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Old Arabic and its descendants are classified as Central Semitic languages, which is an intermediate language group containing the Northwest Semitic languages (e.g., Aramaic and Hebrew), the languages of the Dadanitic, Taymanitic inscriptions, the poorly understood languages labeled Thamudic, and the ancient languages of Yemen written in the Ancient South Arabian script.
PERF 558 is the oldest surviving Arabic papyrus, [1] found in Heracleopolis in Egypt, and is also the oldest dated Arabic text using the Islamic era, dating to 643. [2] It is a bilingual Arabic- Greek fragment, [ 3 ] consisting of a tax receipt, [ 4 ] or as it puts it "Document concerning the delivery of sheep to the Magarites and other people ...
The first known recorded text in the Arabic alphabet is known as the Zabad inscription, composed in 512. It is a trilingual dedication in Greek, Syriac and Arabic found at the village of Zabad in northwestern Syria. The version of the Arabic alphabet used includes only 21 letters, of which only 15 are different, being used to note 28 phonemes:
Text of the Zabad inscription: May [the Christian] God be mindful of Sirgu son of Abd-Manafu and Ha{l/n}i son of Mara al-Qays and Sirgu son of Sadu and Syrw and S{.}ygw. Paleo-Arabic (or Palaeo-Arabic, previously called pre-Islamic Arabic or Old Arabic [1] [2]) is a pre-Islamic Arabian script used to write Arabic.
Sabaic is the best attested language in South Arabian inscriptions, named after the Kingdom of Saba, and is documented over a millennium. [4] In the linguistic history of this region, there are three main phases of the evolution of the language: Late Sabaic (10th–2nd centuries BC), Middle Sabaic (2nd century BC–mid-4th century AD), and Late Sabaic (mid-4th century AD–eve of Islam). [16]
Sura al-Baqarah, verses 282–286, from an early Quranic manuscript written on vellum (mid-late 7th century CE). In Muslim tradition the Quran is the final revelation from God, Islam's divine text, delivered to the Islamic prophet Muhammad through the angel Jibril (Gabriel).
An extreme case is the Vedic Sanskrit of the Rigveda: the earliest parts of this text date to c. 1500 BC, [1] while the oldest known manuscripts date to c. 1040 AD. [2] Similarly the oldest Avestan texts, the Gathas, are believed to have been composed before 1000 BC, but the oldest Avestan manuscripts date from the 13th century AD. [3]
This edition, known as the Leiden text, was compiled in Arabic by Muhsin Mahdi (1984–1994). [51] Mahdi argued that this version is the earliest extant one (a view that is largely accepted today) and that it reflects most closely a "definitive" coherent text ancestral to all others that he believed to have existed during the Mamluk period (a ...