Thamudic B is a Central Semitic language and script concentrated in northwestern

Arabia The Arabian Peninsula (, , or , , ) or Arabia, is a peninsula in West Asia, situated north-east of Africa on the Arabian plate. At , comparable in size to India, the Arabian Peninsula is the largest peninsula in the world. Geographically, the ...

, with attestations in Syria, Egypt, and Yemen. As a poorly understood form of

Ancient North Arabian Languages and scripts in the 1st Century Arabia Ancient North Arabian (ANA) is a collection of scripts and a language or family of languages under the North Arabian languages branch along with Old Arabic that were used in north and central Ara ...

, it is included in the

Thamudic Thamudic, named for the Thamud tribe, is a group of Epigraphy, epigraphic scripts known from large numbers of inscriptions in Ancient North Arabian (ANA) alphabets, which have not yet been properly studied. These texts are found over a huge area f ...

category. Mentions of the king of

Babylon Babylon ( ) was an ancient city located on the lower Euphrates river in southern Mesopotamia, within modern-day Hillah, Iraq, about south of modern-day Baghdad. Babylon functioned as the main cultural and political centre of the Akkadian-s ...

and the Nabataean god

Dushara Dushara (Nabataean Arabic: 𐢅𐢈𐢝𐢛𐢀 ''dwšrʾ''), also transliterated as Dusares or Dhu Shara, is a pre-Islamic Arabian god worshipped by the Nabataeans at Petra and Madain Saleh (of which city he was the patron). Safaitic inscripti ...

show that Thamudic B was written over a span of centuries, ranging at least from the seventh or sixth to fourth centuries BCE.

Characteristics

Thamudic B is mostly written horizontally, from right to left. Salient linguistic features include the following: # The suffix morpheme of the prefix conjugation in the first person is ''-t'', as in Arabic and

Northwest Semitic Northwest Semitic is a division of the Semitic languages comprising the indigenous languages of the Levant. It emerged from Proto-Semitic language, Proto-Semitic in the Early Bronze Age. It is first attested in proper names identified as Amorite l ...

, as opposed to the ''-k'' of Ancient South Arabian and Ethiopic. # The dative preposition is ''nm'', which appears to be an assimilated form of an original *''lima''. # The consonant /n/ often assimilates to a following contiguous consonant, ''ʔṯt'', from earlier *ʾVnṯat and ''ʔt'', from earlier * �anta # Imperatives are often augmented by the energic suffix ''-n''.

References

{{Semitic languages Central Semitic languages Ancient North Arabian Extinct languages of Asia