As the writing system grew in popularity, these markers were gradually added, along with additional letters to reach today’s 29, including the hamza (glottal stop). The old Kufi script contained seventeen letters and lacked the diacritic markings used to distinguish between letters of an identical shape or marks for vowel sounds. Phoenician evolving into Arabic and modern Latin scriptsĪround 100 AD, the first proto-Arabic script known as Old Kufi (or Kufic) appeared in Kufa, a city located about 170 KM south of modern-day Baghdad. It was also adopted by Semitic languages, including Aramaic, Nabatean, and Arabic. These included the Indo-European languages such as Greek, Latin, and eventually English. This writing system influenced a large number of later alphabets. The Phoenician AlphabetĪn alphabet for writing Phoenician emerged around 1300 BC in the town of Byblos in modern-day Lebanon.
The Phoenicians were a trading people and their cultural influence spread by sea throughout the Mediterranean world. Today’s Arabic alphabet can be traced to the Phoenicians, an ancient civilization that inhabited coastal areas of present-day Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine from 2500-539 BC.
