OCIANA
Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia

The Aramaic scripts of North Arabia

Aramaic was probably introduced into North Arabia as an official written language by the last king of Babylon, Nabonidus. In 552 BC, he conquered Taymāʾ, Dadan (modern al-ʿUlā), Yathrib (modern Medina) and three other oases on the frankincense route and lived at Taymāʾ for 10 years of his 17-year reign. Since Imperial (or Official) Aramaic was the administrative language of the Neo-Babylonian empire, it would almost certainly have been used by Nabonidus' officials in Taymāʾ, indeed we have Aramaic graffiti by two of them. However, we know that some of them could also write in the local language and script, Taymanitic, and some fragmentary cuneiform inscriptions from this period have also been found in the Saudi-German excavations there. After Nabonidus returned to Babylon in 543 BC, it appears that Imperial Aramaic remained one of the written languages at Taymāʾ and seems gradually to have displaced Taymanitic.

The Persian empire of the Achaemenids, which succeeded the Babylonian, continued to use Imperial Aramaic in its administration, though, at present, there is very little evidence of an Achaemenid presence in North Arabia. However, recent excavations at Taymāʾ by a Saudi-German team have discovered that the Lihyanite rulers of Dadan also ruled Taymāʾ at some point and the official inscriptions from this period are couched in Imperial Aramaic, rather than Taymanitic or Dadanitic.

After Alexander the Great's conquest of the Achaemenid empire in 330 BC, North Arabia appears to have been more or less independent and, as in other parts of the former empire, local developments of the Imperial Aramaic script took place in Taymāʾ and possibly elsewhere, though not — on present evidence — in Dadan. However, by the late first century BC the Nabataeans had absorbed much of north-west Arabia into their kingdom, and the Nabataean form of the Aramaic script — itself a local development from Imperial Aramaic — became the standard. The Nabataeans set up the city of Ḥegrā (modern Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ) just 20 km north of Dadan and left large numbers of formal inscriptions and graffiti throughout north-west Arabia.

Although, some of the nomads of North Arabia continued to write in Ancient North Arabian scripts until probably the 4th century AD, but new evidence suggests that at least Thamudic D texts were produced perhaps into the 5th century AD, Nabataean Aramaic was used as the common written language of the settled inhabitants from the first century AD onwards. Indeed, when the Romans set up inscriptions on a small temple at Ruwāfah in the wilds of north-west Arabia, to mark the levying of a military unit from one of the local tribes (the Thamūd), the texts were in Greek for the Roman side and Nabataean as the local written language.

North Arabia was home to continuum of ancient Arabic dialects, most often expressed in the Ancient North Arabian scripts like Safaitic and Hismaic. However, among the Nabataeans, Arabic appears to have remained primarily a spoken language until probably the fifth century AD. It only appears in a handful of texts, e.g. when the writer wanted to make a point by his/her use of language or did not have a very good grasp of Aramaic. Likewise, around the turn of the era, Araboid texts begin to appear on the Yemen frontier, where writers deployed the Ancient South Arabian script to write non-standard forms of Sabaic heavily influenced by a northern Arabian variety. The linguistic nature of this admixture remains a point of scholarly debate. Even more rarely, Arabic speakers carved their vernacular in the Greek script. These precious texts provide an unparalleled glimpse into the phonetics of pre-Islamic vernacular Arabic, as the Greek script was capable of not only expressing short vowels, but also shedding unique light on the pronunciation of the glyphs of the extinct Ancient North Arabian scripts.

By the 5th century AD, the Aramaic component of the Nabataeo-Arabic inscriptions was reduced to formulaic components of the text, usually the word for ‘son’, the dating formula, and introductory particles. This may have been because knowledge of the Aramaic language had faded and more and more people were discovering that it was possible to use the Nabataean script to express their spoken language (Arabic). Although no documents in early Arabic on soft materials have yet been found, we know that there must have been widespread use of the Nabataean script for documents in ink at this period because writing in ink is the stimulus for the development of a script. If a script is only used to carve on stone there is no pressure for development of letter forms and ligatures, apart from cosmetic changes dictated by fashion (as in the formal Ancient South Arabian alphabet) and these are quite different from the developments we see in the Nabataean script. It was in this way that the Nabataean alphabet became widely used to express the Arabic language and developed into what we think of as the ‘Arabic script’. From north-west Arabia, it appears to have spread to Syria in the late fifth century and it is there that the first inscriptions in what is recognizably the Arabic language and script are found in the sixth century.

For further reading see:

  • Al-Jallad, A. and H. Sidky, ‘ A Paleo-Arabic Inscription of a Companion of Muhammad? ’ Journal of Near Eastern Studies , 2024, 83(1): 1-14.
  • Al-Jallad, A., & H. Sidky, H. A Paleo-Arabic inscription on a route north of Ṭāʾif. Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy , 2022, 33: 202–215. https://doi.org/10.1111/aae.12203
  • Fiema, Z.T., Al-Jallad, A., Macdonald, M.C.A., Nehmé, L., Provincia Arabia: Nabataea, the emergence of Arabic as a written language, and Graeco-Arabica. Pages 373-433 in G. Fisher (ed.), Arabs and Empires before Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
  • M.C.A.Macdonald, "Ancient Arabia and the written word". Pages 5–27 in M.C.A. Macdonald (ed.), The development of Arabic as a written language. (Supplement to the volume 40 of the Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies). Oxford: Archaeopress, 2010.
  • L. Nehmé, ‘A glimpse of the development of the Nabataean script into Arabic based on old and new epigraphic material’. Pages 47–88 in M.C.A. Macdonald (ed.), The development of Arabic as a written language. (Supplement to the volume 40 of the Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies). Oxford: Archaeopress, 2010.