South Semitic scripts
{{Short description|Family of writing systems that split from the Proto-Sinaitic script}}
{{Infobox writing system
| name = South Semitic scripts
| type = Abjad
| direction = right-to-left
| languages = Old South Arabian, Ge'ez, Dadanitic, Taymanitic, Dumaitic, Thamudic, Safaitic, Hismaic
| time = {{circa|10th century BCE to 6th century AD}}
| fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs
| fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic script
| children = {{plainlist|
}}
The South Semitic scripts are a family of alphabets that had split from Proto-Sinaitic script by the 10th century BC.Ahmad Al-Jallad, "Script and Orthography", An Outline of the Grammar of the Safaitic Inscriptions (Brill, 2015), p. 26. The family has two main branches: Ancient North Arabian (ANA) and Ancient South Arabian (ASA).
The scripts were exclusive to Arabia and the Horn of Africa. All the ANA and most of the ASA scripts fell out of use by the 6th century AD.
File:Panel Almaqah Louvre DAO18.jpg]]
The exception was Geʽez, a child of ASA in use in Ethiopia. It and its variants remain in use today for various Ethiosemitic languages. In Arabia, the South Semitic scripts were replaced by the Arabic script, which is descended from the Nabataean script.Michael Everson and Michael Macdonald, [https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6jv5g061 "Proposal to Encode the Old North Arabian Script in the SMP of the UCS"], Proposals from the Script Encoding Initiative, UC Berkeley, 2010.