This article contains Syriac text, written from right to left in a cursive style with some letters joined. Without properrendering support, you may see unjoined Syriac letters or other symbols instead ofSyriac script.
The ancientAramaic alphabet was used to write theAramaic languages spoken by ancientAramean pre-Christian peoples throughout theFertile Crescent. It was also adopted by other peoples as their own alphabet when empires and their subjects underwent linguistic Aramaization during alanguage shift for governing purposes — a precursor toArabization centuries later — including among theAssyrians andBabylonians who permanently replaced theirAkkadian language and itscuneiform script with Aramaic and its script, and amongJews, but notSamaritans, who adopted the Aramaic language as their vernacular and started using the Aramaic alphabet, which they call "Square Script", even for writingHebrew, displacing the formerPaleo-Hebrew alphabet. The modernHebrew alphabet derives from the Aramaic alphabet, in contrast to the modernSamaritan alphabet, which derives fromPaleo-Hebrew.
The letters in the Aramaic alphabet all representconsonants, some of which are also used asmatres lectionis to indicate longvowels. Writing systems, like the Aramaic, that indicate consonants but do not indicate most vowels other than by means ofmatres lectionis or added diacritical signs, have been calledabjads byPeter T. Daniels to distinguish them from alphabets such as theGreek alphabet, that represent vowels more systematically. The term was coined to avoid the notion that a writing system that represents sounds must be either asyllabary or an alphabet, which would imply that a system like Aramaic must be either a syllabary, as argued byIgnace Gelb, or an incomplete ordeficient alphabet, as most other writers had said before Daniels. Daniels put forward, this is a different type of writing system, intermediate between syllabaries and 'full' alphabets.
The Aramaicalphabet is historically significant since virtually allmodernMiddle Eastern writing systems can be traced back to it. That is primarily due to the widespread usage of the Aramaic language after it was adopted as both alingua franca and the official language of theNeo-Assyrian andNeo-Babylonian Empires, and their successor, theAchaemenid Empire. Among the descendant scripts in modern use, the JewishHebrew alphabet bears the closest relation to the Imperial Aramaic script of the 5th century BC, with an identical letter inventory and, for the most part, nearly identical letter shapes. By contrast theSamaritan Hebrew script is directly descended from Proto-Hebrew/Phoenician script, which was the ancestor of the Aramaic alphabet. The Aramaic alphabet was also an ancestor to theSyriac alphabet andMongolian script andKharosthi[2] andBrahmi,[3] andNabataean alphabet, which had theArabic alphabet as a descendant.
The earliest inscriptions in theAramaic language use thePhoenician alphabet.[4] Over time, the alphabet developed into the Aramaic alphabet by the 8th century BC. It was used to write theAramaic languages spoken by ancient Aramean pre-Christian tribes throughout theFertile Crescent. It was also adopted by other peoples as their own alphabet when empires and their subjects underwent linguistic Aramaization during alanguage shift for governing purposes — a precursor toArabization centuries later.
Around 500 BC, following theAchaemenid conquest ofMesopotamia underDarius I,Old Aramaic was adopted by the Persians as the "vehicle for written communication between the different regions of the vast Persian empire with its different peoples and languages. The use of a single official language, which modern scholarship has dubbed as Official Aramaic, Imperial Aramaic or Achaemenid Aramaic, can be assumed to have greatly contributed to the astonishing success of the Achaemenid Persians in holding their far-flung empire together for as long as they did."[5]
Imperial Aramaic was highly standardised. Its orthography was based more on historical roots than any spoken dialect and was influenced byOld Persian. The Aramaic glyph forms of the period are often divided into two main styles, the "lapidary" form, usually inscribed on hard surfaces like stone monuments, and a cursive form whose lapidary form tended to be more conservative by remaining more visually similar to Phoenician and early Aramaic. Both were in use through the Achaemenid Persian period, but the cursive form steadily gained ground over the lapidary, which had largely disappeared by the 3rd century BC.[6]
For centuries after the fall of the Achaemenid Empire in 331 BC, Imperial Aramaic, or something near enough to it to be recognisable, remained an influence on the various nativeIranian languages. The Aramaic script survived as the essential characteristics of the IranianPahlavi writing system.[7]
30 Aramaic documents fromBactria have been recently discovered, an analysis of which was published in November 2006. The texts, which were rendered on leather, reflect the use of Aramaic in the 4th century BC, in the Persian Achaemenid administration ofBactria andSogdiana.[8]
The widespread usage of Achaemenid Aramaic in the Middle East led to the gradual adoption of the Aramaic alphabet for writingHebrew. Formerly, Hebrew had been written using an alphabet closer in form to that of Phoenician, thePaleo-Hebrew alphabet.[9]
Since the evolution of the Aramaic alphabet out of the Phoenician one was a gradual process, the division of the world's alphabets into the ones derived from the Phoenician one directly, and the ones derived from Phoenician via Aramaic, is somewhat artificial. In general, the alphabets of the Mediterranean region (Anatolia, Greece, Italy) are classified as Phoenician-derived, adapted from around the 8th century BC. Those of the East (the Levant, Persia, Central Asia, and India) are considered Aramaic-derived, adapted from around the 6th century BC from the Imperial Aramaic script of the Achaemenid Empire.[citation needed]
After the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, the unity of the Imperial Aramaic script was lost, diversifying into a number of descendant cursives.
The Hebrew andNabataean alphabets, as they stood by theRoman era, were little changed in style from the Imperial Aramaic alphabet.Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) alleges that not only the old Nabataean writing was influenced by the "Syrian script" (i.e. Aramaic), but also the old Chaldean script.[10]
Acursive Hebrew variant developed from the early centuries AD. It remained restricted to the status of a variant used alongside the noncursive. By contrast, the cursive developed out of the Nabataean alphabet in the same period soon became the standard for writing Arabic, evolving into theArabic alphabet as it stood by the time of the earlyspread of Islam.
The development of cursive versions of Aramaic led to the creation of theSyriac,Palmyrene andMandaic alphabets, which formed the basis of the historical scripts of Central Asia, such as theSogdian andMongolian alphabets.[11]
Today,Biblical Aramaic, Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects and the Aramaic language of theTalmud are written in the modern-Hebrew alphabet, distinguished from theOld Hebrew script. In classicalJewish literature, the name given to the modern-Hebrew script was "Ashurit", the ancient Assyrian script,[17] a script now known widely as the Aramaic script.[18][19] It is believed that, during the period of Assyrian dominion, Aramaic script and language received official status.[18]
Syriac and Christian Neo-Aramaic dialects are today written in theSyriac alphabet, which script has superseded the more ancient Assyrian script and now bears its name.Mandaic is written in theMandaic alphabet. The near-identical nature of the Aramaic and the classical Hebrew alphabets caused Aramaic text to be typeset mostly in the standard Hebrew script in scholarly literature.
InMaaloula, one of few surviving communities in which aWestern Aramaic dialect is still spoken, an Aramaic Language Institute was established in 2006 byDamascus University that teaches courses to keep the language alive.
Unlike Classical Syriac, which has a rich literary tradition in Syriac-Aramaic script, Western Neo-Aramaic was solely passed down orally for generations until 2006 and was not utilized in a written form.[20]
Therefore, the Language Institute's chairman, George Rizkalla (Rezkallah), undertook the writing of a textbook in Western Neo-Aramaic. Being previously unwritten, Rizkalla opted for theHebrew alphabet. In 2010, the institute's activities were halted due to concerns that the square Maalouli-Aramaic alphabet used in the program bore a resemblance to the square script of the Hebrew alphabet. As a result, all signs featuring the square Maalouli script were subsequently removed.[21] The program stated that they would instead use the more distinctSyriac-Aramaic alphabet, although use of the Maalouli alphabet has continued to some degree.[22] Al Jazeera Arabic also broadcast a program about Western Neo-Aramaic and the villages in which it is spoken with the square script still in use.[23]
The Syriac Aramaic alphabet was added to theUnicode Standard in September 1999, with the release of version 3.0.
The Syriac Abbreviation (a type ofoverline) can be represented with a special control character called theSyriac Abbreviation Mark (U+070F). The Unicode block for Syriac Aramaic is U+0700–U+074F:
^Inland Syria and the East-of-Jordan Region in the First Millennium BCE before the Assyrian Intrusions, Mark W. Chavalas, The Age of Solomon: Scholarship at the Turn of the Millennium, ed. Lowell K. Handy, (Brill, 1997), 169.
^Shaked, Saul (1987). "Aramaic".Encyclopædia Iranica. Vol. 2. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. pp. 250–261. p. 251
^Greenfield, J.C. (1985). "Aramaic in the Achaemenid Empire". In Gershevitch, I. (ed.).The Cambridge History of Iran: Volume 2. Cambridge University Press. pp. 709–710.
^Geiger, Wilhelm; Kuhn, Ernst (2002).Grundriss der iranischen Philologie: Band I. Abteilung 1. Boston: Adamant. pp. 249ff.
^Naveh, Joseph; Shaked, Shaul (2006).Ancient Aramaic Documents from Bactria. Studies in the Khalili Collection. Oxford: Khalili Collections.ISBN978-1-874780-74-8.
^Babylonian beginnings: The origin of the cuneiform writing system in comparative perspective, Jerold S. Cooper,The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process, ed. Stephen D. Houston, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 58–59.
^Tristan James Mabry,Nationalism, Language, and Muslim Exceptionalism, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 109.
^Turks, A. Samoylovitch,First Encyclopaedia of Islam: 1913–1936, Vol. VI, (Brill, 1993), 911.
^George L. Campbell and Christopher Moseley,The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets, (Routledge, 2012), 40.
^Oriens Christianus (in German). 2003. p. 77.As the villages are very small, located close to each other, and the three dialects are mutually intelligible, there has never been the creation of a script or a standard language. Aramaic is the unwritten village dialect...
^Maissun Melhem."Schriftenstreit in Syrien" (in German). Deutsche Welle. Retrieved15 November 2023.Before the Islamic conquest, Aramaic was spoken throughout Syria and was a global language. There were many variants, but Aramaic did not exist as a written language everywhere, including the Ma'alula region, notes Professor Jastrow. The decision to use the Hebrew script, in his opinion, was made arbitrarily."
^Al Jazeera Documentary الجزيرة الوثائقية (11 February 2016)."أرض تحكي لغة المسيح".Archived from the original on 17 November 2021. Retrieved27 March 2018 – via YouTube.
Byrne, Ryan. "Middle Aramaic Scripts".Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics. Elsevier. (2006)
Daniels, Peter T., et al. eds.The World's Writing Systems. Oxford. (1996)
Coulmas, Florian.The Writing Systems of the World. Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford. (1989)
Rudder, Joshua.Learn to Write Aramaic: A Step-by-Step Approach to the Historical & Modern Scripts. n.p.: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011. 220 pp.ISBN978-1461021421. Includes a wide variety of Aramaic scripts.
Ancient Hebrew and Aramaic on Coins, reading and transliterating Proto-Hebrew,online edition (Judaea Coin Archive).
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