The Phoenician alphabet proper uses 22 consonant letters—as an abjad used to write a Semitic language, the vowel sounds were left implicit—though late varieties sometimes used matres lectionis to denote some vowels.

Most Semitic alphabets are actually abjads, and only include consonants, not vowels. These alphabets all seem to have come from a single source (see commentary below) except for Akkadian, which used a cuneiform syllabary rather than an abjad. (In the charts below I only list its consonants, not its actual writing system.)

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North Semitic alphabet, the earliest fully developed alphabetic writing system. It was used in Syria as early as the 11th century bc and is probably ancestral, either directly or indirectly, to all subsequent alphabetic scripts, with the possible exception of those scripts classified as South Semitic ( e.g., Ethiopic, Sabaean).

[5] [6] The Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa, and South Asia, mainly through Phoenician and the closely related Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, and later Aramaic (derived from the Phoenician alphabet) and the Nabatean—derived from the Aramaic alphabet and developed into ...