The Arabic book owes its origin to Islam, and this has given it a character that it has retained. I wonder if we may begin with the history of writing and books in the Islamic civilization.
That is right, but it does not mean that written records were unknown in the Arabian Peninsula before the coming of the Prophet (S.A.A.) around the year 600, i.e. the Prophet’s emigration from Mecca to Medina, the starting point of the Muslim calendar, which took place in A.D. 622.
What are the earliest surviving monuments of the Arabic script?
From information brought back by Niebuhr’s expedition from Yemen, where it had sojourned in the second half of the 18th century, it was known in Europe that there were inscriptions with a distinctive script in Southern Arabia. During the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, a large number of these became known in Europe, partly through squeezes. The south Arabian characters, now usually called Himyaritic, which are monumental and symmetrical in shape, are derived from an adaptation of the oldest Semitic alphabet writing, which originated with the Canaanitic people. This sourth Arabian script was called in the Arabic tradition musnad “supported” probably because of its stiff, pillar-like form.
What is the language of these inscriptions?
The language is a branch of the Arabic family of languages, differentiated into various dialects but quite distinct from the north Arabic language, which later became classical Arabic. The inscriptions, most of which are incised in stone, are largely dedications and building inscriptions, but they also include laws, documents, and expressions of religious feeling; they give an impression of the rich culture that flowered in these regions that conducted trade both with India and with the Mediterranean lands. Most of the inscriptions are from first millennium B.C., but there are some from later centuries; a couple of long inscriptions, dealing with the collapse of dams, date from the middle of the 5th and mid 6th centuries.
Where is the cradle of the writing activities of the Arabs?
In the later Arabic tradition, southern Arabia plays a large role as a starting point for popular movements in Arabia, and it would not be remarkable if the impulse for the writing activities of the Arabs had come from here, the more so since commercial intercourse brought the southern Arabs into continuous contact with their northern kinsmen. We do have evidence, in fact, that the south Arabian script spread beyond its own boundaries. This was of greatest significance in a country beyond Arabia, namely, Abyssinian, the leading language of which is close to Arabic, probably because the ruling people had migrated there from southern Arabia. A script derived from the south Arabian one is still used there today, but with the important improvement that it can depict vowels. The oldest inscriptions extant in this script date from the fourth century A.D.
What about northern Arabia?
Offshoots of the south Arabian script have also been found in northern Arabia. At the oasis of al-‘Ula, which lay on the caravan route leading from southern Arabia via Mecca and Medina to the countries of the Mediterranean, purely south Arabian (Minaean) inscriptions, originating from a south Arabian colony, have been discovered. Other inscriptions have been found at the same place, but with a more cursive adaptation of the south Arabian script called Lihyanic, after the people among whom it originated. A number of inscriptions, often scratched graffiti,, i.e. ancient inscriptions, have been found, in a script also derived from the south Arabian one, but showing a greater degree of modification. These are all comprehended under the description “Thamudic.” A third group, closely related to these with regard to both script and language, composes the Safaitic, which are found as far north as Safa, a place situated in the Haurān mountains southeast of Damascus. Most of these inscriptions are incised in rock walls and on the remains of ancient buildings. They are not very informative, of course, but they are part of the evidence of the expansion of the south Arabian script in the period between the second century B.C. and the third century A.D.
Which script did form the basis for the Islamic book?
It was not the southern Arabs whose script came to furnish the basis for the Islamic book. The south Arabian alphabet and its offshoots did not achieve any widespread dissemination in northern Arabia beyond peoples of the southern Arabian type. The script that became of historical world importance throughout Islamic literature came into existence as an offshoot of Aramaic.
When did the Aramaic script come into existence?
Its existence was in close association with the north Semitic type, which was used in the Canaanitic region and has strong affinities with the later Hebrew script. It was in use during the centuries before and after the start of our era over virtually the whole of the Near East, where Aramaic had become both the universal popular idiom and an international second language. It goes without saying that over such a vast region, local variations would occur in both language and script. So, one characteristic subgroup consists of inscriptions from the busy trading settlement at the oasis of Palmyra; the Nabataean inscriptions form a second.
The latter are of particular interest in this context, for they stem from Arabs who in the Hellenistic age had pushed into the region of the dominant culture and had adopted the language and script of the host population. So they wrote Aramaic, but their Arabic mother-tongue shines through clearly, especially in the names. From about 100 BC to about the third century AD, the Nabataeans controlled the northern section of Arabia’s western caravan and trade routes, from the oasis of Madā’in ṣāliḥ via Petra and southeast of the Dead Sea northward to Damascus. Their inscriptions have been found in this region, and others not very different from them are met with in the Sinai Peninsula.
Could you briefly talk about their inscriptions?
Once the Arabs had gone this far, it was but a short additional steep for them to use the same alphabet for writing their own language. This step is taken in an epitaph to the Arab King Imru’ al-Qais found at al-Namāra, southeast of Damascus, dated 328 AD. This is the oldest inscription in the north Arabic language so far known. The inscription proclaims the deceased to have been king of all the Arabs enumerates various northern Arabian tribes subdued by him, and includes even Najrān in southern Arabia. It says also that he set his sons over the tribes and sent them on missions to the Persians and the Byzantines.
How is Imru’ al-Qays depicted in this inscription?
This inscription shows him to have been a powerful Bedouin chieftain, who gathered the northernmost tribes of Arabia around him and made contact, like so many later great Arab chieftains, with the imperial civilizations of East and West.
So the first genuine Arabic inscription comes from the Bedouins. How did the script lead to the development of a distinctive Arabic script?
We find this in three inscriptions from the Pre-Islamic era, all of them from Syria. The oldest is from Zabad, in northern Syria, and is dated AD 512. it contains a Syriac, a Greek, and a short Arabic text, the latter consisting mainly of proper names. The second, at Harrān in the province of al-Lajā, southeast of Damascus, is to be found together with a Greek translation, dated AD 568, on the lintel over the portal of a now-ruined church. The third is from Umm al-Jamāl, and likewise dates from the sixth century. The new script differs from the Nabataean in its more rounded shapes, in its tendency for giving the last letter of the word a distinctive form, and in general in its simplification of the more monumental lines of the Nabataean characters. It may be presumed to have sprung up in the period between the Namāra inscription and the Zabad inscription, namely, in the fourth or fifth century AD, somewhere in northern Arabia or neighboring Syria. It is worth noting, perhaps, that it resembles the Sinai inscriptions more than the other inscriptions of Nabataean origin. In the same way as it spread northward to the outermost margin of the Arabic-language region, as the Zabad inscription shows, so also it moved southward, reaching at least as far as Mecca, where it attained its historic significance with the emergence of Islam. That it was this and not the south Arabian type that prevailed results from the fact that the inhabitants of al-Hijāz, the territory in which Mecca and Medina are situated, had close linguistic affinities with the northern Arabia tribes.
Does any other Arabic script survive from the pre-Islamic era?
No Arabic script other than those just noted has survived from that time. Before Islam, the Arabs had innumerable stories of the lives and exploits of the tribes, and they also had a highly developed poetry bound by fixed rules of rhythm and construction, but both the stories and the poems were handed down orally. The tribes had their special reciters and narrators. A narrator, or khatīb, needed to command every shade of meaning of which his language was capable in order to uphold the honor of his tribe when recounting its heroic deeds, and he had to have a large fund of knowledge that others could inherit from him. Poets did recite their poetry themselves, but a prominent poet would have his transmitter, a rāwī or rāwiya, who knew all his poems by heart and who was master of the fine art of recitation. Such a rāwī was a living edition of the great poetry collections, and naturally he had pupils, who represented new editions of the poems. Such a mode of transmission could ensure the survival of the poems for no more than a few generations, as a rule; the oldest poems to have come down to us date back no further than the first century before Islam.
