Nabataean Arabic in the context of "History of the Arabic alphabet"

The Rūwafa inscriptions (or Ruwwāfa inscriptions, Rawwāfa inscriptions) are a group of five Greek–Nabataean Arabic inscriptions known from the isolated Ruwāfa temple, located in the Hisma desert of northwestern Arabia, or roughly 200 km northwest of Hegra. They are dated to 165–169 AD. The inscriptions are numbered using Roman numerals, running from Inscriptions I to Inscription V. Two of the five inscriptions describe the structure as a temple and that it was constructed by the εθνος/šrkt of Thamud in honor of the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. The Thamud tribe is otherwise well-attested to have existed in this region of Arabia from at least the 8th century BC. At the time of the composition of these inscriptions in the second century, northwestern Arabia was known as Arabia Petraea, a frontier province of the Roman Empire that had been previously conquered in 106 AD.

The location of the inscriptions are curious, given that they are found at the southern extremities of the Roman province of Arabia with little else nearby, which has been described by some as the "last place" where a set of inscriptions recognizing the imperial authority of the Roman Empire would be found, though it adds to the significance of the inscription, indicating that this distant region of Arabia alongside the allied auxiliary unit still received attention from the emperors. It may have been that the empire was recruiting some of the inhabitants of the region into the army. Today, the inscriptions are housed at the National Museum of Saudi Arabia except for the Inscription V which is lost.

The Nabataean script is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) that was used to write Nabataean Aramaic and Nabataean Arabic from the second century BC onwards. Important inscriptions are found in Petra (in Jordan), the Sinai Peninsula (now part of Egypt), Bosra and Namara (in Syria), and other archaeological sites including Abdah (in Israel) and Mada'in Saleh (Hegra) (in Saudi Arabia).

Nabataean is only known through inscriptions and, more recently, a small number of papyri. It was first deciphered in 1840 by Eduard Friedrich Ferdinand Beer. 6,000 – 7,000 Nabataean inscriptions have been published, of which more than 95% are mostly short inscriptions or graffiti, and the vast majority are undated, post-Nabataean or from outside the core Nabataean territory. A majority of inscriptions considered Nabataean were found in Sinai, and another 4,000 – 7,000 such Sinaitic inscriptions remain unpublished. Prior to the publication of Nabataean papyri, the only substantial corpus of detailed Nabataean text were the 38 funerary inscriptions from Mada'in Salih (Hegra), discovered and published by Charles Montagu Doughty, Charles Huber, Philippe Berger and Julius Euting in 1884-85.