Until very late in Arabia’s history, writing was used only for inscriptions and other short statements made for important occasions. The first book written in Arabic—or in any form of Arabian language—was the Quran.
East Arabia used Sumer’s cuneiform during its Bronze Age heyday. Cuneiform was difficult to learn, only boys intended to use writing as a major part of their employment would be taught. If you wanted something written, you hired a scribe. That’s why the cheap-copper complaint sent to Ea-Nasir begins “Tell Ea-Nasir,” because it was presumed that one hired scribe wrote it, and another would read it.
There were several dozen writing systems in use in the Near East, from the Iron Age forward. The first one was the Phoenicians’ abjad, that is, a consonant-only writing system. Phoenician was a Semitic language in which vowels were more like color than like real information, so the abjad system made sense. It was widely adopted across the Semitophone region: Paleo-Hebrew, Moabite, Aramaic, Sabaean, Himyarite, and Ethiopic languages all used Phoenician-imitative abjads.
Abjads were a disruptive technology in their time; the region around Babylonia still used cuneiform for official records, but no other languages adopted it after abjads came around. You could learn to read and write an abjad in a few days. Once the problem of “what to write on” was solved, anyone could write down anything. In Greece, the notion of vowels improved the technology even more, allowing them to quickly write whole books. But since vowels weren’t needed to denote what was said in a Semitic language, that improvement only took over in Indo-European languages and their neighbors.
South Arabia’s writing system could be written and read either right-left or left-right. You could tell which way to read the letters because they flipped to face forward (English’s b and d pairing make it impossible for us to try that trick). A stone inscription would begin one way, then turn at the end of each line. This method of orienting letters is called boustrophedon.
Ethiopia and Somalia used their high degree of cultural exchange with South Arabia to borrow some Sabaean letters to write Ge’ez, their ancient language. Ge’ez only added vowels when Ethiopia adopted Christianity that came out of Egypt, where the Greek alphabet was in wide use.
The nomadic people of the Arabian interior used various alphabets, often the Sabaean one, if they wanted to write something down. The desert is covered with over 40,000 rock graffiti (Hoyland, 201). The texts don’t seem to have a clear purpose; they are doodles. Shepherds wrote out phrases about their livestock, hunters wrote about their catches. Many nomads wrote out their lineage. The rock inscriptions are known as “Thamudic,” referring to a legendary proto-Arabian tribe. There’s also a script known as Dadanitic, since it was used mostly near the large oasis of Dadan.
But meanwhile, Aramaic-speaking people around Syria and Jordan had developed a very successful form that spread with their merchant culture. “Square” Aramaic was used for formal writing, and we’re familiar with its look from Hebrew. There was also a more cursive Syriac Aramaic, which was adapted by the Nabataeans of Petra for their form of Arabic.
The Nabataean abjad is what North Arabians began using to write Old Arabic. The oldest sample of this adapted writing is a tombstone with a Christian cross.
At the time that Mohammad was giving the first revelations that became the Quran, it was said that fewer than 20 people in Mecca could write or read. Mohammad probably knew the simplest writing, since he worked in caravan shipping to the Nabataean region. But a handful of his early followers were fully literate, and they made the unusual (in Arabia) choice to write down whatever he said, however long and un-inscription-like.
Arabia was poised to go from being mostly non-literate to almost universally literate. In the two generations before Mohammad, oral literature was extremely popular and strong, but it wasn’t written down. The Quran itself was intended to be preserved as oral literature. “Quran” indicates notes for an oral recitation, not a book as we think of books. After the Quran, books were called kitab, a thing that’s been written down. But the Quran itself was the tipping point, called “the Recitation” but becoming the first book.
Arabia and the Arabs: from the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam. Robert Hoyland. New York: Routledge, 2001.