36
The Arabic Language
Bellamy reads as
fa-raʾasū
: most older interpreters read here
fārisī
in the sense of
either ‘cavalry’ or ‘Persians’. Whatever the interpretation of details, the text is
written in recognisably Classical Arabic, with only a few singularities. The female
demonstrative
tī
is not unknown in Classical poetry,
and the relative
ḏī
is reported
by the grammarians as a pre-Islamic dialecticism (cf. below, p. 51). The word
ʿkḏy
(
ʿakkaḏā
?) is not attested in Classical Arabic; it is translated by Bellamy as ‘there
-
after’ or ‘until then’. Lexically, we note the occurrence of the Nabataean loanword
nfs
in the sense of ‘funerary monument’.
Rather more difficult to interpret is an even older text, dating from the first
century
ce and discovered in 1986 in ʿĒn ʿAvdat, 60 km south of Be’er Sheva in the
Negev Desert, which possibly represents the oldest example of a text in Arabic.
The three lines in Arabic are part of an Aramaic inscription
in Nabataean script
to the God Obodas, erected by Garmʾalahi, son of Taymʾalahi. Transliteration and
translation are given here after Bellamy (1990):
1.
fyfʿl lʾ fidʾ wlʾ ʾṯrʾ
2.
fkn hnʾ ybġnʾ ʾlmwtw lʾ ʾbġh
3.
fkn hnʾ ʾrd jrḥw lʾ yrdnʾ
1.
fa-yafʿalu lā fidan wa-lā ʾaṯara
2.
fa-kāna hunā yabġīnā l-mawtu lā ʾabġāhū
3.
fa-kāna hunā ʾarāda jurḥun lā yurdīnā
1. For [Obodas] works without reward or favour
2. and he, when death tried to claim us, did not let it claim [us]
3. for when a wound [of ours] festered, he did not let us perish.
Almost no element of this interpretation is uncontested. It seems that in this
text the common nouns
ʾlmwtw
and
jrḥw
contain the Nabataean
-w
, which was
later to be used almost only in proper names (as in the an-Namāra inscription).
But others
deny this and connect the
w
with the next word. The element
kn
is
interpreted as a verb
kāna
, or as a conjunction ‘if ’, or as a positive counterpart to
Classical
lākin
, that is,
kin
‘thus’. Sharon (
CIAP
,
I, 193) reads the third line
wa-kun/
ken hunā ʾarid, jarḥū lā yaridnā
‘and if I come to the water in this place, let no
calamity come upon me’, deriving
the verb from the root
warada
‘to go down to
the water’. Whatever the correct interpretation, there can be no doubt that the
inscription is in Arabic because of the use of the article
ʾl-
; and, pending further
interpretation, the inscription stands as a fascinating testimony of the oldest
form of Arabic.
The most important conclusion to be drawn from the an-Namāra inscription
is
that the ending
-w
is no longer used for common nouns, as in the inscrip
-
tions from ʾUmm al-Jimāl and al-Ḥijr, and not even in all proper names. This
would seem to indicate that the pausal ending had become zero, as in Classical
Arabic, except in the accusative in
-ā
; the spelling
of the proper names would
The Earliest Stages of Arabic
37
then be a relic of Nabataean/Aramaic spelling that was retained for some time
for historical reasons and eventually disappeared in the orthographic system of
Classical Arabic, except in the name
ʿamr
. The pre-Islamic inscriptions do not
provide any conclusive evidence for or against the existence of declensional
endings in the Arabic of this period. They follow the conventions of Nabataean
spelling, among other things in the accusative pausal ending. One way or the
other, the inscriptions cannot answer the question of
whether the distinction of
case endings was reintroduced from some kind of poetic language (cf. Chapter 4)
or had been retained. The only example that has been adduced of a dual ending,
in the an-Namāra inscription,
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