Muscat – A forgotten writing system etched into the cliffs and caves of Dhofar has finally been deciphered, offering insight into a lost chapter of Arabia’s linguistic history. 

After more than a century of failed attempts, Dr Ahmad al Jallad, a linguist at Ohio State University, has successfully decoded the so-called Dhofar script, revealing it as an independent South Semitic alphabet once used by ancient communities in southern Oman.

“These texts offer our first glimpse into the pre-Islamic language and culture of Dhofar,” wrote Jallad in his paper published in the 2025 issue of Jaarbericht Ex Oriente Lux.

The breakthrough came when Jallad identified three unusually long inscriptions as ancient abecedaries – alphabetic sequences rather than sentences. “Each inscription exhibited more than 20 distinct signs with minimal repetition – features characteristic of alphabetic listings,” he explained.

By aligning the letters with known Semitic phonetic systems, he determined that the script follows a halḥam-type order, typical of South Semitic traditions. He concluded that the Dhofar script “developed from a North Arabian archetype, which underwent significant local modification”.

Unlike the well-documented ancient South Arabian script used in Yemen, the Dhofar script shows closer ties to the Thamudic scripts of northern Arabia, but it is clearly a distinct system. “The script system shows significant deviation from known Old South Arabian writing, including its ductus, letter shapes and order,” the study noted.

Once the phonetic values were established, Jallad analysed over 100 inscriptions. Most are short invocations, names or graffiti. Common themes include blessings, divine appeals and personal identifiers. One reads ḥyb br mys (‘Ḥayb son of Mys’), another ḥhy (‘grant life’) and a third hĝf-h (‘help him!’). “They were probably intended to be seen and may have functioned as protective prayers or personal markings,” he wrote.

The decipherment places Oman at the heart of a unique writing tradition. “The inscriptions reveal a distinctive writing culture in Dhofar that had developed its own script and presumably language,” Jallad said.

The enduring enigma of the Dhofar script had fuelled many theories over the decades, including the notion that “these were inscriptions by the people of ʿĀd, a lost Arabian tribe mentioned in the Quran,” Jallad told Science magazine.

Scholarly interest dates back to 1900, when two British archaeologists mentioned the inscriptions in a study of southern Arabia. In the 1930s, Bertram Thomas – the first westerner to cross the Rubʿ al Khali – described stone monuments in Dhofar bearing unknown characters. Traces of the script were later identified in Yemen’s Al Mahrah governorate and on Socotra Island.

The inscriptions faded into obscurity until the 1990s, when Omani epigraphist Ali Maḥash al Shahri and British scholar Geraldine King began systematically documenting painted cave texts in Dhofar. Although they could not decipher these, the two concluded there were two subtypes: Script 1 and Script 2.

Jallad’s new research deciphers Dhofar Script 1, the more common of the two. Script 2, which is visually distinct, remains undeciphered.

Notably, no bilingual texts have yet been found, and the script appears to have vanished by the early Islamic period. “Its use was likely limited to a particular community or network in southern Oman and eastern Yemen,” Jallad wrote.

As researchers continue to examine Arabia’s ancient inscriptions, the Dhofar script now offers a rare window into Oman’s pre-Islamic past. “We now have a new written page of Arabia’s pre-Islamic history,” Jallad stated.