 Phoenician colonies (such as Carthage) spread their Canaanite language throughout much of the Mediterranean, while its close relative, Hebrew, became the vehicle of a religious literature, the Torah and Tanakh, which would have global ramifications.However, as an ironic result of the Assyrian Empire's vast conquests, Aramaic became the "lingua franca" of the Fertile Crescent and much of the Near East and parts of Anatolia, gradually pushing Akkadian, Hebrew, Phoenician-Canaanite, and several other languages to extinction, although Hebrew and Akkadian remained in use as sacred languages, Hebrew in particular developing a substantial literature.Ethiopian Semitic languages are first attested by the ninth century BC, with the earliest proto-Ge'ez inscriptions of the kingdom of using the South Arabian alphabet.