Image Source : namesinarabic The Arabic sources, as long as they do not attribute the invention of the Arabic script to Adam or Ishmael, tell us that the script had been introduced either from South Arabia region or from Mesopotamia (Iraq). Ibn Al-Nadim, for example, said that the people of Al-Hira, the capital of the Lakhmid dynasty in the Euphrates valley, used a form of Syriac cursive script which had developed into the Arabic alphabet. According to Siibawayh, the Arabic Alphabet is made of 29 letters, including 3 long vowels. He put them in the following order starting with the laryngeal and ending with labial, representing the place of articulation along the vocal tract. Theory of Syriac origin has now been abandoned by most scholars. It seems much more likely to him that the Arabic alphabet is derived from a type of cursive Nabataean in Petra, Jordan. In the Aramaic script, from which Nabataean writing ultimately derived, there are no ligatures between letters. But in ...
