No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
Among the documents from the Judaean Desert, ten or eleven are written in Nabataean:1 six of them belong to the Babatha archive (P.Yadin 1-4, 6 and 9)2 and four or five more belong to the so-called Seiyâl collection.3Of the latter group only one has so far been published.It is called Papyrus Starcky, after its editor.4This document is the outer (lower) version of a large 'double deed',5 written in an elegant cursive Nabataean script, and consists of three large fragments (A, B, and C), five small fragments which cannot be placed (a-e), and frag, f which contains the dating formula and thus must be the first line of the outer text (see figures 1-4).Starcky was vague about its provenance.6However, two tiny fragments of this very document were found by I would like to thank my friend Professor Hannah Cotton for a thorough editing of my text.By Nabataean I mean the local Aramaic dialect in the ,Nabataean' script.The Aramaic of the Nabataean documents is mixed with Arabic words.To which one should add the Nabataean subscriptions to the Greek documents published in N. Lewis, The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave o f Letters.Greek Papyri (with Aramaic and Nabatean Signatures and Subscriptions, edited by Y. Yadin and J.C. Greenfield), Judean Desert Studies II, Jerusalem 1989 (henceforth Lewis).See General Introduction in H.M. Cotton and A. Yardeni, Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek Texts from Nahal Hever and Other Sites, with an Appendix containing alleged Qumran Texts.The Seiyâl Collection II, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XXVII, Oxford 1997, Iff.J. Starcky, 'Un contrat nabatéen sur papyrus', Revue Biblique 61, 1954, 161-81.I.e. a document which contains two copies -not always entirely identicalof the same text, an inner text (or upper text) and an outer text (or lower text); the inner (upper) version, which was legally binding, was rolled and tied with a string, and each one of the witnesses signed on the back of the document against one of the stiches.Starcky (above, n. 4), 161.
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.