The earliest instances of the Ancient South Arabian (
ASA) script are painted pottery sherds from Raybun in Hadhramaut in Yemen, which are dated to the late 2nd millennium BCE. It is an
abjad script, meaning that only
consonants are usually written in the script, with vowels inferred from context; it shares this feature both with its predecessor, the
Proto-Sinaitic script, and modern
Semitic languages. It is unclear precisely how and when the ASA script diverged from Proto-Sinaitic script, as inscriptions from its earliest days are rare. Its mature form was reached around 800 BCE, and it remained use in more or less the same form until the 6th century CE. In those centuries, it was used to write multiple languages of the Southern Arabian peninsula and the Horn of Africa, including
Sabaic,
Qatabanic,
Hadramautic,
Minaean,
Hasaitic, and
Geʽez. It was eventually displaced by the modern
Arabic alphabet during the early years of the spread of Islam. The modern Arabic writing system is related to the ASA script, as both are children of the Proto-Sinaitic script, but modern Arabic derives from the
Phoenician and
Nabatean scripts rather than ASA. The
Geʽez script is the sole extant writing system that derives from ASA. Unlike ASA, Geʽez is an
abugida; the primary characters are pairs of consonants and vowels, with each character representing a
syllable. Geʽez has been used to write
Amharic,
Tigrinya and
Tigre, as well as other languages (including various
Semitic,
Cushitic,
Omotic, and
Nilo-Saharan languages). ASA is also a sibling of the
Phoenician – the ancestor of most of the modern European alphabets, such as
Latin,
Cyrillic and
Greek. ==Properties==