Ancient Semitic Scripts

This page contains a collection of fonts related to the history of the Hebrew writing. Starting with the Proto-Canaanite continuing with Phoenician/Canaanite, Paleo-Hebrew, Aramaic, early Hebrew Square Script - all the way to the modern Hebrew letter forms. Wherever possible, pictures of the documents used for font creation are included.

The History of the Hebrew Alphabet (Hebrew Presentation)

Latest Release: 0.05-1 ( Download or view sample )

Release Notes:

Changes:
This is a minor release. A "gasp" table was added to all the fonts so as to display properely in Windows OS.
A ZIP file with installation instructions for Windows now available in the download section

All the fonts in the binary tarball are in open type .ttf format. The source tarball includes FontForge source font database files of the fonts.
In the Phoenician and Aramaic Early fonts, the glyphs appear both in the Phoenician and in the Hebrew Unicode positions (See Specifications and standards). In all other the glyphsa are only in the Hebrew Unicode positions (This will be corrected in future releases for Proto-Canaanite, Paleo-Hebrew and Samaritan fonts.
The "About the fonts" PDF documents are Hebrew only. Hopefully this will change in the future.

About the fonts

View Documentation (Hebrew only for now) .

Specifications and standards:

Unicode Hebrew (0590-05FF)
Unicode Phoenician (10900-1091F)
Unicode Alphabetic Presentation Forms (FB00-FB4F)
Unicode Basic Latin (0020-007F)
Unicode Currency (20A0-20CF)
Microsoft Hebrew OpenType Recommendations

Mailing Lists:

The ancient scripts subproject will use the Culmus project mailing list

culmus-announce - A list for announcements about new releases

Acknowledgements:

I'd like to thank:

George Williams for his FontForge , the ultimate tool for font design.
Maxim Yorsh who was kind enough to host this pages in the Culmus project
Israel Gidali from IBM Israel. His innocent question about existance of proper Paleo-Hebrew font trigered my interst.
Ada Yardeni for her "Book of Hebrew Script" which was a further stimulus for my hobby.

License

The entire package of fonts is distributed under the terms of GNU General Public License version 2. The fonts contain parts created by various entities, see the LICENSE file inside the tarball or among the accompanying documentation files.

Contact

For all questions regarding the ancient semitic fonts in this subproject contact Yoram Gnat (יורם גנת).