3rd century BC-3rd century AD. A section of a wooden stick with facetted sides, five lines of cursive script (zabur) to one side. See Rickmans, J., Mueller, W.M. & Abdallah, Y.M., Textes du Yemen antique, Universite Catholique de Louvain, Institute Orientaliste, Louvain 1994, for further information. Zeileis, F.G., Ausgewählte Chinesische Jade aus Sieben Jahrhunderten, 1994. 13.9 grams, 13cm (5"). Ex central London gallery; acquired on the USA art market in 1998; accompanied by an extensive collector's cataloguing and information sheet. The stick dates from a time when South Arabian had developed as a separate language from North Arabian, and when the alphabet common to all Semitic languages, which is thought to have been invented circa 1700 BC, had developed into various local variants, of which South Arabian is a very distinct version. Ethiopic script later developed from the South Arabian alphabet. The ancient South Arabian script and language has been known for some time from several thousand massive inscriptions on rock, but these inscriptions have a rather stereotyped content and vocabulary. In recent decades excavations have uncovered sticks and other inscriptions on wood from the same period as the stone inscriptions, which are generally found to be personal letters and records of deliveries of goods. They have provided a new insight into areas of South Arabian language and daily life, which were not known from the inscriptions. The wooden objects are not written in the same script as the few personal graffiti found from the same sites, suggesting that they are the work of professional scribes rather than being written by the persons mentioned in them. There are still only a few dozens of these objects known. [No Reserve]