In writing the history of Arabic, scholars have made the silent assumption that the ancient linguistic situation of the Arabian Peninsula was always like that of the early Islamic period, with Arabic dominating the landscape. This lecture confronts this assumption with the only true witness to Arabia’s pre-Islamic linguistic history: the epigraphic record. Relying on recent advances in the decipherment and interpretation of these datable and localizable materials, I suggest the need to redraw the linguistic map of ancient Arabia. Rather than being the language of all Arabian nomads from time immemorial, Arabic, concentrated in the northwest, was only one of many Semitic languages spoken across the Peninsula. Nevertheless, by the time the Yemeni polymath al-Hamdānī (d. 334AH/945CE) composed his Description of the Arabian Peninsula, Arabic had become dominant, and non-Arabic languages survived only in small pockets in the southwest. To understand the spread of Arabic, I examine linguistic changes documented in the epigraphic record in light of the political history of the Arabian Peninsula, based on literary sources and recent archaeological discoveries.
Ahmad Al-Jallad (PhD Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard) is Assistant Professor of Ancient Arabia and Arabic and Semitic Linguistics at Leiden University and Director of the Leiden Center for the Study of Ancient Arabia (2015-present). The author of An Outline Grammar of the Safaitic Inscriptions (2015), he specializes in the early history of Arabic and Ancient North Arabian. He has published on Arabic from the pre-Islamic period based on documentary sources, Arabic in Greek transcription from the pre-Islamic period, language classification, North Arabian and Arabic epigraphy, historical Semitic linguistics, the Arabic grammatical tradition, and modern Arabic dialects. His notable decipherments include a zodiac star calendar used in the Safaitic inscriptions (Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy, 2014, 2016), the oldest Arabic poem yet discovered (Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religion, 2015), and the decipherment of the oldest, fully vocalized Arabic text, written in Greek letters (Arabian Epigraphic Notes, 2015). He is the founding director of the Leiden Center for the Study of Ancient Arabia, and has led or been a member of several epigraphic and archaeological projects
