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In 1984, a "Thamudic E" inscription was discovered at Uraynibah West, almost 35 km south of Amman in Jordan. It is of exceptional character in regard to its length, content, style, and language. An analogous rhetorical petition to the god Sa'b and goddess Lot was also discovered at Madaba in 1996, with similar phraseology and content, which offers important parallels to the Uraynibah text (dealt with in an appendix). What is striking about both texts is that they are written completely in an early form of Old or even Classical Arabic. The date is problematic, but because of the Nabataean cultural elements embedded in the texts, we would date them to around the beginning of our era. The provenance and sophistication of these texts In the heartland of Transjordan also argues against the standard ascription of Old North Arabic "Thamudic E" to "nomads" or "Bedouins."
INTRODUCTION
The progressively expanding corpus of extant texts written in one or another of the various Epigraphic North Arabian scripts-especially "Safaitic" and "Thamudic"-and/or languages has, in recent years, been materially enhanced by a number of important finds on the Transjordanian plateau. Previously such texts were thought to be concentrated in two areas: "Safaitic" in the harm or blackstone desert of southern Syria, northeastern Jordan, and northern Saudi Arabia; and "Thamudic" in the sandstone desert of the Hisma in southern Jordan and the adjacent area of the northern Hijaz in Saudi Arabia (fig. 1). The faulty nomenclature that came to be applied to these texts is no longer acceptable as such; nor can their provenance be any longer confined arbitrarily to specific areas. It is widely acknowledged now that the labels "Safaitic" and "Thamudic" for these North Arabian scripts are misnomers and misleading (Macdonald 1995; Macdonald and King 2000). Furthermore, the finds of Epigraphic North Arabian (hereinafter, ENA) inscriptions and graffiti have by no means been restricted to these desert regions. In fact, several hundred Safaitic texts were recorded recently from the villages of the southern Hawran (Zeinaddin 2000), and more and more of the Thamudic texts have been discovered on the Transjordanian plateau, between the two concentrations in the harm and Hisma (e.g., Milik 1958; Knauf 1981; 1985; 1998; Rö'llig 1987), as well as in the adjacent regions...