Early Cyrillic alphabet

Early Cyrillic alphabet
Словѣньска азъбоукꙑ
Early Cyrillic alphabet; Словѣньска азъбоукꙑ
Script type	Alphabet
Period	From c. 893 in Bulgaria
Direction	Varies
Languages	Old Church Slavonic, Church Slavonic, old versions of many Slavic languages
Related scripts
Parent systems	Egyptian hieroglyphs Phoenician alphabet Greek alphabet (with influence from the Glagolitic alphabet) Early Cyrillic alphabet; ; ;
Child systems	Cyrillic script
Sister systems	Latin alphabet; Coptic alphabet; Armenian alphabet
ISO 15924
ISO 15924	Cyrs (221), Cyrillic (Old Church Slavonic variant)
Unicode
Unicode range	U+0400–U+04FF Cyrillic; U+0500–U+052F Cyrillic Supplement; U+2DE0–U+2DFF Cyrillic Extended-A; U+A640–U+A69F Cyrillic Extended-B; U+1C80–U+1C8F Cyrillic Extended-C;

The Early Cyrillic alphabet, also called classical Cyrillic or paleo-Cyrillic, is an alphabetic writing system that was developed in Medieval Bulgaria in the Preslav Literary School during the late 9th century. It is used to write the Church Slavonic language, and was historically used for its ancestor, Old Church Slavonic. It was also used for other languages, but between the 18th and 20th centuries was mostly replaced by the modern Cyrillic script, which is used for some Slavic languages (such as Russian), and for East European and Asian languages that have experienced a great amount of Russian cultural influence.