About 3,700 years ago, from the land of the Amorites a West Semitic-speaking people of the Sinai became workers or slaves under the sway of Egyptian rule. The Bible attributes the name to Canaan, the son of Ham and the grandson of Noah. At around 1300 BC, a branch of the evolving Proto-Sinaitic broke off and spread into the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula. This Proto-Arabian script eventually evolved by the 5th century BC into the highly elegant South Arabian script of West Asia. Amorites and Canaanites along the Phoenician coast and into Upper Galilee come out of Arabia into Syria and Lebanon.
Six Arabian tribes are also sons of Cush. Cush in the Old Testament do not refer to Ethiopia, Cushites of East Africa, including Aksum in Ethiopia, branched out and settled in Arabia or elsewhere. Ethiopia with Eritrea (D'mt) and the southeastern part of the Red Sea coast of Sudan, is the most likely location of the land known to the ancient Egyptians as Punt- the Western body of the Nile Valley- the start of the Iron Age in Africa. The Sahara divides the continent with the Nile Valley as one major exception to the Atlantic Ocean on the west. The Phoenician homeland of the Western Sahara was however the downstream of Lower Egypt The northern-most section of Egypt stretching from just south of modern-day Cairo to the Nile Delta at Alexandria.
The South Arabian alphabet was used primarily in the Sabaean and Minaean kingoms in the Southern edge of the Arabian Peninsula. This script was transported across the Red Sea to Ethiopia, where it transformed into classical Ethiopic (Ge'ez) and modern-day Amharic. The earliest Aramaic alphabet was based on the Phoenician script, a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet; a linear, non-Cuneiform abjad of acrophonic glyphs found in Levantine texts of the Late Bronze Age to 1050 BC.
The South Arabian script went out of fashion as Islam increased the popularity of the Arabic alphabet. There is one remarkable difference between the South Arabian tradition and West Semitic: the letter ordering. The South Arabian alphabet has the order h, l, h, m, etc..., while West Semitic has the order ', b, g, d, etc. The earliest example of an abecedary (a list of the letters in an alphabet in the some kind of order) was found in the city of Ugarit.
The Nabataeans, which established a kingdom in what is modern-day Jordan from the 2nd century BCE, were Arabs. They wrote with a highly cursive Aramaic-derived alphabet that would eventually evolve into the Arabic alphabet. Generally speaking, there are two variants to the Arabic alphabet: Kufic and Naskhi. The Kufic script is angular, which was most likely a product of inscribing on hard surfaces such as wood or stone, while the Naskhi script is much more cursive. The Kufic script appears to be the older of the scripts, as it was common in the early history of Islam, and used for the earliest copies of the Qu'ran. By the 11th century CE, the Naskhi script appeared and gradually replaced the Kufic script as the most popular script for copying the Qu'ran as well as secular and personal writings.
Like other Proto-Sinaitic-derived scripts, Arabic doesn't have letters for vowels.
|
Name |
Number |
English |
Meaning |
|
alif |
1 |
a |
al-Bari: the Creator |
|
ba |
2 |
b |
al-'aql: the Intellect |
|
jim |
3 |
j |
an-nafs: Soul |
|
dal |
4 |
d |
at-tabi'ah: Nature |
|
ha |
5 |
h |
al-Bari' bil-idafah: Creator in relation to what is below Him |
|
waw |
6 |
w |
al-'Aql bil-idafah: Intellect in relation to what is below it |
|
za |
7 |
z |
an-nafs bil-idafah: Soul in relation to what is below it |
|
Ha |
8 |
h |
at-tabi'ah bil-idafah: Nature in relation to what is below it |
|
Ta |
9 |
t |
al-hayula: Material world, having no relation to anything below it |
|
ya |
10 |
y |
al-ibda: Plan of the Creator |
|
kaf |
20 |
k |
at-takwin: Structure transmitted to the created realm |
|
lam |
30 |
l |
al-amr: The Divine Commandment |
|
mim |
40 |
m |
al-khalq: The Created Universe |
|
nun |
50 |
n |
al-wujud: the two-fold aspect of being |
|
sin |
60 |
s |
The doubled relation between khalq and takwin |
|
'ayn |
70 |
' |
al-tarTib: the chain of commands being impressed upon the universe |
|
Sad |
90 |
s |
The tripled relation between amr, khalq and takwin |
|
qaf |
100 |
q |
ijtimal al-jumlah fil-ibda: The assembly of all things in the Plan of the Creator |
|
ra |
200 |
r |
at-tawhid: Unity, the return of all things to the One, which is their principle and reason for existence |