Thamudic

‘Thamudic’ is an unfortunate name invented by nineteenth-century scholars for large numbers of inscriptions in ANA alphabets which have not yet been properly studied. It does not imply that they were carved by members of the ancient tribe of Thamūd, nor does it suggest that the Thamudic scripts are chronological or geographic variants of one architype. These texts are found over a huge area from southern Syria to Yemen. In 1937, Professor Fred V. Winnett divided those known at the time into five rough categories A, B, C, D, E. In 1951, some 9000 more inscriptions were recorded by the Philby-Ryckmans expedition in south-west Saudi Arabia and these have been given the name ‘Southern Thamudic’, now ‘Himaitic’ or ‘Thamudic F’. Further study by Winnett showed that the texts he had called ‘Thamudic A’ represent a clearly defined script and language and he therefore removed them from the Thamudic ‘pending file’ and gave them the name ‘Taymanite’, which was later changed to ‘Taymanitic’ (see above). The same was done for ‘Thamudic E’ by Dr Geraldine King, and this is now known as 'Hismaic' (see above). Similarly, Dr Christian Robin and Dr Alessia Prioletta have recorded large numbers of ‘Himaitic/Thamudic F’ inscriptions and made detailed studies of them. However, Thamudic B, C, and D still await detailed study. One of the problems is that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries large numbers of them were recorded only in hand copies by people who could not read them, and so it is difficult to know how accurately they reproduced the texts. Fortunately, in recent years, increasing survey work has rediscovered many of them and they have been photographed. It is hoped that by bringing all these texts together in one fully searchable corpus, with photographs wherever possible, OCIANA will speed up the accurate identification of the script and language of many more of these inscriptions which can then be removed from the ‘Thamudic pending file’ and potentially given their own names.