Shortly after its invention in the second millennium BC, the alphabet split into two traditions. One of these—the Phoenico Aramaic—spread both west to the Greeks1 and beyond, and east, across Asia as far as Manchuria (Stary, in this volume), becoming the ancestor of all but one of the traditional alphabets in use today. By contrast, the other—South Semitic—alphabetic tradition was used almost exclusively within the Arabian Peninsula3 in antiquity, and only one of its descendants has survived into the modern world.