Deciphering A Mysterious Pre-Islamic Script

Ahmad Al-Jallad discusses his recent research deciphering the Dhofari script, which is shedding new light on the linguistic and cultural map of pre-Islamic Arabia. You can download a copy of his research on his Academia page here and listen to his previous episode on the show about Safaitic here. 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

I said, let's assume this order and put that order on top of this text. Are we going to get the values then for all of the glyphs? Well, once I did that, I started seeing that I could I could start to understand how the some of the exotic shapes we had in front of us derive from shapes we knew in other scripts indeed. And uh that was just, and then, you know, we had one of them, two of them, three of them, and all three of them showed basically the same order and the same shapes. It's too much to be a coincidence. We have now a falsifiable decipherment of the script, uh, without having to read one single word. It was uh it was uh a very different kind of Rosetta Stone, you could say. It was these ancient writers basically telling us what the values of their letters were, and one just had to see them.

SPEAKER_02 0:44

Ahmed Jalad is the Sophia Chair in Arabic Studies at Ohio State University, and his work focuses on the languages, writing systems, histories, and cultures of pre-Islamic Arabia and the ancient Near East. He's also the scientific director and manager of the online corpus of the inscriptions of ancient North Arabia, known as Oceana. This is his second time coming on the show, and in this episode, we discuss his recent research deciphering the Daufari script, which is shedding new light on the linguistic and cultural map of pre-Islamic Arabia. Okay, we're live. It's great to have you back on. Good to be here. So your July 2025 research has been described as a breakthrough in deciphering the Daufari script. For people who aren't familiar, can you tell us what exactly is the Daufari script and where it's found?

SPEAKER_00 1:27

Yeah, well, we can begin with a more broad uh a broader introduction to writing in pre-Islamic Arabia, because the Daufari script is a pre-Islamic Arabian writing system. And it belongs ultimately to a family of scripts that scholars call the South Semitic script family. It is a sister, if you think about all the alphabets used in the world today, almost all, virtually all of them, go back to what is ultimately the Phoenician script, and then before that to a script called Proto-Sanayitic, which was the first alphabet that was invented sometime in the middle of the first millennium BCE. So all of the world's alphabets, almost all of the world's alphabets, go back to this Phoenician, Phoenico-Aramaic branch of the alphabet. But 1400 years ago and earlier, Arabia had its own family of alphabets. Arabia, and then these were scripts were brought to the Horn of Africa, to Ethiopia as well. And these were called the South Semitic script family. They do not derive from Phoenician, but they rather come from the Proto-Sanaaiic script itself and represent a sister branch of the alphabet. So we can think of these as sort of indigenous scripts of Arabia. Now, almost all memory of these scripts was lost following the domination of Arabic and the Arabic script in the Islamic period. All of these scripts went extinct. There are some traces of memory of them in the works of Arab antiquarians from ancient Yemen. And these are called the Himyari script, the Musnad. In the 19th century, European explorers began to, let's say, travel the deserts of Arabia, and they noticed that the rock faces of Arabia were filled with writing in a script that was not the Arabic script, something that was pre-Arabic. In the 19th century, the ancient writing system of Yemen was deciphered by comparisons with the Ethiopian script, which we know today, the script uh used in Ethiopia for Amharic and classically for Gerez. This enabled them to access the history of ancient Yemen and decipher the now more than 10,000 uh texts that are known from the region, in fact, probably more than that. But across Arabia, there were other scripts, and these were different from the script of ancient Yemen. Across West Arabia, you could say, West and Central Arabia. Scholars gave these alphabets the name initially Thamudik. It's a misnomer. It's not a real, uh, it's not a term that probably any group using these scripts would have used of themselves, but it was meant to evoke this idea of a lost Arabian civilization. Thamud is a tribe mentioned in the Quran that was destroyed by God for disobedience. So the idea was that these scripts were part of that lost era. And over the next century or so, the scripts were more or less deciphered. There were some funny letter shapes that I think resisted proper understanding and challenged the interpretation of the inscriptions. But today we can say most of these scripts are legible. We understand what they say, and most of them just contain personal names. Which are fun, but uh far cry from huge uh tales of history and uh lost civilizations. And so these this kind of exploration transformed our idea of Arabia before Islam. According to common knowledge, according to legends in the Islamic period, Arabia was this vast, illiterate desert, and there was no hope to access its past except through oral traditions. But now we have, you know, with the Thamoudic inscriptions, tens and tens of thousands of more texts. Even if they just contain personal names, there's much contained within personal names, like the names of gods, beliefs, regions, and so forth, etymology. So it transf or transformed Arabia's what was previously prehistory, only known through oral traditions into history, history that can be extracted from texts. And Arabia was then highly literate, it seems. I mean, these are graffiti, most of them, so they were written by literate private individuals and not commissioned by kings or rulers. But the picture in East Arabia was very different. While we had tens and tens of thousands of texts from West Arabia, North Arabia, Central Arabia, East Arabia was, well, ooh, um, let's say it better fit that idea of an illiterate of a landscape without writing. In East Arabia, the inscriptions are very few, and most of them have to be discovered in excavations. That is taken out of the ground. They're usually on tombstones. Hasayidic is the name of a script that was used across the Gulf from basically Thaj to the Arman Peninsula on the Gulf. And this script, uh, well, there's about 45 specimens, uh, mostly tombstones. So very formulaic. So it's a huge contrast with what we see in West Arabia. Uh, explorers, early explorers of the Far and Oman in general, noted recorded inscriptions, rock inscriptions to begin with, in a very, very, we could say exotic form of the script, of the Arabian alphabet, a very exotic form of the Arabian alphabet. And I use the term exotic because if you look at the letter shapes, they're geometric figures, some of them correspond to what we see in other Arabian alphabets, but they don't produce anything meaningful when you attempt to read them. And other letter shapes are completely unknown. These were recorded over throughout the 20th century, but didn't really attract much attention. They were known, but they there was no real corpus to work with until the early 90s, when Geraldine King, who was a student of Michael McDonald, works on North Arabian, collaborated with a Romani scholar called a Shahri to systematic or to attempt to systematically document these inscriptions uh in the region of Dhofar. And so they called provisionally the script the Dhofari script. The Dhofari script. They documented hundreds of texts and and and wrote up a report with actually relatively accurate drawings, or not 100%, but relatively accurate drawings. And this has been available online, so circulated widely by specialists. And it is the only systematic study of these inscriptions. After that, Ashahri published uh books with many photographs of them, and a lot has been said about these inscriptions. But in 2000, Michael MacDonald, in his assessment of the epigraphic landscape of Arabia, well, of course, he the inscriptions remained undeciphered, and uh he noted that they were the main exception to the absence of writing in East Arabia. But the script was undeciphered and it was unclear whether we were going to learn anything from them at all. So that is basically the story of the Dhofari script.

SPEAKER_02 7:57

And then part of your breakthrough research was that you figured out that the scripts you were looking at were what are called abysdaries. So can you talk about one, what what that is, an abcedere and when that moment dawned on you?

SPEAKER_00 8:09

Yeah. So so the the decipherment, and when we say decipherment of a script, what we're talking about is being able to divine the phonemic values. That is, the every glyph will correspond to some, let's say, phonological segment in a language. And to be able to establish with certainty what that glyph reflects in the linguistic system that it represents. Now, that's can be achieved in a number of ways. If you have long texts, long enough texts, it could be like Wheel of Fortune. If you know a few letters, then it's just a matter of guessing and using context, using parallel genres of what we know from, let's say, allied cultures and languages, guessing what the unknown letters or unknown glyphs could signify, and then testing it. And that can be achieved relatively easy if you easily if you have a large corpus, because you have a laboratory, then you can experiment. And you need long inscriptions as well that can show you, that can record the use of all the variants within the same text so you can know that this belongs to a discrete uh uh script variant, you could say, or a discrete variant of the alphabet. Okay, very good. So the fadi didn't have that. Bufati inscriptions are relatively short. I mean, most texts have fewer than 15 glyphs. Very short. It's not very, it's yeah, it's very difficult to, with texts that short that that are that short, to, you know, demonstrate a decipherment. The most important thing about a decipherment is whether it's falsifiable. Because you can make, if you have a small enough corpus, you can be creative and get those texts to say whatever you like, but that might be a testament to your own creativity rather than what the texts actually say. In order to really demonstrate that you've cracked it, you've got to be able to falsify it somehow, right? Audi, you know, it attracted the attention of a number of really good scholars in in recent times, and it was well dis people started describing it in a better way and hypothesizing about what the language could be. Because it wasn't obviously, it wasn't easy to decipher, it wasn't obviously South Arabian or any of the North Arabian languages that we knew, and the the values of the letter shapes were mostly unknown. In fact, there were a number that were very clear, they're stable across the Arabian Peninsula, like the cross being a T, the uh circle with a line, uh, the bisected circle being a W. These are basically established across all of Arabia. Every script has these. But the remaining letters of that uh wheel of fortune game were impossible to discover, it seems, based on the corpus as it stood. So so it was rightfully undeciphered, and the inscriptions as well, unlike the inscriptions, uh the Thamudic inscriptions, don't seem to have not seem to have been very formulaic. That is, in the Thamotic inscriptions, what you get is basically a standard formula like Thamudic Sheeds, one of the script variants, just oh it begins with wadad, which means something like love or greetings, and then personal names. And it's that over and over again. The Faring inscriptions, if you compare them side by side, don't seem, even if you can't read them, you would be able to locate the reoccurrence of many formulae. Even if you can't read it, you'll see these three shapes continue to reoccur. There are very few instances of that, meaning that these writers were writing more creatively, which also challenges decipherment. Because if you can't isolate formulae, you can't uh uh you can't fill in the blinks. So those are big challenges, but King did recognize that there was this reoccurring sequence of a half circle and a dot. And from the script she knew, what she worked on was called Hismaic from Jordan, that sequence meant son of bin. And so she identified the dot as an N, the half circle as a B. And the half circle is pretty stable across Arabia as well. And bin is very nice because it's the word for sun, but it's also problematic because in the area where these inscriptions are attested, these dofari inscriptions are attested in Dufar, basically, and uh adjacent areas of the uh Yemeni Mahra governorate and uh Sukotra, the word for sun in the local language, and in these areas, the local indigenous language continues to the local language continues to be an indigenous, non-Arabic, pre-Arabic Semitic language that we use the very terrible term for modern South Arabian. And we can see how bad this term is as we start looking at these inscriptions. So these languages include languages like Mahri. Mahri is probably the most widely spoken of them. Uh, and in these languages, the word for sun is bar, like Aramaic.

SPEAKER_02 12:26

Aramaic, right?

SPEAKER_00 12:27

And like Aramaic, it's bar. So it's very weird that the ancient inscriptions from this region have been, whereas the indigenous languages, which are pre-Arabic, which must have been there in ancient times, use bar. So there was this paradox, this conundrum, which remained unsolved, but everyone took King's identification for granted. And so it just made the past look very difficult. I really never intended to work on these inscriptions, but I am the director of the online corpus for the inscriptions of ancient North Arabia. And Michael MacDonald gave me the photographs for all of the inscriptions that uh the photographs for all the the Fadi inscriptions that Geraldine King took to upload onto the database at some point. I was on a flight to Jordan to do my fieldwork, and this was in early June from Paris. So Paris Amen. The Royal Royal Jordanian is a wonderful airline, uh, but this particular plane, uh, the entertainment system was down. Uh, there were no plugs for my laptop, and there was no internet on the foot on the on the plane to connect to. So I couldn't do any work on my laptop and I couldn't waste my time watching uh bad movies. So all I had at my disposal were PDFs that were on my phone. And of them was this uh the Fatih stuff. And I had never really looked into it before. So I opened up my phone, I started reading through and looking at the fati inscriptions and and and different uh reports, and you'll find the three texts in the article that I eventually published. I was just looking at they did look like nonsense mostly to me. I mean, completely untrained and uninitiated, but then I I noticed in the one, then two, and the number of these inscriptions, three total, that the texts were rather long, and for a text of that length, about 26 glyphs in the end, none of the glyphs repeated, which is very strange for a natural language. So either it's a very creative poem or it's an ABC dare. That is a list of all the letters in the script. I assumed it was an ADC dare, and because it is a South Semitic script, that is, it belongs to the family that ancient South Arabian belongs to, that Ghaz belongs to, Safietic and all these other fun scripts belong to, Thamuridic, the letter order, the ABC order of this script is actually distinct from the ABCs we use, the Abged, Alifbed Gimel Dalat. Theirs is organized H L dotted H, H, Ma, Pa, Wa, Cha Ra, Bat, Sakana, and so on and so forth. It's a different order. I said, let's assume this order and put that order on top of this text. Are we going to get the values then for all of the glyphs? Well, once I did that, I started seeing that I could I could start to understand how the some of the exotic shapes we had in front of us derive from shapes we knew in other scripts indeed. And uh that was just, and then, you know, we had one of them, two of them, three of them, and all three of them showed basically the same order and the same shapes. It's too much to be a coincidence. We have now a falsifiable decipherment of the script uh without having to read one single word. It was uh it was uh a very different kind of Rosetta Stone, you could say. It was these ancient writers basically telling us what the values of their letters were, and one just had to see them. So the the funny thing is that this uh these uh ABC theers have been around since 1991. So they were there, people had looked at them, they'd been published multiple times, even republished. Sometimes you need to be from the outside and completely uninitiated to see the obvious. And so that was very nice. That was a nice uh stroke of luck there. And then I so once we had that, then I started investigating the corpus. Now, I was on field work, and so that's not really the ideal time to do research. So I wrote up a basically a quick solution and and did a kind of preliminary edition of text and sent it out to, well, a journal from my first uh academic home in Leiden in the Netherlands, the journal of the uh uh what would they call the Albericht ex Orienteluks? It's a classic journal for those in Near Eastern studies. It's been about been rather sleepy in recent times, but I hope that this publication will revive interest in it. Uh so I was very happy to do that. And since then I've just been reading through the inscriptions that we have and trying to build up a corpus. We can read them now, and that's a separate thing from being able to understand all of them.

SPEAKER_02 16:26

Aaron Powell It seems that some of the inscriptions are invoking deities like Shams, the sun goddess. Yes. So, with that, what what do these invocations tell us about the religious life of Dophar's community? Aaron Powell That's fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 16:39

So in this area, what's really interesting about this area is, as I said, it continues to be one of the only places in the Arabian Peninsula where a pre-Arabic language survived the pre-Islam-Islam boundary. All other parts of the Arabia, including Yemen, where many other pre-Arabic languages were once spoken, are today completely Arabic. Now, very fun kinds of Arabic, very interesting dialects, with a lot of substrate that is influenced from the older languages, but the ancient languages of Yemen have disappeared. The Far and Ar and these areas in Oman and Eastern Yemen, Sokotra, they continue to use the ancient languages, but we know very little about that population before the arrival of Islam. Even the onomasticon, the personal names of these groups, are today, of course, Muslim names. And so even the original native names are have disappeared in a big way. There are some that are still used, as I understand it, as a um as nicknames or so forth, but most people have Arabic Muslim names. So this corpus gives us, well, one, the name the names used there in ancient times, uh in very ancient times. Now, how do we date this corpus? Well, we it's hard to say. I mean, I I tend to put it around 2,000 years ago, give or take, some centuries, probably a little bit earlier. So we get names, but we also get a bit of insight into the religious life of these folks as well. Now, like I said, the inscriptions are painted usually in caves and and um rocky shelters, and they don't follow established formulae. So if we look to our Safietic guys in Jordan, when they carve an inscription, even though we might call it a graffito in the sense that it's a text that's not commissioned but produced by a private individual for perhaps personal reasons, they still follow established genre and writing a formulae. So they will write texts on the occasion of the death of someone mourning them. They will write texts commemorating the erection of some religious stone, standing stone, or monument or what have you. These individuals here did not seem to do the same thing. They seem to just write random prayers, if so, but the prayers are not following any kind of strict formula. They're they're they're they're rather random. What their names sometimes, and sometimes what seem to be just quotations from some oral text we have no access to. We can read them. They seem to be a quotation, but we don't know very much about that. So as you mentioned, you have the god Shems. Now, Shems, and you said goddess, I think, right?

SPEAKER_01 19:06

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 19:06

So what's fascinating about Shemps is in Yemen, ancient Yemen, Shemps is a goddess. Shemps just basically means sun. But in Mesopotamia, in East Arabia, and in North Arabia even, Shemps is male. And in the Dophadi inscription, Shems is male as well. It's interesting too. Side note with Arabic and Hebrew, it's a feminine. Yes, yes, yes. I mean, so so grammatically, the sun can be feminine, but the deity, the sun god, is masculine. And this is very interesting. So we have a beautiful text, which you and you can find these texts on the Oceana database I manage, which is Oceana O-C-I-A-N-A.osu.edu. And you can search there under script for the vofari, and you'll bring up the text that I've managed to insert so far. Now you have a very nice prayer in these, actually. It's very, very nice, which is by a woman, in fact, or for a woman. Her name is something like Shunnat Bart Ghafar. Ghafar is just the Arabic name we know, Jafar, which is very interesting. Um, and it's a prayer to shems, who's called, who has an epithet who's called Ma'al or Ma'il. I we don't know the vocalization, in fact, right? But meme ayinlam, this comes from the root alayh, to be exalted, to be high. So shems ma'al, and then the prayer is dawi, that is uh cure, heal. Dawi, shems, ma'al, shunnat bartgafar. So this is a beautiful, we go from these texts being completely impenetrable to now having, I think, understandable prayers to deities we know from the Semitic world, which is just tremendous. Ma'al is also very interesting because this Aleya root, to be high, to be exalted, is applied to shams across Arabia and elsewhere, of course. In a Thambudic B inscription, we have a prayer to shams where he's called the T stem, but still exalted, right? So this is something you get everywhere. Here we have a prayer to Shams, the high Shams Exalted Divine Son, Exalted Divine Son, Kure Shunnat, daughter of Gafar. We have another other another thing that surprised me as well in this text is in this this corpus of inscriptions, is the frequency of prayers using the root hamada, which means to thank or praise, and also asking for gafara, which is repentance, okay, forgiveness. And then you also have, in addition to those two, inscriptions that attest the word halatah, which means to err or sin. So this is a so there is a package of religious terminology here that are associated with these texts, and individuals seem to be painting their confessions and religious invocations for pardon by the divinities on these caves. And again, highly they're not formulaic. So almost each they use the same roots, but each text is almost a different expression. So KME 64, for example. Is a very, very interesting text which says something like so he camps, naze dai. So he camps here, sharing supplies with travelers, supplicating, so that they maybe the gods pardon him, in order that the gods pardon him. And grammatically here is very interesting because you have this form yachfir, and then you have a meme at the end. And that meme could be a plural as you get in the modern South Arabian languages like Mehri. Those memes have plurals. It's a plural ending on verbs, or it could be something that you get in the ancient South Arabian language, language of Hadramidic as well, suffix. But whatever the case, there's no verb form in Arabic that has a meme suffix. So this is particularly interesting. I think one of the most exciting bits, and I'm writing a paper on this right now, called Mahamada. So the root mem uh, the continental skeleton meme ha mim da before Muhammad. All right. So we said in the Fari, they like to use the root hamada in inscriptions praising gods. South Arabian also use the hamada, they have this adverb hamdam, for example, which means in thanks for a deity, to a deity. Now, something very interesting is there's two interesting points here that we should take note of. The first, Hamada. The name Muhammad, as we know it, if we look at the Arabic genealogies that are preserved by the Islamic tradition, it is an incredibly rare name, pre-Islam. After Islam, it becomes the most popular name in the world, even today, the most common name in the world. But in pre-Islamic times, very rare, very, very rare. The name in the consonantal sequence is attested in the inscriptions of Arabia. But in Safietic, for example, a corpus of 40,000 texts, almost every text contains names. That consonantal sequence is attested a couple of times. And it could be Muhammad, it could be Mahmoud, it could be Muhammad, it could be any of these things. We can't tell. There are stories within the Islamic tradition. We don't need to think about their veracity, but it's just interesting to me that they're there that suggested that even the ver that the Prophet Muhammad having the name Muhammad was remarkable because it was a name that was revealed to his mother in a dream, and that he originally had another name, son, for example. Now, we don't have to say that's you know historical, but if people are telling stories about the name itself, it may suggest that it was recognized in an earlier period as being an exceptional name. In South Arabia, there's one inscription, a very famous inscription, where Mimha Mim Dal occurs. And this has been the subject of tremendous discussion. A lot of ink has been spilled on the significance of this. It doesn't occur as a personal name, but rather it seems to occur as an epithet of a deity called Rabbihud, which means Lord of the Jews. So it's in the Jewish inscription. There's a there's a deity called Rabbi Hud, Lord of the Jews, be Muhammad, or be Muhammad or whatever, which seems to be in being Muhammad, being praised or what have you. So it is an epithet being applied to the Lord of the Jews. One attestation in in South Arabia like that. Of course, there's you could speculate all day, but with one data point, it's hard to say anything for sure. Now, KMC 28. This is an inscription you can look up on the uh in Bufari. It's very interesting. We have a an inscription that accompanies the drawing of a cow and a camel, rock art. Now, in Arabia, rock art, painted rock art, carved rock art, many times, there's a nice paper about this too, um, which we can share with the listeners in the bibliography after the talk, that you'll find that these rock drawings are not just for personal amusement, but are oftentimes can be dedicated to deities. I talk about this in my book on Safiidic religion, where you have inscriptions drawing a camel and saying the camel is dedicated to a deity. So the drawing itself is an offering. Now you don't have to think about the logic of offering a drawing to a deity. I mean, people used to offer everything to deities, vases, cups. I mean, what are the deities going to do with a cup any more than a drawing of the can? But it was considered to be a legitimate offering by practitioners of traditional Arabian religion. We have, it seems to be a very similar genre in the fari. We have this inscription which begins with z. Z is the relative pronoun, that which, and then li is for, and then you have ma'al again. Okay, and we know ma'al already. This is the epithet of the sun. So we have Ma'al Muhammad or Mahmoud or what have you. So Ma'al Mahmud, and then it is a hairy camel and a cow. So this that which is for Ma'al Muhammad, a hairy camel, and a cow. That's the those are actually the images we see on accompanying the inscription. So here we see this epithet Muhammad actually, uh, how do you say it, being applied to another epithet, which is Ma'al, exalted, which could be plausibly then an epithet of the sun. So the exalted praised one. So you have all of these very nice sort of adjectives used to describe the deities, and we have, again, in the Fahadi the use of Mahmad, for example, or we don't know its vocalization being used as a divine epithet. Very, very interesting. So these are some of the surprises that come out from, you know, a corpus like this. And who knows what more things await our discovery. I have hundreds and hundreds of photographs to go through, but so far it's been sort of a one-man show. But uh, we'll go through these things and more surveying is needed. But you can see how even sometimes the most what appears to be a very insignificant, you know, 10-letter painted inscription in a cave can have huge historical implications. So the fati script I would refer to now as a complex. Uh in the decipherment, I make clear that what we are deciding, what what the decipherment accomplished is the phonemic values of the glyph inventory of one of the most commonly inscribed form of the fati script, which I called one A. There are other script types, and and Geraldine King even recognized there were at least two script types, but there are many more. That there's a script two, but I recognize there's also a one B and a one C, for example. And while one A is the most common, and you can find it everywhere, the others are much more geographically restricted. So sorting out all that, seeing all that variation come out, I think is important. That was rather unexpected, but in retrospect, quite expected, that usually you're going to have that kind of thick variation. Maybe it's paleographic or maybe it reflects something else. But another thing, and this is a linguistic shock, the modern South Arabian languages. So this, so once we decipher the script, we see that the Vafadi language is indeed similar to the modern South Arabian languages. Geraldine's king identification of the dot as an N was wrong. The dot is actually an R. And the R gives the word for Sanbar, as we would expect. So it fits in, it's perfect. It's exactly what you would expect. And then we have other grammatical things like these M's for plural at the end of verbs, which fit with the modern South Arabian languages. Uh, but there are also irregularities, things that that stand out. And I think one of the things that shocked me most was the glyph inventory is 26. The modern South Arabian languages have the most robust uh phonemic inventories in the Semitic-speaking world. They have 29 glyphs. The Fadi alphabet script, as we've seen three times, has 26 glyphs because what this language seems to have done, lose the interdental sounds like th as in three, the as in that, and then an emphatic version, th or the, we don't know how it was pronounced. These have disappeared and they have merged with the sibilant s sounds, says um t perhaps, or tha. It's uh that's a matter of debate, but they're gone. All of the modern South Arabian languages spoken today do not, they either preserve these or they do not merge them with sibilants. So that means the language of the Lafati script one inscriptions, 1a, I should say, is an ancient relative, an ancient cousin of the modern South Arabian languages, but is not directly ancestral. In other words, the modern South Arabian languages are not later changed forms of ancient Lefati. They are relatives. That's shocking. That's interesting. So where is the relative, where is the ancient form of Mehri, for example? Well, perhaps behind one B. I have a feeling that one B has more letters. Well, it does have more letters. And so we I think maybe one B might conceal that, but it's very interesting that one B is much less frequently written and in a very narrow geographical area. So this is uh it's quite fun. It's a whole new world. There's a lot to be done, there's a lot to discover. This is just sort of the beginning. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:47

Last thing I wanted to cover to as we wrap up is turning to early Islam and how the Dopari decipherment changes our picture of the linguistic and also the religious environment into which the Quran emerged. How does this change your your view of the religious environment into which the Quran emerged?

SPEAKER_00 31:05

Yes, so I think the Dufari inscriptions are very far away from, but I think it's fascinating that we see the same cluster of liturgical terminology. See, it's not j this is not just a matter of cognates. These are all related languages, that's true. But we see a clustering of religious vocabulary that includes rafarah, hamadah, rharapah, and so forth, right? So this is these are interesting concepts that are bound together and that are used as a package. So all of this, I think, belongs to the background of our study of Quranic diction, and it moves us away from just viewing, and I think this is where the field has been going. We don't read the Quran anymore as a flash in a pen, right? It actually there is a history to the necessarily to the text, but to the language, the expressions, the um vocabulary. Many of these terms are not terms used only in the Quranic milieu and the shallow pre-Islamic period, but are used widely across Arabia and have very deep histories. And the study of texts such as these helps us illuminate what these tech, what these terms might have meant in the original context and especially to their audience. So I think that that's a good direction we're moving.

SPEAKER_02 32:17

Right. Well, I really enjoyed reading the research. For anybody who wants to get in touch or learn more about what you're doing, how can they how can they find you?

SPEAKER_00 32:23

Yes, well, I have an academia page. So if you look up my name, Ahmad Jalad on academia.edu, you have access to almost all my writings, all my papers, and also unpublished things as well. I tend to put preprints up there. So there's a lot of fun material on that site for those who are interested in questions about pre-Islamic Arabia and epigraphy, linguistics, and even, you know, uh, I I would I do not consider myself a uh bona fide historian, but I do have some things to say about the past that are not linguistic. So you can find some of those opinions on there as well. And so that would be the best way. And uh and you can and uh and do go to the oceana.osu.edu website, and you can follow that database on Twitter. It has it where the where it announces new inscriptions. That's all the Twitter account does. It announces new inscriptions that are in Oceana. So follow that to keep up with all the new discoveries.

SPEAKER_02 33:18

Great. Well, thanks so much for coming back on. It was great. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 33:20

Thank you. Good to be here.