Canonization of texts through linguistic archaism and higher registers: The case of the Psalter fragment from the Qubbat al-Khaznah, Damascus

Abstract

Sacred writings containing the foundations of any religion are often drawn up in the highest and most archaic kind or register of languages occasionally used and known to some people at the time and in the place of its preaching, with the aim of adding credibility to supposedly divine and everlasting messages. Concerning the bilingual Greek-Arabic Psalter fragment, found by Violet in Damascus, and published in 1901, quite reliably dated in the eighth century A.D., and subsequently studied by Kahle and other scholars, it was our contention that the clear dominance in it of Neo-Arabic features turned into a kind of birth certificate of so-called Nabaṭī Arabic. But why this Arabic text was not conveyed in its own script, or in one of the Aramaic alphabets, in agreement with the absolute dominance of this later language in the whole Middle Eastern area among Jews, Christians and even Muslims outside the Arabian Peninsula? No less puzzling was the curious appearance of high register items in the middle of a Neo-Arabic text exhibiting much more analytical structure than the language of pre-Islamic poetry or even of the Qur’ān. In this brief review of such subjects, we try to cast some additional light by introducing a sociolinguistic approach to the survey of sacred texts canonized by adoption of higher registers.