Aramaic was for a long time (between the later Assyrian empire and the Abbasid Caliphate) a lingua franca in the Middle East; its alphabet, though itself derived from the Phoenician alphabet, therefore superseded the Old Hebrew alphabet that had been independently descended from the Phoenician alphabet. It is no longer the case that Aramaic has a single alphabet; rather, just as Aramaic has diversified into a family of closely related languages, the Aramaic alphabet has likewise become a family of closely related alphabets, chief among them Syriac alphabet, Mandaic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Palmyrenean alphabet, Nabataean alphabet. However, before splitting up, the Aramaic alphabet went through two principal stages: an early period, during which it closely resembled its ancestor the Phoenician alphabet, and the later period known as Imperial Aramaic, very closely resembling its descendant the modern Hebrew alphabet. The Aramaic alphabet is generally accepted as the source of the Orkhon script, the Arabic alphabet, and, ultimately, the Mongolian alphabet, and more controversially may be the ancestor of the Indic alphabets.
Imperial Aramaic alphabet
Redrawn from A Grammar of Biblical Aramaic, Franz Rosenthal; forms as used in Egypt, 5th century BC. Names as in Biblical Aramaic.
he Aramaicalphabet was developed sometime during the late 10th or early 9th century BCE and replaced Assyrian cuneiform as the main writing system of the Assyrian empire.
The Aramaicalphabet is thought to be the ancestor or a number of Semitic alphabets as well as the Kharosthi alphabet.
Aramaic, a language which developed from Phoenician which became the Lingua Franca throughout the Near East and Asia Minor during the late Assyrian period (1000 to 600 BCE).
The length of consonants in Nabataean script is not marked at all, and it is still limited to the repertory of the Aramaicscript, which is inadequate for the consonant phonemes of Arabic.
Rapidly executed, the script does not appear to have been subject to formal and rigorous rules, and not all the surviving examples are the work of professional scribes.
In Spain the maghribi ("western") script was evolved and became the standard script for Qurans in North Africa.
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