The Gods of Pre-Islamic Arabia

Sometime around the year 800, in the Abbasid heartland of Iraq, an Arab scholar named Hisham Ibn Alcali sat down to write a book about gods who no longer had any worshippers. He called it the Book of Idols. It was, in a sense, the first encyclopedia of pre-Islamic Arabian paganism. Tribe by tribe, sanctuary by sanctuary, Alcali cataloged the gods that his ancestors had prayed to before the rise of Islam.

Alcali, like every Muslim scholar of his era, had a name for this pre-Islamic period he was describing: the Jahalia, the Age of Ignorance, an era of moral and spiritual darkness. So, in other words, it's not a particularly sympathetic history of his ancestors. And most scholars today don't view it as an accurate historical source. But for more than a thousand years, this is essentially what the world knew about pre-Islamic Arabian religion. Oral traditions and reports filtered through an Islamic lens, written down 200 years or so after the events they describe.

But there was always another source, just no one could read it at the time. Across the deserts of what's now southern Syria, Jordan, and northern Saudi Arabia, scholars have cataloged tens of thousands of old Arabic inscriptions carved into the region's black basalt rocks. Short texts, most only a sentence or two, scratched by the people who actually lived in pre-Islamic Arabia. They're written in a script called Safaitic, which was not deciphered until the late 1800s. The earliest of these inscriptions date to around the 3rd century B.C.E., and the latest were carved a few centuries before the birth of the Prophet Muhammad.

Now, as I've talked about in my earlier videos on the Quranic name of Jesus and pre-Islamic Allah, these inscriptions preserve the names of gods, prayers, curses, and sacrifices. Short glimpses into pre-Islamic Arabian religion and the very words of the people who practiced it. Here's one as an example. A herder somewhere in what's now Saudi Arabia lost a sheep, and he picked up a stone and carved this: "He lost a sheep. Oh, Allat, cause him to find it." That's it. It's not exactly a theological treatise by a priest. This is a simple prayer from a man missing his sheep and a goddess named Allat that he believed could help him find it.

The people leaving these carvings were nomads moving with their flocks and caravans across one of the harshest landscapes in the entire ancient world. They camped, moved on, camped again, and as they went along, they left behind names, prayers, complaints, curses, and camels. Lots and lots of drawings of camels. Thousands and thousands of unfiltered, first-person religious utterances from ordinary people.

In an earlier video, we looked at one corner of this world: the pre-Islamic god Allah, who was viewed as some sort of high creator god. Today, we're going to go wider, exploring the other gods of pre-Islamic Arabia and the rituals they performed to worship these gods. The religious world these Safaitic inscriptions describe is, broadly speaking, what we see across most of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. They were polytheists. They recognized and worshipped many gods. And some of these inscriptions really show the scope of this.

One inscription from northeastern Jordan reads like a prayer thrown in every direction at once. A man called Anam writes, "And he called out, 'Oh Allat, Duchara, Baalsamin, Godar, God Navat, Godwel, and every god in the heavens.'" So, if you're counting, that's six gods invoked by name, and then a catch-all, "every god in the heavens." Lots of gods. Some were known only locally, worshipped by a single tribe. Others apparently were honored by neighboring peoples as well, like the goddess Allat. And some appear to have histories stretching back into the distant past, like the god Baal, the storm god of the ancient Canaanites. They were understood as living forces behind the sun, the rains, abundance, and fortune. You could appeal to them. You could sacrifice to them. You could invoke them against your enemies. And as we've just seen, you could appeal to all of them at once in moments of real desperation.

Now, there are too many pre-Islamic Arabian gods to cover in one video, so we'll just focus on a few. Starting with the most prominent, the goddess Allat. Her name simply means "the goddess" from the Arabic al-ʿilāt, which eventually contracted to Allat, the feminine counterpart of Allah, the God. Though, counterpart only linguistically, since there's no direct evidence that Allat and Allah were considered consorts at this time in this region. Though centuries before, the Canaanite gods El and Elat or Asher were considered consorts. Allat is the most popular goddess in the Safaitic inscriptions, invoked over 1,400 times. And you can ask her for just about anything, like this one: "Oh, Allat, grant him a feast and his sister a lamb." So, apparently, a woman's brother needs a feast for some occasion. The inscription doesn't say why. And his sister wants a young lamb for her gift. Or this one: "He longed for a beloved in the month of Shubat. So, oh Allat, may there be a safe reunion." So, apparently, someone was missing his lover during the cold month of Shubat in the late winter, when the herds are thin and travel is especially hard. So, call upon Allat to bring them back together. Another one: "He set off on a journey for Palmyra. So, oh Allat, may he be secure." Palmyra was the great caravan city to the north, and this traveler doesn't know if he'll make it back.

So, this is the texture of Allat's role in these inscriptions. Lost sheep, reunions with people you miss, safe arrival to a destination. The kind of small, daily, deeply human requests that almost never make it into the religious literature that we inherit from the ancient world. Ancient literature was almost always written for institutional purposes by professionals like priests, poets, and scribes. So, we tend to see elite concerns in these elite texts. The Safaitic inscriptions, though, are by individuals in real moments of need, talking to a goddess they trusted to be listening. She doesn't seem to be an abstract, distant goddess. You could call upon her for when something goes wrong in your day-to-day life. When the sheep wanders off, when your sister wants a sheep, when your beloved is hurting sheep in another camp three weeks away, lots of camels and lots of sheep.

She also may have been considered some sort of fertility goddess. One inscription says, "Oh Allat, Queen of Abundance, help Benam Kusay, son of Zagar, and he pastured on fresh herbage. And oh Roda, may whoever effaces this inscription experience a dir of pasture." That title, "Queen of Abundance," has led some scholars to compare her to other great goddesses of the ancient world like Aphrodite, Venus, Ishtar, goddesses linked with fertility, life, and the rejuvenation of the natural world. So, it's possible that Allat's role in this religious world also included presiding over the conditions that made life possible.

Other inscriptions hint at her family, and in one, she's called the daughter of another god, Roda, a male deity who himself shows up frequently in inscriptions, sometimes in roles overlapping with Allat's, like in this inscription from a man named Field to Eil: "Oh, Allat, daughter of Roda, deliver Field to Eel, son of Hazer, from this year of war." Why this inscription names her genealogy is not entirely clear. It may be a ritual formula or an epithet. It may be that he's trying to invoke both gods at once, like a father-daughter double protection during a dangerous year. Other inscriptions go further, calling her the mother of the gods. Again, we don't have a full mythology here to map out who's related to whom, but there's enough here to suggest that worshippers understood these gods as part of a divine family tree, with Allat as their mother, which may echo Asher, who the Canaanites considered to be the mother of the gods.

Allat is also frequently paired with Duchara, the national god of the Nabataeans, the Arab kingdom centered at their capital Petra. His name means "master of the Shara," the mountain range east of the Dead Sea. And one inscription even calls him "the one from Petra." Allat and Duchara appear together so often that they seem to have functioned as a kind of pair, sometimes invoked side by side as twin guarantors of a request. Like this example when a man's brother is murdered and the carver wants revenge: "And he was devastated by grief for his brother who was murdered at Hael. So, oh Allat and Duchara, let there be vengeance upon the one who attacked him." Unlike the clear father-daughter link we see between Allat and Roda, the nature of Allat's relationship with Duchara is more ambiguous.

Whoever Allat was to these people, though, she was definitely not a marginal figure. In fact, she's mentioned in the Quran, prominent enough that the new religion singled her out as one of three goddesses to reject. The 53rd chapter of the Quran names her directly alongside two other goddesses whose worship was widespread across Arabia: "Have you considered Allat and Aluza and Manat? They are not but names that you have named, for which God has sent down no authority." The passage dismisses all three: "Nothing but names invented by the Arabs and their ancestors." It's a striking moment if you put yourself in the mindset of that original audience. For nearly 1,000 years, Arabs prayed to Allat across the deserts of Syria and Arabia, asking her to find lost sheep, to grant safe passage, to watch over the dead, and then, in a single passage of scripture, she was declared to have never existed at all.

So, Allat may be the most prominent deity in the Safaitic corpus, but what about the other gods? The inscriptions name dozens and dozens of gods. Some invoked hundreds of times, others appear only once or twice in the entire collection. To list them all would take hours. So, instead of cataloging them all, I want to ask a different question: What were these gods for?

Dr. Ahmed Al-Jallad is one of the leading scholars on pre-Islamic Arabian religion. And he reconstructs the religious worldview of these nomads as divided into two great forces. On one side were the gods, sentient beings who stood behind the workings of nature and the pattern of human life: the sun, the rain, abundance, fortune, justice, and vengeance. And on the other side, as we'll see toward the end of this video, was fate. A malevolent, uncaring force that hunted human beings and struck without warning, against which no prayer could help. In between those two poles was the entire business of trying to stay alive in the desert. And the gods, in Al-Jallad's reconstruction, were what stood between you and disaster. Which makes pre-Islamic Arabian religion, at least what we see in the inscriptions, a very practical worldview. We don't see a ton of mythology or theology here, or abstract philosophical concepts to contemplate. You could address them when the rain didn't come, when your brother was murdered, when the pasture failed, and you suspected the evil eye. You could sacrifice to the gods or call on their names for help. And when one didn't answer, you could try another. But you couldn't keep them on your side forever. When they lost interest or stopped answering, fate was waiting.

The clearest place we see the gods as the practical powers standing behind the forces that could kill you is with the gods who controlled those forces. For example, consider the god Shams, whose name simply means "the sun." We find Shams invoked only once, appearing alongside Allat in one of the most striking inscriptions in the corpus: an oath of self-amputation, in which a man swears to cut off his own hand in promise of vengeance. It reads: "He found the trace of his brother. So he was distraught with grief for him. So, O Allat and Shams, may he cut off his hand for you for vengeance against the one who has committed this act." Shams may have also gone by the epithet "Baalshemesh," or "the radiant one." Another inscription reads: "Oh radiant one, help Yakfel." The exact theology concerning Shams is not entirely clear. Perhaps people in this region saw the sun god as a supernatural being represented by the physical sun. Or perhaps the sun itself was understood as the visible form of the god. But the logic of calling on a sun god here is not hard to grasp. In a landscape with almost no natural shade, where temperatures can climb past 110 degrees Fahrenheit by midday, and the only relief comes in the few hours after sunset, the sun is the most powerful presence in the sky. You can imagine why a nomad might cry out to him for relief.

Another deity tied to the natural forces of the desert was the primary rain and storm god, Baalsamin, sometimes shortened simply to Baal. He should sound familiar because he shares the name with the Canaanite storm god, the rival of the god of Israel in the Hebrew Bible, which shouldn't come as a huge surprise. The religious world of the northern Arabian nomads was not hermetically sealed off from the religious world of the ancient Levant. They shared deities and, in some cases, entire cosmological frameworks like the creation myth. And here in the Arabian deserts, 6 or 7 hundred years after those Hebrew texts were composed, Baal appears with a slightly different epithet, but also called "master of the rains." And in this landscape, the master of the rains was the god who decided whether you'd make it through the next year. The inscriptions make those stakes clear. In one, a herder records what happened when the rains didn't come: "He fed the goats on dry fodder the year of misery because Baalsamin withheld it." So, notice he doesn't say "the rain didn't fall." He says "Baalsamin withheld it." A god somewhere had chosen not to act, and a man's herd was eating dry food because of it. Which puts the carver in a difficult position. If your survival depends on a god, and the god had stopped responding, what do you do? Well, try someone else who might listen to you. "He returned to permanent water from the inner desert the year Baalsamin withheld it. And he watered in the place where one spends the dry season at the end of the dry season. So, oh Allat, may he be secure." I can kind of hear the frustration in this one. Baalsamin is not sending rain. The livestock are suffering. The dry season is dragging on way past its proper end. So, the carver calls upon Allat instead of Baalsamin. The rain god isn't listening. So, he tries the god of abundance. This is what it looked like in practice to live in this two-force worldview. The gods were powers you negotiated with. They could grant you reign, safety, vengeance, the safe return of a brother from a journey. But their favor was never permanent and never guaranteed. When one withdrew their favor, you turned to another, hoping that the second would prove more helpful than the first.

Which brings us to the gods of fortune. If Shams was the god of the sun burning in the sky, and Baalsamin the capricious god of the rains, the "Gad" gods were the deities of something more abstract but no less urgent: fortune. Across the inscriptions, you see a lot of different gods: Gad Nabat, the god of the Nabataeans. Gad Dyy, the god of the Dyy tribe. Gad Awed, Godwel. Now, at first glance, this looks like a small army of separate gods, each one belonging to a different group. But Dr. Al-Jallad and others have argued that they're actually all one god: the West Semitic god of fortune, comparable to the Greek god Tyche or the Roman god Fortuna. And what we're seeing are localized versions of that god, tribe by tribe. The Nabataeans had their god, the Dyy had theirs, the Awed had their own same god, but different relationships with each community. Each tribe carrying their version of fortune with them as they moved across the desert. And fortune was definitely something you wanted on your side in this hostile environment. You can see this in action in one of the more striking inscriptions: "He performed an animal sacrifice. So, oh Gad Awed, may he be secure and have bounty as the cattle froze the year the cold came during the early summer." So, here we see the local god of the Awed tribe, one of the northernmost Arab tribes. And the author is making a massive decision here, sacrificing one of his animals, probably a cow or a camel, to the deity with the hope that by giving up one animal, he can protect the rest. Whether he expected Gadawid to intercede with weather gods like Baalsamin, or whether he hoped his tribe's god would simply protect his herd directly, the underlying logic is the same as everything else we've seen so far. The gods were powers you negotiated with. Fortune was something you could try to influence by giving the gods a reason to care.

All right, so we've met a few of the pre-Islamic Arabian gods. Now, let's talk about how people actually approached them. Because if the gods were the forces standing between human beings and the malevolence of fate, then the question of how to get the gods to respond was the most important question in this religious worldview. You needed the rains to come. You needed your herds to live. You needed your brother to come back from the journey. The gods could grant all of that, but their attention was never guaranteed. Which brings in ritual practices designed to, let's say, motivate the gods.

These inscriptions show us several types of ritual, including standardized prayers, pilgrimage, and sacrifice. Let's start with prayer. By now, you've heard a lot of these prayers: the lost sheep, the lamb for a sister, longing for your lover during the month of Shubat, the journey to Palmyra, the cattle freezing to death in early summer. You might notice that they sound kind of the same, as in they're very formulaic. Almost every prayer in the Safaitic corpus follows the same basic structure. It opens with the equivalent to the letter "H" or the letter "ha" to use the Safaitic name. This is a vocative particle. The ancient equivalent of "Oh Lord" or "Oh my God," the "O" part, the vocative particle. Then comes the name of the god. Then an imperative verb, and then the request: "Oh Allat, cause him to find it." "Oh Allat, may he be secure." "Oh Duchara, grant aid to the Nabataeans." Before the prayer itself, the carver almost always names himself, sometimes just his own name, but more often by his name and his father's name, and sometimes by five or six generations going back. The prayer is the request, but the genealogy is kind of like the signature. The carver is saying, "This is who I am. This is the family I come from, and this is what I ask of you." What this tells us is that these prayers are not exactly improvised prayers. After all, people are sitting down and carving a prayer on a stone, which probably took some time. So, we're probably seeing a correct way to pray, a structured way that people learned and followed, generation after generation, across hundreds of years and hundreds of miles of desert. If you wanted the gods to listen, you addressed them in the form they recognized.

And you could also go to them, or rather, you went to where they were most powerful. The Safaitic inscriptions describe a practice that should sound very familiar to anyone who knows anything about Islam. They performed a ritual called *ḥajj*. And yes, that's the same root as the Arabic word Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that is one of the five pillars of Islam today. The Safaitic *ḥajj* predates the Islamic Hajj by hundreds of years, but we're almost certainly not talking about an annual pilgrimage to Mecca. The one pilgrimage site we can name for certainty from the inscriptions is in southern Syria, and the others seem to have been scattered across settlements just west of the desert. Sanctuaries belonging to gods like Baalsamin, Allat, and Duchara. But the category of action, a journey to a sacred place undertaken as a religious obligation, was already there in pre-Islamic Arabia. And there is some evidence that timing mattered, with pilgrimages tied to specific seasonal festivals.

In one inscription, a man says, "And he returned to water during the pilgrimage period." That phrase "return to water" is a technical term. It refers to the moment in late spring or early summer when nomads move their herds back to permanent water sources as the desert dried out. So, this carver is anchoring his pilgrimage to a specific point in the seasonal cycle, possibly tied to a shrine that needed to be visited before the dry month set in. Another inscription is even more specific: "And he ritually cleansed during Virgo to perform a pilgrimage." All right, two things stand out here. First, he's performing a ritual purification before the pilgrimage. That's a recognizable feature of pilgrimage in a lot of ancient religions, but notably the Hajj in Islam, where pilgrims enter a state of ritual purity called *iḥrām* before approaching Mecca. And second, he's dating his pilgrimage to a specific astronomical period, the rising of the constellation Virgo, which would place the event sometime in the late summer, possibly connected to rituals around the seasonal rains. So, apparently, pilgrimages could happen at a particular month tied to an astronomical cycle. And as I mentioned, we even know one of the names of these destinations, a site called Seiya near the ancient city of Kanitha in what's now southern Syria. The sanctuary there was dedicated to Baalsamin and was active from roughly the 1st century B.C.E. to the 2nd century C.E. And it seems to have been linked with a specific tribe. One inscription reads, "And he escaped by fleeing the year the pilgrimage to Seiya failed." Tantalizing, but we don't really know what he means by "the pilgrimage failing." Maybe it was canceled because of war, or the temple was closed. Maybe it meant the pilgrimage failed in its religious purpose because Baalsamin once again withheld the rains. Another inscription from around the same time period mentions that "the images were removed from Seiya," which might suggest the temple was decommissioned at some point. So, this carver may be recording a year when his community couldn't complete a pilgrimage that they normally would have made.

So, was the Safaitic *ḥajj* the same as the Islamic Hajj? Well, as we've seen, no. The Islamic Hajj is a single annual pilgrimage to a single site performed by Muslims worldwide. The Safaitic *ḥajj* was much more local. Different tribes going to different sanctuaries, possibly at different times, and possibly more than once, to different gods. But as I said, the category of ritual was functionally the same: pilgrimage as religious obligation, a seasonal journey to a sacred place, ritual purification before arriving. And the expectation presumably was that the gods could be approached more powerfully at their own sanctuaries than from anywhere else. All of that was deeply established in the religious life of Arabia long before Islam, when we see the practice focused on a single destination.

But the most powerful way to motivate a god was to give them something very costly. Which brings us to animal sacrifice. The Safaitic carvers describe animal sacrifice with the word *dabaḥa*. It's the same root still used in modern Arabic for ritual slaughter. The *dabaḥa*, the word at the heart of Muslim *halal* practice today. Now, the religious context has changed completely in the last 2,000 years since these inscriptions were carved, but the word survived. The formula for recording a sacrifice is usually pretty simple: the author's name, lineage, the verb *dabaḥa*, then the prayer. A standardized way to record a sacrifice, just as there was a standardized way to record a prayer.

One inscription in particular shows what's at stake. It's carved across the entire face of a large volcanic boulder. The letters are long, tracing downward from the top to bottom, making the message visible from a distance. Whoever carved this wanted it to be seen. It reads: "Beni, son of Beni. And he made an animal sacrifice. So, oh Allat, may he be secure." That's a fairly brief inscription: a name, a genealogy, a sacrifice, and a prayer. But for a nomad moving through the desert, animal sacrifice would have been incredibly costly. Whether losing a sheep, a goat, or a camel, we're talking about a real economic blow. The kind of thing you could only do if you believed the goddess's protection was worth more than the animal being sacrificed. And then, having made that sacrifice, this guy Beni carved the record of it across an entire boulder in letters big enough that his community would definitely see what he had done, and that Allat would have a permanent witness to her side of the bargain. That's the logic here. Sacrifice was costly, but carving was permanent. A permanent public testament of your costly action.

But not all problems were visible. The Safaitic carvers were concerned about drought, war, lost sheep, separation from loved ones, you know, very down-to-earth problems. But the inscriptions show that ancient Arabs in this region were deeply concerned with magic, and especially the evil eye. And when they suspected they were being targeted, no surprise, they called upon the gods. Here's one that shows how this worked. The author is a herder out with his flocks during the rising of the Pleiades, the late spring when the vegetation should be at its peak. But the season goes wrong, and he pastured during the rising of the Pleiades on herbage of the season of abundance. But he did not prosper, and he suspected the evil eye when he saw its evil. So, "O Allat from Aman, and O Duchara from Petra, grant abundance and keep him safe from misfortune."

The evil eye is one of the oldest and most widespread beliefs in the entire ancient Near East. Incantations against it survive from Mesopotamia going back nearly 5,000 years. And the belief was alive across Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Levant, and Arabia. And it's easy to think about magic as something abstract or supernatural. But the evil eye is very social. It was all about envy, and specifically about envy of the people around you. The basic idea is that another person's gaze, energized by jealousy or resentment, could literally damage the things in your life that they envied. And what people envied, both then and now, was almost always the same set of things: your health, your kids, your livestock, your fields, your prosperity, your love life, anything that made your life slightly better than your neighbors and gave them a reason to wish them harm. So, when this herder watches his pasture fail in a season that should have been very abundant, he reaches for the most ordinary explanation available to him. Someone, maybe his neighbor, maybe a rival, maybe someone whose own herds had done worse that year, had looked at his flocks and envied them. And that envy had reached out and done what envy was understood to do: emaciated his herds. So, he calls on his two most powerful gods, Allat and Duchara, by name, to help him.

There's something else interesting here that we've already seen throughout this video. A lot of Safaitic inscriptions end with a curse on anyone who would deface it: "May whoever effaces this writing be made blind or be cast out of the grave." For a long time, scholars treated these as boilerplate, formulaic phrases. But these are actually magical curses. The carvers couldn't predict who would come along years or decades later and try to mess with their prayer. So, they preempted the threat, asking the gods to enforce a kind of basic decorum. "Don't erase my prayer." Often, the curse asks specifically that the offender be struck with blindness, which is a particularly harsh punishment for a nomad trying to make his way through the Jordanian desert. Yeah, you're going to die.

And as we're talking about magic, there's one more inscription worth pausing on. "This cult stone was erected by Hul, son of Hul. So, O Roda, aid him against a whisperer's mischief." So, here a man named Hul set up a sacred standing stone, which serves as a focal point for prayer, and he asks for protection against a whisperer, someone working against him through speech, through rumor. The author doesn't know who, but he needs Roda to know. What's striking is that you might recognize this from the Quran. The very last chapter is itself a prayer for divine protection, and it names this exact threat: "I seek refuge in the Lord of mankind, from the evil of the stealthy whisperer who whispers into the breasts of mankind." Now, this doesn't mean the Quran is directly borrowing from the Safaitic inscriptions. But the category of threat being named—a malevolent, invisible voice working through whispered speech—was already part of the religious world of the region centuries before the Quran was preached.

So, that's a picture of pre-Islamic pagan ritual that emerges from these inscriptions: standardized prayers, pilgrimages timed to the seasons with ritual purification, sacrifices costly enough to make a goddess listen, curses to protect your words from the people who would scratch them out, rituals for keeping the gods on your side and motivating them to act when you needed them most. And it was thought to work, but not always, and not against everything.

Which brings us back to the other half of Dr. Al-Jallad's reconstruction of pre-Islamic Arabian paganism: fate, a force deaf to all of this. Fate was another matter entirely. The word for it in the inscriptions is *manā*, and it shows up in two phrases that appear over and over again: *tazar manā*, "fate lay in wait," and *ragū manā*, "struck down by fate." If you spend any time reading these inscriptions, you start seeing these phrases everywhere, and they almost always show up in funerary inscriptions, carvings made by people in mourning when a loved one died. "By Adam, son of Latimat. And he grieved for Habach and for Agir, and fate lay in wait. So, oh Allat, let there be spoil." Look what he's asking for, and what he's not asking for. He's not asking Allat to bring his loved ones back from the dead, or even to explain what happened. He's asking her for some kind of compensation to make up for the loss. And that's about as much as anyone in the Safaitic corpus ever asks for in that situation, because fate, in this world, was not a personality you can negotiate with.

Fate, in this religious world, does appear as an active force or agent, something that does things to people. The random violence of war, the unpredictability of nature, the simple fact that people get sick and die, and you can't see it coming. Fate covered all of that. But across tens of thousands of inscriptions, no one ever addresses fate directly. It doesn't function as a god you can petition. No one says, "Oh, fate, spare him." No one offers a sacrifice to fate. The image that comes through most strongly in the inscriptions is a hunter or a raider. Something that lay in ambush and struck without warning. As Dr. Al-Jallad writes, the only hope humans had to survive was to seek the intervention of the gods. But this was never guaranteed. Fate simply didn't listen.

So, what do we actually learn from these inscriptions? For hundreds and hundreds of years, the world's main source on pre-Islamic Arabian religion was Alcali's Book of Idols. A text composed 200 years after the rise of Islam by a scholar describing a religion he and his contemporaries called the Age of Ignorance. The Safaitic inscriptions, though, give us an unfiltered glimpse into the religious world of ordinary people, in their own words, and they reveal a deeply practical, lived religious world. Dr. Al-Jallad ended his book with this reconstruction: a worldview concerned with two great forces. The gods on one side, beings who you could address and persuade, who stood behind the rains and the seasons and the flocks and the fortunes of human beings. And on the other side, fate. And sometimes fate wins, and life gets cut short.

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