You might enjoy a fascinating article at the New Yorker on pre-Islamic texts found in the north of Arabia as much as I did:
In a small valley, an ancient grave was surrounded by a toppled cairn, with a desert meadow of nettles and tiny blue wildflowers below. Al-Jallad walked to a basalt slab shaped like a giant arrowhead, covered in etchings. As the field hand stood nearby, he squatted and read aloud, “Li ‘Addan bin Aws bin Adam bin Sa‘d, wa-ra‘aya ha-d-da’na bi-qasf kabir ‘ala akhihi sabiy fa-hal-Lat fasiyyat.†The writing said that the grandson of a man named Adam had once sat in this spot and pastured his sheep; he grieved for a brother who’d been captured by an enemy tribe, and prayed to the goddess Allat for his deliverance. As Al-Jallad read, the field hand stared, astonished that these markings encoded a language that he could, more or less, understand.
For three days, the members of Al-Jallad’s expedition walked across hilltops, logging a thousand new Safaitic inscriptions. Around the remains of cairns, there were texts carved everywhere, and rock art, too—drawings of lions leaping on horses, warriors with bows and spears, gazelles, ostriches, dancers with flutes. The inscriptions, Al-Jallad explained, were a form of monument-making. “The fact that they don’t appear monumental to our eyes is because our idea of monumentality comes from a Greco-Roman model, where things are neat and square,†he said.
They paint a picture of Arabia in the period just before the birth of Mohammed somewhat different than the prevailing one just as the earliest texts of the Qur’an do. They’d better scour them up quickly; challenging people’s religious beliefs can be a dangerous activity. Don’t be surprised if an active program to suppress them springs up.
