Ancient Arabian Script Deciphered: Ahmad Al-Jallad Reveals the Lost Voices of Pre-Islamic Arabia
For decades, scholars knew that the caves and rocky shelters of southern Oman contained inscriptions written in an ancient Arabian script.
They could see the letters. They could document the inscriptions. They could compare their shapes with other writing systems.
But they could not reliably read them.
The script, known as Dhofari, remained one of the most intriguing undeciphered writing systems of the Arabian Peninsula.
That changed when Semitic linguist Ahmad Al-Jallad recognized something extraordinary in several inscriptions: they appeared to contain the letters of an ancient alphabet written in sequence.
This observation provided the key to identifying the sound values of the script's characters.
In an episode of The Levantini Podcast, I welcomed Al-Jallad back to discuss his research, the process of decipherment, and what these inscriptions are beginning to reveal about the languages, religions, and cultures of Arabia before Islam.
Al-Jallad is the Sofia Chair in Arabic Studies at Ohio State University and directs the Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA).
His research opens a window onto communities whose written voices had remained inaccessible to modern scholars.
Explore the inscriptions: OCIANA — Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia
This post was generated by AI but edited by me.
What Is the Dhofari Script?
The Dhofari script is an ancient writing system found primarily in Dhofar, a region of southern Oman, with related inscriptions reported in neighboring areas, including eastern Yemen and Socotra.
It belongs to the South Semitic family of writing systems.
To understand its significance, it helps to recognize that the history of alphabetic writing did not follow a single path.
Most alphabets used around the world today ultimately descend from the Phoenician and related alphabetic traditions.
Ancient Arabia, however, also possessed its own family of alphabets.
These South Semitic scripts were related to early alphabetic writing but developed along a different historical branch.
They were used across various regions of the Arabian Peninsula, and related writing traditions also reached the Horn of Africa.
Some of these scripts are now relatively well understood.
Ancient South Arabian inscriptions, for example, have provided extensive evidence for the political, religious, and linguistic history of ancient Yemen.
Other Arabian writing systems, including Safaitic and various scripts historically grouped under the label Thamudic, have revealed tens of thousands of inscriptions.
Many are relatively short, recording personal names, prayers, expressions of grief, or religious invocations.
Yet even these brief texts have transformed scholarly understanding of Arabia before Islam.
Rather than an entirely illiterate desert society known only through later oral traditions, they reveal widespread traditions of writing among individuals who were not necessarily members of royal courts or administrative institutions.
The Dhofari inscriptions promised to add another chapter to this history.
But until recently, their writing system remained largely undeciphered.
Why Was the Dhofari Script So Difficult to Read?
One major obstacle was the unusual appearance of its letters.
Some Dhofari characters resemble signs found in other ancient Arabian scripts.
Others have unfamiliar geometric forms.
When scholars attempted to apply sound values from related writing systems, the resulting sequences often failed to produce recognizable words.
Another difficulty was the brevity of the inscriptions.
Many contain fewer than fifteen characters.
Short texts provide little linguistic context.
A scholar attempting to decipher an unknown script might ordinarily look for repeated words, recognizable grammatical patterns, or familiar names.
But the Dhofari inscriptions did not consistently follow the standardized formulas found in some other Arabian epigraphic traditions.
Without repeated expressions or longer passages, it was difficult to determine what individual letters represented.
Earlier researchers had made important progress documenting the material.
Al-Jallad discusses the work of Geraldine King and a local scholar, Al-Shahri, who helped assemble and record a substantial corpus of Dhofari inscriptions.
Their documentation preserved crucial evidence.
The challenge was finding a method to establish the values of the letters rather than simply proposing speculative readings.
The Breakthrough: Ancient Alphabet Lists Hidden in Plain Sight
The decisive insight came in an unexpected setting.
Al-Jallad was traveling to Jordan for fieldwork.
With limited access to his usual research materials during the flight, he began examining photographs and reports of Dhofari inscriptions stored on his phone.
Several inscriptions caught his attention.
They were longer than most of the others, containing approximately twenty-six characters.
More importantly, the signs did not repeat in the way one would normally expect from an ordinary sentence.
This suggested a different possibility.
What if the inscriptions were not sentences at all?
What if they were lists of the alphabet?
Such sequences are called abecedaries.
An abecedary records the letters of a writing system in a conventional order, much like writing A, B, C, D in English.
The crucial point was that ancient South Semitic alphabets used a different traditional letter order from the one familiar through Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.
Al-Jallad hypothesized that the mysterious Dhofari sequences followed this South Semitic ordering.
He then aligned the signs with the expected sequence.
Suddenly, unfamiliar letter shapes began to make sense.
Forms that previously seemed unrelated could be understood as regional variants of characters found in other Arabian scripts.
Even more compellingly, the same pattern appeared in three separate inscriptions.
That repetition made the proposed decipherment testable.
Rather than guessing the meaning of individual words, Al-Jallad had identified an independent framework for assigning sound values to the characters.
In our conversation, he described the result as a different kind of Rosetta Stone.
The ancient writers had effectively left behind a guide to their alphabet.
The key was recognizing what they had written.
Ancient Prayers to the Sun God Shams
One of the most exciting consequences of the decipherment is the ability to recognize religious expressions.
Al-Jallad discusses an inscription containing a prayer to Shams, a solar deity known from several ancient Arabian religious traditions.
The name Shams is related to the Semitic word for the sun.
But the gender of the deity varied across regions.
In ancient South Arabia, Shams was a goddess.
In other Arabian religious settings, solar deities could be masculine.
Al-Jallad explains that the Dhofari evidence points to a masculine Shams.
One inscription appears to preserve a request for healing on behalf of a woman whose name he interprets approximately as Shunnat, daughter of Gafar.
The deity is described with an epithet derived from a Semitic root meaning elevated or exalted.
The inscription can therefore be understood as an appeal to an exalted solar deity to heal a named individual.
This is a remarkable development.
A text that previously consisted of unexplained symbols can now be approached as evidence of personal religious practice.
It preserves a human concern that remains immediately recognizable: a request for healing.
The inscription also provides evidence for ancient personal names and the ways individuals addressed divine beings.
Forgiveness, Repentance, and Religious Vocabulary
The decipherment has revealed more than isolated divine names.
Al-Jallad identifies a cluster of religious vocabulary associated with praise, thanksgiving, wrongdoing, and forgiveness.
These include roots related to ḥ-m-d, associated with praise or thanks, and gh-f-r, associated with forgiveness.
He also discusses terminology connected with error or sin.
What makes this especially interesting is that these terms appear together in religious contexts.
Some inscriptions seem to contain requests for divine pardon.
Others suggest personal supplication or religious expressions connected with activities such as travel.
The inscriptions are not all identical or rigidly formulaic.
Their writers appear to have expressed themselves in varied ways.
This diversity may provide a particularly valuable perspective on the religious lives of ordinary people.
Rather than relying only on official monuments commissioned by kings, historians can examine the prayers and personal expressions preserved in caves and rock shelters.
These texts offer evidence for a religious world that existed long before the rise of Islam.
An Ancient Inscription and the Name Muhammad
One particularly intriguing part of our discussion concerned the Semitic root ḥ-m-d, associated with praise.
This root is also found in the name Muhammad.
Al-Jallad explains that names built from the relevant consonants appear to have been relatively uncommon in surviving pre-Islamic Arabian personal-name evidence.
But a sequence of consonants in an ancient inscription does not necessarily reveal exactly how a word was pronounced.
The same consonantal structure can potentially represent different vocalizations and grammatical forms.
He discusses a Dhofari inscription associated with images of a camel and a cow.
The inscription appears to contain a dedication involving an exalted divine figure and an additional epithet built from the consonants associated with praise.
Al-Jallad interprets this as possible evidence for religious use of a form related to maḥmūd or muḥammad as an epithet rather than necessarily a personal name.
The inscription contributes to understanding how a Semitic root associated with praise was used in religious language before Islam.
What Language Did the Dhofari Inscriptions Record?
The decipherment also has major implications for historical linguistics.
Southern Oman and neighboring parts of eastern Yemen are particularly important because indigenous Semitic languages survived there alongside Arabic.
These are conventionally called the Modern South Arabian languages.
They include Mehri and other related languages spoken in the region.
Despite the label, they are not simply modern descendants of the ancient written South Arabian languages of Yemen.
They constitute a distinct branch of the Semitic language family.
Al-Jallad explains that the language represented by Dhofari 1A shares important characteristics with Modern South Arabian languages.
One example concerns the word for “son.”
Earlier interpretations had identified a sequence as bn, resembling forms found in Arabic and other Semitic languages.
The decipherment instead supports br, a form comparable to that used in Modern South Arabian languages and Aramaic.
Other grammatical features also suggest a relationship.
But the similarities conceal an important difference.
The Dhofari 1A alphabet contains twenty-six characters, whereas the modern languages preserve a richer set of consonantal distinctions.
Al-Jallad argues that Dhofari 1A reflects the loss or merger of certain sounds still distinguished in Modern South Arabian languages.
This suggests that the language represented by Dhofari 1A was not simply an earlier stage of a surviving language such as Mehri.
Instead, it may represent an extinct relative.
That would mean the ancient linguistic landscape of southern Arabia was more diverse than the surviving languages alone might suggest.
Other Dhofari script varieties could preserve evidence of additional languages or dialects.
How Old Are the Dhofari Inscriptions?
Dating the inscriptions remains difficult.
Many are painted on rock surfaces rather than preserved in securely dated archaeological contexts.
Al-Jallad tentatively places the material around two thousand years ago, allowing for considerable uncertainty.
This means the inscriptions may preserve evidence from the centuries surrounding the beginning of the Common Era, but a precise chronology has not yet been established.
What Does Dhofari Tell Us About the World Before Islam?
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Al-Jallad how the decipherment might change our understanding of the religious and linguistic environment into which the Qur'an emerged.
His response emphasized the long history of religious vocabulary.
Words associated with praise, forgiveness, repentance, and other religious concepts did not necessarily appear suddenly in the seventh century.
Related expressions circulated across Semitic-speaking communities long before Islam.
The Dhofari inscriptions provide new evidence for this broader history.
They show that some religious terms familiar from later Arabic and Qur'anic usage had counterparts in older Arabian traditions.
This does not mean that the Dhofari texts directly influenced the Qur'an.
Nor does it establish that the communities using the script practiced the same religion as later Muslims.
Instead, it helps scholars reconstruct the linguistic and cultural background against which later religious developments occurred.
That is an important distinction.
Historical connections between words and concepts can be meaningful without implying that the religious traditions using them were identical.
