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Imar Koutchoukali 🥃🟦🌿 🌐 Profile picture
@koutchoukalimar
Aug 5, 2020 • 15 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X
So as I'm nearing 1k followers on Twitter while at the same time approaching my annual PhD progress review, I thought I'd make a thread of all my scholarly activities on Twitter the past academic year.
August 2: A small thread on the background of the name Laḫīʿa and its South Arabian pre-Islamic origins.
July 31: A small back-and-forth about the origins of the Ethiopic script and its relationship to the South Arabian script.
July 12: Shared a link to my blog, where I discuss whether or not Razihit and Faifi (spoken in North Yemen/Southwest Saudi-Arabia) are the last remaining Ancient South Arabian languages (spoiler alert: the answer is no)
June 25: Made a thread about the representation of South Arabia in the grand strategy game Imperator: Rome, about what's good and what could still be a lot better.
June 9: Discussed the discovery and edition of the sixth volume of Hamdānī's Iklīl, long-thought lost. In-thread, I added a few remarks about its most significant aspects.
May 29: Somewhat more general (and not really immediately related to my doctorate): my opinion on the trope "orientalists are actively trying to dismantle Islam"
May 26: Reflections on my first year of teaching full-time at college
May 17: Can I describe the topic of my PhD using only words of one syllable? Almost.
May 12: Link to my blog on the provenance of some South-Arabian-like inscriptions here at the University of Tartu.
April 7: While watching Indiana Jones, I figured out the why Alexandretta is called al-Iskandarūna in Arabic.
April 6: An overview of my talk on the transmission of South Arabian toponyms between Sabaic and Arabic. This is currently being turned into a proper article.
Nov 13, 2019 (wow I wasn't doing much tweeting inbtw). A thread on how some Arabic religious terminology ended up in the Finno-Ugric languages of Central Russia

Aug 31, 2019: On the history of the name Mārib and why it is spelled with a hamza in Arabic, which is not there in Sabaic.
And here are of course my most important contributions to the field. ImageImageImageImage

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More from @koutchoukalimar

Imar Koutchoukali 🥃🟦🌿 🌐 Profile picture
Oct 9, 2023
I am extremely happy to be able to announce that my doctoral thesis, entitled "Our ˁirbīt is not like your ˁarabiyya! – Linguistic and socio-political change in Late Antique South Arabia (550 – 850 AD)" has been accepted for defense.
It will take place on Dec 8, 2023. 🧵 Image
Why linguistic change in South Arabia during this period? As most historians of the region will tell you, this is a period for which we have very little direct evidence.
Local writing traditions in South Arabia come to an abrupt end around 560 AD (!!!) The youngest dated South Arabian inscription (CIH 325) was written in the year 559 AD (Himyarite calendar 669) and talks about the reparation of a dam! Speak of anti-climactic.
For the next two centuries, there are no primary sources that can tell us about what happened in South Arabia during this pivotal time in history (see Smith)
I decided to look at how processes of language contact can at least help us understand this period a bit better. Image
Read 13 tweets
Imar Koutchoukali 🥃🟦🌿 🌐 Profile picture
Mar 22, 2022
As I'm nearing the end of my thesis, I wanted to share with Twitter some things I've been working on.

For those don't know: my thesis on linguistic change (in its broader social context) in Late Antique South Arabia (c. 300 – 800 AD).

It's a WIP, so things may change!
Before the coming of Islam, South Arabia (think what is now Yemen, but a bit bigger) had been home to several civilizations which had their own languages and also wrote in another script. Though sharing a distant ancestor, the South Arabian and Arabic scripts are very different! ImageImage
The recorded history of South Arabia begins c. 1000 and BC, when the Sabaeans adopted the South Arabian script and began writing inscriptions. Over the next centuries, this script got adopted by the other major South Arabian states: Maʿīn, Qataban, and Ḥaḍramawt. Image
Read 19 tweets
Imar Koutchoukali 🥃🟦🌿 🌐 Profile picture
Nov 2, 2021
Was there anyone who could read South Arabian inscriptions after the coming of Islam?

A thread 🧵re-evaluating the skills of the Yemeni scholar al-Hamdānī (died c. 950), and what he knew about the inscriptions of pre-Islamic South Arabia.
Al-Hamdānī was so well-known for his knowledge on anything related to South Arabia that he earned the nickname Lisān al-Yaman, i.e. "The tongue of Yemen". This is no joke: he knew things about astronomy, geography, history, topography, linguistics, folklore, metallurgy, and more.
As far as we know, he authored three books:
- Ṣifat ǧazīrat al-ʿarab, "Description of the Arabian Peninsula"
- Kitāb al-ǧawharatayn, "The book of the two metals [i.e. gold & silver")
- Kitāb al-Iklīl, "The Crowns".

Of this last one, only volumes 1, 2, 8, 10 & 12 survived.
Read 17 tweets
Imar Koutchoukali 🥃🟦🌿 🌐 Profile picture
Nov 1, 2021
This inspired me to make a small🧵about this phenomenon from one of my own fields of study, the niche field of pre-Islamic South Arabian studies.

About South Arabia's identification with India (what?!) and sourcing on Wikipedia. Let's have a look.
This is from the Wikipedia page "South Arabia". Overall, it's not bad. At times, it feels a bit amateuristic, but I've seen worse.
But look at the etymology part. Yes, sometimes South Arabia is identified with India in Greek and Roman (and also Jewish Aramaic) texts, but why? ImageImage
Wikipedia says that's because the Persians, who annexed the area around 560, thought Indians and Ethiopians were similar, as both are "dark-skinned". This makes alarm bells go off, because references to South Arabia-as-India are much older than that. But let's look at the source.
Read 10 tweets
Imar Koutchoukali 🥃🟦🌿 🌐 Profile picture
Jan 29, 2021
Last week I tweeted this. One of the comments argued that the origin of Arabic qamīṣ < Latin camisia is hypothetical. It reminds me of people sometimes say "well [proven thing] is just a *theory*".

A thread on methods in historical linguistics.

bit.ly/3iXqTTf
The further one goes back in history, the more difficult it becomes to find direct evidence for how a word was pronounced or where it came from. Many cultures, but certainly not all, invented writing systems, making our job somewhat easier, but certainly not always.
So what kind of methods can we use to figure out where a word came from.

Firstly: phonology. As a language changes, so does pronunciation. Certain sound changes are much more common than others. For example, /k/ > /t͡ʃ/ is much more common than //t͡ʃ/> k.
Read 20 tweets
Imar Koutchoukali 🥃🟦🌿 🌐 Profile picture
Dec 25, 2020
!𐩺𐩣|𐩣𐩥𐩡𐩵|𐩫𐩧𐩯𐩩𐩯|𐩷𐩺𐩨𐩬

For Christmas, let's talk a bit how Christianity spread to South Arabia. And fully in the spirit of the season, this is a story of slavery and mass murder. Image
Most people who know something about South Arabian history have heard about the martyrs of Najran. In or around 523 CE, the South Arabian ruler Yūsuf ʾAšʿar Yaʾṯar (called Dhū Nuwās by later Muslim authors ) massacred the entire Christian population of Najrān. Image
Most Muslims connected this event with what the Qur'ān (85:4-7) calls the "Companions of the pit" (ʾaṣḥab al-uḫdūd). The Qur'ānic allusion is rather vague, so other interpretations are also possible. This is discussed in David Cook's article "The Aṣḥab al-Uḫdūd". Image
Read 13 tweets

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