A conversation with Ahmad Al-Jallad about the languages and inscriptions of pre-Islamic Arabia, our main contemporary source for life, death, and worship before the time of the Prophet Muhammad. We talk about field surveys in search of inscriptions and what they tell us about Allah and other Arabian deities in the early centuries of the first millennium.

Ahmad Al-Jallad is Professor in the Sofia Chair in Arabic Studies at Ohio State University, where his research focuses on pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions. You can find his work on Academia.edu and some of his lectures are posted online. The article on which this conversation is based has not yet been published (its provisional title is “Ancient Allah: An Epigraphic Reconstruction”).

See also Digital Archive for the Study of pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions

See also The Digital Corpus of the Nabataean and Developing Arabic Inscriptions

Byzantium & Friends is hosted by Anthony Kaldellis, a Professor at the University of Chicago. You can follow him on his personal website. You can listen to more episodes of Byzantium & Friends through Podbean, Spotify  or Apple Podcasts

Top Image: Pre-Islamic inscription in Saudi Arabia – photo by Prof. Mortel / Wikimedia Commons