thumb|upright=1.2|South Arabian inscription addressed to the Sabaean national god [[Almaqah|class=skin-invert]]
The Ancient South Arabian script (; modern ) 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. 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.
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.
Letters
thumb|Sabaean letter examples on page 274 of the book "Illustrirte Geschichte der Schrift" by Carl Faulmann, 1880
thumb|Sabaean letter examples on page 275 of the book "Illustrirte Geschichte der Schrift" by Carl Faulmann, 1880
{| class="wikitable" id="letters_chart" style="text-align: center;"
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! rowspan="2" | Ancient South Arabian Letter
! rowspan="2" | Phoneme
! rowspan="2" | IPA
! colspan="9" | Corresponding letter in
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! Ancient North Arabian
! Ge'ez
! Phoenician
! Aramaic
! Arabic
! Hebrew
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thumb|Wikipedia, written with letters, from right to left on the upper line and from left to right on the bottom one. Notice how the letters are mirrored.
Numerals
<!-- Note that and are used here because Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge don't treat the Arabian as right-to-left, causing the display to be incorrect. Firefox and Chrome display the text correctly regardless. -->
Six signs are used for numbers:
{| class="wikitable"
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! 1 !! 5 !! 10 !! 50 !! 100 !! 1000
|- align=center
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|}
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.
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 (𐩽) represents both the numeral one and a word divider.
Gallery
- Photos from National Museum of Yemen:
<gallery>
File:Sabaic inscription (YM 371) in the National Museum of Yemen.jpg|
File:Sana'_national_museum_03.jpg|
File:Sana'_national_museum_04.jpg|
File:Sana'_national_museum_05.jpg|
File:Sana'_national_museum_06.jpg|
File:Sana'_national_museum_08.jpg|
File:Sana'_national_museum_09.jpg|
File:Sana'_national_museum_10.jpg|
File:Sana'_national_museum_11.jpg|
File:Sana'_national_museum_12.jpg|
File:Sana'_national_museum_13.jpg|
</gallery>
- Photos from Yemen Military Museum:
<gallery>
File:Sana'_military_museum_05.JPG| * Photos from the Mukalla Museum
File:Sana'_military_museum_06.JPG|
File:Sana'_military_museum_08.JPG|
</gallery><gallery>
File:Musnad script on a stone.jpg
File:Frankincense burners.jpg
File:Frankincense burners (1).jpg
</gallery>
- Photo from the British Museum
<gallery>
File:Incense burner, from Yemen, 5th-4th century BCE. An ancient South Arabian inscription about the names of incense. British Museum.jpg|Incense burner, from Yemen, 5th-4th century BCE. An ancient South Arabian inscription about the names of incense
</gallery>
See also
- Ancient North Arabian script
- Arabist and archeologist Eduard Glaser
- Geographer Carl Rathjens
- Paleo-Arabic
References
Citations
References
External links
- Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
- Omniglot's entry on South Arabian
- Carved, Signed, Crossed Out – Documents on Wooden Sticks from Ancient South Arabia – Peter Stein – ANE Today – Oct 2022