNationale, 1900–1968.

Ry Ancient South Arabian, Ha-saitic and UndifferentiatedNorth Arabian inscriptions pu-blished by G. Ryckmans in theseries ‘Inscriptions sud-ara-bes’.

SIJ Safaitic inscriptions in WinnettFV. Safaitic Inscriptions fromJordan. Toronto: University ofToronto Near and Middle EastSeries, 2: 1957.

WAM S Safaitic inscriptions in WinnettFV. An Arabian Miscellany.AION 31 [N.S. 21]: 1971: 443–454.

WH Safaitic inscriptions in Winnett


FV & Harding GL. Inscriptionsfrom Fifty Safaitic Cairns. To-ronto: University of TorontoNear and Middle East Series, 9:1978.

WTay Taymanitic inscriptions pu-blished in Winnett & Reed, An-cient Records from North Arabia.

WTI Dumaitic, Thamudic B, C andD,HismaicandSafaitic inscrip-tions published in Winnett &Reed, Ancient Records fromNorth Arabia.

ZI Ancient South Arabian inscrip-tions published in cInan ZA.Ta$rıh hw adw arat al-yaman al-qadıma. Al-Qahira: Al-silfiyya,1976.

References1. When first mentioning a term I shall use diacri-

tical marks, when appropriate, to indicate pro-nunciation or etymology. However, in subse-quent references I shall follow normal practiceand omit these marks. In transliterations of textsI use the following editorial sigla: a letter be-tween is a doubtful reading; a letter between[ ] is restored; ∞.± represents signs or markswhich are considered extraneous to the text andwhich have been omitted from the reading; aletter between ( ) is an emendation when a text isknown only from a hand-copy; and - - - mark amissing or unreadable passage, regardless of itslength. One / represents a word-divider, two //the end of a line. Inseparable particles and en-clitic pronouns are attached by a hyphen to thefollowing or preceding word respectively. Withthe exception of Dadanitic, most North andSouth Arabian texts are written entirely withoutmatres lectionis, I have therefore not vocalizednames in the translations. Finally, AlexanderSima has pointed out to me that the ancient nameof the oasis now called al-‘Ula was almost cer-tainly pronounced Dadan (thus uruda-da-nu in theNabonidus Stelae from Harran H2,A and H2,B,both i: 26, and the Septuagint’s rendering of He-brew dedan by Dadau. The Hebrew transcription,dedan, (from which English ‘Dedan’ derives) isthe result of two sound shifts characteristic ofHebrew: /a/±/a/ in an accented syllable (He-

63

brew placing the accent on the final syllable) andthe unaccented vocal in the preceding syllablebeing reduced to a schwa (cf. melak-ım∞*malak-ım). I therefore refer throughout this paper toDadan and Dadanitic and only use the term ‘De-danite’ when referring to the name formerlygiven to some of the Dadanitic inscriptions. I ammost grateful to Dr. Sima for this suggestionwhich I have quoted verbatim.

2. Thus, for instance, Nabia Abbott’s book entitledThe Rise of the North Arabic script... which dealswith the development of the Arabic script, notthe North Arabian alphabets and the (to me)bizarre classifications in Bergstrasser’s Einfuh-rung in die semitischen Sprachen (retained in theEnglish translation of 1983) in which ‘NorthArabic’ refers only to Arabic, and ‘South Arabic’refers to Gecez, Amharic, Tigre and Mehri! Refe-rence to Ancient South Arabian in Bergstras-ser’s book is confined to notes on Mehri.

3. In view of this confusion I would suggest thatthe terms ‘North Arabic’ and ‘South Arabic’ beabandoned altogether, since they are not evenuseful to describe the dialects of spoken Arabicfound in the north and south of the Peninsula,for which the terms ‘northern/southern Arabicdialects’ are better used. In French too, Chris-tian Robin has led a move away from the tradi-tional terms ‘nord-arabe’ and ‘sud-arabe’ in fa-vour of ‘nordarabique’ and ‘sudarabique’. Un-fortunately, such a distinction is not possible inGerman where ‘arabisch’ is used for both ‘Ara-bian’ and ‘Arabic’. Nevertheless, a clear diffe-rentiation is still possible, see below.

4. See Figs 1 and 2.5. See Fig. 1.6. W. W. Muller, following Caskel, used the term

‘Fruhnordarabisch’ for these texts. However, hedid so in the belief ‘daß die Sprache der thamu-dischen, lihyanischen, safaitischen und hasai-tischen Inschriften eine Vorstufe des Altara-bischen bildet’ (Muller WW. Das Altarabischeund das klassische Arabisch. In: Fischer W, ed.Grundriß der Arabischen Philologie, 1. Wiesbaden:Reichert, 1982: 17). More than a decade and ahalf later, I am not sure that he would maintainthis view, and it is one with which I cannotagree. It is clear that in pre-Islamic Syria andArabia there were two North Arabian dialectgroups, one using h- (or possibly zero) as the de-finite article and one using $l-. It is only the latterwhich is the direct ancestor of the Arabic knownfrom the Islamic period, and it is this which Ihave called ‘Old Arabic’ and to which I wouldsuggest the term ‘Altarabisch’ be restricted. I

M. C. A. MACDONALD

would therefore propose that the term ‘Fruhnor-darabisch’ be replaced by ‘Altnordarabisch’,which has the advantage of consistency with thewell-established parallel term ‘Altsudarabisch’,describing those Sayhadic and non-Sayhadiclanguages of ancient South Arabia known at pre-sent, none of which was the lineal ancestor of anyof the Modern South Arabian tongues. It is alsoeasily recognizable as the equivalent of the En-glish and French terms, ‘Ancient North Arabian’and ‘nordarabique ancien’.

7. See the discussion of Hismaic and Hasaiticbelow.

8. For all these terms, see below.9. Formerly ‘Thamudic E’. See the discussion of

this term below.10. I owe this term to Christian Robin.11. W. W. Muller used this term to cover both ANA

and Old Arabic (Das Altarabische und das klas-sische Arabisch: 17–36), see note 6 above. Ho-wever, I would suggest that the present, morerestricted definition provides greater clarity,and that ‘Nordarabisch’ be used as the overallterm for ANA (ΩAltnordarabisch), Old Arabic(ΩAltarabisch) and (Middle, Classical, ModernStandard and Spoken dialect-) Arabic (ΩAra-bisch).

12. See Fig. 2.13. On the analogy of Old English, Old French and

Old Arabic. As noted above, there is no suchclose connection between the Sayhadic lan-guages and Modern South Arabian. See, for ins-tance, Porkhomovski V. Modern South ArabianLanguages from a Semitic and Hamito-SemiticPerspective. PSAS 27: 1997: 219–223. We stillknow too little of the non-Sayhadic languagesto decide whether they are ‘related’ in any linealsense to Modern South Arabian.

14. For a fuller explanation of this term see BeestonAFL. Apologia for ‘Sayhadic’. PSAS 17: 1987:13–14.

15. That is, what was formerly called ‘Minaean’ or‘Minaic’. It is the language of the pre-Minaeaninscriptions in the area which was to becomethe kingdom of Macın, and which the Minaeans(who probably spoke something quite different)appear to have adopted and used (more or lesscompetently) as their written language. Theterm was first proposed by Christian Robin. Fora fuller explanation see Robin C. L’Arabieantique de Karib$ıl a Mahomet. Nouvelles don-nees sur l’histoire des Arabes grace aux inscrip-tions. Revue du Monde Musulman et de la Mediter-ranee, 61: 1991: 98.

16. For a brief, clear and very useful discussion of

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these languages, see Robin, L’Arabie antique:95–100.

17. See Robin, L’Arabie antique: 96: 122–125.18. That is, the latter part of ZI 11 and Ja 2353

(Jamme A. Miscellanees d’ancient (sic) arabe, 2.Washington, DC: [privately produced], 1971:86), see Beeston AFL. Languages of Pre-IslamicArabia. Arabica 28: 1981: 180–181 (where thepage numbers in n. 6 should read 194–195); andBeeston, Apologia: 14 (where ZI II should readZI 11).

19. See al-Shahw rı AAM. Recent Epigraphic Discove-ries in Dhofar. PSAS 21: 1991: 173–191, and al-Shahw rı AAM. Kayfa ibtadayna wa-kayfa irtaqaynabi-l-hw adw arati l-insaniyyati min sibhi l-gazırati l-cara-biyyati. Zw afaru, kitabatu-ha wa-nuqusu-ha l-qadı-matu. [Privately published. Printed by al-Ghu-rair, Dubai], 1994: 61–145, and the discussionbelow.

20. This does not rule out the possibility of somelinks between some members of each group.See, for instance, the final paragraph ofFrantsouzoff S. Regulation of Conjugal Rela-tions in Ancient Raybun. PSAS 27: 1997: 123.

21. This is a new term, which I owe to ChristianRobin, for what is commonly called the ‘SouthSemitic script’. The term ‘Arabian’ is appropriatesince this branch of the alphabet was, to all in-tents and purposes, confined to Arabia, apartfrom the one case of expansion into Ethiopia.

22. In its earliest form, in Ugaritic, the order was$bghd. However, since Phoenician, from whichall the North-West Semitic alphabets derived,lacked the phoneme /h/ and therefore had nosign to represent it, the order became $bgd.

23. The hlhw m order was used in the South Arabianscripts and still survives in a modified form inEthiopic (see Ryckmans J. L’ordre des lettres del’alphabet sud-semitique. Contribution a laquestion de l’origine de l’ecriture alphabetique.L’Antiquite classique 50: 1981: 698–706; Ry-ckmans J. L’ordre alphabetique sud-semitique etses origines. In: Robin C, ed. Melanges linguisti-ques offerts a Maxime Rodinson par ses eleves, sescollegues et ses amis. (Comptes Rendus duGLECS. Supplement, 12). Paris: Geuthner, 1985:343–359; Macdonald MCA. ABCs and LetterOrder in Ancient North Arabian. PSAS 16: 1986:154–156, n. 145; Irvine AK & Beeston AFL. NewEvidence on the Qatabanian Letter Order. PSAS18: 1988; and Ryckmans J, Muller WW & Ab-dallah YA. Textes du Yemen antique inscrits surbois (with an English Summary). Avant-Proposde J.-F. Breton. Louvain-la-Neuve: Publicationsde l’Institut Orientaliste de Louvain, 43: 1994:


43–44, pl. 1A and B). However, among theNorth Arabian scripts it is only known in Dada-nitic, the alphabet of an urban society wherewriting was probably taught in schools (seeMacdonald, ABCs: 112–115 and note that Fig. 5(on p. 113) has been printed upside-down). TheSafaitic script, on the other hand, which seemsto have been used almost exclusively by no-mads, appears to have been spread informallyfrom one individual to another with no fixedalphabetic order, the letters being groupedroughly according to shape, with the groupingsbeing different in each case (see most recentlyMacdonald MCA, al-Mu$azzin M & Nehme L.Les inscriptions safaıtiques de Syrie, cent qua-rante ans apres leur decouverte. CRAIBL 1996:439–443 and references there). For Hismaic, wehave an interesting ‘ABC’ more or less in the$bgd order, but with differences which are verysignificant for the early letter-orders of theArabic script (see Macdonald, ABCs: 105–112,117–130 [note that, in that article, Hismaic waswrongly called ‘South Safaitic’]; and MacdonaldMCA. On the placing of sw in the Maghribi abjadand the Khirbet al-Samra$ ABC. JSS 37: 1992:155–166).

24. See Dietrich M & Loretz O. Die Keilalphabete. Diephonizisch-kanaanaischen und altarabischen Alpha-bete in Ugarit. Munster: Abhandlungen zur Lite-ratur Alt-Syrien-Palastinas, 1: 1988, for a discus-sion of the evidence for the Ugaritic and Phoe-nician orders. Their discussion of the Arabianorder has been overtaken by subsequent disco-veries, see the important paper by Bordreuil P &Pardee D. Un abecedaire du type sud-semitiquedecouvert en 1988 dans les fouilles archeologi-ques francaises de Ras Shamra-Ougarit.CRAIBL 1995: 855–860, and references there. Apartial hlhw m has also been found in the so-called‘short’ Ugaritic alphabet at Beth-Shemesh in Pa-lestine, some 500 km south of Ugarit (see thediscussion and references in Bordreuil &Pardee, Un abecedaire).

25. See de Maigret A & Robin C. Les fouilles ita-liennes de Yala (Yemen du nord): nouvellesdonnees sur la chronologie de l’Arabie du sudpreislamique. CRAIBL: 1989: 286–291. Note thatthe authors very properly base their conclusionson the lower of the calibrated dates produced,while noting that any date within the range isequally possible.

26. See under Hasaitic below in the second sectionof this paper.

27. Represented by the private documents incisedon sticks which have been appearing in their

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hundreds in northern Yemen since 1970. See Ry-ckmans et al. Textes du Yemen antique, especially12–14, 31–33 and the works by J. Ryckmanscited in the bibliography there, pp. 18–19.

28. The linguistic material contained in a propername does not, of course, identify the languageof its bearer; only the linguistic context in whichit occurs can do that. Even a graffito consistingsolely of a single name would have had a lin-guistic context within the mind of the writer,but this, of course, is irretrievable.

29. Thus the language of a text in the Safaitic scriptis called ‘Safaitic’ unless there is evidence thatit is in another language/dialect (see the exam-ples quoted below under the hn- dialects andSafaeo-Arabic).

30. This is the script (and the dialect normally ex-pressed in it) which Winnett originally called‘Thamudic A’ (Winnett FV. A Study of the Li-hyanite and Thamudic Inscriptions. Toronto:University of Toronto Studies, Oriental Series,3: 1937: 20–28, 50, pl. III). After further workon the texts, he isolated the dialect and scriptsufficiently for it to be removed from the Tha-mudic Restklassenbildung and named it ‘Tayma-nite’ (Winnett FV & Reed WL. Ancient Recordsfrom North Arabia. Toronto: University of To-ronto Near and Middle East Series, 6: 1970: 69–70, 89–93; Winnett FV. A Reconsideration ofSome Inscriptions from the Tayma Area. PSAS10: 1980: 133–140).

31. Called by Winnett ‘Jawfian’ (Winnett & Reed,Ancient Records: 69, 73, 80–81 (nos. 21–23), pls 1,3, 12). So far only three texts in the Dumaiticscript have been published, but the forms of d,z and dw show them to be distinct from textswhich can be classified as Taymanitic or Dada-nitic. See Fig. 3 and the more detailed discus-sion below.

32. On these see Ephcal I. The Ancient Arabs. Nomadson the Borders of the Fertile Crescent 9th-5th Centu-ries B.C. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1982: 112–117. InMacdonald MCA & King GMH. Thamudic. EI,(new edition), 10. Leiden: Brill, 1998: 437, thisscript is referred to as ‘Old North Arabian’. Thisshould be corrected to ‘Oasis North Arabian’.

33. For instance the distinctive Taymanitic b for bnin the ONA text on the Vienna seal 1247 (seeSass B. Studia Alphabetica. On the Origin andEarly History of the Northwest Semitic, South Se-mitic and Greek Alphabets. Freiburg Schweiz:Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, 102: 1991: Fig. 33)and in the text (s1lmn // b hw fn) on the seal im-pression in the Ecole Biblique (Sass, Studia Al-phabetica: 65–66, Fig. 41).

M. C. A. MACDONALD

34. These are conveniently listed and illustrated inSass, Studia Alphabetica: 38–66, Figs. 8–41, towhich should be added Robin 5 (Robin C. Do-cuments de l’Arabie antique, 3. Raydan 6: 1994:86–87, pl. 46).

35. This name was given to them by W. F. Albright,on the basis of an extremely speculative argu-ment in which he assumed that the Chaldaeansbrought the script to Babylonia ‘from an unde-termined part of East Arabia, to which it hadspread from cOman [scil. Dhofar]’, (AlbrightWF. The Chaldaean Inscriptions in Proto-ArabicScript. BASOR 128: 1952: 44–45).

36. See Burrows E. A New Kind of Old Arabic Wri-ting from Ur. JRAS 1927: 795–806.

37. See Sass, Studia Alphabetica: 58–65.38. Several unpublished seals in private collections

are said to have come from Saudi Arabia. SeeGolding M. Artefacts from Later Pre-Islamic Oc-cupation in Eastern Arabia. ATLAL 8: 1984: 166,who illustrates one such seal with the legendklbm in South Arabian letters (pl. 135b).

39. One or more tribes called Thamud are knownfrom the Annals of the Assyrian King Sargon II(722–705 BC); from Classical sources (datingfrom between the second century BC and thefifth century AD); from the Qur$an and fromIslamic commentators and historians (seventhcentury AD onwards), with nothing from theperiods in between. While it is perfectly pos-sible that some members of a tribe or tribescalled Thamud used one or more of the scriptswhich have been placed in the ‘pending file’ wecall ‘Thamudic’, there is pitifully little evidencethat they did so. In the approximately 11,000‘Thamudic’ texts the name tmd occurs only fourtimes (all in Thamudic B), with another twopossible cases (one each in Thamudic B andThamudic D) where the reading is doubtful orcan only be obtained by emending the copy.Moreover, it is perfectly possible that in some,or all, of these occurrences tmd was not voca-lized ‘Thamud’ and/or did not refer to thetribe(s) of that name known to history. The fourmore or less secure occurrences are as follows:JSTham 280 ($hw s1dt h-tmd(y) ‘$hw s1dt theTmd(aean)’) and 300 (l b$tr h-tmd[y] ‘By B$tr theTmd[aean?]’), HU 172 (h $lh tmd rllkgc? ‘O godof Tmd ....?’), Doughty 51/2 (s1t h-tmd nm h(l)sw t‘Lady of the Tmd. By H(l)sw t?’). It will be seenthat although the letters t-m-d are clear in eachof these inscriptions the reading and/or inter-pretation of the whole text is in each case farfrom secure. Even more uncertain are the Tha-mudic B text JSTham 339 (? lcgtmdrktmgrhw ?)

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and the Thamudic D text HU 453 (?ncmtbml(t)md ?). Of course, there may be otherreasons why the ethnicon tmd is so rare in thesetexts and I repeat that this paucity of occur-rences cannot be taken as proof that membersof the Thamud did not use these scripts. Itshows only that, at present, we have very littleevidence that they did. The name tmd also oc-curs twice in a dating formula in Safaitic: s1nthw rb gs2m $l tmd ‘the year of the war [between]Gs2m and the $l Tmd’ (WH 3792a) and s1nt hw rbgs2m tmd (WH 3792c). In this case, an identifica-tion with a tribe called Thamud known fromoutside sources is more plausible, though un-provable.

40. Conveniently expounded in van den BrandenA. L’unite de l’alphabet thamoudeen. StudiaIslamica 6: 1957: 5–27, and van den Branden A.Histoire de Thamoud. Beirut: Publications del’universite libanaise – Section des etudes histo-riques, 6: 1960 (2nd edition, 1966). See alsoJamme A. Miscellanees d’ancient arabe, 5.Washington, DC: [privately produced], 1974:19–20.

41. King GMH. Early North Arabian Thamudic E. APreliminary description based on a new corpus ofinscriptions from the Hw isma desert of southernJordan and published material. Ph.D. thesis sub-mitted to the School of Oriental and AfricanStudies, University of London, 1990.

42. In the past, I have argued strongly for the reten-tion of Winnett’s original label, ‘Thamudic E’, asagainst his revised term ‘Tabuki Thamudic’ andKnauf’s proposed ‘South Safaitic’. The latter isentirely inappropriate since King’s study hasshown that in script, linguistic features andcontent these inscriptions form a distinct groupwhich is markedly different from Safaitic. See thediscussion below, plus Macdonald MCA. Sa-faitic. In: EI, (new edition), 8. Leiden: Brill, 1995:760–762, and Macdonald & King, Thamudic:437–438. I therefore regret my temporary adop-tion of Knauf’s nomenclature in Macdonald,ABCs; and in Macdonald MCA. Inscriptions, Sa-faitic. In: Freedman DN, ed. The Anchor Bible Dic-tionary, 3. New York: Doubleday, 1992: 418–423(submitted in 1988). My objection to the term ‘Ta-buki Thamudic’ was that it suggested that themain concentration of these texts was in the re-gion of Tabuk, and that it was ‘the type of Tha-mudic’ native to that area. Such a term runs peri-lously close to endorsing van den Branden’sdiscredited theory, which denies that ‘Thamudic’is an artificial Restklassenbildung and claims ins-tead that there was only one ‘Thamudic alpha-


bet’ with various geographical variations. I the-refore argued that the neutral term ‘Thamudic E’which had no such implications was to be pre-ferred, and it was under this label that GeraldineKing analyzed the script and dialect. However,as a result of her study it would now be confu-sing to continue referring to the script and dialectas ‘Thamudic’, and for this reason a new name isrequired.

43. This spelling (ie. with alif maqsw urah) is the onein the Official Standard Names Gazetteer forJordan (Department of the Interior, WashingtonDC).

44. Macdonald and King, Thamudic: 437–438.45. Formerly Jabal al-Duruz (le Djebel Druze) or

Jabal Hw awran, Roman Auranitis.46. See below and, for a detailed discussion, Mac-

donald MCA. Nomads and the Hw awran in thelate Hellenistic and Roman Periods: A Reassess-ment of the Epigraphic Evidence. Syria 70: 1993:305–310, 377–382.

47. These texts were first identified as representinga separate group by F.V. Winnett (A HimyariticInscription from the Persian Gulf Region.BASOR 102: 1946: 6). The name ‘Hasaean’ wasoriginally suggested by R. le B. Bowen (TheEarly Arabian Necropolis of Ain Jawan. A Pre-Islamic and Early Islamic Site on the Persian Gulf.New Haven, CT: BASOR Supplementary Stu-dies, 7–9: 1950: 5, 25) and taken up by A. Jamme(Sabaean and Hw asaean Inscriptions from SaudiArabia. Rome: Studi semitici, 23: 1966: 66). Ho-wever, W.W. Muller has called for them to berenamed ‘Hasaitic’ to preserve the -ic/aean dis-tinction mentioned above (Das Altarabischeund das klassische Arabisch: 26). There is nocomplete corpus of all the Hasaitic texts knownto date, but useful collections can be found inPotts DT. The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity. 2. Ox-ford: Clarendon 1990: 69–85, with a good dis-cussion and abundant references but with onlyone figure (showing four facsimiles) and nophotographs. However, there are generally ex-cellent illustrations in Livingstone A. A Lin-guistic, Tribal and Onomastical Study of the Ha-saean Inscriptions. ATLAL 8: 1984: pls 85–90,although unfortunately the text of this articlehas been rendered unusable by numerous prin-ters’ errors.

48. Eg. at Warka in southern Mesopotamia (CIH699) or on the Oman Peninsula, at Mleiha inSharja, UAE (Robin-Mulayhw a I, see Robin, Do-cuments de l’Arabie antique, 3: 80). Note that inthe same article Robin republishes, under thesiglum ‘Wilkinson-Mulayhw a 1’, Beeston’s trans-

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lation and a corrected version of his translitera-tion of a text (now lost) from the same site (seeBeeston AFL. [Note on an inscription fromSharja]. In: Wilkinson JC. Water and Tribal Settle-ment in South-East Arabia. A Study of the Aflaj ofOman. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977: 135, n. 6).

49. See, for instance, Robin, L’Arabie antique: 118–119, or Muller, Das Altarabische und das klas-sische Arabisch: 25–26.

50. Robin, L’Arabie antique: 136 and see the tableon 137, contradicting his statement on pp. 118–119.

51. Loftus WK. Travels and Researches in Chaldaea andSusiana. London: Nisbet, 1857: 233.

52. If a North Arabian script had been native tosouthern Mesopotamia – an area of obsessiveliteracy which has been explored by archaeolo-gists for almost two centuries – one would ex-pect far more texts to have been found and a fargreater consistency in the scripts employed inthem.

53. It would appear that Robin’s idea of a connec-tion between the Hasaitic and the DispersedOasis North Arabian scripts may derive ultima-tely from a misunderstanding of a remark by J.Ryckmans that the script of Ja 1049 (ΩJamme,Sabaean and Hw asaean Inscriptions: 6: Fig. 18), arock graffito found near al-Hw asa, was in a script‘proche de certains cachets trouves en Mesopo-tamie’ (Ryckmans J. Review of Jamme, Sabaeanand Hw asaean Inscriptions. BiOr 26: 1969: 246).However, Ja 1049 is known only from a roughand incomplete hand-copy and the unusualletter-forms it contains must inevitably be sus-pect. Thus, for instance, the triangle which Gar-bini compared with letters in some DispersedONA texts (Garbini G. Le iscrizioni proto-arabe.AION 36 [N.S. 26]: 1976: 170–171) could well be-long to a d of the normal South Arabian formthe stem of which was missed by the copyist.Note also that the forms of $ are South Arabianrather than ONA, see Figure 3 here. Moreover,if Ja 1049 were in one of the Dispersed ONAscripts this would automatically exclude itsbeing Hasaitic, since the scripts of the DispersedONA texts are very clearly different from thatof the known Hasaitic texts (see Fig. 3).

54. See Ryckmans G. Inscriptions sud-arabes. Vingt-et-unieme serie [Ry 687–688]. Le Museon 76: 1963:420–422, pl. VI;ΩJa 1046 (Jamme, Sabaean andHw asaean Inscriptions: 72–73, pl. XVI).

55. See Ryckmans, Inscriptions sud-arabes. Vingt-et-unieme serie: 422–423, pl. VI;ΩJa 1047 (Jamme,Sabaean and Hw asaean Inscriptions: 73–74, pl. XVI).

56. Pirenne J. Quoted in Altheim F & Stiehl R. Die

M. C. A. MACDONALD

Araber in der Alten Welt, 3. Berlin: de Gruyter,1966: 60–61.

57. For a discussion of the whole problem of SouthArabian chronologies see de Maigret & Robin,Les fouilles italiennes de Yala: 255–278; and forthe archaeological evidence from C14 dating,ibid. 286–291. For a very clear and concise expo-sition of the problems and an argument foradopting a modified long chronology see Robin,L’Arabie antique: 49–51.

58. Pirenne, in: Altheim & Stiehl: 60.59. This may seem to contradict the view given

above that the Hasaitic texts are ‘written in themonumental South Arabian alphabet (albeitwith occasional unusual letter-forms) or in oneclosely derived from it’, but see the hypothesisadvanced below.

60. The site of Thag, where a number of these textswere found, has been dated roughly to betweenthe late fourth century BC and late first centuryAD (see Potts, The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, 2:44 and 203), but this provides only the most un-certain of evidence for dating the inscriptions.

61. For more detailed discussions see MacdonaldMCA. The Form of the Definite Article in Clas-sical Arabic. Some Light from the Jahiliya. JSS(forthcoming); and my forthcoming book, OldArabic and its legacy in the later language. Texts,linguistic features, scripts and letter-orders.

62. In a Psalter fragment from a Damascus genizah,the Septuagint text of Psalm 78 (LXX, 77) andan Arabic gloss written in Greek letters, are ar-ranged in parallel columns. The fragment wasfirst published in Violet B. Ein zweisprachigesPsalmfragment aus Damascus. OLZ 4: 1901: col.384–403, 425–441, 475–488 and I have recentlyrestudied it in Macdonald, The Form of the De-finite Article, and Macdonald, Old Arabic, whereI have argued that it dates to the pre-Islamicperiod.

63. That is, the five pre-Islamic inscriptions inwhat is recognizably the Arabic script, so farknown. For descriptions, references, discussionand illustrations see Grohmann A. ArabischePalaographie. Wien: Denkschriften. Oster-reichische Akademie der Wissenschaften.Wien. Philosophisch-historische Klasse 94.1–2:1967–1971: 2, 14–17, Taf. I-II; and, for more re-cent references, Gruendler B. The Developmentof the Arabic Scripts From the Nabatean Era tothe First Islamic Century According to DatedTexts. Atlanta, GA: Harvard Semitic Series, 43:1993: 13–14.

64. For a list of all known Old Arabic texts see Mac-donald, The Form of the Definite Article.

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65. This appears to me to be less ugly and moreeasily pronounced than ‘Safaitico-Arabic’!

66. Robin first suggested calling these ‘pseudo-Sa-been’ but, as he recognized, this risks confusionwith the ‘Pseudo-Sabaic’ texts of Abyssinia andhe therefore proposed the label ‘qahw tw anite’(L’Arabie antique: 97). However, it is dangerousto name a language or a habit of writing after ahistorical political entity or social group, sincethis immediately implies a connection with, andlimitation to, such an entity or group. It was forthis reason that Robin proposed the new name‘Madhabic’ to replace ‘Minaic’, and that I havesuggested replacing ‘Dedanite’ and ‘Lihyanite’with ‘Dadanitic’. Furthermore, the name ‘qahw tw a-nite’ does not immediately suggest the mixednature of these texts and would artificially sepa-rate them from texts of the same sort in otherscripts. However, as I explain below, no texts ofthis kind have yet been identified, although itis likely that when all the inscriptions from Qa-ryat al-Faw are published some will fall intothis category. It is for this reason that I haveplaced the term between [ ].

67. That is, texts in Aramaic scripts and dialectsother than Nabataean.

68. J. Ryckmans gives an instructive example ofthis. ‘A graffito in South Arabian writing whichwe found in 1952 in Nafud Musamma, about10 km north-east of Kawkab [south-west SaudiArabia] reads: ‘‘Hw ugr bin cAmr, malik Kiddat[ie. Kinda]’’. Had the royal title been left out,one would normally have added these namesto the late Sabaean, and not Central Arabian,stock of personal names.’ (Ryckmans J. Alpha-bets, Scripts and Languages in Pre-Islamic Ara-bian Epigraphical Evidence. In: al-Ansary AT,ed. Studies in the History of Arabia. 2: Pre-IslamicArabia. (Proceedings of the Second InternationalSymposium on Studies in the History of Arabia,Jumada I, 1399 A.H./April 1979). Riyadh: KingSaud University Press, 1984: 74).

69. See Beeston AFL. On the Correspondence ofHebrew s to ESA s2. JSS 22: 1977: 51.

70. This point is discussed more fully in MacdonaldMCA. Some Reflections on Epigraphy andEthnicity in the Roman Near East. In: Clarke G,ed. Identities in the Eastern Mediterranean inAntiquity. Proceedings of a Conference held atthe Humanities Research Centre in Canberra10–12 November, 1997. Mediterranean Archaeo-logy 11: 1998: 177–190.

71. Even the several hundred inscriptions found inDhofar by A.A.M. al-Shahw rı and G.M.H. Kingare unlikely to redress the balance. They are in


a previously unknown form of the Arabianscript and have so far defied decipherment but,even when eventually they can be read, theshort, informal nature of the texts suggests thatthey may not be particularly informative. Forexcellent colour illustrations see al-Shahw rı, Kayfaibtadayna.: 61–145.

72. If, as seems likely, the drawing of a chariot witha caption in Thamudic B represents an Assyrianvehicle, this could date from any time from theinvasions of Tiglath-Pileser III (744–727 BC) tothose of Ashurbanipal (668–627 BC). See Mac-donald MCA. Hunting, Fighting, and Raiding.The Horse in Pre-Islamic Arabia. In: AlexanderDG, ed. Furusiyya: The horse in the art of the NearEast, 1. Riyadh, 1996: 76–79 (and the corri-genda). Note that on Illustration IIa in this workthe right-hand section of the composition hasbeen omitted. However, a reproduction of thecomplete drawing can be found on pp. 224–225of the book.

73. See the discussion, references and lists in Potts,The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, 1: 217–219 and305–307 (Bahrain); 284–290 and 292–297 (Fai-laka), to which add Eidem J. In: Højlund F &Andersen H, eds. Qala’at al-Bahrain. 2. The Cen-tral Monumental Buildings. Århus: JutlandArchaeological Society Publications, 30.1: 1997;and, for the largest single find so far (sometwenty tablets, thirty inscribed fragments andseveral bullae), see Andre-Salvini B & LombardP. La decouverte epigraphique de 1995 a Qalcatal-Bahrein: un jalon pour la chronologie de laphase Dilmoun Moyen dans le Golfe arabe.PSAS 27: 1997: 165–170.

74. See Roueche C & Sherwin-White SM. Some As-pects of the Seleucid Empire: The Greek Inscrip-tions from Failaka, in the Persian Gulf. Chiron15: 1985: 1–39; Marcillet-Jaubert J. Une inscrip-tion grecque de Tell Khazneh. In: Calvet Y &Salles J-F, eds. Failaka, fouilles francaises 1984–1985. Lyon: Travaux de la Maison de l’Orient,12: 1986: 265–267; Marcillet-Jaubert J. Une nou-velle inscription grecque a Failaka. In: CalvetY & Gachet G, eds. Failaka, Fouilles francaises1986–1988. Lyon: Travaux de la Maison del’Orient, 18: 1990: 193–195; Marcillet-Jaubert J.Stele funeraire du musee de Bahrein. Syria 67:1990: 665–673; Piejko F. The Inscriptions ofIcarus-Failaka. Classica et Mediaevalia 39: 1988:89–92; and Potts, The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity,2: 183–194. The longest of these is the so-called‘Ikaros inscription’ from Failaka (forty-fourlines), on which see Potts, The Arabian Gulf inAntiquity, 2: 186–193 for discussion and refe-

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rences. Three letters (‘LNV’) in the Latin al-phabet on an amphora fragment were found inArea Z of ed-Dur (Potts DT. In: Boucharlat R,Haerinck E, Lecomte O, Potts DT & Stevens KO.The European Archaeological Expedition to ed-Dur, Umm al-Qaiwayn (U.A.E.). An Interim Re-port on the 1987 and 1988 Seasons. Mesopotamia24: 1989: 26–27, Fig. Y); and Papadopoulos JK.A Western Mediterranean amphora fragmentfrom ed-Dur. AAE 5: 1994: 276–279.

75. For example, r with a hook at the top (Ja 1044/1, see the photograph on ATLAL 8: 1984: pl.89A), d back-to-front (Ja 1044/2, ibid.), f as acircle with a horizontal bar to the right or left(Ja 1048/1, 2, 3, see Jamme, Sabaean and Hw asaeanInscriptions: pl. XVII).

76. See, for instance, Potts, The Arabian Gulf in Anti-quity, 2: 219–221, 227, 278; Naveh J. The Inscrip-tions from Failaka and the Lapidary AramaicScript. BASOR 297: 1995: 1–4, with referencesthere (Aramaic lapidary); Sznycer M. L’inscrip-tion arameenne sur un vase inscrit du Museede Bahrain. Syria 61: 1984: 109–118 (cursive?);Teixidor J. Une inscription arameenne prove-nant de l’emirat de Sharjah (Emirats ArabesUnis). CRAIBL 1992: 695–707 (the longest text,see below) and, on the coin legends, MaraqtenM. Notes on the Aramaic script of some coinsfrom East Arabia. AAE 7: 1996: 304–315; andMacdonald MCA. Queens in Pre-Islamic Eas-tern Arabia? Another Look at the so-called‘Abiel’ Coin Legends. (Forthcoming).

77. See Teixidor, Inscription arameenne: 696 andthe discussion below.

78. In the same article, Teixidor published a smallfragment of a bronze plaque with part of a textin the same script (pp. 705–706).

79. See the interesting paper by Alessandra Avan-zini in the proceedings of the workshop on ‘Ci-vilisations de l’Arabie preislamique’, Aix-en-Provence, 1996, when these are eventually pu-blished.

80. Thus, to take only one example, Christian Robindates texts in the South Arabian script fromFaw on the same palaeographical grounds asthose from Yemen (L’Arabie antique: 114ff).

81. See Ryckmans et al. Textes du Yemen antique: 35–39.

82. Some 3,000 South Arabian graffiti were re-corded in southern Saudi Arabia by the Philby-Ryckmans-Lippens Expedition in 1951, see Ry-ckmans G. Graffites sabeens releves en ArabieSacudite. Scritti in onore di Giuseppe Furlani. RSO32: 1957: 557–563.

83. The Philby-Ryckmans-Lippens Expedition re-

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corded some 9000 ‘Thamudic’ graffiti, see Ry-ckmans J. Aspects nouveaux du probleme tha-moudeen. Studia Islamica 5: 1956: 5–17; andbelow. Unfortunately, these have yet to be pu-blished.

84. For a discussion of the South Arabian languagessee the paper by Avanzini mentioned in note79.

85. This dating is arrived at partly on palaeo-graphical grounds (Rabinowitz I. AramaicInscriptions of the Fifth Century B.C.E. from aNorth-Arab Shrine in Egypt. JNES 15: 1956: 6,and n. 41) and partly by the quite arbitraryidentification of Gsm (the patronym of one ofthe donors), with ‘Geshem the Arab’ mentionedin Nehemiah (2:19; 6:1 and cf. 6:2, 6). Gsm was,of course, a common name in southern Syriaand northern Arabia in the pre-Islamic periodand there is no external evidence to suggest thatthese two occurrences refer to the same person.

86. Robin, L’Arabie antique: 102.87. Rabinowitz, Aramaic Inscriptions: 2, 4–5. W.

Kornfeld (Onomastica aramaica und das AlteTestament. Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentlicheWissenschaft 88: 1976: 109–112) argues that thename sw hw $ may not be of Egyptian origin hereon the grounds that the patronym (cbd-cmrw) isSemitic (he assumes it is ‘Qedarite’, apparentlybecause an entirely separate dedication at theshrine was made by a king of Qedar). However,the possible North Arabian etymologies for sw hw $

which he proposes, are not entirely satisfactoryand there seems no reason why the name couldnot be Egyptian, in view of the purely Egyptiannames of another dedicator (Rabinowitz I. Ano-ther Aramaic Record of the North-Arabian God-dess Han-$Ilat. JNES 18: 1959: 154–155) and thegeographical position of the shrine, nearEgypt’s northeastern border, where one wouldexpect just such an onomastic mingling of Egy-ptian and North Arabian. The countless exam-ples of men and women with Greek or Latinnames and Semitic patronyms (and vice versa)in the Hellenistic and Roman Near East shouldmake us wary of the argument usedby Kornfeld on this occasion.

88. Rabinowitz, Another Aramaic Record: 154–155.89. Herodotus 1.131; 3.8.90. Robin suggests that the form $Alilat ‘pourrait

correspondre en principe a une graphie semi-tique *hal-Ilat ou *al-Ilat’ (L’Arabie antique: 102).While, of course, this is theoretically possible, Iam not aware of any evidence for a definite ar-ticle hl- in Ancient North Arabian, although itappears to occur in a theophoric personal name

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(cbd-hl-czy) found in a graffito in South Arabianscript in southwestern Saudi Arabia (Ryckmans,Aspects nouveaux: 11). The supposed examplesof hl- in late Dadanitic (formerly ‘Lihyanite’) are‘ghosts’. JSLih 158 is an unfinished attempt towrite the alphabet in the Arabian hlhw m order,which was restarted in the second line (seeMuller, Das Altarabische und das klassischeArabisch: 22). Note also that JSLih 71, in whichan article with -l- occurs in b-l-hw gr and, follo-wing the preposed demonstrative adjective h-in h-l-mfl, is not Dadanitic but a Dadano-Arabictext (see below). A third ‘ghost’ is the supposedarticle hl- in the name of a Dadanite womanmentioned in the so-called ‘hierodulenlisten’(see now the excellent edition by Bron F. Inven-taire des inscriptions sudarabiques. Tome 3. Paris:Boccard/Rome: Herder, 1998: 106, no. Macın 93(Gl. 1270/16); and see p. 116, no. 28/1270). Thename of the woman is written bmhl / czy and ithas been suggested that hl here is an exampleof the definite article (cf. Ryckmans, Aspectsnouveaux: 11, n. 1). However, the position ofthe word-divider clearly shows that the name isbmhl-czy which could be analyzed b-mhl-czy‘with the forebearance/ gentleness of czy’.

91. For instance, hn-$fklt ‘the priestess’, JSLih 64/3,and many others. There are as yet no instancesof the article before a word beginning with theglottal fricative /h/.

92. For instance, hn-cnk ‘the foundation’, JSLih 54/3. There are as yet no clear instances in Dada-nitic of the definite article before a word begin-ning with the other pharyngal fricative /hw /.Jamme read hn-hw s1 in JSLih 269/4 (see Jamme A.Miscellanees d’ancient arabe, 7. Washington, DC:[privately produced], 1974: 117, but note thatthere is a misprint in his transliteration) andcompared hw s1 with ‘Ar. hw usas ‘trace, vestige,mark’ (ibid.). However, I cannot find such ameaning in the lexica and a more natural rea-ding is h-nhw s1. The context is a curse on anyonewho might damage the hw s1 or nhw s1 (using thesame phraseology as in JSLih 276 and HE 1, seebelow, which have s1fr in place of hw s1/nhw s1).Thus a word meaning ‘writing’ or ‘inscription’would be expected. It is possible that this textwas engraved as a warning beside a bronzeplaque with a funerary inscription, similar tothe one found at Mleiha (see Teixidor, Inscrip-tion arameenne, and the discussion below) andthat h-nhw s1 refers to this. Only an examinationof the rock-face will reveal whether there aresigns that something was originally attached tothe surface beside JSLih 269.


93 See, for instance, Muller, Das Altarabische unddas klassische Arabisch: 18, 22, 24; and MullerWW. Some Remarks on the Safaitic Inscriptions.PSAS 10: 1980: 69.

94. JSLih 81/2–3 hn-// qbr. It should be noted thatit is not clear from the published photographwhether the first three lines of JSLih 81 arereally complete (see Jaussen A & Savignac M-R.Mission archeologique en Arabie, 2. Paris: Geu-thner, 1914: pl. LXXXV). The article hn- appearsto be at the end of line 2 and qbr at the begin-ning of line 3. But the syntax of the text as re-corded by Jaussen and Savignac is awkwardand has not yet received a convincing interpre-tation. The ends of lines 4–6 appear to be mis-sing (they are appreciably shorter than lines 1–3) and it is possible that lines 1–3 are also in-complete. If this is so, the definite article hn- inline 2 would have referred to a noun no longervisible at the ‘end’ of that line, rather than toqbr. Only a re-investigation of the original willsolve this problem. In all other cases the articleis h- before words beginning with q (h- qbr inJSLih 79/2–3, h- qrt in JSLih 64/1, 366/2, JaL85d/1ΩJamme, Miscellanees 7: 73–74, pl. 19).

95. LP 87. See Macdonald, Nomads and the Hw a-wran: 308 for this reading.

96. NH 6.32.157 Avalitae (oppida Domata, Haegra).97. Thus the epithet of the goddess hn-$lt at Tell el-

Mashutw a and, in Hasaitic, the names $mt-hn-$lt(LivH A.13/2 Pl.87A), cwd-hn-$lt (LivH O.15/2–3Pl.85D), $ws1-hn-$lt (Ry 155/2–3, see RyckmansG. Inscriptions sud-arabes. Quatrieme serie [Ry155–202]. Le Museon 50: 1937: 239–240) and .rm-hn-$lt (Ja 1043, see Jamme, Sabaean and Hw asaeanInscriptions: pl. XV). One of the exceptions is thename hn-cbd in Ja 1044/2 (ATLAL 8: 1984: pl.89A). The other is hn-$mlt, on which see below.

98. JaS 162a (Jamme A. Safaitic Inscriptions fromthe Country of cArcar and Ra$s al-cAnanıyah. In:Altheim F & Stiehl R, eds. Christentum am RotenMeer, 1. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971: 93, 634), cf.Ar. $imla ‘hope’. The letters l and n are clearlydifferentiated in this text.

99. Wilkinson-Mulayhw a 1 (Robin, Documents del’Arabie antique 3: 80) which A.F.L. Beeston readnfs1 w-qbr Dryt fty $mlkn ‘gravestone and grave ofDhariyyat servant of the kings’. However, asRobin rightly points out, $mlkn may be a personalname equivalent to the Arabic clan name al-Amluk.

100. As in Hismaic (see below), affiliation to a socialgroup is always marked by the phrase d $l ‘whois of the lineage of’ and, so far at least, never bythe nisba.

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101. For the most recent treatment of this text and itssignificance see Macdonald MCA. Trade Routesand Trade Goods at the Northern End of the‘‘Incense Road’’ in the First Millennium B.C. In:Avanzini A, ed. Profumi d’Arabia. Atti delconvegno. Roma: Saggi di Storia Antica, 11:1997: 338–340, and references there.

102. The text is damaged at the beginning of the listof scripts.

103. Lipinski E. De fenicische inscripties uit Karatepe.In: Veenhof KR, ed. Schrijvend Verleden. Docu-menten uit het oude Nabije Oosten vertaald en toege-licht. Leiden: Ex Oriente Lux, 1983: 54; and Li-pinski E. Phoenicians in Anatolia and Assyria.OLP 16: 1985: 82. Luwian having no exact equi-valent to /sw /, s was used as the nearest approxi-mation. The late Jonas Greenfield suggested thatthe term ‘script of Tyre’ could have been used tocover Aramaic as well as Phoenician since thedistinction between the two alphabets would nothave been obvious at this period (Greenfield J. OfScribes, Scripts and Languages. In: Baurain C,Bonnet C & Krings V, eds. Phoinikeia Grammata.Lire et ecrire en Mediterranee. Actes du Colloque deLiege, 15–18 novembre 1989. Namur: Collectiond’Etudes Classiques, 6: 1991: 179–180).

104. Greenfield, Of Scribes: 180–181 and, indepen-dently, Livingstone A. New light on the ancienttown of Taima. In: Geller MJ, Greenfield JC &Weitzman MP, eds. Studia Aramaica. New Sourcesand New Approaches. Papers Delivered at theLondon Conference of the Institute of JewishStudies University College London 26th-28thJune 1991. Oxford: Journal of Semitic StudiesSupplement, 4: 1995: 133–137.

105. I am most grateful to Professor David Hawkins,who is publishing an edition of this text, for thisinformation. He himself suggested that ta-i-ma-ni-ti referred to the Aramaean tribe of Temanin northern Mesopotamia, but this was mainlybecause he felt that it would be inconceivablethat Aramaic would not be among the scriptsmentioned. However, as he points out, the be-ginning of the list is broken and we do notknow what has been lost. Moreover, he agreeswith Greenfield that Yariris is unlikely to havedistinguished between the Phoenician and Ara-maic scripts (pers. comm.). The gentilic formTayma$ is attested as tymny$ in Nabataean textsfrom Hw egra (H 1/2, 12/2) although this, ofcourse, is from a very much later period (firstcentury AD), see Healey JF. The Nabataean TombInscriptions of Mada$in Salih. Oxford: Journal ofSemitic Studies Supplement, 1: 1993: 71.

106. I have explored these relationships in Macdo-

M. C. A. MACDONALD

nald, Trade Routes. See also Liverani M. TheTrade Network of Tyre according to Ezek. 27. In:Cogan M & Ephcal I, eds. Ah, Assyria... Studies inAssyrian History and Ancient Near Eastern Histo-riography presented to Hayim Tadmor. Jerusalem:Scripta Hierosolymitana, 33: 1991: 65–79.

107. Livingstone (incorrectly in my view) describesit as ‘the old South Arabic script’ (New light:136). However, it is clear that he is confusingthe terms ‘South Arabic’ and ‘South Semitic’ (ie.‘Arabian’) and that he makes no distinction be-tween the North Arabian and South Arabianscripts since on p. 137 he refers to the script ofthe seals found in Mesopotamia as ‘South Ara-bian’.

108. The inscription on the Vienna seal 1247 (ΩRES2688, see Sass, Studia Alphabetica: Fig. 33) mustbe Taymanitic because of the use of b for bnwhich is unique to this dialect. See MacdonaldMCA. HU 501 and the use of s3 in Taymanite.JSS 36: 1991: 20–21.

109. See Macdonald, HU 501.110. HU 501 and WTay 4, on which see Macdonald,

HU 501: 12–20.111. WTI 22.112. WTI 21, 22 and 23.113. See below and Macdonald & King, Thamudic:

437–438.114. King, Early North Arabian Thamudic E.115. Winnett, A Study. Roschinski created a new cate-

gory, ‘F’, which he claims stands ‘in ihrenSchriftformen zwischen D und E’ and wascontemporary with them (Roschinski HP.Sprachen, Schriften und Inschriften inNordwest-arabien. In: Die Nabataer. Ertrageeiner Ausstellung im Rheinischen Landesmu-seum Bonn 24. Mai – 9. Juli 1978. Bonn: Kunstund Altertum am Rhein, 106: 1981: 43, 45). Ho-wever, he does not explain the basis for creatingthis new category and the only two examples of‘F’ texts he gives (Roschinski, Sprachen,Schriften und Inschriften: 43, Abb. 3/24–25ΩJSTham 98 and 97 respectively) are both Tha-mudic C. There thus seems no reason to retainthis category.

116. Winnett & Reed, Ancient Records: 69–70, 205.117. It is clear from the work of Geraldine King that

Thamudic C and D are distinct categories,although Winnett’s identification of some lettersneeds to be refined (pers. comm.). The geo-graphical names given by Winnett in 1970 to thetypes are also confusing, since they suggest alink between the script and a particular regionwhich is not borne out by the distribution pat-terns. Thus Thamudic B texts are found all over

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western Arabia from Yemen (eg. Ph 212 a1, 2, 3;212 d) to southern Syria (eg. C 3559, LP 273,495), while C and D texts are by no meansconcentrated in the Hw igaz. It therefore seemsmuch safer to retain for these rough, provisionalsubdivisions, the neutral ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’, labelswhich do not carry any misleading overtones,until such time as a more refined classificationis possible. It may be argued that the names‘Taymanitic’ and ‘Hismaic’ for the two typeswhich have been removed from ‘Thamudic’ riskcreating similar confusion. However, it is nowclear that the major concentrations of these textsare in the areas after which they have been la-belled, and the major distinctive features ofeach have been identified. Thus, while the la-bels may yet turn out to be misnomers, this is ofless importance with well-defined groups thanwith texts which have yet to be clearly classi-fied, and it is important to show by the labelthat they are no longer in the ‘Thamudic’Restklassenbildung.

118. King, Early North Arabian Thamudic E: 65, n. 105.119. JSTham 1 and JSNab 17. See now Healey JF &

Smith GR. Jaussen-Savignac 17 – The EarliestDated Arabic Document (A.D. 267). ATLAL 12:1989: pl. 46.

120. Ryckmans, Aspects nouveaux.121. See, for instance, Knauf A. Sudsafaitisch. ADAJ

27: 1983: 587–596.122. See King, Early North Arabian Thamudic E: 12–

13; Macdonald, Safaitic: 762 and referencesthere; and Macdonald & King, Thamudic: 437.

123. The complete list is as follows: the signs whichrepresent t, g, hw , s2, tw, zw , in Hismaic are used fordw , t, d, n (or l), hw , z respectively in Safaitic.

124. It is expressed by d $l and in one case each bymn $l (KJC 641) as in Nabataean, and d (AMJ148ΩJobling WJ. Desert Deities: Some New Epi-graphic Evidence for the Deities Dushares andal-Lat from the Aqaba-Macan Area of SouthernJordan. Religious Traditions 7–9: 1984–1986: 32–35; and see King, Early North Arabian ThamudicE: 622–623).

125. See the remarks in Macdonald, Nomads and theHw awran: 377–378.

126. Macdonald, Nomads and the Hw awran.127. Beeston AFL. Arabian Sibilants. JSS 7: 1962:

222–233.128. See for instance LP 258, 260, WH 2411.129. See Beeston, Arabian Sibilants: 223–225; McDo-

nald MV. The Order and Phonetic Value ofArabic Sibilants in the ‘‘Abjad’’. JSS 19: 1974:42–43.

130. Healey, Nabataean Tomb Inscriptions: 59.


131. Some of these will be discussed in Macdonald,Old Arabic.

132. See Macdonald, On the placing of sw .133. For the most recent survey of Nabataean and a

detailed discussion of the points made here, seeMacdonald MCA. Inscriptions, languages andscripts among the Nabataeans. In: Markoe G, ed.Splendors of the Caravan Kingdom. Cincinnati, OH:Cincinnati Art Museum, 2001 (in press).

134. See the classic expositions by Cantineau J. LeNabateen. 2. Paris: Leroux, 1932: 177–180; and ingreater detail in Cantineau J. Nabateen et arabe.Annales de l’Institut d’Etudes Orientales 1: 1934–1935: 77–97; more recently maintained by, forexample, Roschinski, Sprachen, Schriften undInschriften: 31–33.

135. See also the interesting analysis by M.O’Connor (The Arabic Loanwords in NabateanAramaic. JNES 45: 1986: 213–229). The diffe-rence between the number of loans in his list(15) and in mine (22–28) results from the factthat O’Connor restricted himself to examiningCantineau’s list of loan-words (excluding JSNab17) whereas I have tried to search all the Naba-taean texts known to me. Moreover, I have in-cluded vocabulary from the Rawwafa inscrip-tions which he discussed separately (O’Connor,Arabic Loanwords: 228–229).

136. The exceptions are sw ryhw $ found at Petra (CIS ii350/1 and RES 1432/1, 2) as well as at Hw egra(CIS ii 213/3, 4); and $l ‘lineage’ which is foundmainly in texts from the Hw awran (x 6), close tothe Safaitic inscriptions in which it is the normalword for any social group, with one (possiblytwo) texts from North Arabia (ARNA Nab 130/2 and JSNab 180/4?) and one from Madaba innorthern Jordan (Milik JT. Nouvelles inscrip-tions nabateennes. Syria 35: 1958: 244, no. 6/4).

137. The stylized or calligraphic way in which theseconventional terms are often written, in contrastto the letter-forms of the rest of the text in whichthey occur, suggests that in many cases theymay have been treated more as conventional‘frames’ for a name than as transcriptions ofconscious statements, cf. ‘R.I.P’ on moderntombstones, or ‘... was here’ in modern graffiti.

138. Some of Diem’s theories of the development oforthographic conventions within Nabataean de-pend heavily on the idea that writers of graffitiwould etymologize the names and words theywere writing and would choose to spell themnot according to how they sounded but accor-ding to complicated rules of sound change be-tween Arabic and Aramaic (eg. Diem W. Unter-suchungen zur fruhen Geschichte der ara-

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bischen Orthographie. 2. Die Schreibung derKonsonanten. Or 49: 1980: 75–82, 87). Diem wasforced to this bizarre hypothesis because his en-tire analysis is based on the anachronistic as-sumption that pre-Islamic Arabic had a pho-nemic repertoire identical to that of ModernStandard Arabic. See the detailed discussions inMacdonald, ABCs: 149–151; The Form of theDefinite Article; and Old Arabic.

139. I remain unconvinced by either J. T. Milik’shighly speculative attempt to show that theycame from eastern Arabia (Origines des Naba-teens. In: Hadidi A, ed. Studies in the History andArchaeology of Jordan, 1. Amman: Department ofAntiquities, 1982: 261–265) or by the similarproposals of D. F. Graf who does not seem tohave understood the implications of much ofthe material he cites (The Origin of the Naba-taeans. With an Appendix by D. F. Graf and H.I. MacAdam. ARAM 2: 1990: 45–75).

140. See King, Early North Arabian Thamudic E: 687. Ihave counted only those examples from sou-thern Jordan (for the provenances of all the His-maic texts see King, Early North Arabian Tha-mudic E: 603–607). There are only twenty-fourinvocations to Lt/$lt (twenty-three to lt and oneto $lt) in the Hismaic inscriptions from the WadıRamm region, as opposed to thirty-nine refe-rences to Dushara from the same area (thirty-one to d-s2ry, four to d-s2r; two to ds2ry; two tods2r).

141. I have added to the number of invocations to lta Hismaic text found by F. Zayadine and S.Fares-Drappeau in 1997 (and therefore not inKing, Early North Arabian Thamudic E). It is on astone built into one of the inner walls of thetemple and is not strictly an invocation sinceit states that the author bny bt lt, ie. ‘built (orparticipated in the building of) the temple ofLt’, see Zayadine F & Fares-Drappeau S. TwoNorth-Arabian Inscriptions from the Temple ofLat at Wadı Iram. ADAJ 42: 1998: 255–258; andFares-Drappeau S. Wadı Iram: Un lieu du culteet de rassemblement des tribus arabes dansl’antiquite. Les premiers resultats de la missionepigraphique 1997. Aram 8: 1996: 269–283. Boththese articles indulge in wild speculation as tothe significance of this text and the authorsignore the fact that the inscription is not a mo-numental foundation text, but a simple graffitoon a stone placed in a position where it wouldnot have been visible in antiquity. They are alsoapparently unaware that the word bny in ANAis regularly used for ‘participation in the buil-ding’ of structures (usually burial cairns) and

M. C. A. MACDONALD

that the most probable explanation of the text isthat its author was one of the labourers em-ployed in the construction of the temple. It isnot impossible that he had a more importantrole, but nothing in the text suggests this. Fi-nally, they base wide-ranging speculation (pre-sented as fact) on the author’s affiliation to theethnic group $d, which they identify without he-sitation with the tribe of cAd mentioned in theQur$an. While such a vocalization is perfectlypossible, it is no more or less likely than cıd,cayd, cud, or cawd. What can be said, however, isthat the presence of this text shows that at leastsome of the Hismaic inscriptions are likely tohave been contemporary with the use of thetemple, even though it does not remove thetheoretical possibility that the majority of theHismaic graffiti were written before the intro-duction of the worship of Lt/$lt to the area.

142. This preponderance of the spelling d-s2ry showsthat the deity was known principally in theNorth Arabian form, with some writersdoubtful about whether the final sound was along vowel (which would not appear in His-maic orthography, hence d-s2r) or a consonant(d-s2ry), and only four examples showing Ara-maic influence (with d for d), although it shouldbe noted that even here half of the cases havethe final consonantal y of the North Arabianform (thus ds2ry) and half presumably have thefinal /a/ of the Aramaic form dwsr$ (thus ds2r).Occasional use of d for d is found in the His-maic texts from this area, but never the reverse.An unpublished text from Wadı Ramm uses dfor d consistently, thus d $l for d $l, and dkrt ltfor dkrt lt. There is, of course, no way of disco-vering the reasons for this. Was the author ofthis last text an Aramaeophone, or merely at-tempting to imitate Aramaic phonology,perhaps because it gave his text a superior orother ‘accent’? Note that the supposed occur-rence of d $n for d $l in the Hasaitic text Ja 1044/3 (see Jamme, Sabaean and Hw asaean Inscriptions:Fig. 18) is the result of a copyist’s error. Thephotograph (ATLAL 8: 1984: pl. 89A) shows d $lat this point.

143. For an excellent discussion of the problems withthis etymology, but written before the Hismaicexamples were published, see Starcky J. Petra etla Nabatene. In: Pirot L & Robert L, eds. Supple-ment au Dictionnaire de la Bible, 7: 1966: 986–987.

144. In eighty-six (or 78%) of the Safaitic referencesit appears as ds2r and in twenty-four (or 22%)as ds2r. This suggests that it was most widelycurrent in the pure Aramaic form but that in

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some cases there was uncertainty over the pro-nunciation of the initial consonant. I know ofonly three examples in Safaitic of the etymologi-cally correct form, d-s2ry.

145. See Contini R. Il Hw awran preislamico ipotesi distoria linguistica. Felix Ravenna Quarta serieFascicolo 1/2 – 1987 [1990] (CXXXIII-CXXXIV):25–79, for an excellent review of the evidence(especially pp. 31–36).

146. The same is true of the supposed attestation ofan ‘Arabic’ definite article which Livingstonehas identified in the phrase fANSE.a-na-qa-a-tea-di ANSE.ba-ak-[ka-ri-si-na...] ‘she-camels, toge-ther with their young’ (Annals of Tiglath-PileserIII (733 BC) 142, 178, 188, 189), see LivingstoneA. An Early Attestation of the Arabic DefiniteArticle. JSS 42: 1997: 259–261. There are conside-rable problems with this and I discuss it in Mac-donald, The Form of the Definite Article.

147. Kropp M. The Inscription Ghoneim AfO 27.1980. Abb. 10: A Fortunate Error. PSAS 22: 1992:55–67.

148. Robin, L’Arabie antique: 114–115.149. This occurs both where $lt seems to represent a

divine name (as in LP 709, quoted in the nextnote, and C 1658 in the sentence h-gmln qsw yn l-$lt w-l-rdw w ‘the two camels are dedicated to $ltand to Rdw w’) and where it represents thecommon noun for ‘goddess’ in the name of atopical deity, eg. in Macdonald et al., Lesinscriptions safaıtiques de Syrie: 466, inscriptionF: ... f h $lt h-nmrt s1lm ... ‘... and so, O goddessof al-Namara, [grant] security ...’ or C 97 ‘... f hlt∞.±s1lm w h $lt $s1s1 nq$t l-d ycwr h-s1fr ... andso, O Lt∞.±[grant] security and O goddess ofUsays [ie. Jabal Says, where the text was found]inflict nq$t [an unknown evil] on whoever scrat-ches out the writing.’

150. See, for instance LP 709 ... f h lt s1lm w (h)rsw $lrm f $lt s1lm ‘... and so, O Lt. [grant] security.And he was on the lookout for Romans, and so,$lt, [grant] security.’

151. The epithet h-$lt ‘the goddess’ (the exact equiva-lent in Safaitic of Arabic al-ilat) is found in anunpublished text from northeastern Jordanwhich reads l zryt w cwd b-h-$lt ‘By Zryt andhe sought refuge in the goddess,’ and in suchtheophoric names as tm-h-$lt (C 263) and grm-h-$lt (C 1984).

152. The short vowel is, of course, a reconstruction.153. See, for instance, Robin C. Inventaire des inscrip-

tions sudarabiques. 1. Inabba$, Haram, al-Kafir,Kamna et al-Hw arashif. Paris: Boccard, 1992: 34.

154. It is hoped that this text will be published by itsfinder in the near future.


155. There is, of course, no reason why Old Arabic,which before the sixth century AD was a purelyspoken language, should not have been writtenin the Safaitic script from time to time, and thereare indeed some examples of this, see belowand Macdonald, The Form of the Definite Ar-ticle.

156. See the excellent photograph in al-Ansary AT.Qaryat al-Fau. A Portrait of Pre-Islamic Civilisationin Saudi Arabia. London: Croom Helm, 1982:146, and the translation and commentary inBeeston AFL. Nemara and Faw. BSOAS 42:1979: 1–2. In the period of its prosperity, Qaryatal-Faw must have been one of the most cosmo-politan centres in Arabia. Inscriptions in the Sa-baic, ‘Thamudic’, Pahlavi and Nabataeanscripts have been found there and in the (Undif-ferentiated) North Arabian, Old Arabic, Pa-hlavi, Nabataean and Sabaic languages (see An-sary, Qaryat al-Fau: 19–20, 28, 73–74, 87–91, 99,106, 118–119, 123, 129–133, 137, 141–147, andRyckmans, Alphabets, Scripts and Languages:75). In the 1980s, Jacques Ryckmans (Alphabets,Scripts and Languages: 75) and Walter Muller(Das Altarabische und das klassische Arabisch:33–34) published admirable summaries of theevidence from Faw, and a few more texts havebeen recognized since then (see Kropp, TheInscription Ghoneim; Robin, L’Arabie antique:97, 103, 113–116). Faw was the centre of theNorth Arabian tribes of Kinda, Madhw ig andQahw tw an. See the tombstone of Mcwyt bn Rbct mlkqhw tw n w-mdhw g (Ansary, Qaryat al-Fau: 144/2); theSabaic text from Mahw ram Bilqısı, Ja 635 (JammeA. Sabaean Inscriptions from Mahw ram Bilqıs(Marib). Baltimore: PAFSM, 3: 1962: 136–138),lines 25–28 of which mention rbct d-$l twrm mlkkdt w qhw tw n at Qrytm dt Khl (ie. Qaryat al-Faw);and Ja 2110, also originally from Marib (DoeDB & Jamme A. New Sabaean Inscriptions fromSouth Arabia. JRAS 1968: 15–16) lines 8–9 ofwhich read Mlkm bn bd mlk kdt w mdhw gm,although this text does not specifically link himwith Faw. The adoption of Qahw tw an as the an-cestor of all the ‘southern’ Arab tribes seems tohave been a later development (see Fischer A &Irvine AK. Kw ahw tw an. In: EI, (new edition), 4.Leiden: Brill, 1978: 448).

157. So Robin, L’Arabie antique: 115–116, on palaeo-graphic grounds.

158. See Macdonald, The Form of the Definite Ar-ticle for a detailed analysis of the treatment ofthe definite article in this text. The /$/ is assimi-lated when it is preceded by an inseparable par-ticle, leaving l-, while the /l/ is assimilated be-

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fore sibilants leaving $-. There is no case in thistext where the article is both preceded by a par-ticle and followed by a sibilant. Robin assumesthat wlh in line 5 stands for ‘wa-∞Al±lah’(L’Arabie antique: 116). However, as just noted,the divine names Lh and Lt are known from Sa-faitic where they stand beside the commonnouns $lh (eg. bcls1mn $lh scc ‘Bcls1mn god of Sıc’in CSNS 424) and $lt (see above), and the epi-thets h-$lh (‘the god’, eg. WH 3923 as re-read inMacdonald MCA. Cursive Safaitic Inscriptions?A Preliminary Investigation. In: Ibrahim MM,ed. Arabian Studies in Honour of Mahmoud Ghul:Symposium at Yarmouk University December 8–11,1984. Wiesbaden: Yarmouk University Publica-tions: Institute of Archaeology and Anthropo-logy Series, 2: 1989: 65–66, 73, 79) and h-$lt (‘thegoddess’, see above).

159. cIgl bn Hfcm line 1 where *bana appears as thesecond of the three bns in the line (no vowelsare represented in the Ancient South Arabianscript). See Beeston’s excellent reading andcommentary (Nemara and Faw: 1–2).

160. Robin interprets bn in line 8 as the South Ara-bian preposition (L’Arabie antique: 116) and re-marks on its curious co-existence with OldArabic mn in line 6. However, Beeston’s expla-nation of bn from Arabic bayn ‘in its primarysense of ‘‘separation, parting’’ [±‘without’]’(Nemara and Faw: 2) is surely preferable, bothin the sense it gives and as an explanation ofthe presence of bn at this point in the text.

161. The two examples of the 3rd person pl. encliticpronoun (lines 3 and 4) are also North Arabian-hm rather than Sabaic -hmw.

162. However, see Beeston, Nemara and Faw: 1, n. 1for one possible explanation of this feature, andsee below for another.

163. Muller, Das Altarabische und das klassischeArabisch: 32–33.

164. See Drewes AJ. The Phonemes of Lihyanite. In:Robin C, ed. Melanges linguistiques offerts aMaxime Rodinson par ses eleves, ses collegues et sesamis. Paris: GLECS Supplement, 12: 1985: 165–173. Contra Drewes, only final /a/ and /u/ andthe diphthong /ay/ in final position are consis-tently expressed in this way (by –h, –w and –yrespectively). Final /ı/ and medial vowels anddiphthongs seem rarely, if ever, to have beenrepresented. Drewes assumes that, becausediphthongs in medial position are not repre-sented in Dadanitic (in accordance with thenormal practice in all the ANA scripts), thediphthongs /aw/ and /ay/ must have beenmonophthongized. This argumentum e silentio,

M. C. A. MACDONALD

combined with a reconstruction of Dedaniticmorphology which sometimes relies too heavilyon analogy with that of Classical Arabic, leadshim to conclude that in final position –w oftenrepresents /–o/ (∞/aw/) and –y almost alwaysrepresents /–e/ (∞/ay/). For a different view,see Macdonald MCA. Ancient North Arabian.In: Woodard RD, ed. The Cambridge Encyclopediaof the World’s Ancient Languages. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2001 (in press).

165. Drewes, The Phonemes of Lihyanite: 167–169.166. The fact that in JSLih 384 the subject of the verb

bnh is a woman is, of course, not a problemsince, as Jaussen and Savignac point out, a femi-nine subject preceded by a verb in the masculineis not unusual in Arabic (Mission 2: 533).

167. See, for example, in JSLih 45/1 and HE 84/1.168. See the new transcription by A. Desreumaux

and the new reading and translation inBordreuil P, Desreumaux A, Robin C & TeixidorJ. 205. Linteau inscrit: A.O. 4083. In: Calvet Y &Robin C, avec la collaboration de F. Briquel-Chatonnet et M. Pic, Arabie heureuse Arabie de-serte. Les antiquites arabiques du Musee du Louvre.Paris: Notes et documents des musees deFrance: 1997: 265–269. Here, as in the inscriptionof cgl bn Hfcm, there is a sprinkling of featurestaken over from the language normally asso-ciated with the script (ie. Nabataean Aramaic).In the Namara inscription these features are li-mited to the use of br for bn in the name of thedeceased, and the attachment of a final -w tocertain proper names. However, in contrast tothe Nabataeo-Arabic text JSNab 17 and the lateNabataean text LP 41, the use of final -w in theNamara inscription accords perfectly with clas-sical Nabataean orthographic practice.

169. A six-line text in the Nabataean script of whichthe first three lines and the last are in Nabataeanand lines 4 and 5 in Old Arabic. For a recentinterpretation and references to previous stu-dies see Kropp M. A Puzzle of Old ArabicTenses and Syntax: The Inscription of cEncAvdat. PSAS 24: 1994: 165–174, and see Macdo-nald, Old Arabic. Bellamy has suggested thatthese lines are in verse and cites Epiphanius’statement that in the late fourth century the Na-bataeans at Petra sang hymns to the virgin mo-ther of Dushara ’A|abikh dialekt, ‘in theArabic language’ (Bellamy JA. Arabic Versesfrom the First/Second Century: The Inscriptionof cEn cAvdat. JSS 35: 1990: 79, n. 13). Kroppregards the lines as a magic charm which thereader was invited to recite and which had tobe spoken in the Arabic language. Whatever the

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correct explanation, this text is another exampleof the coexistence of Old Arabic in close proxi-mity to other languages.

170. Negev’s dating of the text is based entirely onspeculation (Negev A, Naveh J & Shaked S.Obodas the God. IEJ 36: 1986: 60) and untilmore evidence is available the inscriptionshould be regarded as ‘undated’.

171. The Jabal Ramm inscription appears to bewritten in something between the Nabataeanand the Arabic script, but its interpretation is souncertain that it is unsafe to try to classify itslanguage. The only phrase which appears to becertain and which, curiously does not seem tohave been recognized before, is b-$rm in the se-cond line, which presumably represents bi-$iram‘in/at Iram’. This would be most appropriategiven the provenance of the inscription. For adifferent interpretation of the text, plus refe-rences to the earlier treatment see Bellamy JA.Two Pre-Islamic Arabic Inscriptions Revised:Jabal Ramm and Umm al-Jimal. JAOS 108: 1988:370–372. Bellamy’s interpretation of the lettersb$rm as barim is unlikely since it assumes thatthe alif represents medial /a/, a feature whichis entirely foreign to the orthography of boththe Nabataean and the pre-Islamic Arabicscripts.

172. See Violet, Ein zweisprachiges Psalmfragment;Macdonald, The Form of the Definite Article;and Macdonald, Old Arabic.

173. See below on the texts from Faw (Ghoneim, Ja2122, the tomb inscription of Mcwyt bn Rbct,and Ansary, Qaryat al-Faw: 147/6) and thosefrom Haram which do not meet this criterionand which I have therefore labelled ‘Undifferen-tiated North Arabian’.

174. None of the uncertainties marked on the transli-teration are serious and they most probably re-present mistakes by the copyist.

175. This translation is based on taking mbcy as themasw dar of bcy, in the accusative of hw al. Bcy in Sa-faitic means ‘to do harm to, make an attack on’with a direct object and this is one meaning ofthe equivalent verb in Classical Arabic (Lisan 14:75a). Cf. C 320 s1nt bcy $l cwd ncm $l cbd ‘the yearthe $l cwd attacked the flocks of the $l cbd’.

176. These are the two great tribal confederations ofthe hw arra, or basalt desert, east and southeast ofthe Hw awran, in the Roman period.

177 The word mcmn is as yet unexplained.178. For a discussion of Dtn, see Macdonald et al.,

Les inscriptions safaıtiques de Syrie: 474–475.179. These are tutelary deities of the two great confe-

derations.


180. In Safaitic, the verb $s1lf almost always occurs inthe context of a killing and a call for vengeanceand, like its equivalent in Classical Arabic (seeLane 1408a-b), means ‘to do something (beforethe present time) which requires requital (eithergood or bad, at the present time)’.

181. The meaning of s1hw r here is not clear.182. See Macdonald, The Form of the Definite Ar-

ticle; and Macdonald, Old Arabic.183. See, for example, l-ys2rq l-mdbr ‘in order to mi-

grate to the inner desert’ (LP 180); or w rdf h-dw $nl-mdbr ‘he urged [ie. walked behind] the sheeptowards the inner desert’ (WH 582).

184. See Macdonald MCA. North Arabian Epi-graphic Notes 1. AAE 3: 1992: 23–25.

185. As opposed to Safaitic h-s1nt, in parallelcontexts (eg. C 1629, 1851, etc.). As in C 2446,the assimilation of the n of the preposition mnis a feature of Safaitic, not Old Arabic.

186. As opposed to h-s1fr, which is very common inthis context. However, note that the assimilationof the n of the relative pronoun mn is typicalof Safaitic not Old Arabic. This text which wasdiscovered by the Basalt Desert Rescue Surveyis to be published by Dr. G.M.H. King, to whomI am most grateful for this information. On thesurvey and its discoveries see, in the meantime,King GMH. The Basalt Desert Rescue Surveyand Some Preliminary Remarks on the SafaiticInscriptions and Rock Drawings. PSAS 20: 1990:55–78.

187. See Macdonald, The Form of the Definite Ar-ticle. Winnett and Harding translate w-bny $rgmin WH 234 as ‘he built the cairn’ and cite thisas an example of a definite article $-. However,it is more likely that $rgm is the plural of rgmand the sentence means ‘and he built somecairns’. Winnett also finds a supposed $- articlein WAMS 11 which he reads l yr bn ghw r $-gml‘By Yr son of Ghw r is the camel’. But it is clearfrom the photograph that the text has been tam-pered with and that the supposed $ was origi-nally written as a h, the lower side stroke(which turned it into a $) being added by a diffe-rent hand.

188. HCH 193ΩHSIM 49218b (provenance unknown)... f dt$ b-hw gr.

189. Naturalis Historia 32.157.190. See Drewes, The Phonemes of Lihyanite: 167–

168; and the discussion above.191. See for example JSLih 75/2, HE 2, Stiehl R. Neue

lihw yanische Inschriften aus al-cUdaib. I. Miteinem Nachtrag M. Hofners. In: Altheim F &Stiehl R, eds. Christentum am Roten Meer. 1. Berlin:de Gruyter, 1971: 23 and 32, nos A18/2 and D5/

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3, respectively. The expression d $l appears tooccur in JSLih 226. However, this number coverstwo separate inscriptions. The first (consisting ofline 1) is in the late Dadanitic script and appearsto read grms2ll. The second (consisting of lines 2–3) is in the South Arabian script (note the formsof $ and d) and clearly reads d $l //bny. Jaussen andSavignac treat the clan or family name as $l-bny,ie. with $l- representing the Arabic definite ar-ticle, and this is possible. However, their compa-rison of this with the ethnicon bnyn (ie. with theSayhadic article -n) in CIH 287/7–8, is inappro-priate since, in the latter text, bn-y is a nisba formand this is the reason that it has the article (ie.bn-y-n ‘the Bn-ite’). In JSLih 226, on the otherhand, $l follows d and so, if it is the definite ar-ticle, it must be part of the name (as it is in the‘tribal’ name which occurs in the forms hn-$hw nktand $l-$hw nkt). It is clear that the two parts of JSLih226 do not belong together and it seems probablethat at least lines 2–3 are part of a text the begin-ning of which is lost.

192. That is, in the Ghoneim inscription discussedearlier (see Kropp, The Inscription Ghoneim;and Robin, L’Arabie antique: 114–115) and inthe Sabaeo-North-Arabian inscription ofunknown provenance, CIH 450/ 2–3 in relationto a woman: dt / $l / $l / $hw nkt, and in lines 5–6 in relation to a man: d-$l / $l / $l-$hw nkt. Theword division suggests that the (presumablySabaeo-phone) engraver was unaware of the li-teral meaning of the ANA expression d $l or ofthe significance of the Old Arabic article $l. Ha-ving correctly separated dt and $l in lines 2–3 heseems to have assumed that d$l in line 5 was themasculine form of dt, and so treated it as asingle word, and then repeated the pattern oftwo $l’s between this and $hw nkt. On the otherhand, having incorrectly separated the definitearticle $l- from $hw nkt in line 3, he correctly joinedthe two in line 6.

193. See for instance Robin, L’Arabie antique: 114–115; Robin, IIS. 1: 54–55.

194. In Kafir 10 (Robin, IIS. 1: 135); Kamna 11/2 (ibid.181); RES 4133/6; and Ryckmans, Graffites sa-beens: 560.

195. In Haram 33 and 36 (Robin, IIS. 1: 101–102 and104–105 respectively).

196. In Ry 455/2 (Ryckmans G. Inscriptions sud-arabes. Neuvieme serie [Ry 444–498]. Le Museon64: 1951: 111), CIH 534/2, RES 4663/2, Haram53 (Robin, IIS. 1: 122–123).

197. Note that there is no case of *d- $hw nktn whichwould be the true equivalent of d $l hn-$hw nkt/d$l $l-$hw nkt.

M. C. A. MACDONALD

198. Beeston AFL, Winnett FV, Ryckmans J & GhulMA. The Inscription Jaussen-Savignac 71. PSAS3: 1973: 69.

199. There is possibly a third example in line 4,where Beeston’s reading of the seventh letter asm seems to me impossible. The sign looks farmore like a l and is preceded by a clear $. Ho-wever, since what follows is partly destroyed, itremains uncertain whether or not this is anotheroccurrence of the article.

200. See the photograph of the squeeze on Jaussen &Savignac, Mission, 2: pl. XCII, their copy on pl.CXXXV, and their description on p. 505.

201. See Macdonald, The Form of the Definite Ar-ticle.

202. There are a number of problems in this inscrip-tion which are still unresolved, and none of thetreatments so far appears to me entirely satisfac-tory. However, it is clear that there are passageswhich cannot be read as Aramaic and whoselexical and grammatical features are very closeto Classical Arabic. For an excellent photographof the text and the most recent discussion andreferences see Healey & Smith, Jaussen-Savi-gnac 17. A new edition and discussion will ap-pear in Macdonald, Old Arabic.

203. See below.204. The dating is very approximate, see Teixidor,

inscription arameenne ... de Sharjah: 699.205. There are a handful of cases where f meaning

‘in’ has been identified in Safaitic, but these arevery rare and b- is the norm.

206. The name is also spelt Mnt in theophoric namesin Ancient North Arabian. However, since me-dial vowels of any quality are rarely if ever re-presented in these scripts it is impossible toknow how this was pronounced.

207. The reading khl is uncertain since the word inthe text is klh and the interpretation depends onassuming metathesis.

208. Jamme A. New Hw asaean and Sabaean Inscrip-tions from Saudi Arabia. OrAnt 6: 1967: 181–183. It was correctly re-read and recognized asNorth Arabian by J. Ryckmans (cUzza et Latdans les inscriptions sud-arabes: a propos dedeux amulettes meconnues. JSS 25: 1980: 199, n.3); see, most recently, Robin, L’Arabie antique:115.

209. Unlike Dadanitic, South Arabian orthographydoes not employ matres lectionis, hence bn ratherthan bnh.

210. Ansary, Qaryat al-Fau: 144 no. 2; see Robin,L’Arabie antique: 121.

211. Kropp, The Inscription Ghoneim: 59. Robin alsoassumes a loss of one or more letters at the end

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of each line in his transcription (L’Arabieantique: 121).

212. When a photograph is published it may be pos-sible to verify this.

213. Jamme A. The Pre-Islamic Inscriptions of theRiyadh Museum. OrAnt 9: 1970: 122. It was re-cognized as North Arabian by J. Ryckmans(cUzza et Lat: 199; Alphabets, Scripts and Lan-guages: 75).

214. Muller WW. Ein Grabmonument aus Nagranals Zeugnis fur das Fruhnordarabische. In:Degen R, Muller WW & Rollig W, NESE. 3.Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1978: 152–157.

215. Jamme A. South-Arabian Antiquities in theU.S.A. BiOr 12: 1955: 152–153. See the discus-sion in Muller, Ein Grabmonument: 154–155.

216. The name of the social group is $l-$hw nkt (see note192, above) but this, of course, cannot be usedto identify the language of the text.

217. See Kropp, The Inscription Ghoneim; and Robin,L’Arabie antique: 114. A. Sima has pointed out tome that in this text the enclitic pronoun -h inmdqnt-h dt refers to Lt (ie. ‘this her portico’) andthus is the regular Sabaic 3gg.f. enditic pronounrather than a North Arabian feature. Similary inCIH450, the only example of -h refers to nfs’which is feminine in Sabaic.

218. See the discussion of Old Arabic above and, inmore detail, in Macdonald, Old Arabic.

219. Robin, IIS. 1: 34.220. However, in Haram 32 (which Robin includes

in the list because of the omission of a medial-h-), the Sabaic preposition bn (rather thanNorth Arabian mn) occurs in line 5.

221. Robin, IIS. 1: 33–34. He also mentions the word$hlht which he takes as the Arabic $alihah(‘gods’) pl. of ilah, assuming the use of h to re-present medial /a/ (in two texts). However, theuse of a mater lectionis for medial /a/ wouldsurely be extraordinary in any pre-Islamic Se-mitic alphabet.

222. See, for instance, hwfy in Haram 10/3, 8 and 13/10–11; hqny in 32/1; hhtw $ in 33/3–4, etc. This isin contrast to the consistent use of the $f cl formin the Sabaeo-Arabic texts from Faw.

223. In a different work (L’Arabie antique: 97), Robinhimself seems to have reached a conclusion si-milar, though not identical, to this; see below.

224. In one of these (Haram 40) medial h is omittedtwice and medial $ once (see Robin, IIS:1: 34 and110), although these could as well be errors asdialectal features.

225. Beeston had suggested that they were in a sepa-rate dialect which he termed ‘Harami’ (BeestonAFL. A Descriptive Grammar of Epigraphic South


Arabian. London: Luzac, 1962: 9). However, ashe himself noted, this invited confusion sincethere are other texts from Haram which are ex-pressed in pure Sabaic or Madhabic. Moreover,I am doubtful whether the language of thesetexts itself represents a dialect, rather thancontamination of standard Sabaic by elementsof one or more other languages. Christian Robinhas called the language of these texts ‘pseudo-sabeen’ (IIS. 1: 34) or ‘pseudo-sabeen qahw tw anite’(L’Arabie antique: 97), but on this see below.

226. Robin, L’Arabie antique: 97. He includes underthis rubric one, unpublished, inscription fromFaw (that of Zaydwadd, ‘le seul exemple verita-blement significatif’, L’Arabie antique: 120) andthe tomb inscription of Mcwyt bn Rbct (L’Arabieantique: 121). However, as stated above, Iwould class the latter inscription as ANA(although within the ‘undifferentiated’ categorybecause we cannot yet assign it to a particulardialect). Robin also, tentatively, includes a textfrom Nagran, Ja 2147 (Jamme A. Lihw yanite, Sa-baean and Thamudic Inscriptions from WesternSaudi Arabia (Pre-Islamic Arabic Documenta-tion, I). RSO 45: 1970: 91–94) despite the factthat it ‘ne comporte aucun caractere linguis-tique qui le classe de maniere evidente soitcomme sabeen, soit comme pseudo-sabeen....’(Robin, L’Arabie antique: 122 and cf. 97).

227. Robin, L’Arabie antique: 97.228. Robin, L’Arabie antique: 97.229. As suggested by Robin (IIS: 1: 59).230. Macdonald, Nomads and the Hw awran: 382–388.231. For examples and a brief discussion see Macdo-

nald et al., Les inscriptions safaıtiques de Syrie:480–487.

232. See Macdonald MCA & Searight A. The Inscrip-tions and Rock-Drawings of the Jawa Area: APreliminary Report on the First Season of Field-work of the Corpus of the Inscriptions of JordanProject. ADAJ 26: 1982: 172.

233. See Macdonald, Old Arabic which will contain adetailed study of the origins of the Arabicscript, with an edition of some previously un-published inscriptions which display veryclearly the transition from Nabataean.

234. The forms of b and t, g and hw , z and r were indis-tinguishable in all positions, and the initial and

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medial forms of b, y, n and t were identical, aswere those of f and q.

235. This situation is entirely different from that ofthe Rawwafa inscriptions which seem to havebeen composed on behalf of the nominal dedi-cants at the instigation of the governor of theRoman Province of Arabia. For this interpreta-tion of the inscriptions see Macdonald MCA.Quelques reflexions sur les Saracenes, l’inscrip-tion de Rawwafa et l’armee romaine. In: Lo-zachmeur H, ed. Presence arabe dans le Croissantfertile avant l’Hegire. Paris: ERC 1995: 98–101.The inscriptions are in Nabataean Aramaic andGreek, the ‘prestige languages’ of the indige-nous population on the one hand and of the im-perium on the other, and they have a symbolicrather than practical function. Indeed, it is ques-tionable how many members of the tribe ofThamud (the nominal dedicants) were literatein these scripts or even whether they wouldhave understood the languages in which theywere couched, if the texts had been read aloud.

236. For the interpretation of srkt as an army unit seeMacdonald, Quelques reflexions sur les Sara-cenes: 98–100.

237. See Stiehl R. A New Nabataean Inscription. In:Stiehl R & Stier HE, eds. Beitrage zur altenGeschichte und denen Nachleben. Festschrift F.Altheim. 2. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1970: 87–90. Thetext dates to AD 357/8.

238. The Lakhmids were not always Christian, as thestories of their sacrifices to al-cUzza show, seeMacdonald MCA & Nehme L. Al-cUzza. EI,(new edition). Leiden: Brill (forthcoming).

239. I am most grateful to Laıla Nehme andAlexander Sima for kindly reading an earlierversion of this paper and for their many helpfulcomments. Needless to say, they are not respon-sible for the use I have made of them.

Address:M. C. A. MacdonaldOriental InstitutePusey LaneOxford, OX1 2LEUnited Kingdome-mail: michael.macdonald/orinst.ox.ac.uk