Literacy and Identity in Pre-Islamic Arabia

by M.C.A Macdonald

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, and possibly any other part of the ancient world. Even among the nomads there seems to have been almost universal literacy in some regions. 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, information which is not available for any other non-élite population in the ancient Near East outside Egypt. This abundance of inscriptions has enabled 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. He describes the many different languages and the distinct family of alphabets used in ancient Arabia, and discusses the connections between the use of particular languages or scripts and expressions of personal and communal identity. The problem of how ancient perceptions of ethnicity in this region can be identified in the sources is another theme of these papers; more specifically, they deal from several different perspectives with the question of what ancient writers meant when they applied the term 'Arab' to a wide variety of peoples throughout the ancient Near East.

432 pages, Hardcover

First published December 28, 2008

Reviews

[Yoni T. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very important book to understand why the distinction between literate and non-literate societies has very little to do with the rate of literacy in a population but the function of literacy in a population. Among the Safaitic nomads, akin to the Tuareg of today, literacy rates were high but the function of literacy expressed in stone inscriptions was of a "lower" register compared to function of literacy in literate socieities which was administrative. However, the Macdonald claims that these non-literate socieities had "no function" to their literacy at all which doesn't quite sit right with me. Their function was just different from centralized literate societies. The Safaitic nomads did not just "tweet from the desert", as Macdonald has argued, since Dr. Ahmad al-Jallad has shown that the vast majority of inscriptions contain narrative religious content that served some ritualistic function. The comparison to Tuaregs fall short in this regard. This is why I believe there needs to be a third category to capture this dinction in the Hijaz.