The Zabad inscription (or trilingual Zabad inscription, Zebed inscription) is a trilingual Christian inscription containing text in the Greek, Syriac, and Paleo-Arabic scripts. Composed in the village of Zabad in northern Syria in 512, the inscription dedicates the construction of the martyrium, named the Church of St. Sergius, to Saint Sergius. The inscription itself is positioned at the lintel of the entrance portal.[1]
The Zabad inscription records the benefaction carried out by Arabic-speaking Christians in the Roman Empire. Despite the inscription being called a "trilingual", the Greek, Syriac, and Arabic components are not merely translations of one another but instead reflect the varying interests by different linguistic communities involved in the composition of the inscription.[1] Only the Greek portion of the inscription explicitly mentions the martyrium and the saint. The individuals mentioned in the inscription are not otherwise known, but were the ones who played a role in the sponsoring and construction of the structure.[2] While it was once thought that the three inscriptions were created in different times, more recent scholarship considers them to have all been incised together.[3]
The decision to include an Arabic portion of the inscription can be seen as a reflection of the desire to express the cultural identity of the author as, otherwise, Greek was the imperial language and Syriac was the ecclesiastical of the Miaphysite Church supported by the Ghassanids who, in turn, were closely linked to the cult of St. Sergius.[4]
Today, the inscription can be found at the Art & History Museum in Brussels.
- ^ a b Fisher, Greg (2020). Rome, Persia, and Arabia: shaping the Middle East from Pompey to Muhammad. London New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. pp. 186–188. ISBN 978-0-415-72880-5.
- ^ Fisher, Greg (2022). The Roman world from Romulus to Muhammad: a new history. London New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. p. 634. ISBN 978-0-415-84286-0.
- ^ Robin, Christian Julien (2006). "La réforme de l'écriture arabe à l'époque du califat médinois". Mélanges de l'Université Saint-Joseph. pp. 336–388.
- ^ Fiema, Zbigniew T.; al-Jallad, Ahmad; MacDonald, Michael C.A.; Nehmé, Laila (2015). "Provincia Arabia: Nabataea, the Emergence of Arabic as a Written Language, and Graeco-Arabica". In Fisher, Greg (ed.). Arabs and empires before Islam. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 410–411. ISBN 978-0-19-965452-9.