Phoenician alphabet where it evolved and was assimilated by many other cultures. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet is a local variant of the Phoenician alphabetical script. Another derivative script is the Aramaic alphabet, which was the ancestor of the modern Arabic script. The Modern Hebrew script is a stylistic variant of the Aramaic script. The Greek alphabet (and by extension its descendants, such as Latin, Cyrillic, Runic, and Coptic) was also derived from Phoenician. As the letters were originally incised with a stylus, most of the shapes are angular and straight, although more cursive versions are increasingly attested in later times, culminating in the
Khitan small script scripts appeared most often on epitaphs and monuments, although other fragments sometimes surface. The Khitan small script was invented in about 924 or 925 CE by a scholar named Yelü Diela. He drew his inspiration from “the Uyghur language and script,” which he was shown by a visiting Uyghur ambassador at the Khitan court. For this reason, Khitan small script was originally thought to be a daughter script of the Old Uyghur alphabet. Using a smaller number of symbols than large script, small script was less complex, yet still “able to record any word.” While small-script inscriptions employed some logograms