Foreign Sailors on Socotra: The inscriptions and drawings from the cave Hoq

In: Vergleichende Studien zu Antike und Orient, Bd. 3 (2012). Bremen, Hempen Verlag 2012 . ISBN 978-3934106-91-8

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Abstract

Several years ago a group of Belgian speleologists of the Socotra Karst Project made a spectacular discovery. Deep inside a huge cave on the island Socotra they came across a large number of inscriptions, drawings and archaeological objects. As further investigation showed, they were left by sailors who visited the island between the 1st c. BC and the 6th c. AD. The majority of the texts is written in the Indian Brahmī script, but there are also inscriptions in South-Arabian, Ethiopian, Greek, Palmyrene and Bactrian scripts and languages. This corpus of nearly 250 texts and drawings thus constitutes one of the main sources for the investigation of Indian Ocean trade networks in the first centuries of our era. The present book is the first comprehensive edition and study of this material. It comprises contributions by an international group of scholars who have been working on these new discoveries for a couple of years (in alphabetical order): Mikhail D. Bukharin (Moscow), Peter De Geest (Brussels), Hédi Dridi (Neuchâtel), Maria Gorea (Paris), Julian Jansen Van Rensburg (Brussels), Christian Julien Robin (Paris), Bharati Shelat (Ahmedabad), Nicholas Sims-Williams (London, Oxford) and Ingo Strauch (Berlin).