In Old South Arabian monumental script

[Sabaean]. South Arabian alabaster plaque with Sabaean inscription.

€ 28,000.00

A fragmentary alabaster plaque bearing a four-line Sabean inscription in al-Musnad or Old South Arabian monumental script. The content concerns the construction of overflow channels for embanked, irrigated fields, at the command of a tribe known as the Bani Mamzafuf.

The highly quadrangular script suggests a provincial origin, rather than a very archaic one; the closest parallels are probably inscriptions from the time of Sumhu'alay Yanuf III (ca. 270 BCE) and Karibil Watar II (ca. 190 BCE), leading to a provisional dating for this piece of ca. 220 BCE (see accompanying letter from the Liverpool archaeologist Kenneth A. Kitchen, dated 16 Jan. 1997). The text is party arranged in boustrophedon style: the top two lines run left to right, the bottom two run right to left. It would originally have covered other, similar placques to right and left; thus, this specimen is from the middle of at least three such plaques containing the entire inscription.

Sabaean (Sabaic), also sometimes incorrectly known as Himyarite (Himyaritic), was an Old South Arabian language spoken in Yemen from ca. 1000 BCE to the 6th century CE, by the Sabaeans; it was used as a written language by some other peoples of Ancient Yemen, including the Himyarites, Hashidites, Sirwahites, Humlanites, Ghaymanites, and Radmanites. The Sabaean language belongs to the South Arabian subgroup of the Semitic group of the Afro-Asiatic language family. It was written in the South Arabian alphabet, and like Hebrew and Arabic marked only consonants, not vowels. Sabaean is attested in some 1040 dedicatory inscriptions (such as this one), 850 building inscriptions, 200 legal texts, and 1300 short graffiti (containing only personal names). No literary texts of any length have yet been brought to light. This paucity of source material, as well as the limited forms of the inscriptions, have made it difficult to get a complete picture of Sabaean grammar.