Script - Carian

Carian is a historical script used to write the Carian language, spoken in ancient Caria, a region in western Anatolia (modern Turkey) and by Carian communities in Egypt. The script’s character property value encompasses both the alphabetic signs and punctuation used in inscriptions, dating roughly from the 7th to the 3rd century BCE. Many of its letters resemble Greek or Phoenician forms, but its phonetic values are distinct, and it was only deciphered in the late 20th century. The property includes 49 characters, covering consonants and vowels, with a unique left-to-right direction in most texts, though some early examples run right-to-left. It is used for encoding ancient texts, supporting scholarly research and digital preservation of this undeciphered-for-centuries writing system.