HGh 1

Madallah 2024: tbl for s¹bl; trans. By ʾkzm son of Ġawṯ of the lineage of Rūm and I carried water from tubāl (place name).

OCIANA 1: ḫbl for s¹bl; trans. 'may the Ṯmd fight whoever {ruins} [the inscription]'

This text joins a small number of Safaitic inscriptions written by people who claim affiliation with rm, either a local tribe or, more likely, the Romans; see also AGK 2. The present inscription seems to record a conflict between this individual and presumably his group with the famed tribe of Thamūd. The text could date to a period of Roman presence in the region, following the annexation of Nabataea in 106 CE.

ws¹q-h: This verb is previously attested in Safaitic where it registers conflicts between two groups. Here, its meaning must be slightly different. The subject of the verb is the tribe ṯmd /ṯamūd/, a large confederacy of North Arabia. The suffixed pronoun -h must therefore refer back to the author. Given that the next phrase is mn s¹bl 'from the path', I would suggest the meaning of ws¹q here to be 'to drive away', which then seems to been semantically narrowed in later Arabic to refer to driving beasts (Hava, 861).

mn-s¹bl: The word s¹bl  'road, way' is attested here for the first time as a noun; it is cognate with Classical Arabic sabīlun (Lane, 1302b). The first letter is damaged, but it cannot be plausibly read as anything else. While there is a clear upward stroke towards the beginning of the letter, it does not cross the horizontal line to form a t. It is best interpreted as a stray mark. Note also the downward stroke under the previous t. While Jeffery (1938: 162) understood the Quranic attestation of this word as a shallow loan from Syriac šbīlā (cf. Hebrew šābîl) 'road, way, path', its occurence in Safaitic would place this borrowing many centuries earlier than the Quranic milleu, if it is to be considered a loan to begin with. There is nothing to speak against understanding the word as genuine cognate. The meaning 'road' is supported by a similar formulation in AGK 2, where the author, also a Roman, record his location at the present place coming from 'the road of Ṣʿrl', m-dr{b}. Drb and s¹bl are near synonyms.