Lichtgedanken 03

Rubrik 55 03 | LICHT GEDANKEN Contact Associate Prof. Dr Peter Stein Faculty of Theology Fürstengraben 6, D-07743 Jena, Germany Phone: +49 36 41 9-41 114 Email: peter.stein@uni-jena.de www.theologie.uni-jena.de Original Publication South Arabian zabur script in the Gulf: some recent discoveries from Mleiha (Sharjah, UAE). Arabian archaeology and epigraphy (2017), DOI: 10.1111/aae.12087 owner, the inscription on the seven-by- six-centimetre silver plaque is evidence of a religious custom hitherto also un- known in the Gulf region. »In material and shape, the plaque re- sembles the bronze plaques that were typical of southern Arabia. There, they were used as votive offerings to the gods,« adds Stein. The letters, six to eight millimetres in size, are punched into the smooth metal surface. As was the usual practice in ancient South Ara- bia, the individual words are separated by vertical lines. Votive offering to the goddess Allāt Now that the content of the inscription has been deciphered, we can see clearly that the plaque was offered to All ā t, a goddess worshipped throughout Ara- bia. Peter Stein suspects that the god- dess »might have been worshipped here as a major goddess of the area, un- der the local name of Hall ā t«. Starting from South Arabia, the Zabur script and the custom of dedicating metal plaques to the gods must have travelled many hundreds of kilometres in order to have become a local custom at the site in the Gulf region where it was found. This probably happened through trade along the famous Incense Route. From numerous inscriptions found in Yemen, it is known that around 300 BCE there was lively trade between the ancient trading city of Gerrha in the east of the Peninsula and the region that is now Yemen. »The eastern Arabian traders, who had not developed their own lo- cal written language, must have used the South Arabian writing system and then brought this knowledge back home with them,« says Stein. A second route that the Zabur script and the religious custom might have taken runs along the south coast of the Arabian Peninsula, through the regi- on Hadramawt—now the eastern part of Yemen—to Oman. Here too, people communicated using wooden sticks in- scribed with the Zabur script. »The local form of the ancient South Arabian wri- ting system that was developed in eas- tern Arabia is referred to by scholars as Hasaitic,« explains Stein. The other wri- ting system we know of from the Gulf Region is Aramaic, which served as a lingua franca throughout the Near East from the middle of the 1st millennium BCE. An Aramaic votive inscription to the same deity on a bronze plaque was already discovered in Mleiha a consi- derable time ago. However, it was only possible to identify this votive offering correctly against the background of the recently discovered silver plaque. Temples still to be discovered What is exciting about these votive plaques is not least the knowledge that there must have been temples or shrines near Mleiha. »However, apart from to- wer-like tombs, no evidence has as yet been found for solid constructions in that period. The permanent settlement of the location by the previously noma- dic population apparently began only 100 to 200 years later,« explains Stein. The finds do answer some questions, but also pose new riddles, which need to be solved. Associate professor Peter Stein has deciphered the inscription on the silver plaque (photo p. 54). He is one of the few experts in the world able to read the ancient South Arabian minuscule script Zabur .