Out in the deserts of southern Arabia, there are a lot of rocks, and a lot of those rocks have inscriptions painted on them, or inscribed into them. It seems that not all of these scripts are understood. I came across an article on Academia by Ahmad al-Jallad, of Ohio State University, on the deciphering of one of them, known as the Dhofari alphabet.
It seems that some rock art found at Duqm, east of Dhofar, in South-Central Oman, in 2022-3 proved to include a text, a snake-like series of letters:
This was misidentified by the original discoverers, but Al-Jallad writes:
…the text is clearly in a variant of the Dhofari alphabet, and its glyph shapes more closely correspond to King’s script 1 classification. The text consists of seven units separated by word dividers. None of the glyphs repeat. I, therefore, submit that we are dealing with an abecedary following the South Arabian halḥam order, and that this text provides our first real key into the glyph-phoneme values for the Dhofari script.
It seems that South Semitic languages have a canonical order of letters, just as we have “a – b – c – d…” etc, and so mapping this inscription to this order gives the meaning of each glyph. Many of the shapes are clearly related to known forms of the letters.
Dr Al-J. adds:
A primary reason scholars struggled to interpret Dhofari inscriptions as an early form of Modern South Arabian languages was the use of the word bn for ‘son.’ But with the correct understanding of the script, it is clear that the sequence XX should be understood as br and therefore is compatible with the Modern South Arabian Language family.
I don’t suppose that most of us know anything about Arabian language inscriptions, but the discovery is interesting for how the author went about it.