page_title: History of the alphabet
section_title: Descendants of the Aramaic abjad
hierarchical_section_title: History of the alphabet / Consonantal alphabets / Descendants of the Aramaic abjad
caption_attribution_description: This map, made by MaGioZal, shows the countries that use the Arabic alphabet. In dark green, the countries that use the Arabic as the sole official script; and in light green, the countries that assume the Arabic alphabet as a co-official script.
context_page_description: The history of alphabetic writing goes back to the consonantal writing system used for Semitic languages in the Levant in the 2nd millennium BCE. Most or nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic proto-alphabet. Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their Egyptian surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language. This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a cursive script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs.
  Mainly through Phoenician, Hebrew and later Aramaic, three closely related members of the Semitic family of scripts that were in use during the early first millennium BCE, the Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa and South Asia.
context_section_description: The Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, like their Egyptian prototype, represented only consonants, a system called an abjad. The Aramaic alphabet, which evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th century BCE, to become the official script of the Persian Empire, appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia:
  The modern Hebrew alphabet started out as a local variant of Imperial Aramaic. (The original Hebrew alphabet has been retained by the Samaritans.)
  The Arabic alphabet descended from Aramaic via the Nabataean alphabet of what is now southern Jordan.
  The Syriac alphabet used after the third century CE evolved, through the Pahlavi scripts and Sogdian alphabet, into the alphabets of North Asia such as the Old Turkic alphabet (probably), the Old Uyghur alphabet, the Mongolian writing systems, and the Manchu alphabet.
  The Georgian scripts are of uncertain provenance, but appear to be part of the Persian-Aramaic (or perhaps the Greek) family.
caption: World distribution of the Arabic alphabet. The dark green areas shows the countries where this alphabet is the sole main script. The light green shows the countries where the alphabet co-exists with other scripts.
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