Safaitic

Records

  • Ahmad Al Jallad’s 21st CE writings. The below draws from it.
  • The oldest surviving records from Ancient North Arabia are religious invocations to the gods carved on stone in an indigenous family of alphabets we call Ancient North Arabian.
    • Perhaps one of the earliest texts of this sort comes from the upper Wādī Sirḥān, the site of Bāyir in Jordan; while undated, its contents suggest that it was composed sometime the first half of the first millennium BCE.

Islamic

  • As Hawting convincingly argues, the narrative arch of kitābu l-ʾaṣnām – the earliest work in the Islamic tradition devoted to the matter of pre-Islamic Arabian religion – is the movement from primeval monotheism to paganism resulting from the excessive veneration of ancestors and foreign influences ending ultimately with the restoration of monotheism by the Islamic prophet.
    • What is noticeably absent from such works is any sense of a mythological framework – the gods are isolated idols, stones, statues, and carvings, each one revered by a different social group with no narrative connection between them or any description of their role in cosmos.

Propaganda

  • “jAhils widely practiced female infanticide”.

Rites

Motivations

  • General requests, such as for security (slm), relief (ryḥ/rwḥ), deliverance (fṣy(t)/flṭ(t)), and protection from enemies or misfortune (śnʾ and bʾs, respectively) are the most common and appear to be made of any deity writers hoped to favor them. The expectation that the gods be just, responding to the correct performance of ritual and prayers. BES19 1 - The supplicant calls upon Baʿal-Samīn to heal a sick man so that his people ʾl-h would say that the god is just, ṣadaqa.
  • Several inscriptions record the performance of sacrifice before embarking on a raid or journey.
  • The performance of a sacrifice is sometimes connected with the transition of seasons and migration.
  • Thanksgiving.
  • Vengence and justice.
  • Reunion
  • Curing illness and prolonging life

Prayers

  • If the effectiveness of a prayer could be increased by expanding its divine audience, then perhaps they could be amplified by reaching a wider human audience as well. The inscriptions ask the passerby to read and/or invoke (qrʾ, dʿy) the inscriptions.

Votive images

  • Erection of the nṣb stone. Often accompanied by sacrifice.

Animal sacrifice

  • ḏbḥ is the common verb. w ḏbḥ l-bʿlsmn = ‘and he made an animal sacrifice to Baʿal-Samīn’
  • Location of Sacrifice: High ground preferred.

Burnt offerings

  • Immolation of the sacrificed animal’s corpse was an important sacrifice type in the Hebrew Bible, there called ʿôlâ ‘that which goes up (in smoke)’.

Pilgrimage

  • ḥg in Safaitic and its verbal counterpart as ḥgg / yḥg.

Ritual purity

  • rḥḍ ‘to wash’ and ṭhr ‘to purify’.
  • The rḥḍ ritual is performed before embarking on a pilgrimage or entering temples.
  • Ritual ablution seems to have been required before engaging in other rites, like mourning.

Sacred baths

  • “He then became very sick, and was told, “There is a hot spring in al-Balqāʾ, in Syria (al-Sha’m); if you would go there, you would be cured.” So he went to the hot spring, bathed therein, and was cured.”

Vows and oaths

  • oaths of self-amputation are twice attested in the context of retribution.

Deities

  • Any of them could be asked to respond to any type of prayer, although requests for security (slm) are the most frequent.
  • Deities were located in heaven. In a few cases, writers invoke the gods in association with what appear to be their mythological earthly residences. Occasionally the proper name of the gods is given along with the locative epithet: ṣalm, who was worshipped at Taymāʾ in the mid-first millennium BCE, was called ʾlh dmt ‘God of Dūmat’ in one text, and the storm god once as bʿlsmn ʾlh sʿʿ ‘Baʿal-Samīn, god of Sīʿ.
  • The most frequently invoked god in the inscriptions is Allāt.
    • Allāt daughter of Roḍaw.
    • Allāt was known by the epithet mlkt ṯry ‘sovereign of fertility’, possibly linking her with the Venus/Aphrodite/Ishtar complex.
    • If we assume a similar mythological complex as other near eastern traditions, the two could form an astral pair of father and daughter, where Allāt is Venus and Roḍaw is the Moon.
    • Allāt is twice called (the one) from ʿmn, a lost location, but perhaps Jebel Ramm.
  • śms which is literally the ‘sun’
  • The god of rain and storm (mlk h-smy) was Baʿal-Samīn, sometimes simply called Baʿal. He is described as directly controlling the rains, withholding them in bad years. When he failed other deities could be called upon to provide relief- w wgm m-dn bʿl f h rḍw rwḥ ‘and he grieved in the absence of Bʿl so O Ruḍaw, send relief/winds’.
  • Gadd is an ancient West Semitic deity, the deification of fortune, cf. Greek Tychē and Latin Fortuna. The great tribal confederations of Ḍayf and ʿAwīḏ each have their own Gadd, but so do outside nations, such as the Nabataeans (Gadd-Nabaṭ) and possibly even the Romans (Gadd-har-Rūm).114 The Gadds are primarily called upon by members of their social group but in principle anyone could invoke them.
  • mny ‘Fate’. Unlike the gods, however, Manay does not hear invocations nor does it accept offerings. Rather, it seems to embody death – a force that stalks the living like a hunter, one that cannot be bargained or reasoned with.

National deities

  • the deity most often partnered with Allāt in invocations is Dusares (dśr), the national deity of the Nabataeans.
    • Dusares is invoked in a similar manner, as (the one) from Rqm, that is Petra.
  • The third type of association is made using the construct phrase ʾlh/ʾlt + toponym or tribe, e.g. ʾlh tm ‘the god of the tribe Taym’, ʾlh ʾbgr ‘the god of Abgar (Edessa?), ʾlh g ‘the God of Gaia (the valley of Petra)’, ʾlt dṯn ‘Goddess of Daṯan’.

Magical forces

  • evil eye, called nagʾat, and the effects of its magic, śr.

Afterlife

  • great concern for having a burial remain intact. One of the commonest curses upon vandals is nqʾt ‘ejection, throwing out’, which occurs in a full form in LP 282 nqʾt mn qbr ‘ejection from the grave’.
  • Safaitic (bly) and Nabataean (blwʾ) - the Baliyyah, the custom of hamstringing camel to provide a mount in the afterlife.
  • the gods do not seem to affect affairs in the afterlife. There are thousands upon thousands of curses directed towards enemies and vandals, yet not a single one concerns matters after death.