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CHAPTER EIGHT
Languages of Arabia
Kevin T. van Bladel
In typical accounts, the Arab‐Islamic conquest of the seventh century marks the end of late antiquity and the beginning of a new period. In this view, Arabic is treated as a source language mainly for the subsequent period and, therefore, accounts of Arabic literature would not belong in a volume on literatures of late antiquity. Such treatment of Arabic materials as “post‐late antique” overlooks the survival of numerous texts in Arabian languages from throughout the late ancient period (third to the early seventh centuries), a tradition of writing with roots as old as the eleventh century BCE. These are the extant portions of late ancient Arabian literatures, the bulk of which is presumably lost.
Many specialists in Arabic have themselves been quite skeptical about pre‐Islamic Arabian literatures. They tend not to believe that there was much writing of any kind in late ancient Arabia. What we have is poetry or song lyrics written down much later. Arabists, therefore, resort to notions of an “oral society,” an ill‐defined term, but one that connotes the idea that literature was essentially only orally performed and that writing was scarce. Adopting this approach, scholars of Arabic have assumed that nothing substantial was written in Arabic until the Qurʾān. There are, however, numerous ancient Arabian written texts, from late antiquity and from long before, and references to more, but lost, written material, enough to make one think again about pre‐Islamic literacy. In the main, three sorts of texts survive from the Arabian Peninsula originating from late antiquity. First, there are tens of thousands of known inscriptions in various ancient Arabian languages (and not just in Arabic proper), from graffiti to royal monumental inscriptions; second, there are hundreds of poems preserved in early Arabic, thought to have originated from the seventh, sixth, and even the fifth century CE, as well as prose tales and moral exhortations deriving from the period, purportedly transmitted orally and recorded in early strata of the medieval Arabic manuscript tradition; third, there is the Qurʾān, Islam’s foundational scripture, which would turn out to be by far the single most influential literary composition of late antiquity. Each of these three kinds of texts poses distinct problems for the student and historian of the literatures of the third to the early seventh century, problems effectively requiring anybody wishing to use these texts for other purposes to adopt a position in the midst of complicated and often unresolved debates. This chapter briefly describes the texts and literature surviving from the Arabian Peninsula and the arid plains and deserts between Iraq, Jordan, and Syria, here collectively “Arabia” for short, during the period adopted for “late antiquity” in this volume.
Maps of Arabia in this period often depict a wide, blank space easily imagined as uninterrupted desert. This is misleading. The 3.25 million square kilometers of terrain in the peninsula were and are highly varied, comprising not only wide sandy deserts of different hues and extensive fields of black volcanic rock but also mountains (some of them wooded), numerous seasonally irrigated gullies and gulches, scattered permanently watered oasis depressions, hot shores with abundant access to the resources of the seas, and a vast, arid, rocky shrubland plateau fit for the grazing of livestock. There were also cities, towns, and villages where water was available.
It should come as no surprise that such a large and diverse territory was home to many different peoples having different means of subsistence and speaking different languages. At least five different populations distinguished by language lived in the Arabian Peninsula in the period under discussion. All of their languages were historically related to one another as members of the Semitic language‐family – meaning that their languages all evolved separately from a much more ancient prehistoric common ancestor – although they were for the most part mutually incomprehensible by the period under consideration here. Most of these languages do not provide us with much written material, but registering their existence helps to contextualize historically the emergence of classical Arabic, which would go on to become the vehicle of an extremely copious medieval literature and the most widespread heir of all the various literatures of late antiquity discussed in this volume. It should be remembered foremost that what we call “Arabic” evolved as one language among several languages of Arabia. By contrast, outsiders in antiquity tended to refer to all the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula as Arabs (or, in late antiquity, as Saracens in Greek and Latin and as Ṭayyāye in Aramaic, or by specific tribal names) without differentiating clearly between them. Modern scholars, too, have sometimes overlooked the linguistic heterogeneity of Arabia, which must correlate with ethnic heterogeneity, and have concluded that the Arabia of Muḥammad around 600 was basically ethnically homogeneous. This was surely not the case, but much research remains to be done to explain the fate of that ancient heterogeneity and the ethnic and linguistic “Arabization” of Arabia, a question scarcely addressed because it is taken for granted as a preexistent condition.
In the interior basin within the mountains of Yemen, people spoke a group of languages dubbed today Ancient South Arabian (in scholarly literature also sometimes Ṣayhadic or Old, or Epigraphic, South Arabian). This was the region called Arabia Felix in Roman sources of late antiquity. Its sedentary inhabitants prospered by means of reservoirs catching seasonal floods from the surrounding highlands, preserving waters used to cultivate cereal crops and palm orchards. Preeminent among their languages was that of the ancient kingdom of Sheba, Arabic Sabaʾ, called Sabaic today. About ten thousand inscriptions survive written in Sabaic and its cousins in the region, Qatabānic, Maʿīnic, and Ḥaḍramitic. These are written in a distinctive script of 29 consonantal glyphs, one per phoneme, and are dated from the eleventh century BCE until the sixth century CE, with the latest dated inscription from the year 554 CE. They attest to the veneration of numerous local gods and, eventually, Jewish and Christian monotheism (Gajda 2009). Many of them commemorate specific events, building foundations, and military expeditions. Relatively recent discoveries have revealed thousands of polished wooden sticks etched with a handwritten form of the same script used for Ancient South Arabian inscriptions. These minuscule texts, called zabūr, were preserved by the dry climate. Those extant are thought to derive from one northern Yemeni find‐area at which they have survived. These economic documents and private letters show what anybody might have guessed before they were discovered: that the speakers of Ancient South Arabian languages, living in towns in a prosperous region cultivated with large irrigation works, did not restrict their literacy to inscriptions on stone alone. As the extant minuscule texts show, they kept records and wrote correspondence on perishable materials. Formal poetry existed, too, as demonstrated by an earlier Sabaic inscription in what is clearly some kind of verse, still opaque, but with consonant end‐rhymes like those occurring in later classical Arabic verse. For the most part, the inscriptions in Ancient South Arabian languages hint at wha
t may well have been copious literature, written on perishable materials and therefore lost, much in the manner of literature in other ancient languages like Parthian (cf. the more hesitant Stein 2011).
In the mountain highlands above the Ṣayhad lived the people called Ḥimyar, who spoke a language known in Arabic sources as Ḥimyaritic. The Ḥimyarites came to possess an extensive kingdom encompassing the Ancient South Arabian‐speaking lowlanders. They wrote a form of locally standard Sabaic for the purposes of almost all of their known inscriptions, with three exceptions that appear to be in poetry but defy interpretation. Scholars have disagreed about whether the language of Ḥimyar was a late species of Ancient South Arabian or an entirely different Semitic language extant essentially just in these poetic inscriptions. The lack of agreement is surely due to the paucity of identifiable traces of the Ḥimyarite language that survive. For Peter Stein (2008), this just suggests that the Ḥimyarites spoke a form of Ancient South Arabian. It will be difficult to say more about their speech without further discoveries. Their inscriptions in Sabaic, as well as sources by outsiders in other languages, attest that the rulers of the Ḥimyarites adopted a form of Judaism as their religion in the fifth century and that they remained Jewish until the disintegration of their kingdom in the sixth.
Today, in the wadis, mountains, and deserts of eastern Yemen and western Oman, an isolated branch of the west Semitic language‐family survives, entirely different from Ancient South Arabian, called conventionally the Modern South Arabian languages. The existence of these languages in antiquity is unattested, but their survival in the present as the languages of some two hundred thousand people demonstrates the otherwise invisible regional variety that certainly existed among the population of the peninsula in antiquity.
In northern Arabia inscriptions remain from the major oases of Tayma and Duma, as do tens of thousands of graffiti in the deserts and basalt fields spanning Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. These are written in a variety of scripts known collectively as Ancient North Arabian, expressing different Semitic languages and dialects known also in the scholarly literature as Ancient North Arabian, attested from perhaps as early as the middle of the first millennium BCE into the third century CE. Ancient North Arabian is, therefore, a category encompassing different languages having in common local variations of the same script, which is closely related to the Ancient South Arabian script. Some Ancient North Arabian texts are written in languages closely related to Old Arabic (the ancestor of Arabic proper); others are still poorly understood and are probably not Arabic strictly speaking. Their mutual differences are still being teased apart (Al‐Jallad 2015). The Ancient North Arabian inscriptions and graffiti consist almost entirely of the names of their authors along with occasional brief remarks to commemorate an event of personal significance. Inscriptions include invocations of gods, prayers, curses, laments, celebrations, notes for friends, signatures, labels for doodles scratched on stone, labels on tombs, and commemorations of events notable to the authors. Examples of three inscriptions in the copious corpus of Safaitic texts, left by pastoralists in the rocky deserts of southern Syria, are given here in Ahmad Al‐Jallad’s rendering. The strings of consonants here represent proper names the vocalization of which is uncertain.
