THE ARABIC LOANWORDS IN NABATEAN ARAMAIC

M. O'CONNOR, Ann Arbor, Michigan

T H E 4,000 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 O n 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 d'epigraphie 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 Nabatean texts, see H . Ingholt, "Palmyrene-HatranNabatean,"in F. Rosenthal, ed., An Aramaic Handbook, pt. 1 (hereafter Ingholt) (Wiesbaden, 1967); I have used the following abbreviations for Ingholt's 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 2.170: 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" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1974), offers a morphological sketch, an edition of some texts (twelve complete, two partial, with notes o n three others), and a glossary; he draws chiefly o n comparative Aramaic materials, notably from rabbinic sources. For the historical background, see J . Starcky's 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]86/4503-0003$1.00.
@

Cazelles and A. Feuillet, eds., Supplhnent arc Dictionnaire de la Bible (hereafter S D B ) , 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. Roschinski's survey "Sprachen, Schriften und lnschriften in Nordwestarabien," Bonner Jahrbiicher 180 (1980): 155-88 (pp. 159-62 on Nabatean); and in the second, Milik's "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 southeastern 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(i<hnaic) Heb, Nab(atean), Off(icia1) Arm, Palm(yrene), Phoen(ician), Syr(iac). For comments o n earlier drafts of this and related papers, 1 a m grateful to P. T . Daniels, J . A. Fitzmyer, D . F. Graf, and L. K . Obler, each of whom pounced o n different gaps and gaffes with wonted assiduity; J . A. Bellamy and E. N. McCarus went over the Raq%h 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 Archaeology, University of London 10 (1972): 23-61, pls. 1-31; further discussion in J . Beaucamp, "Rawwafa (et les Thamoudeens)," SDB, vol. 9/fasc. 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 nNab . ~ irkt 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 r k 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 Trubetzkoy's Grundziige der ~ h o n o l o ~ iNonetheless, e.~ Cantineau's 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 irkt as an Arabic loan in Nabatean, we need to reconsider Cantineau's 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 c.E.) when it was decided to write nearly pure Arabic [l'urube a peu prPs purl while preserving Nabatean script.7

It would be wrong to dismiss Cantineau's description as romantic, though there is a streak of romanticism in it, and we can surely enlarge on Marcel Cohen's protest, "Bad theory!" ["Doctrine erronken], quoted by Cantineau h i m ~ 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 Arabia,"in J. Bingen et al., eds., Le Monde grec: Hommages a Claire Prkaux (Brussels, 1975), pp. 512-22. O n 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. Graf's 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 Sozialgeschichle: 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 PreIslamic 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 t o the al-NamBrah epitaph of lmru 1-Qais, dated 328 c.E.; see 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. Starcky's 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 Inscriptions," pp. 6-7; 13; 100, n. 10.

evaluation as a language.9 The second step must be to evaluate Cantineau's list of borrowed words and forms. Ideally, this should be done in light of the entire Nabatean record, but I will draw chiefly on Cantineau's 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 Cantineau's great successors in Nabatean studies, J. Starcky and J. T. Milik." Along with the reconsideration of Cantineau's list must come recognition of the special status of the bilingual RaqZsh Epitaph from al-HijriMada'in SZlih, recently reread by Milik and Starcky. Reconsideration of Cantineau's list involves the fundamental difficulty of all intraSemitic 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 language.12 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 known.13 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 Cantineau's efforts.
9 New material on names is abundant; see, for example, Milik, "Nouvelles inscriptions nabateennes," Syria 35 (1958): 227-51, esp. pp. 245,250, and Milik and Starcky, "Inscriptions rCcemment dCcouvertes a Petra," A D A J 2 0 (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., n.s. 48 (1979): 207-57 (hereafter Diem I); "Untersuchungen . . . 11. Die Schreibung der Konsonanten," Or., n.s. 49 (1980): 67-106 (hereafter Diem 11); "Untersuchungen . . . 111. Endungen und Endschreibungen," Or., n.s. 50 (1981): 332-83 (hereafter Diem 111); "Untersuchungen . . . IV. Die Schreibung der zusammenhangden Rede. Zusammenfassung," Or., n.s. 52 (1983): 357-404 (hereafter Diem 1V). 11 In the C I S 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 (e.g., 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. 71117 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, "Petra,"cols. 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 d'e'pigraphie proche-orientale. I. Didicaces faites par des dieux /Palmyre, Hatra, Tyr) et des ihiases skmitiques a I'e'poque romaine, BAH 92 (Paris, 1970). 13 O n 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, e.g., 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 ' j d q 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 (e.g., Milik and Starcky in A R N A , p. 148); see Winnett in A R N A , pp. 77-78. o n 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 them.15 I will begin by sorting out his list.16 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-, e.g., 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'- (e.g., JArm he!'&, 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 limitations of Hijazi evidence for the history of the Arabic language (Diem 111. p. 335). Blau refers to the alNamarah text as Nabatean Arabic; most of his remarks stand, though some are vitiated by Bellamy's restudy, "NamBrah Inscription," notably with reference t o the passage in line 4 concerning Rome, wwklhm frsw Irwm 'and they became phylarchs (ra'su) 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 c.E., 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 than'from the top of that page. O n 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 phz/Arb fakh(i)d 'thigh, tribal subdivision' and Palm wrSt ? / A r b 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. 99-100,202) 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," Z D M G 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. 2303 1; the term is analogous to Arm npf, for example, in Milik and Starcky, "Inscriptions rkcemment decouvertes," p. 126; cf. p. 115. On the importance of steles, see M. Gawlikowski, "Les Tombeaux anonymes [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, e.g., BHeb 'azkiir 'daring', 'akziib 'deceptive', '8tiin 'perennial'), 'sdq, the term for a legal heir, i.e., 'moreimost legitimate', is probably a loan.I9 Northwest Semitic languages, too, have only rare instances of medial h roots, so rhn is probably also a loan.20 These five loans are the most certain on Cantineau's list. 4. Words recognized as loans on the grounds that the words are not attested in Aramaic (six words): 'I 'tribe, lineage';21 kpr 'grave' (the Aramaic is qbr, cf. ~ q b r ) ; ~ ' to draw out'. niyb 'relative (father-in-law?)'; 'yr 'other than'; 'yr 'to alter'; p s '~ 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 1.103: 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 B.v.E.) 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, tenthcentury hand) and has been corrected; see H. Frisk, Le Periple de la Mer ~ r y t h r i eGoteborgs , 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, q.v. for JArm. Another Aramaic term for mortgage, mSk (contrast 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 4,6). 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, i.a., Ps. 18:46! The Nabatean root hrg is otheruise k n o u n only in IngNab 4:3, in the legal phrase hrm whrg &Srh 'Ih mr'n wmwthh hrjS

w'lhy ' klhni 'interdicted and forbidden of DhuShara, the god [of'!] our lord, and of his (dibine) throne Harisha and of all the (other) gods'. O n this phrase, see Gaulikouski, "Tombeaux," p. 37, whose thesis will need to be reconsidered in light of the MilikStarcky text just cited (olim CIS 2.200, 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, etymologically, 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 D I S O ) , a new Hatra text (Hatra 245), which reads in part dr. 'hrym I'hd'dr. sgyl'which 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 'I'god'(not 'tribe') in CIS 2.174, see Starcky in Starcky et al.. C7n Royaume au.u confins du de'sert: Pc;tra et la NahatPne (Lyons, 1978), p. 88. 22 O n 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. Bergstr'kser, Introduction t o the Semitic Languages, trans. P. T. Daniels (Winona Lake, Indiana, 1983), pp. 107. n. 13 (West A r a m a i c kla-liila), and 115, n. 14 (East Aramaic Urmia).

DISO s.v. for possible OffArm cases of the sense 'to die');25 lCn'to curse' (twice in 517; but cf. BHeb, J A r m l a c ~ n & 'wormwood, bitterness'); s n c 'to make' (only in 517; cf. JArm s n c 'to guard'); sryh 'chamber' (cf. J A r m srh 'to be narrow'); Slw 'ossements, bony remains' (but cf. J A r m 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 t o 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 Samalianp>b shift, otherwise only in the word n b ~ , Panammuwa ~' I = KAI 214, line 34); gb' (see discussion above); gwh 'tomb, loculus' (a loan from Akk kimahhu, cf. (in, for example, JArm, Palm gwmh, grnh, Syr grnh, MHeb kwk, e t ~ . ) g ; r~ 'client' ~ Palm, BHeb, MHeb, ~ h o e n ) hlt ; ~ 'maternal ~ aunt' (cf. Palm hl; hlt may occur in a Dura proper name;30the pair hllhlt 'avunculus/matertera' 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 ' ) ; p ~~~'to ? open, be split' (attested in JArm); qsr 'cella' (whether 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); S'ryt (attested in

25 Diem also regards hlk as a loan and cites the occurrence in the a l - N a m a a h text (Diem 111, p. 365 and n. 83) cited belou. For BHeb, note the idiom hlk ICmlit (e.g., Gen. 25:32), reduced to hlk both in prose (Gen. 15:2) and verse (Job 14:20, 19:lO); see F. I. Andersen, Job (Downers Grove, Illinois, 1976), p. 174; cf. R. Gordis, The Book of' God and Man (Chicago, 1965), pp. 256 ('he departs forever'), and 263 ('I perish'); M. Pope, oh', AB 15 (Garden City, New York, 1973), pp. 11 l ("The general verb for going is here used as a euphemistic substitute for dying") and 141 (citing the Arabic sense). On the alleged case of hlk 'to die' in a Thamudic text (Winnett in A R N A , p. 96), see A. Jamme, review of A R N A , Or., n.s. 40 (1971): 481-89, on p. 486, who parses h lk 'the meaty or fleshy one', of a camel. 26 See E. M. Yamauchi, Mandaic Incantation Te.uts, AOS 49 (New Haven, 1967), p. 358; the incantation text references seem to involve a fetus; Drower and Macuch, however, do not recognize that sense but only the 'placenta' meaning (DM 454). Arabic has Silw, pl. 'aSlC' '(decaying) corpse, severed member'; in view of the sibilant, this is probably an Aramaic loan into Arabic. 27 The Hatra occurrence is the dream text Hatra 106b, [ z l h ~ d w ~:r.hhSy/[hn hrnny ~ ] 'rdkl'lhr ~ h h f y 'rdkl'ldy :IhZ hhlm' 'lp hnw 'Zabidii and Yahbshay, the sons of Barnannay the architect, the son of Yahbshay the architect, (Zabidu and Yahbshay)

whom the god instructed in a dream'; the text is well treated in Milik, DPdicaces, pp. 388-99. The traditional understanding of the divinely made model (tahnft) of Exodus 25 suggests that sketching or writing may have been involved in the Hatran dream. On p l h , see, for example, G. B. Sarfatti, "Hebrew Inscriptions of the First Temple Period," Maarav 3 (1982): 55-83, 69-71. In a number of cases in the list of rejected loans, the determinations are based on evidence that has come to light since Cantineau wrote; in some cases I may simply have missed his point. 28 The developments uere first unraveled by E. Y. Kutscher; see Kaufman, AkkadianlAramaic, p. 64; cf. D. Boyarin, review of Y. Sabar, PaSai Wayahi BaSallah: A Neo-Aramaic Midrash on Beshallah (Wiesbaden, 1976), in Maarav 3 (1982): 113-14; der S. Hopkins, review of W. Fischer, ed., Grundr~g arahischen Philologie I. Sprachwissenschaft (Wiesbaden, 1982) in Z A L 14 (1985): 83. 29 See, too, Teixidor, The Pagan God, pp. 12-13, n. 28. 30 On both, see Milik, DPdicaces, pp. 331-32. 31 See R . Payne Smith, A Compendious Syriac Dictionary (Oxford, 1903), pp. 142, 145; C. Brockelmann, Le-xicon Syriacum (Halle, 1928), p. 221. For hlt' in Old Syriac, see H. J . W. Drijvers, Old-S.r.riac (Edessean) Inscriptions, Semitic Study Series, n.s. 3 (Leiden, 1972), p. 94; hl also occurs in Amorite. 32 See Kaufman, AkkadianlAramaic, pp. 78, 142-43, cf. 145-46, 151, 161.

4. Ordinary vocabulary (four words): l'n '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 t o 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 , 3), and the legal rights t o the graves must be controlled (rhn, Group 3) and p ~ s Group through documents36('yr 'to alter', Group 4) and performative gestures (l'n 'to curse', Group 4). Only two of the loans fall outside this assemblage: hty'h 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 funerary.37

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 nouns.38 The occurrence as loans of four verbs and one functor, '-vr 'other than', is perhaps greater testimony t o the Arabic influence on Nabatean than the entire witness of the nouns.39 The use of 'vr, confined to Nabatean texts from Mada'in 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 particles.40
36 Note IngHab 10:8, kpr' wkthh dnh hrm 'the grave and these its documents are sacred'. 37 On Petra, see "Petra," cols. 95 1-73; o n 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, "Tombeaux," pp. 36-39, and Teixidor, BES 1979, no. 18. T h e uniformity of the Mada'in Salih texts is emphasized by N. I. Khairy in his useful survey, "An Analytical Study of the Nabataean Monumental Inscriptions at Medi'in Saieh," Z D P V 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. F o 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 S o m e 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 R o m a n militaryadministrative 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, qn!rr.n2,a loan from Latin t o Greek t o Nabatean. O n kirk 'chiliarch', see Levinson, "The Nabatean Inscriptions," p. 173. T o this we must add hms, nws, and tr.!r2 (see n. 35 above), and hgmwn 'hpgemon, governor'in two texts from Rawwafah, all nouns. Note, too, that in the OffArm Arsames correspondence, 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 prepositional 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 Akkadian/Aramaic, p. 168. 39 Cantineau, Le .VabatCen, vol. 1, p. 66. 40 See O'Connor, 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, e.g., mn yqbr bh 'yr kmkm wbrth 'whoever buries in it (the tomb) anyone other than Kamkam and her daughter' (IngNab 11:6) and wmn y'bd k'yr dnh 'and whoever does (anything) other than this' (IngNab 12:7). The use in IngNab 12:6 (the Halifu Dedication, CIS 2.209) is unusual: in light of parallels in other texts (e.g., IngNab 10:6-8, 11:3-7), one is inclined to parse wl' ri,v '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 loan.43 IV. THERAQASH EPITAPH The Raqash Epitaph of 267 C.E. is a bilingual Nabatean-Thamudic text from the Qasr al-Bint group at Madg'in 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 distinguished 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 S o also Gaulikowski, "Tombeaux," p. 36. Nabatean is not alone in borrowing Rayr. Modern Mandaic has borrowed the verb gyr as G I R ( D M 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 Azerhaijan, 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 Teixidor's explanation of Dushara-A'ra 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 C R A I B L (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. Diem's treatment is integrated into his monographic "Untersuchungen" I-IV, and Blau's 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 Cantineau's I believe it must be vacillating treatment of it is ~ n d e r s t a n d a b l e .Nonetheless, ~~ 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, Cantineau's views must be revised.48 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 demonstra. "is ~ 'a feminine demonstrative in tive, tih, which is scarcely acceptable ~ ~ n t a c t i c a l l ~th
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 Cantineau's vacillating views can be seen in Naveh's 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 2.333); 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 5:'l (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 S O also, again, Starcky, "Petra," col. 925. 49 I omit discussion of the personal names. On the consonantism of k'bu,, 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; o n 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 (Manawtkjt); Blau, "Beginnings," p. 14 (Manlt). The use of w for internal d is reflected in certain features of Arabic spelling, e.g., the (Sumerian>Akkadian>Aramaic>) Arabic loan 'kwrl'akkdr 'farmer'; see Diem I, pp. 220-21. O n the graphic layout of the text, see Diem's remarks. Most Nabatean texts are written in scriptio continua with ligatures over word boundaries (contrary 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). Diem's treatment of ulaw and the Classical Arabic SchlussAlif'is a matter I hope to return to elsewhere. 50 Milik and Starcky in A R N A , pp. 154-55; cf. Milik, "Bilingue," p. 144. 51 Diem 111, p. 354, n. 50; on tiltih, see, in addition t o 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 nps'lnfs, which is feminine; but this seems unlikely. qbrw. The noun bears the "Nabatean waw" commonest on personal names and designed t o mark elements as (in some sense) non-Aramaic, as Diem has shown most recently; the broadest usage, on triptotic nouns, is reflected here.52 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 suffix.j3 Whether the suffix's 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 syntax.54 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) P N made (it)'. This is one of the two interpretations espoused by Cantineau, and it has j ~is supported by the analogy of other been most recently championed by ~ 1 a u . It Nabatean texts, e.g.,
dnh hmn' dj, 'bd m'yrw 'This is the incense altar which P N made' IngNab 2:l. d' mhrmt3 dy bnh 'nmw, 'This is the consecrated place'6 which P N built' IngNab 6: 1. dnh qbr' d j 'bd 'ydw 'This is the tomb which P N made' IngNab 10:1 (similarly 11: 1, 12:1 , 13:1, and many others). dnh mSkb3 d j 'hd 'nmw 'This is the banqueting place'7 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 u,aw 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, PseudoCorrections, p. 51. The waw also occurs on k'bu,, 'bd~nnu,rw,'Ihgrw, and 'lqbru,. O n 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 Categories 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 m h r n ~ t ,see Gawlikowski, "Tombeaux," p. 38. 57 O n the sense of m f k b , see Milik and Starcky in A R N A , p. 150.

he hypothesizes, allowed for "a type of attribute (relative) clause different from Standard Arabic usage, i.e., [one with] the antecedent standing in construct relation to the following asyndetic attribute clause, a construction preserved in Standard Arabic only after antecedents denoting time."58 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 This made (it)'. Cantineau also advocated this view, and its current defender is construction, an asyndetic relative clause with an indefinite head, is syntactically correct in Classical ~ r a b i c . ~ Diem, ' calling Blau's suggestion f a r f e t ~ h e d ,relies ~' on the analogy of Classical Arabic grammar to support the parsing; he proposes seeing a similar construction in two other arabized Nabatean texts:
[ d ] hmsgd 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 'l'tr 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[h/yh?] 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 analogies.66 ~ ~ hlktpy ~ 'lhgrw (5) Snt m'h wStyn (6) wtryn byrh tmwz 2 why . (4)
Aramaic, see Whitehead, "Arsames," pp. 126-28, and note the discussion of related patterns in Phoenician in Teixidor, BES 1979, no. 12. 64 Jaussen and Savignac, Mission, p. 174: "Ce tombeau I'a fait Kacabu"; Chabot, CRAIBL (1908), p. 270: "Ce tombeau (est celui) qu'a fait," etc. 65 Cantineau, Le Nabate'en, vol. 2, p. 18; cf. Diem 111, p. 354. 66 Milik, "Bilingue," pp. 143-44. 67 The bulk of previous discussion of the text has concentrated on the opening clause to the exclusion of the remainder.

5s Blau, "Beginnings," p. 11. The clause type hypothesized would be analogous to the bit p u f u type in Akkadian (GAG 166b) and the br'fyt br' type in Hebrew (GKC 130d). 59 Cantineau, Le Nabate'en, vol. 2, p. 38; Diem 111, p. 354. 60 Wright, Arabic Grammar, vol. 2, pp. 317-19. 61 Diem 111, p. 354, n. 51. 62 Ibid., p. 354. 63 O r topic-comment or casus pendens; on the grammar generally, see, for example, Hebrew Verse Structure, pp. 79-82. For the construction in Official

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 allowed."68 'Ihgrw. The form of the name with the bound Arabic article constrasts with hgr', the form with the bound Aramaic article,69but the toponym cannot be regarded strictly as part of the plain text. int. Year formulas in Nabatean may be introduced by b (e.g., 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: ' k d y hlk snt 223 ywm 7 bkslwl 'Thereafter he died in the year 223 [328 c . ~ . ] ,o n 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' w m n ypthh hSy dy"72 ( 9 ) wldh
'Iqbrw d 3 . If the pronoun is Aramaic, it is feminine; if Arabic, it is masculine (for dd),73used where the Classical language would use hiid& 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 ma'nd I-iarti 'conditional meaning' associated with 'in and the like, e.g., faman yastajirna Id yakhaf ba'da 'aqdinh waman la yusiilihna yabit gayra nii'imi '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 2.181). 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 here.76 It has usually been assumed that h i y dy is a compound, like Arm br m n (zldy),??and
68 Diem 1, p. 213; cf. IV, p. 359. In fact the vowel o f p y 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 Qur'Bnic spelling (sura 15.80), 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 A R N A , pp. 154-55, read d(v?), against the w of Jaussen and Savignac.

See Diem I. pp. 214-15 and n. 18. 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 inflection, e.g., y'vr J 17, 9 (&r 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 u,alirnan yasma'u haS5 I-iappina wa'abC7 I-'asba@ 'God, pardon me and all who hear, except for Satan and PN' (Wright, Arabic Grammar, vol. 2, p. 343). 77 See DISO 43.
73
74

that it governs the noun wldh 'his (or less likely her) progeny',78 but it may be better to parse d v wIdh as a relative clause, 'him whom he (Kacb) begot (him)'. S4. wlcn mn yqbr ~ ' ~ mnh l y yqbr . . . mnh. Jaussen and Savignac read (a) .v'yr d' 'ly mnh.79 Chabot proposed (b) yqbr ~ ' ~ mnh, l y 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 Chabot's suggestion. Ingholt followed Cantineau. Milik and Starcky have returned to (b), Jaussen and Savignac's 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 form;82 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 present"83-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 object.84It has been proposed that wXly mnh is a compound preposition; in suggesting the reading, Chabot rendered mn yqbr ~.tj"ly mnh 'whoever buried (anyone) on top of it (or her)', remarking, "The grammatical interpretation remains obscure, while the general sense does not seem dubious."85 The argument from obscurity only goes so far: Chabot fails to explain either the w or the ' of w"ly, 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 Ka'b bar Haritat made. (b) This is a grave which Ka'b bar Haritat made. (c) As for this grave, Ka'b Haritat made it.
78 The feminine suffix would presumably be -h'. For this reading, see, for example, Diem IV, p. 386. 79 I.e., "(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 A R N A , pp. 154-55. 8 2 Nabatean has both ApCZls and Hap'Zls; 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, l'.ytpjs mn kl dy bhm m n d c m nml' ytqbr bybr ' dnh 'nwS klh Ihn nln d.v 'No one at all ( m n . . . mndcm<mdcm) of those who are (mentioned) 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 4:5; note p ~ s ,cf. above) and w:vlLn dwSr3. . . m i ? . . . ynpq mnh gt 'n, SIN, 'w m n yqbr hh ' j r k m k m . . . 'May DhuShara c u r s e . . . 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 16.4.26 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 m n 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 begotten/his 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),87as 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. S2. S3. S4. dnh qbrw ?nch P N , IPN, ' m h why hlkt py GN DATE wlcn DN m n ySn3 'lqbrw d' wmn ypthh hSy d,v wldh 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 cThe .~~ 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 terms,89 without being allowed to irregularize Nabatean grammar on a regular basis.90
87 O n the use of br, brt, 'bn, and (Arb, not Heb) bn in name formulas, see Diem 11, pp. 87-90, 99-100; 111, pp. 339, 362. 88 Cantineau, Le Nabateen, vol. 1, pp. 59-60. 89 Or perhaps on the terms of the "late NabateanHijazi" group Diem associates it with (Diem I, pp. 213,222; cf. 217), a group that includes (at least?) J71 and J85 (Diem 11, p. 71); it may be identical to the arum.-arab. group (Diem 111, p. 353; cf. pp. 333, 337), which would bring in RES 1097 and 518. Assessment of all these texts is not possible here. 90 Such a reasonable approach is implicit in the work of Blau and Diem, though Diem takes a broader view of loanwords in general (Diem 111,

pp. 353-54); see n. 91 below. Fuller epigraphic evaluation will be a matter of the ethnography of writing. Note F. M. Cross's qualifications on the use of the freakish 'Izbet Sartah ostracon, "Newly Found Inscriptions in Old Canaanite and Early Phoenician Scripts," B A S O R 238 (1980): 1-20 on pp. 8-15, and more generally, my paper "Writing Systems, Native Speaker Analyses. and the Earliest Stages of Northwest Semitic Orthography," in C. L. Meyers's and my collection of Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman (Philadelphia, 1983), pp. 439-65. In linguistic terms, it should be emphasized that the Raqssh text is a radical exception t o 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 lexicon."93 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 Qoheleth's 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 a n d 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 trpfs'adoptee', but also a IV Form verb with h, hwhb, against late Aramaic (generally), Classical Arabic, and Pre-Islamic Arabic; this may reflect the 'ApCFl/HapcPI 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;', I?yr '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 h,aw o r 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 speakers/writers 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 locutions 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 (Le Nabate'en, 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 o n the sibilants. Even names are generally regular, e.g., Nab SCdy/SCdt/SCydw, etc., v. Arb sacid, etc., and Nab Slymt/Slmw, 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: i.a., qlwny' 'colonia', pylys 'phylt?~, tribe', 'wfqr!wr 'autokratdr,' hpws 'hippeus, horseman', hpty' 'hypateia, consulate', and the Semitic-Greek-Semitic calque-loan mtrpwls 'metropolis' (cf. 'yr w'm in 2 Sam. 20:19). 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 dialect."95 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, Cantineau's 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 witness to Nabateans or nabateophones but with n a b a t e ~ g r a ~ h the s ; ~ inscriptional ~ language, that is, is a tentative one.97The Rawwiifah texts, which have given us the Semitic etymon of Saracen, at the same time remind us of the difficulties of reading such evidence.98
Milik, "Rawwafa," p. 57. The view of the Nabatean language implicit here is complementary t o the notions of Nabatean culture now accepted among historians and archaeologists; see, for example, the contributions t o the Oxford Symposium, Studies, of A. Hadidi, "The Archaeology 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 Influence," pp. 23 1-38. This volume can be supplemented with R . North's report, "Jordan Archeology Conference at Oxford," Or., n.s. 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
95 96

period, compare Sarfatti's remarks: "A surprising feature is the small number of words and roots found in the inscriptions which were not already known t o us from Biblical Hebrew. It is commonly thought that, o n 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. O n writing systems and lexicon growth, see the preliminary 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 t o its existence.