Homiletic Arabic Inscription on a Ceramic Vessel from the Rubas Architectural Assemblage of the 8th-9th Centuries
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24852/2587-6112.2025.3.56.63Keywords:
archaeology, Rubas architectural assemblage of the 8th–9th centuries, Arabic inscription on pottery, regarding to the 11th–12th centuries, moral orientation of the inscriptionAbstract
This paper deals with the content of an Arabic inscription placed on a ceramic jug, fragments of which were discovered in 2014 during exploratory excavations of an 8th-9th century architectural assemblage on the Rubas River in Southern Dagestan. The inscription is a quotation from an ayah (verse) of a Quranic surah and is homiletic in nature. The study considers the moral orientation of this tradition of inscribing vessels with religious texts. This aspect is raised in the scientific literature for the first time. The difficulty in interpreting the fact of finding fragments of a ceramic vessel with an Arabic inscription lies in the discrepancy between the dating of the architectural structure itself (8th–9th centuries) and the vessel bearing the inscription, which dates to the 11th–12th centuries.
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