Aus altsüdarabischer Korrespondenz: Wie man einem Grabräuber auf die Schliche kommt

Correspondence by letter from Ancient South Arabia is still belonging to the most intricate fields in Semitic philology. Although the grammatical structure of particularly the Sabaic language is meanwhile fairly well understood, its lexical substance is far from being adequately accessible due to the still rather modest amount of sources. By early March 2024, about 5.200 Sabaic lexemes have been identified by the digital Sabaic dictionary project of Jena university (SW)—being only a minor part of what must have made up the vivid vernacular of the Sabaeans about 2000 years ago. With every new inscription coming to light, not only the number of Sabaic words may increase but also our knowledge of syntactic features and idiomatic expressions—especially with text genres that do not merely consist of stereotype formula but may contain freely formulated passages, expressions of emotions, and so on. A fairly spectacular piece of Sabaic correspondence from the collection of the Bavarian State Library in Munich is presented here for the first time. It is a letter on a wooden stick, dating to about 300 ce, in which the female sender reports her adventures on a trip from northern Yemen to Ṣanʿāʾ, where she faced the news of a freshly looted tomb of probably a remote relative of hers in the outskirts of that city. In a lively narrative, the addressee is informed about the circumstances that eventually lead to capture the thief, who had in fact robbed yet another tomb after that. Being examined, the delinquent confessed how he plundered the tomb by destroying the coffin therein. This report is thus not only an entertaining narrative but also an important contribution to our knowledge of Ancient South Arabian funerary practice. Although the tomb mentioned in the text cannot be localised, some parallels can be drawn to a necropolis which has partly been excavated in the north of Ṣanʿāʾ, adding some textual illustration to the archaeological evidence of burials in pre-Islamic Yemen.