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The Paleo-Hebrew and Phoenician alphabets are two slight regional variants of the same script. The first Paleo-Hebrew inscription identified in modern times was the Royal Steward inscription (KAI 191), found in 1870, and then referred to as "two large ancient Hebrew inscriptions in Phoenician letters".
The Hebrew alphabet was later adapted in order to write down the languages of the Jewish diaspora (Karaim, Kivruli, Judæo-Arabic, Ladino, Yiddish, etc.), and was retained all the while in relatively unadapted form throughout the diaspora for Hebrew, which remained the language of Jewish law, scriptures and scholarship.
A Hebrew variant of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, called the paleo-Hebrew alphabet by scholars, began to emerge around 800 BCE. [13] An example is the Siloam inscription (c. 700 BCE). [14] The paleo-Hebrew alphabet was used in the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
Ancient Hebrew writings are texts written in Biblical Hebrew using the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.. The earliest known precursor to Hebrew, an inscription in the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, is the Khirbet Qeiyafa Inscription (11th–10th century BCE), [1] if it can be considered Hebrew at that early a stage.
The letters of the earliest script used for Semitic languages were derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. In the 19th century, the theory of Egyptian origin competed alongside other theories that the Phoenician script developed from Akkadian cuneiform , Cretan hieroglyphs , the Cypriot syllabary , and Anatolian hieroglyphs . [ 24 ]
Ancient Hebrew and Aramaic on Coins, reading and transliterating Proto-Hebrew, online edition. (Judaea Coin Archive) Paleo-Hebrew Abjad font—also allows writing in Phoenician (the current version of the font is 1.1.0)
The 22 letters of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet numbered less than the consonant phonemes of ancient Biblical Hebrew; in particular, the letters ח, ע, ש could each mark two different phonemes. [69] After a sound shift the letters ח, ע could only mark one phoneme, but (except in Samaritan Hebrew) ש still marked two.
Samekh or samech is the fifteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician sāmek 𐤎, Hebrew sāmeḵ ס , Aramaic samek 𐡎, and Syriac semkaṯ ܣ. Samekh represents a voiceless alveolar fricative /s/. In the Hebrew language, the samekh has the same pronunciation as the left-dotted shin. The numerical value of samekh is 60.