The Writing Culture of Ancient Dadān

Fokelien Kootstra obtained her Ph.D. from Leiden University, the Netherlands, in 2019 and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University, Belgium. She has published on the epigraphic traditions of pre-Islamic North Arabia (Taymāʾ and al-ʿUlā). Her most recent work focuses on the language and writing culture of the early Arabic papyri.

List of Figures, Maps and Tables

Sigla and Abbreviations

Acknowledgements



Introduction

 1 Outline of the Present Work

 2 The Corpus

 3 A Holistic Approach to the Epigraphic Object

 4 Scribal School and Variation



1 The Oasis of Dadan in Space and Time

 1 The Dadanite and Liḥyanite Kingdoms

 2 Philological Arguments

 3 Minaean Presence at Dadan

 4 Paleography

 5 Dadan in Other Corpora

 6 Archaeological Evidence

 7 Summary of the Dating Evidence



2 Script and Manners of Inscribing

 1 Glyphs and Their Variant Forms

 2 Script Styles

 3 Dadanitic Alphabetic Text

 4 Summary: Varying Styles, Varying Forms



3 Genres and Compositional Formulae

 1 Superscriptio

 2 Narratio

 3 Invocatio

 4 Graffiti

 5 Summary



4 Orthography and Phonology

 1 Word Dividers

 2 Matres lectionis

 3 Triphthongs

 4 Final Short Vowels

 5 Diphthongs

 6 Sound Changes



5 Verbal Morphology

 1 Suffix Conjugation

 2 Prefix Conjugation

 3 Derived Stems

 4 Participles



6 Nominal and Pronominal Morphology

 1 Gender

 2 Number

 3 Noun Formation

 4 Demonstrative Pronoun

 5 Relative Pronoun

 6 hmḏ

 7 mh

 8 mn

 9 Personal Pronouns

 10 Prepositions

 11 Numerals

 12 Adverbs

 13 Particles

 14 Conjunctions



7 A Quantitative Approach to Variation

 1 Methodology: Statistics

 2 The Data and Methodology



8 Analysis

 1 Text Internal Variants

 2 Register Indicators

 3 Important Non-significant Co-occurrences

 4 Discussion

 5 Summary



Conclusions

 1 Descriptive and Grammar Chapters

 2 Chapters Analyzing Variation

 3 Variation and Literacy

 4 Future Directions

 5 Summary



Glossary

Bibliography

Index of Inscriptions