Lichtgedanken 03

S C HW E R P U N K T 53 03 | LICHT GEDANKEN Gifts to the gods Travelling broadens the mind, as getting to know other people and cultures makes us see our own lives in a different light. Travellers bring something back from foreign places and leave traces in those places that they have visited. Such exchanges go back thousands of years, as evidenced by the latest research results of the Jena University Semitist, associate professor Peter Stein. In the Persian Gulf area, he deciphered the inscripti- on on a silver plaque, which is evidence that people in the Gulf region worshipped the goddess Allāt. Previous- ly, such gifts to the gods were only known from southern Arabia—the area that is now Yemen. BY JULIANE DÖLITZSCH N E A R E A S T E R N S T U D I E S InMleiha, an archaeological site some 55 kilometres east of Dubai in the Emirate of Sharjah, local researchers made two discoveries a few years ago. In excavati- ons they found a small silver plaque and a handle broken off an amphora, both dating from the late 3rd century BCE. Both finds bear inscriptions in Hasaitic, the language spoken in the region 2,000 years ago. However, the writing on the two objects presented the researchers with a puzzle, because it did not resemble the letter forms known from the region up to that point. Peter Stein, a researcher in Semi- tic languages, cultures and histories, who in recent years has been working intensively on the written culture of an- cient South Arabia, was able to solve the puzzle. With support from the Director- General of the Sharjah Archaeological Authority, Dr Sabah Jasim, Stein has been able to study the original inscrip- tions and decipher them. The Zabur writing system What made the inscriptions initially so »unreadable« was the fact that they were written in Zabur , in cursive letters that were commonly used for writing The archaeological site in Mleiha, with recons- tructed tower-shaped tombs from the late 3rd century BCE. The site is in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, on the Persian Gulf. Here, archaeolo- gists have found records written in Zabur , the everyday writing system of ancient Yemen. daily matters in ancient Yemen. » Za- bur was usually scratched into small wooden sticks,« explains Stein. Letters, contracts and other official documents were written down and distributed in this way as far back as the early 1st cen- tury BCE. The »ancient South Arabian minuscule script«, as Zabur is also refer- red to, was previously only known from the south of the Arabian Peninsula, but not from the Persian Gulf region. The content of the inscriptions was also a source of astonishment for the re- searchers. Whereas the writing on the handle of the amphora refers only to its