Desert Tracings: Pre-Islamic Poetry and Arabian Archaeology

Join the School of International Letters and Cultures in inviting Alexander Foreman as he gives a talk titled Desert Tracings: Pre-Islamic Poetry and Arabian Archaeology.

There has been a lot of uncertainty about the relationship between the oral poetry attributed to pre-Islamic Arabian nomads and the reality of ancient Arabia. How "real" is this poetry? Can we be assured that it reflects nomadic life? What, if anything, can it tell us about how these ancient people lived? Recent archaeological discoveries in Arabia have allowed us to find some partial answers to those questions. It is thanks to such discoveries, to be discussed in this talk, that we can now be fairly sure that this literature really does reflect ancient nomadic life. Ancient and late antique Arabia still has much to tell us yet, in transmitted literature, in archaeology and in the synthesis of the two.

Alex Foreman is a student in the NELC doctoral program at Oregon State University, studying the pre-Islamic poetic corpus in light of both its late antique context and the linguistic history of Arabic. His scholarly interest centers around all forms of intentionally unusual language, including poetic dialects, scriptural reading traditions, cryptolects and conlangs. Of particular interest to him are the ways in which such forms of unusual language change over time. His areas of curiosity include Pre-Islamic and Early Umayyad Arabic Poetry, Arabic linguistic history, Medieval Hebrew liturgical reading traditions, early Qur'anic reading traditions, the performance of medieval lyric verse and the languages of the late antique Mediterranean. He is also a literary translator, principally of poetry.