Talk:Solluba

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A fact from Solluba appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 11 November 2012 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the Solluba are considered remnants of pre-Semitic peoples that once dominated Arabia?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2012/November. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Solluba.

Wikipedia

“Were”?

These peoples still exist in Northern Central Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, I don’t see why they’re referred to in the beginning of the article as “were”. Modi mode (talk) 07:04, 6 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It's because finding information on these folks is NOTORIOUSLY difficult. Anthropologists would LOVE to be able to talk to some of these people, especially if it is true that they are indigenous to the area and were there when the Arabs were not, but at the same time Saudi Arabia is not a particularly fun place to try and do serious anthropology in, and for the most part there's just not a lot of information about them coming out of the region at all. If you have some good sources, please share.

Aqua817 (talk) 19:58, 13 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure about the ancient Assyrian connection?

I read Blench's paper, and for the identification of Solluba with Neo-Assyrian "šelappayu" he cites Postgate in an article in "Labor in the Ancient Near East." I checked, and Postgate says (on p. 269, "Employer, Employee and Employment"):

It is the writer's suspicion that [the Slubba] are indeed an archaic survival, and that their ancestors are the šelappayu of Neo-Assyrian (and indeed Middle Assyrian) texts, who have been recognized as smiths by J. V. Kinnier Wilson. The name itself is close enough to be the same...

and he goes on to discuss the term in Assyrian texts, in which it appears as a professional title in a foundation-laying for the Esagila, and as the profession of a witness in a land sale tablet.

But the names aren't actually that similar, are they? šelappayu starts with *shin*, whereas Sullabu (however it is variously transcribed) always starts with *tsade*. Postgate makes an argument for the job title being simultaneously an ethnic descriptor, but admits there's no evidence that those with this career in Assyrian texts were itinerant.

Another issue is that of the desert kites. A short ethnographic discussion of the Sulabbu appears in "Village on the Euphrates" by AMT Moore in chapter 13 (given there as "Sleyb") on page 447, and in the accounts discussed there, they go over the use of desert kites for gazelle mass-drives at length before then covering the fact that the Sleyb present an *alternative* model for gazelle hunting - they reportedly did *not* use the kites, but rather stalked their prey utilizing concealment and camouflage, even making gazelle-skin kneepads and elbow-pads for prone stalking.

Moore lists the following references for the Sleyb:

Glubb, J.B. 1943, "The Sulubba and other ignoble tribes of Southwestern Asia" General Series in Anthropology 10, 14-17,

Field, H. 1951, "Anthropology of Iraq: the northern Jezira" Papers of the Peabody Museum 46, 1

Doughty, C.M. 1888, "Travels in Arabia Deserta" Cambridge

Chesney 1868, "Narrative of the Euphrates Expedition"

Lanoy, T. 1707, "A relation of a voyage from Aleppo to Palmyra in Syria" Miscellanea Curiosa; containing a Collection of Curious Travels, Voyages and Natural Histories of Countries as they have been delivered to the Royal Society, London III

Burckhardt, J.L. 1830, "Notes on the Bedouin and Wahabys"

Blunt, A. 1879, "Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates"

Wright, W. 1895, "An Account of Palmyra and Zenobia, with Travels and Adventrues in the Bashan and the Desert",

A Gentleman 1784 "A Journal Kept on a Journey from Bassora to Bagdad Over the Little Desert to Aleppo, Cyprus, Etc. in the year 1779"

and

Musil 1928b, "The Manners and Customs of the Rwala Bedouins" Oriental Explorations and Studies 6

The sources I could find for the Assyrian term šelappayu are:

Chicago Assyrian Dictionary š v. 2, p. 270, "šeleppāju"

"Resurrected and Reevaluated: The Neo-Assyrian Temple as a Ritualized and Ritualizing Built Environment" by Kiersten Ashley Neumann, 2014 PhD dissertation, p. 181

"Neo-Assyrian Texts from Assur, Private Archives in the Vorderasiatisches Museum of Berlin pt 1", by Fales and Jakob-Rost, p. 80

Postgate's sources for his "Slubba" section are:

Caskel, W. 1967 in M. von Oppenheim, Die Beduinen, IV/I:131-153

and

Kinnier Wilson, J.V. 1972: The Nimrud Wine Lists (CTN 1)

In short, the source for the claim that this ethnic group is attested in Assyrian texts ultimately comes from N. Postgate rather than Blench, and it's speculative. Blench only repeated Postgate's musings in brief. The consensus about the Assyrian term is that it denotes a profession, likely a craftsman of some sort involved in foundation rituals.

Blench is possibly mistaken about their use of desert kites; they were definitely specialist gazelle hunters, but apparently did not engage in mass-drives.

Another wiki page has a section on the Solluba with some more stuff about their origins, but the amount of detail given there is not matched by Blench's terse reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Islamic_Arabia#Solluba so I'm not really sure where all that came from.

Asdjk48 (talk) 02:30, 11 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]