Ancient South Arabian script
| Ancient South Arabian script 𐩣𐩯𐩬𐩵 | |
|---|---|
| Script type | |
Period | From late 2nd millennium BCE to 6th century CE |
| Direction | Right-to-left, boustrophedon |
| Languages | Old South Arabian, Ge'ez |
| Related scripts | |
Parent systems | Egyptian hieroglyphs
|
Child systems | Geʽez |
Sister systems | Ancient North Arabian |
| ISO 15924 | |
| ISO 15924 | Sarb (105), Old South Arabian |
| Unicode | |
Unicode alias | Old South Arabian |
| U+10A60–U+10A7F | |
The Ancient South Arabian script (Old South Arabian: 𐩣𐩯𐩬𐩵, romanized: ms3nd; modern Arabic: الْمُسْنَد musnad) branched from the Proto-Sinaitic script in about the late 2nd millennium BCE, and remained in use through the late sixth century CE. It is an abjad, a writing system where only consonants are obligatorily written, a trait shared with its predecessor, Proto-Sinaitic, as well as some of its sibling writing systems, including Arabic and Hebrew. It is a predecessor of the Ge'ez script, and a sibling script of the Phoenician alphabet and, through that, the modern Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets.
The script is really two variants: the monumental and the minuscule script, the former for inscriptions, the latter scratched with wooden sticks. The scripts have a common origin but evolved into separate systems.