History of the Arabic alphabet

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources:  –  ·  ·  · scholar · JSTOR (August 2010) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

The history of the Arabic alphabet concerns the origins and the evolution of the Arabic script. It is thought that the Arabic alphabet is a derivative of the Nabataean variation of the Aramaic alphabet, which descended from the Phoenician alphabet which among others, gave rise to the Hebrew alphabet and the Greek alphabet (and therefore the Cyrillic and Roman alphabets).

Origins[]

The Arabic alphabet evolved either from the Nabataean,^[1][2] or (less widely believed) directly from the Syriac.^[3] The table below shows changes undergone by the shapes of the letters from the Aramaic original to the Nabataean and Syriac forms. The Arabic script shown is that of post-Classical and Modern Arabic -- notably different from 6th century Arabic script. (Arabic is placed in the middle for clarity and not to mark a time order of evolution.)

It seems that the Nabataean alphabet became the Arabic alphabet thus:

• In the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, northern Arab tribes emigrated and founded a kingdom centred around Petra, Jordan. These people (now named Nabataeans from the name of one of the tribes, Nabatu) spoke Nabataean Arabic, a Northwest Semitic language.
• In the 2nd or 1st centuries BCE,^[4][5] the first known records of the Nabataean alphabet were written in the Aramaic language (which was the language of communication and trade), but included some Arabic language features: the Nabataeans did not write the language which they spoke. They wrote in a form of the Aramaic alphabet, which continued to evolve; it separated into two forms: one intended for inscriptions (known as "monumental Nabataean") and the other, more cursive and hurriedly written and with joined letters, for writing on papyrus.^[6] This cursive form influenced the monumental form more and more and gradually changed into the Arabic alphabet.
• Laïla Nehmé has demonstrated the transition of scripts from the Nabataean Aramaic to the recognisably Arabic form that appears to have occurred between the third and fifth centuries CE, replacing the indigenous Arabic alphabet.^[7]

Pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions[]

Petroglyphs in Wadi Rum (Jordan)

The first recorded text in the Arabic alphabet was written in 512. It is a trilingual dedication in Greek, Syriac and Arabic found at Zabad in Syria. The version of the Arabic alphabet used includes only 21 letters, of which only 15 are different, being used to note 28 phonemes:

Phoenician		Nabataean	Syriac	Arabic	Latin
Image	Text