How it began
The Nabataean alphabet was the writing system of the Nabataean kingdom, whose capital was Petra in present-day southern Jordan. Britannica dates its use to between about 150 BCE and 150 CE. The Nabataeans used it to write Aramaic, and it was related to the Aramaic alphabet, one of the major Semitic scripts. Inscriptions also record Nabataean Arabic. The kingdom extended beyond modern Jordan, and many inscriptions come from Sinai and from Hegra in present-day Saudi Arabia.
Before it existed
Aramaic had been the common written language of the Middle East since the 7th and 6th centuries BCE and the official language of the Achaemenid Persian empire, written in a script derived from the Phoenician alphabet. Regional forms of that script developed after the Persian period. The Nabataean form was one of them.
How it works
Like its Semitic precursors, Nabataean had 22 letters, all standing for consonants, and was written from right to left. Compared with other scripts descended from Aramaic, it developed more loops and ligatures joining letters, probably to speed up writing. The joins were not standardized and varied by place and period.
How it spread
Nabataean inscriptions have been found in Petra, the Sinai Peninsula, Bosra, Namara, Abdah and Hegra, as well as in Egypt and Italy and on coins from Petra. A bilingual inscription in Nabataean and Greek was found on the Aegean island of Kos. Between 6,000 and 7,000 inscriptions have been published, most of them short texts or graffiti.
What lasted
Britannica states that the Nabataean script gave rise to the neo-Sinaitic alphabet, the ancestor of the Arabic alphabet. A cursive form of Nabataean developed into Arabic writing from the 4th century CE. The joined letters of Nabataean cursive carried over into Arabic script.
Where it stands today
Nabataean itself went out of use by about the 4th century CE and is known only from inscriptions and a small number of papyri. Eduard Beer first deciphered it in 1840. The 38 funerary inscriptions of Hegra, published in 1884 and 1885, were long the only substantial body of detailed Nabataean text. The script was added to the Unicode Standard in June 2014 with version 7.0.
