Hijazi script () is the collective name for several early

Arabic script The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic (Arabic alphabet) and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world (after the Latin script), the second-most widel ...

s that developed in the

Hejaz Hejaz is a Historical region, historical region of the Arabian Peninsula that includes the majority of the western region of Saudi Arabia, covering the cities of Mecca, Medina, Jeddah, Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, Tabuk, Yanbu, Taif and Al Bahah, Al-B ...

(the northwest of the

Arabian Peninsula 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 ...

), a region that includes the cities of

Mecca Mecca, officially Makkah al-Mukarramah, is the capital of Mecca Province in the Hejaz region of western Saudi Arabia; it is the Holiest sites in Islam, holiest city in Islam. It is inland from Jeddah on the Red Sea, in a narrow valley above ...

and

Medina Medina, officially al-Madinah al-Munawwarah (, ), also known as Taybah () and known in pre-Islamic times as Yathrib (), is the capital of Medina Province (Saudi Arabia), Medina Province in the Hejaz region of western Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, ...

. This type of script was already in use at the time of the emergence of Islam. A calligraphic Hijazi script is called a Ma'il script (); these are found in a number of the earliest Qur'anic manuscripts. The two terms are often used interchangeably. Hijazi was one of the earliest scripts, along with Mashq and Kufic. Earlier scripts included

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 ...

and the South Arabian script. The script is notably angular in comparison with other Arabic scripts and tends to slope to the right. The script does not yet contain any dots or

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...

al marks to indicate vowel sounds: but does differentiate consonants by the intermittent use of dashes above the graphic letter forms.

Historicity

Ancient manuscripts are divided into two major types, Hijazi and Kufic. Kufic style also has its own subdivisions. The term Hijazi was coined in the 19th century by Michele Amari, who distinguished between "Meccan script" and "Medinan script" from a 10th-century manuscript. Today, no element reinforces such a geographical distinction, and there is no clarity as to their certainty of geographic origin. Since the 1980s, the Kufic script has been referred to by François Déroche as a preference, with the definition of an "ancient Abbasid script".Cellard É., "Les manuscrits coraniques anciens", ''Le Coran des historiens,'' T.1, 2019, p. 681. The concept of Hijazi script has been criticized by Estelle Whelan, who sees this definition as a "scientific artefact" based on the form of a single letter (

aleph Aleph (or alef or alif, transliterated ʾ) is the first Letter (alphabet), letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician alphabet, Phoenician ''ʾālep'' 𐤀, Hebrew alphabet, Hebrew ''ʾālef'' , Aramaic alphabet, Aramaic ''ʾālap'' � ...

) and archaic explanations.François Déroche, ''Le codex Parisino-petropolitanus,'' p. 113 et suiv.

References

External links

British Library MS. Or. 2165
Early Qur'anic manuscript written in Ma'il script, 7th or 8th century CE

(

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. Based in London, it is one of the largest libraries in the world, with an estimated collection of between 170 and 200 million items from multiple countries. As a legal deposit li ...

)
Ma'il manuscript from the Tareq Rajab Museum in Kuwait
.

from the discoveries at the Great Mosque,

Sana'a Sanaa, officially the Sanaa Municipality, is the ''de jure'' capital and largest city of Yemen. The city is the capital of the Sanaa Governorate, but is not part of the governorate, as it forms a separate administrative unit. At an elevation ...

Fragment in a Makkan Hijazi script
from the Vatican library Arabic calligraphy Hejaz {{arabic-script-stub

Historicity

See also

References

External links