DʿMT & early highlandsRIÉ 5 B

Separate Enda Tcherqos block with restored DʿMT

DASI calls the text conjectural and notes palaeographic difficulty in treating 5A and 5B as one inscription; the initial Dʿ of DʿMT is restored, so this is not an independent direct attestation.

Date: Early 1st millennium–5th/4th c. BCE (DASI Period A)
Place: Enda Tcherqos, Aksum/Melazo area, Ethiopia; reused in church wall
Language: Ethiopian Early Sabaic
Script: Ancient South Arabian

01 · Original text

Ethiopian Early Sabaic

Ancient South ArabianSurviving text; DASI lineation retained

[... ... 𐩵𐩲]𐩣𐩩 𐩣𐩦𐩧𐩤-𐩠𐩺 𐩥-𐩣𐩲𐩧𐩨-𐩠𐩺 𐩱𐩵𐩣-𐩠𐩺 𐩥-𐩮𐩡𐩣-𐩠𐩺 𐩨-𐩬—

𐩭 𐩲𐩪𐩩𐩧 𐩥-𐩠𐩨𐩪 𐩥-𐩱𐩡𐩣𐩤𐩠 𐩥-𐩹𐩩-𐩢𐩣𐩺𐩣 𐩥-𐩹𐩩-𐩨𐩲𐩵𐩬 [... ...]

Normalized Old South Arabian letters follow the DASI reading, including its line breaks and editorial brackets. See the image for the engraved letter forms.

Scholarly transliteration

[... ... Dʿ]mt ms²rq-hy w-mʿrb-hy ʾdm-hy w-ṣlm-hy b-n— ḫ ʿs¹tr w-Hbs¹ w-ʾlmqh w-ḏt-Ḥmym w-ḏt-Bʿdn [... ...]

02 · Translation

English reading

[... ...] Dʿmt, its east and its west, its Red and its Dark, with the guidance of ʿs¹tr and Hbs¹ and ʾlmqh and ḏt-Ḥmym and ḏt-Bʿdn [... ...]

CSAI/DASI English translation; DASI record data licensed CC BY 4.0.

Joined across DASI display lines; editorial brackets and uncertainty marks are retained.

Sources

Editions & references

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

RIÉ 5B / DASI 7819
Giulia Buono (ed.), ‘RIÉ 5 B’, DASI, first published 2015-01-05.

Habesha History corpus

HYohannes, The Kingdom of DʿMT (2025)

David W. Phillipson (2012), p. 38