DʿMT & early highlandsʿAddi Baʿekel 1

Fragmentary text concerning mutual aid and harvests

A dressed block probably from a public monument preserves a damaged six-line boustrophedon text in a local Semitic language close to Sabaic; the editors’ tentative interpretation mentions mutual aid and harvests, but the context is lost.

Date: Possibly 8th–7th century BCE; a later date cannot be excluded
Place: ʿAddi Baʿekel, Daʾero area north of Feresmay, Tǝgray, Ethiopia
Language: Local Semitic language close to Sabaic
Script: Ancient South Arabian

01 · Original text

Local Semitic language close to Sabaic

Ancient South ArabianComplete surviving six-line fragment; top, right, and bottom are broken away

…] 𐩧𐩵𐩱𐩩 / 𐩩

𐩧𐩵𐩱𐩥 / 𐩡[…

…] 𐩠𐩣 / 𐩥𐩫

𐩡 / 𐩪𐩣𐩧𐩣[…

…](𐩢)𐩵𐩪 / 𐩥

[…

Normalized Old South Arabian Unicode from Dugast and Gajda’s transcription. The stone is boustrophedon; the edition does not print direction arrows beside these six lines. Brackets and parentheses retain its damage and uncertain ḥ.

Scholarly transliteration

…] rdʾt / t rdʾw / l[… …] hm / wk l / smrm[… …](ḥ)ds / w […

02 · Translation

English reading

Line 1

…] the help that they

Line 2

gave one another (?) for […

Line 3

…] their (?) and

Line 4

all the harvests […

Line 5

…] built / occurred (?)

Line 6

[…

Habesha History English translation of Dugast and Gajda’s explicitly tentative French interpretation, Annales d’Éthiopie 29 (2014), p. 185.

This is a line-aligned rendering of the editors’ tentative interpretation, not a continuous reconstruction. Lines 1–2 join rdʾt / trdʾw and lines 3–4 join w-kl.

Sources

Editions & references

Follow the record back to the edition, catalogue, or image source used here.

Dugast and Gajda, ʿAddi Baʿekel 1
Fabienne Dugast and Iwona Gajda, ‘Prospections archéologiques dans la région de Meqele et les contreforts orientaux du Tigray’, Annales d’Éthiopie 29 (2014), 179–197, inscription at 184–186.