Languages, scripts and their uses in ancient North Arabia: Papers from the Special Session of the Seminar for Arabian Studies held on 5 August 2017

The 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 Contents

Introduction – 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