Reflections on the linguistic map of pre-Islamic Arabia - Khalili ...

I would therefore suggest the following
alternative explanation.
1) The texts from Haram and those from
Qaryat al-Faw should be considered separately.
The geographical positions, histories
(as far as we can tell), social and cultural
lives of the two towns appear to have been
very different. Haram, even in the Amīrite
period, was firmly within the Sabaean
cultural sphere, even if the dominant part
of the population may have hailed originally
from northern nomad stock (229).
Faw, on the other hand, was an entirely
Central Arabian town, albeit an extremely
cosmopolitan one. Certainly, there was
strong Sabaean influence there – Saba $ was
its most powerful neighbour – but it was
only one element among many, and I do
not get the impression that it was in any
way ‘a South Arabian town’.
2) At Haram, the limited range and nature
of the non-Sabaic elements in the Sabaeo-North-Arabian
inscriptions suggest
that they are clumsy attempts at writing
correct Sabaic by people whose mother
tongue was either a different language, or a
dialect of Sabaic which contained elements
from another language.
3) At Qaryat al-Faw, on the other hand,
the situation is more complex. Here it
seems very probable that at least two forms
of North Arabian coexisted: Old Arabic
and one or more, as yet undefined, dialects
of ANA. There are a handful of texts in Old
Arabic and ANA written in the Sabaic
script, but we cannot know how widespread
this practice was until the Faw
inscriptions are fully published. However,
there are also texts at Faw couched in the
Sabaic language with only a few North
Arabian intrusions and I would suggest
that these, like the Sabaeo-North-Arabian
inscriptions at Haram, are the products of
North-Arabian speakers trying, not entirely
successfully, to write correct Sabaic.
4) Too few inscriptions from Nagˇrān
THE LINGUISTIC MAP OF PRE-ISLAMIC ARABIA
have been published to make any realistic
judgement on the linguistic situation there,
although given its geographical position
one would obviously expect there to have
been a mixture of North Arabian and Ancient
South Arabian languages. We can
only hope that more texts will appear in
the near future.
The late Pre-Islamic period
As we have seen, there are remarkably few
documents in Old Arabic, and until the
sixth century AD there was no single script
associated with it. This implies that, until
the period immediately before the rise of
Islam, it remained a vernacular in societies
which were either non-literate or which
wrote in other languages – Sabaic, Ancient
North Arabian, Aramaic, Greek. We can
only guess at the reasons for this and the
reasons why, on occasions, Old Arabic was
written. In the late first millennium BC and
the early first millennium AD, it was presumably
the vernacular of groups which
were basically non-literate, perhaps primarily
nomadic, which when they moved into
situations where literacy was necessary –
eg. contact with settled peoples – found
writing systems associated with other languages
already established. Those who
wanted to write would therefore have had
to learn the rudiments of the language associated
with the script, or simply have
had their texts written for them by scribes
and masons. Only in very special circumstances
would an individual have insisted
on his text being expressed in the
vernacular, and the problems that this
caused the scribes and masons in adapting
the orthographic conventions of one language
to an unfamiliar tongue, can be seen
both in the true and mixed Old Arabic texts
and in the Undifferentiated-North-Arabian
inscriptions. Since several of these texts in
ANA and Old Arabic (or approximations
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