Corpus of Early Sabaic Inscriptions
The chronological subdivision of the long Sabaean linguistic history adopted in CSAI follows the guidelines indicated by P. Stein, who locates the beginning of the "Middle Sabaic" period in the 4th – 3rd century AD. The Corpus of the Early Sabaic inscriptions in CSAI collects all the Sabaic texts from Ancient South Arabia dating to the previous phase, which corresponds to the mukarribs' period.
Learn more »Not only does it comprise the texts of the so-called period A, but also extends into the first part of the so-called period B set for the Qatabanic documentation. The corpus of the Early Sabaic inscriptions collects - up to now - nearly 800 texts. The completion of this corpus is still work in progress. The inscriptions recorded so far come from the many geographic areas part of the early Sabaic kingdom, excluding Ethiopia/Eritraea. Some texts are from the core of the kingdom (Mārib and Ṣirwāḥ), but the majority comes from the high-plateau North and South of Ṣanʿāʾ (the latter mainly from the regions of Dhamār and Baynūn, as their museums were partners of the CASIS project). The documentation of the Sabaic towns of the Jawf is also impressive. This has been enlarged thanks to the digitization of the texts published in the catalogues of the pieces from the Jawf, hosted in the Ṣanʿāʾ National Museum. Among the epigraphs, dedicatory and construction texts are counted, some of which attesting the building activity of the mukarribs on town walls (in particular, the very ancient Lundin 16+CIH 367). A mention is needed to remember some long legal texts and the artistic quality of some artifacts.