Identity, script, and the uses of writing in pre-Islamic Arabia - Michael Macdonald

“From at least the early first millennium BC, the western two-thirds of Arabia saw the flowering of a large number of literate cultures in both the north and the south, using a family of alphabets unique to Arabia. This happened not only in the settled areas, but among the nomads who, however, used writing purely as a pastime. These scripts died out in the north by about the third century AD and in the south by the end of the sixth. Among the written languages used in western Arabia, Old Arabic is conspicuous by its absence and seems only to have been transcribed on very rare occasions, using a variety of scripts. The Nabataeans used Aramaic as their written language and brought their version of the Aramaic script to Arabia in the first century BC. In late antiquity, the Nabataean Aramaic script gradually ceased to be employed to write Aramaic and came to be used for Arabic, which thus at last came to be a habitually written language. However, writing appears to have been used only for notes, business do