The foundation “Het Oosters Instituut” houses one of three significant collections of inscribed wooden sticks from Ancient South Arabia, documenting everyday correspondence of the Sabaeans and Minaeans from the Ancient South Arabian civilization, which thrived from the early 1st millennium BC to the 6th century CE in the Arabian Peninsula. These documents are crucial for understanding the social, economic, and religious history of pre-Islamic Arabia, as well as for the linguistic reconstruction of Ancient South Arabian languages and Semitic language history. The collection includes various text genres such as letters, legal contracts, business accounts, oracular records, and writing exercises. It features 340 texts and fragments in Sabaic or Minaic, along with 44 anepigraphs, mostly modern forgeries. This corpus was first systematically studied by Abraham J. Drewes and Jacques Ryckmans between 1994 and their deaths in 2005 and 2007. The current volume is a product of their collaborative efforts, presenting a catalog of the entire collection and transliterations of all 340 texts, along with three additional documents from the Leiden University Library. Peter Stein has adapted the transliterations to reflect the current state of research. With detailed photographs illustrating about half of the texts, this volume serves as a solid foundation for further research in Semitic epigraphy. The text is in French.
