BHB, Volume 92 Peter De Geest, Michal Hejna & Jos Beyens (Eds.): Karst and Caves of Soqotra Island (Yemen) - interdisciplinary expeditions 2000 - 2025 = a fact!

Never give up, but here all gratitude to the perseverance of both Michal Hejna's team to keep on exploring the caves of Soqotra and Jos Beyens who mapped caves with a eagerness as if discovered yesterday. 

Also big thanks to Michael Laumanns, who kept pushing for an update!

The “Berliner Höhlenkundliche Berichte” (BHB), published by the Speleoclub Berlin, is the only comprehensive and continuously published series of caving expeditions and speleological country compilations. ISSN 1617-8572 

Volume 92 Peter De Geest, Michal Hejna & Jos Beyens (Eds.): Karst and Caves of Soqotra Island (Yemen) - interdisciplinary expeditions 2000 - 2025. 89 pages + fold-out surveys, many color photos; Berlin 2026. An update of volume 20 in this series, which featured 28 caves (22.7 km). This volume covers Belgian and Czech expeditions, which so far have yielded almost 39 km of passages from 90 caves - including Giniba Cave at 13.5 km and Difshelei at -282 m. With many cave maps and detailed chapters on biospeleology, archaeology and speleothem dating. In English with abstracts in French, Arabic, Czech and Dutch. Price: 15 EUR / 15 GBP (plus postage)

Links: https://www.speleo-berlin.de/en_publikationen.php / https://www.speleo-berlin.de/inc/abstracts.php?volume=92&lan=en

Inshallah, time to start writing another book about all the scientific discoveries linked to this body of work...

Soon available: De Geest, P.; Hejna, M. & Beyens, J. (Eds.) (2026): Karst and caves of Soqotra Island (Yemen) - interdisciplinary expeditions 2000-2025.

Soon summary and links will be provided here FIRST!

Meanwhile the references:

De Geest, P. (Ed.) (2006): Soqotra Karst Project (Yemen), 2000-2004. - Berliner höhlenkundliche Berichte, 20, 69 pp.; Berlin.

New volume (available later THIS MONTH!)

De Geest, P.; Hejna, M. & Beyens, J. (Eds.) (2026): Karst and caves of Soqotra Island (Yemen) - interdisciplinary expeditions 2000-2025. - Berliner höhlenkundliche Berichte, 92, 89 pp.; Berlin.

Sales price of the book will be 15 EUR (plus postage: 7 EUR in the Euro-zone, 9 EUR to the UK).

Last cave maps are being finalized, soon the overview of 25 years of cave and karst exploration will be ready!

 Last cave maps are being finalized! 

After 20 years, this feels like a huge relief... we keep you posted on the publication progress.

Thanks to all, especially Jos Beyens (see pictures) and Michael Laumanns

Mapping the Socotran caves again... after a small pause...

 After (a small pause of) 20 years, some of the cave maps are finally getting finished! All SKP-members have been active elsewhere, but thanks to Jos Beyens (final topo editor) and his discussions with Michael Laumanns (series editor of the Berliner Hohlenkundliche Berichte - BHB) all will be updated and published in 2026. As a reminder, our previous results can be found in Band 20 (2006).

Thanks to Jos Beyens, Rudi Debbaut, Karl Willems and all other SKP-members for these efforts and final wrap of exploration fun...

Meanwhile a Czech caving team is actively exploring on the island, with which we will start collaborating closely. Previous cave photographers are sharping their... images and the GPS-expert is uploading all exploration tracks.

In summary, all ingredients for a final book describing 20-30 years of exploration and research are piling up, the challenge in mine, Inshallah...

Peter   

The Decipherment of the Dhofari Script – Three halḥam abecedaries and the first glimpses into the corpus

Once in a while, here after a century of research, Prof. Dr. Ahmad Al-Jallad, a Jordanian-American philologist, epigraphist, and a historian of language might be on a break to decipher some enigmatic ancient South-Arabic scripts. 

Exciting stuff, as this ancient pre-Islamic language indigenous to South Arabia, also occurs on Socotra Island. While the experts are working on it right now, it might soon open the door towards a new fascinating chapter in the cultural history of Arabia.

Al-Jallad concluded the script most likely descended from a script called Thamudic B. That script was widely used on the northern side of the Arabian Peninsula, in what is today the Saudi Arabian province of Najd.

A nice summary can be found here: https://www.science.org/content/article/mysterious-pre-islamic-script-oman-finally-deciphered

The article itself is available here: https://www.academia.edu/129778573/Al_Jallad_2025_The_Decipherment_of_the_Dhofari_Script_Three_hal%E1%B8%A5am_abecedaries_and_the_first_glimpses_into_the_corpus

Picture website IASA

Thanks!

Caves, the next frontier...

 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-024-02302-y

After years of exploring cave systems and tafoni's on the island, we discovered quite some burial sites on the island. Questions popped-up: Who were these people? How old are the remains? Are these families/tribes? Where do the Soqotri people came from anyway? 

Finally some information got extracted from these remains, freshly published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, titled: 

Medieval DNA from Soqotra points to Eurasian origins of an isolated population at the crossroads of Africa and Arabia