The Phoenician letter may continue a glyph from the
Middle Bronze Age alphabets, possibly based on a
hieroglyph for a tent peg or support, such as the
djed "pillar" hieroglyph 𓊽 (cf. Hebrew root סמך s-m-kh 'support', סֶמֶךְ semekh 'support, rest', סוֹמֵךְ somekh 'support peg, post', סוֹמְכָה somkha 'armrest', סָמוֹכָה smokha 'stake, support', indirectly ''
s'mikhah'' ; Aramaic סַמְכָא samkha 'socket, base', סְמַךְ smakh 'support, help'; Syriac
ܣܡܟܐ semkha 'support', Arabic 'to raise, to elevate'). The shape of samek undergoes complicated developments. In archaic scripts, the vertical stroke can be drawn either across or below the three horizontal strokes. The closed form of Hebrew samek is developed only in the
Hasmonean period. The Phoenician letter gave rise to the
Greek xi (Ξ), whereas its name may also be reflected in the name of the otherwise unrelated Greek letter
sigma. The archaic "grid" shape of Western Greek
xi () was adopted in the early
Etruscan alphabet (𐌎
esh), but was never included in the
Latin alphabet. The letter samekh is currently the only letter of the Semitic abjad that has no surviving descendant in the Arabic alphabet, and the letter corresponds exclusively to rather than . The history of the letters expressing sibilants in the various Semitic alphabets is somewhat complicated, due to different mergers between
Proto-Semitic phonemes. As usually reconstructed, there are four plain
Proto-Semitic coronal voiceless fricative phonemes (not counting
emphatic ones) that evolved into the various voiceless sibilants of its daughter languages, as follows: Note: Hebrew represents both and , when distinguishing is required, they can be distinguished a dot above the left-hand side of the letter for and above the right-hand side for . == Hebrew samekh ==