Soumya Sagar writes for Science about a new decipherment:
Rock faces within the caves and dried riverbeds of Oman’s Dhofar governorate bear nearly 2400-year-old writings that snake across the surface in a mysterious script. For more than a century, these inscriptions—known as the Dhofari script—had defied decipherment. Now, in a study in press at the journal Jaarbericht Ex Oriente Lux, a linguist says he has deciphered the main subtype of the Dhofari script, and has found evidence that its alphabet didn’t originate in southern Arabia.
The enduring enigma of the Dhofari script had led to many theories over the decades, including the fanciful idea that “these were inscriptions by the people of ʿĀd, a lost Arabian tribe mentioned in the Quran,” says study author Ahmad Al-Jallad, a linguist at Ohio State University. Al-Jallad’s new paper marks “the first ever reliable study on this matter” and “has the potential of writing an entirely new page of the history of Arabia,” says Giuliano Castagna, a linguist at Beijing Normal University who was not involved in the work.
Study of the Dhofari script dates back to 1900, when two British archaeologists mentioned the inscriptions in a book on the southern Arabian Peninsula. Three decades later, Bertram Thomas, the first westerner to cross the Empty Quarter—the vast desert that covers much of the southern Arabian Peninsula—described stone monuments in Dhofar that had been marked with the script. Beyond the hills of Dhofar, researchers also found examples of Dhofari in the neighboring al-Mahrah governorate of Yemen, as well as scraped onto rocks on the island of Socotra.
The inscriptions were more or less forgotten until the early 1990s, when Omani epigraphist Ali Maḥāsh al-Shahri teamed up with British epigraphist Geraldine King to thoroughly document the painted inscriptions from the caves in Dhofar. Although they failed to decipher the script, the researchers determined it had two distinct subtypes, which they called Script 1 and Script 2. The new study contains Al-Jallad’s decipherment of Dhofari Script 1, the more common of the two.
While examining al-Shahri and King’s photos of the inscriptions, Al-Jallad noticed that one particular writing from a cave in Dhofar only had about 26 individual symbols, or glyphs, that never repeated. Al-Jallad strongly suspected he wasn’t dealing with a long sentence, but rather an abecedary, a listing of the script’s individual letters akin to our ABCs. A second inscription, with the same glyphs in the same order, solidified his theory. And the same sequence appears, in a snakelike curve, in a third inscription from Duqm, Oman, published in March in the Omani archaeology journal Athar.
To suss out the Dhofari alphabet, Al-Jallad looked at the broadly similar scripts of ancient Yemen and ancient North Arabia, whose alphabets begin with the sequence h-l-ḥ-m and are therefore called halḥam. He reasoned that the Dhofari letters must be in the same order. By matching the Dhofari glyphs with their equivalents in halḥam, Al-Jallad could assign sounds to them and gain the ability to pronounce—and begin to decipher—words of a long-lost language.
Those words hold clues about the people who used the Dhofari script to write their language. For one, this language was not Arabic, but an ancient relative of Oman’s pre-Islamic indigenous languages, which are still spoken today. After closely examining the glyphs’ shapes, Al-Jallad also concluded they most likely descended from those used in a script called Thamudic B. That script was widely used on the northern side of the Arabian Peninsula, in what is today the Saudi Arabian province of Najd, suggesting the letterforms somehow made their way southward into modern-day Oman and Yemen.
(I wonder if the “book on the southern Arabian Peninsula” is Southern Arabia, by James and Mabel Bent?) More at the link; thanks, Dmitry!
The zenodo link was restricted for me, but here is a link to a free copy from al Jallad’s academia page.
He notes that the traditional understanding looked at a sequence as being bn, meaning son of. He describes this as “the main obstacle preventing a linguistic connection with the Modern South Arabian languages,” and reinterprets the letter previously recognized as an n as r. The sequence br would still mean son of, “compatible with the modern South Arabian languages”. This sounds plausible to someone like me with no background in all of this.
He also offers an interpretation of several texts. Again, plausibly to me, but I’ll be interested to see what specialists say.
Thanks, I also noticed the academia link but it didn’t work when I tried it a few days ago. Works now!
An elementary, rather.
h-l-ḥ-m
Ε-Λ-Η-Μ
“For one, this language was not Arabic, but an ancient relative of Oman’s pre-Islamic indigenous languages, which are still spoken today. ”
Better clickbait and better dopamine-for-attention payoff than just saying “the language was also, like Arabic, a Central Semitic language, having other ancient relatives which are no longer spoken and modern relatives which are.” At least they didn’t attribute it to Bigfoot, Atlantis, or ancient astronauts, right? A win for science journalism!
Here’s all the paper says about the language (link added):
BTW, the root for “worry, think about” is hmm.
To draw out my point from earlier, I suspect the issue with n/r was that they used the bn reading to recognize that many of the inscriptions were genealogies. However, interpreting the r as an n made it more difficult to understand other words that contained this theoretical n.
I’ve now read the wiki articles on the Modern South Arabian languages (which Al Jallad says are related to the language used in the script. Main takeaway – they’re not descendants of the Old South Arabian languages. (Sigh. I’m feeling kind of Luo about that.)
Anyway, does anyone know the earliest attestation for any of the Modern South Arabian languages? Wiki makes it sound like they haven’t been written since the arrival of Arabic 1500 years ago.
To be clear, al Jallad also writes that the language used in the script is not a direct ancestor of the Modern South Arabian languages, because it reflects an early loss of interdentals which are preserved in MSALs. But he seems to think that the script language would fit best in a family grouping with them.
He is working on Script 1, and suggests that script may reflect a language directly ancestral to MSALs.
I wonder how much can be learned about classification by pushing back first attestation by nearly two millennia. With MSALs perceived to fall outside a (debated) grouping of Yemeni/Southwester Arabian and Ethipic Semitic languages, maybe not so much, but it could cast some light on sound changes in these branches.
[David’s post showed up while I was writing, making a few of the points I was trying to. Hopefully repetition aids memory.]
>the language was also, like Arabic, a Central Semitic language, having other ancient relatives which are no longer spoken and modern relatives which are
Kim, I don’t think that’s right. He’s saying that they are closely related to Modern South Arabian languages, which are not considered Central Semitic.
I wonder if you may have been caught in the Old South Arabian/Modern South Arabian morass. Old South Arabian is Central Semitic, according to some classifications; others put it in South Semitic. Either way, Modern South Arabian is not Central Semitic.
Notably, science journalism was not tripped up by that confusion. A win indeed.
While the Modern South Arabian languages are something else again, al-Jallad has published a lot on the various not-quite-Arabic languages which have been submerged by Arabic proper over the centuries. It’s all very interesting. I’m always pleased to find out that language prehistory was even more complex than I thought.
Lots of good stuff on his academia.edu page.
IMHO, it would have been a bigger win for science journalism to say that those modern languages are Semitic but not in the same branch as Arabic.
@Ryan, you’re right that I was wrong about it being Central, but because of a more generalized brain failure and not specifically from conflating Old/Modern South Arabian.
I’m going to spin this by claiming that _actually_ I was presenting a hypothetical example of ‘better’ pop-sci reporting and so the error is necessary, because if it were all solid and correct that still just wouldn’t be plausible 😉
The directional terminology in which Northwest belongs to Central, which is in turn part of West, and South is bifurcated, part belonging to Central and part not, sure befuddles anyone who isn’t immersed in it.
As Kipling reminds us, East is East, and West is … everything else.
Soumya Sagar has another al-Jallad-themed piece, about an inscription attributed to one of Muhammad’s companions (said to be second such).
As for me, the article is fine. Yes, some readers will think that it’s something totally crazy like Sumer, so it would be better to put it slightly differnetly. But not a blunder.
Of course if the author wants readers to think so, that is not what journalists should do.
Besides “Dhofari” is confusing too – I’m accustomed to hearing of Dhofari Arabic.