"Free Free" .. History of the ancient Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula on volcanic rocks

The Arabian Peninsula is located in the heart of the contemporary Middle East, and it has great strategic and commercial importance in the modern era, and thus was the case in ancient times, however important pages of its history, languages, and ancient culture are still unknown.

Despite many excavations and archaeological discoveries, the archaeological research in the Arabian Peninsula is still less than it should have, and I discovered many stone inscriptions and ancient writing on the walls and rocks dating to the ancient "educated" societies that inhabited north and south of the island, and many of these inscriptions belong to the Bedouins who left scores Thousands of ancient inscriptions and writings in a large area stretching from southeastern Syria and the Levant to Yemen, giving a vivid picture of their daily lives and their emotions.

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In the black desert known as the "free free", located to the south of Mount Druze (Arabs) in southern Syria through eastern Jordan to the Al-Jouf region in northern Saudi Arabia, there are many rocks resulting from ancient lava in the region.

Over millions of years, lava flows have split into billions of stones and rocks that now cover the desert limestone floor that contains many ancient drawings, engravings and engraved Arabic writing, according to Michael MacDonald, academic at Oxford University and an archaeologist in the history of the Arabian Peninsula.

Until the Middle Ages, when writing paper became relatively inexpensive and readily available, reading and writing were skills that the Bedouins did not need much. In ancient times, papyrus papers were very expensive outside their original habitat in Egypt, and the Bedouins had more practical alternatives to write on, such as patches of skin, animal skin, saddle and even Clothes and tent fabrics.

In settled areas pottery was broken the most common surface to write on, but the Bedouins did not carry much of it because it was broken by their movement, and thus the only writing surfaces freely available were rocks, as they were abundant.

Al-Hurra is a geographical phenomenon in which the surface of the earth is covered with igneous rocks and basaltic volcanic lava.

Old inscriptions

In the joint paper published by the academics at Oxford University on Al-Manasir and Michael MacDonald, the researchers say that rocks do not serve as a medium for sending messages, nor are they suitable for a mobile community like the Bedouins, nor are they suitable for writing contracts or recording history and poetry, and therefore the Bedouins did not depend on writing the way we used to Modern times, and their culture was oral use of memory and spoken word instead of physical writing despite the proficiency of many of them reading and writing.

MacDonald says that these Bedouins carved tens of thousands of writings on the walls literally in the free and free desert outside, and these ancient writings and inscriptions provide what can be considered the only written source for the history of the Bedouins in Nabatean time (169 BC - 106 AD) and later Roman, according to the published paper At the British Institute in Amman.

These ancient inscriptions give a vivid picture of the Bedouin community, their daily lives, their religions, and their relationships with the settled peoples. MacDonald says that while the Bedouin contemporaries in the villages and towns did not know the writing or did not have enough time for it or until the walls that they wrote on were destroyed and replaced, the irony is that we know - At the present time - more Bedouins in this period than any other community in the region.

As the Bedouin lifestyle included grazing and nomadic life, they needed to spend time sculpting and writing on the walls and rocks, and many ancient Bedouins drew rock drawings recently discovered, and MacDonald said that the Bedouins had a long time to carve very long writings that narrate different aspects of their lives, and cross About their emotions, especially sadness, and also lack a sense of humor, irony and even satire, and reading it now is like reading a text or tweet to a friend he wrote two thousand years ago.

In the Badia Al-Sham (southeastern Syria, eastern Jordan, western Iraq, and a small part of northern Saudi Arabia), numerous inscriptions dating back to the period between a thousand years BC to 400 AD were found, and many of these inscriptions were written in Musnad script and represented ancient Arab island dialects.

The Musnad script - or the Himyari script - is known as an ancient writing system that developed in southern Arabia and Yemen around a thousand years BC, and is one of the types of southern Semitic writing that was used in the Arabian Peninsula for a long time, before modern Arabic writing.

More than 35,000 Safae inscriptions have been documented today, and new inscriptions are constantly being revealed.

In 2013, a project was established at the Khalili Research Center at Oxford University to build a digital database that includes all these inscriptions, in addition to all other inscriptions from the Arabian Peninsula before Islam within a database called "The Electronic Collection of Inscriptions in Northern Arabia," and was made available on the website Electronic, and researchers on Al-Manasir and Michael MacDonald are trying to locate the location of many of these discovered inscriptions to facilitate the researchers ’work.