THE DHOFAR EPIGRAPHIC PROJECT A Description of the ...

§ 6.
6.1.
Script 1.
The Transliteration of the Inscriptions.
Many of the forms of the letters of the inscriptions
are similar to graphemes found in inscriptions written in other
South Semitic scripts and it is tempting to assume the letters
have the same values here. By assigning values to the letters on
the basis of comparisons of letters in other scripts, it is
possible, with some of the shorter lines, to identify roots that
occur in Arabic. An obvious interpretation of them would be that
they are personal names.
Short texts and such interpretations do not, however,
prove the value of the letters and difficulties are encountered
when trying to establish the values of more ambiguous forms.
Furthermore, the longer inscriptions, where there is some
context, have not, at this stage of analysis, provided
conclusive evidence for the values of either familiar forms or
the less common ones.
For these reasons r no attempt has been made in the
edi tion to attribute etymological or phonemic values to the
letters and the inscriptions in both Scripts 1 and 2 have simply
been transliterated into two separate fonts which represent, in
standardized forms, the original shapes of the letters.
Table 1 is a chart of the typed forms in Script 1. The
forms are arranged according to shape, reading from left to
right and down the page. Underneath each form are the number of
attested examples. Figures 1 - 6 is a script table of Script 1
wi th examples of the letters represented by each typed forms.
The last two columns of Figure 6 give some anomalous forms which
have not been transliterated into the typed script.
Most of the texts in Script 1 are wri tten vertically
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