Brief Guide To The Development Of The Arabic Script
This post is
intended as a very brief guide to the development of the modern Arabic script
and derived scripts (Persian /Urdu/Sindhi/Balochi/Afghani/Turkic and their
friends). The history of the development of the Arabic script proper is to an
extent a history of Quranic orthography ie the way the Quran is written out in
the Arabic script. I have tried to steer clear of any historical and
hagiographical controversies and presented only the bare minimum of information
needed to get a clear grasp of the journey of the Arabic script from its
embryonic stage to maturity. I hope this will serve as an introduction to my
next post which will be on the different styles of Arabic calligraphy.
Super Short History of Arabic's Ancestors
Arabic is a Semitic
language and all Semitic scripts (not languages) are based on the
proto-Canaanite script. It is agreed that Proto-Canaanite is a child of
Egyptian Hieroglyphs with a hint of
Akkadian DNA (completely different from Hieroglyphs). The pictographic Egyptian
Hieroglyphs become proto-Canaanite Acrophones, symbols in which the symbol
represents only the first sound of the word depicted by the same symbol in
Egyptian Hieroglyphs rather than the whole word itself, eg. the hut Hieroglyph
symbol depicted the word "beyt" (house) in totality but actually just
stood for only the "b" sound of "beyt" in the Acrophonic
proto-Canaanite script.
In the Semitic
language, tree over time, the Proto-Canaanite script mothered the Phoenician
script which begot the Aramaic script which birthed the Nabataean script which
bore the Arabic script. It is very important to note that the Nabataean script
used only 22 consonants and early Arabic had to make do with these 22 symbols
for its own repertoire of 28 consonants. This 22 vs 28 difference will be
significant later. Another feature of almost all of these Semitic scripts was
that they did not depicts vowels (long or short), something of a family trait
because the Egyptian Hieroglyphs omit vowels too; this also should be kept in
mind for later on.
This would also be a
good place to mention that the Greek, Roman and many Indian scripts (and their
spawns) are also derivatives of the proto-Canaanite script. So Arabic and
Devanagari are distant cousins and most of the things mentioned so far apply to the
Indic/Greek/Roman scripts as well.
Earliest Arabic Script
Now let's come to
the Arabic script itself. As of now, the first definitive example of what can
be called as Arabic script is a rock engraving, an epitaph of a certain Mrs
Raqush, found in Mada'in Saleh (Saudi Arabia) dated to about 267AD. Some
scholars believe this script to be something in between Nabataean and Arabic
and others unequivocally classify it as Arabic script. This inscription does
have some words in the Thamud scripts as well. However do not assume that this
is the oldest inscription in Arabic language.
Many, much older, Arabic language samples have been found, albeit
written/engraved in non-Arabic scripts such as pre-Islamic Arabic poetry
written in Nabataean, Aramaic, Thamudic, Epigraphic South Arabian scripts etc.
The famous Raqush
inscription to the left and modern Arabic copy/interpretation to the right. Can
you make out any of the words in the original? Without the aid of the modern
copy I can barely recognize the odd عhere and the odd ل there and one حand a فيsomewhere and that's
all conjecture too. The second word in the second line is Raqoosh. Of course I have
forgotten most of my Arabic anyway. But this must have been perfectly legible
to the people it was meant for.
Revelation Era
Jumping forward
three and a half centuries after the demise of Mrs Raqush we come to the era of
the Quranic revelations (610-632AD). By this time the Arabic script had been
modified a lot more from the semi-Nabataen form and had come much closer to its
final form. The initial Meccan utterances in the Quraishi dialect of Arabic by
Prophet Muhammad were shorter and quickly committed to memory by the small but
fast expanding group of Muslims. However by the time the Prophet emigrated to
Medina the revealed verses became much longer as did the size of the Muslim
community. Now secretaries started recording these longer Arabic verses on
whatever medium was ready at hand at the moment of revelation, be it animal
hide, parchment, rocks, leaves or bones etc. These written records were created
purely as memory aids and not as written scripture. According to Kees
Versteegh, this shift from an purely oral Meccan record of the divine words to
a partially written Medinan record is attested to in the Quran itself, through
the shift in the usage of the word Quran (recite this), referring to the sacred
revelations in the earlier verses to the word Kitaab (book), referring to the
sacred revelations in the later verses. However the key thing to remember here
is that despite the growing importance of a written record, for the Quranic
verses as well as the pre and post Islamic Arabic poetry these written records
were still secondary to the primary method of preserving something which was to
memorize it (except in the case of commercial transactions and war treaties).
This tradition of oral recitation and transmission is quite well entrenched in
most Semitic cultures and religions so much so that to this day those who
commit the Quran to memory are bestowed the title of "Haafiz" which
means the preserver/protector, one who preserves the sacred text in his/her
heart. Hence even till the a few years after the death of Prophet Muhammad
(632AD) the written records were considered secondary as there were thousands
of "reciters" who knew the Quran by heart and had learnt it from the
Prophet's own mouth.
Supposed letter dictated by Prophet Muhammad to a
scribe and then dispatched to the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, circa 630AD.
Regardless of the authenticity, if this text is indeed from around 630-650AD it
clearly shows the strong departure of the Arabic script from its Nabataean
sandbox-days as depicted in the Raqush engraving. I can easily make out quite a
few letters (and words!) of this text.
Although the scripts
used in the 5th-8th Centuries were very different from the one given below,
this table gives an idea of what the shapes of the different Arabic letters
were at this time, which sounds they represented and how common shapes were
used for very different sounds. One can see that there are no dots, diacritical
marks, above any of the letters.
As noted in the
table given above:
The sounds b/t/th
were represented by the same symbol.
The sounds j/H/kh
were represented by the same symbol.
The sounds d/dh were
represented by the same symbol.
The sounds s/sh were
represented by the same symbol.
The sounds ṣ / ḓ
were represented by the same symbol.
The sounds ṭ / ẓ
were represented by the same symbol.
The sounds r/z were
represented by the same symbol.
The sounds `/gh were
represented by the same symbol.
Early Caliphate Era - The Rashidun
In less than 15
years of the death of the Prophet certain developments compelled his
successors, the Caliphs, to take make changes in the written Quran and the
Arabic script. First, many of the reciters died in battles against the
apostates, the Romans and the Persians. A famous, oft quoted, example is of the
half a thousand reciters who died at the
Battle of Yamama in
632AD; an event which so perturbed the pious
Uthman that he convinced the first Caliph,
Abu Bakr, to overcome "the loss
of much of the Quran" by having it compiled into a book. Second, the
increasing number of non-Arab converts to Islam, who were new to the Arabic
language and sounds, often incorrectly recited the Quranic verses. Finally, many
of the Muslims started to disagree amongst each other on the pronunciation and
meaning of some words as the Prophet had clearly declared that there were seven
different, perfectly equal, readings of the Quran, based upon the different
urban and Bedouin dialects of Arabic in his time. When Uthman became the third
Caliph (644-652AD) he decided to bring an end to the worry of "forgetting
the Quran" and also to the conflicts caused by the variant readings by
undertaking a codification of the Quran. He collected all the written sheets of
Quran from the Prophet's time, had them collated them into one definitive
edition and then returned the sheets to Hafsa, the widow of the Prophet from
whom he had taken them in the first place . For some reasons there are no
extant samples of the original written records of the Quranic revelations made
by the secretaries of Prophet Muhammad. This "final" version was sent
to every province of the geometrically expanding Islamic empire as the authorized
Quran and all non-compliant written variants were destroyed by state officials.
Some variants were concealed but ultimately lost to the hands of man or of
time.
Umayyad and Very Early Abbasid Caliphate Eras
However, soon two
characteristics which the Arabic script had inherited from Nabataean and had
not caused any problems before now returned to haunt the Arabic script's
efficacy in a vast and diverse empire. Quranic orthography still employed 22
symbols to depict its 28 consonant sounds and it did still did not depict
vowels in writing. This negated any real codification and unification efforts
which the Caliph Umar had hoped to achieve with his authoritative final version
of the Quran.
1.The first
characteristic of using 22 symbols to depict 28 sounds caused a problem in
identifying the correct letters. The examples below
illustrates the problem. Without diacritical points to identify which of the
phonemes (sounds) is being referred to, only reference to context or external
guidance can help shed some light on the correct word which is implied by the
author of the text.
The problems caused
by misreading of Bs for Ts and Rs for Zs and so forth had reached an inflection
point and something had to be done to correct the situation. Some accounts
would have us believe that under the aegis of the Umayyad governor
Hajjaj ibn Yusuf (d.714AD), the diacritical points were
innovated and adopted for use in the Quranic texts in order to remove the
ambiguity in reading. However the actual historical evidence proves these
accounts are largely apocryphal. As of now, the oldest usage of such
diacritical points has been found on a papyrus called Perf No. 558, a
billingual (Greek and Arabic) advance tax receipt which dates itself to 643 AD,
a decade an a half before Hajjaj ibn Yusuf was even born. The Arabic text in
this tax receipt has some letters dotted and others undotted and the dots
appear to have been used in a very matter of fact way. Although Perf No. 558
has not been studied extensively, it is clear that at least 20 years after the
Hejira of the Prophet, if not earlier, non-religious Arabic texts occasionally
employed diacritical points to eliminate faulty reading of the text.
Based on the
evidence of Perf No. 558, it can be stated that Arabic script did have
diacritical points used as a tool to proper understanding of the text. The
Arabic letters with the diacritical points to differentiate them from each
other would have looked almost exactly like the ones used today, as shown in
the table given below. The dots help, as shown in the mountain/dementia/rope
example above to read
However mere
availability is not the same as active usage and we know for a fact that the
Arabic Qurans did not employ the diacritical points, perhaps largely to avoid
any inadvertent desecration of the base text. The arrangement in the table
below was made by Arabic grammarians on the basis of similarity in the shapes
of the letters. More on arrangements later.
The final Arabic alphabet. Compare with the first table above which gives the same number of sounds but with fewer letters
2.The second
characteristic of the Arabic script of not marking vowels also caused
confusions, especially between verb forms which often have the same shape and
letters but different short vowels and sometimes between plurals and verb
forms. The example below illustrates the latter confusion.
This
vowel problem was initially overcome by the pioneer grammarian Abul Aswad AdDuali (d.688AD) at the behest of the Umayyad Caliph AbdUl Malik (d.705AD), who was also instrumental in switching the administrative
language of the entire Arabian empire from a patchwork of Greek, Aramaic and
Pahlavi over to Arabic after he caught a Greek scribe urinating into the ink
well used to write out the official records for lack of water to prepare the
ink. The solution proposed by the grammarian Abul Aswad seems to have been
partially inspired by similar solutions in other Semitic script traditions:
place dots around each letter to indicate short vowel sounds for that letter.
Abul Aswad is also credited with inventing the symbols for the Hamza and the
Khafeef vowels and the Shadda. Before, the Khafeef (absence of any vowel) and
the Shadda (doubling of a consonant) were not depicted at all, hence the
Khafeef and the Shadda too had to be inferred from the context of the base
text. This system of Abul Aswad was further refined by the 8th Century
grammarian and author of the first Arabic dictionary, Al Khalil ibn AhmedFaraaheedi (d.791AD) who replaced the dots with smaller versions of the
corresponding long vowel sounds. This has been illustrated in the table below.
Vowel Name and Sound
|
Abul Aswad Ad-Duali's (d.688AD) Vowel Markers
|
Al Khalil ibn Ahmed's (d. 791AD) Vowel Markers
|
Fatha
- Short "a" - "Ma"
|
ݥ
|
مَ
|
Dhamma - Short "u" - "Mu"
|
م.
|
مُ
|
Kasra - Short "i" - "Mi"
|
ݦ
|
مِ
|
Tanwin - Short Nunation - "Dan, Dun, Din"
|
ڍ , د.. , ڌ
|
دٍ , دٌ,داً
|
Shadda - doubling of a consonant sound
|
Symbol unknown to me
|
ّ
|
Khafeef aka Sukoon - absence of any vowel sound
|
Symbol unknown to me
|
ْ , ۡ
|
Hamza - glottal stop
|
ء
|
ء , ؤ , ئ , أ , إ
|
Middle Abbasid Caliphate Era onwards
These two changes
were not accepted immediately by the religious members of the Muslim community
largely as a result of fear of innovating the received text of the Quran.
Similar fears also dissuaded the Jews from accepting any diacritical points or
matres lectionis to identify letters or vowels
over the base text of the standardized Hebrew Bible until well over a thousand
years after the composition of the last book of the Hebrew Bible. It took close
to 250-300 years after the revelation of the Quran for the vowel markers and
diacritical points to become a common place feature in Qurans. Interestingly
the Jewish initiative, called the
Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible, and the
Muslim initiative for making these changes in the Quran were both finalised
around the same time, being almost contemporaneous events, within 50-75 years
of each other. Further both of these sacred texts with the diacritical marks
and vowel points are now the standard texts for their respective religions
(though only unmarked, base text Hebrew Bibles are used for liturgy).
Very early Kufic Arabic Quranic calligraphy from
Yemen.
Shows only the base text.
No vowel markers - No diacritical points to
distinguish between phonemes
Kufic Arabic calligraphy, Surah Hujjarat, 9th
Century. Text on the obverse side is visible due of inadequate thickness of the
parchment.
Shows base text. Coloured vowel markers added later
in Abul Aswad's style over base text in an effort to standardize the sounds.
No diacritical points to distinguish between
phonemes.
Later Kufic Arabic Quranic calligraphy, perhaps 10th
Century.
Shows base text, vowel markers in Abul Aswad's style
and diacritical points to distinguish between phonemes.
Naskh Arabic Quranic calligraphy, Surah Fatiha,
representative of all Qurans post-11th Century.
Shows base text, vowel markers in the newer Al Khalil
style and diacritical points all made as part of the writing at the same time.
However
by the turn of 10th-11th Century Qurans employed both diacritical points and
vowel markers and from then have been mandatorily written with diacritical points and vowel marks. By this time non-Quranic Arabic texts also used the diacritical
points as standard usage, though they did not use vowel markers. In non-sacred and non-school texts, the ancient Semitic habit of not
marking vowels has managed to keep its hold till today. As a result only the
diacritical points are marked in the majority of Arabic texts and the short
vowels are left unmarked, to be guessed by reference to context. Even religious
commentaries on the Quran and Hadith do not carry the short vowel markers. All
other scripts based on Arabic such as Persian/Urdu/Turkic have also continued
with this same tradition. Though in certain rare cases vowels are marked to
clear ambiguity. The following examples will make the partial usage of vowel marks more clear.
A textbook to teach Arabic from the 1950s, employs
vowel markers in every word to remove ambiguity.
Modern printed version of the first page of the
celebrated Introduction or "Muqadimah" of Ibn Khaldun's 14th century
Arabic treatise on history, politics, economics and sociology. Again, barely
discernable use of vowel markers
Modern printed version of the first page of the Persian translation of Mevlana Rumi's "Fi Hi Ma Fi Hi" ( In It Is What Is In It). Notice that although most of the sentences do not have vowel marks, some sentences do. These sentences are verses from the Quran which must always be written with vowel marks.
First page of the famous turn of 20th Century Urdu
novel, Umrao Jaan Ada, bereft of vowel markers but for the short vowel u in the
name Umrao
The Arabic Alphabet
The modern standard Arabic alphabet arranged according to similarilty in shapes of the letters
Note that many letters have different slightly
different stand-alone, initial, medial and final forms. This feature is common
to many Semitic scripts and seems to be an ancient feature of these scripts.
Gematrical Values and Other Arrangement of the Alphabet
Along with the shapes and sounds of the Arabic letters, the
numerical values of these letters are also fundamental. Many Semitic and
non-Semitic alphabets assign numerological values to their letters.. Often in
earlier times, the letters were used as numbers based on their numerical values
in lieu of any special number symbols, until Hindu numerals (to the Arabs) were
adopted by the Abbasid Caliphs in early 9th Century and then later on adopted
by most of the West as Arab numerals. Hence the letter أ was used for the value
1, the letter ب was used for the value
2, تfor 3, ج for 4 and
so on; these first four letters,
A-B-J-D, which correspond to values, 1-2-3-4 were together called the abjd and gave rise to the
term abjd for the Arabic alphabet. The numerical arrangement of the Arabic
alphabet is given below. Other Semitic scripts also follow this same numerical
system. The numerical values of letters are used for various purposes such as
religious symbolism, magic and divination, astrology and occult and even for
seeking divine patterns. The table below shows the numerical values and
arrangements of the letters.
The arrangement of Arabic letters into numbers is called Taarikh تاريخor Chronogram and the most famous chronogram in Arabic is
undoubtedly the number 786 which is derived as follows:
بسم لله - bism illah -
2+60+40 + 1+30+30+5 = 168
الرّحمن - a(l) rrahman -
1+30+200+8+40+50 = 329
الرّحيم - a(l) rraheem -
1+30+200+8+10+40 = 289
168+329+289
= 786
The title
of one of my favourite books, Bagh - o - Bahar is also a chronogram which gives
the value 1217AH corresponding to 1802AD, the year in which the book was
written. Chronograms have been used for thousands of years and can sneak up on
you quite suddenly, which is why they are so much fun!
We have already noted two arrangements of the Arabic alphabet: the
one arranged according to similarity in the shapes of the letters and the other
based on the numerical values of the letters. A third arrangement of the Arabic
alphabet was created by the grammarian Al Khalil ibn Ahmed Faraaheedi (d.791AD), whom we
have already encountered as the one who
perfected the vowel marker system. Al Khalil Faraaheedi wrote the first
dictionary of Arabic, Kitaab al Ayn, in which he arranged the letters neither
according
to their shapes nor according to their values but according to where their sound originates in
the mouth. His dictionary starts with Ayn عas the first letter because it is voiced from the
lowest point in the throat and moving upwards and outwards in the mouth, ends
with Meem مas the last letter because it is voiced from the tip of the lips.
Because the first letter in this dictionary is Ayn it is called Kitaab al Ayn.
These
three arrangements of the Arabic alphabet are not exhaustive.
Persian, Urdu, Turkic, Malay and Allied Scripts
Persian, Urdu,
Turkic, Malay use the Arabic script for their own sounds by mapping the Arabic
letters onto similar sounds from their alphabet. However in the case of each of
these languages their sound space is much larger than the one catered to by the
28 Arabic letters and this has neccesitated the innovation of new shapes from
with the 28 letter repertoire in each of these languages.
Additional letters
can be spotted in the alphabet tables given below:
Persian / Daari alphabet
Urdu alphabet
Ottoman Turkish alphabet
Sindhi alphabet
Jawi / Malay alphabet
I hope this post has helped you to understand the basics of the development of the Arabic script and will point you in the right direction.
To Know More About:
Arabic script and learning to write Arabic
Wikipedia's page on the history of the Arabic script
Guidedways's has a decent introductary course to learn the script
Youtube video tutorial
Numerology/Gematrical values
One of my favourite Urdu luminaries, Prof Frances Pritchett, talks about Chronograms
Wikipedia on Arabic gematrical values
Wikipedia on Hebrew gematrical values
Writing Systems, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Proto-Cannanite
Writing Systems, A Linguistic Approach by Henry Rogers
Writing Sytems of the World by Florian Coulmas
Others
The phenomenal work by Kees Versteegh on the development of the Arabic language
Alan Jones talks about the significance of papyrus Perf No 558
Wikipedia on the history of the Quran, including its compilation
