At a workshop on ‘Civilisations de l’Arabie préislamique' in Aix‐en‐Provence in February 1996, I was asked by the organizers to give a survey of the state of our knowledge of the languages and scripts of pre‐Islamic Arabia and to propose a coherent set of definitions and terms for them, in an attempt to clarify the numerous misapprehensions and the somewhat chaotic nomenclature in the field. I purposely concentrated on the languages and scripts of the Arabian Peninsula north of Yemen, and only mentioned in passing those of Ancient South Arabia, since these were to be the subject of another paper. Unfortunately, four years after it took place, the proceedings of this workshop remain unpublished. In the meantime, the contents of my paper have circulated widely and I, 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 a considerably revised version of my paper to be published here. It should be seen as an essential preliminary ground‐clearing for my detailed discussion of the Ancient North Arabian languages and scripts which will appear early in 2001 in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages (ed. R.D. Woodard, Cambridge University Press) and my book Old Arabic and its legacy in the later language. Texts, linguistic features, scripts and letter‐orders, which is in preparation.
Excavations of a monumental tomb in Area F at Mleiha have revealed a lime-plaster funerary stele with an Aramaic and Hasaitic inscription. The excavation of the tomb was not completed but a preliminary report on the tomb and a discussion of the text is presented. The inscription states that the tomb was built by the deceased's son and mentions the date and his name, family lineage and function in the service of the King of ʿUm an. 1
According to Musil, the bedouin of North Arabia know five seasons, distinguished by different types of rain or its absence. The rains within each season are also thought to be governed by particular stars. The following table sets out these five seasons with the associated rains and stars.
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.
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