Phoenician language in the context of "Etruscan language"

Arwad (Phoenician: 𐤀𐤓𐤅𐤃‎, romanized: ʾRWD; Arabic: أرواد, romanized: ʾArwād), the classical Aradus, is a town in Syria on an eponymous island in the Mediterranean Sea. It is the administrative center of the Arwad Subdistrict (nahiyah), of which it is the only locality. It is the only inhabited island in Syria. It is located 3 km (1.9 mi) from Tartus (the ancient Tortosa), Syria's second-largest port.

Today, Arwad is mainly a fishing town. According to the Syria Central Bureau of Statistics, during the 2004 census, it had a population of 4,403, predominantly Arab Sunni Muslims. Plans were unveiled in May 2016 to renovate the island to become a tourist attraction. The island is currently surrounded by ancient Phoenician era walls.

The Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions, also known as Northwest Semitic inscriptions, are the primary extra-Biblical sources for understanding of the societies and histories of Phoenicia, the Israelites, and the Arameans, which includes groups within the Northwest Semitic languages. Northwest Semitic contains the Aramaic and Canaanite languages; the latter groups includes Phoenician—Punic, the Ammonite language, and Hebrew.

Semitic inscriptions may occur on stone slabs, ostraca, and ornaments and range from simple names to full texts.

Biblical Hebrew (Hebrew: עִבְרִית מִקְרָאִית, romanized: ʿiḇrîṯ miqrāʾîṯ or לְשׁוֹן הַמִּקְרָא, ləšôn ham-miqrāʾ ), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, a language in the Canaanitic branch of the Semitic languages spoken by the Israelites in the area known as the Land of Israel, roughly west of the Jordan River and east of the Mediterranean Sea. The term ʿiḇrîṯ 'Hebrew' was not used for the language in the Hebrew Bible, which was referred to as שְֹפַת כְּנַעַן śəp̄aṯ kənaʿan 'language of Canaan' or יְהוּדִית Yəhûḏîṯ 'Judean', but it was used in Koine Greek and Mishnaic Hebrew texts.

Paleo-Hebrew is attested in inscriptions from about the 10th century BCE, when it was almost identical to Phoenician and other Canaanite languages, and spoken Hebrew persisted as a first language through and beyond the Second Temple period, which ended in 70 CE with the siege of Jerusalem. It eventually developed into Mishnaic Hebrew, which was employed as a second language until the 5th century.

The Punic people, usually known as the Carthaginians (and sometimes as Western Phoenicians), were a Semitic people who migrated from Phoenicia to the Western Mediterranean during the Early Iron Age. In modern scholarship, the term Punic, the Latin equivalent of the Greek-derived term Phoenician, is exclusively used to refer to Phoenicians in the western Mediterranean, following the line of the Greek East and Latin West. The largest Punic settlement was Ancient Carthage, but there were 300 other settlements along the North African coast from Leptis Magna in modern Libya to Mogador in southern Morocco, as well as western Sicily, southern Sardinia, the southern and eastern coasts of the Iberian Peninsula, Malta, and Ibiza. Their language, Punic, was a variety of Phoenician, one of the Northwest Semitic languages originating in the Levant.

Literary sources report two moments of Tyrian settlements in the west, the first in the 12th century BC (the cities Utica, Lixus, and Gadir) that hasn't been confirmed by archaeology, and a second at the end of the 9th century BC, documented in written references in both east and west, which culminated in the foundation of colonies in northwest Africa (the cities Auza, Carthage, and Kition on the southern coast of Cyprus) and formed part of trading networks linked to Tyre, Arvad, Byblos, Berytus, Ekron, and Sidon in the Phoenician homeland. Although links with Phoenicia were retained throughout their history, they also developed close trading relations with other peoples of the western Mediterranean, such as Sicilians, Sardinians, Berbers, Greeks, and Iberians, and developed some cultural traits distinct from those of their Phoenician homeland. Some of these were shared by all western Phoenicians, while others were restricted to individual regions within the Punic sphere.

The Central Semitic languages comprise one of the three groups of West Semitic languages, alongside Modern South Arabian languages and Ethiopian Semitic languages. They are therefore of the Semitic phylum of the Afroasiatic language family. The group is spoken across much of the Arabic peninsula and north into the Levant region.

Central Semitic can itself be further divided into two groups: Arabic and Northwest Semitic. Northwest Semitic languages largely fall into the Canaanite languages (such as Ammonite, Phoenician and Hebrew) and Aramaic.

The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BC. It was one of the first alphabets, attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean basin. In the history of writing systems, the Phoenician script also marked the first to have a fixed writing direction—while previous systems were multi-directional, Phoenician was written horizontally, from right to left. It developed directly from the Proto-Sinaitic script used during the Late Bronze Age, which was derived in turn from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The Phoenician alphabet was used to write Canaanite languages spoken during the Early Iron Age, sub-categorized by historians as Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite, Ammonite and Edomite, as well as Old Aramaic. It was widely disseminated outside of the Canaanite sphere by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean, where it was adopted and adapted by other cultures. The Phoenician alphabet proper was used in Ancient Carthage until the 2nd century BC, where it was used to write the Punic language. Its direct descendant scripts include the Aramaic and Samaritan alphabets, several Alphabets of Asia Minor, and the Archaic Greek alphabets.

Idalion or Idalium (Greek: Ιδάλιον, Idalion, Phoenician: 𐤀𐤃𐤉𐤋, ʾDYL, Akkadian: e-di-ʾi-il, Edīl) was an ancient city in Cyprus, in modern Dali, Nicosia District. The city was founded on the copper trade in the 3rd millennium BC. Its name does not appear on the Sargon Stele of 707 BC, but does appear on the later Prism of Esarhaddon [nl] (copies of the text dated to 673–672 BC) and in similar spellings in Ashurbanipal's annal (648/647 BC).

Recent excavations have uncovered major buildings on the site which are open to visitors. A new museum is at the entrance of the site.