________________
SOUTH SEMITIC ALPHABETS
225 script. "The broken jar was found on the floor of a room in level III. which may be dated approximately in the eighth century B.C. These letters then become the first letters of the South-Arabic alphabet which have been discovered in a stratified excavation. ... The origin of the jar is a matter of speculation. It is not impossible that the Midianites used the South-Arabic script, and there must have been active trade between Ezion-Geber and South Arabia" (Glueck). However, if Prof. Glueck's dating is right, we must allow some 2-3 centuries, at least, for the development and spread of the South Semitic alphabet.
The date of the establishment of the South Arabian kingdoms cannot yet be determined with any accuracy. It may be assumed, however, that after a certain non-datable prehistoric period, southern Arabia became an important centre of civilization in the last centuries of the second millennium B.e. During the first millennium B.C. it was a highly civilized agricultural region, a land of international commercial relations, producing gold and the frankincense so valued by ancient religion. It served also as the principal route by which goods from India were transhipped and carried overland to the ports of the eastern Mediterranean. In the Roman period the region was known as Arabia Felix. By the time of the establishment of Islam, southern Arabia had lost its importance to northem Arabis. The later development wrecked the older civilization, and relegated these fertile lands into the backwoods of history.
Until recently the Minaean kingdom, with its capital at Ma'in (north-West of the modern Sana'a, in Yemen), was considered as the oldest. The Qatabanian kingdom, with its capital at Tamna' (which according to some scholars was situated in the district of Baihan), lying to the south-east of Yemen, was roughly contemporary, while the Sabxan kingdom, with its capital at Marib, lying between the Mingan and Qatabanian kingdoms, attained its importance after the decay of the Minacan empire. Glaser, in 1889, suggested dating the beginnings of the Minxan kingdom in the second, or even the third, millennium s.c. He was criticised by Halévy, Mueller, Mordtmann, and others, and defended by Winckler, Hommel, and other scholars. Hommel placed the Mintean kingdom between 1300 or 1200 B.C. and 700 B.C.; according to his opinion, the latest Minæan inscriptions could not be later than the earliest Sabxan. Other scholars proposed a kind of middle way. For instance, according to "Tkatsch, the Minæan kingdom was contemporaneous with the Sabzan, beginning at the very earliest" in the eighth century s.c. and lasting down to the second century BC. In Mordmann's opinion, epigraphically the Minzari inscriptions are later than the earliest Sabuan texts and older than the Sabzan inscriptions of the later period.
The Canadian authority on South Semitic epigraphy, Prof. F. V. Winnett, TC-examined the chronological problem of the Minaans in an excellent article (The Place of the Mineans in the History of pre-Islamic Arabia) in the "BULLETIN OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOLS OF ORIENTAL RESEARCH", No. 73. February, 1939 According to him, some of the inscriptions discovered by Peres Jaussen and Savignac at al-'Ula (see below), and by them considered as Lihyanite, are really Minan, while others "betray a strange mixture of the Lihyanite and Minean characters," and may be considered as "Libyanite texts exhibiting Minzean influence. On this and other evidence, such as the bilingual Minæo-Greek inscription found on the island of Delos and dated by the French oriental epigraphist Clermont-Ganneau to the latter half of the second century B.C.. Winnett arrives at the following conclusions:
