Afro-Asiatic, Semitic (Old South Arabian) · Ancient South Arabian script
Sabaean
𐩪𐩨𐩱 sbʾ, “Saba”
- Spoken
- c. 1000 BC – AD 600
- Where
- The highlands and desert edge of Yemen
Frankincense and myrrh made the kingdom of Saba rich. Caravans carried the resins north from southern Arabia to Gaza and Damascus, and the Sabaeans built temples, dams and cities on the profits. They carved their language in a handsome, geometric alphabet on temple walls and bronze plaques, and scratched it in quick cursive on palm-leaf stalks. Saba is very probably the Sheba of the Bible, though the famous queen has never turned up in a Sabaean inscription.
Where and when
Saba's heartland lay around Marib and Sirwah, on the eastern slopes of the Yemeni highlands facing the desert. Its great dam at Marib, first built early in the first millennium BC and repaired many times, watered thousands of hectares of fields. Sluice gates of the ancient dam still stand in the desert today.
Sabaean inscriptions begin around the tenth to eighth centuries BC and run to the sixth century AD. Over time Saba conquered and was conquered by neighbours such as Qataban, Hadramawt and Himyar. The Himyarite kings who ruled Yemen from about AD 275 still wrote in Sabaean. Most were carved for temples and royal building works.
How it fell silent
The incense trade declined once Roman ships learned to sail the monsoon winds directly to India, bypassing the caravan routes. The Marib dam broke repeatedly, and after a final collapse around AD 570, remembered in the Quran, the irrigated oasis could not be maintained. Wars with Aksum in Ethiopia and with Persia weakened Himyar further.
Arabic then replaced Sabaean. Even before Islam, northern Arabic dialects were spreading, and after Yemen joined the Islamic world around AD 630, Arabic became the language of religion, law and daily life. The last dated Sabaean inscriptions come from the mid-sixth century. Today's Modern South Arabian languages, such as Mehri, are relatives, but not its descendants.
How it may have sounded
-
𐩱𐩡𐩣𐩤𐩠
ʾlmqh
Say it roughly al-MAH-kah
“Almaqah, the chief god of Saba”
Only the consonants are known; Almaqah is a modern convention, and the real vowels, perhaps even the division of the name, are uncertain.
-
𐩣𐩡𐩫 𐩪𐩨𐩱
mlk sbʾ
Say it roughly MAH-lik sah-BAH
“king of Saba”
A title found in countless royal inscriptions; the vowels are supplied by analogy with Arabic malik and with Greek spellings of Saba.
Your name, set in stone
Sabaean writes consonants only, usually right to left, with 29 letters. Your name is reduced to its consonants, and a vowel at the start may need the letter aleph to hold its place.
A playful transcription, not a scholarly one: the people who used this script never heard your name, and would have spelled it in more than one way.
Three things
- Sabaean was also written in a cursive script on palm-leaf stalks; thousands of these sticks survive, many still unpublished.
- The Marib dam's final collapse, around AD 570, is recalled in the Quran's sura named after Saba.
- Ge'ez, the classical language of Ethiopia, uses a script that grew out of the South Arabian alphabet.