Across the southern reaches of the Arabian Peninsula, enigmatic inscriptions in a variety of ancient pre-Islamic Arabian scripts pepper the landscape. In particular, the region of Dhofar in southern Oman is known for two such scripts, Dhofari 1 and the related Dhofari 2, discovered in the early 20th century. Painted on cave walls and carved into desert boulders, these previously undeciphered scripts, which date to more than 2,000 years ago, have lent themselves to a variety of speculative hypotheses, such as connections to ancient Arabian tribes mentioned in the Quran. Now, that is all beginning to change. Epigrapher Ahmad Al-Jallad […]
