Vintage

The Art of Written Forms

Development of the Arabic Alphabet

Arabic, as well as Hebrew, are the best known living examples of what are known as 'Semitic' languages. The term 'Semitic' was coined by European scholars in the 18th Century AD in order to refer to a group of languages that dominated much (but not all) of the Middle East. This area ranged

...between the Sinai to the South, along the coast of the Mediterranean to an area best known as Levant, through north to present day Syria and Asia Minor, and east to the opening of the Tigris and Euphrates Valley.

(Drucker, 1995)

As for the origins of the word 'Semitic', this arose from an assumed connection with 'Shem', this being the name of one of Noah's son.

Figure 1

Alphabetic Development (Arabic highlighted in bold)

Timeline depicting Alphabetic Development

The first Semitic language recorded was Akkadian and was used in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) under the great empires of the Babylonians and the Assyrians. The use of this language in its various dialects continued onto the time of Christ. It used the 'cuneiform' writing style (that of signs formed from patterns of wedges pressed into soft clay) and used a syllabic system which was a development of pictographic writing. However were pictographic writing used signs to represent objects or concepts, instead signs were used to represent individual syllables. The drawback of this was that in such languages as Akkadian, a large variety of syllables had to be represented and this ranged up to nearly six-hunded! As syllables normally contain two sounds, a language could be represented far simpler by representing individual sounds instead.

The development of the alphabetic system, in which each individual sound was represented by signs was therefore a giant leap forward in writing. However it is hard to trace its origin - was it devised by an individual or, more likely, did it evolve from scripts of Mesopotamia, Egypt or Crete.

Some scholars would prefer to avoid thinking in terms of an individual inventor, but unless we think of an individual discovering the alphabet... we are in danger of undervaluing the greatness of the achievement.

(Healy, 1990)

In fact it is widely excepted is that the first alphabets drew inspiration from Egyptian Hieroglyphs down to a number of inscriptions discovered in Sinai and Palestine (called Proto-Sinaitic or Proto-Canaanite respectively) in which it appears that the Egyptian way of writing has been converted into an alphabetic system.

The Arkadian system was not only clumsy, but was originally devised for Sumerian (and is often called Sumero-Akkadian). Sumerian was a completely unrelated language that lacked some of the distinctive sounds essential to the Arkadian language, and so some of these sounds were never properly represented in its script. Not surprisingly then, that Arkadian came under strong pressure from Aramaic, another Semitic language which dated from the second millennium BC, and was the language of the Aramaeans.

The Arameanens lived mostly in Syria and upper Mesopotamia and they used an alphabetic script for their writings. It wasn't long before the Aramaic language spread rapidly throughout the region, replacing local languages such as Phoenician and Hebrew with a number of local dialects of Aramaic becoming established in important centres. Following on from Akkadian and Aramaic, the next major linguistic upheaval would come in the seventh century AD with the dramatic spread of Arabic at the time of the Islamic conquests.

Development of Arabic and its form

Among the various different forms of the Aramaic script, a local form developed in Edessa in the first centuries AD and had widespread success. It quickly developed and later received an unexpected boost when Edessa became the focus of the spread of Christianity in the semitic-speaking world. When the Bible was translated into the local Aramaic dialect, which was now known as Syriac, it meant the script and the language would spread from Palestine to the ends of the Silk Road.

The early Syriac form of writing was very elegant and called 'estrangela' script - derived from the Greek strongulos meaning 'rounded'. However sectarian troubles amongst Syriac Christians led to the development of eastern and western variations of the script called Nestorian and Jacobite (more correctly serta pesitta - '(script of) the (simple) character') respectively. Two important innovations associated with the Syriac scripts, although not unique, was the use of Diacritics (marks used to distinguish between similar letter forms to afford confusion - especially important with later cursive developments of the scripts) and vowel-signs. Syriac ended up with two systems of vowel notation. In the east, an extension of the use of diacritic dots and consisted of patterns of dots above and below consonants to indicate the following vowel. In the west, the Greek letters A, E, H, O and OU were used to represent the vowels 'a' 'e' 'i' 'o' and 'u', and were written in small script above or below the consonant after the vowel to be pronounced. It is thanks to Syriac, that Arabic (and Hebrew) have supralinear and sublinear markings, and is responsible for the development of the Arabic diacritics and the vowel-system. However, Arabic doesn't owe its origins all just to Syriac.

The first independent Arab kingdom that we know of is that of the Nabataeans located on Petra (modern Jordan) who spoke a form of the Arabic language. For their inscriptions they used Aramaic which was the established script of the Assyrians and Persians. Eventually however, when they started to experiment writing Arabic, they decided to use the Nabataean Aramaic script due to its familiarity to them. This script was found in two forms - formal (used for monumental inscriptions on tombs etc.) and cursive which was continuous and flowing and often influenced the style of the formal script. It is the Nabataean Aramaic script that lies at the heart of heart of the Arabic script. However there have been several forms of the Arabic script ranging from the 'western cursive' script with closest connection to Nabataean, to the east were a slightly different script called Kufic existed with strong Syriac influences.

As the early scripts developed to be used with Arabic, they required some modifications in order for the to represent the greater range of consonantal sounds - twenty-eight instead of the existing Aramaic twenty-two. Perhaps inspired by Nabataean or Syriac, Arabic used diacritic dots, firstly to distinguish certain letters, and secondly to create new consonants. The consonantal alphabet was also reordered, mainly on the basis of the shapes of the letters. Arabic also developed a system of marking vowels by the use of supralinear and sublinear marks.And so we are left with what we see today, as described by Albertine Gaur:

The Arabic script is written right to left and contains 29 letters made up of 17 basic outlines plus diacritical points to distinguish otherwise identical characters.

Arabic is a Semitic language were the root meaning of the word is borne by the consonants, and vowels serve mainly to fashion grammatical forms. Arabic letter forms can be joined to its neighbour, either on one side or two. This can alter the shape of the letters and even though the Arabic alphabet has more or less the same amount of letters as the roman alphabet, the calligrapher is provided with more versatile range of possible letter form compared to the largely self contained Roman letter forms.

And it is with it's calligraphy, that Arabic stands alone.

The Arabic script is today, one of the great scripts of the world, owing to the fact that it is the sacred script of Islam.

(Robinson, 1995)

Their is a very strong link between religion and calligraphy, and this lies with the Koran and the need for its exact and correct transmission. The Koran is the revealed word of God and according to tradition, it was revealed to Muhammad by the Archangel Gabriel. Tradition also dictates that copying the Koran is an act of merit, and he who writes the basmalah well, will obtain countless blessings and enter paradise. One of first and most successful scripts for copying of the Koran was the 'Kurfic' script that emerged from the territories of Kufah and Basra and this would have a great influence on Arabic calligraphy. Kurfic is recognisable by its very bold style with its elongated and straight lines, and was the favoured script for copying the Koran for 300 years. By the 9th Century AD, the script had started to be used to represent the shapes of animals and human figures and became an important part of Islamic art and is used in the Koranic verses. There have been many versions of the Arabic script to emerge since.

Bibliography

Drucker, J (1995) - The Alphabetic Labyrinth
Thames and Hudson
Gaur, A (1994) - A History of Calligraphy
British Library
Healy, J.F (1990) - The Early Alphabet (Reading the Past)
British Museum Press
Robinson, A (1995) - The Story of Writing
Thames and Hudson