Libyco-Berber alphabet
| Libyco-Berber alphabet | |
|---|---|
| Script type | |
Period | Sometime during the first millennium BC to the 4th-7th century AD |
| Direction | Various, but usually bottom-to-top or right-to-left |
| Languages | Numidian ? Guanche ? Garamantian |
| Related scripts | |
Parent systems | Egyptian hieroglyphs
|
Child systems | Tifinagh (Tuareg Tifinagh) |
The Libyco-Berber alphabet is an abjad writing system that was used during the first millennium BC by various Berber peoples of North Africa and the Canary Islands, to write ancient varieties of the Berber language like the Numidian language.
The use of the Libyco-Berber alphabet died out in northern areas during or after the reign of the Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire, but it spread south into the Sahara desert and evolved there into the Tuareg Tifinagh alphabet used by the Tuareg Berbers to this day.
It is also known as the Numidian script or the Old Lybian script, the point being to avoid an assumption that Numidian has any continuity with any surviving modern Berber language.