________________
ARAMAIC BRANCH
269 "The linguistic and historical importance of the Sinaitic inscriptions is not very considerable: unlike the inscriptions on Nabatæan monuments they are not the work of professional calligraphists and practised masons, but of members of the caravans which traded between South Arabia (India) and the Mediterranean. ... The inscriptions may be said to represent the type of cursive writing used by the Nabatæans." (B. Moritz).
This script developed out of the Nabataan alphabet, probably in the first century A.D., although the extant inscriptions presumably belong to the second and third centuries, and some may even belong to the fourth century. The neo-Sinaitic alphabet is the probable link between the Nabatzan and the Arabic scripts. The evolution of the form of the letters of the Nabataean-Sinaitic-Arabic branch has been the most rapid amongst all the branches of alphabetic scripts. All the letters have completely changed their form in the course of a few centuries (see Fig. 132),
ARABIC ALPHABET
Lidzbarski adduced as one of the reasons of the great changes in the Nabatæan-Sinaitic-Arabic branch, the geographic situation, whereas Rosenthal considers as its main reason the fact that the users of these scripts were not Aramscans. However, neither of these explanations is sufficient, the geographic situation of the users of other varieties being not very dissimilar, and on the other hand not all the users of other scripts of Aramaic origin were Aramæans.
In my opinion, there must have been various concomitant reasons.
Arabic Language and Script (Speech and Writing follow Religion)
The Arabic seript is, after Latin, the most generally used in the world to-day. The Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries and the consequent expansion of the religion of Mohammed and the diffusion of his holy book, the Qur'an (commonly written Koran or Coran), made Arabic one of the chief languages of the universe. It is spoken, in some form or other, throughout the vast territories which lie between India and the Atlantic Ocean. It was formerly spoken in Spain, in the Balearic Islands and in Sicily
Arabic script spread even further than Arabic speech. Becoming in turn the script of the Persian and, especially, of the Ottoman empire, it spread in the course of time, to the Balkan peninsula, to what is now southern, or rather south-castern Russia, to western, central and south-eastern Asia, and to a great part of Africa. The Arabic alphabet has thus been adapted not only to Arabic, which is a Semitic speech, but also to langunges belonging to various linguistic groups: Indo-European or Indo-Aryan, such as Slavonie (in Bosnia), Spanish (the Arabic script employed for Spanish is called aljamial), Persian, Hindustani (Fig. 138, t); Turkish; Hebrew, and various African languages, such as Berber, Swahili (Fig. 138, 2), Sudanese, and so forth. On the other hand, there are more instances of Arabie being written in non-Arabic scripts, for instance, in garshmi, or karshum, which is the Syriac script adapted to Arabic Arabic script has driven out of use various scripts derived from the Syriac alphabet, is also the
