Thread by @Safaitic

What is the earliest mention of #Damascus in Arabic? In 1995, Alulu discovered a fascinating #Safaitic inscription from southern Syria containing the name of the city. The enigmatic text is known only from a crude hand copy. Photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Roma…

The inscription is dated as to ‘the year lʾk qṣr ʾn myt ʿm rm w f t w qd dms²q; the original editor did not provide a convincing interpretation of its difficult language. The text is filled with hapax legomena (words attested only once) and Safaitic has no word dividers.

But let’s have a try anyway. There are multiple ways to understand this text; here is option 1: ‘the year (word) was sent to Caesar that the people of Rome died and Damascus burned = loʾeka qaysara ʾan mayeta ʿamm rūm wa-fa tawaqqada demaśq.

lʾk = loʾeka, a passive verb, ‘it was sent’. While it is very rare in later Arabic, known only in form IV ʾalʾaka, the root is found in the word for ‘angel’ malak, ultimately from Hebrew malʾāk or Aramaic malʾakā via Ethiopic. It is the normal verb meaning ‘to send’ in Ugaritic.

ʿamm is the Old Arabic word for grandfather/ancestral kinsman (it means paternal uncle in modern Arabic), and can refer to a ‘people’, as in Hebrew עם ישראל ‘the people of Israel’. The combination of wa ‘and’ and fa ‘then’ is difficult to interpret, perhaps a writing error.

The final sentence wqd dms²q ‘Damascus burned’; wqd is equivalent to the Classical Arabic waqada ‘to take fire, to burn’. While Damascus is feminine in later forms of Arabic, gender agreement in Safaitic seems to have been more flexible.

This is only one possible interpretation. Another is: word was sent to Caesar that the people of Rome died and passed away (wa fātū) and Damascus surrendered (wa qīda demaśq). More interpretations are possible and there is no way to know for certain without more context.

What unfortunate chapter in Damascus’ history does this text attest? It seems too early for the Persian conquest of Damascus in 613 CE. The reference to the Romans seems to rule out a connection with Aretas III, king of the Nabataean’s, taking of the city in 85 BCE.

Perhaps the text refers to an unknown and brief siege during the Perso-Roman wars of the 3rd/4th c. CE or an attack related to the sack of Bostra by the Palmyrene Empire in 270 CE. Perhaps the text simply refers to a great fire unrelated to warfare? All of this is speculation.

This text highlights what is so exciting and so frustrating about the Safaitic inscriptions. They are eyewitnesses to important events that have been lost in other sources, but because their writers were carving on stone, they often have the same word limits as twitter.

The rest of the inscription is fully intelligible. It states:
wallada haḍ-ḍaʾna fa-hā-llāt salāma w ġaneyyata le- ḏī daʿaya has- sefra wa-wagama ʿal-ʾaḫaway-h ʿal-ṣaʿd wa ʿal-qadam ḏī- ʾāl naġbār

Translation: ‘and he helped the sheep to give birth so, O Allāt, may he who reads this writing have security and abundance; and he grieved for his two brothers, for Saʿd and for Qadam, of the lineage of Naghbar’.

The txt remains in situ, AFAIK, and will hopefully be re-discovered one day so that it can be properly studied from photographs. Luckily the hand is clear and I do not suspect that there are significant copy errors. What historical event do you think this text could refer to?

Bibliography:
ʿAlūlū [Alulu], Ġ.M.Y. Dirāsat nuqūš ṣafawīyyah jadīdah min wādī al-sūʿ ǧanūb sūrīyyah. Unpublished M.A. thesis, Yarmouk University. 1996.