KJC 539

Siglum: KJC 539
Transliteration: rb s²q w s¹qm w s¹rr b hd ʾl- nʿrt w ġlmt w bkrt w ʾrḫl w s¹lʿt w hd bn s¹mʿn ḫṭṭ
Translation: Hd feels much yearning and sickness and happiness towards young girls and young women and maidens and young girls and ‘women’, and Hd son of S¹mʿn is [the] drawer

Interpretation

Apparatus Criticus: TRANSLATION ḫṭṭ, King: "[the] inscriber". DISCUSSION King (1990: 416–417) commented: "The text begins at the top left of the cartouche and winds round in a zig-zag. The letter I have read as b of bkrt looks more like a r. The r of ʾrḫl was originally left out and has been added slightly below the ʾ and ḫ. For love texts of this kind, see Ch.4.E.1. The occurrence of a clearly plural form in ʾrḫl suggests that all the substantives after the preposition ʾl ‘towards’ (Ar. ʾilā) are feminine sound plurals rather than singular forms. nʿrt ‘young girl’, Heb. neʿara; ġlmt ‘young woman’, Ar. ġulāmah; bkrt ‘young girl’, Ar. bakrah; ʾrḫl ‘ewes’, cf. Ar. riḫl, pl. ʾarḫul, the word might refer to female sheep or by extension ‘young women’. The root slʿ in Ar., Heb. and Syr. has the meaning cleave and Ar. silʿ is a ‘cleft, fissure’ perhaps denoting here the female genitals. For the phrase w N ḫṭṭ at the end, see Ch.4.G.(3)".

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 [Unpublished]. 1990.