Two amphoras found at burials outside the ancient city of Thaj, Saudi Arabia, bear inscriptions mentioning wine. The chemical analysis of the content of one of them confirms the presence of wine and more precisely as red wine. Contextual information from one of the graves suggests that wine was consumed as part of burial rituals. One inscription is in Aramaic and the other is in South Arabian cursive or zabur-in fact the first attestation for this particular script in the core region of the so-called Hasaitic writing culture. Complementing the recent discoveries of zabur inscriptions from Mleiha (Sharjah, UAE), this inscription buttresses our idea of the emergence of writing in East Arabia in the Hellenistic period.

The Aramaic-Hasaitic bilingual tomb inscription from Mleiha published in Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 27 (2016) is one of the most important epigraphic discoveries from the entire Gulf region. The inscription, which is in an extraordinarily good state of preservation, is not only one of the most comprehensive texts from the region in terms of its languages and scripts, but also provides unique historical information. It contains the first ever reference to a kingdom of Oman and is probably dated to the Seleucid era, about the year 222/221 or 215/214 BCE (Overlaet, Macdonald & Stein, ). Within two years of its publication, epigraphic research in Mleiha and beyond has yielded some new results which contribute to an improved perception of this extraordinary inscription. These mainly concern the palaeography of the Aramaic script, including the modified reading of some letters, the use of the word br for son', and the historical background of the functionary title bqr in the Hasaitic version. Finally, reference is made to some more epigraphic artefacts from Mleiha which are suitable for re-evaluating the historic importance of the site.

While the so‐called Hasaitic script in the Gulf region has long been understood as being an influence from South Arabia, the actual reason for, and the way of, adapting the Ancient South Arabian script in that region has remained a matter of dispute. Recent finds from Mleiha may now contribute to clarify this picture. The two objects, a small tablet of silver and the fragment of an amphora, are inscribed with a script that is neither Hasaitic in its common form (i.e. a close relative of the Ancient South Arabian monumental or musnad script) nor Aramaic, but rather a derivative of the so‐called minuscule script or zabūr from Ancient South Arabia. The discovery of this script, which was used for everyday correspondence in ancient Yemen, is thus far unparalleled in the Gulf region. The paper provides a first decipherment and interpretation of the two inscriptions and draws some preliminary conclusions on the development of writing in the region.

Excavations of a monumental tomb in Area F at Mleiha have revealed a lime‐plaster funerary stele with an Aramaic and Hasaitic inscription. The excavation of the tomb was not completed but a preliminary report on the tomb and a discussion of the text is presented. The inscription states that the tomb was built by the deceased's son and mentions the date and his name, family lineage and function in the service of the King of ʿUmān.

One of the most disputed issues in the history of pre-Islamic Yemen is the absolute chronology of the epigraphic sources. Since reliable dates according to a fixed era are available only from inscriptions of the later periods, the chronological framework for the first millennium BC has been rather weak. The main argument in dating Ancient South Arabian inscriptions still remains palaeography. Against this background, the discovery in the 1970s of the everyday correspondence of the Sabaeans and their neighbours marks the beginning of significant progress, since this correspondence is written on wooden sticks, a material which is basically suitable for scientific dating methods, such as C-14 (radiocarbon analysis). Unlike the amply attested monumental epigraphy from the region, the wooden support of the inscribed sticks for the first time enables absolute dating of particular texts, irrespective of their stratigraphy or contents. First analysis was carried out on objects from the collection of the Oosters Instituut in Leiden about ten years ago and published in 2013. This analysis revealed much chronological data but also raised a couple of questions. They mainly concern the starting point of the writing tradition in Ancient Yemen as well as its end, and thus immediately affect the historical discussion on the origin and fall of Ancient South Arabian civilization.It was mainly for this reason that a second attempt to use radiocarbon analysis has recently been made in the framework of the German-French collaboration project CORANICA, funded by ANR and DFG. Samples were taken from twenty-nine objects from the collection of the Bavarian State Library in Munich in 2014 and 2015. The results of these analyses are presented, and partly discussed, in this paper. They may help better to establish the palaeographical sequence of the Ancient South Arabian script and thus clarify some of the extant problems in the chronology of pre-Islamic Yemen.