U+10A71 "𐩱" Old South Arabian Letter Alef Unicode Character

U+10A71 "𐩱" Old South Arabian Letter Alef is a glyph from the Old South Arabian script, a writing system used between roughly the 9th century BCE and the 6th century CE to inscribe the languages of ancient civilizations in the southern Arabian Peninsula, such as Saba, Qataban, and Himyar. Character U+10A71 specifically represents the first letter of the alphabet, the glottal consonant sound /ʔ/ (similar to the English "aleph" or Arabic "alif"), and it appears in monumental stone inscriptions and carvings found across modern-day Yemen and Oman. This character is part of the Unicode Old South Arabian block, encoded to preserve and digitally represent the historical texts of these pre‑Islamic Arabian cultures, which are crucial for understanding the region's linguistic and cultural heritage.