Quick Facts Type Consonantal Alphabetic Genealogy Proto-Sinaitic Location West Asia Time 10th century BCE to 0 CE Direction Right to Left

The Aramaic language was the international trade language of the ancient Middle East between 1000 and 600 BCE, spoken from the Mediterranean coast to the borders of India. Its script, derived from Phoenician and first attested during the 9th century BCE, also became extremely popular and was adopted by many people with or without any previous writing system.

The following is the Aramaic script:

One interesting innovation in Aramaic is the matres lectionis system to indicate certain vowels. Early Phoenician-derived scripts did not have letters for vowels, and so most texts recorded just consonants. Most likely as a consequence of phonetic changes in North Semitic languages, the Aramaeans reused certain letters in the alphabet to represent long vowels. The letter 'aleph was employed to write /ā/, he for /ō/, yodh for /ī/, and waw for /ū/.

Aramaic flowered into myriads of different variants, which eventually became the script of many nations in the Middle East. One important example is the square Hebrew script. Writing, derived from Phoenician, began to appear in Palestine around the 10th century BCE, and the Old Hebrew script was one of them. However, by the 6th century BCE, an Aramaic-derived script, appropriately called the Jewish script, began to replace the Old Hebrew script. It is the Jewish script that eventually evolved into the modern square Hebrew script.

Another important Aramaic offshoot is the Nabataean script, which eventually evolved into the Arabic script.