South Semitic scripts

South Semitic scripts
Script type	Abjad
Period	c. 10th century BCE to 6th century AD
Direction	Right-to-left
Languages	Old South Arabian, Ge'ez, Dadanitic, Taymanitic, Dumaitic, Thamudic, Safaitic, Hismaic
Related scripts
Parent systems	Egyptian hieroglyphs Proto-Sinaitic script South Semitic scripts
Child systems	Ancient North Arabian Ancient South Arabian Ge'ez
Sister systems	Phoenician
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The South Semitic scripts are a cluster of alphabets that had derived from the Proto-Sinaitic script by the 10th century BC. ^[1] The family has two main branches: Ancient North Arabian (ANA) and Ancient South Arabian (ASA).

The scripts were exclusive to the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa. All the ANA and most of the ASA scripts fell out of use by the 6th century AD.

South Arabian inscription addressed to the Sabaean national god Almaqah

The exception was Geʽez, a child of ASA in use in Ethiopia. It and its variants remain in use today for various Ethiosemitic languages. In Arabia, the South Semitic scripts were replaced by the Arabic script, which is descended from the Nabataean script. ^[2]

References

1. Ahmad Al-Jallad, "Script and Orthography", An Outline of the Grammar of the Safaitic Inscriptions (Brill, 2015), p. 26.
2. Michael Everson and Michael Macdonald, "Proposal to Encode the Old North Arabian Script in the SMP of the UCS", Proposals from the Script Encoding Initiative, UC Berkeley, 2010.