315 16 THE EARLIEST STAGES OF ARABIC AND ITS LINGUISTIC CLASSIFICATION Ahmad Al-Jallad 1 Introduction The irst clear attestation of an Arabic word occurs in the Kurkh monolith inscription of the neo-Assyrian monarch, Shalmaneser III (853 BCE). The text lists the names of a coalition of leaders who opposed the expansion of the Assyrians into the Levant. Among rulers such as Adad-’idri of Damascus and Ahab the Israelite, we ind m Gi-in-di-bu- kur Ar-ba-a-a, that is, ‘Gin- dibu the Arab’ (lit, of the land of Arby). The cuneiform sources use the term “Arab” (A-ri-bi) to describe peoples living from Mesopotamia in the east to the Anti-Lebanon mountains in the west, and from northwest Arabia to the Sinai in the south (Eph’al 1982). Later Greek and Per- sian sources record the presence of Arabs across the Fertile Crescent and North Arabia as well, although it not always possible to determine what individual authors meant when they used the term (see the various articles in Macdonald 2009). Only one text in the Arabic language can be dated to this period: a Ancient North Arabian inscription, discovered at Bayir in Jordan, con- taining a prayer to the gods of the Iron Age kingdoms of Ammon, Moab, and Edom, Malkom, Kemōš, and Qaws, respectively (Hayajneh, Ababneh, and Khraysheh 2015). While the text is undated, the combination of its contents as well as an accompanying Canaanite inscription strongly suggests a mid to late Iron Age II date. Aside from this short prayer, the Arabic of the ancient Near East is known only from a handful of personal and divine names transcribed in other languages (on these fragments, see Macdonald 2008). Evidence for Arabic becomes more abundant towards the end of the irst millenium BCE with the arrival of inscriptions in the Nabataean, Hismaic, and Safaitic scripts. While the Nabataeans used a form of Achaemenid Oficial Aramaic as a literary language, several fea- tures betray an Arabic substratum, most notably in the areas of syntax and personal names. The epigraphy in the Safaitic and Hismaic scripts, which extends from North Arabia to the Ḥawrn, also provides considerable evidence for the earliest stages of Arabic. It is impos- sible to determine when these writings began but their authors seem to have been especially productive in the Nabataean and Roman periods (1st c. BCE – 4th c. CE), as references to the political events of these centuries are relatively abundant. Nevertheless, the Iron Age inscrip- tion from Bayir mentioned earlier could suggest a continuous tradition of writing Arabic in the region throughout the irst millenium BCE. A bird’s-eye view of the situation places the earliest stages of Arabic in northwest Arabia and the southern Levant.