In memoriam Jacques Ryckmans and Bram Drewes
In the last 40 years, several thousand palm‐leaf stalks and sticks inscribed in the Ancient South Arabian minuscule script have been discovered in Yemen. The fact that they are on an organic support makes these documents the first Ancient South Arabian inscriptions that can be subjected to AMS dating. Between 2003 and 2006, thirty‐six of these palm‐leaf stalks and sticks from the collection in the Oosters Instituut in Leiden were tested at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, part of the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art at the University of Oxford. This work has largely confirmed the palaeographical sequence worked out by the late Jacques Ryckmans and published in AAE in 2001, and provided date ranges for the different stages in it, with the possibility of an unexpectedly early starting point.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.