Description
Book SynopsisThe Seminar for Arabian Studies has come a long way since 1968 when it was first convened, yet it remains the principal international academic forum for research on the Arabian Peninsula. This is clearly reflected in the ever-increasing number of researchers from all over the world who come each year to the three-day Seminar to present and discuss their latest research and fieldwork. Most of the papers published in this volume were presented at a Special Session of the fifty-first Seminar for Arabian Studies, held at the British Museum on 5 August 2017. Its subject was ‘Languages, scripts, and their uses in ancient North Arabia’ and it was held to celebrate the completion in the previous March of Phase 2 of the ‘Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia’ (OCIANA).
Table of ContentsIntroduction – by Michael C.A. Macdonald ;
I. The use of languages and scripts in settled areas ;
Towards a re-assessment of the Ancient North Arabian alphabets used in the oasis of al-ΚUlā – by Michael C.A. Macdonald ;
Scribal practices in contact: two Minaic/Dadanitic mixed texts – by Fokelien Kootstra ;
‘Literacy in literate societies’: the scribe in Nabataean and other Aramaic contexts – by John F. Healey ;
The role of Aramaic on the Arabian Peninsula in the second half of the first millennium BC – by Peter Stein ;
II. The use of languages and scripts among nomads: ;
New research on the ‘Thamudic’ graffiti from the region of Дimā (Najrān, Saudi Arabia) – by Alessia Prioletta with a note by Christian J. Robin ;
A survey of the Ancient North Arabian inscriptions from the Dūmat al-Jandal area (Saudi Arabia) – by Jérôme Norris ;
A preliminary investigation of an Ancient North Arabian invocation from the Madaba region of central Jordan – by Hani Hayajneh ;
Understanding Safaitic inscriptions in their topographical context – by Ali Al-Manaser ;
The earliest attestation of laysa and the implications for its etymology – by Ahmad Al-Jallad ;
Papers read at the Special Session
