Dadanitic

Dadanitic [formerly called ‘Dedanite’ and ‘Lihyanite’] was the alphabet used by the inhabitants of the ancient oasis of Dadan (Biblical Dedān, modern al-ʿUlā in north-west Saudi Arabia), during the second half of the first millennium BC, and possibly earlier. Dadan was an important centre on the caravan route bringing frankincense and other aromatics from ancient South Arabia to Egypt, the Levant and the Mediterranean. Dadanitic does not seem to be an Arabic dialect but has the same repertoire of 28 phonemes as Arabic. It is the only ANA script to use matres lectionis, (i.e. some letters — h, w, and y — to represent both consonants and long vowels or, in the case of y a diphthong) at the end of words, though not within words. It was used for both formal inscriptions and graffiti. The fact that many of the letters developed informal shapes, at the same time as the formal ones were being used — we can see both shapes in the same inscriptions — strongly suggests that the script was being used extensively to write in ink. This is because changing the shape of a letter is of no help to someone who only carves on stone. It is only when one is writing in ink that pressures of speed and ease provide the impetus for developing letter forms to make them easier and quicker to write. These new forms are then sometimes transferred to stone. Dadanitic inscriptions and graffiti are mainly concentrated in the oasis of al-ʿUlā and the mountains surrounding it, with very few distributed more widely.