The analysis thus far presents the spectre of an ‘Arabless’ pre-Islamic Arabia which may appear an extreme reaction to the familiar notion of Arabs in Antiquity, but we pose these radical challenges as there is a need to provoke critical questioning of the idea of Arabness and the timeworn practice of labelling peoples ‘Arab’ without considering how they related to senses of Arab community. An array of groups inhabited pre-Islamic Arabia and some of their descendants would come to identify themselves as Arabs, but outsiders’ evidence and anachronistic paradigms about ‘original Arab characteristics’ have not been able to give a sense of the process which caused formerly disparate groups to recognise and rally around a shared sense of community as ‘Arabs’. To grasp the process of Arab ethnogenesis and the meaning of early Arabness, we need to probe deeper and evaluate the articulations of communal identity inside pre-Islamic Arabia. The findings shall explain what we mean by the ‘Arabless’ centuries before Islam, and uncover the first communities who expressed their consciousness of Arab communal ties.

The Arabic Language: a Signpost to Arabness?

The ever-growing body of pre-Islamic inscriptions found in archaeological surveys in Saudi Arabia is prompting a new approach to rethink Arab ethnogenesis by tracing the emergence of the Arabic language. The research proposes that language is a key component of Arab identity, and that the first truly Arab communities can be located by determining when and where the Arabic language developed.

Linguistic searches reveal a wide array of languages spoken in pre-Islamic Arabia, and amongst the thousands of pre-Islamic inscriptions uncovered to date across Arabia, the Syrian Desert and surrounding steppe, a small number have been classified as ‘Old Arabic’, inasmuch as they share characteristics that potentially differentiate them from other attested languages and herald the beginnings of the Arabic language familiar from the Islamic period. But it is difficult to precisely enumerate the ‘Old Arabic’ inscriptions. Michael Macdonald notes that the small number of samples, the variety of scripts used and the brevity of the texts make it difficult to ascertain definitively whether a given inscription is Arabic, or in a related language, or an attempt by a proto-Arabic speaker to write in a different (but related) language.