Ancient South Arabian script in the context of "Middle Bronze Age alphabets"

The Proto-Sinaitic script is a Middle Bronze Age writing system known from a small corpus of about 30–40 inscriptions and fragments from Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, as well as two inscriptions from Wadi el-Hol in Middle Egypt. Together with about 20 known Proto-Canaanite inscriptions, it is also known as Early Alphabetic, i.e. the earliest trace of alphabetic writing and the common ancestor of the Hebrew, the Ancient South Arabian script and the Phoenician alphabet, which led to many modern alphabets including the Greek alphabet and, subsequently, the Latin alphabet. According to common theory, Israelites, Canaanites or Hyksos who spoke a Canaanite language repurposed Egyptian hieroglyphs to construct a different script.

The earliest Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are mostly dated to between the mid-19th (early date) and the mid-16th (late date) century BC.

The Ugaritic alphabet is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) with syllabic elements written using the same tools as cuneiform (i.e. pressing a wedge-shaped stylus into a clay tablet), which emerged c. 1400 or 1300 BCE to write Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language; it fell out of use amid the Late Bronze Age collapse c. 1190 BCE. It was discovered in Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, Syria) in 1928. It has 30 letters. Other languages, particularly Hurrian, were occasionally written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit, but not elsewhere.

Clay tablets written in Ugaritic provide the earliest evidence of both the North Semitic and South Semitic orders of the alphabet, which gave rise to the alphabetic orders of the reduced Phoenician writing system and its descendants, including the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, Hebrew, Syriac, Greek and Latin, and of the Geʽez script, which was also influenced by the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system, and adapted for Amharic. The Arabic and Ancient South Arabian scripts are the only other Semitic alphabets which have letters for all or almost all of the 29 commonly reconstructed Proto-Semitic consonant phonemes.

Zabur (Arabic: ٱلزَّبُورِ, romanized: az-zabūr) is, according to Islam, the holy book of David, one of the holy books revealed by Allah before the Quran, alongside others such as the Tawrāh (Torah) and the Injīl (Gospel). Muslim tradition maintains that the Zabur mentioned in the Quran is the Psalms of Dawud (David in Islam).

The Christian monks and ascetics of pre-Islamic Arabia may be associated in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry with texts called mazmour, which in other contexts may refer to palm leaf documents. This has been interpreted by some as referring to psalters.

Ancient South Arabian (ASA; also known as Old South Arabian, Epigraphic South Arabian, Ṣayhadic, or Yemenite) is a group of four closely related extinct languages (Sabaean/Sabaic, Qatabanic, Hadramitic, Minaic) spoken in the far southern portion of the Arabian Peninsula. The earliest preserved records belonging to the group are dated to the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE. They were written in the Ancient South Arabian script.

There were a number of other Old South Arabian languages (e.g. Awsānian), of which very little evidence has survived, however. A set of possible surviving Sayhadic languages is attested in the Razihi language, Rijal Alma language, and Faifi language spoken in far north-west of Yemen and far south-west of Saudi Arabia, though these varieties of speech have both Arabic and Sayhadic features, and it is difficult to classify them as either Arabic dialects with a Sayhadic substratum, or Sayhadic languages that have been restructured under pressure of Arabic.

Samekh or samech is the fifteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician sāmek 𐤎, Hebrew sāmeḵ ס‎, Aramaic samek 𐡎, and Syriac semkaṯ ܣ. Samekh is the only letter of the Semitic abjad that has no surviving descendant in the Arabic alphabet; however, it was present in the Nabataean alphabet, the Arabic alphabet's immediate predecessor, as the letter simkath 𐢖‎, which was related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪏‎‎‎ and South Arabian 𐩯. The numerical value of samekh is 60. The page has Arabic س and Ge'ez ሰ in the cognate letters, because they are similar in pronunciation.

Samekh represents a voiceless alveolar fricative /s/. In the Hebrew language, the samekh ס‎ has the same pronunciation as the left-dotted shin שׂ‎.

Aleph (or alef or alif, transliterated ʾ) is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ʾālep 𐤀, Hebrew ʾālef א‎, Aramaic ʾālap 𐡀, Syriac ʾālap̄ ܐ, Arabic ʾalif ا‎, and North Arabian 𐪑. It also appears as South Arabian 𐩱 and Ge'ez ʾälef አ.

These letters are believed to have derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph depicting an ox's head to describe the initial sound of *ʾalp, the West Semitic word for ox (compare Biblical Hebrew אֶלֶף‎ ʾelef, "ox"). The Phoenician variant gave rise to the Greek alpha (Α), being re-interpreted to express not the glottal consonant but the accompanying vowel, and hence the Latin A and Cyrillic А and possibly the Armenian letter Ա.

Lamedh or lamed is the twelfth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Hebrew lāmeḏ ל‎, Aramaic lāmaḏ 𐡋, Syriac lāmaḏ ܠ, Arabic lām ل‎, and Phoenician lāmd 𐤋. Its sound value is [l]. It is also related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪁‎‎‎, South Arabian 𐩡, and Ge'ez ለ.

The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Lambda (Λ), Latin L, and Cyrillic El (Л).

The Qahtanites (/ˈkɑːtənaɪts/; Arabic: قَحْطَانِيون, romanized: Qaḥṭānīyun), also known as Banu Qahtan (Arabic: بنو قحطان) or by their nickname al-Arab al-Ariba (Arabic: العرب العاربة), are the Arabs who originate from modern-day Hadhramaut, Yemen. The term "Qahtan" is mentioned in multiple Ancient South Arabian inscriptions found in Yemen. Some Arab traditions believe that the Qahtanites are the original Arabs.

In some Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions, the Qahtanite Arabs descend from Jokshan, a son of Abraham through Keturah and half brother of Ishmael son of Abraham through Hagar.