Middle Bronze Age 19 c. BCE
- Ugaritic 15 c. BCE
- Proto-Canaanite 15 c. BCE
- Phoenician 12 c. BCE
- Paleo-Hebrew 10 c. BCE
- Samaritan 6 c. BCE
- Aramaic 8 c. BCE
- Kharoṣṭhī 6 c. BCE
- Brāhmī & Indic 6 c. BCE
- Brahmic abugidas
- Devanagari 13 c. CE
- Brahmic abugidas
- Hebrew 3 c. BCE
- Thaana 4 c. BCE
- Pahlavi 3 c. BCE
- Avestan 4 c. CE
- Palmyrene 2 c. BCE
- Syriac 2 c. BCE
- Sogdian 2 c. BCE
- Orkhon (Old Turkic) 6 c. CE
- Old Hungarian ca. 650
- Old Uyghur
- Mongolian 1204
- Orkhon (Old Turkic) 6 c. CE
- Nabataean 2 c. BCE
- Arabic 4 c. CE
- Sogdian 2 c. BCE
- Mandaic 2 c. CE
- Greek 8 c. BCE
- Paleohispanic 7 c. BCE
- Paleo-Hebrew 10 c. BCE
- Epigraphic South Arabian 9 c. BCE
- Ge’ez 5–6 c. BCE
- Phoenician 12 c. BCE
Ge'ez (ግዕዝ Gəʿəz), also called Ethiopic, is an abugida script that was originally developed (as an abjad) to write Ge'ez, now the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. In modern communities that use it, such as the Amharic and Tigrinya, the script is called fidäl (ፊደል), which means "script" or "alphabet".
The Ge'ez script has been adapted to write other mostly Semitic languages, such as Amharic in Ethiopia and Tigrinya in Eritrea and Ethiopia. It is also used for Sebatbeit, Me'en, and most other languages of Ethiopia. In Eritrea it is used for Tigre, and it has traditionally been used for Blin, a Cushitic language. Tigre, spoken in western and northern Eritrea and Eastern Sudan, is considered to resemble Ge'ez more so than do the other derivative languages. Some other languages in the Horn of Africa, such as Oromo, used to be written using Ge'ez but have migrated to Latin-based orthographies.
For the representation of sounds, this article uses a system that is common (though not universal) among linguists who work on Ethiopian Semitic languages. This differs somewhat from the conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet. See the articles on the individual languages for information on the pronunciation.
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Arabic alphabet and that had already ceased to exist when Islam started to spread It is also called Old Abyssinian or Amharic and it is the only script in this group that is still in use The oldest written documents in this script date from the fourth century and are written in Ge ez the classical Ethiopian language This name actually provides the link between the south
