The impact of the Hellenization in the Ancient Near East resulted in a notable presence of Greek koiné language and culture and in the interaction between Greek and Nabataean that conducted inhabitants to engrave inscriptions in public spaces using one of the two languages or both. In this questionably ‘diglossic’ situation, a significant number of Nabataean-Greek inscriptions emerged, showing that the koinŽ was employed by the Nabataeans as a sign of Hellenistic cultural affinity. This book offers a linguistic and philological analysis of fifty-one Nabataean-Greek epigraphic evidences existing in northern Arabia, Near East and Aegean Sea, dating from the first century BCE to the third-fourth century CE. This collection is an analysis of the linguistic contact between Nabataean and Greek in the light of the modalities of social, religious and linguistic exchanges. In addition, the investigation of onomastics (mainly the Nabataean names transcribed in Greek script) might allow us to know more about the Nabataean phonological system.

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This paper deals with three fragments of the Hellenistic biographer Diokles of Magnesia in which he ascribes three poetic quotations from Sophokles and Homer to three philosophers, namely Aristippos, Diogenes of Sinope and Krates. These attributions, which are presented as ipsissima verba uttered by the philosophers themselves, were probably inserted by Diokles in order to defend his personal philosophical views.

Through a new analysis of the Greek-Sidetic inscription of Seleucia (S6) further considerations about the Lycian origin of the author and the possible diglossic nature of the inscription emerge.

The Arabic word furāt occurs only three times in the Qur"an denoting the "sweet (fresh) waters" of the river in contrast to the salt waters of the see. Moreover, the adjective with the definite article, al-Furāt, identifies the Euphrates River. The aim of this article is to establish if an etymological relationship between furāt and al-Furāt exists. The adjective furāt derives from the verb form faruta meaning "to be sweet (referring to the water)", therefore the problem is to establish if the qualitative verb faruta, and its adjective furāt, is related to other verbs of the root of frt/prt or if it originated from the adjective furāt as a denominative verb. The root frt/prt meaning "sweet in relation to the water" is not present in other Semitic languages as Hebrew and Aramaic. On the contrary, in Arabic al-Furāt derives from Sumerian Buranum and Akkadian Purattum indicating the Euphrates River as the river where sweet (fresh) waters flow; later the name of the river changed into the adjective furāt meaning "sweet waters" and al-Furāt refers to the Euphrate as "the sweet river". In addition, the Greek form, Euphrates, may have originated from Old Persian Ufrātu where the initial U-could have been a reinterpretation of the Sumerian determinative hid-(ID 2 ) "river"; later it was transformed into U-< Persian prefix HU-"good, well", so the Greeks understood *eu-frat "the good (sweet) river".