The city-states of the Jawf at the dawn of Ancient South Arabian history (8th-6th centuries BCE). II. Corpus of the inscriptions

In the fertile area of wadi al-Jawf in north-western Yemen - transit zone for overland trade towards the north of the Arabian Peninsula - five independent city-states flourished in the first half of the 1st millennium BCE along the course of the wadi Madhab: Nashshan, Kamna, Haram, Qarna/Ma'in and Inabba'. From these come the earliest Ancient South Arabian inscriptions, which are the expression of a specific historical and cultural horizon in the wider landscape of Ancient South Arabia, lasting until the expansion of the kingdom of Ma'in in the 6th century BCE. The present volume, which is the second of the publication entitled The city-states of the Jawf at the dawn of Ancient South Arabian history (8th-6th centuries BCE), is a collection of the nearly three hundred inscriptions composing the epigraphic corpus of these political entities, in a renewed philological edition provided with transliterations, translations, contextual information and commentaries. These texts bear witness to a rich and mature textual and artistic tradition, specific to the Jawf region, already in the earliest historical phases of Ancient South Arabia. Though they represent the tip of the iceberg of the original epigraphic heritage, which still remains largely submerged, these documents are the essential primary sources used for the historical reconstruction offered by Mounir Arbach in Volume I of this work. On a linguistic level, they attest to the earliest phases of the Ancient South Arabian language that has since long been defined with the label of Minaic, and constitute the basis for the lexical and onomastic indices contained in Volume III.