An Ancient Zodiac from Arabia Discovered
Posted on November 21, 2014 in Geschiedenis
An Ancient Zodiac from Arabia Discovered
New discovery fuels debate on the links between Arabic-Islamic and pre-Islamic civilizations.
Cover photo: Safaitic inscription from the Jabal Qurma depicting a hunting scene (see also the website of the Jebel Qurma Project).
Beginning just south of Damascus and stretching as far as the sand dunes of the Nefud is a basalt wasteland known as the Harrah. The area is mostly unpopulated today, but two thousand years ago nomads roamed this region, seeking pasture and water. The most remarkable witness to lives of its ancient population is the tens of thousands of inscriptions adorning the desert’s rocks. These texts are written in an indigenous Arabian alphabet known as Safaitic and express a form of Old Arabic, perhaps as different from Classical Arabic, the language of Islamic civilization, as Beowulf’s English is from Chaucer's.
The Safaitic inscriptions are notoriously difficult to understand, and many of them contain re-occurring sets of enigmatic words which defy interpretation. Since the discovery of these inscriptions over a century ago, scholars have always assumed that these mysterious terms were the names of places. By considering not only their etymologies, but the way they pattern with the seasons and other chronological information, I have recently shown that they are in fact the names of the ecliptic constellations, the zodiac, and were used to reckon time.
The zodiac of Islamic times used names of the signs that were clear translations from Aramaic or Greek. The ancient Arabian zodiac, on the other hand, has much older roots, going back to Babylon. Almost all knowledge of this ancient tradition seems to have been lost by the Classical Islamic period. Al-Ṣūfī, the 10th century Persian astronomer, claimed that the zodiac was unknown to the pre-Islamic Arabs. Its discovery in the Safaitic inscriptions not only proves the opposite, but also suggests much closer cultural ties between the pre-Islamic nomads of Arabia and the great civilizations of the Fertile Crescent than has usually been assumed.
http://leiden-islamblog.nl/articles/an-ancient-zodiac-from-arabia-discovered
Topic: Ancient arabic zodiac discovered