Old Italic scripts

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Old Italic scripts" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (August 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Old Italic
An inscription from the Marsiliana tablet, around 700 BC
Script type	Alphabet
Time period	7th century – 1st century BC
Direction	Right-to-left script, left-to-right
Related scripts
Parent systems	Egyptian hieroglyphs Proto-Sinaitic Phoenician Greek Old Italic
Child systems	Runic, Latin alphabet
ISO 15924
ISO 15924	Ital (210), ​Old Italic (Etruscan, Oscan, etc.)
Unicode
Unicode alias	Old Italic
Unicode range	U+10300–U+1032F[1]
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

The Old Italic scripts are a family of ancient writing systems used on the Italian Peninsula between about 700 and 100 BC, for various languages spoken in that time and place. The most notable member is the Etruscan alphabet, which was the immediate ancestor of the Latin alphabet used by more than 100 languages today, including English. The runic alphabets used in Northern Europe are believed to have been separately derived from one of these alphabets by the 2nd century AD.^[2]