South Arabian alphabet

Epigraphic South Arabian;
Type	Abjad
Languages	Ge'ez, Old South Arabian
Time period	c. 9th century BC to 7th century AD
Parent systems	Proto-Sinaitic Epigraphic South Arabian;
Child systems	Ge'ez
Sister systems	Phoenician alphabet
ISO 15924	Sarb, 105
Direction	Right-to-left
Unicode alias	Old South Arabian
Unicode range	U+1BC0–U+10A7F
	This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

The ancient Yemeni alphabet (Old South Arabian ms₃nd; modern Arabic: المُسنَد‎ musnad) branched from the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet in about the 9th century BCE. It was used for writing the Old South Arabian languages of the Sabaic, Qatabanic, Hadramautic, Minaic (or Madhabic), Himyaritic, and proto-Ge'ez (or proto-Ethiosemitic) in Dʿmt. The earliest inscriptions in the alphabet date to the 9th century BCE in Akkele Guzay, Eritrea^[3] and in the 10th century BCE in Yemen^{[citation needed]}. There are no vowels, instead using the mater lectionis to mark them.

Its mature form was reached around 500 BCE, and its use continued until the 6th century CE, 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).

The Musnad or Monumental Script

Sign inventory

(epigraphic) Old Yemeni alphabet
Character Transcription IPA	20px h [h]	20px l [l]	20px ḥ [ħ]	20px m [m]	20px q [q]	20px w [w]	20px s² [ɬ]	20px r [r]	20px b [b]	20px t [t]	20px s¹ [ʃ]	20px k [k]	20px n [n]	20px ḫ [x]	20px s³ [s̪]	20px f [f]	20px ʾ [ʔ]	20px ʿ [ʕ]	20px ḍ [ɬˤ]	20px g [ɡ]	20px d [d]	20px ġ [ɣ]	20px ṭ [tˤ]	20px z [z]	20px ḏ [ð]	20px y [j]	20px ṯ [θ]	20px ṣ [sˤ]	20px ẓ [θˤ]
Other transcriptions							ś,š				š,s				s,ś

By shape
Character Transcription IPA	20px r [r]	20px ʿ [ʕ]	20px w [w]	20px q [q]	20px y [j]	20px ṯ [θ]	20px ṣ [tsˤ]	20px ẓ [θˤ]	20px h [h]	20px ḥ [ħ]	20px ḫ [x]	20px ʾ [ʔ]	20px s¹ [s]	20px k [k]	20px ġ [ɣ]	20px b [b]	20px n [n]	20px g [ɡ]	20px l [l]	20px m [m]	20px s² [ɬ]	20px s³ [s̪]	20px t [t]	20px f [f]	20px z [z]	20px d [d]	20px ḏ [ð]	20px ḍ [ɬˤ]	20px 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.

File:Panel Almaqah Louvre DAO18.jpg

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]

Old South Arabian^[1] Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF)
	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	A	B	C	D	E	F
U+10A6x	𐩠	𐩡	𐩢	𐩣	𐩤	𐩥	𐩦	𐩧	𐩨	𐩩	𐩪	𐩫	𐩬	𐩭	𐩮	𐩯
U+10A7x	𐩰	𐩱	𐩲	𐩳	𐩴	𐩵	𐩶	𐩷	𐩸	𐩹	𐩺	𐩻	𐩼	𐩽	𐩾	𐩿
Notes 1.^ As of Unicode version 7.0</br>

Gallery of some inscriptions

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

Sana' national museum 02.jpg
Sana' national museum 03.jpg
Sana' national museum 04.jpg
Sana' national museum 05.jpg
Sana' national museum 06.jpg
Sana' national museum 08.jpg
Sana' national museum 09.jpg
Sana' national museum 10.jpg
Sana' national museum 11.jpg
Sana' national museum 12.jpg
Sana' national museum 13.jpg

Photos from Military Museum of Yemen:

Sana' military museum 05.JPG
Sana' military museum 06.JPG
Sana' military museum 08.JPG

Notes

^ ^a ^b Daniels, Peter T.; Bright, William, eds. (1996). The World's Writing Systems. Oxford University Press, Inc. pp. 89, 98, 569–570. ISBN 978-0195079937.
^ ^a ^b Gragg, Gene (2004). "Ge'ez (Aksum)". In Woodard, Roger D. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages. Cambridge University Press. p. 431. ISBN 0-521-56256-2.
^ Fattovich, Rodolfo, "Akkälä Guzay" in Uhlig, Siegbert, ed. Encyclopaedia Aethiopica: A-C. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz KG, 2003, p. 169.
^ Ibn Durayd, Ta‘līq min amāli ibn durayd, ed. al-Sanūsī, Muṣṭafā, Kuwait 1984, p. 227 (Arabic). The author purports that a poet from the Kinda tribe in Yemen who settled in Dūmat al-Ǧandal during the advent of Islam told of how another member of the Yemenite Kinda tribe who lived in that town taught the Arabic script to the Banū Qurayš in Mecca, and that their use of the Arabic script for writing eventually took the place of musnad, or what was then the Sabaean script of the kingdom of Ḥimyar: "You have exchanged the musnad of the sons of Ḥimyar / which the kings of Ḥimyar were wont to write down in books."
^ Stein 2005.
^ Maktari, Sutlan; Mansour, Kamal. "N3395: Proposal to encode Old South Arabian script" (PDF). Retrieved 2 August 2014.

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

[WorldsWritingSystems89-1] Daniels, Peter T.; Bright, William, eds. (1996). The World's Writing Systems. Oxford University Press, Inc. pp. 89, 98, 569–570. ISBN 978-0195079937.

[CambridgeAncientLanguages431-2] Gragg, Gene (2004). "Ge'ez (Aksum)". In Woodard, Roger D. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages. Cambridge University Press. p. 431. ISBN 0-521-56256-2.

[3] Fattovich, Rodolfo, "Akkälä Guzay" in Uhlig, Siegbert, ed. Encyclopaedia Aethiopica: A-C. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz KG, 2003, p. 169.

[4] Ibn Durayd, Ta‘līq min amāli ibn durayd, ed. al-Sanūsī, Muṣṭafā, Kuwait 1984, p. 227 (Arabic). The author purports that a poet from the Kinda tribe in Yemen who settled in Dūmat al-Ǧandal during the advent of Islam told of how another member of the Yemenite Kinda tribe who lived in that town taught the Arabic script to the Banū Qurayš in Mecca, and that their use of the Arabic script for writing eventually took the place of musnad, or what was then the Sabaean script of the kingdom of Ḥimyar: "You have exchanged the musnad of the sons of Ḥimyar / which the kings of Ḥimyar were wont to write down in books."

[5] Stein 2005.

[6] Maktari, Sutlan; Mansour, Kamal. "N3395: Proposal to encode Old South Arabian script" (PDF). Retrieved 2 August 2014.

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