Tayma' III : Catalogue of the Inscriptions in the Tayma' Museum and Other Collections

Taymāʾ III presents a catalogue of the inscriptions which were kept in the Taymāʾ Museum until 2017 as well as all known inscriptions from Taymāʾ in other collections, such as the National Museum in Riyāḏ and the Musée du Louvre in Paris. The catalogue contains 102 inscriptions from the Taymāʾ Museum in various languages and scripts, as well as 29 other inscriptions.

Michael C.A. Macdonald has not only edited the volume, but also the inscriptions in Imperial Aramaic, Taymāʾ Aramaic, Nabataean, and the Taymanitic language and script. With Peter Stein's updated reading of the Taymāʾ stone and Jérôme Norris' new edition of the Qaṣr al-Ḥamrā stele, the two most important monuments for the religious history of Taymāʾ in the mid-1st millennium BC are also included in this volume. Frédéric Imbert has edited the Arabic inscriptions from the Taymāʾ Museum.

The indices contain the words and names of all known texts from the Taymāʾ oasis, i.e. those discovered during the Saudi-German excavations between 2004 and 2015 (published in Taymāʾ II, including the cuneiform inscriptions of King Nabonidus of Babylon) and those edited in this volume.

With these two volumes of the Taymāʾ excavation series, all currently accessible inscriptions that originate from this major north-west Arabian oasis, or very likely from there, are published in printed and digital form.

Michael C.A. Macdonald is a Fellow of the British Academy, holds a D.Litt from the University of Chicago, and is an Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. For the last 50 years he has studied the languages, scripts, rock-art and cultures of ancient Arabia and its neighbours, ancient nomads, and ancient literacy. He has led numerous expeditions to record inscriptions in the deserts of Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and led the creation of the Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA).

Muhammad H. al-Najem headed for many years the Taymāʾ Antiquities Office of the Heritage Commission and its predecessors, which included the Taymāʾ Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography. He was the local cooperation partner of the Saudi-German joint archaeological project in Taymāʾ and has published on the archaeology and heritage of the oasis.

Frédéric Imbert is Professor at the Institut de recherches et d'études sur les mondes arabes et musulmans, Aix-Marseille University.

Peter Stein is Associate Professor for Semitic studies at the Faculty of Theology / Ancient languages division at the University of Jena.