Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ Jeffery1938: »The denominative verb sallaṭa ‘to give power over’, occurs in iv, 92; lix, 6. The primitive verb salaṭa ‘to be hard, strong’ occurs frequently in the old poetry¹ but not in the Qurʔān. It is cognate with Eth [Gz] śalaṭa ‘to exercise strength’,² and with a group of NSem words, but in NSem the sense of the root has developed in general to mean ‘to domineer, have power over’, e.g. Akk šalāṭu ‘to have power’,³ Hbr šālaṭa ‘to domineer, be waster of’,⁴ Aram šlaṭ, Syr šlaṭ ‘to have mastery over’. Under this Aram influence the Eth [Gz] śalaṭa later comes to mean ‘potestatem habere’.
The Muslim philologers were entirely at sea over the Qurʔānic sulṭān which they wish to derive from salīṭ (cf. LA, ix, 193), and Sprenger, Leben, i, 108, rightly took it as a borrowing from the Aram.⁵ In BiblAram, šālṭān occurs several times, with the meaning ‘sovereignty, dominion’, like the Rabbinic šwlṭʔnʔ and šlṭnwt. In the Nab inscriptions also we find šlṭwn ‘rule, dominion’ (cf. Lidzbarski, Handbuch, 376), but it is in Syr that we find the word most widely used. In particular šūlṭanā is used in precisely the same senses as sulṭān is used in the Qurʔān, and it was doubtless from this source that both the Arab sulṭān and Eth [Gz] śəlṭān were derived.⁶ «
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1. Aʕšà in Geyer, Zwei Gedichte, i, 163; Dīwān, iv, 41; v, 60; Aṣmaʕiyyāt, vi, 17. 2. Cf. also Gz salaṭa and Nöldeke’s note, Neue Beiträge, 39, n. 3. 3. Zimmern, Akkad. Fremdw, 7. 4. It is only a late word in Hbr and possibly a borrowing from Aramaic. 5. So Nöldeke, Neue Beiträge, 39, n. 3; Wellhausen, ZDMG, lxvii, 633; Massignon, Lexique technique, 52. 6. Fischer, Glossar, 56, gives it from Aramaic.

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▪ (Huehnergard2011:) Engl soldan, sultan, from Ar sulṭān ‘power, authority, ruler, sultan’, from Aram šulṭānā ‘power, authority, rule, ruler’, from šᵊlaṭ ‘to dominate, rule, prevail’; sultana, from Ar sulṭānaẗ, f. of sulṭān.

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