I’ve been in Yemen for the last few weeks, and came across some old inscriptions. I think they’re Greek, but what do I know? Any out there have a clue as to what they are?
For ancient Greeks on ancient dial ups, the pics are ~250Kb
Nothing particularly helpful to say, except those don’t look like any kind of greek letter that I’ve ever seen. Cyrillic alphabet maybe? Is arabic a stupid suggestion? (Don’t really know what arabic letters look like, but being in yemen I imagine you would.) Maybe something from out India-way??
Will be watching this thread with considerable interest.
It doesn’t look like any Ethiopian script I’ve ever seen. Doesn’t look like any variety of Greek I’m familiar with either. But it definitely matches the link you gave to South Arabian. That’s gotta be it.
Come to think of it, since the scripts for Greek, Hebrew, Arabic etc are all derived from the same source, there are going to be similarties among all of them, and those similarities will be more pronounced in the older versions. In that link I gave for South Arabian, you can see some similarities to Greek.
Definitely. But it doesn’t look like Ethiopic - in part, it’s probably just the style of the writing, but the letters didn’t have those little doodly things on the right side that are used in writing Amharic at least to distinguish vowels (and, as far as I know in other Ethiopic languages as well.) I don’t know anything about Amharic, beyond what I picked up in an introductory linguistics class several years ago with a professor who was an expert on Ethiopic languages. So it’s possible that Ethiopic writing has changed in the intervening.
I could be wrong, but I thought I had seen a non-cursive (box-letter) version of Ethiopic somewhere in the past that more closely resmbles the South Arabian script I cited. Hence my first refernce to Ethiopian. But maybe I’m remembering incorrectly… I looked for some more samples, but was unable to find any. At any rate, I should have stressed more stongly in my first post the the OP’s pictures look very much like South Arabian. Sorry for the confusion.
