The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies Seminar hosted Dr. Mohammed Maraqten, Researcher at the Institute of Ancient Oriental Languages and Civilizations at Heidelberg and currently Visiting Linguist at the Doha Arabic Historical Dictionary, to present a lecture on "The Origin of Arabic Calligraphy in Light of Modern Archeological Discoveries," on Wednesday, 8 January 2020.
The scholar began by surveying the main questions regarding the origins of the Arabic script used in recording the Holy Quran, and the places in which this script developed as an aesthetic and artistic medium used in writing more than thirty languages. Dr. Maraqten highlighted pre-Islamic era archaeological discoveries made in the past three decades in the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant that have transformed our understanding of the region's history and languages and clarified many such questions regarding the history and language of the Arabs in particular, including the roots of Arabic script.
Dr. Maraqten's illustrated talk presented features of this new knowledge of the origins of Arabic calligraphy and its pictorial and graphic development. The Sumerians invented writing, gifting to humanity the cuneiform and hieroglyphic writing system that makes use of hundreds of symbols and syllables to write words. The Canaanites in the Levant followed with the initial development of an alphabet, influenced by hieroglyphics, at the beginning the second millennium BC. Subsequently this alphabet developed further, in particular as a system for writing Semitic languages including Arabic. Most of the world's alphabets evolved from, or drew upon this ancient Canaanite alphabet.
In the second half of the second millennium BC, the researcher indicated, peoples and tribes of the Arabian Peninsula embraced a specific branch of the ancient Canaanite alphabet, namely the long alphabet of 28-29 letters referred to as the musnad and taking its aesthetic and design features from the southern peninsula's state institutions and temples. In the middle and north of the peninsula, however, the alphabet came to be known as naskhi and mukharbashāt, or 'graffiti'. (It was the fortune of the musnad script to develop into a calligraphic script called 'the Yemeni Hornet' (al-zabūr al-yamāni), which was written on palm branches.) Dr. Maraqten explained that the number of inscriptions found in the southern musnad (saba'i) and northern musnad (safā'i, thamudi, lahiāni, and others), all dating from pre-Islamic times, are estimated to be in the tens of thousands.
Dr. Maraqten then discussed the traditional theory of the origin of Arabic script, as in the Arab-Islamic heritage (turāth) narrative, which places the origin of Arabic calligraphy in Syriac lettering, and the prevailing theory on the origin of Arabic calligraphy as having developed from the nabaṭi script. He stressed that there are many mysterious and unresolved issues in the study of the history of the Arabic script's origins and development, for we do not know the reason why northern peninsula Arabs did not develop their own script, in keeping with their appearance, mentioned by historical sources, on the stage of history in the ninth century BC. However we can say that Arabs from the central and northern peninsula settled the matter at the start of the third century AD, as they abandoned all the scripts that they had been using in their writing, including the safā'i, thamudi, and lahiāni scripts, the southern Musnad, and various Aramaic scripts, such as the tadmuri and Greek letters which were also used on some occasions. They apparently had effectively resolved to develop their own script, linked from the very beginning to writing of early Classical Arabic, which constituting the first shoots of the comprehensive classical Arabic in the language of the Holy Quran. This stage is associated with the remarkable development in the cultural identity of the Arabs.
In addition to the thousands of inscriptions preserved in pre-Islamic temples and palaces in Yemen from pre-Islamic times, the Dr. Maraqten, pointed out that hardly a valley, rock, stone, or district in the Arabian Peninsula is devoid of some memorial inscription. The Arabs were ever writing down their names, and those of their clans and tribes: news of their settling in new places and their onward migrations, and glorification of their gods, putting on record their thoughts. Tens of thousands of northern and southern Arab inscriptions have been found scattered throughout the Arabian Peninsula and recording Arab life in their own words – virtually the tweets of their times. Arabic calligraphy as we know it today sprung from the womb of writing and recording customs that the people of the peninsula had practiced, for more than 1500 years prior to the advent of Islam.
The researcher concluded his remarks by noting that effectively saying that modern archaeological discoveries have to all intents and purposes resolved the issues concerning the origins of the Arabic script and calligraphy and its purported Nabataean origins.
