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Literacy and Identity in Pre-Islamic Arabia (Variorum Collected Studies Series)

by Michael C.A. Macdonald

Article  in  British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies · January 2010

DOI: 10.2307/23077043

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Fountain University Osogbo Nigeria
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LITERACY AND IDENTITY IN PRE-ISLAMIC ARABIA

Variorum Collected Studies
M. C. A. Macdonald
Ashgate: SURREY, BURLINGTON, 2009. x + 420pp. ISBN 978-0-7546-
5965-5. Price £75 (HB).
The Ashgate Variorum Series is noted for its tradition of reproducing
individual studies by outstanding scholars, which studies have, regardless of
the time of their original publication, perdurably improved our knowledge of
many aspects of the intellectual and material cultures of the Near East and
the Islamic world. The volume under review has not fallen a step behind in
this hallowed tradition. It is a collection of articles by Professor Macdonald,
the world acclaimed archaeologist and paleologist, as published between
1991 and 2005. It is divided into three parts, and each of these has three
articles. Part 1, ‘Literacy, Language, and Scripts’, contains essays dealing
with literacy in the pristine oral Arabian environment; a reassessment of the
epigraphic evidence in the construction of the history of the nomads and the
•awr n in the late Hellenistic and early Roman periods; and the linguistic
map of pre-Islamic Arabia. The family of ancient Arabian alphabets,
musnad, was in use exclusively in the Peninsula till the 6th century CE, and it
was only after this period that it was exported across the Red Sea to survive
as a vocalized alphabet for Ge‘ez and other Ethiopian alphabets.
Environmental conditions in the desert promoted the use of powerful
memories and oral communication among tribal societies, and these reduced
the paramountcy of literacy. Literate nomads nonetheless provided our only
first hand evidence for life in the Syro-Arabian desert, according to our
author.
Part 2, ‘Ancient Ethnicity’ consists of articles dealing with epigraphy
and ethnicity in the Roman Near East; contacts between Arabs and the
Greeks and their mutual perception of one another; and the Arabs in Syria
and the notion of perception. Little or nothing is known about how ethnicity
was perceived in pre-Islamic Near East (p. 183), and this is a fact. Ethnicity
as a mythical entity, an atavistic representation of a past or a form of
collective identity has always been a key issue in anthropological discourse
and the various essays in this volume have once more reinforced this in
regard to pre-Islamic communities of Arabia. Rome annexed the Nabataean
Kingdom in 106 C.E. after it had existed for some 417 years, but not all the
scripts in Nabataean were by subjects of the Nabataean king. As rightly
observed, Greek characterization of the different populations they described
as “Arab” shows them to be widely distributed along spatial and social
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landscapes; namely, nomads, settled farmers, peasants, pastoralists, and

merchant communities. The essays here clearly demonstrate how etymology
of personal names or particular script may not be a valid criterion for
assigning ethnicity, and more helpful indices for this purpose have been
highlighted in an articulate manner, a feat which has been achieved through
a progressive updating, correction, and modification of many of the
hypotheses put forward in earlier studies.
Part 3, ‘Aspects of the History of Ancient Arabia’ contains essays
dealing with whether the Nabataean kingdom was a Bedouin state or not; the
Raww fah inscriptions, the Roman army and the Saracens; and trade routes
and goods in the first millennium B.C. at the northern end of the ‘incense
road’. The underlying subject matter of the entire volume is the use of
writing and inscriptions in ancient Near East and the ways personal and
communal identities were constructed and construed among the interacting
ethnic and social interlocutors. Thought and its verbal expressions in oral
culture, and literate thought and expression in regard to its emergence from
and relation to orality have recently assumed a greater significance in this
age of new technology,1 so the studies being reproduced here will doubtless
inspire further interests in the matter. As enlightening as this volume is, the
consistency of the author in providing details of all abbreviated titles and
names is thrown into some relief by his failure to give in full the siglon, M.
C. A., the abbreviations for his names. Only a thorough reading between the
lines offers one the opportunity to know that Michael is one of the names (p.
47). By all account, this volume will lastingly serve as a historic vademecum
for all those interested in the antique subject of literacy in the context of its
definitive function as an identity and civilisational marker within and across
social and ethnic boundaries in pre-historic Near Eastern societies.
Amidu Olalekan Sanni
Lagos State University-Nigeria
amsanni@yahoo.co.uk

1
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the World, 2nd edition (London
& New York: Routledge, 2002)

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