The Scholar Who Learned to Hear Ancient Nomads Speak

The nomads weren't silent. Safaitic inscription and rock drawing from al-Mafraq, Jordan, dating to roughly 100 BCE–100 CE. The stone depicts a woman playing reed pipes alongside writing left by the nomadic peoples of the region. Now in the Jordan Museum. Photo: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Imagine trying to write the history of your people almost entirely from what your neighbors said about you.

Not necessarily friendly neighbors.

Perhaps an empire whose soldiers fought you.

A city-dweller who thought your way of life was primitive.

A religious writer who regarded your beliefs as pagan.

A government official frustrated because your people kept crossing the boundaries he was trying to administer.

Now imagine that historians carefully preserved all those accounts for centuries.

Your neighbors had written your history.

Your own people, meanwhile, seemed silent.

That is remarkably close to the problem we have faced in trying to understand many of the nomadic peoples of the ancient world.

As Anthony Sattin reminds us in Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World, the history we inherit has overwhelmingly been written by settled people. Cities produce archives. Empires commission monuments. Governments keep records.

People on the move leave different footprints.

But what happens when we discover that the nomads weren't actually silent?

What happens when we learn how to read what they wrote?

Thousands of voices in the rocks

Across the basalt deserts of southern Syria, northeastern Jordan, and northern Arabia are tens of thousands of inscriptions scratched into stone.

They are written in an ancient writing tradition scholars call Safaitic.

At first glance, many don't look particularly impressive.

No great royal monument.

No beautifully illuminated manuscript.

No library.

Sometimes just a few lines scratched onto a dark basalt rock by someone who stopped there perhaps two thousand years ago.

But learn how to read them and suddenly the desert starts talking.

Someone pastured his animals here.

Someone was waiting for rain.

Someone mourned a brother.

Someone feared an enemy.

Someone longed for relatives far away.

Someone prayed.

Someone moved camp.

Someone wrote his genealogy.

And then walked away.

Thousands upon thousands of these voices remain on the rocks.

We've already encountered one remarkable example in “When Nomads Wrote the Name of Jesus in the Desert”, where an inscription studied by Ahmad Al-Jallad and Ali Al-Manaser appears to contain a remarkably early invocation of Jesus.

But that inscription is only one tiny part of a much bigger story.

And one of the scholars who has helped us learn to hear that story is Ahmad Al-Jallad.

A teenager fascinated by ancient worlds

Al-Jallad's own path into this world isn't quite what you might expect.

He was born in Salt Lake City to a Jordanian father and an American mother from Texas. His family spent time in Kuwait before returning to the United States around the time of the Gulf War, and he grew up near Tampa, Florida.

Arabic wasn't even the language spoken in his home.

As a teenager, however, he became fascinated with ancient civilizations.

Books led to ancient languages.

Ancient languages led deeper into the Near East.

Eventually he began teaching himself Biblical Hebrew, Classical Arabic, and Syriac before going on to earn a doctorate in Semitic philology at Harvard.

Today Al-Jallad is the Sofia Chair in Arabic Studies at The Ohio State University and specializes in Arabian epigraphy, the history of Arabic, Semitic linguistics, and pre-Islamic Arabia. He also directs the Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA), an extraordinary resource for studying Arabia's pre-Islamic inscriptions.

His work, alongside that of scholars such as Michael Macdonald, has helped transform our understanding of the ancient Arabian desert.

Because the people who lived there were not mute figures waiting for Greeks, Romans, or later historians to describe them.

They had been writing all along.

We simply had to learn how to listen.

This wasn't supposed to be a literate world

There is an old picture of the pre-Islamic Arabian nomad that many of us have inherited.

The Bedouin was a brilliant oral poet.

He could memorize genealogies.

He knew the desert.

He could navigate by stars.

He preserved tribal memory through poetry and story.

But writing belonged primarily to towns and settled civilizations.

There is truth in the importance of oral tradition.

But the inscriptions complicate the rest of that picture considerably.

Al-Jallad describes Safaitic as the writing tradition used by nomads of the basalt desert east of the Ḥawrān roughly two thousand years ago. Most of their inscriptions qualify technically as graffiti—but only because they were generally self-authored personal expressions written in public space.

There apparently wasn't a professional class of scribes and stonecutters traveling around with these pastoralists.

The nomads themselves were doing the writing.

That is what makes these inscriptions so valuable.

Kings tell us what kings wanted remembered.

Empires tell us what empires considered important.

But a pastoralist scratching words into a rock while watching his animals can tell us something else entirely.

One man records that he pastured his camels and then prays that his pasturing will bring abundance.

Another writes that he set off at night to migrate toward the inner desert and asks Allāt for return and security from enemies.

Stop there for a moment.

Nearly two thousand years disappear.

This isn't “a nomad.”

It is someone moving through the desert at night, concerned about whether he will return safely.

The rock gives him his humanity back.

They wrote about movement

Safaitic inscription and rock drawing of a camel from the basalt desert of Jordan, dating to the pre-Islamic period. The combination of writing and animal imagery offers a glimpse into the world of the nomadic pastoralists who left thousands of inscriptions across the region. Now in the Jordan Museum. Photo: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

For those of us interested in nomadic peoples, this is particularly valuable.

The inscriptions let us see mobility from the inside.

Pasturing.

Migration.

Rain.

Drought.

Water.

Raiding.

Danger.

Changing seasons.

Separation from kin.

Return.

One section I have already encountered looks at inscriptions expressing longing for absent loved ones.

Al-Jallad examines 93 inscriptions in which an expression of longing is followed by a prayer. In three out of four of them, the prayer is for reunion.

Think about that.

Community. Mobility. Belonging.

Written into desert rock two thousand years ago.

In another group of inscriptions, people record waiting for the rains. The prayers that follow overwhelmingly ask for relief associated with rain, often directed to Baʿal-Samīn, the storm god.

Al-Jallad argues that these details of daily life and the prayers that follow them belong together. The writers aren't simply keeping diaries. Their inscriptions often emerge from situations of uncertainty—migration, drought, warfare, pasturing—and their prayers respond to what they are experiencing.

This is not merely a sedentary observer saying:

“The nomads came through this region.”

It is someone effectively saying:

“I was here.”

“I am waiting for rain.”

“I miss my people.”

“I am moving into the desert.”

“Bring me safely home.”

That difference matters.

We've talked before about mobility as a community resource. These inscriptions give us glimpses of people actually living that reality long before anyone coined anthropological terminology for it.

Movement wasn't necessarily the interruption of normal life.

Movement was normal life.

They wrote about God, too

I've only just begun working through Al-Jallad's 2022 book, The Religion and Rituals of the Nomads of Pre-Islamic Arabia: A Reconstruction Based on the Safaitic Inscriptions.

At more than 160 pages, I'm not pretending I've already digested the whole thing.

But even in the introduction and examples I have begun exploring, one thing is immediately striking.

Al-Jallad is trying to reconstruct the religious world of these nomadic communities primarily from their own inscriptions, rock art, and archaeological context.

That distinction matters.

Much of what later writers tell us about traditional pre-Islamic Arabian religion was written centuries afterward, often through the interpretive lens of another religious tradition.

Al-Jallad deliberately begins somewhere else.

With the rocks.

These are prayers and religious expressions written by people participating in that religious world themselves.

They invoke deities.

They make petitions.

They perform sacrifices.

They express grief.

They ask for protection.

They ask for rain.

They seek justice.

They mark graves and remember the dead.

One inscription I encountered while beginning the book is particularly haunting.

A man named Sʿd says that his brother Nr was killed by Nabataeans while pasturing livestock. He calls upon several deities for justice and describes himself as continually distraught, brokenhearted over his brother—his beloved forever.

Again, the category disappears.

Not “ancient Arabian nomadic religion.”

A grieving brother.

Al-Jallad is also careful from the outset not to claim that these inscriptions tell us everything. Different tribal groups used this writing tradition. Most inscriptions cannot be precisely dated. And what people chose to scratch into stone cannot possibly represent the entire spectrum of their lives and beliefs.

But they allow us to hear something extraordinarily precious:

their own voices.

And then, somewhere within the changing religious landscape of Late Antiquity, a new name appears.

Jesus.

The book I'm just beginning to explore contains a tantalizing footnote mentioning what Al-Jallad then described as at least one Safaitic inscription with a possible clear reference to Jesus. That research would lead into the inscription we explored two episodes ago.

So in a sense, I have now stumbled backward into the larger world behind that one remarkable inscription.

And I have a lot more reading to do.

Now compare this with Mavia

Last week we met the fourth-century Arab queen Mavia and the desert monk Moses.

That story came to us through Christian historians.

It is wonderful evidence.

But notice the difference.

Mavia didn't write the account we possess.

Moses didn't write it.

Settled Christian authors wrote about them.

And, as we noted, Socrates Scholasticus described Moses as “a Saracen by birth.”

That makes his story extraordinary.

But we are still hearing it through somebody else's pen.

The Safaitic inscriptions give us something different.

They allow us, however imperfectly, to listen from the other direction.

And putting those kinds of evidence beside each other begins to produce a richer picture.

A rock scratched by a pastoralist.

A Christian historian describing an Arab queen.

An archaeological site.

A monastery.

A prayer.

A genealogy.

A movement across the desert.

None tells the whole story.

Together, they begin to make people visible.

What else have we missed?

This is where Al-Jallad's work becomes relevant far beyond ancient Arabia.

Because the methodological question is enormous:

Whose evidence have we learned to recognize?

If historians are trained to look primarily for buildings, archives, official texts, and permanent settlements, what kinds of people become easiest to see?

Settled people.

And who becomes harder to see?

Pastoralists.

Maritime peoples.

Forest peoples.

Seasonal migrants.

Communities whose knowledge is transmitted orally.

People whose social geography consists of routes and relationships rather than streets and property lines.

This doesn't mean they left no history.

It may mean we haven't learned to recognize their archives.

Perhaps an archive can be a migration route.

A genealogy.

A song.

A grazing agreement remembered between clans.

A grave cairn.

A boat-building tradition.

A place-name.

A story repeated around a fire.

Or words scratched into basalt.

And that problem isn't ancient

There is an uncomfortable contemporary parallel.

Nomadic peoples can still disappear inside systems built by settled people.

They disappear in censuses.

They disappear inside national boundaries.

They disappear within broader ethnic categories.

They disappear when a historically nomadic population settles in a city and outsiders conclude that its nomadic identity has therefore disappeared.

And they can disappear from the databases Christians use to understand where the Good News has—and has not—taken root.

That matters deeply to me.

If a people becomes invisible in our data, their absence can become invisible in our priorities.

We don't see the gap.

So nobody goes.

One of the things we need to do in the years ahead is learn to see peoples and places with strong nomadic heritage more clearly—especially those with least access to Jesus.

That work requires databases and researchers.

But it also requires something Al-Jallad's scholarship models exceptionally well.

Listen to the people themselves.

Don't just study nomads. Learn to hear them.

There is a temptation when engaging any unfamiliar people to arrive with categories already prepared.

What religion are you?

What ethnic group?

What country?

What language?

Where do you live?

Where is your permanent address?

What do you need?

Those questions can be useful.

But they may not be the questions that reveal how people understand themselves.

Perhaps we need to spend more time asking:

Who are your people?

Where do you move?

Who moves with you?

Where did your grandparents move?

Who makes decisions together?

Where do you gather?

What places matter to you?

What stories do you tell about yourselves?

What do you call yourselves?

What do you pray about?

What do you fear?

What do you hope for?

And then listen.

That is useful preparation whether you're sitting with pastoralists in the Sahara, fishermen in Southeast Asia, shepherds in the Himalayas—or a family with nomadic heritage who now lives across the street.

The rocks were speaking all along

There is something wonderfully humbling about Al-Jallad's work.

The inscriptions weren't newly written.

Many had been sitting in the desert for something approaching two thousand years.

Generations walked past them.

Empires rose and disappeared.

Religions transformed Arabia.

Borders were drawn.

Cities grew.

Universities were established.

Libraries filled with books explaining the ancient world.

And still the rocks waited.

The nomads had spoken.

The problem wasn't that they had nothing to say.

We hadn't learned how to hear them.

That should make those of us who care about nomadic peoples ask an uncomfortable question.

Who might be speaking today whom we still haven't learned to hear?

Perhaps somewhere in a desert, a pasture, a fishing village, a refugee neighborhood, or an apartment building in one of our cities, there are people whose world doesn't fit our categories particularly well.

We could begin by explaining them.

Categorizing them.

Developing programs for them.

Trying to reach them.

Or perhaps we could begin somewhere else.

We could show up.

Sit down.

Ask questions.

Receive hospitality.

And listen.

Because sometimes the first step toward walking together with the Shepherd is simply learning to hear the people who have been speaking all along.

Explore Further

Ahmad Al-Jallad, The Religion and Rituals of the Nomads of Pre-Islamic Arabia: A Reconstruction Based on the Safaitic Inscriptions. Leiden: Brill, 2022.

The complete book is available free as an Open Access publication through JSTOR. This is the book I've just begun working through and expect to return to in future posts.

Learn more about Ahmad Al-Jallad at The Ohio State University.

Explore the inscriptions themselves through the Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA).

For the larger question of how settled societies have shaped the histories we tell about mobile peoples, see Anthony Sattin, Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World (2022).

And see the earlier post in this series, “When Nomads Wrote the Name of Jesus in the Desert”, for the remarkable Safaitic inscription invoking ʿĪsay/Jesus.