KJA 23

Siglum: KJA 23
Transliteration: wdd hnʾ ftt ḥs¹nt f nk -h f ġmt f ʾḍ f ns²rt
Translation: Hnʾ loved a beautiful young girl and he had sex with her and she was grieved, so he repeated (it) and she unfolded??

Interpretation

Apparatus Criticus: King (1990: 182–183) commented: "The text begins above and to the right of KJA 22 and loops round to the left. hnʾ has recorded his actions and the effect they have had on a young girl. For other love texts using wdd and nk, see Ch.4.E.2. ftt, Ar. fatāh, ‘young girl’; ḥs¹nt, Ar. ḥasan ‘beautiful’, here with the feminine ending. f, cf. Ar. fa, here and in the other occurrences in the text, the particle has the sequential sense ‘and so, thus’. The object of the verb nk is the third person feminine pronominal suffix, -h. ġmt and ns²rt are third person feminine verbs. I have translated the former from the root ġmm. Form I and III in Ar. have the meaning ‘grieve s.o.’ and Form VIII an intransitive sense ‘be grieved, saddened’ which is the meaning here. For ʾḍ, cf. Ar. āḍa ʾilā, ‘return to s.th. i.e. do the thing a second time’. The translation of ns²rt is problematic. The Ar. verb našara means ‘spread out, expand, unfold’ none of which, if taken literally, are suitable here. A possible translation is suggested by the meaning ‘unfold, spread out’ which in a reflexive sense ‘she unfolded herself’ might mean ‘she became compliant [to his advances]’. An antithesis to this might occur at the end of KJA 28 which is also about someone called hnʾ but not inscribed by him".

King, G.M.H. Early North Arabian Thamudic E. A preliminary description based on a new corpus of inscriptions from the Ḥismā desert of southern Jordan and published material. Ph.D thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1990. [Unpublished]. 1990.