The Arabic Script before Islam
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| Qurʾanic palimpsest in Hijazi script |
Before Islam, the Arabs had a predominantly oral culture. Their main art form was poetry, an immaterial heritage deposited, as the Arabic language puts it, “in the breasts of men” (fi sudur al‐nas).
The written language was used for secondary purposes: among thousands of pre‐Islamic inscriptions discovered in the Arabian desert, many are short invocations of the gods, or simple declarations about everyday life probably carved as a pastime by travelers and nomadic pastoralists.
As far as writing with pen and ink is concerned, a huge time gap separates the latest extant papyri written in Nabataean, the Aramaic script of Petra in northwestern Arabia (second century), from their distant offshoots, the earliest Arabic documents, which date to the first decades of Islam (seventh century).
Nevertheless, several elements of content and context make it likely that Arabic portable documents were written in the intervening period for correspondence, contracts, and other utilitarian purposes.
Papyrus presumably continued to be used, in which case it may have needed to be imported from across the Red Sea. Archaeological finds in the Yemen have only yielded more makeshift writing materials, such as palm stalks, ceramic fragments, and bones: being readily available and economical, they are likely to have also been employed in the neighboring Hijaz, the cradle of Islam.
In antiquity, Old Arabic, the linguistic ancestor of Qurʾanic Arabic, had been written by borrowing the alphabet of adjoining regions, such as South Arabian near the Yemen and the native Ancient North Arabian scripts in the Hijaz.
These were all derivatives of the South Semitic alphabet, which only survives today in the form of the Ethiopic syllabary. At an early date, the Nabataean script also began to spread in the northwest of the Arabian Peninsula.
By the fourth century, it had eclipsed all other scripts in that region, where it underwent an evolution that gave rise to the script we know as “Arabic.” In this process, several Nabataean letter shapes were progressively transformed, and the ligatures that joined the letters were moved from the top to the bottom of the writing line.
Paradoxically, the extinct Ancient North Arabian scripts had been better suited to record the full range of sounds in the Arabic language. Being an Aramaic alphabet, Nabataean only offered some 16 letter shapes to record the 28 phonemes of Arabic (29 if one counts the glottal stop, hamza). This deficiency was innately more acute for longer texts or texts not known by memory or convention, as would become apparent in the early years of Islam.
By the fourth century, it had eclipsed all other scripts in that region, where it underwent an evolution that gave rise to the script we know as “Arabic.” In this process, several Nabataean letter shapes were progressively transformed, and the ligatures that joined the letters were moved from the top to the bottom of the writing line.
Paradoxically, the extinct Ancient North Arabian scripts had been better suited to record the full range of sounds in the Arabic language. Being an Aramaic alphabet, Nabataean only offered some 16 letter shapes to record the 28 phonemes of Arabic (29 if one counts the glottal stop, hamza). This deficiency was innately more acute for longer texts or texts not known by memory or convention, as would become apparent in the early years of Islam.
The Nabataean origin of the Arabic script has only been decisively established in recent years thanks to the discovery of a growing number of transitional late Nabataean inscriptions, especially in Saudi Arabia.
It was particularly associated with the Syrian Orthodox Church and the Church of the East, two native churches of the Middle East respectively called “Jacobite” and “Nestorian” by their detractors.
In the sixth century, their missionary activities extended to Yemen, East Arabia, India, and Central Asia. Closer to their homelands, they also worked to convert Arabs of the desert areas between Syria and Iraq. In seeking to reach out to these constituencies, they appear to have used the Arabic script, even though they had not invented it.
For much of the twentieth century, a strand in scholarship had instead posited a Syriac origin of the script.
Syriac, the written form of the Aramaic dialect of Edessa, was a major language of liturgy, literature, and culture in the first millennium.
It was particularly associated with the Syrian Orthodox Church and the Church of the East, two native churches of the Middle East respectively called “Jacobite” and “Nestorian” by their detractors.
In the sixth century, their missionary activities extended to Yemen, East Arabia, India, and Central Asia. Closer to their homelands, they also worked to convert Arabs of the desert areas between Syria and Iraq. In seeking to reach out to these constituencies, they appear to have used the Arabic script, even though they had not invented it.
Only three dated pre‐Islamic inscriptions in the fully formed “Arabic” script have been discovered to date, and in different ways they reflect this context .
All of them are from Greater Syria: the inscriptions of Zabad (512 ce) and Harran (568 ce) originally belonged to churches; the graffito from Jabal Usays (529 ce) was carved by an envoy of the Ghassanid king al‐Harith ibn Jabala (r. 529–569), an Arab Christian ally of Byzantium.
A visual contrast with the latest dated Nabataean transitional texts is apparent: the ligatures have become straight, while the tall strokes are parallel to one another and slanting to the right. These essentially aesthetic transformations convey an unprecedented sense of regularity to the script. They were probably introduced under the influence of Syriac, and eventually made their way into the earliest Qurʾanic scripts.
A visual contrast with the latest dated Nabataean transitional texts is apparent: the ligatures have become straight, while the tall strokes are parallel to one another and slanting to the right. These essentially aesthetic transformations convey an unprecedented sense of regularity to the script. They were probably introduced under the influence of Syriac, and eventually made their way into the earliest Qurʾanic scripts.
Book Reference:
A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, First Edition. Edited by Finbarr Barry Flood and Gülru Necipoğlu. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
