DʿMT & early highlandsHG Färäs May 1 / HG Färäs May 2010

Tubbaʿkarib’s inscribed bronze kettle

The one-line name inscription and repeated monogram mark a high-quality bronze kettle as belonging to Tubbaʿkarib of the Yasrān clan, which Nebes connects with Sabaean stonemasons from the Maʾrib region; the text contains no dedication formula.

Date: About the 7th century BCE or earlier (palaeographic)
Place: Found at Guldam near Yeha; kept at Färäs May, Tǝgray, Ethiopia when published
Language: Ancient Sabaic
Script: Ancient South Arabian

HG Färäs May 1Read the text ↓

ImagePhotograph courtesy of Häylä Śəllase Gäbräkidan; published in Norbert Nebes, Ityopis 1 (2011), p. 160, fig. 1.

RightsReproduced with the user’s confirmed source-author/contributor permission for Habesha History. No open or onward reuse licence is asserted.

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HG Färäs May 1 monogramPhotograph by Wolbert Smidt; published in Nebes 2011, p. 162, fig. 2.Reproduced with the user’s confirmed source-author/contributor permission for Habesha History. No open or onward reuse licence is asserted.

HG Färäs May 1 handle monogramPhotograph by Wolbert Smidt; published in Nebes 2011, p. 163, fig. 3.Reproduced with the user’s confirmed source-author/contributor permission for Habesha History. No open or onward reuse licence is asserted.

01 · Original text

Ancient Sabaic

Ancient South ArabianComplete one-line ownership/name inscription; separate monogram retained as ◊

◊ 𐩩𐩨𐩲𐩫𐩧𐩨 / 𐩹-𐩺𐩪𐩧𐩬

Normalized Old South Arabian Unicode from Nebes’s published tbʿkrb / ḏ-ysrn. ◊ marks the separate undeciphered clan monogram rather than inventing a letter value; ḏ and s¹ are explicit normalized equivalents of the edition’s ḏ and unindexed s.

Scholarly transliteration

◊ tbʿkrb / ḏ-ys¹rn

02 · Translation

English reading

Tubbaʿkarib, (member) of (the clan) Yasrān.

Norbert Nebes, Ityopis 1 (2011), p. 159.

Complete published English translation. Nebes interprets the text as an ownership mark; a votive use cannot be wholly excluded, but no dedicatory verb occurs.

Sources

Editions & references

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

Nebes, HG Färäs May 2010
Norbert Nebes, ‘An Inscription in Ancient Sabaic on a Bronze Kettle from Färäs May, Tigray’, Ityopis 1 (2011), 159–166.