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The Writing Culture of Ancient Dadān
Get PDFThis work focuses the social context of writing in ancient Western Arabia in the oasis of ancient Dadan, modern-day al-ʿUlā in the northwest of the Arabian Peninsula between the sixth to first centuries BC. It offers a description and analysis of the language of the inscriptions and the variation attested within them. It is the first work to perform a systematic study of the linguistic variation of the Dadanitic inscriptions. It combines a thorough description of the language of the inscriptions with a statistical analysis of the distribution of variation across different textual genres and manners of inscribing. By considering correlations between language-internal and extralinguistic features this analysis aims to take a more holistic approach to the epigraphic object. Through this approach an image of a rich writing culture emerges, in which we can see innovation as well as the deliberate use of archaic linguistic features in more formal text types
Kaplony, Andreas / Marx, Michael Josef:Qur’ān Quotations Preserved on Papyrus Documents, 7th–10th Centuries. Leiden/Boston: Brill 2019. = Documenta Coranica 2. ISBN 978-90-04-35891-1
No full textVariation in the Dadanitic inscriptions : the case of RḌY
No full textIn the first millennium BC Dadān was an important oasis town on the incense trading route with a flourishing writing tradition in a local script, called Dadanitic. Dadān (modern-day al-ʿUlā) was situated in the north-west of the Arabian Peninsula. The Dadanitic corpus is the only Ancient North Arabian corpus to boast a substantial number of monumental inscriptions. Despite the official character of these inscriptions, they also contain variation in language, orthography, and technical execution. This paper will focus on the variation in the spelling of the verb from the root √RḌY before enclitic pronouns. It will argue that this particular variation attests a phonological change in the Dadanitic language after it started being written. This has important implications for the orthography and our general understanding of variation in this corpus of inscriptions
The ẓll of ancient Dadān : ritual and documentary practice
No full textIn and around the site of ancient Dadan (modern-day al-'Ula), located in the Northwest of the Arabian Peninsula, many inscriptions are found in the local North Arabian script variety called Dadanitic (6th-1st centuries BC). Many of the Dadanitic inscriptions mention the zll ceremony for the main local deity Dugabat, both unique to Dadan. While the zll inscriptions are the most common type of monumental inscriptions in the Dadanitic script, their function is still little understood. Previous interpretations of the zll inscriptions have primarily relied on the etymology of the root zll, 'to cover' or 'shade' (compare Arabic zulal 'shade'). This article takes a broader approach to the inscriptions and considers their formulaic structure, phrasing, the distribution of attested personal names in them, and the use of the root in other genres and corpora to arrive at a new interpretation of the ritual, suggesting that the zll inscriptions are better understood as documenting land leases. In this context the root ZLL should be understood as 'to write, to put down in writing; to record'
The writing culture of ancient Dadān : a description and quantitative analysis of linguistic variation
No full textThis work focuses the social context of writing in ancient Western Arabia in the oasis of ancient Dadan, modern-day al-ʿUlā in the northwest of the Arabian Peninsula between the sixth to first centuries BC. It offers a description and analysis of the language of the inscriptions and the variation attested within them. It is the first work to perform a systematic study of the linguistic variation of the Dadanitic inscriptions. It combines a thorough description of the language of the inscriptions with a statistical analysis of the distribution of variation across different textual genres and manners of inscribing. By considering correlations between language-internal and extralinguistic features this analysis aims to take a more holistic approach to the epigraphic object. Through this approach an image of a rich writing culture emerges, in which we can see innovation as well as the deliberate use of archaic linguistic features in more formal text types
He made it for his lord : the verbs fʿl and ʿbd in Dadanitic inscriptions
No full textDadanitic is the name of the script that was used in and around ancient Dadan (modern-day Al-ʿUlā, Northwest Saudi Arabia) to carve graffiti and monumental inscriptions between the 6th and late 1st centuries BCE. The recent publication of several monumental inscriptions that were discovered in the 2012 excavations of the site of ancient Dadan by King Saud University added a new attestation of the verb ʿbd ‘to do’, ‘to make’ to the known corpus of Dadanitic, bringing the number of published attestations of this lexeme up to three. This article examines the distribution of the seemingly semantically equivalent verbs fʿl and ʿbd in the Dadanitic corpus in light of this new discovery and proposes a more narrowly defined meaning for the form ʿbd as a more restricted term preferred in the context of artisanal production. In this way, the article sheds further light on possible cultural and linguistic contact between the authors of the Dadanitic inscriptions and Aramaic
The Language of the Taymanitic Inscriptions & its classification
Get PDFThis work comprises a linguistic survey of the Ancient North Arabian (ANA)
epigraphic material from Taymāʾ, conventionally known as Taymanitic
(Macdonald 2000: 28-9). A grammatical sketch, based on the linguistic
features in the Taymanitic corpus is presented, followed by a discussion of
the linguistic features of Taymanitic that are relevant to its linguistic classification.
Two appendices follow: a compilation of all previously published
inscriptions with grammatical content, and a glossar
A quantitative approach to variation in case inflection in Arabic documentary papyri : the case of 'ab in construct
No full textThe Arabic documentary papyri (seventh-ninth centuries CE) are precious witnesses to the day-to-day written Arabic of their time. These texts exhibit considerable variation in grammar and orthography. Classical Arabic and the prescriptive attitudes of the Arabic grammarians traditionally provided the lens through which the earliest documents of the Islamic period have been read. Since Classical Arabic was only fully canonized in the tenth century, approaching the early Arabic papyri, and the variation attested in them, through this standard is anachronistic. This article seeks to understand the language of these documents on their own terms. It employs a quantitative approach to investigate the nominal case system. focusing on the form of 'ab in construct, producing a fine-grained analysis of how inflection operated in early documentary Arabic, and attempts to account for points of divergence within a historical and sociolinguistic framework
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