ISO 15924
Nbat
Family
Middle Eastern
Type
abjad
Direction
RTL (right-to-left)
Baseline
bottom
Word separation
unspecified
Ligatures
required
Status
Historical
Unicode
true
Contextual forms
true

The Nabataean script was used from the 2nd century BC until the 4th or 5th century AD for writing the Nabataean language, a Northwest Semitic language closely related to Arabic. The script was developed from Aramaic writing, and was the immediate precursor of Arabic writing.

Nabatean was a right-to-left abjad; each letter represented a consonant and the reader had to supply the vowels from the context. It was a cursive script which made extensive use of ligatures. The script was used over a wide geographic area, and letter shapes were highly diverse from one region to another.