| Old Phoenician 10th-9th cent. BCE |  |
| Moabite 850 BCE |  |
| Early Aramaic 800 BCE |  |
| Siloam Inscription 700 BCE |  |
| Samaritan * |  |
| Lachish Ostraca 6th cent. BCE |  |
The Semitic languages are classified as Northwest Semitic, Northeast, Southwest and Southeast. Northwest Semitic consists of 2 major groups, Aramaic and Canaanite. Canaanite is represented by Ugaritic, Phoenician, and Hebrew. Northeast Semitic consists of Akkadian, represented by Babylonian and Assyrian. The Southwest and Southeast Semitic languages consist of North and South Arabic and Ethiopic, which are outside the scope of this website.
The term epigraphy is generally used for writing on hard durable materials such as stone or postsherds (ostraca) but some use the term for any inscriptional remnants of a past civilization.
Palaeography is the study of the progressive changes and developments in the form of letters over time and is usually applied to writing on less durable materials such as parchment, leather or papyrus. An experienced palaeographer can often date a specific manuscript with fair accuracy. Epigraphy on stone is usually harder to date since more archaic forms were often retained for monumental inscriptions. The causes of changes in scripts were primarily sociological and psychological, a script hand being a reflection of styles and trends for particular time periods. Unfortunately, this is not measurable for the palaeographer whose primary tool is a systematic collection or database of thousands of exemplars of written material of known date.
Spelling and the sequence of characters in a word and their setting in a grammatic structure is the provenance of Orthography.
Using the fonts I have created for classroom work by my various scholar friends in the discussion lists, I have arranged the following inscriptions of Genesis 1:1 to display the development of the Semitic scripts since the 10th century BCE.
Archaic Scripts
| Old Phoenician 10th-9th cent. BCE | |
| Moabite 850 BCE | |
| Early Aramaic 800 BCE | |
| Siloam Inscription 700 BCE | |
| Samaritan * | |
| Lachish Ostraca 6th cent. BCE | |
*Samaritan retained the use of the archaic script.
Aramaic Square Scripts
| Elephantine Payrus 5th cent. BCE |  |
| Nabataean Aramaic 1st cent. CE |  |
| Great Isaiah Scroll 200-100 BCE |  |
| Habakkuk Pesher 150-100 BCE |  |
| Codex Leningradensis 1010 CE. |  |
| Modern Hebrew |  |
