reynolds-the-quran-in-its-historical-context-2

126 llanillayqinehthat can elucidate vague cultural and linguistic references ininscriptions. 41The Arabian languages and dialects 42 of Arabia before IslamIn the last five decades, the documentation of Ancient South Arabian languageand culture has significantly improved. Pre-Islamic South Arabia is one of theoldest centers of civilization in the Near East, as it enjoyed a fertile soil and a wetclimate, which was of great importance for the stability of the population.ological work in this part of Arabia has shown that it witnessed a sophisticatedcivilization starting from the last centuries of the Late Bronze Age. The earliestepigraphical documentation can be roughly dated back to the tenth or eleventh.century BC.ASA consists of four dialects 43 - Sabaic, Minaic, Qatabanic and Hadramitic .... ::all of which are written in a distinctive script called al-musnad. 44 ASA is affiliated •41 One might trace historical, religious or cultural aspects of the epigraphical sources of Pre-IslamicArabia through the Qur'iin. For example, the references in South Arabian epigraphical sources to"daughters of II" might be better understood in light of the Qur'iin references to the pre-IslamicArabian goddesses All at, Mina and a/- 'Uzza. Some temple decorations seem to offer a representationof the "Daughters of II," namely images of young women in a hieratic attitude, duplicated agreat number of times. The Qur'an constantly denies that God ever begot daughters ("Daughtersof God"), which shows that in Western Arabia, too, some people venerated deities similar to theSouth Arabian "Daughters of II." See C. Robin, "Les 'Filles de Dieu' de Saba' a Ia Mecque:Reflexions sur l'agencement des pantheons dans ('Arabie ancienne," Semitica 50,2001, 104-92.42 The identification of the linguistic affiliation of a certain language and its relationship to otheradjacent or remote languages or dialects is morphologically based; i.e. it is the morphologyis taken as a basis for linguistic clustering. Due to the vowelless script of ASA and ANA and otherknown epigraphical groups in Arabia, our knowledge of the morphological situation of thesebranches is still restricted and vague. Therefore, it is for the meantime impossible to decide.whether the ASA epigraphical groups (Sabaic, Qatabanic, Hadramitic and Minaic) are distinctlanguages to which the generic name ASA can be given. Although there are linguistic differencesbetween them, i.e. with regard to the verbal system, e.g. the existence of the short and long prefixconjugation in Sabaic particularly, etc., the current situation as can be gleaned from the ASAinscriptions does not grant us the right to designate these epigraphical groups as discrete"languages". Therefore, I prefer here the designation "dialect" rather than "language". The same isalso applicable to the ANA epigraphical variants. There, the situation is more complicated, not·only because of the vowelless script used, but also because of the lack of sufficient morphologicaland syntactical evidence; the texts are very short which prevents us from drawing sufficientreliable conclusions in this regard. The generic designations of ANA mentioned above arebased on geographical considerations. Other Arabian epigraphical groups, i.e. the texts discoveredin Qaryat al-Fiiw written in ASA script, are difficult to classify, as they contain linguistic featuresthat are familiar in both ASA as well as Arabic.43 There are no strong distinctive linguistic features that lead us to consider these linguistic variantsas different languages, as the morphological scope of these linguistic unities is not clear due tovowelless script used.44 A. Beeston, "Pre-Islamic South Arabian," in David Noel Freedman (ed.), Anchor Bible ut.cmmaiY,.New York: Doubleday,l992, 4:223-26.Arabian languages as a source for Qur 'iinic vocabulary 127the western branch of the South Semitic linguistic group. 45 The aforemenlinguisticdesignations refer to political entities. After the advent ofthe southern parts of Arabia (modem Yemen) became part of the IslamicArabic replaced Sabiac, which was used in the later stages as a prestigious]ruagrtag·e, while Himyaritic seems to have been used colloquially (see below). 46possess thousands of published ASA inscriptions of different lengths