W. J. Bankes and the Identification of the Nabataean Script - Khalili ...

42 N.N. LEWIS and M.C.A. MACDONALD
Syria 80 (2003)
THE NABATAEAN SCRIPT
DISCOVERY, IDENTIFICATION AND DECIPHERMENT 1
The existence in Sinai of rock-cut writings in a strange script has been known in the Christian world since
at least the early sixth century AD, when an Alexandrian merchant, later known as Cosmas Indicopleustes,
noticed them while travelling through Sinai. 2 He tried to discover what they were and what they said, and some
Jews who claimed to be able to read them told him that they recorded > Cosmas speculated that the Children of Israel
first learnt the art of writing after Moses received the Law on Mount Sinai and inscribed it on tablets of stone.
Thus, he reasoned, writing was given by God to the Israelites at a very early period in their history and, during
their forty years wandering in the Wilderness, they practised it with exuberance on the rocks of the Sinai desert. 3
Cosmas went on to suggest that, after their entry into the Promised Land, the Israelites passed the script to their
neighbours, the Phoenicians, who, via Cadmus king of Tyre, transmitted it to the Greeks and thence to the rest
of the world.
Although it was incorrect, this theory had a certain internal coherence and was immensely attractive in that
it promised access through these texts to a primeval writing system, given directly by God to Man on Mount
Sinai, from which every alphabet in the world could trace its ancestry.
The first printed edition of Cosmas' work was published in Paris in 1706 4 and it was not long before his theory
became the orthodox view, ousting more recent hypotheses 5 and generating considerable interest in the
> inscriptions throughout Europe. Thus, in 1753 Richard Clayton, Bishop of Clogher, published an
English translation of the journal of the « Prefetto >> of the Franciscans at Cairo. The Prefetto had noticed the
inscriptions on his way to the monastery of St. Catherine in 1722 and remarked that < though we had in our
company persons, who were acquainted with the Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic, Latin, Armenian,
Turkish, English, Illyrican, German, and Bohemian languages, yet none of them had any knowledge of these
characters >. 6 Clayton's commentary is an (unacknowledged) expansion of Cosmas' theory:
1. The authors are grateful to the National Trust and to the Dorset Archives Service for giving them access to the material discussed
here and for permitting them to publish it. References below in the form D/BKL HJ4/12 >> are to the W.J. Bankes Travel Journals
Collection in the Archive of the Bankes Family ofLingston Lacy and Corfe Castle, held by Dorset Record Office at Dorchester and owned
by the National Trust. Those in the form < D/BKL V.A 21 >> are to the W.J. Bankes Drawings and Inscriptions Collection in the same
archive. We would also like to thank Madame Pascale Linant de Bellefonds for providing us with a number of excerpts from the
unpublished manuscript logbook kept by Linant de Bellefonds on his journey with Leon de Laborde, and Dr Lafla Nehme for alerting
us to many Nabataean references. Unless otherwise stated, translations from works in languages other than English are by Macdonald.
2. COSMAS INDICOPLEUSTES/MIGNE 1864: Liber V. §§205-206, col. 215-218.
3. < Those who have newly acquired the art of writing write frequently and much; and thus it is that all these places [in Sinai] are
covered with Hebrew inscriptions. > COSMAS INDICOPLEUSTES/MIGNE 1864: §205, col. 217.
4. MONTFAUCON 1706.
5. For instance, an early seventeenth-century traveller records that both the monks at St. Catherine's monastery and the Bedouin who
guided pilgrims to it, repeated a tradition that one text on a stone at the foot of Mount Sinai had been written by the Prophet Jeremiah
to mark the place where he had hidden the < sacred vessels >> from the Temple (II Maccabees 2: 4-6), despite the fact that the Biblical
passage quite clearly refers to Mount Nebo, not Mount Sinai (see KIRCHER 1636: 205), a point reiterated by Pococke when he saw the
remains of the inscription more than a century later (POCOCKE 1743-1745, I : 148). Kircher, who published a copy and tentative
decipherment of this inscription [= CIS II 3031 ] believed that it was a very ancient < Chaldaic >> inscription and interpreted it as an echo
of Isaiah's prophecy o Behold a virgin shall conceive... >> (Isaiah 7:14; see KIRCHER 1636: 206-216), though he believed that there were
many others in the < ancient Hebrew character >> around the area where Moses had broken the tablets of the Law. The French traveller,
de Monconys, who passed through Sinai in 1647, and whose Bedouin guides denied him the opportunity of copying the texts, recognized
that the letters had < ni la forme des Latins, Grecs, Hebreux, Arabes, ni des Hieroglyphiques >> but nevertheless concluded that