The ẓll of ancient Dadān: Ritual and documentary practice

In and around the site of ancient Dadān (modern-day al-ʿUlā), located in the Northwest of the Arabian Peninsula, many inscriptions are found in the local North Arabian script variety called Dadanitic (6th–1st centuries BC). Many of the Dadanitic inscriptions mention the ẓll ceremony for the main local deity Ḏūġābat, both unique to Dadān. While the ẓll inscriptions are the most common type of monumental inscriptions in the Dadanitic script, their function is still little understood. Previous interpretations of the ẓll inscriptions have primarily relied on the etymology of the root ẓll, ‘to cover’ or ‘shade’ (compare Arabic ẓulal ‘shade’). This article takes a broader approach to the inscriptions and considers their formulaic structure, phrasing, the distribution of attested personal names in them, and the use of the root in other genres and corpora to arrive at a new interpretation of the ritual, suggesting that the ẓll inscriptions are better understood as documenting land leases. In this context the root ẒLL should be understood as ‘to write, to put down in writing; to record’.