Mysterious Arabian Script Deciphered

COURTESY AHMAD AL-JALLAD

Across the southern reaches of the Arabian Peninsula, enigmatic inscriptions in a variety of ancient pre-Islamic Arabian scripts pepper the landscape. In particular, the region of Dhofar in southern Oman is known for two such scripts, Dhofari 1 and the related Dhofari 2, discovered in the early 20th century. Painted on cave walls and carved into desert boulders, these previously undeciphered scripts, which date to more than 2,000 years ago, have lent themselves to a variety of speculative hypotheses, such as connections to ancient Arabian tribes mentioned in the Quran.

Now, that is all beginning to change. Epigrapher Ahmad Al-Jallad from the Ohio State University has managed to decipher the Dhofari 1 script. In examining the available inscriptions, Al-Jallad observed that three of them contained more than 20 separate letters without any repetitions. This would be highly unlikely if the texts recorded words that could be read sensibly, but it would make perfect sense if they instead recorded the Dhofari alphabet.

Treating these three inscriptions as abecedaries (lists of letters in alphabetical order), Al-Jallad conducted comparisons with other pre-Islamic Arabian scripts, relying on certain tell-tale similarities between Dhofari 1 and these other writing systems to confirm that the inscriptions did indeed approximate the traditional letter order evident in other contexts. The general correspondence enabled Al-Jallad to sort out specific cases where letters were uncertain or in an unexpected order, and the Dhofari 1 code was cracked.

Thanks to Al-Jallad’s pioneering work, many Dhofari 1 inscriptions have been identified as short prayers or apotropaic texts, while others are now understood to record personal names or simple graffiti such as “I was here.”