m. o'connor, the arabic loanwords in nabatean aramaic

THE ARABIC LOANWORDS IN NABATEAN ARAMAIC

M OCONNOR Ann Arbor Michigan

T H E 4000 Nabatean texts cover a remarkable range of territory-from the area of Bostra over to the Sinai and down into northern Arabia-and document the history of the region in a variety of ways Among the most remarkable historical witnesses in the Nabatean corpus is a lintel inscription from the isolated shrine site of Rawwafah a Greek and Nabatean bilingual it records that the Thamiid erected the shrine in honor of the Roman emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius ~ e r u s The

1 On the language see J Cantineau LA Nabateen (Paris 1930-32) for recent work see in addition to the articles cited below and J Teixidor Bulletin depigraphie semitique Syria 44- (1967-) (hereafter BES) A Negev The Inscriptions of Wadi Haggag Sinai Qedem vol 6 (Jerusalem 1977) and idem Nabatean Inscriptions in Southern Sinai BA 45 (1982) 21-25 For a convenient selection of Naba- tean texts see H Ingholt Palmyrene-Hatran- Nabateanin F Rosenthal ed An Aramaic Hand- book pt 1 (hereafter Ingholt) (Wiesbaden 1967) I have used the following abbreviations for Ingholts texts IngNab = a Nabatean text published in Ingholt and IngHat = a Hatran text published there J = a Nabatean text published in J A Jaussen and R Savignac Mission archPologique en Arabic vol 1 (Paris 1907) lngholt Nabatean texts in Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum (CIS) (Paris 1881-) vol 2 are IngNab 1 = CIS 2170 3 = 196 4 = 350 10 = 197 1 1 = 198 12 = 209 13 = 213 14 = 234 15 = 271 IngNab 13-15 are discussed in F V Winnett and W L Reed Ancient Records from North Arabia (hereafter A R N A ) Near and Middle East Series 6 (Toronto 1970) 517 IngNab 15 or the Raqiish Epitaph is treated below For the history of Aramaic I follow the periodization of J A Fitzmyer The Phases of the Aramaic Language in his A Wandering Aran~ean Collected Aramaic Essays SBL Monograph Series 25 (Missoula Montana 1979) pp 57-84 J H Levinson The Nabatean Aramaic Inscriptions (PhD diss New York Uni- versity 1974) offers a morphological sketch an edition of some texts (twelve complete two partial with notes on three others) and a glossary he draws chiefly o n comparative Aramaic materials notably from rabbinic sources

For the historical background see J Starckys masterful summary PCtra et la Nabatene in H

[JNES 45 no 3 (1986)l 1986 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved 0022-2968]864503-0003$100

Cazelles and A Feuillet eds Supplhnent arc Dicshytionnaire de la Bible (hereafter SDB) vol 7 (Paris 1966) cols 866-1017 Teixidor The Pagan God Religion in the Graeco-Roman Near East (Princeton 1977) F E Peters The Nabateans in the Hawran JAOS 97 (1977) 263-77 G W Bowersock Roman Arabia (Cambridge 1983) and two symposia one held at the Rhine Regional Museum at Bonn in 1978 under the direction of H P Roschinski and published as part of Bonner Jahrbiicher 180 (1980) and the other held at Christ Church College Oxford in 1980 and published A Hadidi ed Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan [(Amman 1982) (hereafter Studies) (see further n 96 below) In the first symposium note esp Roschinskis survey Sprachen Schriften und lnschriften in Nordwestarabien Bonshyner Jahrbiicher 180 (1980) 155-88 (pp 159-62 on Nabatean) and in the second Miliks Origines des Nabateens in Studies pp 261-65 in which he proposes that the Nabatean homeland was in the area where the United Arab Emirates and south- eastern Saudi Arabia meet (ibid pp 264-65)

Note the following language abbreviations used throughout Akk(adian) Ar(a)m(aic) B(ib1ical) Heb(rew) C(1assical) Ar(a)b(ic) Gr(ee)k Hatr(an) J(ewish)Arm Mand(aic) M(ilthnaic) Heb Nab(atean) Off(icia1) Arm Palm(yrene) Phoen(ician) Syr(iac)

For comments on earlier drafts of this and related papers 1 am grateful to P T Daniels J A Fitzmyer D F Graf and L K Obler each of whom pounced on different gaps and gaffes with wonted assiduity J A Bellamy and E N McCarus went over the Raqh text with me

2 The basic description is P L Parr G L Harding and J E Dayton Preliminary Survey in N W Arabia 1968 Bulletin of the Institute of Archae- ology University of London 10 (1972) 23-61 pls 1-31 further discussion in J Beaucamp Raw- wafa (et les Thamoudeens) SDB vol 9fasc 53 (Paris 1979) cols 1467-75 The texts are published by Milik Inscriptions grecques et nabateennes de Rawwafa in Parr et ai Preliminary Survey pp 54-59 for further discussion of the Greek text see G W Bowersock The Greek-Nabatean Bilingual

213

Nabatean portion of the text is as its editor J T Milik puts it full of lexical novelties among them three previously unattested Arabic loanword^^ One of these is of special interest irkt federation company furnishes the long-sought etymon for Grk sarakgnos from which derive the stock European designations for Arabs among them English ~ a r a c e n ~Nab i rk t is not alone in evidencing pre-Islamic use of the root cognate to CArb Sarika to associate especially IV airaka (billahi) to attribute associates (to God) The term Srkt may occur in a text in Hatran a dialect like Nabatean of the Middle Aramaic group The verb i rk is found in a Safaitic text and is used in a variety of names found in texts in Middle Aramaic (Palmyrene Old Syriac Elymaian) North Arabic (Safaitic Thamudic) and Old South Arabian ( ~ a t a b a n i a n ) ~ The RawwZifah texts make it necessary to re-examine the stock of Arabic loanwords in Nabatean a stock defined by J Cantineau in his grammar of the language

Cantineau was not only one of the great Semitists of his time he was also among the most theoretically sophisticated of all Semitists the major formulator of the lateral hypothesis for Proto-Semitic and the French translator of Prince Nikolay Trubetzkoys Grundziige der ~ h o n o l o ~ i e ~ Nonetheless Cantineaus statement of the relationship between Nabatean and the North Arabic dialects spoken by its users is erroneous in order to assess properly the place of i rk t as an Arabic loan in Nabatean we need to reconsider Cantineaus views

Written by speakers of Arabic [Nabatean] underwent an extremely strong Arabic influence it borrowed from that language not only nearly all its proper names and a portion of its vocabulary but further isolated grammatical forms Nabatean seems to have emptied itself little by little [semble sFtre vidP peu a peu] of the Aramaic elements it had and to have successively replaced them with Arabic loans this went on up to the time (at the beginning of the fourth century cE)when it was decided to write nearly pure Arabic [lurube a peu prPs purl while preserving Nabatean script7

It would be wrong to dismiss Cantineaus description as romantic though there is a streak of romanticism in it and we can surely enlarge on Marcel Cohens protest Bad theory [Doctrine erronken] quoted by Cantineau h im~e l f ~ The first step must be to insist that the personal and other names in Nabatean do not bear on its

Inscription at RuwwSa Saudi Arabiain J Bingen et al eds Le Monde grec Hommages a Claire Prkaux (Brussels 1975) pp 512-22 On the religious background of the text see J Starcky Quelques aspects de la religion des Nabateens in Studies pp 195-96

3 Milik Rawwafa p 56 4 See D F Grafs and my article The Origin of

the Term Saracen and the RawwSah Inscriptions Byzantine SrudieslEtudes byzantines 4 (1977) 52-66 The suggestion has been well received by for example Bowersock Mavia Queen of the Saracens in W Eck et al eds Studien zur antiken Sozial- geschichle Festschrift Friedrich Vittinghof(Cologne 1980) pp 477-95 esp p 483

5 These are discussed in my paper The Etymology of Saracen and Nabatean Srkt in Aramaic and Pre- Islamic Arabic Contexts in J A Bellamy ed Essays in Near Eastern History and Culture in

Memory of Ernest T Abdel-Massih (forthcoming) 6 See Cantineau Etudes de linguistique arabe

(Paris 1960) 7 Idem Le Nabarken vol I p x The last phrase

refers to the al-NamBrah epitaph of lmru 1-Qais dated 328 cEsee ibid p 13 vol 2 pp 49-50 Starcky Petra col 932 and J A Bellamy A New Reading of the N a m a a h Inscription JAOS 105 (1985) 31-51

8 Cantineau Le Nabateen vol 2 pp 219-20 Starckys formulation is more cautious although Nabatean is more conservative than Jewish Aramaic or Palmyrene (cf PCtra col 925) and closer than either to Official Aramaic it has nonetheless a certain number of arabisms the origins of which are not homogeneous (Petra col 924) Levinson is similarly cautious see his The Nabatean Inscrip- tions pp 6-7 13 100 n 10

evaluation as a language9 The second step must be to evaluate Cantineaus list of borrowed words and forms Ideally this should be done in light of the entire Nabatean record but I will draw chiefly on Cantineaus own materials and only incidentally on texts discovered in the last half-century To evaluate the whole corpus we must await the next fascicle of the second volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum long under preparation by Cantineaus great successors in Nabatean studies J Starcky and J T Milik Along with the reconsideration of Cantineaus list must come recognition of the special status of the bilingual RaqZsh Epitaph from al-HijriMadain SZlih recently reread by Milik and Starcky

Reconsideration of Cantineaus list involves the fundamental difficulty of all intra- Semitic language study there is a common stratum of vocabulary and grammatical structure which makes it impossible to assign many words and formants to a particular language12 The difficulty of recognizing loans of various sorts is inversely proportional to the relationship of the languages Akkadian-West Semitic loans are sometimes easy to recognize Palm pkl for example displays a syllabic structure which would be recognized as distinctive even if its origins in Akk apkallu (from Sumerian ab-gal) were not known13 Although they are closely related the fundamental differences between Arabic and Middle Aramaic are numerous enough and the languages of the Aramaic family are well enough attested to make it possible to isolate a set of words loaned from Arabic into abatea an^ Let us examine Cantineaus efforts

9 New material on names is abundant see for example Milik Nouvelles inscriptions nabateennes Syria 35 (1958) 227-51 esp pp 245250 and Milik and Starcky Inscriptions rCcemment dCcouvertes a Petra ADAJ20 (1975) 1 1 1-30 esp 122 129

10 As W Diem notes in a different context Cantineau is quite complete (Diem I p 210 n 3 see below) for some new material see also n 91 below Please note the following studies by Diem cited throughout this article Diem Untersuchungen zur friihen Geschichte der arabischen Orthographie 1 Die Schreibung der Vokale Or ns 48 (1979) 207-57 (hereafter Diem I) Untersuchungen 11 Die Schreibung der Konsonanten Or ns 49 (1980) 67-106 (hereafter Diem 11) Untersuchungen 111 Endungen und Endschreibungen Or ns 50 (1981) 332-83 (hereafter Diem 111) Untersuchungen IV Die Schreibung der zusammenhangden Rede Zusammenfassung Or ns 52 (1983) 357-404 (hereafter Diem 1V)

11 In the CIS volume Milik will discuss the question of dialects in Nabatean (cf PCtra col 925) The dialect patterns to be looked for intersect with the geographical distribution of the texts (a) Petra (b) the Hawran and Bostra (c) north Arabia and (d) the Sinai (e) texts from elsewhere (eg Delos Miletus Rome) must also be considered Levinson touches on dialect patterns too alluding to Northern (a + b S e) and Southern (c) groups see The Nabatean Inscriptions p 16 and his editions pp 71- 117 passim The first four of these groups d o show distinctive onomastic patterns as Kegev Nabatean

Inscriptions has shown (working chiefly from CIS) 12 See Starcky Petracols 924-25 Major recent

contributions to intra-Semitic study include Diem I-IV S A Kaufman The Akkadian Influences on Aramaic AS 19 (Chicago 1974) and Milik Recherches depigraphie proche-orientale I Didi- caces faites par des dieux Palmyre Hatra Tyr) et des ihiases skmitiques a Iepoque romaine BAH 92 (Paris 1970)

13 On this loan see for example Teixidor BES 1979 no 17 and references

14 Starcky briefly discusses the loans from the Arabic side (Pitra col 924) noting that loans attested only in North Arabian Nabatean eg kpr tomb were probably borrowed from Lihyanite the language of Dedan al-UIB so also Milik Didicaces p 178 Roschinski Sprachen p 163 and Levinson The Nabatean Inscriptions pp 75 106 Cantineau Le Nabatien vol 2 p 172 cites hr as Lihyanite and jdq and kpr as probably so Diem takes sdq similarly (Diem IV p 372) 1 shall assume the relative homogeneity of North Arabic represented by both Classical Arabic and the pre-Islamic dialects (Lihyanite Thamudic Safaitic) though there are differences among them the best known involving the article Pre-Islamic Arabic dialects use a hlhn article in contrast to the alattested both in Classical Arabic and in names preserved in pre-Islamic texts (eg Milik and Starcky in ARNA p 148) see Winnett in ARNA pp 77-78 on the proposed derivation of It Allat from 01- -ilfhat the goddess

Kabatean Arabic must have been distinct from

Cantineau recognizes twenty-nine Arabic loans in Nabatean giving only occasional indications of his reasons for so describing them15 I will begin by sorting out his list16 Items which occur in the RaqZsh Epitaph (517) are marked as such I shall return to that text in section IV below

1 Words recognized as loans on the grounds of consonantism (two words) wgr stele wld child(ren) to bear (only 517) 2 Words recognized as loans on the grounds of apparent vocalism (two words proposed one accepted) g b 3 well hty3h (recompense for) sin The first of these is presumably alleged to be Arabic on the basis of the dominance of Aramaic forms from gubb- eg JArm g8b gzib(ba3) Mand quba etc but JArm gebeJ geb are also attested so Nab gb could be ~ r a m a i c ~ The Aramaic forms cognate to the second word are based on the stems hitJ- and hats- (eg JArm heamp he5 hPta Mand hfata offense [pl] hataiia sins) rather than the stem hafT presupposed by the Nabatean spelling (but cf Mand htita) 3 Words recognized as loans on the grounds of morphology (two words) sdq rhn to mortgage Since the Northwest Semitic languages lack the elative formation

both the PIA dialects (in using a1 rather than h-lhn- for example see Milik Origines p 262) and the Classical or Standard Diem and Blau both call Nabatean Arabic a border dialect (see J Blau The Beginnings of the Arabic Diglossia A Study of the Origins of Neoarabic Afroasiatic Linguistics 4 [1977] 175-202 esp p 183) Diem notes the limita- tions of Hijazi evidence for the history of the Arabic language (Diem 111 p 335) Blau refers to the al- Namarah text as Nabatean Arabic most of his remarks stand though some are vitiated by Bellamys restudy NamBrah Inscription notably with refer- ence to the passage in line 4 concerning Rome wwklhm frsw Irwm and they became phylarchs (rasu) for Rome The other pre-Islamic texts in Arabic script are listed by Diem 1 pp 210-1 1 (Ramm graffiti inscriptions from Zebed 512 cE Jabal Usays 528 Harran 568 Umm al-JimA ca 600) with al-NamBrah may belong the Fihr text (RES 1097) see Diem 111 p 362 Diem has studied all these texts thoroughly

1s The main list is given in Cantineau Le NubatPen vol 2 p 172 to which 1 add yr other thanfrom the top of that page On the need to revise the list see Petra col 925 Roschinski discusses some of the loans briefly in Sprachen p 161 and mentions some toponyms and nicknames in the course of his remarks on personal names Diem also treats some of the loans Diem 11 p 83 and Diem 111 pp 353 355 (There are fewer Arabic loans in Palmyrene and Starcky notes too that that inventory needs to be revised See Palmyre in SDB vol 6 (1960) cols 1066-1 103 at 1081 Diem discusses Palm phzArb

fakh(i)d thigh tribal subdivision and Palm wrSt Arb warifa heiress Diem 11 p 71)

For the most part the morphological loan list

(Cantineau Le Nubareen vol 2 pp 171-72) is based on names the exceptions are the suffixes (see n 54 below) and perhaps the two participial forms which are linguistically important but beyond our scope and the exclamations which are not 1 think important The prepositions and syntactic features of the RaqBsh Epitaph cited on the top of p 172 are discussed in section IV below The phonetic loans also involve names rather than plain text for the most part see p 17 1 and the discussion in Cantineau Le ~VabatPen vol 1 pp 38-48 The conjunction p could be Aramaic as well as Arabic as Cantineau (ibid p 103) acknowledges Levinson argues both that it is an arabism The Nabatean Inscriptions (pp 99-100202) and that it is not (p 98)

16 For some of the methodological problems at issue see R Zadok Arabians in Mesopotamia During the Late-Assyrian Chaldean Achaemenian and Hellenistic Periods Chiefly According to the Cuneiform Sources ZDMG 13 1 (1 98 1) 42-84 He concludes The main problem remains It is impossible to isolate the Arabian names from the rest of the West Semitic names (p 83)

17 For the sense stele rather than tomb see Milik Nouvelles inscriptions nabateennes pp 230- 3 1 the term is analogous to Arm npf for example in Milik and Starcky Inscriptions rkcemment decou- vertes p 126 cf p 115 On the importance of steles see M Gawlikowski Les Tombeaux anoshynymes [de Pktra] Berytus 24 (1975-76) 35-41 and his The Sacred Space in Ancient Arab Religions in Studies pp 302-3 Cf J B Segal Edessa The Blessed Citv (Oxford 1970) pp 18 23 29 who renders npS tomb tower in Syriac contexts

18 Levinson The Nabatean Inscriptions p 142

(notwithstanding isolated examples eg BHeb azkiir daring akziib deceptive 8tiin perennial) sdq the term for a legal heir ie moreimost legitimate is probably a loanI9 Northwest Semitic languages too have only rare instances of medial h roots so rhn is probably also a loan20

These five loans are the most certain on Cantineaus list 4 Words recognized as loans on the grounds that the words are not attested in Aramaic (six words) I tribe lineage21 kpr grave (the Aramaic is qbr cf ~ q b r ) ~ niyb relative (father-in-law) yr other than yr to alter p s ~to draw out 5 Words recognized as loans on the grounds that although the roots or similar forms are known in Aramaic the relevant sense is not attested in Aramaic (seven words) hr posterity (but cf Old Arm hrth his posterity Nerab I1 = KAI 226 line BHeb aharit in for example Ps 109 13 Jer 31 17 and Ug uhry in KTU 1103 39-40) gt corpse (but cf JArm gew body as well as OffArm gw frequent in compound prepositions)24hlk to die (only in 517 cf BHeb etc to go anglice to pass on and

19 An honorary Arabic-Nabatean loan may be mentioned here with an f c I structure albeit a broken plural rather than an elative i t is the plural of nh found in ancient texts only in the Palmyrene phrase gd nhi the Fortuna of the Nabateans see Milik and Starcky in ARniA p 158 and Milik Didicaces pp 21 1-12 Palm nht corresponds to CArb a n h i t showing the af alpattern uhich is the commonest of all broken plural forms (A Murtonen Broken Plurals [Leiden 19641 p 2)

The form may be reflected in Greek sources too A letter addressed to Xenon of Philadelphia (third century BvE) refers to tous analhataious though the editor of the papyrus records that the initial a has been deleted on the papyrus see G Vitelli Papiri greci et latini IV (nl 280-445) (Florence 19 17) text 407 col I lines 21-22 (See Milik Origines pp 263-64) In the major manuscript of the Periplus of the Red Sea (early second century c ~ ) too the form anahataios stands (in the principal tenth-century hand) and has been corrected see H Frisk Le Periple de la Mer ~ r y t h r i e Goteborgs Hogskolas Arksskrift 33 (Gtiteborg 1927) p 6 in section 19 cf p 30 Bowersock would athetisize both of these forms with a see his Roman Arabia p 17 n 19 others would see a false etymology in the a spellings deriving the term from anahaind

20 Contra Levinson The Nabatean Inscriptions p 215 qv for JArm

Another Aramaic term for mortgage mSk (conshytrast CArb m s k ) to draw carry along occurs in an al-Hijr text republished by Milik and Starcky in A R N A p 153 line 3 They render in the same text hryg literally set off as mainmorte (anglice mortmain) (lines 46) The meaning to be straitened is known in Northwest Semitic although the legal applications of this term are not it may be that this should be regarded as an (aramaized) Arabic loan pare Levinson The Nabatean Inscriptions p 161 citing ia Ps 1846 The Nabatean root hrg is otheruise knoun only in IngNab 43 in the legal phrase hrm whrg ampSrh Ih mrn wmwthh hrjS

wlhy klhni interdicted and forbidden of DhuShara the god [of] our lord and of his (dibine) throne Harisha and of all the (other) gods On this phrase see Gaulikouski Tombeaux p 37 whose thesis will need to be reconsidered in light of the Milik- Starcky text just cited (ol im CIS 2200 where hrg is not read) cf his The Sacred Space in which the related root hgh is dealt with p 302 and the suggestion is made that Hegra al-Hijr is etymo- logically the Holy Enclosure For hrm add to the references in C-F Jean and J Hoftijzer Dictionnaire des inscriptions simitiques de lbuest (Leiden 1965) (hereafter DISO) a new Hatra text (Hatra 245) which reads in part dr hrym Ihddr sgylwhich he dedicated for the worship at the (E)sagila see F Vattioni Le Iscrizioni di Hatra AION supp 28 (Naples 1981) p 84

21 Beaucamp Rawwafah col 1472 rejects the first of these glosses Diem also takes I to be an Arabic loan (Diem IV p 372) The word seems to be attested in Mandaic see E S Drouer and R Macuch A Mandaic Dictionary (hereafter D M ) (Oxford 1963) p 18 On Igod(not tribe) in CIS 2174 see Starcky in Starcky et al C7n Royaume auu confins du desert Pctra et la NahatPne (Lyons 1978) p 88

22 On kpr see Starcky Petra col 924 uhose remarks on gwh require correction see also n 28 below

23 Hatr hrwhn their posterity (Hatra 79 line 7) may also be relevant for the text see Vattioni Iscrizioni p 49 Ingholt at IngHat 20 reads hdw hnw Cf Levinson The Nabatean Inscriptions p 125

24 Note too Hatr l g ~ (Hatra 336 line 8) in Vattioni Iscrizioni p 102 Mand gaua interior cf Levinson The Nabatean Inscriptions p 145 for other modern forms of gw see simply G Bergstrkser Introduction to the Semitic Languages trans P T Daniels (Winona Lake Indiana 1983) pp 107 n 13 (West Aramaic kla-liila) and 115 n 14 (East Aramaic Urmia)

DISO sv for possible OffArm cases of the sense to die)25 lCn to curse (twice in 517 but cf BHeb JArm l a c ~ n amp wormwood bitterness) s n c to make (only in 517 cf JArm s n c to guard) sryh chamber (cf JArm srh to be narrow) Slw ossements bony remains (but cf JArm S2lg to be at ease Silyii dregs Sil-vri placenta Mand Sulita placenta)26

These thirteen words segregated as Arabic loans on the basis of sense and occurrence may be added to the five isolated on strictly phonological and morphological grounds In addition to these eighteen words Cantineau lists others which need not be regarded as loans 6 Rejected loans (eleven words) Ip to draft write (cf not only OffArm [Ahiqar] Hatr JArm Mand Ip to study instruct but also Samalian lb to write with the Samal ianpgtb shift otherwise only in the word n b ~ ~ = KAI 214 line Panammuwa I 34) gb (see discussion above) gwh tomb loculus (a loan from Akk kimahhu cf Palm gwmh grnh Syr grnh MHeb kwk e t ~ ) ~ ~ g r client (in for example JArm Palm BHeb MHeb ~ h o e n ) ~ ~ hlt maternal aunt (cf Palm hl hlt may occur in a Dura proper name30 the pair hllhlt avunculusmatertera occurs in ~ ~ r i a c ) ~ hrb in the form hrbw (JArm Mand hrb is used in the ApCFl) nsht copy (a loan from Akk nishu cf Syr n w ~ k ) ~ ~ to open be split (attested in JArm) qsr cella (whether p ~ from the root to be(come) short in both Arb and JArm or from Latin castra as JArm qasrii fort Arb qasr castle Cantineau cites Arb qusiirat) Sryt (attested in

25 Diem also regards hlk as a loan and cites the whom the god instructed in a dream the text is well occurrence in the a l -Namaah text (Diem 111 p 365 treated in Milik DPdicaces pp 388-99 The tradi- and n 83) cited belou tional understanding of the divinely made model

For BHeb note the idiom hlk ICmlit (eg Gen ( tahnft) of Exodus 25 suggests that sketching or 2532) reduced to hlk both in prose (Gen 152) and writing may have been involved in the Hatran dream verse (Job 1420 19lO) see F I Andersen Job On plh see for example G B Sarfatti Hebrew (Downers Grove Illinois 1976) p 174 cf R Gordis Inscriptions of the First Temple Period Maarav 3 The Book of God and Man (Chicago 1965) pp 256 (1982) 55-83 69-71 (he departs forever) and 263 (I perish) M Pope In a number of cases in the list of rejected loans oh AB 15 (Garden City New York 1973) pp 11 l the determinations are based on evidence that has

(The general verb for going is here used as a come to light since Cantineau wrote in some cases I euphemistic substitute for dying) and 141 (citing the may simply have missed his point Arabic sense) 28 The developments uere first unraveled by E Y

On the alleged case of hlk to die in a Thamudic Kutscher see Kaufman AkkadianlAramaic p 64 text (Winnett in A R N A p 96) see A Jamme cf D Boyarin review of Y Sabar PaSai Wayahi review of A R N A Or ns 40 (1971) 481-89 on BaSallah A Neo-Aramaic Midrash on Beshallah p 486 who parses h + lk the meaty or fleshy one (Wiesbaden 1976) in Maarav 3 (1982) 113-14 of a camel S Hopkins review of W Fischer ed Grundr~gder

26 See E M Yamauchi Mandaic Incantation arahischen Philologie I Sprachwissenschaft (WiesshyTeuts AOS 49 (New Haven 1967) p 358 the baden 1982) in Z A L 14 (1985) 83 incantation text references seem to involve a fetus 29 See too Teixidor The Pagan God pp 12-13 Drower and Macuch however do not recognize that n 28 sense but only the placenta meaning (DM 454) 30 On both see Milik DPdicaces pp 331-32 Arabic has Silw pl aSlC (decaying) corpse severed 31 See R Payne Smith A Compendious Syriac member in view of the sibilant this is probably an Dictionary (Oxford 1903) pp 142 145 C Brockel-Aramaic loan into Arabic mann Le-xicon Syriacum (Halle 1928) p 221 For

27 The Hatra occurrence is the dream text Hatra hlt in Old Syriac see H J W Drijvers Old-Srriac 106b [ z l h ~ d w~ r h h S y [ h n ~ ]hrnny rdkllhr ~ h h f y (Edessean) Inscriptions Semitic Study Series ns 3 rdkl ldy IhZ hhlm lp hnw Zabidii and Yahb- (Leiden 1972) p 94 hl also occurs in Amorite shay the sons of Barnannay the architect the son of 32 See Kaufman AkkadianlAramaic pp 78 Yahbshay the architect (Zabidu and Yahbshay) 142-43 cf 145-46 151 161

4 Ordinary vocabulary (four words) ln to curse (eight times) p ~ sto draw out (once) yr other than (eleven times) vr to alter (four times)

This classification is a useful preliminary If we consider the Hijazi Nabatean texts (continuing to set aside the Rawwafah texts) as a class of documents concerned with the control of real property like so many other classes of ancient Near Eastern texts indeed with the special class of funerary property we can better understand this set of loanwords The property must be defined (Group I) as must the persons involved with the property (Group 2a) The contents of the graves must be protected (Group 2b and p ~ s Group 3) and the legal rights to the graves must be controlled (rhn Group 3) through documents36 (yr to alter Group 4) and performative gestures (ln to curse Group 4) Only two of the loans fall outside this assemblage htyh and vr other than of these only vr occurs frequently The class of Arabic loanwords does not it seems testify to the strong influence of Arabic on the Nabatean language as a whole as Cantineau thought Rather the class of words reflects rather closely the fact that the most important finds at MadaJin Salih as at Petra are funerary37

Of the fifteen loanwords ten are nouns indeed even with such a small sample it is surprising that only ten are nouns since the vast majority of loans in any language are nouns38 The occurrence as loans of four verbs and one functor -vr other than is perhaps greater testimony to the Arabic influence on Nabatean than the entire witness of the nouns39

The use of vr confined to Nabatean texts from Madain SBlih may be discussed briefly Technically CArb gayr is used as a noun in construct with a following genitive but it belongs to the subclass of nouns most closely allied to the particles40

36 Note IngHab 108 kpr wkthh dnh hrm the grave and these its documents are sacred

37 On Petra see Petra cols 95 1-73 on Madi in Salih al-Hijr see A R N A pp 42-53 F o r further discussion of the question of what exactly the Hegra funerary inscriptions are see Gawlikowski Tom- beaux pp 36-39 and Teixidor BES 1979 no 18 The uniformity of the Madain Salih texts is emphasized by N I Khairy in his useful survey An Analytical Study of the Nabataean Monumental Inscriptions a t Medi in Saieh ZDPV 96 (1980) 163-68 he even suggests that many of the texts were executed by one and the same personW(p 165)

38 In general see the discussion in R A Hall Introductorj Linguistics (Philadelphia 1964) pp 319-22 353-58 Fo r a variety of Semitic loans in Egyptian including three verbs see A A-H Youssef A Nineteenth Dynasty New Word for Blade and the Semitic Origin of Some Egyptian Weapon-Names and Other Words M D A I K 39 (1985) 255-60

All the Greek loans in Nabatean are nouns Cantineau lists four Greek terms for Roman military- adminis t ra t ive positions ( L e NahatPen vol 2 pp 172-73) taken over as Bouersock observes t o describe Nabatean officers ( R o m a n Arabia pp 57

71 and 154) and a fifth qnrrn2a loan f rom Latin to Greek to Nabatean O n kirk chiliarch see Levinson The Nabatean Inscriptions p 173 T o this we must add hms nws and trr2 (see n 35 above) and hgmwn hpgemon governor in two texts from Rawwafah all nouns

Note too that in the OffArm Arsames corresshypondence twenty-seven of the thirty-one Old Persian loans all fifteen Akkadian loans and all seven possible Egyptian loans are substantives three of the Old Persian loans are adjectives and one is a preposi- tional phrase adverb see J D Whitehead Some Distinctive Features of the Language of the Aramaic Arsames Correspondence JNES 37 (1978) 119-40 esp pp 131 ff

In his vastly larger field Kaufman notes that ca 90 percent of the Akkadian loans in Aramaic are nouns see AkkadianAramaic p 168

39 Cantineau Le VabatCen vol 1 p 66 40 See OConnor Hebrew Verse Structure (Winona

Lake Indiana 1980) pp 300-303 305-6 on Rayr see W Wright A Grammar of the Arabic Language 3d ed (Cambridge 1896-98) vol I p 288 vol 2 pp 208-9

Most cases of Nab yr follow the patterns of Arb gayr eg mn yqbr bh yr kmkm wbrth whoever buries in it (the tomb) anyone other than Kamkam and her daughter (IngNab 116) and wmn ybd kyr dnh and whoever does (anything) other than this (IngNab 127) The use in IngNab 126 (the Halifu Dedication CIS 2209) is unusual in light of parallels in other texts (eg IngNab 106-8 113-7) one is inclined to parse wl riv nwS klh dy yzbn kpr dnh w yktb mwhbh w yrh as It is not permitted that anyone sell (Pacel) this tomb or write out for it a gift-deed or do anything else (in order to alienate the property) but Arabic usage makes it clear that we should parse it as write out for it a gift-deed or anything else (that would serve as an instrument of a~ienation)~

The phonology of the loans is largely uninformative preservation of initial u and the writing of for g are features well known from the stock of personal names in

abate an^^ There is almost no indication of the linguistic accommodation of the loans Only the sibilant of nfyb presents a revelation since the Arabic cognate has s niyb is apparently an aramaized loan43

IV THE RAQASH EPITAPH

The Raqash Epitaph of 267 CE is a bilingual Nabatean-Thamudic text from the Qasr al-Bint group at Madgin Sglih The Thamudic text is written in Hijazi Thamudic (olim Thamudic C and D) set out vertically as is usual for this script group directly to the right of the Nabatean zn rqS bnt bdmnt This is Raqash daughter of ~ b d m a n a t ~ ~ The Nabatean text is longer and much more difficult its publication by J A Jaussen and R Savignac elicited discussions by no less distin- guished a trio than J-B Chabot C Clermont-Ganneau and M Lidzbarski and it has more recently attracted the attention of W Diem and J ~ l a u ~

41 So also Gaulikowski Tombeaux p 36 Nabatean is not alone in borrowing Rayr Modern Mandaic has borrowed the verb gyr as GIR (DM 92) uhile the classical form of the language uses the particle gair not other except ( D M 76) In the Eastern Neo- Aramaic dialect described by I Garbell The Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Persian Azer- haijan J L S P 3 (The Hague 1965) she records yer except only as a loan from Arabic via Kurdish

42 For another 8 note Teixidors explanation of Dushara-Ara as Dushara (of the altar) dyed (red with the blood of offerings) cf Arb Burr dyed object see The Pagan God p 86

43 On the Nabatean sibilants see J Blau On Pseudo- Corrections in Some Semitic Languages (Jerusalem 1970) pp 52 58-59 and n 92 below

44 The Thamudic text first copied by Huber and Euting is no 1 in the Thamudic corpus of Jaussen and Savignac Mission archiologique en Arahie vol 1 see pp 271-72 for text and photo of the squeeze pl 31 for copy of the bilingual This copy is reproduced in Cantineau Le Nahatien vol 2 p 46 in J Naveh Thamudic Texts from the Negev EI 12 (1975) 129-31 at p 130 with two new Thamudic

texts and a discussion of zn in idem Early History of the Alphaher (Jerusalem 1982) p 46 and in Roschinski Sprachen pp 169-70 cf p 162 I have at my disposal a photograph made by D F Graf which does not offer material improvements to the reading of the text Graf informs me that the text is angled in such a way that it is exceptionally difficult to photograph

Jaussen and Savignac did not appreciate that the Nabatean and Thamudic texts belong together because they misread the latter J-B Chabot first realized the pairing see CRAIBL (1908) pp 269-72 The Thamudic was clarified by Winnett in A Study of the Lihyanite and Thamudic Inscriptions (Toronto 1937) pp 38 41 52-53 in that study he treats the text as Thamudic D he has since renamed his earlier C and D groups Hijazi see A R N A p 70

45 The comments of the earlier scholars are reported in the publication in Jaussen and Savignac Mission pp 172-76 481 and pl 9 Diems treatment is integrated into his monographic Untersuchungen I-IV and Blaus is presented in his programmatic Beginnings

The Nabatean text is of special interest because of its arabisms Cantineau did not hesitate in excluding the al-Namgrah Epitaph from the Nabatean corpus for that text is entirely Arabic The Raqash Epitaph however is a mixed text and Cantineaus vacillating treatment of it is ~ n d e r s t a n d a b l e ~ ~ Nonetheless I believe it must be excluded from the main body of Nabatean texts and given a separate accounting The fact that it is among the latest substantial Nabatean texts and the latest known to him led Cantineau to see it as only a step away from a l - ~ a m a r a h ~ ~ but in fact since there is no trajectory of Yabatean turning into Arabic Cantineaus views must be revised48

The Nabatean text is presented below S indicates the sentences of the text

S 1 ( 1 ) dnh qbrw rich kcbw br (2 ) hrtt lrqdS brt ( 3 ) cbdmnwtw mh49

dnh Jaussen and Savignac Chabot and others read dnh and allow that th is possible Milik and Starcky in their reconsideration of the text do not mention the reading but Milik cites th as his preference el~ewhere~ Diem contends too that either reading is palaeographically possible and prefers dnh because th yields an Arabic demonstrative tih which is scarcely acceptable ~ ~ n t a c t i c a l l ~ ~ th is a feminine demonstrative in

46 Contrast the treatment throughout the grammar with the concluding discussion (Le NabatPen vol 2 pp 177-79) cf Starcky Palmyre cols 1097-98 The continuing influence of Cantineaus vacillating views can be seen in Navehs remarks (in The Early History of the Alphabet [Jerusalem 19821 p 158) tempered though they are

The language of the Nabataean inscriptions and documents is Official Aramaic but it absorbed Arabic words and forms In the course of time the Arabic elements in the language of the Nabataean inscriptions gradually increased At Hejra there was found a burial inscription The Nabataean text is written in what amounts to a mixed language containing many Arabic words and forms

For a largely Classical Arabic text in Lihyanite script see A F L Beeston et al The Inscription Jaussen-Savignac 71 Proceedings of the Seminar fbr Arabian Studies 3 (1973) 69-72

47 In fact the chronological horizon around 517 can be filled in a 266-67 c F Sinai graffiti published by A Negev New Dated Nabatean Graffiti from the Sinai IEJ 17 (1967) 250-55 b 306-7 c F the Simeon epitaph from al-Ula (5386) and the epitaph of a young girl (CIS 2333) see Starcky Petra cols 932-34 c 356 c ~ the Mawiyya Epitaph from Hegra published by F Altheim and R Stiehl Die Araber in der alten Welt 5l (Berlin 1968) pp 305-9 and by Stiehl A New Nabatean Inscription in R Stiehl and H E Stier eds Beitrage zur alten Geschichte und deren Nachleben Festschriji fur Franz Altheim (Berlin 1970) vol 2 pp 87-90 This the latest Nabatean text known was found at Jiddah but derives from Hegra Altheim and Stiehl publish it as the epitaph of Monah wife of Adnon head of

Hegra (ryS hgr) and contend that the persons involved are Jews Starcky reads the eponym as Mawiyya he says that the text has only one Arabic word hdy one and comments that the text has not been extensively studied See Starcky in Royaume pp 47 49 This Mawiyya is not the slightly later Queen of the Saracens discussed in Bowersock Mavia but see also his p 495 n 29

48 SO also again Starcky Petra col 925 49 I omit discussion of the personal names On the

consonantism of kbu see Diem 11 pp 72-73 On the possibility that internal (7 was written with waw in Nabatean (and other late forms of Imperial Aramaic) see Diem 11 pp 219-23 on rquS esp p 221 and mnult pp 221-23 On this Hijazi Nemesis figure see also Diem 1 p 243 111 pp 340 357-58 IV pp 402-3 Milik Origines p 262 (Manawtkj t) Blau Beginnings p 14 (Manlt) The use of w for internal d is reflected in certain features of Arabic spelling eg the (SumeriangtAkkadiangtAramaicgt) Arabic loan kwrlakkdr farmer see Diem I pp 220-21

On the graphic layout of the text see Diems remarks Most Nabatean texts are written in scriptio continua with ligatures over word boundaries (con- trary to Arabic practice) but in 517 some spaces occur (Diem IV p 386) note for example that in byrh tmuz there are ligatures at b -+ y y + r r + h m + w but not between h and t (pp 388-89) Diems treatment of ulaw and the Classical Arabic SchlussshyAlifis a matter I hope to return to elsewhere

50 Milik and Starcky in ARNA pp 154-55 cf Milik Bilingue p 144

51 Diem 111 p 354 n 50 on tiltih see in addition to Diem 111 p 363 n 76 Wright Arabic Grammar vol 1 p 265

Arabic while dnh is a masculine demonstrative in Aramaic since the verbal suffixes are ambiguous the only other gender-marked item is qbrw which is (otherwise) masculine If th is the preferred reading the use of the feminine for qbrw may have been triggered by analogy with npslnfs which is feminine but this seems unlikely qbrw The noun bears the Nabatean waw commonest on personal names and designed to mark elements as (in some sense) non-Aramaic as Diem has shown most recently the broadest usage on triptotic nouns is reflected here52 snch The suffix -h here and on ypthh could represent (a) Aramaic epicene final -2h or (b) Arabic masculine final -h the pausal form of the suffixj3 Whether the suffixs shape is Aramaic or Arabic the use of the suffix (as opposed to a suffixed form of yt) is unusual for Nabatean (and late Imperial Aramaic generally) and reflects Arabic syntax54

In addition to the various problems noted the overall structure of the sentence is unclear there are three competing interpretations of dnh qbrw sn h PN

(1) equational sentence with definite predicate viz This is the tomb (which) PN made (it) This is one of the two interpretations espoused by Cantineau and it has been most recently championed by ~ 1 a u j ~ It is supported by the analogy of other Nabatean texts eg

dnh hmn dj bd myrw This is the incense altar which PN made IngNab 2l

d mhrmt3 dy bnh nmw This is the consecrated place6 which PN built IngNab 6 1

dnh qbr d j bd ydw This is the tomb which PN made IngNab 10 1 (similarly 11 1 12 1 13 1 and many others)

dnh mSkb3 d j hd nmw This is the banqueting place7 which P N occupied (or came to occupy) IngNab 14 1-2

As these examples make clear the Nabatean pattern involves a predicate marked as definite and an explicit relative marker Blau argues that the absence of a relative marker is a sign of Arabic calquing the calque is not however from the Classical or Standard language but from the border dialect used by the Nabateans a dialect which

52 Diem 111 pp 336-55 on the uaw as marking the (nominative) citation form (Nennfor~n)see esp pp 337-38 on the triptotic pattern pp 344-49 Cf Cantineau Le NabatPen vol 1 p 61 Blau Pseudo-Corrections p 51 The waw also occurs on kbu bd~nnurw Ihgrw and lqbru On the u in this text see Diem 111 pp 350 352 cf p 342

53 Diem IV pp 384-85 and n 63 54 Cantineau La NabatPen vol I p 56 Diem IV

pp 383-84 Chabot CRAIBL (1908) p 270 The preference for object-marking yt is one of the several features in which late Imperial and Middle Aramaic materials prefer analytical structures the shift from older synthetic to newer analytical structures can be paralleled in Modern Hebrew see for example R A Berman Lexical Decomposition and Lexical

Unity in the Expression of Derived Verbal Cate- gories in Modern Hebrew Afroasiatic Linguistics 6 (1979) 117-42 esp pp 118-21 though Berman recognizes the well-documented trend for richly inflected languages to become more analytical in certain areas she prefers to attribute the developments at least in part to the influence of foreign languages such as Yiddish and more recently English p 120 Of the four trends mentioned on p 120 three are exemplified in ancient Aramaic

55 Blau Beginnings p I 1 56 On the sense of mhrn~t see Gawlikowski

Tombeaux p 38 57 On the sense of mfkb see Milik and Starcky in

ARNA p 150

he hypothesizes allowed for a type of attribute (relative) clause different from Standard Arabic usage ie [one with] the antecedent standing in construct relation to the following asyndetic attribute clause a construction preserved in Standard Arabic only after antecedents denoting time58 Other scholars hesitant to postulate such a construction for a little-known dialect prefer the obvious alternative (2) equational sentence with indefinite predicate viz This is a tomb (which) PN made (it) Cantineau also advocated this view and its current defender is This construction an asyndetic relative clause with an indefinite head is syntactically correct in Classical ~ r a b i c ~ relies on the Diem calling Blaus suggestion fa r fe t~hed ~ analogy of Classical Arabic grammar to support the parsing he proposes seeing a similar construction in two other arabized Nabatean texts

[ d ] h msgd dy qrh P N This is an offering-stone which P N brought RES 2052

dnh t r dy hd P N This is a place which PN has taken possession of 583

The use of the relative dy here reflects Aramaic grammar the use of [d]h for dnh in RES 2052 (and the phrase ltr later in the text) and the indefinite predicates are arabisms according to (3) verbal sentence with a focus c o n s t r ~ c t i o n ~ ~ viz As for this tomb PN made it This is the interpretation preferred by Jaussen and Savignac Chabot and ~ i d z b a r s k i ~ ~ The demonstrative may precede the noun it modifies in Aramaic usually does precede it in Classical Arabic but does not precede it in the only relevant construction in this text in S3 It is not surprising that Jaussen and Savignac and after them Cantineau treated the opening lines of 583 and RES 2052 (cited above) as examples of a focus c o n s t r ~ c t i o n ~ ~The focus interpretation would specify that qbrw is defective in not being marked as definite in either language This interpretation is also favored by Milik who cites several texts as further evidence (a) a betyl dedication from Jabal Ramm nsbt It lht rbt [dy 61 bsr [dy] bdwh PNN The stele of Allat the great goddess [who resides in] Bosra [which] PNN made it This differs from our text in having a (restored) relative before the verb (b) the Biib al-Siq bilingual at Petra mqb[r3] dnh bn[hyh] PN PN built [bnh] this grave if an Aramaic construction is preferred or As for this grave PN built it [bnyh] if an Arabic The restorations in both cases make it difficult to rely too much on these analogies66

~ 2 why (4)~ hlktpy lhgrw (5) Snt mh wStyn (6) wtryn byrh tmwz ~

5s Blau Beginnings p 11 The clause type Aramaic see Whitehead Arsames pp 126-28 hypothesized would be analogous to the bit p u f u and note the discussion of related patterns in Phoeni- type in Akkadian (GAG 166b) and the brfyt br cian in Teixidor BES 1979 no 12 type in Hebrew (GKC 130d) 64 Jaussen and Savignac Mission p 174 Ce

59 Cantineau Le Nabateen vol 2 p 38 Diem 111 tombeau Ia fait Kacabu Chabot CRAIBL (1908) p 354 p 270 Ce tombeau (est celui) qua fait etc

60 Wright Arabic Grammar vol 2 pp 317-19 65 Cantineau Le Nabateen vol 2 p 18 cf Diem 61 Diem 111 p 354 n 51 111 p 354 62 Ibid p 354 66 Milik Bilingue pp 143-44 63 O r topic-comment or casus pendens on the 67 The bulk of previous discussion of the text has

grammar generally see for example Hebrew Verse concentrated on the opening clause to the exclusion Structure pp 79-82 For the construction in Official of the remainder

py The spelling here is an example of the Arabic rule that each word is to be written according to its form in isolation and thus for example sandhi writings of final long vowels are not allowed68 Ihgrw The form of the name with the bound Arabic article constrasts with hgr the form with the bound Aramaic article69 but the toponym cannot be regarded strictly as part of the plain text int Year formulas in Nabatean may be introduced by b (eg IngNab 6 7) or as here by (IngNab 2) In the al-NamZrah text there is no preposition on the year formula and b is used as here with the month kdy hlk snt 223 ywm 7 bkslwl Thereafter he died in the year 223 [328 c ~] on the seventh day in ~aslul the similarity extending to the verb hlk is striking

S3 wlcn (7) mry ~ m ~ m n yin lqbrw (8) d wmn ypthh hSy dy72( 9 ) wldh

Iqbrw d3 If the pronoun is Aramaic it is feminine if Arabic it is masculine (for dd)73 used where the Classical language would use hiidamp The latter possibility seems more likely The Classical language would usually prepose the demonstrative the postposing is characteristic of colloquial Egyptian usage mn The pronoun m n as an indefinite is standard in Arabic and a frequent alternative for rnn z l d y in Aramaic Here it governs two prefixing verb forms If the morphology is Arabic then the verbs are jussives7 with the mand I-iarti conditional meaning associated with in and the like eg faman yastajirna Id yakhaf bada aqdinh waman la yusiilihna yabit gayra niiimi And he who seeks our protection has nothing to fear after our covenant but he who does not come to terms with us will pass his nights without sleep or man yaqum aqum macahu Whoever gets up I will get up with hirn 75

yin The Arabic for altering a text is baddala (sura 2181) hiy dy wldh The exceptive particle hdSd may be written in Classical Arabic with the regular alif or more commonly with the alif maqsiira the spelling reflected here76 It has usually been assumed that h iy dy is a compound like Arm br m n (zldy) and

68 Diem 1 p 213 cf IV p 359 In fact the vowel ofpy is probably only long underlyingly it would be shortened due to the two following consonants

69 Diem I p 215 IV p 378 cf 11 p 96 on the QurBnic spelling (sura 1580) see Diem 111 p 368

70 1 quote Bellamy (NamBrah Inscription) but there is no material difference from Rene Dussaud Dussaud parses the adverb -kdy (akkadC7) with the previous clause

71 Mare AlmB is either Lord of the Eternity or of the World perhaps here as at Palmyra a title of Baal-Shamin though it is used of Yahweh in a fragment related to 1QapGen See Teixidor The Pagan God pp 84-85 cf 28 34 n 34 126 133 137-38 Milik Dkdicaces pp 59-60 Segal Edessa p 59

72 Milik and Starcky in ARNA pp 154-55 read d(v) against the w of Jaussen and Savignac

73 See Diem I pp 214-15 and n 18 74 There is no reason to believe that verbal mode is

ever directly indicated in Nabatean the ul which Noldeke read in that way are instances of the Nabatean ulau on names which happen to end in verbal forms and genuine Arabic verbal forms as they appear in later inscriptions have no final inflec- tion eg yvr J 17 9 (ampr II) Diem 111 p 349

75 Wright Arabic Grammar vol 2 pp 23-24 262 on mn ibid p 319

76 Ibid pp 342-43 cf Cantineau Le Nabatken vol 2 pp 100 103 and Diem I p 215 cf p 218 Note mn and hi in allahumma g i r IT ualirnan yasmau haS5 I-iappina waabC7 I-asba God par- don me and all who hear except for Satan and PN (Wright Arabic Grammar vol 2 p 343)

77 See DISO 43

that it governs the noun wldh his (or less likely her) progeny78 but it may be better to parse d v wIdh as a relative clause him whom he (Kacb) begot (him)

S4 wlcn mn yqbr ~ ~ l y mnh

yqbr mnh Jaussen and Savignac read (a) vyr d ly mnh79 Chabot proposed (b) yqbr ~ ~ l y mnh a reading confirmed by a later squeeze and accepted by Jaussen and Savignac in an addition to their Cantineau overlooked the addendum and took (a) as the editors reading though he did report Chabots suggestion Ingholt followed Cantineau Milik and Starcky have returned to (b) Jaussen and Savignacs true reading supporting it on the basis of new photos by Winnett and ~ e e d ~ yqbr As in 53 mn governs a prefixing presumably jussive verb apparently with no expressed object wXly The rnn also appears to govern a suffixing verb form82 the construction is in accordance with Classical Arabic grammar-After many words which imply the conditional meaning of in [including man] the perfect is said to take a future sense the condition being represented as already fulfilled In English it may usually be rendered by the present83-though the use of a perfect directly after an imperfect in the same sense seems odd Again there is no expressed object it is less clear whether 1y IV mn to cause to come up (= exhume) from would require such an object84 It has been proposed that wXly mnh is a compound preposition in suggesting the reading Chabot rendered mn yqbr ~tjly mnh whoever buried (anyone) on top of it (or her) remarking The grammatical interpretation remains obscure while the general sense does not seem dubious85 The argument from obscurity only goes so far Chabot fails to explain either the w or the of wly and he fails to show that alG rnin can mean on top of [au-dessus d e ~ ~

We may translate the text as follows

S1 (a) This is the grave which Kab bar Haritat made (b) This is a grave which Kab bar Haritat made (c) As for this grave Kab Haritat made it

78 The feminine suffix would presumably be -h For this reading see for example Diem IV p 386

79 Ie (and may he curse whoever) alters that which is above an inscription-protecting curse of the usual sort See Jaussen and Savignac Mission p 175 But the editors realized that in their reading the second y of j c ~ rwas dubious and the very dubious

80 Ibid p 481 81 ARNA pp 154-55 8 2 Nabatean has both ApCZls and HapZls see

Cantineau Le Nabarhen vol I pp 68-70 83 Wright Arabic Gran~mar vol 2 p 14 84 The concern with adding a body to a grave is

commoner than the reverse but the latter is not rare See for example lytpjs mn kl dy bhm mndcm nml ytqbr bybr dnh nwS klh Ihn nln dv No one at all (mn mndcmltmdcm) of those who are (menshytioned) in them (the tomb documents) is to be drawn forth and no one at all (nnmf klh) except for those

w h o is to be buried in this grave (IngNab 45 note p ~ s cf above) and wvlLn dwSr3 mi ynpq mnh gt n SIN w mn yqbr hh j r kmkm May DhuShara curse anyone who brings forth from it a body or a limb or anyone who buries in it anyone other than Kamkam (IngNab 11 3-6) In these two cases body snatching seems to be preliminary to tomb squatting but it is difficult to be sure The sense of the passage may be illuminated by reconsideration of Nabatean burial practices see Strabo 16426 and Gawlikowski Tombeaux pp 39-41 for an illun~inating discussion

85 Chabot CRAIBL (1908) p 270 86 min a18 means from above but does a1G min

yield any obvious sense The w is not ligatured in either direction but is mn yqbrw 14 mnh easier to parse Note at any rate that nln governs singular verbs in the preceding sentence Diem also apparently takes ly as a preposition see Diem I pp 215 218

for R a q a h berat Abd-Manat his mother S2 And she died in al-Hijr (in the) year 162 in the month of Tammuz S3 And may Mare Alma curse him who alters the tomb or opens it save for him whom he (Kacb) has begottenhis progeny S4 And may he curse anyone who buries (anyone else in it) or exhumes (anyone) from it

The names are largely Arabic Aretas (hrtt) is notably Nabatean in background The name formulas are Aramaic (br brt)87 as is the date formula (Snt not snt the numbers perhaps the use of yrh in byrh tmwz contrast bkslwl in al-Namiirah) If we exclude the nine naming words (six in S l lhgrw in S2 mry lm in S3) and the six words of the date in S2 we are left with the following schematic text

S1 dnh qbrw nch PN IPN m h S2 why hlkt py GN DATE S3 wlcn DN mn ySn3 lqbrw d wmn ypthh hSy dv wldh S4 wlcn rnn yqbr w X l y mnh

In S1 dnh is distinctively Aramaic snc distinctively Arabic and the rest of the words qbr 1 m are neither In S2 hy is proper to either language and hlk and py to Arabic only Sn in S3 is Aramaic and fen d hSy and wld (be it noun or verb) are Arabic the other words mn qbr pth dy are common In the last sentence all the words except lcn are common mn who mn from qbr and ly On this rather crude accounting ten out of nineteen words are common seven Arabic and two Aramaic

A more revealing view of the distribution is based on the parts of speech Of the nouns the category most liable to be loaned qbr grave and m are common and wld if a noun is uniquely Arabic Of the verbs half are Arabic (wld if a verb lcn hlk snc of these only lcn is known elsewhere in Nabatean) three are common (qbr to bury ly pth) and only in is Aramaic Two classes of grammatical words are represented of the prepositions 1 and mn are common and py and hSy are Arabic while of the pronouns mn hy and dy are common d is Arabic and dnh is ~ r a m a i c ~ ~The use of the grammatical words from Arabic is the most vivid testimony to the extent of linguistic interference The lexicon as a whole is in this case a better index to the background of the text since the morphology has little that is diagnostic and the syntax as we have seen is full of problems

It is manifest that the R a q a h Epitaph is closer to being a polyglot puzzle than Nabatean plain text It is eccentric enough to demand being treated on its own terms89 without being allowed to irregularize Nabatean grammar on a regular basis90

87 On the use of br brt bn and (Arb not Heb) pp 353-54) see n 91 below bn in name formulas see Diem 11 pp 87-90 Fuller epigraphic evaluation will be a matter of the 99-100 111 pp 339 362 ethnography of writing Note F M Crosss qualifi-

88 Cantineau Le Nabateen vol 1 pp 59-60 cations on the use of the freakish Izbet Sartah 89 Or perhaps on the terms of the late Nabatean- ostracon Newly Found Inscriptions in Old Canaan-

Hijazi group Diem associates it with (Diem I pp ite and Early Phoenician Scripts BASOR 238 213222 cf 217) a group that includes (at least) J71 (1980) 1-20 on pp 8-15 and more generally my and J85 (Diem 11 p 71) it may be identical to the paper Writing Systems Native Speaker Analyses arum-arab group (Diem 111 p 353 cf pp 333 and the Earliest Stages of Northwest Semitic Orthog- 337) which would bring in RES 1097 and 518 raphy in C L Meyerss and my collection of Essays Assessment of all these texts is not possible here in Honor of David Noel Freedman (Philadelphia

90 Such a reasonable approach is implicit in the 1983) pp 439-65 work of Blau and Diem though Diem takes a In linguistic terms it should be emphasized that broader view of loanwords in general (Diem 111 the Raqssh text is a radical exception to the general

The three Arabic loanwords in the RawwFifah texts stand apart from other Arabic loans in abate an Unlike nSyb the sibilant of irkt has not been aramaized (viz is not written s ) ~ ~ The linguistic diversity of the larger class of loans which includes verbs is seen here too in the occurrence of the verb rm Milik is correct in saying apropos of the Rawwsah texts Arabic loanwords are well known in the Nabatean lexicon93 Those loans however form a semantic cluster explicable for the most part in terms of the funerary concerns of the main body of substantial texts and the Rawwafah loans are not to be accounted for in the same way Their context is political and the loans-Srkt company federation rm to make peace and hpyt encouragement1-are readable because of that ~ o n t e x t ~

pattern found in bilingual Semitic texts and in texts produced by bilinguals the native speaker of two Semitic tongues generally does not merge or confuse them The attested exceptions to this pattern involve the mixed Aramaic-Hebrew dialect associated with the Qabbalah and its predecessors Another exception has been alleged for the class of supposed translators associated with certain late biblical texts the Book of Qoheleth in particular has been alleged to be in its present state a (not-very-good) translation from the Aramaic There is however no consensus on the matter of Qoheleths often difficult Hebrew For a description of the actual phonological functioning of bilingualism (unified perceptual system dual production system) see L K Obler The Parsimonious Bilingual in L K Obler and L Menn eds Exceptional Language and Linguistics (New York 1982) pp 339-46

91 Some other new material may be mentioned here (1 ) In a graffito published by Jaussen and Savignac (J109) Milik has proposed to read the Arabic noun nsc shipment caravan and the verbs bd to stay do something continually and ml (mwl) to grow rich the last two used together bd wml he grew progressively richer See Milik Origines p 263 (2) In the Petraios Epitaph from the BZb aal-Siq at Petra Milik has noted not only the Greek loan threptos in the phrase br trpfsadoptee but also a IV Form verb with h hwhb against late Aramaic (generally) Classical Arabic and Pre-Islamic Arabic this may reflect the ApCFlHapcPI vacillation in Nabatean Aramaic see Origines p 263 (3) On the epithet (or name) of the goddess of Tayma trh(y) His Abundance see Milik in Royaume p 98 (4) Diem has construed the syntax of the openings of RES 2052 and 583 as arabizing as noted above see Diem IV p 354 (5) Diem has also singled out as an interesting hybrid mqtry for Arm mtqr it combines the Aramaic sense to call and the Aramaic use of the Gt as a passive with the Arabic VIII Form morphology see Diem I pp 212-13 n 13 11 p 90 IV p 366 and n 19

( 6 ) On some other uossible loans see Diem on mahr (sacrifice) inspecto Iyr good (cf Levinson i h e Nabatean Inscriptions p 158) msgd offering stone and (though they must surely be rejected) rb teacher and tr place(Diem 111 p 353 and on the last Diem IV p 372) The implicit criterion seems to he that any noun marked with the Nabatean haw or with the article I o r used in an arabizing syntactic context should be taken as a loan but this set of criteria would sidestep a major aspect of the investigation the extent to which speakerswriters of the languages were aware of overlap similarities etc Levinson notes rk bed couch (Arb arika couch) The Nabatean Inscriptions p 132 and (I( to cut ibid p 158

Milik is surely correct to aver that Arabic locu- tions are more to be expected in texts which are less formal more spontaneous in their expression of current preoccupations Origenes p 263

92 Pace Cantineau (LeNabateen vol I pp 42-44) the sibilants in Nabatean texts are generally regular Proto-Semitic Arb 1 = Heb S = Nab t P-S Heb Nab S= Arb s P-S Heb Arb Nab s and probably P-S Heb S = Arb S= Nab s (the only example I know is qns fine from qSS) See also Diem 11 p 77 on npS (hapax) nps and p 82 on s Diem 111 p 335 on the sibilants Even names are generally regular eg Nab SCdySCdtSCydw etc v Arb sacid etc and Nab SlymtSlmw etc v Arb salim etc Is the variation in slirf-names (for example both Nab srpyw and Srpyw Cantineau Le NabatPen vol 1 p 43) phonetically conditioned (by the r) For the notion of degrees of loan adaptation compare simply Arb usquf pl asaqif(al) episkopos and briitustanti pi -on Protestant

93 Milik Rawwafa p 57 94 The Middle Aramaic document with the greatest

number of loans almost all political seems to be the Old Syriac Sale Deed from Dura which offers ia qlwny colonia pylys phylt~ tribe wfqrwr autokratdr hpws hippeus horseman hpty hypa- teia consulate and the Semitic-Greek-Semitic calque-loan mtrpwls metropolis (cf yr wm in 2 Sam 2019) For the text see Drijvers Old-Syriac pp 54-57

Milik immediately adds that the loans are even less surprising in a Nabatean text drafted by Thamudeans who spoke an Arabic dialect95 In fact historical plausibility is a matter distinct from linguistic structure a direct bridge between the realms is a commonplace of the ethnography of writing but a suspect bridge As we have seen Cantineaus versions of those notions led him astray-the Arabic loan vocabulary is smaller and more specialized than he was led to imagine and the Raq2sh Epitaph clarifies neither the grammar nor history of Nabatean-and we must be careful not to be similarly misled Milik has instructed us to associate Nabatean texts not with Nabateans or nabateophones but with n a b a t e ~ g r a ~ h s ~ ~ the inscriptional witness to language that is is a tentative one97 The Rawwiifah texts which have given us the Semitic etymon of Saracen at the same time remind us of the difficulties of reading such evidence98

95 Milik Rawwafa p 57 96 The view of the Nabatean language implicit here

is complementary to the notions of Nabatean culture now accepted among historians and archaeologists see for example the contributions to the Oxford Symposium Studies of A Hadidi The Archaeshyology of Jordan Achievements and Objectives pp 15-21 P Parr Contacts Between North West Arabia and Jordan in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages pp 127-34 and P C Hammond The Excavations at Petra 1974 Cultural Aspects of Nabataean Architecture Religion Art and Influshyence pp 23 1-38 This volume can be supplemented with R Norths report Jordan Archeology Con- ference at Oxford Or ns 50 (1981) 415-28 which mentions useful elements of the discussion after the papers

97 Milik Bilingue p 145 A further stage in argumentation would involve suggesting that we have attestations of all the Arabic loanwords that might have been attested in the kinds of texts we have For a similar problematic involving Biblical Hebrew and Inscriptional Hebrew of the biblical

period compare Sarfattis remarks A surprising feature is the small number of words and roots found in the inscriptions which were not already known to us from Biblical Hebrew It is commonly thought that on account of its limited scope and of the particular subjects treated in the Bible the lexicon of the biblical period contained far greater vocabulary than that preserved in scripture Thus far this opinion cannot be sustained by the inscriptional evidence See Sarfatti Hebrew Inscriptions p 76 On writing systems and lexicon growth see the preshyliminary remark in my article Writing Systems p 44

98 A late first or early second-century Nabatean inscription has recently been found at Oboda the body of the votive text is Aramaic plaintext but there are three clauses difficult of interpretation apparently written in Classical Arabic The Negevite provenience of the text is noteworthy Professor Avraham Negev of the Hebrew University who will publish the text in a forthcoming issue of IEJ kindly alerted me to its existence

Nabatean portion of the text is as its editor J T Milik puts it full of lexical novelties among them three previously unattested Arabic loanword^^ One of these is of special interest irkt federation company furnishes the long-sought etymon for Grk sarakgnos from which derive the stock European designations for Arabs among them English ~ a r a c e n ~Nab i rk t is not alone in evidencing pre-Islamic use of the root cognate to CArb Sarika to associate especially IV airaka (billahi) to attribute associates (to God) The term Srkt may occur in a text in Hatran a dialect like Nabatean of the Middle Aramaic group The verb i rk is found in a Safaitic text and is used in a variety of names found in texts in Middle Aramaic (Palmyrene Old Syriac Elymaian) North Arabic (Safaitic Thamudic) and Old South Arabian ( ~ a t a b a n i a n ) ~ The RawwZifah texts make it necessary to re-examine the stock of Arabic loanwords in Nabatean a stock defined by J Cantineau in his grammar of the language

Cantineau was not only one of the great Semitists of his time he was also among the most theoretically sophisticated of all Semitists the major formulator of the lateral hypothesis for Proto-Semitic and the French translator of Prince Nikolay Trubetzkoys Grundziige der ~ h o n o l o ~ i e ~ Nonetheless Cantineaus statement of the relationship between Nabatean and the North Arabic dialects spoken by its users is erroneous in order to assess properly the place of i rk t as an Arabic loan in Nabatean we need to reconsider Cantineaus views

Written by speakers of Arabic [Nabatean] underwent an extremely strong Arabic influence it borrowed from that language not only nearly all its proper names and a portion of its vocabulary but further isolated grammatical forms Nabatean seems to have emptied itself little by little [semble sFtre vidP peu a peu] of the Aramaic elements it had and to have successively replaced them with Arabic loans this went on up to the time (at the beginning of the fourth century cE)when it was decided to write nearly pure Arabic [lurube a peu prPs purl while preserving Nabatean script7

It would be wrong to dismiss Cantineaus description as romantic though there is a streak of romanticism in it and we can surely enlarge on Marcel Cohens protest Bad theory [Doctrine erronken] quoted by Cantineau h im~e l f ~ The first step must be to insist that the personal and other names in Nabatean do not bear on its

Inscription at RuwwSa Saudi Arabiain J Bingen et al eds Le Monde grec Hommages a Claire Prkaux (Brussels 1975) pp 512-22 On the religious background of the text see J Starcky Quelques aspects de la religion des Nabateens in Studies pp 195-96

3 Milik Rawwafa p 56 4 See D F Grafs and my article The Origin of

the Term Saracen and the RawwSah Inscriptions Byzantine SrudieslEtudes byzantines 4 (1977) 52-66 The suggestion has been well received by for example Bowersock Mavia Queen of the Saracens in W Eck et al eds Studien zur antiken Sozial- geschichle Festschrift Friedrich Vittinghof(Cologne 1980) pp 477-95 esp p 483

5 These are discussed in my paper The Etymology of Saracen and Nabatean Srkt in Aramaic and Pre- Islamic Arabic Contexts in J A Bellamy ed Essays in Near Eastern History and Culture in

Memory of Ernest T Abdel-Massih (forthcoming) 6 See Cantineau Etudes de linguistique arabe

(Paris 1960) 7 Idem Le Nabarken vol I p x The last phrase

refers to the al-NamBrah epitaph of lmru 1-Qais dated 328 cEsee ibid p 13 vol 2 pp 49-50 Starcky Petra col 932 and J A Bellamy A New Reading of the N a m a a h Inscription JAOS 105 (1985) 31-51

8 Cantineau Le Nabateen vol 2 pp 219-20 Starckys formulation is more cautious although Nabatean is more conservative than Jewish Aramaic or Palmyrene (cf PCtra col 925) and closer than either to Official Aramaic it has nonetheless a certain number of arabisms the origins of which are not homogeneous (Petra col 924) Levinson is similarly cautious see his The Nabatean Inscrip- tions pp 6-7 13 100 n 10





























































































ARNA p 150























77 See DISO 43


































































































































ARNA p 150























77 See DISO 43




























































77 See DISO 43






































m. o'connor, the arabic loanwords in nabatean aramaic

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