Sabaean inscriptions from Ḥāz, Yemen

A phenomenon found in all old villages in Yemen is that the inhabitants move out of their old houses and build new ones. Because of this, the inscriptions and decorative stones, taken from pre‐Islamic ruins long ago, and which were reused in many of those buildings, slowly disappear; they are either taken away by the owners of the deserted houses, who store them or sell them, or they disappear under the debris when houses collapse, or they are stolen, as villagers often relate. For epigraphic study, it is of the utmost importance that as many of these inscriptions as possible are found and photographed before it is too late. Although many of the important pre‐Islamic sites have in the past been visited by scholars and explorers, they were not always able to take photographs, and many texts were copied by hand in more or less accurate ways. Existing photographs are, in some cases, of limited quality, which makes deciphering some texts difficult. It was seldom possible to find all the stones that exist in a particular village because of the irregular layout of the streets, the hostility of the local population, and/or the lack of time. My aim is to try to fill in some of these gaps by going back to places that Joseph Halévy, Eduard Glaser, or Carl Rathjens and Hermann von Wissmann visited, to take photographs of all the remaining inscriptions reused in the houses and thus give a current overview of the epigraphical remains. This paper contains the fifty‐eight inscriptions still to be found in Ḥāz as of September 2016, including a number of new inscriptions and some enhanced readings of previously discovered texts.