Sabaic

With its textual corpus comprising approximately 6000 inscriptions dating back from the 8th century BCE to the 6th century CE, Sabaic is the best documented and the longest attested language within the Ancient South Arabian (ASA) language family. On account of the political and cultural reputation of the tribe of Sabaʾ, Sabaic was used as a written language in southern Arabia and beyond for many centuries and this, combined with the more varied repertoire of available documents, is the reason why Sabaic has been studied much more extensively than its sister languages.

With its textual corpus comprising approximately 6000 inscriptions dating back from the 8th century BCE — possibly even earlier — to the 6th century CE, Sabaic, the idiom of the tribe of Sabaʾ, is the best documented and the longest attested language in the Ancient South Arabian (ASA) language family.

The main linguistic features distinguishing Sabaic from the other ASA languages are: the h- based pronouns and verbal causatives, the n- augmented “long” form of the verbal prefix conjugation, and the n- augmented infinitives of the derived verbal stems. It has been a matter of debate recently whether these traits, together with other features of the verbal system such as stem formation, should mean that Sabaic is not genetically affiliated with the other ASA languages. Stein (2020 with the previous literature) argues that Sabaic is rather closer to the northwest Semitic languages — Aramaic in particular — and explains this historically by the arrival in southern Arabia of small Sabaean communities from the Levant at the beginning of the Iron Age, around the 12th century BCE.

Types of documents, text genres, and language style

Sabaic documents almost entirely consist of the so-called monumental inscriptions, i.e., official texts drafted on hard material by professional scribes and intended to be displayed in public spaces. The most represented text genres are votive or dedicatory inscriptions, followed by building inscriptions, legal inscriptions, and commemorative inscriptions.

However, since most of the minuscule texts on wooden sticks discovered so far are in Sabaic, this means that in contrast to the other ASA languages — with the exception of Minaic, albeit to a far lesser degree — many different kinds of documents intended for private use are also known in Sabaic, such as economic and legal texts (deeds, quittances, promissory notes, court reports, etc.), letters, cultic texts (oracular notifications, oracular enquiries, incantations, prayers), and writing exercises (Stein 2010; Maraqten 2014).

Moreover, the only specimens of poetic texts known from Yemen today are written in Sabaic. These rhymed hymns (Sabaic s³mdt) carved on rock or incorporated in stone inscriptions were traditionally thought to be expressed in another, non-Sabaic local language, possibly to be identified with the Himyaritic idiom recounted by the medieval Arabo-Islamic authors (Robin 2007). However, despite their still obscure content, a close linguistic examination reveals that their odd deviant features are attributable to the highly artificial character of the poetic language (Stein 2008).

On the other hand, the assumption of an existing opposition between a high, literary language register that would be represented by the monumental inscriptions, and a lower register conveying the everyday language that would be utilized in the minuscule texts has to be discarded. Apart from one orthographic divergence — in minuscule texts the glyph ḍ is used to represent the etymological *ẓ, reflecting the merger of these two phonemes in the spoken language — no other major contrast can be observed in grammar, especially in morphology (Stein 2012). Nonetheless, the language of minuscule texts is a promising field of research that may enrich our knowledge of areas of linguistics such as syntax and lexical studies, variation and discourse analysis.

Chronological and geographical subdivision

Contrary to the other ASA languages, the long-standing substantiation and the broad geographical distribution of Sabaic have led to the detection of a diachronic and dialectal variation within the language. Three main stages have been identified — early, middle, and late — with the middle one distinguishing many regional varieties (Beeston 1984; Stein 2004).

Yet the linguistic map of Sabaic (Fig. 1) must be understood more as a reflection of the distribution of written documents than as a linguistic reality, since an inscription in a given variety is often the result of political trends and does not necessarily express the language spoken in the area where it was found. Besides the core area of the Sabaic tribe (the lowlands of Maʾrib and Ṣirwāḥ), it may be assumed that Sabaic was spoken over a large area of the Yemeni highlands, the southern limit of which, however, can hardly be established. As for Late Sabaic, this was a purely written language in many of the regions where it was employed.

Ancient Sabaic

The corpus in ancient Sabaic (8th–4th cent. BCE) is made up of some 800 texts, clustered in the areas of Maʾrib, Ṣirwāḥ, and the Jawf. A few inscriptions come from the Yemeni highlands, most of them from the area of Dhamār.

The linguistic traits typical of early Sabaic are: the absence of the n- assimilation in the following consonant, the defective writing of the dual in nominal and verbal forms (∅ as opposed to -y); the defective writing of some particles (e.g., ʿd as opposed to ʿdy; l-k-ḏ as opposed to l-k-ḏy); the lack of the -n augment in the infinitive of the derived verbal stems; the spelling of the numerals “three” and “six” (s²lṯ and s¹dṯ, as opposed to ṯlṯ and s¹ṯ).

Middle Sabaic

Middle Sabaic (late 4th cent. BCE–3rd cent. CE) comprises the greatest number of inscriptions, forming a corpus of over 2000 texts. During this time, inscriptions in Sabaic are found over a wide territory ranging from the Jawf, through the area of Maʾrib and Ṣirwāḥ, and the northern and southern highlands up to the south-eastern border with Qatabanic and Hadramitic-speaking areas.

From the middle period onwards, a series of innovations spread from the central highlands of Yemen, and subsequently included the original core of Sabaic, thus resulting in the formation of a Central Sabaic: the assimilation of the n- in the following consonant, the plene writing of the nominal and verbal duals, the regular use of mimation and the -n augmented infinitive of the derived verbal stems.

By contrast, the areas to the north and to the south did not share all of these innovations and were, in turn, characterized by other features, often a product of contact-induced change, as a result of the interaction of Sabaic with other languages such as Arabic (north) and Qatabanic (south).

Hence, the small corpus of Northern Middle Sabaic (Stein 2007), encompassing the inscriptions from sites of the Jawf (Haram), the Wādī Shuḍayf and Najrān, shows some innovations typical of Arabic (such as the merger of the s¹ and s³ phonemes, the -t verbal endings in the 1st and 2nd persons of the suffix-conjugation, and the negative particle lm followed by a verb in the prefix-conjugation). Recent studies, which enlarged the corpus by including the texts from the site of Qaryat al-Fāw, argued that these inscriptions were produced by a population speaking a variety of old Arabic (“vieil-arabe”), and who used Sabaic as a prestige language with different levels of language proficiency (Robin 2023).

Several varieties are distinguished among southern Middle Sabaic, the dialect of the inscriptions from the areas south of Ṣanʿāʾ: the Himyaritic dialect, the Radmanic dialect (which retained some of the early Sabaic archaisms), and the Dhamār dialect (Prioletta 2013).

Late Sabaic

Late Sabaic defines the inscriptions written during the last two centuries of Ancient South Arabian history (late 4th–mid 6th cent. CE), a period characterized by the political unification of southern and central Arabia by Ḥimyar and by the adoption of monotheism (Fig. 2). Nevertheless, in spite of an extensive geographical distribution — Sabaic inscriptions have been carved as far north as the Riyadh region — the corpus in late Sabaic only counts some 300 inscriptions.

Some typical features of late Sabaic are the merging of the s¹ and s³ phonemes; the treatment of the 2nd and 3rd weak consonant roots (-w- as opposed to -y-), the metathesized plural form ʾlwd “children” (instead of ʾwld), the unchangeable plural relative pronoun ʾlht, the negation particle dʾ, and the use of pluralis maiestatis. These traits are not true linguistic innovations, however, as all of them (with the exception of the first, borrowed from northern Middle Sabaic) were already present in southern Middle Sabaic. This means that Late Sabaic is only a continuation of southern Middle Sabaic, the language that the Himyaritic court imposed all over the kingdom.

Sabaic as a prestige language and its use outside Ancient South Arabia

During its history, Sabaic often took on the role of a prestige language not only within Ancient southern Arabia but also in the neighbouring countries. Hence, at the dawn of epigraphic production in the ASA kingdoms, Sabaic influenced the other scribal schools — a phenomenon called Sabaeization in the literature — the most noticeable proof of which is the use of the *h-*based forms (instead of the non-Sabaic s¹-based ones) in the non-Sabaic texts of the time. On the other hand, as late as the 4th and 6th cent. CE, some Ethiopian kings chose to draft their inscriptions in an artificial mixed language based on Geʿez (their native tongue), with traits borrowed from Sabaic (Robin 2022).

Sabaic was also used beyond southern Arabia by Sabaean communities settled abroad. The Ethio-Sabaic inscriptions — a corpus of around 100 texts dating from as early as the 9th cent. BCE and found in southern Eritrea and northern Ethiopia – are drafted in Sabaic language with a heavy substrate influence due to the prolonged contact and interaction of the Sabaeans and Ethio-Semitic-speaking local populations (Nebes 2023). Recent discoveries have proved that Sabaeans also founded settlements in Somalia, although the inscriptions found there do not show any substrate influence.

Alessia Prioletta

References and suggested readings

• Beeston, A.F.L. 1984. Sabaic grammar (JSS Monograph, 6). Manchester: University of Manchester.
• Maraqten, M. 2014. Altsüdarabische Texte auf Holzstäbchen: epigraphische und kulturhistorische Untersuchungen (Beiruter Texte und Studien, 103). Beirut: Orient-Institut.
• Müller, W.W. 2010. Sabäische Inschriften nach Ären datiert. Bibliographie, Texte und Glossar. (Veröffentlichungen der Orientalischen Kommission, 53). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. 
• Nebes, N. 2023. Early Saba and Its Neighbors, in K. Radner, N. Moeller & D. Potts (eds) The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East Volume V: The Age of Persia: 299–375. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Prioletta, A. 2013. Inscriptions from the southern highlands of Yemen: the epigraphic collections of the museums of Baynūn and Dhamār (Arabia Antica, 8). Roma: "L’Erma" di Bretschneider.
• Robin, C.J. 2007. Ḥimyaritic. In K. Versteegh (ed.) Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics. Vol. II: Eg–Lan: 256–261. Leiden, Boston: Brill.
• Robin, C.J. 2022. Le guèze maquillé en sabaʾique des inscriptions royales aksūmites (Éthiopie antique), in J.-N. Robert (ed.) Hiéroglossie III. Persan, syro-araméen et les relations avec la langue arabe: 171–205. Paris: Bibliothèque de l’Institut des Hautes Études Japonaises.
• Robin, C.J. 2023. Le vieil-arabe de Najrān. Une variété archaïque de la langue arabe dans la région de Najrān vers le début de l’ère chrétienne (Semitica et Classica, Miscellanées, 2). Paris: Geuthner
• Stein, P. 2003. Untersuchungen zur Phonologie und Morphologie des Sabäischen (EFAH, 3). Rahden/Westf: Leidorf.
• Stein, P. 2004. Zur Dialektgeographie des Sabäischen. JSS 49: 225–245. DOI: 10.1093/jss/49.2.225.
• Stein, P. 2007. Materialien zur sabäischen Dialektologie: Das Problem des amiritischen („haramischen‟) Dialektes. ZDMG 157: 13–47.
• Stein, P. 2008. The “Ḥimyaritic” Language in pre-Islamic Yemen. A Critical Re-evaluation. Semitica et Classica 1: 203–212. DOI: 10.1484/J.SEC.1.100253.
• Stein, P. 2010. Die altsüdarabischen Minuskelinschriften auf Holzstäbchen aus der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek in München (EFAH, 5). Tübingen: Wasmuth.
• Stein, P. 2012. Aspekte von Sprachbewusstsein im antiken Südarabien, in J. Thon, G. Veltri & E.-J. Waschke (eds) Sprachbewusstsein und Sprachkonzepte im alten Orient, alten Testament und rabbinischen Judentum (Orientwissenschaftliche Hefte, 30): 29–59. Halle: Zirs.
• Stein, P. 2013. Lehrbuch der sabäischen Sprache (Subsidia et instrumenta linguarum orientis). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
• Stein, P. 2020. Ancient South Arabian, in R. Hasselbach-Andee (ed.) A Companion to Ancient near Eastern Languages: 337–353 (Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.