Page 16 - Arabian Studies (I)

4 Arabian Studies /
within the period envisaged, and is thus effectively a substitute for
the lacking year-date. The phrase has hitherto been supposed to
mean the latter part of the month (the genitive then being partitive);
yet it strikes one as distinctly odd that the drafter of the text should
have been so specific in this case, when all the other events
mentioned in the text are dated simply by the month.
The argument which I earlier used in attempting to fix the
beginning of the Himyaritic calendar year has now proved to be
invalid, since an essential link in it was my incorrect placing of dm'n.
Granting, however, that the repair work of C 541 was completed in
the seventeenth month after it was begun, we can draw the following
conclusions. The first month of the year cannot have been August,
September or October; for in that case the beginning of the repairs
would either have been in the Himyarite year 658, or (most
improbably) have been deferred until fifteen months after the
rupture. It cannot have been any of the months from November to
February inclusive: had that been so, the completion would have
been in 659. It is just possible that it might have been July: but this
requires us to assume that the political and military events detailed in
the first part of the text are treated chronologically in isolation from
the part devoted to the dam, and that the successful conclusion of
the military operations, which is stated to have taken place in
dqyzn = June of 657, was not the month before the rupture of the
dam but eleven months after it. The objection to this is that the
tremendous material effort which was thrown into the dam repairs,
and the incidence of the plague, make it unlikely that major military
operations could have been conducted concurrently.
However, once one’s choice is narrowed down to these four or five
months, it is hardly possible to avoid thinking that the name dmbkrn
is precisely equivalent to Arabic mubakkir (bakkara ‘ala ashabihi ‘he
went before, or had precedence over, his companions’ — Lane,
Lexicon). The first month in the Himyarite year was thus dmbkrn =
May.
In some ways, the most important result of our new information is
that it is now possible to say definitely that C621 is dated in
February (<dhltn). This makes it certain that the Abyssinian attacks
which it records took place in winter, and not (as earlier researchers
believed) in summer. The stormy weather which Simeon of Bet
Arsham says delayed the Abyssinian crossing of the straits was not
winter, but the late-summer monsoon10 in or around August. It is
pertinent here to quote a very significant phrase used by Bertram
Thomas: ‘the rainy months of summer, when the seas are too
stormy to be used by native craft’.