Dharma
This is a main concept in many Indian religions. It comes from the Sanskrit dhr-, meaning ‘to hold, to support.’ Referring to the law that sustains things. In its most used sense, dharma refers to a person’s moral responsibilities or duties.
In Hinduism, dharma denotes behavior considered to be in accord with Rta (the order & custom that make life & the universe possible). This includes duties, rights, laws, conduct, virtues, & ethics to form the “righteous way of living.” Dharma is believed to have trans-temporal validity & is 1 of the Purusartha.
In the Hindu tradition, Dharma isn’t a “1 size fits all” kind of deal. Often it’s divided into 2 primary categories:
Much of Indian epic literature, like the Mahabharata, focuses on “Dharma Yuddha” (a righteous war). The Bhagavad Gita is essentially a 700-verse philosophical crisis where the warrior Arjuna must decide between his familial affection & his Kshatriya (warrior) dharma.
In Buddhism, dharma (in Pali: dhamma) refers to the teachings of THE Buddha & to the true nature of reality. The Dharma is the “truth” that the Buddha realized under the Bodhi tree. It is symbolized by the Dharmachakra (the 8-Spoked Wheel), representing the Noble 8-Fold Path.
In Buddhist philosophy, dhamma/dharma is also the term for specific “phenomena” & the ultimate truth. In a technical sense, “dharmas” refer to the fundamental building blocks of experience. It’s the 2nd of the “Triple Gem” (Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha) that a practitioner looks to for liberation from suffering (dukkha).
In Jainism, dharma refers to the teachings of Tirthankara (Jina) & the body of doctrine of purification & moral transformation. Jainism agrees that Dharma involves virtue (specifically the “10 Virtues,” like forgiveness & humility), & it also defines Dharma as a substance called Dharmastikaya. This is the principle of motion. Just as water lets fish swim, Dharma is the medium that lets souls & matter move through the universe.
In Sikhism, dharma indicates the path of righteousness, proper religious practices, & performing moral duties.
The antonym (opposite) of dharma is adharma (“not dharma”). In common usage, adharma means that which is against nature, immoral, unethical, wrong, or unlawful. In Buddhism, dharma integrates the teachings & doctrines of the founder of Buddhism, the Buddha.
In the mid-20th century, an inscription of the Indian Mauryan Emperor Asoka from the year 258 BCE was found in Afghanistan, the Kandahar Bilingual Rock Inscription. This rock inscription contains Greek & Aramaic texts.
After a bloody conquest of Kalinga, Ashoka was struck by/with remorse. He converted to Buddhism & replaced the policy of Dig-vijaya (conquest by force) with Dharma-vijaya (conquest by piety). He carved “Dharma Edicts” onto massive stone pillars & rocks throughout the Indian subcontinent.
They weren’t just religious texts. They were also administrative orders promoting religious tolerance, animal welfare, & the planting of medicinal herbs.
The evolving literature of Hinduism links dharma to 2 other important ideals: Rta & Maya. Rta, in the Vedas, is the truth, & cosmic principle which regulates & coordinates the operation of the universe & everything within it. Maya, in the Rig-veda & later literature, means illusion, fraud, deception, magic that misleads & creates disorder. Thus is contrary to reality, laws, & rules that establish order, predictability & harmony.
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The perils of paleographic dating: a few Aramaic examples from Arabia
My last post included a quote by Michael Macdonald that concluded:
This text shows that different forms of the same letter within the Aramaic alphabet could be held in the memories of scribes, and presumably readers, and used as they pleased to achieve various effects. Such a conclusion is not particularly startling but it shows the dangers of trying to use supposed palaeographical sequences to date inscriptions.
This is in reference to the second of the three inscriptions on the picture below, the one that Macdonald says is in Tayma Aramaic. While most of the inscription is in something in between Imperial and Nabataean Aramaic, the first word is in nice, old-fashioned lapidary Imperial Aramaic. The effect is something like lead-in small caps in Latin typography:
Tʜɪꜱ ɪꜱ the funerary monument of …
I think this is a great point. While certain script styles may be typical of a certain time and place, that doesn’t mean they were strictly limited to that setting and you can never be 100% sure of a dating based on paleography alone. In this short post, I want to give two more examples.
First, here are two funerary inscriptions in Nabataean Aramaic (Macdonald, one of the editors, again considers the first one Tayma Aramaic). They are both dated, so we know they were written a century and a half apart (203 and 356 CE). But the earlier one has considerably more advanced letter forms than the later one. In each case, I’ll give you a transliteration in (Unicode’s pretty archaic) Nabataean and Arabic script so you can compare the letter shapes to those extremes.
Tayma, 203 CE𐢅𐢀 𐢕𐢘𐢜 𐢁𐢝𐢗𐢍𐢆
𐢕𐢃𐢑𐢋𐢀 𐢃𐢛 𐢍𐢈𐢖𐢘
𐢛𐢁𐢜 𐢞𐢍𐢓𐢌 𐢅𐢌 𐢁𐢚𐢍𐢒
𐢗𐢑𐢇𐢈𐢌 𐢗𐢓𐢛𐢒 𐢈𐢁𐢝𐢓𐢈
𐢁𐢊𐢈𐢇𐢌 𐢃𐢍𐢛𐢊 𐢁𐢍𐢛
𐢝𐢕𐢞 𐢮𐢮𐢮𐢮𐢭𐢬𐢩 𐢑𐢇𐢘𐢛𐢏𐢍𐢀
دا نفس اسعيه
نبلطا بر يو𐢖ف
راس تيمى دي اقيم
علهوي عمرم واسمو
احوهي بيرح اير
سنت 𐢮𐢮𐢮𐢮𐢭𐢬𐢩 لهفركيا
𐢅𐢕𐢆 …
𐢗𐢅𐢍𐢈𐢔 𐢃𐢛 𐢊𐢕𐢌 𐢃𐢛 𐢝𐢓𐢈𐢁𐢐 𐢛𐢍𐢜
𐢊𐢄𐢛𐢀 𐢑𐢓𐢈𐢍𐢆 𐢁𐢞𐢞𐢆 𐢃𐢛𐢞
𐢗𐢓𐢛𐢈 𐢃𐢛 𐢗𐢅𐢍𐢈𐢔 𐢃𐢛 𐢝𐢓𐢈𐢁𐢐
𐢛𐢍𐢜 𐢞𐢍𐢓𐢀 𐢅𐢌 𐢓𐢍𐢞𐢞 𐢃𐢍𐢛𐢊
𐢁𐢂 𐢝𐢕𐢞 𐢓𐢁𐢞𐢍𐢔 𐢈𐢊𐢓𐢝𐢍𐢔
𐢈𐢁𐢊𐢅𐢌 𐢃𐢛𐢞 𐢝𐢕𐢍𐢔 𐢞𐢑𐢞𐢍𐢔
𐢈𐢞𐢓𐢕𐢌
دنه…
عديون بر حني بر سموال ريس
حجرا لموية اتته برت
عمرو بر عديون بر سموال
ريس تيما دي ميتت بيرح
اب سنت ماتين وحمسين
واحى برت سنين تلتين
وتمني
It’s also interesting that the older text is mostly in good Aramaic (with one or two interesting spelling mistakes), while the second one uses a more phonetic spelling of the Aramaic words and has borrowed two Arabic numbers. So the linguistic evidence at least points in the right direction, dating-wise.
The second and last example is a graffito that wasn’t published too long ago (Nehmé 2017), but that may deserve some more attention outside epigraphic circles. What appears to be the same inscription, dated to 548/9 CE, starts with the Aramaic phrase dkyr (𐢅𐢏𐢍𐢛) ‘may he be remembered’ written in a not terribly advanced Nabataeo-Arabic and then continues in the Arabic language and Paleo-Arabic script. The use of the cognate verb in the opening phrase (ذكر الإله ḏakara l-ʾilāhu ‘may God remember’) allows for a nice comparison of the two script types. Normally, we would consider these to be centuries apart, but they appear to have been inscribed by the same hand.
A site near Dumat al-Jandal, 548/9 CESo remember, kids, have fun dating inscriptions paleographically, but be careful out there.
#linguistics #Aramaic #Arabic #paleography
Tayma Aramaic or early Nabataean?
This month, I spent two weeks teaching an introduction to Nabataean epigraphy at a small winter school set near the Nabataean ruins of Hegra, in northwest Arabia. One of my final tasks as part of the AlUla Inscriptions Corpus Analysis Project at Ghent University, this was an extraordinary experience and one that will feature in a number of blog posts to come. In this one, I want to focus on a question that came up in preparing my final class, on early Nabataean, centering on some fascinating Aramaic material from the next oasis over: Tayma.
Map from Healey (1993; paywalled)Under the editorship of Michael C.A. Macdonald and (for vol. 3) Muhammad al-Najem, a range of inscriptions from Tayma were published Open Access in 2023 and 2025. These include inscriptions in Akkadian, Taymanitic (the local, West Semitic language written in an Ancient North Arabian script), Imperial Aramaic,1 Nabataean Aramaic, and, in Macdonald’s view, a unique, local variety: Tayma Aramaic. The arguments for treating Tayma Aramaic as a distinct variety are not made explicit,2 but I think the reasoning is as follows:
By way of illustration, here is a gorgeous triply-inscribed funerary stela (or three or four separate stelae, I guess) in Imperial Aramaic, Tayma Aramaic, and Nabataean (from vol. 2: 100):
Imperial Aramaic: npš g{z}{y}ʾh brt rgʿl ‘the funerary monument of G{Z}{Y}ʾH daughter of RGʿL’Macdonald’s commentary on the second inscription (vol. 2: 103) contains this very quoteworthy passage:
The importance of this inscription is its physical and chronological position between the Imperial Aramaic text (TA 10277 A) and the Nabataean one (TA 10277 C), a position which is reflected in the variety of its letter forms. The first two letters have their Imperial Aramaic forms, but the following letters are in a mixture of post-Imperial Aramaic shapes. Thus if one compares the first and last letters (h) one can see that the first is angular and the last is more rounded. More dramatically, comparison of the second letter with the eighth (y) shows that the stance of the letter has been reversed and that the short horizontal line half-way down the stem has disappeared. Comparison of the fifth letter (š) with the third letter in inscriptions A and C shows what looks like a steady, if purely theoretical, progression: from the Imperial Aramaic form (in A) to one local development (in B), and another (later) local development, the Nabataean form (in C). However, an indication of the complications of palaeographical ‘history’, is provided by the fourth letter (p) in TA 10277B. This letter, in a text which clearly predates the introduction of Nabataean into Taymāʾ, has a similar form to that at the end of line 2 in the Nabataean inscription of AD 203 found at Taymāʾ, see TM.N.004 in Macdonald – Al-Najem 2021 [and now also in vol. 3, BDS]. By contrast the form in the Nabataean inscription here (C, which is 188 years earlier than TM.N.004) is much closer in shape to the Imperial Aramaic p (the second letter in A); and there are other letter forms which will be discussed in the present author’s study of the development of the Aramaic script at Taymāʾ (Macdonald [in prep. a]).
This text shows that different forms of the same letter within the Aramaic alphabet could be held in the memories of scribes, and presumably readers, and used as they pleased to achieve various effects. Such a conclusion is not particularly startling but it shows the dangers of trying to use supposed palaeographical sequences to date inscriptions.
There’s a lot of very insightful observations here and I think the second paragraph is especially important (we’ll probably return to this point in my next post). But especially given the non-linear development of letter shapes Macdonald highlights here, I’m not fully convinced yet that Tayma Aramaic is definitely its own thing. In particular, I think it rather closely resembles the corpus of Nabataean inscriptions from the first (and maybe second) century BCE, before Nabataean had reached its classical, spidery shape.
The closest point of comparison, in my view, is in the Tayma Aramaic inscription TA 14285+14286+13651 (vol. 2: 117-118), which could actually be classified as Nabataean based on its contents:
bXI bʾb šnt ʿšr {w}šbʿ {l}mn{k}{w} mlk nbṭw ʾdyn qrb ʾlḥ{d/r}ym br ʿrgw {ʿ}lwʾ dnh lṣlm ʾlhʾ [l]ḥyy np{š}h wnpš […]{t}{h} {l}{ʿ}{l}{m}Macdonald (vol. 2: 118) relates this inscription to “the Nabataean king known in Classical sources as Malichus [II] … [who] reigned from AD 40–70 and so year 17 of his reign would be AD 56/57” (numeral “[II]” in original). But check out this inscription from Tell al-Shuqafiyya, Egypt:
dʾ rbʿtʾ dy ʿbd whbʾlh[y] br ʿbdʾlgʾ br ʾwšʾlhy ldwšrʾ ʾlhʾ dy bdpnʾ mṣryt šnt XVIII lmlkt qlptrw dy šnt XXIIIIII [l-] {m}nkw mlk nbṭw dy hy šnt II lʾṭlh byrḥ nysnThe synchronism of Cleopatra’s year 18 and Malichus’ year 26 shows that the date corresponds to 34 BCE, ninety years earlier than the date Macdonald suggests for the inscription from Tayma (based on the overlap, we must be dealing with Cleopatra VII and Malichus I). Yet, although there are certainly some differences in particular letter shapes, the overall script type seems highly similar to me. For instance, both inscriptions have the typical round 𐢁 ʾ, the roofless 𐢃 b, the zig-zagging non-final 𐢍 y, back-looping 𐢙 ṣ, and the vertical but not (yet) connecting 𐢝 š (but in the Tayma inscription, note the broad-tailed 𐢘 p here too). Unless there is some archeological argument I’m missing, it seems preferable to date both inscriptions to roughly the same period and interpret the date in the one from Tayma as year 17 of Malichus I, 45 BCE. In terms of script, it would be odd to call an Egyptian inscription referring to a Nabataean king “Tayma Aramaic”, and in fact the editor on DiCoNab—none other than Michael Macdonald—opts for Nabataean.3
Several of the other Tayma Aramaic inscriptions reminded me of BCE Nabataean inscriptions. Compare TA 17431 (vol. 2: 118-120) to the Nabataean one above as well as CIS II 349 (from Petra, 69 BCE) below:
bII bnysn šnt II lšhrw mlk lḥyn ʾd{y}[n …]mw wtbʿhn wbny ʿṣ{d/r}w rbʿtʾ dʾ […] ʾḥrhn lʿlm wʾbqy lbyt {ḥ}m{w} h[…] t{l}t wlʾ yzbnn wlʾ yrhnn wlʾ yh[wgrn …]Or TM.TAr.003 (vol. 3: 40-41) to MPNab 3 (from Petra, completed 99 BCE):
ḥgrʾ dy qrb ʾḥbw{l}whw pny ḥṭmh lmnwh ʾlht ʾlhtʾ lḥyy npšh wn[p]š ʾḥrth lʿlmOthers are just very close to Imperial Aramaic, which is also the case for the most archaic inscriptions mentioning Nabataean kings. Like an alleged Tayma Aramaic graffito, JSNab 334, and CNIK 1 (from Elusa, 2nd or early 1st c. BCE):
mšʿwdw mlk lḥyn ktb dnhOr, perhaps a better comparison, TM.TAr.004 (vol. 3: 41-44) and an Aramaic-Dadanitic bilingual from al-Ula, RCU.2023.150:
[… šn]{t} III mšʿwdw mlk lḥyn ʾdyn bnw ʿm{y}{w} {w}{ʿ}mrw […] {r}{b}ʿthn dʾ qrbn lrṣy ṣlmw ʾlhʾ lḥyy npš[…] w{ʾ}ḥrt-h{m} lḥgthn [w]{l}{r}pyhn w lb{k}{.}hm w ly{t}bh{n} w{r}ʿ{h}n wʾḥrthn lʿl{m}In both these last comparisons, the Tayma Aramaic text is actually a bit more developed in both spelling and letter shapes than the text mentioning the Nabataeans, but mostly in ways that are shared with later Nabataean. (The exception, again, is the lengthened 𐢘 p).
In his commentary on TM.TAr.003, Macdonald writes: “The script of this text is remarkable for the variety of its letter forms and can be classed neither as Imperial Aramaic nor Nabataean, though it has some letter forms typical of each” (vol. 3: 40, emphasis mine). For the most part, this statement appears to me to be applicable to Tayma Aramaic as a whole. Given the apparent dating of the first entirely Tayma Aramaic inscription we considered to the middle of the first century BCE and the relative chronology where Tayma Aramaic precedes “Classical” Nabataean (see the triple funerary monument and occasional dating to kings of Lihyan, who ruled Tayma before the Nabataeans), can we just take Tayma Aramaic as a transitional, first-centuries-BCE script type between Imperial Aramaic and Nabataean? If so, that would fit nicely with the explicitly Nabataean inscriptions from this period, which similarly lack many typical features of mainstream Nabataean. I’m sympathetic to Macdonald’s implied objections against using the term Nabataean for inscriptions from Lihyanite Tayma (just like I wouldn’t want to call the ones from Egypt Tayma Aramaic).5 Maybe we could settle for Arabian Aramaic,6 or maybe Arabian square script and then explicitly contrast it with Jewish square script. Either way, I think we should include this material in discussions of the development from Imperial Aramaic to Nabataean proper, not sequester it in a niche of its own.
“The Nabataeans called, they want their letter shapes back”
Benjamin Suchard
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Spirituality & Religious Studies
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Benjamin Suchard