BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Mysterious Pre-Islamic Arabian Script Deciphered

Breakthrough cracks ancient Dhofari script

A pre-Islamic Dhofari 1 abecedary. Courtesy Al-Jallad.

In the deserts of Oman and Yemen can be found a treasure trove of ancient inscriptions written in pre-Islamic Arabian scripts. Among these is the enigmatic script known to scholars as Dhofari 1, named after the Dhofar region where it is most commonly found. More than 2,000 years old, the script offers a chance to unlock a new chapter in the history of pre-Islamic South Arabia. The only problem is that since its discovery in the early 20th century, no one was able to decipher it, despite the similarity of several of its letters to known scripts from the region. That changed when Ahmad Al-Jallad, the chair of Arabic studies at Ohio State University, had a sudden realization.

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Deciphering a Pre-Islamic Script

The Dhofari 1 script, as well as the related Dhofari 2 script, is found painted on cave walls and carved into wadi stones and loose boulders across the deserts of the southern Arabian Peninsula. The script originated around the end of the first millennium BCE and went out of use before the spread of Islam in the seventh century CE. It has remained undecipherable since then. According to Al-Jallad, in communication with Bible History Daily, “Since the script was undeciphered, it lent itself to wild theories. Some connected it with the tribe of Ad, one of the ‘extinct’ Arab tribes mentioned in the Quran.” Perhaps now, scholars will finally be able to get to the bottom of the many questions surrounding the script and the culture that produced it.

Al-Jallad presented his decipherment breakthrough in the journal Jaarbericht Ex Oriente Lux. It was a breakthrough so simple it had been under scholars’ noses for decades: Three of the Dhofari 1 inscriptions did not record words, but rather the Dhofari alphabet.

While examining a number of Dhofari 1 inscriptions, Al-Jallad noticed that three contained more than 20 separate letters without any repetitions. Given the length of the inscriptions, this would be highly unexpected if the text recorded words. But if they recorded the Dhofari alphabet, it would be exactly what you would expect. Viewing the three inscriptions as abecedaries (lists of letters in alphabetical order), Al-Jallad was able to compare them to other pre-Islamic Arabian scripts, which is when the similarities between a handful of the Dhofari 1 letters and those of other languages came in handy. Assuming the similarly shaped letters corresponded to similar sounds, it became clear that the Dhofari 1 abecedaries were halḥams, a name corresponding to the order of the first four letters of numerous pre-Islamic alphabets, similar to how the ABCs are named after the first three letters of the English alphabet.

A Dhofari 1 inscription reading, “Hḍ made an offering to S²ms¹.” Courtesy King and Macdonald; CC BY

Although the Dhofari 1 abecedaries do not always perfectly follow the halḥam order, the overall correspondence enabled the identification of readings for all the remaining uncertain letters, cracking the code of Dhofari. Suddenly, scholars could read the millennia-old script. The language of Dhofari 1 shares many similarities with other pre-Islamic Arabian languages and scripts. Despite being found in southern Arabia, it may be a descendant or close relative of the North Arabian Thamudic B script, which is found in northwestern Arabia as well as Syria, Egypt, and even Yemen. Dhofari 1 similarly has much in common with the modern non-Arabic language, Mahri, which is primarily spoken in Oman and Yemen, roughly coinciding with the same areas where Dhofari 1 is found.

According to Al-Jallad, “We have a new written page of Arabia’s pre-Islamic history! Already the deciphered texts give us a window into a language and culture long forgotten by the time Islamic-period historians of the eighth and ninth centuries CE take an interest in what came before.” Many of the Dhofari 1 inscriptions contain short prayers and were possibly used for apotropaic purposes. Other inscriptions, however, simply record names; many are ancient graffiti recording expressions like, “I was here.”

Bible History Daily readers: Learn more about Ahmad Al-Jallad’s research, including his discovery of an ancient desert inscription that may reveal the earliest evidence of Christianity in Arabia.

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