Page 4 - Christianity among the Arabs

Writing came to the nomads of North Arabia as early as the

beginning of the first millennium B.C.E. By the turn of the
Common Era, the nomads of the Harra had mastered the

written word. They
Damascus
carved tens of
HARRA ®Wadi al-Khudari
thousands of rock
Jerusalem • Amman
inscriptions in their
local vernacular, an
Petra
early dialect of
Aqaba
Arabic, using an
indigenous,

consonantal alphabet, which modern scholars have called
Safaitic.

Safaitic belongs to a family of alphabets labeled the South
Semitic script. These were employed in the Arabian
Peninsula from as early as the late second millennium B.C.E.

to the rise of Islam. This script family is a sister of the
Phoenico-Aramaic script, both descending from the Proto-
Sinaitic script sometime in the second millennium B.C.E.(a)

The circumstances under which the South Semitic script
spread from the Levant to Arabia remain shadowy, but by the

middle of the first millennium B.C.E. varieties of the alphabet
were used from Jordan to Yemen.

The Safaitic texts belong to many genres: funerary,
commemorative, votive, etc. Some contain religious
invocations, prayers for security and success, and curses
upon enemies. Most texts, however, contain only personal

names—commemorations of one’s presence in a place.

Most Safaitic inscriptions contain no absolute chronological

information, but a minority employ a dating formula using the

word sanat (“year”)
followed by a
description of an

event, such as “the
year the king of
Nabatea died” or

“the year Caesar announced the Province." Inscriptions such
as these could date as early as the second century B.C.E.