Sabaic

The principal language of the kingdoms of ancient Yemen, named for Saba, the kingdom of Marib whose inscriptions begin around 1000 BCE and whose language the later Himyarite kings went on using for their own monuments until the middle of the sixth century CE. Sabaic survives in some ten thousand inscriptions, dedications, building texts, and royal annals carved on stone and bronze, and in a smaller cursive corpus incised on palm-stalks, and it stands with Geʽez in the South Semitic group: the two were neighbors across the Red Sea, the Ethiopic script descends from the South Arabian one, and the first names the written record gives the kingdom of Aksum are Sabaic. The atlas uses the language for those names and for the South Arabian view of the great powers that its last inscriptions record.

The script, the musnad, is a consonantal alphabet of twenty-nine letters, written in its early centuries in alternating directions and later from right to left, with no vowels and a suffixed definite article -n that the atlas keeps where the stone writes it. Transliteration follows the epigraphic convention, with the three sibilants distinguished as s¹, s², and s³; readings are consonantal, the vowels of Sabaic being recoverable only by comparison, so the atlas gives no phonetic transcription for the language. Its own name for the land of Saba, s¹bʾ, serves here as the language’s name in its own letters.

@misc{onomastikon-sabaic,
  author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
  title = {Sabaic},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/languages/sabaic}},
  note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}