Reflections on the linguistic map of pre-Islamic Arabia - Khalili ...

Thus, there is at present a very clear contrast
between eastern Arabia, where
writing seems hardly to have taken root,
and the western two-thirds of the Peninsula
where it seems to have been endemic.
This said, however, there are also clear distinctions
between the northwest and the
southwest in languages, scripts, the types
of document available and relations with
other societies. In what follows, I shall be
concentrating on what we know of the
linguistic situation in north and central Arabia
in the first millennia BC and AD. I
shall not deal with the languages of ancient
South Arabia, except when they impinge
on those of the north (84).
Ancient North Arabian
The hn-dialects
In northwestern Arabia a multiplicity of
dialects developed within the group I have
called Ancient North Arabian, which uses
h- as the definite article. The earliest occurrence
of this article is in the name of the
goddess hn- $ lt in the Aramaic dedications
on silver bowls found at her shrine at Tell
al-Mashūtw a, in the Nile delta. These have
been dated to the late fifth century BC (85).
One of the dedicators was Qaynū bar
Gesˇem, king of Qēdār, and it has recently
been suggested that this is evidence that
this tribe could have spoken a h-/hn-dialect
(86). However, this is to stretch the evidence
too far. The other dedications found
at the shrine are also to hn- $ lt. Of the two
others which name the dedicator, one is
made by a man with an Egyptian name
and a North Arabian patronym (87), while
in the other both names are Semiticized
Egyptian (88). It seems clear, therefore, that
the goddess of this shrine was worshipped
as hn- $ lt, regardless of how this epithet
would be realized in the languages of individual
pilgrims, or the Aramaic of the
dedications. This epithet cannot therefore
THE LINGUISTIC MAP OF PRE-ISLAMIC ARABIA
be used as evidence for the language
spoken by the tribe of Qēdār or any other
of the dedicants.
Similarly, this example should warn us
that the epithet $ Alilát mentioned by Herodotus
(89) is not necessarily evidence for
the dialect of his Arab informants (who
were probably living in eastern Egypt or
Sinai). In ancient Near-Eastern religions
epithets rapidly became names and, once
this had happened, the form of the name
was fixed. All we can say is that in eastern
Egypt in the fifth century BC both the hand
the $ l-dialects were represented in the
epithet ‘the goddess’ (90), but with no certainty
as to who was speaking these dialects
at the time, or where they originated.
Dadanitic
The one dialect of Ancient North Arabian in
which it is certain that hn- was used was Dadanitic.
The normal Dadanitic article is hbut
before / $ / (91) and / c / (92) it is hn-. It
has been suggested that hn- is a survival of
the original article in all members of this
group, but that in the other dialects it was reduced
to h- (93). It is impossible to prove or
disprove this theory, but if this were so, one
would expect the odd irregularity of usage
in Dadanitic and sporadic survivals in other
dialects. In fact, however, there is only one
possible instance in Dadanitic of hn- before
a phoneme which is not a pharyngal or a
glottal (94), and no certain examples (except
in names) in the other dialects. So this feature
could just as well, or perhaps more
likely, be a euphonic development within
Dadanitic, as a survival from an earlier
period.
A Safaitic inscription, by an author who
gives his nisba as hn-hw wly (95), provides an
interesting footnote to this discussion. It is
clear from many other Safaitic texts that the
Hw wlt came from outside the normal migration
areas of the tribes east of the Hw awrān
whose members wrote these graffiti,
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