An early Christian Arabic graffito mentioning ‘Yazīd the king’

Abstract

This article is an edition and commentary on an early Christian Arabic inscription discovered near Qaṣr Burquʿ in northeastern Jordan. The text mentions a certain yzydw ʾl-mlk 'Yazid the king' and could date to the sixth or seventh century. We discuss the text's palaeography, its relevance for the history of the Arabic script, and attempt to identify the historical figure to which it refers. K E Y W O R D SArabic palaeography, Christian Arabic, graffiti, pre-Islamic Arabic, Umayyad | INTRODUCTIONThe rock inscription discussed here was discovered during the first season of the El-Khḍer ı archaeological and epigraphic survey project in north-eastern Jordan. The inscription comes from as-Samr un ıyy at (site number S5), located 12 km south-west of Qaṣr Burquʿ, and was the only text found at the site. In terms of archaeological remains, the site contains a tailed tower tomb on its southern slope and a number of stone-circle structures scattered on its northern side. These ancient structures have been reused in recent times as seasonal camps by nomadic pastoralists. The inscription consists of a four-word early Arabic graffito, perhaps from the sixth or seventh century, accompanied by a cross. The text contains several unique palaeographic features and a reference to a certain yzydw ʾl-mlk or 'Yaz ıd the king'. The present article will provide a reading and interpretation of the inscription, a discussion of its palaeographic and linguistic features, and an attempt to identify the historical figure mentioned in the inscription. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

A Palaeo‐Arabic inscription from the Ḥismā Desert (Tabūk region)

“…In the Ǧabal Usays inscription and that of Ḥakīm son of ʿUmārah, it is a stroke or a hook in a crescent shape facing the right side (Al‐Rāšid, 1995, p. 55). Another early Arabic inscription bearing a final kāf is the Yazīd inscription (likely to be from the sixth‐ or the seventh‐century CE; see Al‐Shdaifat et al, 2017), in which the upper stroke is a straight, vertical line (Table 3).…”

Points of Contact: The Shared Intellectual History of Vocalisation in Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew

“…In this stage, scribes distinguished consonants which were identical in writing, but had different points of articulation. A consonant articulated farther back in the mouth received a dot above, while its graphemic twin with a more fronted 20 Though note al- Shdaifat et al (2017), who argue for the application of a Nabatean diacritic dot in an Arabic inscription that might be from the sixth century.…”

“…They may also have favoured the use of ʾiʿjām on specific difficult words or grammatical categories, following similar tendencies among Syriac scribes to mark only ambiguous homographic forms with the diacritic dot (Kaplony 2008, 101). Furthermore, there is at least one Arabic inscription from the sixth or seventh century that appears to have diacritic dots held over from earlier Aramaic writing systems (al-Shdaifat et al 2017).…”

Epigraphica Dusaria I. Some Nabataean, Hismaic and Hismaic/Nabataean inscriptions with rock drawings from the Ḥismā desert, north‐west of Tabūk (Saudi Arabia)

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