A glimpse of the development of the Nabataean script into Arabic based on old and new epigraphic material
Résumé
This contribution presents a corpus of epigraphic texts the script of which is transitional between Nabataean and Arabic. This corpus was established first according to the date of the texts - they have to be dated between the 3rd and the 5th centuries AD, second by identifying, in the undated texts, the evolved forms of the characters which occur in the dated ones. Appendix 1 provides a list of all the dated texts and Appendix 2 contains a sample of thirty-five texts, out of which fifteen were previously unpublished, which are presented along with photographs and facsimiles. The forms of the letters are analyzed and those which can be termed "evolved" are identified and described.