Historic Development of Arabic

Last updated: April 17th, 2025 at 9:07 am · Est. Reading Time: 4 minutes

Arabic developed and matured in a span of at least six centuries before the advent of Islam.

At one stage of its development it was written, and probably spoken, in a style called Old Arabic.  Scholars have given it a fancy name of Palaeo-Arabic.¹  Lately Palaeo-Arabic refashioned into Classical Arabic.

The earliest document, which its discoverers consider to be in the Arabic language, is the inscription of ‘Igl bin Haf’am from Qaryat al Faw, written in the Sabaic script.  Now it is lodged in the National Museum of Saudi Arabia, Riyadh.  Its palaeographic study has led scholars to believe that it may date from the end of the first century BCE.²

This finding gives us a clue that Arabic, or its earlier version Palaeo-Arabic, was a spoken language as far back as the 1^st century BCE.  A handful of inscriptions, written fully or partially in Arabic, are found from the first century BCE onwards right across the Arabian Peninsula, in Syria, the Negev, northern Arabia, central Arabia and eastern Arabia.  They are all written in one of the non-Arabic scripts.  Their wide distribution and exclusive use of non-Arabic scripts gives the impression to MacDonald that during the first centuries of the first millennium CE, probably Arabic was a vernacular language of nomads. Writing was not their need.  They might be illiterate or writing in scripts other than Arabic. It is also possible that they hired others to write their inscriptions in Arabic, and the ‘others’ wrote Arabic in their own script.³

The earliest dated Arabic inscription, written on the grave of a certain Raqush in 267 CE in Madain Salih, Saudi Arabia, is still in Nabataean, a non-Arabic script.⁴

As time passed, by the last quarter of 5^th century CE, Arabic developed its own unique alphabets.  They are first attested in Thawban Inscription discovered near Najran.⁵  It is this writing style of Arabic which has got the name of Old Arabic or Palaeo-Arabic.

There is ample evidence, in light of dated Arabic inscriptions, that the final Arabic alphabets developed from the Nabataean script in the region of northern Arabia, southern Syria, and southern Iraq.⁶

Now, inscriptions in all ancient Arabian languages, both from the north and from the south, are abundant, literally numbering into thousands.  On the other hand, pre-Islamic inscriptions of Arabic can be counted on fingers of the hands.  Why it is so?  The thousands of inscriptions etched on the rock faces by non-Arabic users are predominantly graffiti.  They must be written by common people.  It means pre-Islamic Arabia was fairly literate.  If we look at the distribution of these inscriptions, they are mostly from Transjordan, the oasis settlements of northern Arabia, and from Yemen.  The desert-like areas such as the Hassaean plains, Oman, Najd or Hejaz produce very few graffiti inscriptions.  This observation gives a hint that the literate population had concentrated into certain areas.  Using this line of argument that more a society was literate, more graffiti it produced, McDonald assumes that Arabic speaking people were mostly illiterate.  They developed their own alphabets only after Arabic became an administrative language.  As Imru’ al-Qays of famous Namara inscription is identified as the second Lakhmid kinglet, and as it is assumed that Arabic was his native language or of those people who wrote his funerary notice, we can assume that the Lakhmid court was literate in Arabic by 328 CE.⁷

As politically influential and ethnically conscious Lakhmids started supporting writing in Arabic, its peculiar alphabets gained ground during the next few centuries, replacing other ancient scripts.  Inscriptions written in Ancient North Arabian scripts are hardly present if any, from 5^th century CE onwards.  Arabic emerged as a language of prestige, as once were the Ancient North Arabian languages.  It no longer remained limited to illiterate nomads.

Further Reading

History of Islam, Social Structure of Pre-Islamic Arabs, https://historyofislam.org/social-structure-of-pre-islamic-arabs/ 

End notes

1. Christian Robin, ‘Alī Ibrāhīm al- Ghabbān, and Sa’īd Fayiaz al-Sa’īd, “Inscriptions antique de la région de Najran (Arabie Séoudite meridionale): nouveaux jalons pour l’historie de l’éctiture, de la langue et du calcenrier Arabes,” Competes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions & Belles-Letters 183 no. 3 (2014): 1039.
2. For the translation of the inscription see: A. F. L. Beeston, “Namara and Faw”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 42 no. 1 (1979): 1.  For the dating of the inscription on palaeographic grounds see: Christian J. Roboin, L’Arabie antique de Karib’îl à Mahomet: Nouvelles données sur l’histoire des Arabes grâce aux inscriptions, (Aix-en-Provence: Édisud, 1992), 115 – 116.
3. M. C. A. Macdonald, “Reflections on the linguistic map of pre-Islamic Arabia,” Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 11 (2000): 49, 57.
4. John F. Healey and G. Rex Smith, “Jaussenn-Savignac 17 – The earliest Dated Arabic Document (A.D. 267),” The Journal of Saudi Arabian Archaeology 12 (1989): 77-84.  For the picture, see plate 46. (Raqush inscription; inscription JSNab 17).
5. Christian J. Robin, ‘Alī Ibrāhīm al-Ghabbān, and Sa’īd F. Al-Sa’īd, “Inscriptions Antiques de la Région de Najrān (Arabie Séoudite Méridionale): Nouveaux Jalons Pour l’historie de l’éctiture, De La langue et du calendrier arabes,” Comptes Rendus de l’académie des Inscriptions et Belles & Letters (2014), 1043.
6. For the step by step development of the Arabic alphabets see: Beatrice Gruendler, The development of the Arabic Scripts: From the Nabatean Era to the First Islamic Century According to the Dated Texts, Atlanta: Scholars press,1993.  For the regions of their development see: M. C. A. Macdonald, “Reflections on the linguistic map of pre-Islamic Arabia,” Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 11 (2000): 58.
7. For the inscription see: James A. Bellamy, A New Reading of the Namārah Inscription, Journal of the American Oriental Society 105 no.1 (1985): 31 – 51. (Namara inscription; inscription RES 483).  For McDonald’s comments see: M. C. A. Macdonald, “Reflections on the linguistic map of pre-Islamic Arabia,” Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 11 (2000): 59.