Nabataean alphabet
| Nabataean |
|
|---|---|
| Type | |
| Languages | Nabataean language |
|
Time period
|
2nd century BC to 4th century AD |
|
Parent systems
|
|
|
Child systems
|
Arabic alphabet |
| Direction | Right-to-left |
| ISO 15924 | Nbat, 159 |
|
Unicode alias
|
Nabataean |
| Final Accepted Script Proposal | |
The Nabataean alphabet is a consonantal alphabet (abjad) that was used by the Nabataeans in the 2nd century BC. Important inscriptions are found in Petra, Jordan, and Sinai, Egypt.
The alphabet is descended from the Syriac alphabet, which was itself descended from the Aramaic alphabet. In turn, a cursive form of Nabataean developed into the Arabic alphabet from the 4th century, which is why Nabataean's letterforms are intermediate between the more northerly Semitic scripts (such as the Aramaic-derived Hebrew) and those of Arabic.
As compared to other Aramaic-derived scripts, Nabataean developed more loops and ligatures, likely to increase speed of writing. The ligatures seem to have not been standardized and vary across time and space. There were no spaces between words. Numerals in Nabataean script were built from characters of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20, and 100.
The Nabataean alphabet (U+10880–U+108AF) was added to the Unicode Standard in June 2014 with the release of version 7.0.
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