Scribal practices in contact: two Minaic/Dadanitic mixed texts

Abstract

In the first millennium BC, the ancient oasis of Dadan (modern al-ΚUlā in north-west Saudi Arabia) was one of the major halts on the incense trade route. It clearly had a vibrant literate culture since not only have some 2000 inscriptions in the local Dadanitic script been found there, but also a corpus of about sixty Minaic texts carved when the Minaeans had a trading outpost in the oasis, which is thought to be contemporaneous with the Lihyanite kingdom. This paper will investigate the possible influence the two writing traditions may have had on each other by studying in detail two inscriptions previously read as Minaic, and suggesting new readings, interpreting them as linguistically mixed Minaic/Dadanitic.