Sabaic, sometimes referred to as Sabaean, was an Old South Arabian language that was spoken between c. 1000 BC and the 6th century AD by the Sabaeans. It was used as a written language by some other peoples of the ancient civilization of South Arabia, including the Ḥimyarites, Ḥashidites, Ṣirwāḥites, Humlanites, Ghaymānites, and Radmānites. Sabaic belongs to the South Arabian Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Sabaic is distinguished from the other members of the Old South Arabian group by its use of h to mark the third person and as a causative prefix; all of the other languages use s1 in those cases. Therefore, Sabaic is called an h-language and the others s-languages.
Script
Sabaic was written in the South Arabian alphabet, and like Hebrew and Arabic marked only consonants, the only indication of vowels being with matres lectionis. For many years the only texts discovered were inscriptions in the formal Masnad script (Sabaic ms3nd), but in 1973 documents in another minuscule and cursive script were discovered, dating back to the second half of the 1st century BC; only a few of the latter have so far been published.
The South Arabic alphabet used in Yemen, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Ethiopia beginning in the 8th century BC, in all three locations, later evolved into the still in use Ge'ez alphabet. The Ge'ez language however is no longer considered to be a descendant of Sabaic or of Old South Arabian; and there is linguistic evidence that Semitic languages were concurrently in use, being spoken in Eritrea and Ethiopia as early as 2000 BC.
Sabaic is attested in some 1,040 dedicatory inscriptions, 850 building inscriptions, 200 legal texts, and 1300 short graffiti (containing only personal names). No literary texts of any length have yet been brought to light. This paucity of source material and the limited forms of the inscriptions has made it difficult to get a complete picture of Sabaic grammar. Thousands of inscriptions written in a cursive script (called Zabur) incised into wooden sticks have been found and date to the Middle Sabaic period; these represent letters and legal documents and as such includes a much wider variety of grammatical forms.
Varieties
Sabaic: the language of the kingdom of Saba and later also of Ḥimyar; also documented in the kingdom of Da'amot; very well documented, c. 6000 inscriptions Old Sabaic: mostly boustrophedon inscriptions from the 9th until the 8th century BC and including further texts in the next two centuries from Ma'rib and the Highlands. Middle Sabaic: 3rd century BC until the end of the 3rd century AD. The best-documented language. The largest corpus of texts from this period comes from the Awwam Temple (otherwise known as Maḥrem Bilqīs) in Ma'rib. Amiritic/Ḥaramitic: the language of the area to the north of Ma'īn Central Sabaic: the language of the inscriptions from the Sabaean heartland South Sabaic: the language of the inscriptions from Radmān and Ḥimyar "Pseudo-Sabaic": the literary language of Arabian tribes in Najrān, Ḥaram and Qaryat al-Fāw Late Sabaic: 4th–6th centuries AD. This is the monotheistic period when Christianity and Judaism brought Aramaic and Greek influences.
In the Late Sabaic period the ancient names of the gods are no longer mentioned and only one deity Raḥmānān is referred to. The last known inscription in Sabaic dates from 554 or 559 AD. The language's eventual extinction was brought about by the later rapid expansion of Islam, bringing with it Northern Arabic or Muḍarī, which became the language of culture and writing, totally supplanting Sabaic.
The dialect used in the western Yemeni highlands, known as Central Sabaic, is very homogeneous and generally used as the language of the inscriptions. Divergent dialects are usually found in the area surrounding the Central Highlands, such as the important dialect of the city of Ḥaram in the eastern al-Jawf. Inscriptions in the Ḥaramic dialect, which is heavily influenced by North Arabic, are also generally considered a form of Sabaic. The Himyarites, whose spoken language was Semitic but not South Arabic, used Sabaic as a written language.