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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a lingua franca in the Middle East; its alphabet, though itself derived from the Phoenician alphabet, therefore superseded the Old Hebrew alphabet that had been independently descended from the Phoenician alphabet.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.

1 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.

Letter name ta	Letter form	Equivalent Hebrew	Pronunciation
Aleph		א	glottal stop; ā, e
Beth		ב	b, v
Gimel		ג	g, gh
Daleth		ד	d, dh
Heh		ה	h
Waw		ו	w; o, u
Zayin		ז	z
Heth		ח	H ( voiceless pharyngeal fricative); kh in modern pronunciations
Teth		ט	emphatic t
Yodh		י	y; i, e
Kaph		ך / כ	k, kh
Lamed		ל	l
Mem		ם / מ	m
Nun		ן / נ	n
Samekh		ס	s
Ayin		ע	voiced pharyngeal fricative
Pe		ף / פ	p, ph
Sade	,	ץ / צ	emphatic s; ts in modern pronunciations
Qoph		ק	q ( voiceless uvular plosiveThe voiceless uvular plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is q, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is q. Features of this consonant: Its manner o)
Resh		ר	r
Sin/Shin		ש	usually sh; in some words s (probably originally a lateral fricative )
Taw		ת	t, th

2 See also

AbjadAn abjad is a type of writing system where there is one symbol per consonantal phoneme, sometimes also called a consonantary . Abjads differ from alphabets in that they lack characters for vowels. The term takes its name from the old order of the Arabic a
AlphabetAn alphabet is a complete standardized set of letters—basic written symbols—each of which roughly represents or represented historically a phoneme of a spoken language. This as distinguished from other writing systems such as ideograms, in which symbols r
Aramaic language
Syriac languageSyriac is an Eastern Aramaic language which used to be spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. Classification Syriac is a member of the Afro-Asiatic language family, the Semitic language sub-family, the West Semitic language branch, and the Aramaic la
Mandaic language
List of writing systems

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