1300 B.C.
"Unveiling the Enchanting World of the Nabataeans: Explore the Gallery of Ancient Marvels and Trade Routes!"

- Jordan - Petra (Extinct city)
- Taken either by the American Colony Photo Department or its successor, the Matson Photo Service.

- Jordan - Petra
- [between 1898 and 1946]
- Taken either by the American Colony Photo Department or its successor, the Matson Photo Service.

- A two story tomb facade carved from rock in the city of Petra, Jordan.

- Petra. Street upon street.
- between 1950 and 1977.

- Petra. Nabatean dam.
- between 1950 and 1977.

- Jordan - Petra (Extinct city)
- between 1950 and 1977.

- Jordan - Petra (Extinct city)
- [between 1932 and 1946]

- Jordan - Petra (Petra Theatre)
- between 1950 and 1977.
Sources and References: library of congress
Language is the cultural interface of nations, and if the Jordanian Nabataean civilization was highly complex and developed compared to other civilizations in the same period, the language used by our ancestors must have reflected this development through its characteristics.
The Jordanian Nabateans, or as they called themselves “nbtw,” transmitted language and writing to the region, a quantum leap that was praised by many researchers and orientalists. The Jordanian Nabataeans recorded all their commercial transactions in addition to their religious matters, and this led to the rapid development of writing. In this research, we will discuss how the Jordanian Nabataean script (alphabet) paved the way for the emergence of the Kufic Arabic script, in which the first Islamic manuscripts were recorded, and how the Nabataean and Arabic inscriptions showed the changes and developments that occurred in the Nabataean letters. We will also review the most important Safavid inscriptions that date the stages of this development, which traced the history of the Arabic language at least eight centuries.
Writing and spoken language
We have dealt in a separate research on the ancient Jordanian Nabataean language, the location of the Nabataean language on the map of the Semitic languages, and how it, i.e. the spoken Nabataean language, was a dialect developed by our Jordanian Nabataean ancestors as a result of their contact with the peoples who speak Aramaic, Arabic and Greek. As for the alphabet and the Nabataean writing, it is considered a revolution in that part of the world. The remarkable cultural accumulation made by the Nabataeans led to an incredible development of language and writing. The religious and worldly needs at that time called for focusing on the alphabet and creating new methods and methods of writing, which we will discuss in some detail in this research.
The Nabataean script is originally an Aramaic script, but with many improvements and developments in the shape of the letters and the variation in their locations and use in the word. Although the Nabataean inscriptions and writings are few compared to others, they gave us a lot of information. The inscription on the tomb was inferred by the name of the deceased, his profession, the time of death, and the ownership of the tomb. The researchers also learned the names of the gods that were worshiped at the time, kings, queens, and other matters related to the features of social life in general (Al-Muhaisen: 2009). Scholars attribute this lack of inscriptional sources to the looting campaigns that the Jordanian Nabataean cities have been subjected to since the collapse of the monarchy at the hands of the Romans in 106 AD.
Returning to the Nabataean script, it is a font that tends to be square in shape, in which some letters are similar, such as the Ba’a, the Ya’a, and the Ta’a, and dots are used for distinction (Cantino: 2016).
The first row: Nabataean writing showing the use of dots by the Nabataeans to differentiate between the ra and the zay.
The second row: the use of Syriac punctuation to differentiate between ra and zay.
Studies on the origin of the Arabic language and its relationship to Nabataean
Arabic calligraphy: Syriac or Nabataean
The debate has been taking place since the nineteenth century about the origin of the Kufic Arabic script, and the first person who attributed it to the Nabateans was the German orientalist Noldeke, and after half a century, the researcher J. Starkey is another theory according to which the origin of the Kufic script is the Syriac Naskhi script, and it relied on the appearance of the Nabataean letters, not relying on the line, but rather dropping them from it. He also relied on the narration of Al-Baladhuri, which says that three men from the Tai tribe met in the Baqqa region near Al-Hira, the capital of the Lakhmids [1] and agreed on Arabic script (Grundler: 2004). Nabataeans are most accepted in the scientific community.
Safavi inscriptions and rewriting the history of the Arabic language
Scholars have dated the Arabic language to the fourth century AD based on two main inscriptions: the (Fahroo) inscription, or as it is called (the first Umm al-Jamal inscription), an inscription found by the researcher Litman in the city of Umm al-Jimal, which was one of the centers of the Nabataean Kingdom of Jordan, and Litman used a Greek inscription found near it. It was a translation of the Nabataean inscription. The importance of this inscription lies in the fact that it used the late Nabataean script and is likely to date back to 250-270 AD.
Umm al-Jimal’s first inscription: the first translation on the right, which relies on the Greek inscription to interpret the inscription. While the modern translation is on the left, and in it the researcher Saad El-Din explains the use of classical Arabic in the word “kingdom” and the use of the word “self” in the sense of grave, as is the case in the linguistic documents written in the Musnad – and Wikipedia.
The second is the Namara inscription dated 328 AD. The inscription is known as the inscription of Imru’ al-Qais, and the orientalist Dosso read it as a witness to the tomb of a king of al-Hirah. However, the studies of researcher Saad al-Din Abu al-Hub indicated that the mention of Imru’ al-Qais was nothing more than a matter of glorification, and that the inscription deals with the biography of a fighter named Akdi. [2]
High-resolution photo of the Namra inscription stone hanging on the walls of the French Louvre Museum in Paris © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons
After the Namara inscription in years, researcher Ahmed Al-Jallad’s studies on the Al-Safawi inscriptions, which are found exclusively in the area north of the Jordanian Badia, indicated that the origin of the Arabic language dates back to the second or fourth century BC. Thus, the Arabic language was re-dated for at least eight centuries, and his research confirmed the idea that the Arabic language did not start from the Arabian Peninsula and extend to the north, but rather it started from the Jordanian desert and extended to the south towards the Hijaz and the Arabian Peninsula.
Safavid inscription from the northeastern Jordan Desert
Al-Safawi’s inscriptions are a massive revolution that rearranged the temporal and spatial map of the emergence of the Arabic language. The inscriptions are Arabic and read in Arabic, except that they are written in the Nabataean script. The researcher Ahmed Al-Jallad faced several difficulties related to reading these inscriptions. Arabic is characterized by short vowel sounds (movements) that are not written in Nabataean. He used the Nabataean inscriptions written in Greek, in which these sounds are written. Thus, the researcher Al-Jallad came out with an Arabic reading of the Safawi inscriptions.
The researcher Enaam Al-War, one of the most important researchers in local dialects in the world, indicated that the Arabic reading of the Safawi inscriptions led to the conclusion of the extent of the convergence between the language used in the inscriptions and the local Jordanian dialect. She gave several examples of this, including the verb “scribble” which is still used in our local dialect, and the verb “winter” which is still used as well. Who would have imagined that what we say today in our daily conversations extends back to the second-fourth century BC and that our Jordanian Nabatean ancestors immortalized it in their inscriptions and using their alphabet. [3]
It is worth noting that the Safa’i inscriptions have exceeded twenty thousand dated inscriptions. The discoveries of these inscriptions follow. In 2013, the two Jordanian researchers, Dr. Sultan Al-Maani and Dr. Mahdi Al-Zoubi, discovered more than 2,000 new Safavid inscriptions in the Jordanian Free Zone in a scientific mission funded by the Hashemite University.
Dr. Abdel Qader Al-Hussan with the rare Safawi inscription discovered in 2017 – Source: Gerasa News
In 2017, researcher Dr. Abd al-Qadir al-Hussan discovered a new Safawi inscription dating back to the fourth decade of the first century AD in the Wadi Ali area, al-Safawi in the eastern Jordanian Badia. Describing the inscription and its importance, the doctor says, “The importance of the inscription lies in the history of the owner of the inscription, as he inscribed it with an important and historical incident that occurred at the time for the Jordanian Nabataean king, Al-Harith IV, who ruled from the year 9 BC – 40 AD, and his escape from the conspiracies of the Jewish ruler of Galilee, Herod Antipas, and the war that he waged against him In the year 34 AD, at the Battle of Jumla, north of the Yarmouk River. And he mentioned that the victory over the Jews was achieved in that incident and they were defeated towards the north of Palestine. How he survived another attempt by the Jews in cooperation with the Romans, led by the Roman commander Vitilius, by order of the Roman governor and by the intimidation of Herod Tiberius, but the death of the ruler in the same year led to the cancellation of the military campaign to kill the king The Jordanian Nabataean and the destruction of his kingdom
Nabataean Journey to Arabia
The Nabataean writing, as mentioned earlier, was characterized by some complexity. The writing methods varied according to the occasion and the situation. The grave inscriptions had a different style from the inscriptions and writings related to trade and transactions. Researcher Grindler summarizes the changes that paved the way for Nabataean writing to lead to Arabic as follows:
The differences between the letters in different locations (the difference in the drawing of one letter)
letter association
mix lam alif (no)
Baseline texture (letters have a supporting base)
Letter merging
The difference in the phonemic signs that distinguish homogeneous letters graphically” (Grundler: 2004).
It is worth noting that there are two types of Nabataean script, the first is the inscription, which is used in memorial inscriptions and monuments, and the second is the naskhi written on scrolls and newspapers. The problem is that the second type, that is, the naskhi, is not available due to the damage of the materials used for writing in it, so scholars can only rely on the inscriptional script (Grindler: 2004) and this may raise an important question: What if the naskhi script preceded the inscriptional script in its transformation into Arabic script?
To the right is the Arabic alphabet, in the middle is Nabataean and finally Aramaic. We note the extent of the similarity of Arabic and Nabataean [4]
In the context of the most recent inscriptions discovered in Jordan, researcher Tayseer Khalaf mentions the discovery of very late Nabataean inscriptions in Aqaba. These inscriptions bridge the chain of transmission of the Jordanian Nabataean script to the Arabic Kufic and provide us with rich scientific material that confirms this journey. These inscriptions, which date back to the end of the fifth century AD (approximately 450 AD), date back to the names of the Ghassanid kings of Jordan, whose rule extended from Balqa to what is today Syria, Lebanon, and large parts of Saudi Arabia. The Nabataean line in its development is called the “Jazm” line, and it is the line that our Nabataean ancestors gave us.
The inscriptions discovered in Aqaba, south of Jordan, date to a late stage in the development of the Jordanian Nabataean script
Hence, it can be said with confidence that despite the collapse of the monarchy in the Nabataean Kingdom of Jordan and the shift towards the tribal system again and through autonomy in the areas occupied by the Romans, the people and culture represented by language and religion continued to penetrate and spread in the region. This resulted in the birth of the Kufic Arabic script, which was used from the pre-Islamic period until it made it the official line of the Umayyad state during the era of Marwan bin Abd al-Malik, as it was used in bureaus and transactions and was also used to announce political positions.
source and reference: jordanheritage.jo