Peter Stein

The texts carved in wooden sticks from Ancient Yemen comprise legal and business documents, correspondence by letter as well as records from religious practice and school exercises. These texts provide unique glimpses of daily life in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula in pre-Islamic times. 180 of these documents, written in the Sabaic and Minaic languages during the 1st millennium BCE, are published and philologically analysed here for the first time. By this volume, the edition of the inscribed wooden sticks from the collection of the Bavarian State Library in Munich has been brought to completion.

Die Thüringer Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek (ThULB) Jena verfügt über einen Bestand von mehr als 1000 Titeln jüdischer (oder mit dem Judentum eng verbundener) Werke des 13.–19. Jh. Dazu gehören frühneuzeitliche Drucke von Bibeln und rabbinischen Standardwerken ebenso wie literarische Schöpfungen in jiddischer Sprache oder mittelalterliche Handschriften zur Sprachwissenschaft und Philosophie, die hier zum ersten Mal in einem umfassenden Querschnitt der Öffentlichkeit vorgestellt werden.

Die Bücher erzählen beispielhaft vom Schicksal jüdischer Autoren und Verleger und zeugen vom regen geistigen Austausch zwischen Juden, Christen und Muslimen in einem grenzenlosen Europa von Gibraltar bis zum Bosporus, vom Hohen Mittelalter bis in die Zeit der Frühaufklärung. Zugleich geben die Bestände einen repräsentativen Einblick in die zentralen Schriften des Judentums wie TaNaKH, Mischna oder Talmud, aber auch weniger bekannte Gattungen wie die mittelalterliche jüdische Grammatik und Philosophie oder frühe Werke der jiddischen Literatur.

The Hilprecht Collection of Babylonian Antiquities is one of the most important collections of its kind in Germany and beyond. It comprises about 3.300 objects, of them more than 3.000 cuneiform tablets, which cover a time span of almost three millennia. Among these tablets we find literary and lexical texts written in Sumerian and Akkadian, mainly from the Old Babylonian period (1st half of the 2nd millennium BCE). The most famous piece in the collection is certainly the so-called „Stadtplan von Nippur“, which is considered to be the oldest city map of the world. But also small artefacts from the Ancient Near East can be found, first of all terracotta figurines, but also more than 60 "incantation bowls" bearing magic inscriptions in Aramaic. The catalogue presents, in 18 chapters, 22 selected objects of the collection in chronological sequence, complemented by introductory essays illuminating the history and scientific importance of the collection as well as the cultural-historical background of the presented artefacts.

The method of manuscript writing in Ancient South Arabia is unique in the Ancient World. In contrast to other societies in the Ancient Near East, the Sabaeans and their neighbors used pieces of wood to write down their everyday correspondence. Wooden sticks, cut off from any kind of tree, form in fact the most easily prepared writing material one can imagine. Thousands of such sticks have come to light—most of them at a single place. They are inscribed with a particular cursive script that developed separately from the well-known lapidary script used for representativepublicly displayed monumental inscriptions.

Among these texts are, first of all, business accounts such as contracts and settlements, as well as letters on business and private matters, but also oracular decisions and other records of religious practice. Numerous writing exercises testify to a developed curriculum in school education. As it seems, the present hoard is the residue of a large public archive in the city of Naššān, a local center in the Wadi al-Ǧawf in northern Yemen, covering the entire history of that region from the early 1st millennium BCE up to the 6th century CE. Since their discovery in the 1970s, the sticks have been dispersed in several collections in Yemen and abroad, with about 400 of them housed by the Bavarian State Library in Munich and another 340 by the Oosters Instituut in Leiden.

Though examination of this type of document is still in its infancy, present research on this and other collections has already yielded rich and partly unexpected data about economic, social, and religious life in pre-Islamic Arabia. It testifies to a well-established tradition of manuscript writing that flourished in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula for more than 1,500 years—contemporary to the cuneiform culture of the Neo-Assyrian Empire as well as to the early Arabic tradition at the time of the Prophet of Islam.

Eastem Arabia has long been underexposed, compared with the south-and northwestem parts of the Peninsula, in terms of the linguistic situation in pre-Islamic times. This is mainly due to the fact that epigraphic evidence from the region is still rather sparse – comprising some forty rather stereotypical "Hasaitic" tomb inscriptions and a few small fragments in Aramaic. Only the site of Mleiha stands out from this picture inasmuch as not only the number of inscriptions from there is comparatively high, but also completely new text genres have been found there. These are particularly two votive inscriptions: one in Aramaic and one in Hasaitic – more precisely, in the South Arabian zabūr script which was used in ancient Yemen for everyday correspondence on wooden sticks. These testify for a differentiated use of writing in the region in the 3rd–2nd centuries BC.

The discussion about the character of »Ashera« in the inscriptions of Kuntillet Ajrūd and Khirbet el-Kōm revolves around the argument that the determination of a proper name by a genitive attribute is not common in Semitic grammar. In the search for parallels, a Semitic written culture has so far completely been ignored: The inscriptions from Ancient South Arabia provide clear examples of the determination of a divine name by another theonym, but also by a suffixed personal pronoun, which should not be disregarded in the assessment of the ancient Hebrew evidence.

Epigraphic records from ancient Arabia comprise not only inscriptions in the local languages and scripts of the region, but also texts in Aramaic. Only recently, places such as TaymāΜ in the north and Mleiha (MulayΉah) in the east of the Peninsula have been shown to be remarkable examples of places where the Aramaic language and script were used during the Achaemenid and Seleucid periods. The evidence from these sites raises several questions, which will be addressed in this paper: when did writing in Aramaic begin in these places, and why there specifically? How much mutual influence can be seen between Aramaic and the local languages and scripts in each of those regions? What is the relationship between the foreign and local languages in terms of their use for administrative, social, and religious purposes?

The Aramaic-Hasaitic bilingual tomb inscription from Mleiha published in Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 27 (2016) is one of the most important epigraphic discoveries from the entire Gulf region. The inscription, which is in an extraordinarily good state of preservation, is not only one of the most comprehensive texts from the region in terms of its languages and scripts, but also provides unique historical information. It contains the first ever reference to a kingdom of Oman and is probably dated to the Seleucid era, about the year 222/221 or 215/ 214 BCE (Overlaet, Macdonald & Stein, 2016). Within two years of its publication , epigraphic research in Mleiha and beyond has yielded some new results which contribute to an improved perception of this extraordinary inscription. These mainly concern the palaeography of the Aramaic script, including the modified reading of some letters, the use of the word br for 'son', and the historical background of the functionary title bqr in the Hasaitic version. Finally, reference is made to some more epigraphic artefacts from Mleiha which are suitable for re-evaluating
the historic importance of the site.

Ancient South Arabia appears to us as a civilisation of script. More than 10,000 inscriptions from there have been known to date, and this is certainly only the tip of the iceberg. Nevertheless the ability of reading and writing among the population was very low, as writing (and reading) remained restricted to only a small group of professional scribes. Regarding the countless inscriptions which were distributed in the public spaces of South Arabia, the question arises for which purpose these texts were in fact composed, whom they should actually address. If hardly anybody was able to read all these public announcements, building inscriptions and votive texts, what was the purpose of their public display?
One answer to this question which is put forward in the present paper is that the main objective of the inscriptions was to give a good external impression, but not necessarily to have a well-composed and accurate text. In other words: the value of a good inscription was not so much seen in a stylistically and orthographically perfect text but rather in the visual aesthetics of a perfect script on an undamaged surface. For this reason, the scribes tended to leave errors in the text unchanged in order not to impair the representative character of the inscription. In consequence we must be aware that scribal errors may occur in any inscription – however perfect and professionally made it ever may appear to us.

The paper provides an entirely new interpretation of the famous Aramaic "Tayma stela", based on an autopsy of the stone. According to this interpretation, the inscription on this stela is not a record of some religious dedication but rather a legal document, testifying the assignment of agricultural estate.

Eastern Arabia has long been underexposed, compared with the south- and northwestern parts of the Peninsula, in terms of the linguistic situation in pre-Islamic times. This is mainly due to the fact that epigraphic evidence from the region is still rather sparse – comprising some forty rather stereotype “Hasaitic” tomb inscriptions and a few small fragments in Aramaic. Only the site of Mleiha stands out from this picture inasmuch as not only the number of inscriptions from there is comparatively high, but also completely new text genres have been found there. These are particularly two votive inscriptions: one in Aramaic and one in Hasaitic – more precisely, in the South Arabian zabūr script which was used in ancient Yemen for everyday correspondence on wooden sticks. These testify for a differentiated use of writing in the region in the 3rd–2nd centuries BC.