DʿMT & early highlandsRIÉ 3

Altar fragment naming a mukarrib of DʿMT

A very short altar fragment preserves the title mukarrib of DʿMT; Schneider tentatively linked it to RIÉ 19.

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

01 · Original text

Ethiopian Early Sabaic

Ancient South ArabianSurviving text; DASI lineation retained

[... ... 𐩣𐩫]𐩧(𐩨) 𐩵𐩲𐩣𐩩 𐩨𐩬 𐩨𐩬[... ...]

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

[... ... mk]r(b) Dʿmt bn bn[... ...]

02 · Translation

English translation

[…,] mukarrib of DʿMT, descendant of […].

Habesha History translation of the DASI reading, compared with Abraham J. Drewes, Recueil des inscriptions de l’Éthiopie, III/B, revised and adapted by Manfred Kropp, ed. Manfred Kropp and Harry Stroomer (2019), entry RIÉ 3, p. 31.

The title mukarrib is left untranslated because its exact institutional sense remains debated.

Sources

Editions & references

Edition, catalogue, and image records used for this entry.

RIÉ 3 / DEE VI 55 / DASI 7558
Giulia Buono (ed.), ‘RIÉ 3’, DASI, first published 2015-01-05.

Habesha History corpus

David W. Phillipson, Foundations of an African Civilisation (2012), p. 38