The composition is beautiful too. Dahr derives from terms of destruction and fire and so the verb šabba 'to burn fiercely' is appropriate! The epithet lord of plunder and fear has a poetic balance - rabb ḥōś wa-hōl.

What secrets remain unread...

Find more: ociana.osu.edu/inscriptions...

Those are lovely hearts but they are not early Islamic inscriptions! One is dated to 2002 :).

The evolution of the Arabic script was set into motion well before the spread of Christianity, so it isn't really comparable to Armenian, etc. Hoyland supposed that the spread of Christianity across Arabia played a roll in the script's spread. I am not sure.

I say this because there are all sorts of cultural reasons why the name could be concealed and replaced by a title, or even if these commemorate the death of babies. Such tombstones elsewhere may just say 'infant'. Also does w have to mean son? or maybe a genitive marker? (sorry for my ignorance!)

Does WRM(H)Z ever occur in second position, or always first, in genealogies?

I know a Bedouin in Saudi Arabia from the ʿUtaybī tribe whose father was named rūmī, similar to turkī.

Thanks! Absolutely not a response to anything you have claimed, but just a PSA as name = language = ethnicity seems to be a super common assumption!

Nabataean cosmopolitanism allowed names to permeate etymological boundaries just as it enabled the widespread use of its written language, Aramaic, in areas far beyond where Aramaic was natively spoken.

Names are extremely important and can provide lots of information, but in this particular area and period, I do not think having a name with an Aramaic or Canaanite etymology tell us much about the ethnicity or language of its bearer. Think of all the Arabic speakers called Yusef and Sarah today!

There is an unpublished Dhofari inscription (Oman) by a man called Rbʾl (popular name)! Nabataean territory was diverse and people of various linguistic backgrounds surely identified as subjects of the Nabataean king. Here's a beautiful example of this diversity: ociana.osu.edu/inscriptions...

Even names like Rbʾl are not decisive. Here is a local nomad from the Ḥarrah, belonging to the nomadic tribe of Nġbr, writing in Safaitic, who is the son of a man called Rabb-ʾEl: ociana.osu.edu/inscriptions.... The diminutive Rbbʾl occurs as far away as Qaryat al-Fāw in the famous Rbbʾl epitaph.

Here is a fantastic text, an Arabic speaker who says he belongs to the people (lit. tribe ʾāl) of Rm /rūm/ Rome.

l ʾkzm bn ġṯ ḏ ʾl rm w ws¹qt -h ṯmd mn- {s¹}bl
By ʾkzm son of Ġṯ of the people of Rm and the Ṯamūd drove him away from (the) road

ociana.osu.edu/inscriptions...

My favorite: this fellow, Bayān son of Taym, belongs to the tribe of Titus! ḏ ʾl tts. He records spending the dry season in this place, qyẓ. ociana.osu.edu/inscriptions.... Maybe the tribe's eponymous ancestor was a runaway Roman, or maybe just a local whose parents gave him a Roman name.

This graffito is by a guy called Ntn. His inscription, however, is not in Canaanite or Aramaic, but Safaitic. Ntn son of Ḫlf and he pastured (w rʿy) so, O Allāt, grant abundance (f h lt ġny{t})). There are also non-Arabic tribal names among the nomads.

Is the etymology of this name suggestive that he was not an Arabic speaker or an "Arab" (whatever that meant in this period)? True, Ntn is not Arabic, but so what? Here is a Dadanitic txt by a man in the mirror: Natan-Baʿl, whose father had an Arabian name, wny. ociana.osu.edu/inscriptions...

The choices tell us much about the sounds of both languages. They also reveal an interesting level of metalinguistic thinking. See the updated OCIANA card here: ociana.osu.edu/inscriptions...

Why is this interesting? The ancient Arabs east of Ḥawrān were well acquainted with Greek. Their own Safaitic script did not have a fixed letter order. This biliteral writer decided to map Safaitic on the Greek order he learned from somewhere.

laughing at the idea of "deux, trois, quatre cinq six sept" becoming a mysterious exegetical puzzle in some far future