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Apologia for ‘the Sabaean cultural-political area’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Andrey Korotayev
Andrey Korotayev
Affiliation:
Oriental Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow
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Extract

Firstly, I accept Beeston's proposal to refer ‘to linguistic data as Minaic, Sabaic, Qatabanic and Hadramitic, leaving Minaean etc. for non-linguistic contexts’ (Beeston, 1987a: 13). His argument (at least with respect to the distinction between the ‘Sabaean’ and the ‘Sabaic’) looks entirely convincing:

The Sabaeans were the inhabitants of the area around Ma'rib. But they shared a common language(no doubt with dialectal varieties) with the peoples of the desert fringes between Ma'rib and Wadial-Jawf, of a considerable part of Wadi al-Jawf itself, and of the high plateaux lying in the angle of those two areas—Arḥab, Qā‘ al-Bawn, Qā‘ Ṣany‘ā’ etc. It is dubious whether these other peoples would have called themselves Sabaeans,1 and it might be preferable therefore to term the language Sabaic rather than Sabaean’ (Beeston, 1979: 115).

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , October 1994 , pp. 469 - 474
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1994

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References

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