Laïla Nehmé

Laïla Nehmé (born 1966) is a Lebanese-French archaeologist. A specialist in the archaeology and epigraphy of the ancient Near East, she is known for her research on Nabataean writings, the evolution of the Nabataean script into the Arabic, and archaeological excavations at Petra and Mada'in Saleh.

Early life Laïla Nehmé was born in Beirut, Lebanon, where she attended high school. A meeting with a restorer of ceramics from a dig in northern Lebanon prompted her to seek higher studies in archaeology.

Nehmé attended the Pantheon-Sorbonne University, where Jean-Marie Dentzer guided her research between 1991 and 1994. She wrote her doctoral thesis on Petra in 1994. She began to conduct excavations in Syria and Jordan, and to specialise in the epigraphy of northern Arabic.

She has studied the transition of scripts from the Nabataean Aramaic to the Nabataean Arabic form that was in use between the third and fifth centuries AD. Nehmé has been credited with categorizing and coining the name of this transitional script.

Awards 2010 – Chevalier of the National Order of Merit (France)

Selected works Articles

Books