The Location of KTLAuthor(s): A.F.L. BeestonSource: Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, , A.F.L. Beeston at the ArabianSeminar and other papers (2005), pp. 111-112Published by: ArchaeopressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41223857 .

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Edited version of a paper first published in Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 6 (1976): 5-7

The Location of KTL

On the way northward from Marib to Yathill (modern Baräqish), there is a group of sites now known as Asähil, Durayb and Khanbat Sacud. Since Halévy's time, up to Philby's journey in that area, scholars gen- erally equated epigraphic KTL in the Sabaic texts with the last-named of those sites. Philby saw reason to [1939: 403] propose instead an equation with Durayb, but this has been strongly rejected by von Wiss- mann (1964: 217ff), who insists on the Khanbat Sacüd identification.

In one of the great "victory" texts at Sirwäh, RES 3946/1, we read that KRBDL WTR son of DMRCLY, mkrb of Saba, walled and incorporated in the Sabaean state a long list of towns and districts, including KTL; and the next place on the list after this is Yathill. This affords grounds for seeking KTL somewhere in the Yathill direction, but is totally unhelpful in determining which particular site it was. The texts dis- covered by Philby certainly prima facie provide the information. In RES 3948, found at Durayb, we read that the same mkrb mentioned above "walled KTL"; in RES 4850, still in situ on the southern perimeter of Khanbat Sacüd, we read that the same personage "walled YLT". The natural inference, that KTL = Durayb and YLT = Khanbat Sacud, would require very convincing evidence to controvert it. Von Wissmann's ar- guments are hardly of the requisite strength.

On the northern perimeter of Khanbat Sacud there is another text, RES 4844, badly eroded owing to exposure to desert sandstorms, reading: "KRBDL WTR son of DMRCLY mkrb of Saba ... Y ...". Von Wissmann argues that the mutilated name "cannot have been YLT" but must have been something else, because Philby's copy has as the second letter something looking like the top of a y, t or s The trend of this argument is to suggest that YLT was not the name of the site as a whole, but only of its southern wall, while the northern wall had a different name. But Philby's copies, when he was faced with a [61 letter dif- ficult to read, are not so absolutely reliable as to override the manifest fact that since "walled Yathill" in RES 3946 unquestionably means "built a wall around Yathill", and not "built a wall named Yathill", we cannot justifiably attribute the latter sense to "walled YLT".

However, von Wissmann places his main reliance for rejection of the equation KTL = Durayb, on Philby's remark (1939: 403) "There is no sign whatever of an encircling wall here (at Durayb), and it must, I think, be assumed that there never was one." This remark must nevertheless be read in the context of what he says immediately before this: Durayb was an "important place in antiquity, and much of its old buildings survives in situ under the clay upper storeys imposed by the more recent inhabitants ... In most cases, however, the old masonry has been re-used for the construction of the ground-floor rooms to form a foundation for the upper stories of the modern fort-like buildings. There must have been a temple of con- siderable magnificence here, as one large and lovely section of a simply decorated marble frieze with an inscription has been raised to the top of the surviving courses of an old, well-built wall to support an upper chamber of clay. Large blocks of masonry, many of them with inscriptions, have also been used indis- criminately in the building of the modern dwellings". In the light of all this, the fact that, in a brief tran- sient visit, he was unable to detect any visible traces of an outer wall cannot be taken as conclusive evi- dence that there never had been one.

Halévy's texts, which led before Philby's visit to the assumption that KTL = Khanbat Sacüd, are a set, some of them fragmentary, from Khanbat Sacüd. The best preserved of them is CIH 496, recording that a certain NBTKRB made a dedication to the deity DT HMYM, "when YD°B (certainly the name of a Sa- baean mkrb) had appointed (s2ym) him in authority over KTL and the construction of the temple of DT HMYM. By (here the names of four divinities), and by (names of three Sabaean mkrbs' and by KTL".

Ill

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112 A.F.L. Beeston

CIH 493 records only a dedication followed by the same invocatory formula as quoted above; CIH 494 and CIH 498 are fragments also containing the same formula. The crucial fact, however, is that another of Philby's texts, RES 4847, also has in fragmentary form the same formula, and this text is at Durayb. The presence of the invocation "by KTL" at two different sites makes it now plain that the earlier inference, that it could only have been used at a site named KTL, was invalid. The only legitimate conclusion that we can draw is that Kharïbat Sacüd and Durayb (one might guess also Asãhil) formed a single socio-political group in which the dominant element was KTL.

Further inferences, plausible though not of course certain, are that the incorporation of KTL in the Sa- baean state, as recorded in RES 3946, and the appointment of NBTKRB as Sabaean governor as recorded in CIH 396, had reference to the whole group; and that the magnificent temple at Durayb was in fact the temple of DT HMYM which NBTKRB was commissioned to build.

Sigla CIH Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum. Pars IV. Inscriptiones himyariticas et sabaeas continens.

Paris: Reipublicae Typographeo, 1889-1932. RES Repertoire depigraphie sémitique. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1900-1968.

References

Philby H.S.J.B. 1939. Sheba's Daughters: Being a Record of Travel in Southern Arabia. With an appendix on

the Rock Inscriptions by A.F.L. Beeston. London: Methuen. Wissmann H. von.

1964. Zur Geschichte und Landeskunde von Alt-Südarabien. Sammlung Eduard Glaser III. (Sitzungsberichte der Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch- historische Klasse, 246). Wien: Böhlaus.

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