Roads of Arabia

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ROADS OF ARABIA
Languages and Scripts
Rawwafa bilingual inscription.
The Jews used Sabaic, Hebrew and Judaeo-Aramaean in their inscriptions in Yemen,
but only different varieties of Aramaic in north-west Arabia. The local language was very
probably preferred for social purposes and Hebrew and Judaeo-Aramaean for religion and
teaching. The many Judaeo-Aramaic terms used in the Himyar tongue confirms this
hypothesis. Another clue to this was supplied by the Muslim theologian al-Bukhari, in a
commentary on the “Cow” surat, in which he notes that Jews read the scriptures in Hebrew
then explained them in the local language.
The language of the Jews of Hijaz during Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH) time
According to Arab-Islamic Tradition, the Jews of Hijaz spoke an Arabic dialect called
yahudiyya, slightly different from that of the region’s other inhabitants. Several anecdotes
mention this. It is recounted for example that an inhabitant of Medina called ‘Abd Allah b.
‘Atik, could speak this Jewish dialect because his mother was a Jew from Khaybar. For this
reason, he was appointed head of the expedition which secretly entered Khaybar and killed
Sallam b. Abu ‘l-Huqayq Abu Rafi‘, one of Muhammad’s leading Jewish opponents. It is
also written that during the Battle of the Trench, the sentinel of the Jewish tribe of Qurayza,
which captured Khawwat b. Jubayr, spoke yahudiyya with his companions. One assumes
that this “Yiddish Saracen” was an Arabic full of special turns of phrase and locutions, probably
borrowed from Aramaic. However, Jewish poets such as al-Samaw’al de Tayma , whose
works have survived, wrote in classical Arabic.
A single script with numerous varieties
The Arabic alphabets and their manifold varieties can be divided into two families, the
“South Arabic or “Sabaean” family in Yemen and neighbouring regions, and the “North
Arabic” family between Syria and Yemen. The South Arabic group largely consists of the socalled
“monumental” writing used in formal inscriptions in South Arabia and its cursory
variety, and the various closely related alphabets used in graffiti in Yemen and southern Saudi
Arabia. It also includes the script used for writing Hagaric in the Arabian Gulf (why the
kingdom of Hagar chose to do so is a mystery). South Arabic monumental script can be
called “Sabaean” because it was elaborated and formalized in the kingdom of Saba.
The North Arabic family is more complex, with the so-called “Dedanite” monumental
alphabet of al-Ula (ancient Dedan), and the wide variety of alphabets used in graffiti. These
two families are clearly derived from the same model: the most ancient forms of the Sabaean
and Dedanite alphabets are very similar. Nevertheless, this model is neither attested nor
clearly situated in time and space. The ensemble can be called “Arabic alphabet”.
The Sabaean alphabet
All the peoples of southern Arabia, the Sabaeans, Qatabanites, Hadramites, Himyarites and the
inhabitants of Najran and Qaryat al-Faw, use the same alphabet. Cultural unity is manifest. Only
a few letters, usually infrequently used ones such as ghayn and ẓ a’, sometimes have a local form.
Although letters have the same form, modes of execution can vary slightly in time and place
(from one kingdom to another), as Jacqueline Pirenne has well shown. Texts can be approximately
dated and attributed to a region according to their graphic style. The Sabaean alphabet has twentynine
letters, all of which note consonants. The order of the letters is known from a handful of alphabet
primers: h l ḥ m q w s 2 r b t s 1 k n h ṣ s 3 f ’ ‘ ḍ g d g ṭ z d y t ẓ
In the most ancient of these alphabet primers, probably dating from the 7th century, the
d and z are inverted. The vowels are generally not written, but when the consonants /w/ and
/y/ come at the end of the word they can have a vocalic value instead of their consonantic signification.
In Minaic and Hadramitic, the /h/ is sometimes used to indicate the /a/ timbre.
Sabaean script has another six numeric symbols, only used before the Christian era.
Four of these symbols are the first letter of a number (’for ’alf, “thousand”; m for mi’at,
“hundred”; ‘ for ‘ashara, “ten” and h for amsa, “five”). The fifth is derived from such a letter
(the half-m signifying “fifty”). The sixth is merely a vertical line to denote the unit. To
avoid confusion, the letters and symbols used with a numerical value are placed between
two specific signs (a double vertical line linked by several horizontal segments). There is a
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