Nabataean alphabet


The Nabataean alphabet is an abjad that was used by the Nabataeans in the second century BC. Important inscriptions are found in Petra, the Sinai Peninsula, and other archaeological sites including Avdat and Mada'in Saleh in Saudi Arabia.
, Aretas IV and Shaqilath, 9 b. C. - 40 a. D., AE18.
On the reverse, an example of Nabataean script: names of Aretas IV and Shaqilath.

History

The alphabet is descended from the Aramaic alphabet. In turn, a cursive form of Nabataean developed into the Arabic alphabet from the 4th century, which is why Nabataean's letterforms are intermediate between the more northerly Semitic scripts and those of Arabic.

Comparison with related scripts

As compared to other Aramaic-derived scripts, Nabataean developed more loops and ligatures, likely to increase speed of writing. The ligatures seem to have not been standardized and varied across places and time. There were no spaces between words. Numerals in Nabataean script were built from characters of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20, and 100.
NabateanNameArabic
alphabet		Syriac
alphabet		Hebrew
alphabet
ʾĀlap̄/ʾAlif
Beth/Ba
Gamal/Jim
Dalath/Dal
Heh
Waw
Zain
Ha/Heth
Teth
Yodh/Ya
Kaph /
Lamadh/Lam
Mim /
Nun /
Simkath
'E/Ain
Pe/Fa /
Ṣāḏē/Ṣad /
Qoph
Resh/Ra
Šin/Sin
Taw/Ta

The Nabataean alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in June 2014 with the release of version 7.0.