HumanitiesLinguisticsReligious StudiesHistorical LinguisticsIslamic StudiesMiddle Eastern HistoryIslamIslamic HistoryIslamic WorldMiddle Eastern LinguisticsPre-islamic Arabian HistoryPre-islamic Arab GenealogyPre-islamic Arabian ReligionPre-islamic Poetry
EOGRAPHICALLY, the Arabian Peninsula should be regarded as being Gbounded on the north by the so-called Fertile Crescent, and thus including the desert areas between the Euphrates and the rift valley which stretches north from 'Aqaba. For knowledge of the linguistic situation before Islam in the peninsula so defined, we must depend principally on a vast number of inscriptions- both formal monumental ones and graffiti- very widely scattered from the extreme north to the south in the western half, with a very much smaller number on the east coast. Some useful information may be gained from the Muslim philologists, but such data are chronologically limited to a period of approximately a century before Islam; about the earlier linguistic facts the philologists knew nothing. Moreover, the area roughly coinciding with the modern Sultanate of Oman and the United Arab Emirates south of Bahrayn is virtually a blank for the purposes of this study. There are a few inscriptions at Khor Rori (a little east of Sallala), but these belong to