Highlights: Deciphering A Mysterious Pre-Islamic Script

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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. 

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

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SPEAKER_00 0:12

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 McDonald gave me the photographs for all of the inscriptions that uh the photographs for all the the Fody inscriptions that Geraldine King took to upload onto the database at some point. I was on a flight to Jordan to do my field work, and this was in early June from Paris. So Paris Amen. The Royal Royal Jordanian is a wonderful airline, uh, but this particular plane, 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 fati 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 ABCD, that is a list of all the letters in the script. I assumed it was an ADC dri. 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 Gim al-Dalat. Theirs is organized H L dot 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 and 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 digits have been around since 1991. So they were there, people would look at them, they'd been published multiple times, even republished. It's um 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 Orientelux? 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_01 3:53

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

SPEAKER_00 4:04

That's fantastic. 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, Sukhotra, they continue to use the ancient languages, but we know very little about that population before the arrival of Islam. Even the onomastikum, 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 6:33

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 6:33

So what's fascinating about Shemps is in Yemen, ancient Yemen, Shemps is a goddess. Shems just basically means sun. But in Mesopotamia, in East Arabia, and in North Arabia even, Shems is male. And in the Dhofadi inscription, Shemps is male as well. It's interesting to 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 ainlam, 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, I mean 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. Smaal is also very interesting because this alayh root, to be high, to be exalted, is applied to shumps 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 that 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 gafarah, which is repentance, okay, forgiveness. And then you also have, in addition to those two, uh 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 KME64, for example, is a very, very interesting text which says something like, Bayit, 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 meme uh, the consonantal skeleton meme hamdah before Muhammad. All right. So we said in the Fari they like to use the root hamadah in inscriptions praising gods. South Arabian also used 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, 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. In the Jewish inscription, there's a there's a deity called Rabbihud, Lord of the Jews, be Muhammad, or Bi 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.