Original subtitles

Ok. So I'm at Yes hand 9.

This is the professor of complaint here at Brown.

We are live right now.

We're webcasting this and I'm really thrilled to introduce my dear friend and delayed a graduate school buddy of mine who is here to talk about digital approaches to ancient literacy the case of Safir Idec.

Matt is a university lecturer in Semitic linguistics at Leiden.

You have his full bio here.

And in Middle East studies we have a tradition where we don't do introductions especially if we hand out an introduction.

So we're not going I'm not going to tell you all about his where he got his page D and all that.

So I will say though that Eichmann's work is very exciting to me.

We've been having conversations about language linguistics history prehistory since we were in graduate school together and you know I've been terrifically excited about this area of research not knowing that much about it and trying to educate myself just to kind of keep up with his own scholarship and and I think this is gonna be a terrific talk.

So Ahmed will speak for whatever it is half an hour and then we'll have a Q and A DISCUSSION AND.

YEAH. Floor is yours.

Thank you very much.

He asked for that kind introduction and I really mean it.

I mean usually embarrassed when the whole biography is written out read out so.

And thank you all for coming and I'm aware that I'm standing in the wave of pizza.

So I'll try to be as quick as possible but I want to thank first to the US for inviting me here and be able to speak with all of you about Sofia can I imagine for many Sofia this is the first time you're hearing this term.

It's an exciting field of study but it's in its infancy I would say that it's inscriptions were discovered more than 150 years ago.

But a critical mass of scholars working on them.

I think it was only achieved in the last five years since we're coming up with a lot of really interesting discoveries in this field and Sofie Erik is a term it's a term that refers to an alphabet.

A s Semitic alphabet it's an alphabetic tradition used in the Arabian Peninsula.

In fact throughout Arabia from the Syrian desert all the way to Yemen you had a family of indigenous alphabets indigenous scripts used before Islam from the previous night as early perhaps as the early or the late second millennium BCE.

And these alphabet to preserve mostly in the form of rock inscriptions and Arabia seems to be unique in the ancient world and the number of inscriptions that are that have been produced mostly and what scholars call graffiti is it's impossible to know how many inscriptions there are out there but so far the known Corpus is around between maybe almost sixty thousand texts and many of these are graffiti and why is that important because they're not commissioned by state actors they're not commissioned texts they imply or it seems to be the case that they imply mass literacy or literacy among nomads among townspeople.

and these are found all over the Arabian Peninsula.

So even in the deepest deserts we find texts written by could only be written by nomads.

So Arabia seems to have been a place of incredible literacy.

Now this has been the assumption.

This is what people have thought based on the number of texts and based on their distributions.

What I want to do in this talk is sort of challenged that idea.

We now have many of these texts not all of them but many of them in a database and we can look at the entire corpus in ways that we haven't been able to study before before these were dispersed editions.

You know some of them of poor quality some of them really hard to to attain it to get a hold of.

And it was really impossible to study the entire corpus as a corpus.

So it did seem like there were just many inscriptions everywhere and everyone could read and write.

What I'm going to argue in this talk today is when we look at the entire corpus in the database with just a little bit of arithmetic it's not so clear cut and maybe literacy wasn't as widespread as we thought.

But before that I want to give you a sort of a an introduction to the significance of these texts from the point of view of the history of Arabic the Arabic language.

So before the 20th century Arabic history began in the sixth century.

That was as old as you could go.

And these are the earliest Arabic texts were in fact poems that were transmitted orally and collected in the Islamic period the first Arabic texts appeared in the 7th century.

The surveying the graphic surveying of Arabia and in late 19th and early 20th century extended Arabic history.

Back more than a thousand years.

So what was previously Arabic prehistory became Arabic history.

And now we have tens of thousands of texts in languages that are rather exotic and far away from Arabic to those that are actually quite similar to classical Arabic.

So the discovery of these texts and suffocated being one of them has in a way turned Arabic prehistory into history and another thing is exciting when we see the dust we filled up the linguistic map of Arabia and we see that the position of text the geographic location of texts that are in a language similar or related most closely related to the Arabic that we know from Islamic times and even till today cluster in Northwest Arabia and the Syrian desert.

JORDAN The Southern Levant.

This from the point of view of traditional sources turns the map of Arabic upside down and in traditional accounts Arabic was always said to come from Yemen and dispersed out and moved northwards but the upper graphic map looks completely the opposite.

So these are just some of the kinds of really revolutionary discoveries that previously is made in the last century.

Arabic in the pre Islamic period was written in a lot of scripts a lot of different scripts in the.

You have it in the neighbor T and Aramaic script in various forms of the South Arabia south Arabian script the s Semitic alphabet.

So this is a theme music text that some would like alphabet that has that expresses Arabic language.

This is his music that expresses Arabic language and these are suffocating texts that express a dialect of Arabic.

So we see that there wasn't one script one writing tradition associated with Arabic it was a it was written with many scripts and sometimes very very rarely we even get Arabic written in Greek letters and this is tremendously valuable because we can say something about the vocalization of language we can pronounce it Semitic scripts don't write the vowels Greek does.

We can talk about how Arabic was actually pronounced this text here probably comes from the third or fourth century see if we look at the area where Arabic is concentrate like I said it roughly coincides with the narrative and kingdom the kingdom of the Abbott teens and the basically ends in the early second century CE and it's located you have the borders here located in northwestern Arabia and the southern Levant and in the settled areas the inhabitants although they spoke Arabic wrote in the Aramaic script and the Nomads as well seem to have spoken Arabic but they wrote their Arabic language in both the south unique alphabet and the Hispanic alphabet and this talk today is going to focus on the sulfuric script and the inscriptions produced in that in the in what we call the heart about the basalt desert of southern Syria and northern Jordan and it extends even to northern Saudi Arabia.

Now this is what the landscape looks like in the area and these are sulfuric inscriptions.

This photograph I actually took when he s and I were doing fieldwork earlier this year in northern Jordan surveying and collecting inscriptions and you can see that you have these endless lands is almost billions and billions of basalt rocks many of them inscribed inscribed with texts that you see here or sometimes rock art and you can walk one day we walked perhaps six hours and found barely anything.

The next day you might come across a care that has thousands of text associated with it in the exact patterns and distributions of white text appear in some places and not others is not quite understood yet but it is something that I think will become clearer once we study the database as a whole.

Now these these texts are and carved are inscribed on these basalt rocks in the Soviet alphabet the Sapphic alphabet is a script from the south Semitic family that I mentioned earlier.

It has 28 consonants and there is no fixed direction of writing.

Authors can write left to right right to left Stratford on that is to go back and forth.

They can write and spirals going inwards beginning inwards firing outward basically in any direction they wish you can write anywhere you like.

There are no vowel letters and no word dividers so you.

So if you didn't know the language you wouldn't know where one word ended and one began and you don't have all of the phonetic material present in the writing system all the vowels long and short are missing right.

So you have a really defective writing system but all the continents are represented.

The the the language of the sulfuric script is not uniform.

You have a continuum of Arabic dialects.

So some that are very close to classical Arabic and some that are quite different from it.

There are different linguistic features across the whole corpus and the dialect boundaries drawing dialect boundaries and trying to figure out where certain dialects might have been spoken certain others have not been worked out yet mainly because the people who wrote these texts were mobile they were nomads.

And so of course you start to get you can get in one location a tremendous amount of variation.

Now we don't know how all this after the inscriptions are some sulfuric inscriptions a very small minority of them are dated and the ones that are dated tend to refer to events involving the neighbor T and kingdom.

So one end in Scripture may be dated to the year the king given about to have died.

We don't know which King it could be the third century B.C.

for example.

And then the latest inscription seem to refer to events as late as the second or third century C scholars suggest that the inscriptions ended in the 4th century CE because there is no references to Christianity.

That's an argument from silence.

So basically we don't know for sure when the inscriptions ended and we really don't know for sure when they began.

But we know that during the now between enrollment periods writers dated their texts and two events perhaps major events of the period that's problematic when we talk about authorship right.

Because if we want to say there was mass literacy we would like to know how.

And there are let's say fifty thousand texts.

We would need to know over how long of a period these fifty thousand protects for produced a fifty thousand text reproduced over a thousand years.

And that's not mass literacy.

That could be something much more limited.

But we'll talk about that in after a few slides.

The inscriptions themselves in the oceanic Corpus now Oceana is the database that I'll be talking about today was put together at Oxford University under the direction of Michael McDonald and Professor Jeremy Johns and it is a database containing the inscriptions of North Arabia the ancient North Arabian inscriptions ones in these kinds of alphabets.

Sophie Eric is make family and so on the south the corpus is thirty three thousand six hundred and seventeen texts.

Now there's more than forty thousand known texts they just have not all been inserted into the database yet.

The texts are usually considered graffiti and what do we mean by graffiti.

That's very difficult to define that these are self authored texts that if a text contains the name of an individual.

This was written by the person who put his name there.

It's this tends to be the the operative definition by people working in ancient North Arabian that these texts were written by their authors.

They were not commissioned and the subjects the textual genres are quite limited.

They include signatures.

Most of the Inscriptions the vast majority of texts are just signatures.

Or we call them signatures that are people's names personal names sometimes just a single name sometimes with a lineage of up to 12 generations or more.

Right. So it really just depends.

You have you have rock art.

You saw a drawing of a camel.

Sometimes these these images are signed maybe by the author made by someone else.

Prayers Memorial texts petitions for protection from deities building inscriptions.

So someone might have built a structure and said OK this structure belongs to or was built by so-and-so and then narratives narrative text and these narratives describe activities like pastoring migrating patrolling what things that seem to be mundane.

And it's this this genre this narrative genre that led scholars to believe that these texts were sort of records diaries of people's everyday lives.

That is the nomads out here in the in the Hara learned an alphabet and sort of wrote about what they were doing in real time sort of like a diary.

So here you have an inscription.

It begins with the personal name by which we translate this by but as bike eventually we're not sure if it actually means by in terms of authorship.

And then he gives his name follow thought son of model.

Some of our had Son of gather lay son of absence of several generations and then a narrative.

What I had enough to lobby the car of roto anima to Senate.

Well first that fast I mean shot it.

Right. So I'm going gonna read it in my best sulfuric and you can read the translations.

Now what's interesting for those of you who know Arabic you can see how close this is to classical Arabic.

It's incredible.

These texts here.

Or at least you know six seven hundred years earlier than the grammatical tradition but very close.

So this is basically a person who talks about pastoring in a valley and then he asks for protection and spoils.

Right. So it seems like a rather mundane thing.

Another here guy gives his name and he says What are you have a partner for a lot.

SALAM Well our the you were her Sephora.

What the show.

Well Ila man he had a lot of blood with lager Mala settlement.

Again. Really.

Pastoring a sheep asking for security and mentioning that he misses his brother and he wants to be reunited with them.

They seem like very mundane tasks really like a diary.

Military activities are mentioned to this individual here.

Puzzle Sabi me at for us or for us the odd life for her Gaddafi life.

Salah he patrolled on behalf of this tribe.

Why did they write.

That's the main question looking at texts like this.

Perhaps the most commonly cited hypothesis is the pass time hypothesis.

The idea is that nomads didn't have a practical use for writing.

We have no evidence that these nomads were involved in long distance trade.

They wouldn't have kept records of legal records or property we have no evidence for any of this.

It seems that the nomads.

The hypothesis goes like this has been art.

I think it begins with with Littman at the beginning of the 20th century.

But it's articulated most clearly by the great scholar of North Arabian Michael McDonald that nomads may have gone to an oasis and there would have noticed traders using WRITING AND THEY WOULD HAVE ASKED WHAT IS THAT.

WHAT ARE YOU GUYS DOING AND I SAY WHAT'S writing in here.

This is how you do it.

Nomad may have learned the system gone back to the desert taught it to his friends and they would have transformed it sort of into a pastime activity while they're spending hours pastoring their sheep there's nothing else to do.

Might as well right.

And they wrote.

I mean if you look at the Corpus it seems like they wrote a lot.

The texts in this sense the text are purely playful they serve no real function.

They were never meant to be read by anybody so authors could write them in.

We said that they can write them in any different way back and forth.

It doesn't seem to be any let's say stable orientation.

So scholars so scholars said well that's evidence that of course the texts weren't meant to be read and there was clearly no schools in the desert.

There were no such institutions as such to manage the language so that the language must have been learned informally or at least the writing tradition must have been learned informally and a large number of texts finally suggests that almost everyone was doing it or at least all the males because there's only there's less than one hundred inscriptions by women in the or at least that contain the word that we translated by with the female's name and the entire corpus.

So it seems have been primarily a male activity which makes sense because males were probably the ones pastoring the animals and they were probably the ones doing the patrolling.

So it may have been associated with those activities.

Now it is a compelling hypothesis but there are problems.

We know that people that the authors did care about their inscriptions they didn't want them to be destroyed.

They wanted them to be read.

You have for example this beautiful curse on anyone who would destroy the inscription had let our dog will hurt us.

We've got a hacker to lead the EU.

Our Sephora right.

And you can get you know even more elaborate curses that are not P.G..

And so you know I really really wanted people to stay away from their texts.

We have examples of people reading texts and sometimes after reading the texts they would make a prayer for the person mentioned in the text.

Gather in the top one here together.

Ezra hang up here for Tyler Lee.

Lee Ha.

He found the writing or the traces of the traces of his of this person hand or hand it had it's unclear how to render that and he said means people have a long life right.

Or this one is very nice here.

We'll get there as Rama.

He found the traces of his grandfather.

And his grandfather's name is probably Hermione for Pilar.

Her good life her blow gas hard work.

Well you can army.

Found the trace of his grandfather and asked for the like of all the wonderful things that the gods bestowed upon his grandfather.

So people are interacting with texts they can read them and when they read them they make a prayer summit.

And I would say that most of the time they wouldn't write the prayer.

They said they said it aloud and we only have very few cases in which a person would say what Kyla.

And he said and what he said so text were meant to be read.

You have prayers asking people to read the text you have prayers protecting the text from destruction and evidence of the texts being read.

The texts are also incredibly formulaic.

Even if.

the teaching of the alphabet was informal a lot more went into the production of these texts than simply knowledge of an alphabet.

Because if that were the case we would get all kinds of expressions.

In fact almost all the texts follow this structure.

You begin with the lineage.

With that you can put as many generations as you like.

Of course it takes time.

So if you have a lot of time you can put more than the narrative usually some kind of activity in this case where a slacker Senate collapsed and he migrated to the inner desert.

The year of collapse at.

Maybe an individual and then a prayer and curse.

To protect the text and to protect the author.

So minimally we can say people were not only taught the alphabet they were also taught how to produce the software to conscription.

What an inscription was the structure of it.

And what should be contained in it.

The narrative has a limited range of themes.

They almost never mentioned good things.

They're constantly talking about the.

If you take it at face value these were very very depressed people.

They were only of them.

There's no rain.

You know they're talking about migration and military activities posturing and wanting protection from predators and from enemies during pastoring protection from Raiders.

So they're really focused on negative events.

They don't ever meant that very rarely of course you can never say never but very rarely does anyone talk about good rains or I don't think we have anything about the birth of children which would have been a I think something worth of writing.

Weddings. Not really.

So the texts themselves even what you could write about was very limited and very formulaic.

It wasn't free expression.

It wasn't a diary as such.

There's another way so all of those things I think make us think twice about the idea that nomad simply learned an alphabet and produced text to pass the time.

But then there's another way we can approach this question and that is looking at the database where we have all of these inscriptions.

Now in a way that we can study them statistically how much evidence do we have just at face value from mass literacy from people basically the scenario was this.

I'm going to write to pass the time while I passed her.

Now a person will pasture for a large part of their life.

We have one inscription where a man says he passion for twenty five years and boredom of course the longer you do this the more bored you're going to get.

So I would expect to find this individual all over the corpus.

I would want to be able to find him in the landscape writing in his name and different narratives as he moved around and as he pastored.

We can only do this test with inscriptions that have more than one name of course.

And so that reduces our corpus to twenty six thousand three hundred sixty six.

Still a large number.

Now when we do that this is what we get.

The vast majority of texts.

76 percent.

Those individuals appear only once in the entire corpus.

That is we couldn't X that we wouldn't be able to say that these individuals were writing their names as they moved around through the landscape.

They appear only once in the corpus.

Only 24 percent appear more than once.

And about 70 percent of that 24 percent only appears twice.

So it's not that they're constantly writing their names their names only appear twice in the corpus so far.

And when you move up to three generations let's say this is for two generations.

If we move to three it stays about equal and reduces to 19 percent of repeats.

Right. So we can say that a minority of India if people are really authoring these text a minority of individuals are authoring more than one text.

So we would have to imagine a scenario that a person learned not only the alphabet but the incredible amount of skill it takes to carve these texts they'd look rough from our eye.

But these Basalt is a hard stone to carve and it takes a tremendous amount of skill to do this.

And you have to plan the text as well.

In many cases they would have learned all of this only to produce one inscription.

It's a very unlikely scenario.

There are some caveats of course.

Most of the areas have not been comprehensively surveyed.

Not every stone has been unturned but in the areas that have been in the areas that have been like a job a survey carried out by Michael McDonald.

If you look at that Corpus where in this entire it's a quite large area several square kilometres every.

It was systematically surveyed and swept the numbers are even lower.

So even when and so we would like to look at of course a complete survey of the whole horror.

And with enough manpower that would be possible.

But with the manpower we have now I think it would take hundreds of years.

But as it stands in the record it does seem representative.

The numbers don't really support the idea of individuals moving in the landscape writing their names as they go around.

And the numbers that I presented are probably too high because the database contains a lot of duplicate inscriptions.

That is it contains every published text but the texts have sometimes been published two or three times and the study can't really distinguish between a duplicate and the same text published multiple times and it will take a lot of time to go through the database and fix it so that all of the duplicates.

That is the same text that's been published in multiple places are placed under one card in one part so the numbers that I presented are probably a bit lower then even if we take the most let's say that there is one hundred thousand inscriptions in the heart of.

Right. So so far about 40000 or no.

Let's just make this very generous estimate.

There were a hundred thousand texts out there.

And let's say that there's 500 years.

Of activity epic graphic activity.

Is that really a big number.

Right. Is it really a big number if you distributed evenly over the years.

It's not.

It's not it doesn't really argue for everyone being able to write.

It suggests maybe a limited group of people a smaller group of people being able to write at the most.

OK. Well if all of this stands in the way and kind of negates the pass time hypothesis our listeners say doesn't support the pass time hypothesis.

Then what did they do all of this for right.

What was the purpose of the sulfuric inscriptions if not to pass the time I mean you still have to deal with texts that are saying I'm past he pastored the ship he basher the camels he migrated what was the reason for that.

So I'd like to suggest a revised hypothesis I would suggest that a small group of people while relatively small does not everyone knew learned the skill of how to read and write.

They learned the alphabet and they also learned the technique of carving and it was passed on informally let's say there aren't schools it was passed on informally from generation to generation.

And writing augmented certain preexisting rituals.

We see this especially clearly with a funerary ritual.

So when the.

There seems to have been a tradition that when you either bury you when a person dies you can either you put a stone on the grave.

All right.

And it ends up as a Karen either bury the person or put them inside the Karen but nevertheless you put a stone down just laying a stone on the grave of a dead person.

Now this ritual is ancient ritual seems to have been augmented by riding in this outfit a context where not only would you put the stone but you would write your name and that you grieved for the dead man or dead person a dead woman in and then you would put the stone so the stone was a memorial of the dead but it was also memorial of the grief of the living.

This ritual was augmented by writing and I wonder I would suggest that various rituals like prayers.

When you set off or migrations sacrifice these types of rituals ended up being augmented by writing.

You would write your prayer for might for protection during your migration which was certainly a dangerous affair.

When you're pastoring pastoring is often followed by prayers for protection and deliverance.

Well of course because you're at risk from predators from Raiders it is not it is not a safe thing to go away from your group to pasture animals prayers.

It makes complete sense that you would put that into writing with a prayer.

If you think writing augmenting these kinds of customs and then so in a sense writing became part of ritual but connected to these rituals and we can speak of a writing tradition right.

We already see that there is some kind of tradition considering how formulaic these texts are.

And those who could write texts would sometimes write graffiti and they would sometimes write the names of other people.

Here we have a text it's very clearly three.

These are three individuals and it's very clearly written by one.

There's one hand here.

So one person wrote the names of three individuals.

Now why would they write the names of individuals.

While I'm sure there whereas we are eventually any name put on Iraq becomes memorial.

Right. You come across it.

You see it and it reminds you of the person.

And at that moment like we've seen some have said you may say.

May this person be blessed.

May this person be remembered you might make an oral invocation.

Right. So ultimately all names on rock whether the original intent was such become memorial.

Thank you very much.