"As we can tell from the few tantalizing excerpts and summaries that have been published, these documents concern the legal affairs of this woman over a period of some forty years. She and her family not only observed the transtion from Arab kingdom to Roman province in the territory known as Arabia: she and her family actually lived there at the time. It is clear that the relationship between Jews and Arabs in the territory south of the Dead Sea was a harmonious one. It is amply apparent that in the archive of Babatha we have precious documentation for a social coherence in Palestine that mirrored the administrative and geographic unity. It scarcely matters whether it is by accident or by desogn that neither Yadin or any other Israeli scholar has seen fit to publish this extraodinary material. In a society in which archeological studies are often extensively reported, the fact that it to this day remains unpublished is eloquent enough." (pp. 52-53).
More recently, a stone bearing the writing of Nabataean Arabs was discovered in the Negev desert. Written in a "single script" in both Nabataean and Arabic languages, the text has been estimated to date from the middle of the second century A.D., which would make it the earliest known example of the Arabic language:
"It is obviously significant that the inscription was lying in the Negev desert. The stone is weathered and brittle. Its signifiance for pre-Islamic scholarship could be enormous. In any other country with a serious interest in archeology, this object would have been removed to a protected place for safekeeping. More than that, one might have expected some publicity for so important a discovery. But there has been no publicatrion of the inscription, and it still lies today under the desert sun." (p. 57)