Objective
South Arabia was the cradle of a strikingly original ancient civilisation which spread throughout the peninsula and into Ethiopia. The land was divided among a number of different kingdoms, of which Saba is the best known but which also included Hadramawt, Qatabân, Ma'in and Himyar. They have left imposing monuments and almost 10,000 inscriptions, not to mention a multitude of graffiti. The tribes in the rest of the Arabian peninsula also carved inscriptions, though in smaller numbers, as well as tens of thousands of graffiti.
These texts provide an exceptionally rich source for the study of the milieu in which Islam appeared. They are still only partially published and are not sufficiently exploited. This project is intended primarily to direct research to a particular region of Southern Arabia, the Hadramawt in Yemen.
The second aim of the project is to integrate the onomastic and toponymic data from these texts into a wider work devoted to pre-Islamic proper names in the Arabian peninsula.
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
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13100 Aix-en-Provence
France