Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1896 edition. Excerpt:...can be fully utilized for science, as Halevy's copies were mostly insufficient and incomplete. Secondly, we now possess about a hundred texts of an entirely new, and so far unknown, species of inscriptions; namely, Katabanian royal inscriptions, written in the Minean dialect. They are of the greatest importance for completing the picture which we can draw of the history and civilization of South Arabia. In the first volume of his sketch, shortly to be published, Glaser will draw the historical results from all the new material which we owe to his efforts. But the publication of the complete wording of all these inscriptions, and their exact paleographical reproduction, so essential for scientific purposes, will only take place after the squeezes have been sold. Shall I, finally, express my own personal view on the importance of the total result to be gained, or already obtained, from an investigation of the Arabian inscriptions for the study of the Bible? It is my conviction that Arabia itself will furnish us the direct proofs that the modern destructive criticism of the Pentateuch is absolutely erroneous. The age of the Minean inscriptions runs parallel with that of the so-called code of the priests. If the former are as old as Glaser believes them to be, and the Arabian civilization, as I have proved in the first part of the present sketch, already existed at the time of Abraham, then the laws of the priests of Israel are also very ancient. The best proofs for the historical accuracy of the Old Testament traditions come more and more from without, from the inscriptions of the surrounding nations. For this very reason every sum of money spent for Semitic epigraphy, whether for Assyro-Babylonian excavations, or for the purchase of squeezes of...