Ancient South Arabian script


The Ancient South Arabian script branched from the Proto-Sinaitic script in about the late 2nd millennium BCE, and remained in use through the late sixth century CE. It is an abjad, a writing system where only consonants are obligatorily written, a trait shared with its predecessor, Proto-Sinaitic, as well as some of its sibling writing systems, including Arabic and Hebrew. It is a predecessor of the Ge'ez script, and a sibling script of the Phoenician alphabet and, through that, the modern Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets.
The script is really two variants: the monumental and the minuscule script, the former for inscriptions, the latter scratched with wooden sticks. The scripts have a common origin but evolved into separate systems.

History

The earliest instances of the Ancient South Arabian script are painted pottery sherds from Raybun in Hadhramaut in Yemen, which are dated to the late 2nd millennium BCE. It is an abjad script, meaning that only consonants are usually written in the script, with vowels inferred from context; it shares this feature both with its predecessor, the Proto-Sinaitic script, and modern Semitic languages. It is unclear precisely how and when the ASA script diverged from Proto-Sinaitic script, as inscriptions from its earliest days are rare. As with these other abjads, some vowels can be indicated if necessary, by including diacritical markings, called matres lectionis.
Its mature form was reached around 800 BCE, and it remained use in more or less the same form until the 6th century CE. In those centuries, it was used to write multiple languages of the Southern Arabian peninsula and the Horn of Africa, including Sabaic, Qatabanic, Hadramautic, Minaean, Hasaitic, and Geʽez. It was eventually displaced by the modern Arabic alphabet during the early years of the spread of Islam. The modern Arabic writing system is related to the ASA script, as both are children of the Proto-Sinaitic script, but modern Arabic derives from the Phoenician and Nabatean scripts rather than ASA.
The Geʽez script is the sole extant writing system that derives from ASA. Unlike ASA, Geʽez is an abugida; the primary characters are pairs of consonants and vowels, with each character representing a syllable. Geʽez has been used to write Amharic, Tigrinya and Tigre, as well as other languages. ASA is also a sibling of the Phoenician – the ancestor of most of the modern European alphabets, such as Latin, Cyrillic and Greek.

Properties

  • It is usually written from right to left but can also be written from left to right. When written from left to right the characters are flipped horizontally.
  • The spacing or separation between words is done with a vertical bar mark.
  • Letters in words are not connected together.
  • It does not implement any diacritical marks, differing in this respect from the modern Arabic alphabet.

    Difference from the Arabic script

The Musnad script differs from the Arabic script, which most linguists believe developed from the Nabataean script in the fourth century AD, which in turn developed from the Aramaic script. The languages of the Southern Musnad script also differ greatly from the Northern Arabic language in terms of script, lexicon, grammar, styles, and perhaps sounds, and the letters of the script increase. The Musnad is derived from Arabic with an extra sibilant letter or the third sīn.

Letters

Numerals

Six signs are used for numbers:
1510501001000

The sign for 50 was evidently created by removing the lower triangle from the sign for 100. The sign for 1 doubles as a word separator. The other four signs double as both letters and numbers. Each of these four signs is the first letter of the name of the corresponding numeral.
An additional sign is used to bracket numbers, setting them apart from surrounding text. For example,
These signs are used in an additive system similar to Roman numerals to represent any number. Two examples:
  • 17 is written as 1 + 1 + 5 + 10:
  • 99 is written as 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 5 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 50:
12345678910
11121314151617181920

Thousands are written two different ways:
  • Smaller values are written using just the 1000 sign. For example, 8,000 is written as 1000 × 8:
  • Larger values are written by promoting the signs for 10, 50, and 100 to 10,000, 50,000, and 100,000 respectively:
  • * 31,000 is written as 1000 + 10,000 × 3:
  • * 40,000 is written as 10,000 × 4:
  • * 253,000 is written as 2 × 100.000 + 50.000 + 3 × 1000:
Perhaps because of ambiguity, numerals, at least in monumental inscriptions, are always clarified with the numbers written out in words.

Zabūr

Zabūr, also known as "South Arabian minuscules", is the name of the cursive form of the South Arabian script that was used by the Sabaeans in addition to their monumental script, or Musnad.
Zabur was a writing system in ancient Yemen along with Musnad. The difference between the two is that Musnad documented historical events, meanwhile Zabur writings were used for religious scripts or to record daily transactions among ancient Yemenis. Zabur writings could be found in palimpsest form written on papyri or palm-leaf stalks.

Unicode

The South Arabian alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in October, 2009 with the release of version 5.2.
The Unicode block, called Old South Arabian, is U+10A60–U+10A7F.
Note that U+10A7D OLD SOUTH ARABIAN NUMBER ONE represents both the numeral one and a word divider.

In modern culture

Yemeni archeologist and linguist Mutaher al-Eryani was keen to record a memorial in the Musnad script and in the Sabaean language, commemorating the renovation of the Ma’rib Dam in 1986, which was carried out at the expense of Sheikh Zayed and in conjunction with the celebration of victory in the North Yemen Civil War against the Kingdom of Yemen. The inscription was published in a scientific article written by the Frenchman Christian Robin as the last official Musnad inscription.