Editing Abjad (section)

==Origins==
[[Image:Ba`alat.jpg|thumb|upright=1.10|A specimen of [[Proto-Sinaitic]] script containing a phrase which may mean 'to [[Baalat]]'. The line running from the upper left to lower right reads ''mt l b<sup>c</sup>lt''.]]

{{See also|History of the alphabet#Descendants of the Aramaic abjad}}

The first abjad to gain widespread usage was the [[Phoenician alphabet|Phoenician abjad]]. Unlike other contemporary scripts, such as [[Cuneiform script|cuneiform]] and [[Egyptian hieroglyphs]], the Phoenician script consisted of only a few dozen symbols. This made the script easy to learn, and seafaring Phoenician merchants took the script throughout the then-known world.

The Phoenician abjad was a radical simplification of phonetic writing, since hieroglyphics required the writer to pick a hieroglyph starting with the same sound that the writer wanted to write in order to write phonetically, much as ''[[man'yōgana]]'' ([[kanji]] used solely for phonetic use) was used to represent [[Japanese language|Japanese]] phonetically before the invention of [[kana]].

Phoenician gave rise to a number of new writing systems, including the widely used [[Aramaic alphabet|Aramaic]] abjad and the [[Greek alphabet]]. The Greek alphabet evolved into the modern western alphabets, such as [[Latin alphabet|Latin]] and [[Cyrillic]], while Aramaic became the ancestor of many modern abjads and abugidas of Asia.

Other sister scripts to Phoenician, that branched from [[Proto-Sinaitic script]] are the [[South Semitic scripts]] with its two main branches; the [[Ancient North Arabian]] scripts that were used in north and central Arabia, until it was displaced by the [[Arabic alphabet]].<ref>Ibn Durayd, ''Ta‘līq min amāli ibn durayd,'' ed. al-Sanūsī, Muṣṭafā, Kuwait 1984, p. 227 (Arabic). The author purports that a poet from the Kinda tribe in Yemen who settled in Dūmat al-Ǧandal during the advent of Islam told of how another member of the Yemenite Kinda tribe who lived in that town taught the Arabic script to the Banū Qurayš in Mecca and that their use of the Arabic script for writing eventually took the place of ''musnad'', or what was then the Sabaean script of the kingdom of Ḥimyar: "You have exchanged the ''musnad'' of the sons of Ḥimyar / which the kings of Ḥimyar were wont to write down in books."</ref> and [[Ancient South Arabian script|Ancient South Arabian]], which evolved later into the [[Geʽez script]], still being used in Eritrea and Ethiopia.