South Arabian Long-Distance Trade in Antiquity: “Out of Arabia”

George Hatke · Ronald Ruzicka

shk 2021 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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South Arabia is one of the least known parts of the Near East. It is primarily due to its remoteness, coupled with the difficulty of access, that South Arabia remains so under-explored. In pre-Islamic times, however, it was well-connected to the rest of the world. Due to its location at the crossroads of caravan and maritime routes, pre-Islamic South Arabia linked the Near East with Africa and the Mediterranean with India. The region is unique in that it has a written history extending as far back as the early first millennium BCE—a far longer history than that of any other part of the Arabian Peninsula. The papers collected in this volume make a number of important contributions to the study of the history and languages of ancient South Arabia, as well as the history of South Arabian studies, and will be of interest to scholars and laypeople alike.

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George Hatke received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2012. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in Ancient South Arabian Studies at the University of Vienna where he teaches Epigraphic South Arabian and the History of South Arabia, in addition to Gəʿəz, Ugaritic, Maltese, and Arabic Epigraphy. Since 2015, he has been involved in a project to digitize South Arabian inscriptions kept at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His research interests include pre-Islamic South Arabia, ancient and medieval Ethiopia, and comparative Semitic languages.

Ronald Ruzicka graduated as Doctor of Technical Mathematics from the University of Vienna in 1987, after which he founded Simutech Inc., a company which develops software for environmental technology and simulation software. After studying at the Language Center of the University of Vienna and at the Bourgiba Institute in Tunisia, he began his undergraduate degree in Near Eastern Studies (Arabic and Ancient Semitic Languages) at the University of Vienna in 2010, before receiving a Master’s in Arabic Studies, with a focus on Ancient South Arabian languages, in 2016. He is currently working on projects about Eduard Glaser (a South Arabian researcher) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.