The Arabic Language

ʾlʾsdyn
, is controversial: some do indeed interpret 
it as 
malaka l-ʾasadayn
‘he became king of the two tribes ʾAsad’, but others read, 
with Bellamy, 
al-ʾasadiyyīna
‘he became king of the ʾAsadīs’. In both cases, the 
syntactic position requires an oblique case anyway, so that we cannot see whether 
the oblique case would have been used in the subject position as well, as in the 
new type of Arabic.
With the ʿĒn ʿAvdat and the an-Namāra inscriptions, we have the first docu -
ments in unequivocal Arabic, but they are still written in a different script. There 
are, however, also a few pre-Islamic inscriptions in Arabic in a script that may be 
called Arabic. The following inscriptions are known:
1. graffiti from Jabal Ramm, east of al-ʿAqaba (middle of the fourth century 
ce
); according to Macdonald (2008: 469) these are written in a transitional 
script between Nabataean and Arabic;
2. the inscription in three languages (Arabic/Syriac/Greek) from Zabad near 
Aleppo (512 
ce
);
3. the inscription from Jabal ʾUsays, ± 100 km south-east of Damascus (528 ce
);
4. the inscription from Ḥarrān in the northern Ḥōrān (568 ce
); and
5. the inscription from ʾUmm al-Jimāl in the southern Ḥōrān from the sixth 
century 
ce
.
The inscription from Ḥarrān, for instance, reads: 
ʾnʾ šrḥyl br ṭlmw bnyt dʾ ʾlmrṭwl 
šnt 463 bʿd mfsd ḫybr bʿm
(Robin 1992: 117), that is, in Classical Arabic 
ʾanā Šaraḥīl bin 
Ẓālim banaytu ḏā l-marṭūla sanata 463 baʿda mafsadi Ḫaybar bi-ʿāmin
‘I, Šaraḥīl, son of 
Ẓālim [or Ṭalmū], built this temple in the year 463 [i.e., 568 ce
], one year after the 
destruction of Ḫaybar’. As these inscriptions are very short and their interpreta-
tion often controversial, their interest is not so much linguistic as epigraphic, 
since they show us the early development of the later Arabic script.
The Arabic sources, as long as they do not attribute the invention of the 
Arabic script to Adam or Ishmael, tell us that the script had been introduced 
from abroad, either from the South Arabian region by the tribe Jurhum or from 
Mesopotamia. The latter theory was supported by the people in al-Ḥīra, who 
claimed that there was some connection with the Syriac script (Ibn an-Nadīm, 
al-Fihrist
, ed. Riḍā Tajaddud, Beirut, 3rd edn, 1988, pp. 7–8). As a matter of fact, the 

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38
The Arabic Language
Figure 3.1 The development of Arabic script (from Hans Jensen, Sign, Symbol 
and Script, 3rd edn, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970, p. 322)

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The Earliest Stages of Arabic 
39
notation of the short vowels in Arabic script, as well as some other features, were 
probably borrowed from Syriac in the first century of Islam (cf. below, Chapter 
4). In modern times, a theory of Syriac origin was proposed by Starcky (1966). 
He pointed out that in Nabataean script the letters seem to be suspended from a 
line, whereas in both Syriac and Arabic script the letters appear to stand on a line. 
He therefore assumed that in al-Ḥīra, the capital of the Laḫmid dynasty, a form 
of Syriac cursive script had developed into the Arabic alphabet (see Figure 3.1).
The theory of Syriac origin has now been abandoned by most scholars. 
Luxenberg’s (2000) thesis about the Syriac/Aramaic origin of the 
Qurʾān
,
 
which 
revives this theory and maintains that the script’s defectiveness was the source 
of a number of misinterpretations of the text, has not gained general accep
-
tance. It seems much more likely that the Arabic alphabet is derived from a 
type of cursive Nabataean. In the Aramaic script, from which Nabataean writing 
ultimately derives, there are no ligatures between the letters. But in later forms 
of the Nabataean epigraphic script, between the third and the fifth centuries ce
transitional forms between Nabataean and Arabic script can be detected (Nehmé 
2010). Besides, in the cursive forms of the Nabataean script, most of the features 
that characterise the Arabic script already appear. Even before 200 
ce
, Nabataean 
ostraca from the Negev exhibit a cursive script with extensive use of connections, 
which in epigraphic Nabataean script were not developed until after 400 
ce
. It is 
conceivable, therefore, that the elaboration of a cursive script that could also be 
used for texts in Arabic took place as early as the second century 
ce
. The most 
important internal development in Arabic script is the systematic elaboration 
of connections between the letters within the word, and the system of different 
forms of the letters according to their position within the word.
With the inscriptions in (pre-)Arabic script, we are slowly approaching the 
pre-Islamic period proper, called in Arabic the 
Jāhiliyya
, the period in which 
the Bedouin did not yet know the revelation of the 
Qurʾān
. This period will be 
dealt with in Chapter 4. The sum total of the evidence mentioned in the present 
chapter is not large. The number of inscriptions is considerable, but even within 
the lengthiest ones there is not enough material to enable us to trace the develop
-
ment of the Arabic language in the period preceding the historical period. Still, 
the stage of the language that we find in the Ṯamūdic, Liḥyānitic, Ṣafāʾitic and 
Ḥasāʾitic inscriptions, and the Arabic elements that emerge from the Aramaic 
inscriptions from Petra and Palmyra, give us at least some glimpse of this early 
development. At the very least, we know that before the earliest written testi
-
monies there was some kind of development, and even though we do not know 
what the language of the 
Aribi
and the inhabitants of Arbāya was, we know that 
for a long time nomads calling themselves by a name derived from the radicals 
ʿrb
inhabited the desert. We also know that at least from the first century ce
onwards 
some of them used a language that was closely related to Classical Arabic.

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40
The Arabic Language