I have lived both in Georgia and an Arabic speaking country… it is not Georgian no matter how you look at it. I think Johanna is right:
Najm Bukhayr
From Zahle, Syria (using the old word for Syria)
Syria (using the modern word for Syria)
(Zahle, now in Lebanon is a small, beautiful mountain town… I was there in 2000 or so)
The guys at the office said it meant something like “Greater Syria.”
Does the translation actually read [one of the men]? The reason I ask is there are quite a few Bogers “residing” in Rowan County predating this person, so–if it didn’t literally say “men”–it’s possible that it was a woman who married one of the local Boger man, and that they picked a phonetically close Arabic name for the Arabic script. Just a thought.
I’ll just wait for the experts to lock and load.
No, at first I thought the word “rajul” (man) might be there, but only because it uses the same letter forms as Zaḥle (which is clearly the correct reading). Where the dots are placed to distinguish different letters makes all the difference.
The guys at the office were correct: al-Shām means exactly that… ‘greater Syria’… a name dating from before the modern-day boundaries were drawn in the 1920s. al-Shām used to include Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan (and a little piece of Turkey) all together.
Today, ash-Shām is colloquially used for Damascus (Dimashq ash-Shām). Zahle is west of there just a bit north of the main Damascus-Beirut highway.