| South Semitic scripts | |
|---|---|
| Script type | |
Period | c. 10th century BCE to 6th century AD |
| Direction | Right-to-left |
| Languages | Old South Arabian, Ge'ez, Dadanitic, Taymanitic, Dumaitic, Thamudic, Safaitic, Hismaic |
| Related scripts | |
Parent systems | Egyptian hieroglyphs
|
Child systems | |
Sister systems | Phoenician |
The South Semitic scripts are a cluster of alphabets that had derived from the Proto-Sinaitic script by the 10th century BC.[1] The family has two main branches: Ancient North Arabian (ANA) and Ancient South Arabian (ASA).
The scripts were exclusive to the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa. All the ANA and most of the ASA scripts fell out of use by the 6th century AD.
The exception was Geʽez, a child of ASA in use in Ethiopia. It and its variants remain in use today for various Ethiosemitic languages. In Arabia, the South Semitic scripts were replaced by the Arabic script, which is descended from the Nabataean script.[2]
References
- ^ Ahmad Al-Jallad, "Script and Orthography", An Outline of the Grammar of the Safaitic Inscriptions (Brill, 2015), p. 26.
- ^ Michael Everson and Michael Macdonald, "Proposal to Encode the Old North Arabian Script in the SMP of the UCS", Proposals from the Script Encoding Initiative, UC Berkeley, 2010.
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