South Arabian alphabet

The ancient Yemeni alphabet (Old South Arabian ms₃nd; modern Arabic: المُسنَد‎ musnad) branched from the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet in about the 9th century BC. It was used for writing the Old South Arabian languages of the Sabaic, Qatabanic, Hadramautic, Minaic (or Madhabic), Himyaritic, and Ge'ez in Dʿmt. The earliest inscriptions in the alphabet date to the 9th century BC in Akkele Guzay, Eritrea.^[3] There are no vowels, instead using the mater lectionis to mark them.

Its mature form was reached around 500 BC, and its use continued until the 6th century AD, including Old North Arabian inscriptions in variants of the alphabet, when it was displaced by the Arabic alphabet.^[4] In Ethiopia and Eritrea it evolved later into the Ge'ez alphabet,^[1][2] which, with added symbols throughout the centuries, has been used to write Amharic, Tigrinya and Tigre, as well as other languages (including various Semitic, Cushitic, and Nilo-Saharan languages).

Sign inventory

(epigraphic) Old Yemeni alphabet
Character Transcription IPA	h [h]	l [l]	ḥ [ħ]	m [m]	q [q]	w [w]	s2 [l]	r [r]	b [b]	t [t]	s1 [ʃ]	k [k]	n [n]	ḫ [x]	s3 [s̪]	f [f]	ʾ [ʔ]	ʿ [ʕ]	ḍ [ɬˤ]	g [ɡ]	d [d]	ġ [ɣ]	ṭ [tˤ]	z [z]	ḏ [ð]	y [j]	ṯ [θ]	ṣ [sˤ]	ẓ [θˤ]
Other transcriptions							ś,š				š,s				s,ś

By shape
Character Transcription IPA	r [r]	ʿ [ʕ]	w [w]	q [q]	y [j]	ṯ [θ]	ṣ [tsˤ]	ẓ [θˤ]	h [h]	ḥ [ħ]	ḫ [x]	ʾ [ʔ]	s1 [s]	k [k]	ġ [ɣ]	b [b]	n [n]	g [ɡ]	l [l]	m [m]	s2 [l]	s3 [s̪]	t [t]	f [f]	z [z]	d [d]	ḏ [ð]	ḍ [ɬˤ]	ṭ [tˤ]
	Circle								Y			Π					Vertical			Diagonal							Box

Zabūr script

Zabūr is the name of the cursive form of the South Arabian script that was used by the ancient Yemenis (Sabaeans) in addition to their monumental script, or musnad (see, e.g., Ryckmans, J., Müller, W. W., and ‛Abdallah, Yu., Textes du Yémen Antique inscrits sur bois. Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, 1994 (Publications de l'Institut Orientaliste de Louvain, 43)).

The cursive zabūr script—also known as "South Arabian minuscules"^[5]—was used by the ancient Yemenis to inscribe everyday documents on wooden sticks in addition to the rock-cut monumental musnad letters displayed above. As yet only about one thousand such texts have been discovered, of which perhaps some 26 have been published; this is partly due to the difficulty of reading the minuscule script.

South Arabian inscription addressed to the Sabaean "national" god Almaqah

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 (see the photo).
• 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 (dots, etc.), differing in this respect from the modern Arabic alphabet.

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.^[6]

Gallery of some inscriptions

• Photos from National Museum of Yemen (Sana'a):

• Photos from Military Museum of Yemen:

See also

• Eduard Glaser
• Carl Rathjens

Notes

References

• Stein, Peter (2005). "The Ancient South Arabian Minuscule Inscriptions on Wood: A New Genre of Pre-Islamic Epigraphy". Jaarbericht van het Vooraziatisch-Egyptisch Genootschap "Ex Oriente Lux" 39: 181–199. 
• Stein, Peter (2010). Die altsüdarabischen Minuskelinschriften auf Holzstäbchen aus der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek in München. 
• Beeston, A.F.L. (1962). "Arabian Sibilants". Journal of Semitic Studies 7 (2): 222–233. doi:10.1093/jss/7.2.222. 
• Francaviglia Romeo, Vincenzo (2012). Il trono della regina di Saba, Artemide, Roma. pp. 149–155. .

External links

• Ancient scripts on South Arabian
• SI
• Omniglot's entry on South Arabian