Nabataean Aramaic in the context of "Nabataean alphabet"

The Nabataeans, also spelled Nabateans (/ˌnæbəˈtiːənz/; Nabataean Aramaic / Nabataean Arabic: 𐢕𐢃𐢋𐢈‎, romanized: NBṬW, vocalized: Nabāṭū; Arabic: الأنباط‎, romanized: al-ʾanbāṭ), were an ancient Arab people who inhabited northern Arabia and the southern Levant. Their settlements—most prominently the assumed capital city of Raqmu (present-day Petra, Jordan)—gave the name Nabatene (Ancient Greek: Ναβατηνή, romanized: Nabatēnḗ) to the Arabian borderland that stretched from the Euphrates to the Red Sea. The Nabateans emerged as a distinct civilization and political entity between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC, with their kingdom centered around a loosely controlled trading network that brought considerable wealth and influence across the ancient world.

Described as fiercely independent by contemporary Greco-Roman accounts, the Nabataeans were annexed into the Roman Empire by Emperor Trajan in 106 AD. Nabataeans' individual culture, easily identified by their characteristic finely potted painted ceramics, was adopted into the larger Greco-Roman culture. They converted to Christianity during the Byzantine period. They have been described as one of the most gifted peoples of the ancient world and one of the "most unjustly forgotten".

Nabataean Arabic was the dialect of Arabic spoken by the Nabataeans in antiquity.

In the first century AD, the Nabataeans wrote their inscriptions, such as the legal texts carved on the façades of the monumental tombs at Mada'in Salih, ancient Ḥegrā, in Nabataean Aramaic.

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of inscriptions considered Nabataean were found in Sinai, and another 4,000 – 7,000 such Sinaitic inscriptions remain unpublished.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.

The Arabic alphabet is thought to be traced back to a Nabataean variation of the Aramaic alphabet, known as Nabataean Aramaic. This script itself descends from the Phoenician alphabet, an ancestral alphabet that additionally gave rise to the Armenian, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek, Hebrew and Latin alphabets. Nabataean Aramaic evolved into Nabataean Arabic, so-called because it represents a transitional phase between the known recognizably Aramaic and Arabic scripts. Nabataean Arabic was succeeded by Paleo-Arabic, termed as such because it dates to the pre-Islamic period in the fifth and sixth centuries CE, but is also recognizable in light of the Arabic script as expressed during the Islamic era. Finally, the standardization of the Arabic alphabet during the Islamic era led to the emergence of classical Arabic. The phase of the Arabic alphabet today is known as Modern Standard Arabic, although classical Arabic survives as a "high" variety as part of a diglossia.

There were different theories about the origin of the Arabic alphabet as attested in Arabic writings, The Musnad theory is that it can be traced back to Ancient North Arabian scripts which are derived from ancient South Arabian script (Arabic: خَطّ الْمُسْنَد ḵaṭṭ al-musnad), this hypothesis have been discussed by the Arabic scholars Ibn Jinni and Ibn Khaldun. Ahmed Sharaf Al-Din has argued that the relationship between the Arabic alphabet and the Nabataeans is only due to the influence of the latter after its emergence (from Ancient South Arabian script). Arabic has a one-to-one correspondence with ancient South Arabian script except for the letter 𐩯 (reconstructed Proto-Semitic s³).

The Tanukh (Arabic: تنوخ, romanized: Tanūkh, sometimes referred to as the Tanukhids (التنوخيون, al-Tanūkhiyyūn), was an Arab tribal group whose history in the Arabian Peninsula and the Fertile Crescent spanned the 2nd century CE to the 17th century. The group began as a confederation of Arab tribes in eastern Arabia in the 2nd century and migrated to Mesopotamia during Parthian rule in the 3rd century. The confederation was led around this time by its king Jadhima, whose rule is attested by a Greek–Nabatean inscription and who plays an epic role in the traditional narratives of the pre-Islamic period. At least part of the Tanukh migrated to Byzantine Syria in the 4th century, where they served as the first Arab foederati (tribal confederates) of the empire. The Tanukh's premier place among the foederati was lost after its rebellion in the 380s, but it remained a zealous Orthodox Christian ally of the Byzantines until the Muslim conquest of Syria in the 630s.

Under early Muslim rule, the tribe largely retained its Christian faith and settlements around Qinnasrin and Aleppo. The Tanukh was an ally of the Syria-based Umayyad Caliphate and became part of the Umayyads' main tribal support base, the Quda'a confederation. The Tanukh's fortunes, like that of Syria in general, declined under the Iraq-based Abbasid Caliphate, which forced its tribesmen to convert to Islam in 780. As a result of attacks during the Fourth Muslim Civil War in the early 9th century, the Tanukh's area of settlement shifted to Ma'arrat al-Nu'man and the coastal mountains between Latakia and Homs, which by the 10th century were called 'Jabal Tanukh'.