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The Phoenician alphabet proper was used in Ancient Carthage until the 2nd century BC, where it was used to write the Punic language. Its direct descendant scripts include the Aramaic and Samaritan alphabets, several Alphabets of Asia Minor , and the Archaic Greek alphabets .
Phoenician (/ f ə ˈ n iː ʃ ən / fə-NEE-shən; Phoenician: śpt knʿn lit. ' language of Canaan ' [2]) is an extinct Canaanite Semitic language originally spoken in the region surrounding the cities of Tyre and Sidon.
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An offshoot of the Phoenician language of coastal West Asia (modern Lebanon and north western Syria), it was principally spoken on the Mediterranean coast of Northwest Africa, the Iberian Peninsula and several Mediterranean islands, such as Malta, Sicily, and Sardinia by the Punic people, or western Phoenicians, throughout classical antiquity ...
One example was the character , to which Gardiner assigned the b sound, on the grounds that it derived from the Egyptian glyph for 'house' , and was very similar to the Phoenician letter bet, whose name derives from the Semitic word for “house”, bayt.
The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. [5] Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system.
The Sarcophagus of Eshmunazar II was the first of this type of inscription found anywhere in the Levant (modern Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria). [1] [2]The Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions, also known as Northwest Semitic inscriptions, [3] are the primary extra-Biblical source for understanding of the societies and histories of the ancient Phoenicians, Hebrews and Arameans.
All forms of the Greek alphabet were originally based on the shared inventory of the 22 symbols of the Phoenician alphabet, with the exception of the letter Samekh, whose Greek counterpart Xi (Ξ) was used only in a subgroup of Greek alphabets, and with the common addition of Upsilon (Υ) for the vowel /u, ū/.