Samekh (Phoenician ''sāmek'' ; Hebrew ''samekh'' , Syriac ''semkaṯ'') is the fifteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including the

Hebrew alphabet The Hebrew alphabet ( he, אָלֶף־בֵּית עִבְרִי, ), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewi ...

. Samekh represents a

voiceless alveolar fricative The voiceless alveolar fricatives are a type of fricative consonant pronounced with the tip or blade of the tongue against the alveolar ridge (gum line) just behind the teeth. This refers to a class of sounds, not a single sound. There are at lea ...

. Unlike most Semitic consonants, the pronunciation of remains constant between vowels and before voiced consonants. In the Hebrew language, the samekh generally shares a similar pronunciation as the left-dotted shin. The numerical value of samekh is 60.

History

The Phoenician letter may continue a glyph from the

Middle Bronze Age alphabets Proto-Sinaitic (also referred to as Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite when found in Canaan, the North Semitic alphabet, or Early Alphabetic) is considered the earliest trace of alphabetic writing and the common ancestor of both the Ancient South Arabian ...

, either based on a hieroglyph for a tent peg or support, possibly the ''

djed The ''djed,'' also ''djt'' ( egy, ḏd 𓊽, Coptic ''jōt'' "pillar", anglicized /dʒɛd/) is one of the more ancient and commonly found symbols in ancient Egyptian religion. It is a pillar-like symbol in Egyptian hieroglyphs representing stab ...

'' "pillar" hieroglyph (c.f. Hebrew root סמך s-m-kh 'support', סֶמֶךְ semekh 'support, rest', סוֹמֵךְ somekh 'support peg, post', סוֹמְכָה somkha 'armrest', סָמוֹכָה smokha 'stake, support', indirectly '' s'mikhah'' ; Aramaic סַמְכָא samkha 'socket, base', סְמַךְ smakh 'support, help'; Syriac ܣܡܟܐ semkha 'support'). The shape of samek undergoes complicated developments. In archaic scripts, the vertical stroke can be drawn either across or below the three horizontal strokes. The closed form of Hebrew samek is developed only in the Hasmonean period.Frank Moore Cross, ''Leaves from an Epigrapher's Notebook: Collected Papers in Hebrew and West Semitic Palaeography and Epigraphy'' (2018)
p. 30
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek xi (Ξ), whereas its name may also be reflected in the name of the otherwise unrelated Greek letter sigma. The archaic "grid" shape of Western Greek ''xi'' ( Greek Xi archaic grid

) was adopted in the early

Etruscan alphabet The Etruscan alphabet was the alphabet used by the Etruscans, an ancient civilization of central and northern Italy, to write their language, from about 700 BC to sometime around 100 AD. The Etruscan alphabet derives from the Euboean alphab ...

(𐌎 ''esh''), but was never included in the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...

Syriac semkat

The Syriac letter ''semkaṯ'' develops from the Imperial Aramaic "hook" shape into a rounded form by the 1st century. The Old Syriac form further develops into a connected cursive both in the Eastern and Western script variants.

Hebrew Samekh

Hebrew ''Samekh'' develops a closed cursive form in the middle Hasmonean period (1st century BC). This becomes the standard form in early Herodian hands.

Talmudic legend

In Talmudic legend, samekh is said to have been a miracle of the

Ten Commandments The Ten Commandments (Biblical Hebrew עשרת הדברים \ עֲשֶׂרֶת הַדְּבָרִים, ''aséret ha-dvarím'', lit. The Decalogue, The Ten Words, cf. Mishnaic Hebrew עשרת הדיברות \ עֲשֶׂרֶת הַדִּבְ ...

. records that the tablets "were written on both their sides." The

Jerusalem Talmud The Jerusalem Talmud ( he, תַּלְמוּד יְרוּשַׁלְמִי, translit=Talmud Yerushalmi, often for short), also known as the Palestinian Talmud or Talmud of the Land of Israel, is a collection of rabbinic notes on the second-century ...

interprets this as meaning that the inscription went through the full thickness of the tablets. The stone in the center parts of the letters ayin and teth should have fallen out, as these letters are closed in the ktav ivri script and would not be connected to the rest of the tablet, but miraculously remained in place. The

Babylonian Talmud The Talmud (; he, , Talmūḏ) is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and the primary source of Jewish religious law (''halakha'') and Jewish theology. Until the advent of modernity, in nearly all Jewish communities, the Talmud was the cent ...

(tractate Shabbat 104a) also cites the opinion that these closed letters included samekh, attributed to Rav Chisda (d. ca. 320).

Arabic Sīn & Nabataean Simkath

Samekh has no surviving descendant in the Arabic alphabet, it was replaced by the letter س Sīn, a letter variant of the letter ش Šīn. Šīn is positioned at its original 21st spot in the Arabic abjadi sequence, while its variant Sīn replaced Samekh at 15th position, with the numerical value of the replaced letter Samekh also assigned to its replacement letter Sīn. The

Nabataean alphabet The Nabataean script is an abjad ( consonantal alphabet) that was used to write Nabataean Aramaic and Nabataean Arabic from the second century BC onwards.Phoenician alphabet Hebrew letters