The Arabic Language

3.2 Ancient North Arabian
For the earliest elements of the Arabic language we have to turn to inscriptions in 
other languages. In the South Arabian inscriptions, we find a few proper names 
of a non-South Arabian type (cf. 
GAP
, I, 27), for example, 
zyd
(Zayd), 
ʾslm
(ʾAslam), 
or with the South Arabian mimation ending, for example, 
slymm
(Sulaymum), 
ʿbydm
(ʿUbaydum), sometimes even with the Arabic article, for example, 
ʾlḥrṯ
(al-Ḥāriṯ). These may refer to North Arabian nomads, whom the South Arabian 
empires employed to protect the caravans along the incense road through 
the Arabian desert. Of more interest from the linguistic point of view are four 
groups of inscriptions, first discovered in the nineteenth century and written in 
a language that seems to be an early stage of the later Arabic language. These 
inscriptions use scripts derived from Epigraphic South Arabian. The language in 
which they are written has sometimes been called proto-Arabic or Early Arabic, 

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The Earliest Stages of Arabic 
29
but will be referred to here as Ancient North Arabian, in order to distinguish it 
from the language of the Arabic inscriptions (proto-Arabic; see below) and the 
language of the early Islamic papyri (Early Arabic). Since most of the inscrip
-
tions are fragmentary and the vast majority of them contain nothing but proper 
names, the exact identification of the language involved is difficult. At any rate, 
the language of these inscriptions is closely related to what we know as Classical 
Arabic. The four groups of inscriptions are the following.
3.2.1 Ṯamūdic
The 
Qurʾān
mentions the people of Ṯamūd as an example of an earlier commu-
nity that perished because it did not accept the message of its prophet, in this 
case the prophet Ṣāliḥ (e.g., 
Q
7/73ff.). The name Ṯamūd occurs in a number of 
historical contexts as well. We have seen above that the Tamudi were mentioned 
in one of the inscriptions of the Assyrian king Sargon II, who settled them near 
Samaria (715 
bce). The name Ṯamūdic has been given to the tens of thousands 
of mostly short inscriptions in a script derived from the South Arabian script 
that have been discovered in a string of oases in west and central-north Arabia, 
along the caravan route to the south, as far as north Yemen. The inscriptions date 
from the sixth century 
bce 
to the fourth century 
ce
; most of them were found in 
Dūmat al-Jandal and al-Ḥijr. One isolated group stems from the oasis of Taymāʾ. 
Most of the inscriptions are rather short, containing almost exclusively proper 
names of the type ‘A, son of B’. They do not tell us much about the structure of 
the language; it is not even clear whether they all belong to the same language. 
But in any case they all belong to the North Arabian group, characterised by the 
definite article 
h-
(e.g., 
h-gml
‘the/this camel’).
3.2.2 Liḥyānitic
The earliest examples of these inscriptions, likewise in a South Arabian type of 
script, probably date from the second half of the first millennium bce
, from the 
oasis of Dadan, modern al-ʿUlā, 300 km north-west of Medina, on the incense 
route from Yemen to Syria. Originally, this oasis was a Minaean colony, but later it 
became a protectorate of Ptolemaic Egypt until the second half of the first century 
bce. Sometimes a distinction is made between Dadanitic and Liḥyānitic inscrip-
tions on the basis of the royal titles that are used. The oldest are the Dadanitic 
(also called Dedanitic), which refer to the kings of Dadan (
mlk ddn
). The majority 
of the more than 500 inscriptions from the oasis refer to the kings of Liḥyān; they 
belong to the period between the fourth and first centuries bce
.
Some of the inscriptions consist of personal names only, often preceded by
 
l-
, possibly indicating the author of the inscription, or more likely the person 
for whom the inscription was made. There are, however, also larger texts (votive 
inscriptions, building inscriptions, etc.). The language of the inscriptions belongs 

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30
The Arabic Language
to the North Arabian group, with an article 
h-
or 
hn- 
(e.g., 
h-gbl hn-ʾʿly
‘the highest 
mountain’ and 
h-gbl hn-ʾsfl
‘the lowest mountain’) (Robin 1992: 118).
3.2.3 Ṣafā
ʾ
itic
The Ṣafāʾitic inscriptions, also written in a South Arabian type of script, received 
their name from the Ṣafāʾ area, south-east of Damascus. In this area and 
neighbouring regions, as far as the northern parts of Saudi Arabia, more than 
15,000 inscriptions have been found. They date from the first century bce
to the 
third century 
ce
and mostly contain only proper names, almost always preceded 
by the preposition 
l-
. A number of somewhat larger inscriptions refer to Bedouin 
camp sites, and to mourning for the dead. In some inscriptions, reference is made 
to political events in the area with the word 
snt
‘in the year that’. In this word, we 
also see the spelling of the feminine ending, 
-t
; only in female proper names is the 
pausal ending 
-h
sometimes used. Unlike the later Arabic script, this script does 
not indicate the long vowels; thus, 
dr
stands for 
dār
‘camp site’. The diphthongs 
are very often not written either, so that 
mt
usually stands for 
mwt
‘death’, and 
bt
for 
byt
‘tent’. Possibly, this vacillation in spelling represents a development in the 
pronunciation of the diphthongs, 
ay
> 
ē
, 
aw
> 
ō
. The article is 
h-
, possibly originally 
hn-
with gemination of certain following consonants because of assimilation of 
the 
n-
.
In Ṣafāʾitic, the sound plural ends in 
-n
, which may stand for 
-ūn
and 
-īn
, since 
the script does not have a special spelling for the long vowels. Thus, we have, for 
instance, 
h-ḍlln
, that is, 
haḍ-ḍālilūn/īn
‘those who err’ (cf. Arabic 
aḍ-ḍāllūn/īn
, with 
contraction of the two identical consonants). The causative stem is formed with 
ʾ-
, as in the verb 
ʾšrq
, imperfect 
yšrq
‘to go east’ (cf. Arabic 
ʾašraqa
/
yušriqu
). There 
seem to be some lexical similarities with the North-west Semitic languages, such 
as in the word 
mdbr
‘desert’ (cf. Hebrew 
midbār
).
3.2.4 Ḥasā
ʾ
itic
To this group belong some forty inscriptions, most of which have been found 
in the Saudi Arabian province of al-Ḥasā on the Gulf, probably dating from the 
period between the fifth and the second centuries bce
. They are written in a 
script that is almost identical with the South Arabian script. The inscriptions are 
very short and do not tell us much about the structure of the language, but it is 
clear that the article in these inscriptions, too, is 
hn-
in proper names like 
hn-ʾlt
, 
the name of the goddess ʾIlāt.
If we take only the article as a discriminatory feature, all the inscriptions 
mentioned here belong to a 
h(n)-
group, contrasting with the Classical Arabic 
ʾl-
. 
Contrary to the situation in the South Arabian languages, which have a postposed 
article 
-n
or 
-hn
, the article in North Arabian is preposed, as in Arabic. With Arabic, 
the language of the inscriptions also shares the reduction of the sibilants to two 

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The Earliest Stages of Arabic 
31
(
s
, 
š
), whereas South Arabian has three sibilants (
s
, 
š
and a lateralised 
ś
). On the 
other hand, they usually have a causative prefix 
h-
(South Arabian 
s-
/
h-
; Arabic
ʾ-
). 
The pronominal suffix of the third person is formed with 
-h-
(South Arabian 
-s-
, 
except Sabaean 
-h-
; Arabic 
-h-
). These are probably not the only traits that distin
-
guish these languages from Arabic and South Arabian, but at the present stage of 
research no further conclusions can be drawn.