LP 326.1

Interpretation

Apparatus Criticus: Not read in LP.
Commentary: The text starts just behind the head of the dromedary and runs up the front of its hump and down the back of it. There is something between the front legs of the Bactrian camel but it is too damaged to interpret and may not belong to the inscription. There is a patch of heavy hammering immediately above the dromedary's hump which has obscured part of the text and only the lower parts of an s² and a f can be seen after it. The last three letters are facing in the opposite direction to the rest of the text and may not belong to it. They were read as a separate inscription by Is.M 115.

Provenance: Al-ʿĪsāwī is the name of a probably ancient well between two headlands on the eastern side of the Wādī Shām as it runs northwards from the modern Al-Namārah dam to the Ruḥbah. The well is large, stone lined and with stone water-channels running from it. The main concentration of published inscriptions is on the top of the northern headland, but there also many inscriptions on its south-west slopes, coming down to the well and on the southern headland, on the crest of which is a stone tower. Littmann visited the site twice when he and other members of the expeditions copied some 450 inscriptions. Between 1996 and 2003, the Safaitic Epigraphic Survey Programme [SESP] made a comprehensive survey of the site recording over 3500 inscriptions.
Original Reading Credit: Ed. pr.
Original Translation Credit: Ed. pr

Littmann, E. Safaïtic Inscriptions. Syria. Publications of the Princeton University Archaeological Expeditions to Syria in 1904–1905 and 1909. Division IV. Section C. Leiden: Brill, 1943.
Macdonald, M.C.A., Al Muʾazzin, M. & Nehmé, L. Les inscriptions safaïtiques de Syrie, cent quarante ans après leur découverte. Comptes rendus des séances de l'Académie des Inscriptions & Belles-Lettres 1996: 435-494.
Inscriptions recorded at al-ʿĪsāwī by Michael Macdonald, on the Safaitic Epigraphic Survey Programme, 1995–2003, and published here.