Sabaic

Sabaic
Native toYemen
RegionArabian Peninsula
Extinct6th century
Ancient South Arabian
Language codes
ISO 639-3xsa
xsa
Glottologsaba1279
Votive stele with Sabaic inscription addressed to the main Sabaean deity Almaqah, mentioning five other South Arabian gods, two reigning sovereigns and two governors: "Ammī'amar son of Ma'dīkarib dedicated to Almaqah Ra'suhumū. With 'Athtar, with Almaqah, with dhāt-Ḥimyam, with dhât-Ba'dân, with Waddum, with Karib'īl, with Sumhu'alī, with 'Ammīrayam and with Yadhrahmalik." Alabaster, c. 700 BC, Yemen, area of Ma'rib (?).

Sabaic, sometimes referred to as Sabaean, was an Old South Arabian language that was spoken between c. 1000 BC and the 6th century AD by the Sabaeans. It was used as a written language by some other peoples of the ancient civilization of South Arabia, including the Ḥimyarites, Ḥashidites, Ṣirwāḥites, Humlanites, Ghaymānites, and Radmānites.[1] Sabaic belongs to the South Arabian Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family.[2] Sabaic is distinguished from the other members of the Old South Arabian group by its use of h to mark the third person and as a causative prefix; all of the other languages use s1 in those cases. Therefore, Sabaic is called an h-language and the others s-languages.[3] Numerous other Sabaic inscriptions have also been found dating back to the Sabean colonization of Africa.[4][5]

  1. ^ Korotayev, Andrey (1995). Ancient Yemen. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-922237-1.
  2. ^ Kogan & Korotayev 1997.
  3. ^ Nebes, Norbert; Stein, Peter (2008). "Ancient South Arabian". In Woodard, Roger D. (ed.). The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia (PDF). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 145–178. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511486890. ISBN 9780511486890.
  4. ^ The Athenaeum. J. Lection. 1894. p. 88.
  5. ^ Radner, Karen; Moeller, Nadine; Potts, Daniel T. (2023-04-07). The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East: Volume V: the Age of Persia. Oxford University Press. p. 353. ISBN 978-0-19-068766-3.