# Ancient #writing Lecture : The curious history of written #Arabic

**Channel:** Cultural Heritage Event Series
**Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2IWyfm3510
**Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/k2IWyfm3510

## Chapters

- 0:00 — Language, Writing, and Arab Identity
- 6:51 — Early Arabic Speech and Scripts
- 15:39 — Nomad Graffiti and Nabataean Arabic
- 24:27 — Roman Rule and Script Development
- 34:19 — From Nabataean to Arabic Script
- 45:02 — Q&A on Nabataean Dating Questions
- 46:40 — Q&A on Language and Culture
- 49:29 — Q&A on Arab Origins
- 51:04 — Q&A on Nomad Literacy
- 53:15 — Q&A on Rock and Script Forms
- 55:32 — Q&A on Arabic Vocabulary Change
- 58:12 — Q&A on Arabic Standardization
- 1:00:20 — Q&A on Archaeological Finds
- 1:00:59 — Q&A on Reference Materials
- 1:02:46 — Q&A on Arabic's Future
- 1:05:15 — Closing Thanks and Farewell

## Transcript

**[0:00]:** language and writing are two quite different things they're often confused there's no necessary connection between them and many languages have survived purely and speech without their users feeling the need to write them down when a particular event makes it necessary to write something the speaker has the choice of either asking someone literate to write in another language for them or much more rarely of trying to express what they want to say in their own tongue but using the script of the nearest written language thus for centuries or more the speaker's of the non-arabic modern south arabian languages in oman and yemen fairy or Diwali mercury circuitry etc never found it necessary to write their spoken tongues on the rare occasions when something did need to be written they would ask a literate Arabic speaker to write it in Arabic for them now however with the arrival of the mobile phone many speakers of modern south

**[1:08]:** arabian languages want to text in their own tongue and say they learn enough of the arabic script to transcribe their language on the keys of the phone although the arabic script is not particularly suitable for this that is irrelevant to these textures and i shall come back to this later my story begins with the earliest reference to people called Arabs in 853 BC as many of you will know this is the Assyrian report that gandi Bou the Arab joined 11 other leaders from Syria and Palestine at the Battle of Kaka to find Assyrian expect to fight a Syrian expansion in northern Syria it seems likely that he would only have done so if he felt threatened by this expansion and so he was probably from an area in Syria rather than in what we think of as the Arabian Peninsula from the eighth century BC until roughly the 1st century AD we find references to

**[2:11]:** Arabs and Arabia's all around the Crescent and on the northern and eastern borders of the peninsula but not in what we today think of as Arabia indeed in looking at the history of the Arabs it's very important to remember the principle enunciated by Herodotus in the pit century BC that quote Egypt is all that country which is inhabited by Egyptians just as solicit Silesia and Assyria of the countries inhabited by solutions and the Syrians unquote that is for the Greeks a country took its name from its inhabitants not the other way around this means that before about the 1st century AD Abram Arabia in the writings of Greek and Roman sources meant any place where there were people whom they called or Arabs this does not mean that these places were populated only by Arabs but that this was where the Arabs they happen to be talking about lived as you can see these Greek

**[3:13]:** ancient Greek and Roman writers found Arabs and hence lots of different Arabia's over a huge area of the Fertile Crescent from eastern Egypt up through Syria and down through Mesopotamia to the Gulf ironically the only part of the peninsula which are Greek and Latin sources called arabia was Arabia Felix modern Yemen and this was based on a misunderstanding the peoples of ancient South Arabia of those ancient south arabian kingdoms of saba marine Caliban and her thermic were not Arabs in any sense and would not have appreciated being identified as them with fries with the reason that the Greeks and Romans thought they were Arabs was a result of it was a result of the trade in frankincense and other aromatics which were either grown in or imported into South Arabia and then brought up the western side of the peninsula and sold in the Levant Egypt and the Mediterranean countries by Arab merchants by a

**[4:22]:** very common mental process the purchases associated the merchandise with the merchants and so assumed that it was produced by the people who sold it that's one of the earliest references to frankincense in Greek literature calls it the Arabian vapor it's important to realize that it is because of this mistake that the whole peninsula eventually came to be called Arabia in the literature of the Greek and Roman conquerors of the Levant and their successors the Byzantines and the early Islamic empire up till the present day in fact we have very little evidence for what the ancient populations of the peninsula north of Yemen called themselves or the era areas in which they lived but we know that in the first millennium BC the inhabitants of Tama and the done for instance called their oases by these names and it is clear that neither of them regarded themselves as Arabs all wrote in the Arabic language a

**[5:25]:** major problem in studying the history of the Arabic language is that while there are many references to Arabs and Arabia's in places all around the Fertile Crescent and in Egypt we do not know what it was that identified these different peoples with very different ways of life as Arabs some were prosperous merchants are those tax collectors peasant farmers and small landowners market gardeners brigands schoolteachers founders restorers and rulers of cities kings with large numbers of chariots guards policemen soldiers and paramilitaries breeders of sheep and goats and finally camel breeding nomads so clearly the term Arab cannot refer to a particular way of life what I have suggested in an article called Arabs Arabia's and Arabic before late antiquity is that if we think today of what defines people as Arabs from Morocco to Iraq it is a loose imprecise complex of language and culture I would suggest that the same was probably true in antiquity

**[6:35]:** both among those who call themselves Arabs and those who called them Arabs it's clear that the turn at term Arab came from the people themselves because writers in many different languages both Semitic and non-semitic used the same word

**[6:51]:** but maddeningly these Arabs have left us only the tiniest clues as to what language they spoke until the very end of the first millennium BC more than 800 years after Ginn Daboo the first Arab to be mentioned in historical records even the handful of documents up to this time in which Arab is a self designation are all in Greek except for one which is in the ancient south arabian language of a dramatic indeed our only evidence that these arabs spoke something akin to what we would recognize as arabic are three words in 800 years two are the words marker a female camel and bakr a young male camel in the assyrian annals of particular parties of the 3rd 7 4 4 to 7 to 7 bc and the third is the word LaVon frankincense which is found in the Greek poetry of Sappho in the 6th century BC the last this last is particularly interesting

**[7:55]:** because the word occurs in Arabic the language of the merchants but not in ancient South Arabia the language of the producers the languages of the producers thus we can only guess that the language spoken by the diverse peoples who were called Arabs since they have left us no writings most of them in the Eastern in East in Egypt the Fertile Crescent and central Syria and Mesopotamia lived in areas where by the 6th century BC aramaic had become the spoken and written lingua franca thanks to its used by the Babylonians and the Persian Achaemenid 's as their language of government throughout their multilingual let empires aramaic is relatively easy to learn particularly if you already speak another semitic language and so it spread widely for example in tamer which had its own language which was not closely related to arabic and its own script Aramaic was probably used by those merchants who traveled to the Levant

**[8:57]:** to the Levant however it became the general written language of Tama when the last king of Babylon nabonidus Concord North Arabia and settled in Tama for ten years of his 17-year reign 5 5 2 2 5 4 3 BC after this the use of Tama nitaac seems to die out rather quickly her public inscriptions like gravestones and is replaced by Aramaic throughout the Oasis curiously ended on modern alula the other great places of Northwest Arabia which was also conquered by nabonidus the native language and script was maintained and the number of pre Nabataean Aramaic inscriptions is relatively small yet when its rulers conquered Tama all their official inscriptions and even the graffiti of two of their kings were written in Aramaic so while Arabic may have been widely spoken in the Arabia's in eastern Egypt Levant Syria Mesopotamia and possibly parts of the eastern Gulf Coast it existed within societies in which Aramaic was the

**[10:08]:** normal and prestige written language written language this might explain why Arabic remained a purely spoken language for so long ironically this is a very similar situation to that of the modern South Arabian spoken languages today in areas where if you needed to write you got a scribe to do so for you in Arabic the concept of the alphabet seems to have been invented only once in the second millennium BC shortly after the intervention the invention sorry it seems to have split into two families which developed in parallel as you can see on the screen one was the Northwest Semitic or phoenician aramaic family on the left and the other from which all but one of the traditional alphabets today are descended the other that was the South Semitic family alphabets on the right which was used exclusively in the Arabian Peninsula as neighbors it's only modern descendant is the vocalized alphabet used in Ethiopia for

**[11:16]:** languages like gas and Amharic the use of this South Semitic family was a script family was accompanied by widespread literacy in a number of little different languages used in the peninsula for example the mustard and sabor scripts in blue on the slide were used in ancient South Arabia to write the four major languages there sedae ik Minh egg katha Bannock and had vomited in Northwest Northwest Arabia other varieties of this script family in green were used to write the non Arabic languages of Tama the den and possibly deal Duma but the most remarkable thing was the use of South Semitic alphabets by the nomads in purple from the deserts of southern Syria Jordan and across the western two-thirds of the peninsula down into Yemen nomads usually don't have much use for writing especially in antiquity when papyrus was expensive outside Egypt and they had more urgent uses for the leather from their animals in settled

**[12:22]:** areas most people use broken pottery to write on rather as we use scrap paper but the nomads carried little if any pottery for the very reason that it got broken in mobile life nevertheless between roughly the first century BC and the fourth century AD the nomads of this area learnt to read and write and covered the desert rocks with their graffiti we can only guess why or how they learnt to write learn to write but the following is one possibility curiosity is a survival skill in the desert if you aren't curious you don't learn about the things that can help you stay alive and the things that can hurt or kill you this is combined with the excellent memories which non-literate Sneed in order to store all the information which we write down or simply google when we needed if a non literate nomad was visiting an oasis in north arabia and saw someone writing

**[13:21]:** a receipt or a letter he might well have asked what are you doing and if the answer was not to Grampy might have said will you teach me to do that having heard the letters drawn for him with the sounds they represented he would have returned to the desert and no doubt shown his friends and relations his new skill drawing the letters in the dust or sand I've had this experience myself with a young Bedouin on a dig in Jordan who seeing me writing my notebook asked me to teach him to write I wrote out the the letters of the our big alphabet in their unjoined forms and the next day he was writing his name and my dear name still in these unjoined forms a similar situation occurred on the excavations that tell it where na he SH in Palestine in the 1930s when the famous lohesh letters written in ink on pot shirts

**[14:18]:** were found there was great excitement among both the archaeologists and the Bedouin workers since they were such showing such interest one of the archaeologists Gerald Lancaster Harding taught them the paleo Hebrew script within hours they were sending him and each other notes in their Arabic dialect expressed in the paleo Hebrew script and this despite the fact that the script had only 22 letters of the 27 consonants in an Arabic dialect unfortunately none of these notes was preserved but if by chance one should be found by archaeologists they dread to think of the effect this might have on Semitic historical linguistics but for the ancient nomads having learned how to express their spoken language in writing will be it without any vowels at all and no spaces between words there was the question of what to do isn't the Nomad Society was perfectly adapted to a non literate condition where memory and speech were used for

**[15:22]:** record or communication but there was one important thing to which writing could be useful relieving the boredom when you were by yourself watching the flocks and herds pastoring the normal daily activity of most men and women before this

**[15:39]:** they had often passed the time by carving pictures

**[15:45]:** so but by by carving pictures on the rocks and now they could sign their drawings better still they could now carve graffiti giving their names and saying what they were doing expressing their hopes and fears mentioning the news from within their tribes or from the wider world and adding prayers almost always for security but also for rain the change of circumstances Booty if they were on a raid reunion with loved ones etc there are tens of thousands of these graffiti and they give us a detailed picture of the way of life social structures political events both within the desert and in the settled areas and above all the personal feelings of these individual nomads something we do not have for any of their urban or rural contemporaries it's important to realize that writing was regarded purely as a pastime and so it was not taught formally in schools but still simply spread informally from one

**[16:48]:** person to another we know this because we have a number of texts which simply consists of all the tech letters of the alphabet each of these is in a different order the nun is in one of the two traditional orders the object for the finisher Aramaic alphabet and the hunt for the South Semitic one both shown at the bottom of the slide formal schooling relies on a particular letter order like our ABC but with informal transmission the one who's instructing just carves the letter says he or she remembers them were groups and roughly according to shape as marked in the colored boxes on the slide this is what we find in these examples the alphabet each has a different grouping of letters according to how the instructor sawed off them or remembered them as my friend and colleague ahmed el telar has shown recently some at least of the ancient nomads who became literate spoke

**[17:48]:** dialects of Arabic and so their graffiti provides us with the first evidence of Arabic in writing will be it in a quite different script from the one we are used to in fact it was used in many ways in fact it was in many ways a far clearer and more suitable script because it had a distinct letter for each of the 28 consonants of Arabic and so there was no need for dots but as I've said suitability is very seldom the reason a particular script comes to be used for a particular language while these nomads in what is now southern Syria Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia were writing that Arabic dialects we find speakers of a different Arabic dialect among the settled peoples these are the Nabataeans a tribe of Arab nomads who settled in what is now southern Jordan at the end of the fourth century BC and made their capital of Petra gradually

**[18:47]:** over the next two centuries excuse me they sorry I gradually the next two centuries they expanded their kingdom northwards into southern Syria and south when woods into northwest arabia through their involvement in the northern end of the frankincense trade they became immensely rich and developed a very glamorous urban culture as can be seen at Petra and Medina holic as well as innovative agricultural methods in Jordan and southern Syria they had settled in areas where for hundreds of years aramaic had been the official language beds of government and of culture and even when greek became the language of government after Alexander the Great's conquests and the establishment of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires Aramaic remained the language of civilized discourse in areas which resisted the conquerors it's worth noting that at the end of the fourth century BC after the Seleucid ruler Antigonus the one-eyed sent a force to attack the Nabataeans at a time when

**[19:52]:** they were still largely nomadic they sent him a letter of complaint in Aramaic not Greek to the Nabataeans and other settled civilized peoples Arabic was a purely spoken language and there was no way of writing it this did not mean that they despised it simply that they did not see how it could be written indeed even those who knew that the local nomads could write Arabic in their particular scripts and a few Nabataeans clearly did know this because they wrote or dictated a handful of graffiti in one of the Nomad scripts Sahib in which they are dying to identify themselves as the Nabataean even these people seem to have regarded both the nomads dialects which were different from Nabataean Aramaic and their scripts there's not something they would want to use in civilized society and yet it is clear that spoken Arabic played a major part in Nabataean life on a rock in the Negev desert not far from the Nabataean town of a Buddha there is a six line graffito in which

**[21:04]:** the first three and last lines are in Aramaic and invoke blessings on the author and those who read his work but the fourth and fifth lines are in Arabic written in the Nabataean aramaic script i have suggested that they are a quotation from the arabic liturgy in praise of the divine abode us if correct this would strongly suggest that the religious liturgy was in arabic and was passed down orally from one generation of priests to another this would fit with what the Greek writer epifanio's tells us a couple of centuries later ie that the religious liturgies of Petra at a town called a looser in the Negev were in Arabic similarly the so called Bubba that Aparri some of the legal documents belonging to a Jewish woman living at the southern end of the Dead Sea in the first and early second centuries ad are written in Nabataean aramaic since

**[22:04]:** they are official papers from before the Nabatean Kingdom was annexed by the Romans in AD 106 there are also Greek documents from that later period here in these Nabataean documents here strings of aramaic legal terms are followed by their equivalents in the arabic language written in the navigator oomiak script this shows that there was a functioning Arabic legal vocabulary and I've suggested that this implies that in never TM courts the spoken proceedings may have been in held in Arabic but recorded in Aramaic just as in medieval English courts the proceedings were held in English or Norman French but recorded in Latin if I'm correct this suggests that the Nabataeans maintained their ancestral language Arabic as a purely spoken tongue and used the Aramaic language for writing it's possible that a full education in Aramaic was relatively limited and that many people learnt the script and orthography so that they could write their name and a

**[23:11]:** few suitable Aramaic words such as Salam may he be safe that kir may he be remembered barrique may be blessed at cetera which which they could add to their names when carving graffiti even so we occasionally get arabic forms such as mathcore instead of duck ear creeping into a graffiti presumably when aware the author had forgotten the Aramaic word this is a feature which also occurs in formal inscriptions where we also where we find not only Arabic loanwords in the Aramaic texts but even more significantly grammatical structures such as the use of the Fowler conjugation to express wishes as in Raqqa Maheu Allah may God have mercy on him which is normal in Arabic but not in Aramaic this sort of linguistic intrusion just a very close link in the use of the two languages when the Romans annexed the Nabatean Kingdom in AD 106 they were really more interested in the parts of it

**[24:15]:** in modern Jordan and Syria then in the sections in northwest Vega excuse me ma'am

**[24:27]:** this was probably because they had Earl already more or less taken over the certain North trade in aromatics etc transporting the goods by sea which was quicker and cheaper than the traditional land route and so they no longer needed hey grammaton sonic at the northern end island of course for a hundred years or so they kept a garrison at Agra and raised troops from at least one local tribe that's a mood but most of their activities in provincial Arabia were in the Levant one reason of this was one result of this was that this northern area became far more romanized then Greek gradually became the normal written language within the first century or so after the annexation in the north we still find some inscriptions in Nabataean aramaic some of them bilinguals with greek but gradually they become less and less common by contrast in northwest arabia greek barely took hold at all of course

**[25:30]:** there are political inscriptions in greek at hagar and elsewhere as well as military ones in latin but these are greatly outnumbered by contemporary texts in Nabataean aramaic even in the middle of the 4th century AD 250 years after the annexation the tombstone of the wife of the chief citizen of hera Madan Salah was written in near perfect Aramaic but by this time it was clear that the situation was changing a century earlier a man called Kabu and buried his mother Integra with an epitaph ostensibly in Nabataean Aramaic but in fact in the equivalent of Franklin the standard expressions like modern but rather than bin and bint for son or daughter of the date and the name of the date of a deity are in Aramaic but much of the rest could be an either Aramaic or Arabic when certain words and expressions are clearly in Arabic it would

**[26:33]:** seem that either Kabu or the scribe who composed the epitaph was an Arabic speaker with only a sketchy knowledge of Aramaic it is highly probable that Aramaic still had prestige as a written language rather than as Latin did in Europe until said the mid 18th century and so even if one wrote it in one's spoken vernacular language one could scatter Latin or in this case Aramaic words and phrases in the text to share one with educators after time many of these words and phrases became fossils with the meaning of their own in the spoken language back etc am/pm infra dig and so on interestingly the one which lasted longest was Aramaic bar meaning meaning son off instead of bin in genealogist this survived right up to the beginning of the Islamic period well in Northwest Arabia people were beginning so well in Northwest Arabia people were beginning to write their spoken Arabic in the Nabataean

**[27:38]:** aramaic script the nomads who had been using their own South Semitic scripts to write the Arabic dialects seem to have disappear or at least they stopped writing unless we have no idea why or heard this happened but in all the tens of thousands of these graffiti there is not a single reference to Christianity their graffiti showed that they were well-informed about events in the settled areas and we know that by the 4th century AD Christian missionaries were going into the desert to try to convert the nomads so it's highly likely that if they were still around or still writing the nomads who carved these graffiti would have been aware of Christianity especially after the Emperor Constantine decriminalized it in 83 1 3 and with his support the Christians became one of the most powerful groups in the Empire unfortunately we have no idea why these nomads either disappeared or stopped writing but with this disappearance

**[28:37]:** their script was gradually forgotten and remained on the rocks of the desert noticed by the authors of pre-islamic Arabic poetry as writing which no one could read by contrast exactly at this time either 3 to 2 or 3 to 8 AD we have the first major document in the Arabic language expressed in the Nabataean aramaic script this is the famous and Amarra inscription discovered in 1901 by - a great french pig rapists and explorers producer in frederick macclare near the watering place of anna Mara in the basalt desert of southern Syria it served as the lintel over the doorway of the tomb of a man called Malik place not the famous Arab a poet in rock icer who lived two centuries later this epitaph described monoprice as king of all the Arabs and described his conquests all over the peninsula as far as Natron on the borders of Yemen and how he made his sons

**[29:40]:** rulers of the settled peoples and proxies for the persians and the romans it ends no king could match his achievements the script of this epitaph is clear still clearly Nabataean aramaic there in a developed form we do not know where the scribe who wrote out the text for the stonemason and learnt the script it may have been in Syria or in southern Mesopotamia where the left mid or Nusrat kingdom of which Merrill Christ may have been the second monarch was developing an Arabic an Arab polity a light to the Persians meanwhile Arabic in the Nabataean aramaic script seems also to have been flourishing in northwest arabia where we find it used in graffiti several years ago the saudi scholar professor Ali el Kabong discovered that ancient route from alula to the Jordan border and presumably further which rather which he did a call to the DAR Buckra at most of the stopping places along this

**[30:39]:** route there were large numbers of graffiti in 14 different scripts and dating from possibly the 5th century BC to the Middle Ages including over 900 Nabataean and never tear arabic scripts these were brilliantly edited by my friend and colleague Leland ma and were published in Riyadh in 2018 and I would strongly recommend all those are interested in the development of the Arabic script from labogen to read her brilliant introduction to these texts see the reference on the screen these graffiti give her snapshots of her script development which is otherwise invisible to us because it was taking place in texts written with pen and ink on papyrus or pop shots all there are no documents on these have yet been on these surfaces and yet been discovered in Northwest Arabia we know that they must have existed because there is no incentive for a script to develop when it is used only on stone and this

**[31:39]:** can be seen in the graffiti of the nomads where there are of course differences in handwriting but no can recognizable and consistent development of letter shapes in formal inscriptions as in ancient south arabian was known that can be calligraphic changes of fashion in the letter shapes but not the sort of development which we see in the Nabataean script where the letter shapes and the joins between the letters are exactly those which make it easier and quicker to write with a pen this is a process which goes right back to our first evidence of the Nabataean script which developed from Imperial Aramaic in which each letter was separate without joints and the only letters with the same form were dal and Ron so the development of which we get glimpses in the graffiti on the double Buckra and in in southern and elsewhere particularly in certain in southern Saudi Arabia near Natron of which the the

**[32:39]:** one in the bottom right-hand corner comes from this development is only the the later part of a process which have been going on since the Nabataeans sent their letter to the Antigonus at the end of the 4th century BC a development driven by the convenience of the writer with pen and ink however alongside this we need to remember that all literate people carrying many forms of each letter in their memory because they need to be able to decipher many different handwriting's and in our day different fonts or the varied artistic forms of writing on shop fronts or posters in addition with graffiti we need to again take account each individual's choice of letter forms his or her skill in carving and the circumstances in which they were doing it how skilled they were how much time they had was someone's writing come on by leaving how bad the flies were that day how good that

**[33:39]:** tool was where they striving for a calligraphic effect etc all these things affect the form of the script in an individual undated graffito it's for this reason that I've always argued that the use of letter shapes in graffiti as a way of dating texts is pointless and likely to be misleading here you can see a graffito fro from da da Barra in which the author has used four different forms of the letter B bar from the very calligraphic and by this time ancient number one to the very developed number four

**[34:19]:** fortunately some of these graffiti include dates and say we can see in very general terms developments in the script they're all dozens we using one of the more curious of these is that the letters dull and draw that of the letters darlin wrong as I said earlier these started off as the only two layer with identical shapes in imperial aramaic and classical sorry

**[34:47]:** in imperial aramaic and classic classical calligraphic Nabataean and the reader just had to work out which was which from the context gradually as the script develop that shapes diverged and it became quite clear which was the dial in which not era ironically it was at this time that it became common to put a dot over the doll though there seemed to have been different views on this and in a minority of small minority of the graffiti the dot is placed over the rock thus at a time when the shape of the letters was already distinct a dot on the doll became the norm fortunately this was not taken over when the Arabic script developed its systems and system of dots to distinguish letters of the same shape yet even in the first Islamic century in graffiti letters on papyri and even some very early currents when only some of the letters were dotted the choice

**[35:45]:** of which letters received dots see often seems bizarre to us for very often the letters which are dotted could easily have been read correctly even without the dot whereas those without dots are more difficult to work out is this the legacy of the Nabataean dal with it's unnecessary doctor I wonder just joking of course as I've already hinted the Nabataean Aramaic script was most unsuitable to express the 28 consonants of the Arabic language it has started off with 22 Aramaic letters only two of which die Alondra had had the same form but during its development between the 3rd and 7th centuries ad more and more letters came to have indistinguishable forms at least at the beginning and middle of words until by the revelation of Islam there were only 16 different shapes to represent the 28th Arabic consonants so no wonder dots were needed and yet a certain snobbery persisted in being able to read

**[36:47]:** fluently without the help of dots now bein at evert in 1939 sights a certain Abdullah even takia governor of Khorasan who died in 1844 who quote when presented with a piece of elaborate penmanship explained how beautiful this would be if there were not so much coriander seed scattered a vert meaning the diacritical dots while as late as the 7th 17th century Khalifa advised quote omitting vowels and dire critical points especially in addressing persons of consequence and refinement in regard to whom it would be impolite to suppose they did not have a perfect knowledge of the written language unquote well it's clear that the development of the Nabataean script and it's used to write Arabic was going on in Northwest Arabia and possibly in the south near nitron certainly and Afra in the south near a trot the earliest inscriptions we have in what we would recognize as the Arabic script I found in Syria at

**[37:53]:** first sight this is curious but we have to take into account into account two factors one is that there have been expedition searching for inscriptions in Syria for more than 170 years whilst such expeditions in the peninsula are much more recent the second explanation was suggested by Leila Nami and that is that the JAF news or hasani's took the script with them when they moved from Arabia to Syria in the 6th century AD and used it in the administration of the kingdom they set up there this is supported by the fact that one of these inscriptions are graffito from general seis in southern Syria you see on the screen says that its author was sent there in AD five to eight or nine by the JAF Nidoking al-harith we that the Nabataean Arabic script was used by pagans Jews and Christians in the pre-islamic period because we have graffiti by individuals from all these groups

**[38:50]:** we are also told in hadith that a number of the early Muslims were literate at the time of the revelation including of course they'd been savvy at one of the prophets and many when sees who it is said not to write Arabic among the Jews no Medina however the curious feature of Arabic in the peninsula is that while writing was used for ordinary day-to-day tasks such as correspondence invoices receipts notes lists treaties etc there seems to have been a very strong feeling that culturally important things such as religion literature history and genealogy should only be transmitted orally this sons reminiscent of the Nabataeans but they have no choice because at that time they had not started to write Arabic in the Aramaic script and apparently did not consider using the scripts of the nomads this preference for oral transmission yes I would suggest a very strong choice which can be illustrated by comparison with cleric

**[39:54]:** Society in North Africa up to about thirty years ago the Tuareg have their own script the Dafina which in former times was used purely for fun children's games graffiti secret notes between lovers etc however their society remained resolutely oral and they did not use the script for anything of practical use if a Tuareg needed to send a letter he or she would find someone who'd been to school and asked him to write it in Arabic or French even though the Tuareg recipient would then have to find someone who'd been to school to read and translate it for them the Tuareg have an incredibly rich oral literature but when an anthropologist once suggested that they could write it down in that traditional script the suggestion was greeted with horror for oral literature is constantly fresh constantly changing with each recitation and there is no such thing as the correct Verta text of a poem or story

**[40:55]:** similarly genealogy is still used among the Bedouin as a way of explaining a social and political events so if two strike two tribes which have been thought to be closely related fall out the junior genealogy is Reax planed to show that they actually were not nearly as closely related as had been thought writing down the genealogist would of course make this impossible in religion kala theism is by its very nature tolerant of differences of belief and and so variations in the stories of gods and goddesses as they were retold orally by different people over generations on the other hand monotheism is inherently intolerant of variations in belief witness the constant corals and wars about theological niceties and say the jews and christians required a written scripture there even that did not stop the theological quarreling the result of this tradition of passing on culturally important things already meant that while the revelations received by the

**[42:00]:** prophet will dictated by him to an amanuensis who wrote them done they had immediately to be learnt by heart and transmitted orally to his followers who would also learn them by heart

**[42:19]:** inevitably as with poems and genealogists this meant that small changes in wording could creep in as more and more people heard the revelations committed them to memory and then recited them to others however in the years after the prophets death as Islam was established first in the Hejaz in yemen and then throughout the Middle East North Africa and beyond the dangers for a monotheism of having lots of dip slightly different versions of the divine revelations became apparent and despite serious opposition the third of the righteous careless will smile even upon decreed that a definitive text of the Quran be established and written down however in the earliest surviving copies of the Quran as well as many from the first three year is Lamech centuries no dots are used to distinguish say bar from noon gene from her etc despite this just - despite the fact that the earliest Arabic papyri and graffiti from 22 and

**[43:21]:** 24 H respectively shows that a route of generally accepted system of dots was already in use I would suggest this is because the transmission of the Quran continued through learning it by heart and so under the undoubted continental text served simply as an aide memoire we can approve this but it seems a possible explanation in the first two islamic centuries the transmission of culturally important materials continued to be oral although scholars and students kept often copious notes to which they could refer gradually however partly through increasing contact with other literate cultures in egypt syria iraq iran etc in arabic became one of the four most literary languages of the world and its script was used to write not only Arabic but languages from the Atlantic to the South China Sea over the centuries the Arabic script has developed in numerous different and often very beautiful ways to the extent that some of the most elaborate

**[44:26]:** and artistically pleasing are almost indecipherable for those who do not already know what they say Hawking back to the earliest Quran today seeing and using this most beautiful and expressive script in all its multitudinous forms it is interesting to reflect on its development across two thousand years from another sinuous and beautiful alphabet Nabataean aramaic thank you very much

**[45:02]:** for sharing with us such a clear presentation on new research you show us how would we single its fiction and it details are important to respect their the ecology of the writing development we can now is that the trivialization so we have already a few questions on the Q&A tab we are the osama ha ha key who's asking when and why did the Nabatean start the forum value around 94 years before our receipt

**[45:47]:** wait a minute why did they start the calendar year before 94 BC I didn't I don't think they did did they most Nabataean inscriptions are dated by the regnal year of their king ah I know what he think he's that there were there are people coulton about or there is a calendar called the neurotic Allen dear in South Arabia but this as far as we can tell has nothing to do with the net with the Nabataeans in North Arabia and I'm afraid I don't know why they started in 94 PC South Arabia ours is a little bit beyond my competence I'm sure there are lots of South organists who could tell sorry

**[46:40]:** so

**[46:45]:** you answered they're a big to this but maybe you'd like to to Abdullah Al shall I ask how does the linguistic phonology fits with the current phonology in Arabia

**[47:14]:** and the relationship between them well sometimes it's not that I can tell it the it's quite difficult to do this because of course for the past we only know languages when they're written before recording became possible so we only know about written languages or and we only have hints as I said about of purely spoken languages when they bits of them get written and it's quite difficult to talk about the chronology of the spoken languages if I'm right in thinking that people were recognized as Arabs partly because of all called himself therapy Arabs partly because of their speech and general culture then as I say the earliest one comes from 835 BC but it's very difficult to know really what the cultures of people who used purely spoken languages to to to give the history I did what I could in in in in the paper but it is I think culture and language don't

**[48:53]:** necessarily round up Sarah as you you see the Nabataean spoke Arabic but they actually wrote in Aramaic so are they an Arabic culture or Aramaic culture in fact they're it's an irrelevant question really because they're those but I'm sorry I'm not helping very much that's right they're struggling a bit

**[49:29]:** requited a question about the

**[49:39]:** hundred the unsaved is saying thanks for that insightful history all Arabs are one place of origin

**[49:52]:** only we knew I'm afraid we we only know when they are mentioned because as I say they they didn't write to their language until quite late and we don't know where they originated from the first Arabs that we that are mentioned in historical sources as I say are all up in the Levant and Syria and Mesopotamia and just along the northern edge of modern Saudi Arabia so but that's purely because we that's where the Greek Greeks and Romans where they very seldom went into the center of the Arabian Peninsula and they may well have been Arabs there but we just have no record of them because they didn't nobody went and explored there so but no we don't know basically I'm afraid

**[51:04]:** question and I am Not sure we have and I'm sure that it's Jose Angelou Mohan West and I imagine any of you members of the nomads were able to write and read in the fascinating all scripts you show us today do we have an idea of harmony and ruin their society where illiterates well we can't cause be absolutely sure but the vast numbers I mean as I say tens of thousands we've recorded something like 40,000 or no no much more 50 or 60,000 and that is just from a relatively few expeditions and every time you go into the desert you trip over more and so I think given that the desert areas can never support very large populations at one time it seems pretty likely that there was almost universal literacy and you know one child would teach another child and so on and we have inscriptions by women as well as men not as

**[52:23]:** many but you know a sizable number and so I think probably because it was used as a pastime it it spread very quickly and as I say nomads who who live in a non literate society when they're not using their literacy instead of memory they they learn very quickly and carving on a rock passes the time very well because it takes a long time takes a lot of strengths also and so it's it's actually a very useful pastime and you can always come back the next day and continue which is why we have actually quite long graffiti sometimes and they they tell us quite a lot about their the lives of the people who carved them

**[53:15]:** because we said the fact that these it's talking work as summer I've been vigeous or they can continue the next day and this and and there is a question not related to that by abdicating fanciful must I did them these of carving on what influenced the later shakes the data shapes it's a question

**[53:43]:** yeah well I'm very honored to have a geologist

**[53:54]:** right yes yes it does to an extent I think if they say the ones that are carved on basalt we get very very beautiful ones just as we get very beautiful drawings on the bass wall despite the difficulty it's much easier doing it on sandstone for instance the but I didn't know that it really changed the the shapes of the letters no they it's more the skill of the person that changes so somebody who's just not very good at it or perhaps just beginning the letters can be quite rough and it also depends on the technique the the nicest ones are either incised or chiseled you say you take one sharp stone and you hit it with another one so you can direct but there are quite a lot with which are just hammered and obviously the the stone you're hammering with misses the the line sometimes so you get much thicker less good ones

**[55:15]:** so it just really depends on the tools more than the the rock I think it but as I say it is obviously much easier to carve on sandstone basalt

**[55:32]:** to the next about

**[55:40]:** okay is there any evidence the Arabic language has changed in terms of vocabulary bring them up at any period yes we have in terms of vocabulary I don't know that we have enough vocabulary in the Navigator Arabic inscriptions but yes I mean if you think for instance of the the language of the Quran and some of the hadith the is very different from modern Standard Arabic and from the dialects certainly the Arabic expressed in the nomads graffiti is a is a very different dialect both different from the Nabataean Arabic as far as we can say so for instance it in one lot of nomads the the definite article is here whereas in Nabataean it's al and you know not a lot of nomads they don't have a dial a definite article at all so you know these are minor differences but they they they look quite dramatic differences when you when you see them so yes there are differences it's quite interesting that the nomads who provide you much more vocabulary other than the Nabataeans and

**[57:26]:** there are words like no which is value nothing sorry with her cart is the valley not a palm tree and it is there which goes with aramaic na which is a valley so they they have preserved ancient Arabic words which have disappeared or change their meaning later sorry that was very incoherent

**[58:12]:** when was that formally formalized for so someone is asking a newsperson

**[58:23]:** the formalization when when it was formalized then for example what helped establish the Spanish language as an official language was the publication of the Ferragamo text in 1492 so what would be the equivalent I think so this is the language not the script is that right I was

**[58:53]:** too Arabic it became formalized in the eight to nine centuries by the grammarians in southern Iraq Kufa and Basra who brought together the dialect of the pre-islamic poetry and the dialect of the of the Quran and molded what we think of as classical Arabic for sir and so they produced this and it after that everybody who wrote Arabic was supposed to write in was although of course we have lots of papyri and letters and things like that which are written more or less in the local dialect still of people in Egypt or people in Iraq or wherever and but the all literature had to be written in in in the first half so that's yes 8th to 9th centuries

**[1:00:20]:** which farm in the mountains in Assyria and

**[1:00:27]:** unfortunately not yet no not very far away in the the Hema area the several have been found but not actually up in the mountains yet but I think that's probably because there has not been very many expeditions exploring that area so we hope

**[1:00:59]:** more than 30 questions that

**[1:01:08]:** someone once a recommendation for a good manual of gives it that leads and prediction of value of a hobby typically for someone acquainted with the printing automate and Arabic but not the insist for money laughter a manual needs an introduction overview and that's the victory of a view of ekp party I hope you picked in in Arabic or English or French or I am

**[1:01:51]:** I'm just trying to think

**[1:01:57]:** if you hold on one moment I'm just going to look at my bookshelf

**[1:02:16]:** I'm sorry I do I have to have to admit that I I can't really think of what I'm afraid of

**[1:02:46]:** and

**[1:02:51]:** I think one question

**[1:03:01]:** is about the future I think it's a nice question to Laney's so where do you see the future of the Arabic language going who is increasing globalization and it is in English for many things but how is Arabic changing still is there an evolution and where did you see them right well so well Arabic is certainly changing and we are fortunate that many would they try get the there are many dialects of Arabic spoken dialects which are beginning to disappear because the Arabic of social media is is becoming more and more common throughout the Arab world and it is very good that a number of scholars are recording as much as they can of these dialects before they they die out completely but the the the Arabic language rather like English is changing very rapidly because so many people from all over the world Munich ating

**[1:04:28]:** in Arabic and I think it has a great future but it will you know I think Arabic Chinese and English are probably going to be the I'm sorry to be the Friant sort of international languages which we which will come and but I did I did see Arabic disappearing I think it will be very useful it will continue to be one of the three great languages of the world

**[1:05:15]:** the dialects are very rich yes yes the dialects are full of rich vocabulary and often much poetry and literature in these dialects but oral and so it's good to it's very important to record them as much as possible thank you thank you thank you for answering this question thank you

**[1:05:51]:** thank you very much for inviting me and thank you and for putting up with all my bad technology

**[1:06:09]:** it's kind of you and that's something we can catch

**[1:06:21]:** thank you very much and thank you so own part in being

**[1:06:31]:** and so the next will be now we're going to which

**[1:06:38]:** so join us on face can Twitter and meanwhile stay safe and consume in fact issing in the future yes well thank you very much thank you Oh