مواطن نشأة الكتابة العربية الأولى في التاريخ ..كتاب مصوّر الخط العربي، ناجي زين الدين

The birthplace of the first Arabic writing in history.. An illustrated book of Arabic calligraphy.. Naji Zein al-Din

The birthplace of the first Arabic writing in history

We feel a great debt in what we know about the emergence of writing in many topics, from the centers of civilizational life to the archaeologists who were guided by examples of important inscriptions throughout the globe. Sumerian writing was found in the year 3300 BC in Mesopotamia.

Historians say: The cuneiform script spread from Mesopotamia to many countries of the Near East. The Hittites and Elamites adopted it, and it was used in the regions of Syria, and the Mitanites, Hurrians, Persians, and Achaemenids adapted it.

It emerged from the cuneiform script, the Akkadian script, the Babylonian script, and the Assyrian script. From Akkadian were derived the Hurrian and Hittite mentioned within the second millennium BC. It was derived from the Elamite cuneiform script after the old Elamite-Syrian script was no longer used. He lived and witnessed the emergence of these numbers and accounts in Mesopotamia for the first time in human history. The proponents of the Babylonian theory say: The Phoenician script is derived from the cuneiform script, as we mentioned, due to the close cultural and commercial ties between Assyria, Babylon, and the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and the similarity of the shapes of some letters.

It is said about the cuneiform writing that, despite the political fluctuations, it remained in use until the time of the appearance of Christ, approximately to the year (75) AD. As stated in the history of ancient civilization by Dr. Taha Baqir. The book “Written on Clay” by Dr. Muhammad Hussein and the history of the Arabs before Islam by Dr. Jawad.

When the Bronze Age civilization spread, as the states of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, and the Hittites began to decline, and the Semites appeared in Syria and Yemen, where the Sabaean state controlled trade between the Far East and the Mediterranean, the alphabet developed at that time in two directions. The northern Semitic alphabet, that is, the Canaanites, conveyed the script. To Hebrew, Aramaic, and Asia Minor scripts, as we see in the series of Semitic scripts in the tablet published on page 300 here.

The Semites in the south of the Arabian Peninsula protected the script that the Sabaeans created or developed, which is the Musnad, and it spread with lightning speed towards the north of the peninsula in Sinai, Syria and Jordan (and it extended to Iraq and then disappeared...), and it also extended to Abyssinia from the south, and this Ge’ez-Amharic script, as he says. Researchers are the remaining trace of the cuneiform script to this day - and the lines that we see in the series of Semitic scripts on the same tablet were born from this southern Semitic script. They are: the Himyarite Musnad, the Sabaean, the Ma’ni, the Lahyani, the Thamudic, the Safavid, etc., and the alphabet of the Arabic letters (South Semitic) consists of 29 letters, just as the alphabet influenced by the cuneiform script, which was found in Ugarit “Ras Shamra”, consists of 29 or 32 letters as we see it in the picture tablet. The alphabet we see above. See: (1, 2) •

(1) Arrangement of the syllabic signs of the abbreviated Babylonian cuneiform writing of (598) letters.
(2) Arrangement of the cuneiform alphabet letters found in the Phoenician city of Ugarit “Ras Shamra” in northern Latakia in Syria.

The hieroglyphic alphabet appeared in the Nile Valley around the year 3200 BC. Scientists say that the Egyptians did not resort to the method of syllables of words as found in the cuneiform script. Rather, they simplified the drawn pictures and made their parts basic rules for writing so that they indicated the thing they wanted to point to and introduce. Then Several successive modifications were made. After hieroglyphs were designated for engraving in temples, cursive writing appeared, simpler than it.
Then an easier writing appeared, used by official writers: hieratic and demotic.
The original is that hieroglyphs are written vertically from top to bottom, and they were also written horizontally. This is usually from right to left, but it may be written vice versa. In both cases, the symbols are written so that the human and animal shapes are facing towards the beginning of the line. The modern hieroglyphs used in printing go from left to right.

In the second millennium BC, several migrations took place, and the Hyksos (1) entered Egypt, cutting off its ties with the countries that were subject to it. This led to the efforts aimed at revising and improving writing being limited to Egypt alone. Hieroglyphic writing is complex writing, as its symbols may be used sometimes to express sounds, and at other times to express ideas, as mentioned above.
Linguists have known the similarity that exists between the Semitic and Hamitic languages, such as the Egyptian and Arabic languages, in some pronouns and number names. The scholars attribute the reason for this to the takeover of the Hyksos (2700-1285 BC) who migrated from the Arabian Peninsula to Egypt and took “Menfis” as their capital, and they were Arabs. Semitic, which influenced the ancient Egyptian language.

Some historians believe that the Semitic peoples should be called Arab peoples because they are Arabs, and today they are the most precious of the remaining Semitic nations, and their many dialects still maintain their ancient Semitic character.

Symbols that represent single consonants and can be considered letters of the alphabet.