Old Arabic is the name for any Arabic language or dialect continuum before Islam. Various forms of Old Arabic are attested in scripts like Safaitic , Hismaic , Nabatean , and even Greek .
15-582: Alternatively, the term has been used synonymously with " Paleo-Arabic " to describe the form of the Arabic script in the fifth and sixth centuries. Old Arabic and its descendants are classified as Central Semitic languages , which is an intermediate language group containing the Northwest Semitic languages (e.g., Aramaic and Hebrew ), the languages of the Dadanitic , Taymanitic inscriptions,
30-528: A small number of papyri. It was first deciphered in 1840 by Eduard Friedrich Ferdinand Beer . 6,000 – 7,000 Nabataean inscriptions have been published, of which more than 95% are extremely short inscriptions or graffiti , and the vast majority are undated, post-Nabataean or from outside the core Nabataean territory. A majority of inscriptions considered Nabataean were found in Sinai, and another 4,000 – 7,000 such Sinaitic inscriptions remain unpublished. Prior to
45-751: Is an abjad ( consonantal alphabet) that was used to write Nabataean Aramaic and Nabataean Arabic from the second century BC onwards. Important inscriptions are found in Petra (now in Jordan ), the Sinai Peninsula (now part of Egypt ), and other archaeological sites including Abdah (in Israel ) and Mada'in Saleh in Saudi Arabia. Nabataean is only known through inscriptions and, more recently,
60-472: Is given below: l *Li- ʼbslm ʼabs¹alām bn bin qymy qayyemyV d dū/ī ʼl ʼāl gsm gas²m w uwa dkrt-n dakaratn lt Paleo-Arabic Paleo-Arabic (or Palaeo-Arabic , sometimes called pre-Islamic Arabic or Old Arabic ) is a script that represents a pre-Islamic phase in the evolution of the Arabic script at which point it becomes recognizably similar to
75-618: Is the definite article al- . The first unambiguous literary attestation of this feature occurs in the 5th century BCE, in the epithet of a goddess which Herodotus ( Histories I: 131, III: 8) quotes in its preclassical Arabic form as Alilat (Ἀλιλάτ, i. e., ʼal-ʼilāt ), which means "the goddess". An early piece of inscriptional evidence for this form of the article is provided by a 1st-century BCE inscription in Qaryat al-Faw (formerly Qaryat Dhat Kahil, near Sulayyil , Saudi Arabia ). The earliest datable Safaitic inscriptions go back to
90-755: The Arabian Peninsula , such as in the Christian texts at the site of Hima in South Arabia . More recently, additional examples of Paleo-Arabic have been discovered near Taif in the Hejaz and in the Tabuk region of northwestern Saudi Arabia . The term "Paleo-Arabic" was first used by Christian Robin in the form of the French expression "paléo-arabe". Paleo-Arabic refers to the Arabic script in
105-863: The Jebel Usays inscription and the Hima Paleo-Arabic inscriptions typically date events according to the Bostran era , whose beginning is the equivalent of the year 106 in the Gregorian calendar . However, at least one, the Zabad inscription (known from Syria) uses the Seleucid era . The current list of known Paleo-Arabic texts and inscriptions is given in a table and appendix of a paper jointly written by Ahmad Al-Jallad and Hythem Sidky. but see Nabataean script The Nabataean script
120-490: The Nabatean Kingdom attest a variety of Old Arabic which may have merged [ð] with [d]. Furthermore, there are 52 Hismaic inscriptions which attest the formula ḏkrt lt [ðakarat allaːtu] "May Allāt be mindful of", foreshadowing similar formulae which are attested in Christian contexts from northern Syria to northern Arabia during the 6th and possibly 7th centuries CE. One such inscription, found near Wadi Rum ,
135-568: The 3rd century BCE, but the vast majority of texts are undatable and so may stretch back much further in time. Aramaic ostraca dated 362–301 BC bear witness to the presence of people of Edomite origin in the southern Shephelah and the Beersheva Valley before the Hellenistic period . They contain personal names that can be defined as Arabic on the basis of their linguistic features: Hismaic inscriptions, contemporaneous with
150-693: The 4th century, which is why Nabataean's letterforms are intermediate between the more northerly Semitic scripts (such as the Aramaic-derived Hebrew ) and those of Arabic. As compared to other Aramaic-derived scripts, Nabataean developed more loops and ligatures , likely to increase speed of writing. The ligatures seem to have not been standardized and varied across places and time. There were no spaces between words. Numerals in Nabataean script were built from characters of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20, and 100. The Nabataean alphabet (U+10880–U+108AF)
165-548: The Islamic Arabic script. It comes prior to Classical Arabic , but it is also a recognizable form of the Arabic script, emerging after a transitional phase of Nabataean Arabic as the Nabataean script slowly evolved into the modern Arabic script. It appears in the late fifth and sixth centuries AD and, though was originally only known from Syria and Jordan , is now also attested in several extant inscriptions from
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#1732765315436180-486: The centuries prior to the standardization Arabic underwent in the Islamic era. According to Ahmad Al-Jallad and Hythem Sidky, Paleo-Arabic can be distinguished from the script that occurs in later periods by a number of orthographic features, including: Known Paleo-Arabic inscriptions fall into one of three categories: As such, they reflect the dominance attained by the spread of monotheism in pre-Islamic Arabia from
195-570: The fourth to sixth centuries in the pre-Islamic period. Paleo-Arabic inscriptions most commonly refer to "God" as al-ʾilāh or by its orthographic variant illāh , though the term Rabb for "Lord" also appears as is seen in the Abd Shams inscription , Jabal Dabub inscription , and the Ri al-Zallalah inscription . The present corpus of Paleo-Arabic inscriptions attests the following introductory formulae: Several Paleo-Arabic inscriptions, including
210-1110: The poorly understood languages labeled Thamudic , and the ancient languages of Yemen written in the Ancient South Arabian script . Old Arabic, is however, distinguished from all of them by the following innovations: The oldest known attestation of the Arabic language dubbed as pre-Historic Arabic language is a bi-lingual inscription written in Old Arabic which was written in the undifferentiated North Arabian script (known as Thamudic B) and Canaanite which remains undeciphered, discovered in Bayir, Jordan . h haː mlkm malkamu w wa kms kamaːsu w wa qws kʼawsu b bi km kumu ʿwḏn ʕawuðnaː h mlkm w kms1 w qws1 b km ʿwḏn haː malkamu wa kamaːsu wa kʼawsu bi kumu ʕawuðnaː "O Malkom and Kemosh and Qaws , in ye we seek refuge" A characteristic of Nabataean Arabic and Old Hijazi (from which Classical Arabic much later developed)
225-522: The publication of Nabataean papyri, the only substantial corpus of detailed Nabataean text were the 38 funerary inscriptions from Hegra (Mada'in Salih) , discovered and published by Charles Montagu Doughty , Charles Huber , Philippe Berger and Julius Euting in 1884-85. The alphabet is descended from the Aramaic alphabet . In turn, a cursive form of Nabataean developed into the Arabic alphabet from
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