Phoenician is a Unicode block containing characters used across the Mediterranean world from the 12th century BCE to the 3rd century CE. The Phoenician alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in July 2006 with the release of version 5.0. An alternative proposal to handle it as a font variation of Hebrew was turned down. (See PDF summary.)
The Unicode block for Phoenician is U+10900–U+1091F. It is intended for the representation of text in Paleo-Hebrew, Archaic Phoenician, Phoenician, Early Aramaic, Late Phoenician cursive, Phoenician papyri, Siloam Hebrew, Hebrew seals, Ammonite, Moabite and Punic.
The letters are encoded U+10900 aleph through to U+10915 taw, U+10916 , U+10917 , U+10918 and U+10919 encode the numerals 1, 10, 20, and 100, respectively, and U+1091F is the word separator.
Characters
History The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Phoenician block:
Version Count L2 ID WG2 ID Document 5.0 U+10900..10919, 1091F 27 N1579 N1603 N1932 N2097, N2133 N2103 N2746R2 N2772 N2787 N2793 N2792 N2909 5.2 U+1091A..1091B 2 doc) N3284
References