texts in the next two centuries from Ma'rib and the Highlands. Middle Sabaean: 3rd century BC until the end of the 3rd century AD. The best-documented language. The largest corpus of texts from this period comes from the Awwam Temple (otherwise known as Maḥrem Bilqīs) in Ma'rib. Amiritic/Ḥaramitic: the language of the area to the north of Ma'īn Central Sabaean: the language of the inscriptions from the Sabaean heartland South Sabaean: the language of the inscriptions from Radmān and Ḥimyar "Pseudo-Sabaean": the literary language of Arabian tribes in Najrān, Ḥaram and Qaryat al-Fāw Late Sabaean: 4th–6th centuries AD. This is the monotheistic period when Christianity and Judaism brought Aramaic and Greek influences. In the Late Sabaean period the ancient names of the gods are no longer mentioned and only one deity Raḥmānān is referred to. The last known inscription in Sabaean dates from 554 or 559 AD. The language's eventual extinction was brought about by the later rapid expansion of Islam, bringing with it Northern Arabic or Muḍarī, which became the language of culture and writing, totally supplanting Sabaean. The dialect used in the western Yemeni highlands, known as Central Sabaean, is very homogeneous and generally used as the language of the inscriptions. Divergent dialects are usually found in the area surrounding the Central Highlands, such as the important dialect of the city of Ḥaram in the eastern al-Jawf. Inscriptions in the Ḥaramic dialect, which is heavily influenced by North Arabic, are also generally considered a form of Sabaean. The Himyarites, whose spoken language was Semitic but not South Arabic, used Sabaean as a written language. Phonology Vowels Since Sabaean is written in an abjad script leaving vowels unmarked, little can be said for certain about the vocalic system. However, based on other Semitic languages, it is generally presumed that it had at least the vowels a, i, and u, which would have occurred both short and long ā, ī, and ū. In Old Sabaean, the long vowels ū and ī are sometimes indicated using the letters for w and y as matres lectionis. In the Old period this is used mainly in word-final position, but in Middle and Late Sabaean it also commonly occurs medially. Sabaean has no way of writing the long vowel ā, but in later inscriptions, in the Radmanite dialect the letter h is sometimes infixed in plurals where it is not etymologically expected: thus bnhy