South Arabian alphabet
| Ancient South Arabian script |
|
|---|---|
| Type | |
| Languages | Ge'ez, Old South Arabian |
|
Time period
|
c. 9th century BC to 7th century AD |
|
Parent systems
|
Proto-Sinaitic
|
|
Child systems
|
Ge'ez |
|
Sister systems
|
Phoenician alphabet |
| Direction | Right-to-left |
| ISO 15924 | Sarb, 105 |
|
Unicode alias
|
Old South Arabian |
| U+1BC0–U+10A7F | |
The ancient Yemeni alphabet (Old South Arabian ms3nd; modern Arabic: المُسنَد musnad) branched from the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet in about the 9th century BC. It was used for writing the Old South Arabian languages of the Sabaic, Qatabanic, Hadramautic, Minaic (or Madhabic), Himyaritic, and Ge'ez in Dʿmt. The earliest inscriptions in the alphabet date to the 9th century BC in Akkele Guzay, Eritrea. There are no vowels, instead using the mater lectionis to mark them.
Its mature form was reached around 500 BC, and its use continued until the 6th century AD, including Old North Arabian inscriptions in variants of the alphabet, when it was displaced by the Arabic alphabet. In Ethiopia and Eritrea it evolved later into the Ge'ez alphabet, which, with added symbols throughout the centuries, has been used to write Amharic, Tigrinya and Tigre, as well as other languages (including various Semitic, Cushitic, and Nilo-Saharan languages).
Zabūr is the name of the cursive form of the South Arabian script that was used by the ancient Yemenis (Sabaeans) in addition to their monumental script, or musnad (see, e.g., Ryckmans, J., Müller, W. W., and ‛Abdallah, Yu., Textes du Yémen Antique inscrits sur bois. Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, 1994 (Publications de l'Institut Orientaliste de Louvain, 43)).
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