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The Ancient South Arabian script (Old South Arabian: 𐩣𐩯𐩬𐩵 ms 3 nd; modern Arabic: الْمُسْنَد musnad) branched from the Proto-Sinaitic script in about the late 2nd millennium BCE. It was used for writing the Old South Arabian languages Sabaic, Qatabanic, Hadramautic, Minaean, Hasaitic, and Geʽez in Dʿmt.
Transliteration key for South Arabian in several scripts. Ancient South Arabian (ASA; also known as Old South Arabian, [1] [2] [3] Epigraphic South Arabian, Ṣayhadic, or Yemenite) is a group of four closely related extinct languages (Sabaean/Sabaic, Qatabanic, Hadramitic, Minaic) spoken in the far southern portion of the Arabian Peninsula.
Sabaic is the best attested language in South Arabian inscriptions, named after the Kingdom of Saba, and is documented over a millennium. [4] In the linguistic history of this region, there are three main phases of the evolution of the language: Late Sabaic (10th–2nd centuries BC), Middle Sabaic (2nd century BC–mid-4th century AD), and Late Sabaic (mid-4th century AD–eve of Islam). [16]
Old Arabic and its descendants are classified as Central Semitic languages, which is an intermediate language group containing the Northwest Semitic languages (e.g., Aramaic and Hebrew), the languages of the Dadanitic, Taymanitic inscriptions, the poorly understood languages labeled Thamudic, and the ancient languages of Yemen written in the Ancient South Arabian script.
The scripts were exclusive to Arabia and the Horn of Africa. All the ANA and most of the ASA scripts fell out of use by the 6th century AD. South Arabian inscription addressed to the Sabaean national god Almaqah. The exception was Geʽez, a child of ASA in use in Ethiopia. It and its variants remain in use today for various Ethiosemitic languages.
Sabaic was written in the South Arabian alphabet, and like Hebrew and Arabic marked only consonants, the only indication of vowels being with matres lectionis.For many years the only texts discovered were inscriptions in the formal Masnad script (Sabaic ms 3 nd), but in 1973 documents in another minuscule and cursive script were discovered, dating back to the second half of the 1st century BC ...
Incense burner, from Shabwah, Hadhramaut, c. 3rd century CE. Nude male riding a camel. Hadramitic inscription, 2 lines. British Museum. Almost the entire body of evidence for the ancient Ḥaḑramautic language comes from inscriptions written in the monumental Ancient South Arabian script, consisting of 29 letters, and deriving from the Proto-Sinaitic script.
South Arabian may refer to: something of, from, or related to the region of South Arabia; Modern South Arabian languages, a group of languages presently spoken in Yemen and Oman; Old South Arabian languages, a mostly extinct group of languages spoken in what is now Yemen Ancient South Arabian script, the writing system of Old South Arabian