Literacy and Identity in Pre-Islamic Arabia

In these studies Michael Macdonald examines the extraordinary flowering of literacy in both the settled and nomadic populations of western Arabia in the 1500 years before the birth of Islam, when a larger proportion of the population could read and write than in any other part of the ancient Near East. The scores of thousands of inscriptions and graffiti they left paint a vivid picture of the way-of-life, social systems, and personal emotions of their authors and enable Michael Macdonald to explore in detail some of the - often surprising - ways in which reading and writing were used in the literate and non-literate communities of ancient Arabia. In addition this volume offers, for the first time, a clear, coherent, and up-to-date classification of the languages and scripts of pre-Islamic North and Central Arabia and describes their interaction.