The Minaeans beyond Maʿīn (original) (raw)

Abstract

Towards the second half of the 1st millennium BC the South Arabian kingdom of Ma‘īn established itself as the leader in the trans-Arabian incense trade, a flourishing economic activity whose significant historical and cultural implications still deserve to be fully appreciated. A recent overall reconsideration of the Minaic corpus has allowed to make the point on the epigraphic documentation left by the Minaeans beyond their kingdoms’ borders in the Jawf valley, i.e. in Najran, Qaryat al-Fāw, al-‘Ulā and Madā’in Ṣāliḥ (modern Saudi Arabia), in Egypt, in the island of Delos and also in other South Arabian regions. In this paper we analyse the textual features of this documentation from different perspectives (language, script and support of the texts) on the basis of the comparison, on one hand, with the foreign cultural environment where these inscriptions originated and, on the other hand, with the background of the documentation from the motherland. The aim is to draw some cultural reflections on such a unique corpus of epigraphs starting from highlighting its linguistic peculiarities, with special attention to the reconstruction of its historical frame.

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