This is the first in a series of papers which aim to publish and comment on new Nabataean and Ancient North Arabian (ANA) inscriptions that contain important data on the political, social, linguistic and religious history of the Nabataeans and their nomadic neighbours. The focus is particularly on texts providing evidence on relationships between the Nabataeans and the groups who left the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions, particularly under the lens of their common cult of Dushara, the main deity of the Nabataeans, and of the question of Hismaic/Nabataean and Safaitic/Nabataean bilingualisms for which there is growing evidence. The inscriptions discussed here come from the massif of Ṭūr al-Qawwās in the region of Tabūk, northwest Saudi Arabia (Figs 1 and 2). They were recorded in October 2013 by a group of Saudi travellers and amateur archaeologists known as the Farīq al-Ṣaḥrāʾ, "the Desert Team". 1 They are carved on a flat and rectangular panel standing a few meters above the valley floor that forms a kind of natural "triptych", the sections of which are separated from each other by some fissures and cracks in the bedrock (Fig. 3). They consist of five Hismaic and three Nabataean inscriptions that surround a group of rock drawings and wusūm (tribal marks), knowing that three of the texts are actually associated to each other and that they form a Nabataean/Hismaic partial bilingual (TQNab 1 The study and publication of this material was carried out with the kind permission of Dr. Abdullah Al-Zahrani, Director General of the Centre for Research and Archaeological Studies at the SCTH (Saudi Commission for Tourism & National Heritage), to whom we are extremely grateful.

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This article focuses on an unpublished Hismaic (Thamudic E) inscription housed in the Amman Museum (AMJ 2/J.14202), which was discovered in 1981 by W.J. Jobling in the area of Wadı Ramm, south-western Jordan. The text presents some interest for the study of the history and language of the nomadic tribes who lived in southern Transjordan and northern Arabia in antiquity, as it represents a rare example of an inscription carved by a woman and because it contains the first attestation, in Hismaic, of the feminine singular form of the relative pronoun ḏ.

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