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Nemara and Faw

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

A. F. L. Beeston
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Extract

The many thousands of inscriptions conventionally classified under the headings of Dedanite, Lihyanite, Safaitic, and Thamudic, all share the characteristic of a definite article in the form h- or hn-. Pre-Islamic texts displaying the distinctively Arabic article al are a mere handful; among them, easily the most important is the funerary text of Umru' al-Qays at Nemara (RES 483). This very minuscule corpus has recently been enlarged by two inscriptions from Qaryat al-Faw (anciently Qaryat Dhāt Kāhil; near modern Sulayyil, on the trade route linking Nagrān with the eastern Arabian coast), publicized by Dr. Abdul Rahman al-Ansary in spring 1977 at the first International Symposium on Studies in the History of Arabia at Riyadh. These texts are particularly welcome in that they are written in fine monumental South Arabian script, and thus do not pose the acute problems of reading occasioned by the exceedingly ambiguous scripts of Nemara and the other northern texts.

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , February 1979 , pp. 1 - 6
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1979

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References

1 It would be risky, on the basis of this text alone, to attempt any firm conclusion on the function of the noun-termination -m, and what relationship (if any) it has with South Arabian ‘mimation’. One possible working hypothesis might be that the definite article has a strongly demonstrative force (implying renderings ‘this heaven’ and ‘this earth’ in 1. 9); that -m has strong indefinite force, ‘any … whatever’; and that absence of both corresponds to both unemphatic ‘the’ and unemphatic ‘a’. This suggests that the -m is not morphologically or functionally equivalent to the Arabic tanwīn, since the latter is not in itself a mark of indefinition (witness its occurrence in proper names and in cases like Šamsun); it would rather seem to correspond to Arabic mā l-ibāhmiyyah (as in rajulun-mā), implying ‘any … whatever’; 'bdm need not be taken to invalidate this explanation, since it is equivalent in sense to ‘for any stretch of time whatever’.

2 When the l of the article is assimilated, its alif seems to be normally retained.

3 Letters not ligatured to the following one are the same as in standard Arabic practice: ',d/d/r, z, w.

4 In Sabaean texts of the third century, Madhhig figure prominently among the Bedouin allies and auxiliaries of the Sabaeans; hence Umru' al-Qays's attack on Sabaean territory at Nagrān was necessarily preceded by action designed to neutralize Madhḥig. This seems to be the point of the consequential conjunction 'kDy ‘so that’. The Nagrān operation was con-sequential on the reduction of Madhḥig, and not an independent operation like the others which are linked by wa.

5 There is a slight element of uncertainty, because al-Tabarī's words, ‘his governorship lasted thirty years’, might be taken by a reader unacquainted with Sasanian chronology as referring to Umru' al-Qays's son who succeeded him in the governorship. But we are also told that this son continued as governor down to the beginning of the reign of Shāpūr III in A.D. 383, 55 years after his father's death; if his own governorship lasted only 30 years, he must have been first appointed 25 years after his father's death. This does not seem to be what al-Ṭabarī envisaged, since he writes halaka mru'u Iqaysi … fa-sta'mala sābūru 'alā 'amaliki bnahu using fa of ‘immediate successiveness’ and not ṯumma ‘later’.

6 I would have liked to read Dw.wgDh = du wagruhu ‘this is his tomb’ (wgr is regularly associated with qbr in the East Arabian pre-Islamic texts), but the g seems dubious. I am not convinced by Clermont-Ganneau's idea (reading ivldh) that ‘le sens serait que le defunt est mort le jour anniversaire de sa naissance, ou après la carrière que lui assignait l'astre le sa naissance (?)’.