The Minaeans were the inhabitants of the kingdom of Ma'in (Old South Arabian mʿn, vocalized Maʿīn; modern Arabic معين Maʿīn) in modern day Yemen, dating back to the 6th century BCE.
Although the inscriptions from ancient South Arabia were already known by the 18th century, it was Wilhelm Gesenius (1786-1842) and his student Emil Rödiger who finally undertook the deciphering of the script, actually independently of each other, in the years 1841/42.
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The Old South Arabian languages were originally classified (partly on the basis of geography) as South Semitic, along with Arabic, Modern South Arabian and Ethiopian Semitic; more recently however, a new classification has come in use which places Old South Arabian, along with Arabic, Ugaritic, Aramaic and Canaanite in a Central Semitic group; leaving Modern South Arabian and Ethiopic in a separate group.
Old South Arabian, a group of extinct Western South Semitic languages
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They left behind many inscriptions in the monumental Musnad (Old South Arabian) alphabet, as well as numerous documents in the cursive Zabūr script.