# Phoenician (Unicode block)

Phoenician is a Unicode block containing characters used across the Mediterranean world from the 12th century BCE to the 3rd century CE. The Phoenician alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in July 2006 with the release of version 5.0. An alternative proposal to handle it as a font variation of Hebrew was turned down. (See PDF summary.)
The Unicode block for Phoenician is U+10900–U+1091F. It is intended for the representation of text in Paleo-Hebrew, Archaic Phoenician, Phoenician, Early Aramaic, Late Phoenician cursive, Phoenician papyri, Siloam Hebrew, Hebrew seals, Ammonite, Moabite and Punic.
The letters are encoded U+10900 𐤀‎ aleph through to U+10915 𐤕‎ taw, U+10916 𐤖‎, U+10917 𐤗‎, U+10918 𐤘‎ and U+10919 𐤙‎ encode the numerals 1, 10, 20, and 100, respectively, and U+1091F 𐤟‎ is the word separator.

## Characters

Phoenician Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF) :
| | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | A | B | C | D | E | F |
| U+1090x | 𐤀‎ | 𐤁‎ | 𐤂‎ | 𐤃‎ | 𐤄‎ | 𐤅‎ | 𐤆‎ | 𐤇‎ | 𐤈‎ | 𐤉‎ | 𐤊‎ | 𐤋‎ | 𐤌‎ | 𐤍‎ | 𐤎‎ | 𐤏‎ |
| U+1091x | 𐤐‎ | 𐤑‎ | 𐤒‎ | 𐤓‎ | 𐤔‎ | 𐤕‎ | 𐤖‎ | 𐤗‎ | 𐤘‎ | 𐤙‎ | 𐤚‎ | 𐤛‎ | | | | 𐤟‎ |
| Notes 1.^ As of Unicode version 16.0 2.^ Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points |||||||||||||||||

## History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Phoenician block:
| Version | Final code points | Count | L2 ID | WG2 ID | Document |
| 5.0 | U+10900..10919, 1091F | 27 | | N1579 | Everson, Michael (1997-05-27), Proposal for encoding the Phoenician script |
| 5.0 | U+10900..10919, 1091F | 27 | L2/97-288 | N1603 | Umamaheswaran, V. S. (1997-10-24), "8.24.1", Unconfirmed Meeting Minutes, WG 2 Meeting # 33, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, 20 June – 4 July 1997 |
| 5.0 | U+10900..10919, 1091F | 27 | L2/99-013 | N1932 | Everson, Michael (1998-11-23), Revised proposal for encoding the Phoenician script in the UCS |
| 5.0 | U+10900..10919, 1091F | 27 | L2/99-224 | N2097, N2025-2 | Röllig, W. (1999-07-23), Comments on proposals for the Universal Multiple-Octed Coded Character Set |
| 5.0 | U+10900..10919, 1091F | 27 | | N2133 | Response to comments on the question of encoding Old Semitic scripts in the UCS (N2097), 1999-10-04 |
| 5.0 | U+10900..10919, 1091F | 27 | L2/00-010 | N2103 | Umamaheswaran, V. S. (2000-01-05), "10.4", Minutes of WG 2 meeting 37, Copenhagen, Denmark: 1999-09-13—16 |
| 5.0 | U+10900..10919, 1091F | 27 | L2/04-149 | | Kass, James; Anderson, Deborah W.; Snyder, Dean; Lehmann, Reinhard G.; Cowie, Paul James; Kirk, Peter; Cowan, John; Khalaf, S. George; Richmond, Bob (2004-05-25), Miscellaneous Input on Phoenician Encoding Proposal |
| 5.0 | U+10900..10919, 1091F | 27 | L2/04-141R2 | N2746R2 | Everson, Michael (2004-05-29), Final proposal for encoding the Phoenician script in the UCS |
| 5.0 | U+10900..10919, 1091F | 27 | L2/04-177 | | Anderson, Deborah (2004-05-31), Expert Feedback on Phoenician |
| 5.0 | U+10900..10919, 1091F | 27 | L2/04-178 | N2772 | Anderson, Deborah (2004-06-04), Additional Support for Phoenician |
| 5.0 | U+10900..10919, 1091F | 27 | L2/04-181 | | Keown, Elaine (2004-06-04), REBUTTAL to "Final proposal for encoding the Phoenician script in the UCS" |
| 5.0 | U+10900..10919, 1091F | 27 | L2/04-190 | N2787 | Everson, Michael (2004-06-06), Additional examples of the Phoenician script in use |
| 5.0 | U+10900..10919, 1091F | 27 | L2/04-187 | | McGowan, Rick (2004-06-07), Phoenician Recommendation |
| 5.0 | U+10900..10919, 1091F | 27 | L2/04-206 | N2793 | Kirk, Peter (2004-06-07), Response to the revised "Final proposal for encoding the Phoenician script" (L2/04-141R2) |
| 5.0 | U+10900..10919, 1091F | 27 | L2/04-213 | | Rosenne, Jony (2004-06-07), Responses to Several Hebrew Related Items |
| 5.0 | U+10900..10919, 1091F | 27 | L2/04-217R | | Keown, Elaine (2004-06-07), Proposal to add Archaic Mediterranean Script block to ISO 10646 |
| 5.0 | U+10900..10919, 1091F | 27 | L2/04-226 | | Durusau, Patrick (2004-06-07), Statement of the Society of Biblical Literature on WG2 N2746R2 |
| 5.0 | U+10900..10919, 1091F | 27 | L2/04-218 | N2792 | Snyder, Dean (2004-06-08), Response to the Proposal to Encode Phoenician in Unicode |
| 5.0 | U+10900..10919, 1091F | 27 | L2/05-009 | N2909 | Anderson, Deborah (2005-01-19), Letters in support of Phoenician |
| 5.2 | U+1091A..1091B | 2 | | N3353 (pdf, doc) | Umamaheswaran, V. S. (2007-10-10), "M51.14", Unconfirmed minutes of WG 2 meeting 51 Hanzhou, China; 2007-04-24/27 |
| 5.2 | U+1091A..1091B | 2 | L2/07-206 | N3284 | Everson, Michael (2007-07-25), Proposal to add two numbers for the Phoenician script |
| 5.2 | U+1091A..1091B | 2 | L2/07-225 | | Moore, Lisa (2007-08-21), "Phoenician", UTC #112 Minutes |
| ↑ Proposed code points and characters names may differ from final code points and names ||||||