Ancient North Arabian (ANA) refers to all of the South Semitic scripts excluding Ancient South Arabian (ASA) used in central and northern Arabia from the 8th century BCE to the 4th century CE. To date, it has not been demonstrated that these scripts derive from an ancestor not also shared by the ASA scripts. The hypothesis that all of the non-ASA alphabets derive from a single ancestor gave rise to the idea that the languages which these scripts express constitute a linguistic unity, a so-called ANA language, the linguistic validity of which has been called into question.