Old Arabic is the name for any Arabic language or dialect continuum before Islam.
Alternatively, the term has been used synonymously with "Paleo-Arabic" to describe the form of the Arabic script in the fifth and sixth centuries.
Classification
Old Arabic and its descendants are classified as Central Semitic languages, which is an intermediate language group containing the Northwest Semitic languages (e.g.,
Aramaic and
Hebrew), the languages of the
Dadanitic,
Taymanitic inscriptions, the poorly understood languages labeled
Thamudic, and the ancient languages of
Yemen written in the Ancient South Arabian script. Old Arabic, is however, distinguished from all of them by the following innovations:
-
negative particles m */mā/; lʾn */lā-ʾan/ > CAr lan
-
mafʿūl G-passive participle
-
prepositions and adverbs f, ʿn, ʿnd, ḥt, ʿkdy
-
a subjunctive in - a
-
t-demonstratives
-
leveling of the - at allomorph of the feminine ending
-
the use of f- to introduce modal clauses
-
independent object pronoun in ( ʾ) y
-
vestiges of nunation
History
Early 1st millennium BCE
The oldest known attestation of the Arabic language dubbed as pre-Historic Arabic language is a bi-lingual inscription written in Old Arabic which was written in the undifferentiated North Arabian script (known as
Thamudic B) and Canaanite which remains undeciphered, discovered in
Qasr Bayir.
+Prayer to the Canaanite gods |
|
A characteristic of
Nabataean Arabic and
Old Hijazi (from which
Classical Arabic much later developed) is the definite article
al-. The first unambiguous literary attestation of Old Arabic and this feature occurs in the 5th century BCE, in the epithet of a goddess which
Herodotus (
Histories I: 131, III: 8) quotes in its preclassical Arabic form as
Alilat (Ἀλιλάτ, i. e.,
ʼal-ʼilāt), which means "the goddess". It also occurs in Aramaic ostraca dated to the 5th century BCE during the period of Achaemenid rule in Palestine in the Negev, an area that would form part of the (future) Nabataean Kingdom.
A later piece of inscriptional evidence for this form of the article is provided by a 1st-century BCE inscription in Qaryat al-Faw (formerly Qaryat Dhat Kahil, near Sulayyil, Saudi Arabia).
The earliest datable Safaitic inscriptions go back to the 3rd century BCE, but the vast majority of texts are undatable and so may stretch back much further in time.
4th century BCE
Aramaic alphabet ostraca dated 362–301 BC bear witness to the presence of people of
origin in the southern
Shephelah and the
Beersheba Valley before the Hellenistic period. They contain personal names that apparently have Arabic etymologies:
-
(opposed to Northwest Semitic ), as opposed to Aramaic and Hebrew
-
diminutives:
-
personal names ending in - w (wawation):
-
personal names ending in feminine - t (as opposed to Aramaic and Hebrew - h):
-
personal names ending in - n -aːn: '
2nd century BCE – 1st century CE
Hismaic inscriptions, contemporaneous with the
Nabatean Kingdom attest a variety of Old Arabic which may have merged ð with d. Furthermore, there are 52
Hismaic inscriptions which attest the formula
ḏkrt lt "May
Al-Lat be mindful of", foreshadowing similar formulae which are attested in Christian contexts from northern Syria to northern Arabia during the 6th and possibly 7th centuries CE. One such inscription, found near
Wadi Rum, is given below:
+Hismaic prayer to Allat |
|
2nd century CE
The En
Avdat inscription dates to no later than 150 CE, and contains a prayer to the deified Nabataean king
Obodas I:
| +Prayer to Obodas
!Transliteration + Transcription + Translation |
|
3rd–4th century CE
/ref>
6th century CE
The earliest 6th-century Arabic inscription is from Zabad (512), a town near
Aleppo. The Arabic inscription consists of a list of names carved on the lowest part of the lintel of a
martyrion dedicated to Saint Sergius, the upper parts of which are occupied by inscriptions in
Greek language and
Syriac language.
+Zabad inscription |
| |
Two Arabic inscriptions, the Jebel Usays inscription (528) and the Harran inscription (568), are from the southern region on the borders of Hauran.
7th century CE
The
Quran, as standardized by
Uthman (r. 644 – 656), is the first Arabic codex still extant, and the first non-inscriptional attestation of the Old Hijazi dialect. The Birmingham Quran manuscript was radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 CE, and contains parts of chapters 18, 19, and 20.
PERF 558 (643 CE) is the oldest Islamic Arabic text, the first Islamic papyrus, and attests the continuation of wawation into the Islamic period.
The Zuhayr inscription (644 CE) is the oldest Islamic rock inscription.
A Christian Arabic inscription, known as the Yazid inscription, possibly mentions Yazid I and is notable for its continuation of 6th century Christian Arabic formulae as well as maintaining pre-Islamic letter shapes and wawation.
Phonology
Consonants
+ Consonant phonemes of Old Arabic (based on Safaitic and Greek transcriptions) | ! rowspan="2"Labial consonant
! colspan="2" | Dental consonant
! colspan="2" | Denti-alveolar
! rowspan="2" | Palatal
! colspan="2" | Velar consonant
! rowspan="2" | Pharyngeal
! rowspan="2" | Glottal |
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Vowels
| { class="wikitable" border="1" style="text-align:center"
| +Monophthong phonemes of Nabataean Arabic
! rowspan="2" | ! colspan="2"Short
! colspan="2" | Long |
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In contrast with Old Higazi and Classical Arabic, Nabataean Arabic may have undergone the shift // < *// and // < *//, as evidenced by the numerous Greek transcriptions of Arabic from the area. This may have occurred in Safaitic as well, making it a possible Northern Old Arabic isogloss.
| align="center" |
| +Monophthong phonemes of Old Higazi
! rowspan="2" | ! colspan="2"Short
! colspan="2" | Long |
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In contrast to
Classical Arabic, Old Higazi had the phonemes and , which arose from the contraction of Old Arabic and , in which V was a short unstressed vowel, respectively. The reduction of // in closed syllables resulted in either short // or //.
|}
Grammar
Nominal Inflection
Proto-Arabic
Early Nabataean Arabic
The ʿEn ʿAvdat inscription in the Nabataean script dating to no later than 150 CE shows that final n had been deleted in undetermined triptotes, and that the final short vowels of the determined state were intact. The Old Arabic of the Nabataean inscriptions exhibits almost exclusively the form
ʾl- of the definite article. Unlike
Classical Arabic, this
ʾl almost never exhibits the assimilation of the coda to the coronals.
Example:
-
pa-yapʿal lā pedā wa lā ʾ aṯara
-
pa-kon honā yabġe-nā ʾ al-mawto lā ʾabġā-h
-
pa-kon honā ʾarād gorḥo lā yorde-nā
-
"And he acts neither for benefit nor favour and if death claims us let me not be claimed. And if an affliction occurs let it not afflict us".
Safaitic
The A1 inscription dated to the 3rd or 4th century in a Greek alphabet in a dialect showing affinities to that of the Safaitic inscriptions shows that short final high vowels had been lost, obliterating the distinction between nominative and genitive case in the singular, leaving the accusative the only marked case.
Besides dialects with no definite article, the Safaitic inscriptions exhibit about four different article forms, ordered by frequency:
h-,
ʾ-,
ʾl-, and
hn-. Unlike the Classical Arabic article, the Old Arabic
ʾl almost never exhibits the assimilation of the coda to the coronals; the same situation is attested in the Graeco-Arabica, but in A1 the coda assimilates to the following
d, αδαυρα */ʾad-dawra/ 'the region'. The Safaitic and Hismaic texts attest an invariable feminine consonantal -
t ending, and the same appears to be true of the earliest Nabataean Arabic. While Greek transcriptions show a mixed situation, it is clear that by the 4th c. CE, the ending had shifted to // in non-construct position in the settled areas.
Example:
-
ʾAws (bin) ʿūḏ (?) (bin) Bannāʾ (bin) Kazim ʾ al-ʾidāmiyy ʾatawa miś-śiḥāṣ; ʾatawa Bannāʾa ʾad-dawra wa yirʿaw baqla bi-kānūn
-
"ʾAws son of ʿūḏ (?) son of Bannāʾ son of Kazim the ʾidāmite came because of scarcity; he came to Bannāʾ in this region and they pastured on fresh herbage during Kānūn".
Old Hijazi (Quranic Consonantal Text)
The Qur'anic Consonantal Text shows no case distinction with determined triptotes, but the indefinite accusative is marked with a final /ʾ/. In JSLih 384, an early example of Old Hijazi, the Proto-Central Semitic /-t/ allomorph survives in
bnt as opposed to /-ah/ < /-at/ in
s1lmh.
| +Nominal inflection |
|
|
| Nominative | -∅ | ʾal-...-∅ | - ∅ | (ʾal-)...-ān | (ʾal-)...-ūn | (ʾal-)...-āt |
| Accusative | -ā | (ʾal-)...-ayn | (ʾal-)...-īn |
| Genitive | -∅ |
Demonstrative Pronouns
Safaitic
Northern Old Arabic preserved the original shape of the relative pronoun ḏ-, which may either have continued to inflect for case or have become frozen as ḏū or ḏī. In one case, it is preceded by the article/demonstrative prefix h-, hḏ */haḏḏV/.
In Safaitic, the existence of mood inflection is confirmed in the spellings of verbs with y/w as the third root consonant. Verbs of this class in result clauses are spelled in such a way that they must have originally terminated in /a/: f ygzy nḏr-h */pa yagziya naḏra-hu/ 'that he may fulfill his vow'. Sometimes verbs terminate in a - n which may reflect an energic ending, thus, s2ʿ-nh 'join him' perhaps */śeʿannoh/.
Old Hijazi
Old Ḥiǧāzī is characterized by the innovative relative pronoun
ʾallaḏī,
ʾallatī, etc., which is attested once in JSLih 384 and is the common form in the QCT.
The QCT along with the papyri of the first century after the Islamic conquests attest a form with an l-element between the demonstrative base and the distal particle, producing from the original proximal set ḏālika and tilka.
Writing systems
Safaitic and Hismaic
The texts composed in both scripts are almost 50,000 specimens that provide a rather detailed view of Old Arabic.
Dadanitic
A single text, JSLih 384, composed in the
Dadanitic script, from northwest Arabia, provides the only non-Nabataean example of Old Arabic from the
Hijaz.
Greek
Fragmentary evidence in the Greek script, the "Graeco-Arabica", is equally crucial to help complete our understanding of Old Arabic. It encompasses instances of Old Arabic in Greek transcription from documentary sources. The advantage of the Greek script is that it gives us a clear view of the vowels of Old Arabic and can shed important light on the phonetic realization of the Old Arabic phonemes. Finally, a single pre-Islamic Arabic text composed in Greek letters is known, labelled A1.
Aramaic and successors
Nabataean
Only two texts composed fully in Arabic have been discovered in the
Nabataean script. The En Avdat inscription contains two lines of an Arabic prayer or hymn embedded in an Aramaic votive inscription. The second is the Namara inscription, 328 CE, which was erected about southeast of
Damascus. Most examples of Arabic come from the substratal influence the language exercised on Nabataean Aramaic.
Nabataean Arabic
A growing corpus of inscriptions are now known from a script that existed in a transitional phase between recognizable Arabic and Nabataean Aramaic. This script has been called
Nabataean Arabic and is known from Northwestern Arabia. It provides further lexical and some morphological material for the later stages of Old Arabic in this region. The texts provide important insights as to the development of the Arabic script from its Nabataean forebear and are an important glimpse of the Old Hijazi dialects.
Paleo-Arabic
Several inscriptions in the fully evolved Arabic script, known as
Paleo-Arabic, are now known from the pre-Islamic period. The earliest one is known as the Zabad inscription (528 CE) and was discovered in
Syria. Another two prominent Paleo-Arabic Syrian inscriptions include the Jebel Usays inscription (528 CE) and the Harran inscription (568 CE).
See also
