My interest in Phoenician began with a broader interest in language, but not merely as a means of communication, but as a way through which people interpret, structure, and preserve their understanding of the world. In that sense, language has always interested me from a hermeneutic perspective: words and writing do more than transmit information; they carry historical and cultural meaning.
This interest led me, in the early 2000s, to work on Phoenician language resources, including my Phoenician Dictionary, and to design Phtem, my own digital Phoenician typeface.
At the time, this was a very different undertaking from what it would be today. Phoenician had not yet been independently encoded in Unicode, and digital resources for the script were extremely limited. When Michael Everson prepared the 2004 Final Proposal for Encoding the Phoenician Script in the UCS, the document presented only four contemporary Phoenician fonts as examples of existing digital typographic work. Phtem was one of them.
The four were Sidon by Michael Everson, Eshmoon by Salim G. Khalaf, Phoenician Moabite by David Myriad Rosenbaum, and Phtem by Maroun Kassab.
That small number is significant. Today it is easy to download fonts, type ancient scripts online, and move text between platforms. At the time, designing a functioning Phoenician typeface meant participating in the still very limited effort to give the script a practical digital existence.
This became particularly important because the independent encoding of Phoenician was itself being debated. One position argued that Phoenician did not require its own Unicode block because Phoenician and Hebrew shared essentially the same twenty-two-letter alphabet. Phoenician could therefore be treated simply as a different typeface applied to Hebrew characters. This position is laid out clearly in Dean Snyder’s 2004 paper, Phoenician: Hebrew or a Separate Script?.
I found that position reductive.
Even where two writing systems share structural ancestry, this does not make them culturally or historically interchangeable. A script is not only a sequence of abstract signs. Its forms accumulate history, geography, use, and interpretation. Representing Phoenician merely as a Hebrew font might preserve a technical correspondence between letters, but it would lose something of the ability to encounter Phoenician as Phoenician.
The eventual encoding of Phoenician was a cumulative effort involving several scholars and contributors, and I do not claim responsibility for that process as a whole. But my work formed a concrete part of the evidence already available when that decision was being made. Phtem was one of the very few digital Phoenician typefaces documented in the official Unicode proposal.
Phoenician was subsequently accepted as an independent script and entered Unicode 5.0 in 2006.
Looking back, this is what gives that early work particular meaning for me. Phtem was not simply an exercise in drawing ancient letters. It was part of an emerging digital infrastructure through which Phoenician could once again be written, reproduced, transmitted, and studied in its own right.
For me, that remains the essential point: preserving a script is not only preserving its shapes. It is preserving its identity as a distinct way in which language, history, and culture become legible.
