Thread by @koutchoukalimar

Alright Twitter, it's time for more South Arabian in Arabic related tweets. Let's take a look at the infamous Himyarite king Ḏū Šanātir, also known as Laḫīʿa b. Yanūf, Laḫnīʿa b. Yanūf and Laḫtīʿa b. Yanūf.

Something went badly wrong here. Let's find out what in this THREAD

So the Islamic tradition (e.g. Wahb b. Munabbih, Ibn Hišām, al-Ṭabarī and al-ʾAṯīr) tell us about this bad dude who ruled Yemen and the Himyarites before the time of Dhū Nuwās (who was also bad, but for different reasons). The reasons for being bad: wrong background and sodomy.

Either way, the Islamic tradition gives us two names: Ḏū Šanātir ("he of the fingers") and Laḫayʿa b. Yanūf.

The problem is that there are many ways to read the sequence <lḥyʿh>, and the Islamic tradition kind of settled on reading the <ḥ> as a <ḫ>.

Here is an example of an early vocalized manuscript of Ibn Hišām's Sīra, which was made in Egypt in 834 (!), which already indicates the name with a dot over the ḥāʾ.

The interesting thing is that the name <Lḫyʿt> is not attested in the South Arabian epigraphy. A name that *is* frequently attested (over a few dozen times, in fact) is the name Lḥyʿt (with a ḥ).

What's neat is that we can track this name to Early Sabaic! This is a contracted form of Lḥyʿṯṯ (over 100 attestations), which is from <Lḥyʿṯṯr>. What does that mean? "May ʿAṯtar grant long life!" (la-ḥayya-ʿAṯṯar).

What is particularly cool about this is that as far as I know, this is the only attestation – albeit in a very changed form – of the pre-Islamic deity ʿAṯtar in the Islamic tradition. That's pretty exciting!

(Here is a nice picture of an oryx, associated with ʿAṯṯar)

So how did we get from Lḥyʿt to Laḫīʿa/Laḫnīʿa/Laḫtīyya. Well as I showed in the above tweet, there are already early manuscripts indicating this form. It seems most probable that the ḥāʾ was misread as a ḫāʾ and that later copyists didn't quite know what to do with this.

This is particularly interesting, as we know that during the 9th and even the 10th century there were still people capable of reading and writing in the South Arabian script (as the famous bilingual inscription published by Said al-Said indicates)

And this most likely indicates that those literate in South Arabian script were not (closely) involved with with the later transmission of the accounts related to pre-Islamic South Arabia.

/THREAD