Table of Contents

Contents: Preface; Part 1 Literacy, Language and Scripts: Literacy in an oral environment; Nomads and the Hawran in the late Hellenistic and Roman periods: a reassessment of the epigraphic evidence; Reflections on the linguistic map of pre-Islamic Arabia. Part 2 Ancient Ethnicity: Some reflections on epigraphy and ethnicity in the Roman Near East; Arabians, Arabias, and the Greeks: contact and perceptions; 'Les Arabes en Syrie' or 'La pénétration des Arabes en Syrie': a question of perceptions?; Part 3 Aspects of the History of Ancient Arabia: Was the Nabataean kingdom a 'bedouin state'?; On Saracens, the Rawwafah inscription and the Roman army; Trade routes and trade goods at the northern end of the 'incense road' in the 1st millennium BC. Addenda and corrigenda; Index.

About the Author

M.C.A. Macdonald is a Research Associate at the Oriental Institute, and a Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford, UK.

Reviews

’... this volume is a most valuable example of the kind of scholarship that generates far-reaching revisions of hitherto commonly accepted views.... Macdonald is an accomplished communicator. Plenty of common sense combined with a thorough knowledge of a vast corpus of data is what creates good scholarship. The volume is a shining example of this.’ Bulletin of the Society for Arabian Studies 'The Ashgate Variorum Series is noted for its tradition of reproducing individual studies by outstanding scholars which 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...this volume will lastingly serve as a historic vademecum for all those interested in the antique subject of literacy...' British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies