Of the former language, leaving Mahrí, Socotrí, and other living dialects out of account, we possess nothing beyond the numerous inscriptions which have been collected by European travellers and which it will be convenient to discuss in the next chapter, where I shall give a brief sketch of the legendary history of the Sabæans and Ḥimyarites. South Arabic resembles Arabic in its grammatical forms, _e.g._, the broken plural, the sign of the dual, and the manner of denoting indefiniteness by an affixed _m_ (for which Arabic substitutes _n_) as well as in its vocabulary; its alphabet, which consists of twenty-nine letters, _Sin_ and _Samech_ being distinguished as in Hebrew, is more nearly akin to the Æthiopic. The Ḥimyarite Empire was overthrown by the Abyssinians in the sixth century after Christ, and by 600 A.D. South Arabic had become a dead language. From this time forward the dialect of the North established an almost universal supremacy and won for itself the title of 'Arabic' _par excellence_.[10] [Sidenote: The oldest specimens of Arabic writing.] [Sidenote: The Pre-islamic poems.] [Sidenote: The Koran.] [Sidenote: Arabic in the Muḥammadan Empire.] The oldest monuments of written Arabic are modern in date compared with the Sabæan inscriptions, some of which take us back 2,500 years or thereabout. Apart from the inscriptions of Ḥijr in the northern Ḥijáz, and those of Ṣafá in the neighbourhood of Damascus (which, although written by northern Arabs before the Christian era, exhibit a peculiar character not unlike the Sabæan and cannot be called Arabic in the usual acceptation of the term), the most ancient examples of Arabic writing which have hitherto been discovered appear in the trilingual (Syriac, Greek, and Arabic) inscription of Zabad,[11] south-east of Aleppo, dated 512 or 513 A.D., and the bilingual (Greek and Arabic) of Ḥarrán,[12] dated 568 A.D. With these documents we need not concern ourselves further, especially as their interpretation presents great difficulties. Very few among the Pre-islamic Arabs were able to read or write.[13] Those who could generally owed their skill to Jewish and Christian teachers, or to the influence of foreign culture radiating from Ḥíra and Ghassán. But although the Koran, which was first collected soon after the battle of Yamáma (633 A.D.), is the oldest Arabic book, the beginnings of literary composition in the Arabic language can be traced back to an earlier period. Probably all the Pre-islamic poems which have come down to us belong to the century preceding Islam (500-622 A.D.), but their elaborate form and technical perfection forbid the hypothesis that in them we have "the first sprightly runnings" of Arabian song. It may be said of these magnificent odes, as of the Iliad and Odyssey, that "they are works of highly finished art, which could not possibly have been produced until the poetical art had been practised for a long