Credited to Saudi Arabia. The Arabic script descends from Nabataean, and older scholarship placed its birth in the Levant and Mesopotamia. Transitional Nabataean-Arabic texts were previously known from the northern Hijaz, Sinai and the Levant, so the origin is shared with Jordan and Syria. Saudi Arabia's claim rests on early dated inscriptions found on its territory.
How it began
Arabic writing passed through an intermediate Nabataean-Arabic stage, described as the earliest phase in its development. In 2014 a French-Saudi team led by Frederic Imbert of Aix-Marseille University reported an inscription in this intermediate script about 100 kilometers north of Najran, in southern Saudi Arabia, dated to 469 or 470 CE. A Saudi report also describes a stone inscription at Al-Mabiyat as the oldest known in the Arabic Hejazi script, dated to the 3rd century CE.
Before it existed
Earlier peoples of the Arabian Peninsula wrote in other alphabets, among them the Ancient North Arabian scripts of the northern oases and the alphabets of southern Arabia. The Nabataeans used their own form of Aramaic writing. The accounts handed down by Abbasid-era historians and repeated by European orientalists portrayed the Levant and Mesopotamia as the birthplace of the Arabic script.
Who pushed back
The Saudi discoveries are presented as contradicting that long-held view and as showing the role of the western part of Saudi Arabia in the development of Arabic writing. The question is not settled in favor of one place. The intermediate script had previously been found only in the northern Hijaz, Sinai and the Levant, and the Najran find extended its known range far to the south.
What lasted
The inscriptions are used by scholars to trace the history of the Arabic language and its writing in the period before Islam, including its relation to early Quranic Arabic. Among the finds are the Thawban inscription from the Najran area, dated to 470 CE, and an inscription by Kab bin Amr at Al-Haqqun, dated to about 485 CE, which shows Nabataean influence. The Hima area north of Najran, with its rock inscriptions, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
