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Samaritan alphabet

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The Samaritan alphabet is a direct descendant of the paleo-Hebrew variety of the Phoenician alphabet. The more commonly known "square letter" form of the Hebrew alphabet was adapted from the Aramaic alphabet which the Israelites absorbed from the Persian Empire.

Large parts of the Hebrew Bible were originally penned in script similar to Samaritan. Among the Jews it saw a short revival during the Hasmonean Kingdom. The Tetragrammaton was often still written in this script for some time after the current Hebrew alphabet was adopted among the Jews.

Today, it is used by the Samaritans for religious writings, including their (slightly different) version of the Pentateuch. It is used by them for writings in their dialect of Hebrew (Samaritan Hebrew) and also for commentaries and translations in Samaritan Aramaic and even Arabic.

On 8 February 2008, the Samaritan alphabet was accepted for inclusion in Unicode at code points 0800–083E.

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Last updated on Wednesday March 12, 2008 at 15:33:57 PDT (GMT -0700)
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