Himaitic

Himaitic is a pre-Islamic Arabian script variety from the Ancient North Arabian family attested mainly in the region of Hima north-east of Najran in southwestern Saudi Arabia. It is formerly known as Thamudic F and has also been labelled Southern Thamudic.

The core area of Himaitic is Hima, about 100 km north-east of Najran in southwestern Saudi Arabia. In antiquity, Hima lay on routes leading from South Arabia northwards and eastwards across the Arabian Peninsula. The site was a northern commercial offshoot of the Najran oasis in the pre-Islamic trans-Arabian trade network. The Hima landscape has thousands of rock inscriptions carved by locals, as well as people travelling by through caravans and armies, into its sandstone. Most of the tens of thousands of inscriptions in the desert region north of Najran belong to Himaitic, whose use extended north toward Tathlith. About 9,000 of these inscriptions have been published into the database OCIANA.

The corpus of Himaitic inscriptions consists mainly of short rock graffiti, especially of personal names and carving formulae. Its chronology and linguistic classification remain uncertain. The Hima region itself was along a trade route that linked southern to northern and eastern Arabia, and it was a contact zone for several populations and writing systems.

The chronology of Himaitic remains uncertain. Ancient North Arabian scripts as a wider group are documented from the first millennium BCE into the early centuries CE, but this broader range is not a secure date range for Himaitic itself.