Hismaic

Hismaic [formerly ‘Thamudic E’] is the name given to texts carved largely by nomads in the Ḥismā sand deserts of what is now southern Jordan and north-west Saudi Arabia, though they are occasionally found in other places such as settled areas of northern Jordan and parts of northern Saudi Arabia outside the Ḥismā. They are thought to date from roughly the same period as the Safaitic, i.e. first century BC to fourth century AD, though there is even less dating evidence in the case of Hismaic. However, some authors of these texts bear Nabataean ‘basiliophoric’ names — that is personal names formed with the name of a Nabataean king, thus ʿbd-ḥrtt ‘the servant of Ḥrtt/Aretas’ — which suggests that at least some of them were contemporary with the Nabataean presence in what is now Jordan and north-west Saudi Arabia.

From the nineteenth century they were included in the group of diverse texts to which early twentieth-century scholars had given the misleading name ‘Thamudic’ — they have no visible connection with the ancient tribe of Thamūd. In 1937, F.V. Winnett divided the ‘Thamudic’ inscriptions into five groups Thamudic A, B, C, D, E, of which the last referred to the Hismaic inscriptions.

In 1990, in her doctoral thesis, the late Geraldine King made a detailed study of the texts which had up to that time been known as ‘Thamudic E’. This meticulous work based on some 1300 new texts, which she herself had recorded in southern Jordan, plus all the material published up to that date, defined the features of the dialect, the script, the distinctive conventions employed in the texts and the historical, social and religious background of their authors. Although this seminal work remained unpublished, it was of such importance to the study of Ancient North Arabian that photocopies of it could be found throughout world in academic libraries dealing with ancient Arabia.

Download a complete pdf version of Geraldine King's thesis: Early North Arabian Hismaic (23.4MB)