Aramaic & Ancient Arabian Scripts

Aramaic began as the language of small Aramaean kingdoms in Syria around 1000 BC and became the common language of the Near East for over a thousand years: the Assyrians used it beside cuneiform, the Babylonians after them, and the Persian kings of the Achaemenid Empire (about 550 to 330 BC) made it the written language of their chancelleries from Egypt to the Indus. The script of that administration is what Unicode calls Imperial Aramaic: 22 consonant letters 𐡀 𐡁 𐡂 𐡃 𐡄 𐡅 𐡆 𐡇 𐡈 𐡉 𐡊 𐡋 𐡌 𐡍 𐡎 𐡏 𐡐 𐡑 𐡒 𐡓 𐡔 𐡕, written from right to left with a reed pen on papyrus and leather, or scratched on potsherds.

It is an abjad: only consonants are written, and the reader supplies the vowels, although scribes increasingly used 𐡀 𐡄 𐡅 𐡉 as hints for long vowels. The letters are named aleph, beth, gimel, daleth, he, waw, zayin, heth, teth, yodh, kaph, lamedh, mem, nun, samekh, ayin, pe, sadhe, qoph, resh, shin and taw, and each name is a word: aleph is an ox, beth a house, mem water, ayin an eye. Numbers were not letters: strokes 𐡘 𐡙 𐡚 count ones, 𐡛 is 10, 𐡜 is 20, and there are separate signs for 100 𐡝, 1,000 𐡞 and 10,000 𐡟, written largest value first, so 13 is 𐡛𐡘𐡘𐡘.

The best-preserved Imperial Aramaic texts are the 5th-century BC papyri of a Jewish garrison on Elephantine island at Aswan, with their letters, contracts and the greeting shlam 𐡔𐡋𐡌. The Indian emperor Ashoka had edicts cut in Aramaic at Kandahar and Taxila in the 3rd century BC, and the script went on to produce the Hebrew square letters, Syriac, Nabataean and Arabic, Palmyrene, Hatran and Mandaic, the Kharoshthi of Gandhara, and, through Sogdian and Old Uyghur, the traditional Mongolian script. The letters on this page are the ancestral forms; for the Hebrew and Syriac alphabets that grew out of them see the Hebrew Letters & Symbols and Syriac Alphabet & Letters collections.

Phoenician: the alphabet behind the alphabets

The Phoenician alphabet is the parent of the Aramaic script and, through the Greeks, of the Latin and Cyrillic letters you are reading now. It was used by the trading cities of the Lebanese coast, Byblos, Sidon and Tyre 𐤑𐤓, from about 1050 BC, and carried by their ships to Cyprus, Carthage, Sicily, Sardinia and Spain. The sarcophagus of King Ahiram of Byblos, inscribed around 1000 BC, is one of its oldest long texts. Like Aramaic it has 22 consonants and runs right to left, and the Greeks who borrowed it around 800 BC turned the consonants they did not need, 𐤀 𐤄 𐤅 𐤉 𐤏, into the vowels alpha, epsilon, upsilon, iota and omicron.

Unicode gives the letters short names after their Phoenician sound values, so the block runs alf 𐤀, bet 𐤁, gaml 𐤂, delt 𐤃, he 𐤄, wau 𐤅, zai 𐤆, het 𐤇, tet 𐤈, yod 𐤉, kaf 𐤊, lamd 𐤋, mem 𐤌, nun 𐤍, semk 𐤎, ain 𐤏, pe 𐤐, sade 𐤑, qof 𐤒, rosh 𐤓, shin 𐤔, tau 𐤕. The block also holds the numbers 1 𐤖, 2 𐤚, 3 𐤛, 10 𐤗, 20 𐤘 and 100 𐤙 and the word separator 𐤟, a dot or short stroke that Phoenician and early Hebrew inscriptions used between words where we leave a space.

One Unicode block stands for a whole family of near-identical early scripts: Phoenician proper, Punic (Carthaginian), Moabite as on the Mesha Stele, Ammonite, Paleo-Hebrew and the earliest Aramaic are all meant to be written with these same 22 code points and told apart by the font. That is why there is no separate Paleo-Hebrew block, and why the Dead Sea Scrolls scribes, who sometimes wrote the divine name in old letters inside a square-script text, would need 𐤉𐤄𐤅𐤄 rather than Hebrew characters to show it on a screen.

Palmyrene, Nabataean and Hatran: three caravan cities, three scripts

When the Persian Empire fell and Greek became the language of government, Aramaic did not die; it broke into local scripts, three of them written in the great caravan cities of the Roman and Parthian frontier. Palmyrene is the script of Palmyra, Tadmor 𐡶𐡣𐡬𐡴 in its own letters, the oasis city in the Syrian desert that grew rich on the silk and spice trade and whose queen Zenobia defied Rome in the 270s AD. Its inscriptions, mostly from the 1st century BC to the 3rd century AD, are usually bilingual with Greek, cut in a formal monumental hand on tombs and columns with leaf-shaped fleurons 𐡷 𐡸 between phrases, and in a quicker cursive on the famous Tax Tariff of AD 137. It has one final form, nun at the end of a word 𐡭, and numbers from 1 𐡹 to 20 𐡿.

Nabataean was written by the Arabic-speaking people whose capital was Petra, Raqmu 𐢛𐢚𐢓𐢈 to them, in Jordan, with a second city at Hegra (Mada'in Salih) in Saudi Arabia, from the 2nd century BC until the 4th century AD, long after Rome annexed the kingdom in AD 106. Its letters lean and link, and nine of them have distinct shapes at the end of a word: final aleph 𐢀, beth 𐢂, he 𐢆, yodh 𐢌, kaph 𐢎, lamedh 𐢐, mem 𐢒, nun 𐢔 and shin 𐢜. That linking is the path to Arabic: the late Nabataean of the 4th and 5th centuries, as on the Namara inscription of AD 328, is already half way to the Arabic script, whose letters, with their own final forms and dots, are the direct descendants of these. It also has a full set of numbers, including two shapes for 4, 𐢪 and the cross-shaped 𐢫.

Hatran is the script of Hatra in northern Iraq, a fortified temple city under Parthian protection that held off two Roman emperors before the Sasanians destroyed it around AD 240. Several hundred short inscriptions survive, dedications and graffiti from the 1st century BC to the 3rd century AD. The script has only 21 letters because one sign, 𐣣, writes both daleth and resh, a merger also seen in some other Aramaic scripts of the period, and its numbers are 1 𐣻, 5 𐣼, 10 𐣽, 20 𐣾 and 100 𐣿. Both Hatra and Palmyra were deliberately damaged in 2015; the Unicode encodings of Palmyrene and Nabataean (version 7.0, 2014) and Hatran (version 8.0, 2015) were completed in the same years.

Musnad: Old South Arabian and Old North Arabian

The other half of this page is not Aramaic at all. The Old South Arabian script, called musnad in Arabic, is the monumental alphabet of the kingdoms of ancient Yemen, Saba 𐩪𐩨𐩱 (the biblical Sheba), Ma'in, Qataban and Hadramawt, cut into stone and cast in bronze from about the 9th century BC until the coming of Islam in the 6th century AD. Its 29 letters are tall, symmetrical and geometric, usually written right to left, in the earliest texts alternating direction line by line (boustrophedon). Both it and Phoenician descend from the Proto-Sinaitic signs of the 2nd millennium BC, but musnad kept more letters, with three s-sounds, s¹ 𐩪 s² 𐩦 s³ 𐩯, and separate letters for ḏ 𐩹, ṯ 𐩻, ẓ 𐩼 and ġ 𐩶.

Its letter order is not aleph-beth but halaḥam: h 𐩠 l 𐩡 ḥ 𐩢 m 𐩣 q 𐩤 w 𐩥 and so on, and the grid on this page follows it, because that is the order the South Arabians themselves carved in their abecedaries and the order the Ge'ez script of Ethiopia, which developed from musnad, still uses for the Amharic and Tigrinya syllabaries. Numbers were written with a stroke 𐩽 for 1, a sign 𐩾 for 50, and otherwise with letters (ḫ 𐩭 for 5, ʿ 𐩲 for 10, m 𐩣 for 100, ʾ 𐩱 for 1,000), set off from the words on either side by the numeric indicator 𐩿. A cursive everyday form of the script, zabur, incised on palm-leaf stalks, is not encoded.

Old North Arabian is Unicode's name for a group of closely related scripts used by the oasis towns and nomads of northern Arabia, Jordan and southern Syria from about the 8th century BC to the 4th century AD: Dadanitic at the oasis of Dadan (al-ʿUla), Taymanitic at Tayma, Thamudic, Hismaic and above all Safaitic, the script of tens of thousands of graffiti scratched on the black basalt of the Harrah desert by herders recording their names, their camels, their grief and their gods. These are sisters of the South Arabian musnad, not children of it, with the same 29 consonants in the same order, and they are not ancestors of the Arabic script either, although the language many of them write is an early form of Arabic. Unicode names their letters after Arabic ones, heh 𐪀, lam 𐪁, hah 𐪂, meem 𐪃, and one block covers every variety; the font decides whether you see Safaitic or Dadanitic shapes. For the ancestor of Arabic, look at Nabataean above and the Arabic Letters & Symbols collection.

Family tree, fonts and how to type these scripts

The tree in short: Egyptian hieroglyphs inspired the Proto-Sinaitic signs of about 1800 BC (see Egyptian Hieroglyphs). One branch became Phoenician, which fathered Greek (and through it Latin, Cyrillic and Coptic), Paleo-Hebrew and Samaritan, and Aramaic. Aramaic in turn fathered the Hebrew square script, Syriac, Palmyrene, Hatran, Mandaic, Nabataean and so Arabic, and eastwards Kharoshthi, Sogdian, Old Uyghur and Mongolian. The other branch went south: the Ancient South Arabian musnad and its northern sisters, and from the musnad the Ge'ez script of Ethiopia and Eritrea. Cuneiform is a separate tradition altogether. The related collections Cuneiform Symbols, Samaritan, Mandaic & Yezidi Scripts, Brahmi & Kharoshthi, Ge'ez Script (Ethiopic Fidel) and Ancient Persian & Silk Road Scripts take each of those branches further.

All seven scripts are ordinary Unicode text in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane: Phoenician (U+10900) since version 5.0 in 2006, Imperial Aramaic (U+10840) and Old South Arabian (U+10A60) since 5.2 in 2009, Palmyrene (U+10860), Nabataean (U+10880) and Old North Arabian (U+10A80) since 7.0 in 2014, and Hatran (U+108E0) since 8.0 in 2015. Every one is right-to-left in Unicode's bidirectional algorithm, so when you paste a word it will display from the right and the cursor will move the 'wrong' way, which is correct; Old South Arabian and Old North Arabian are also right-to-left even though the originals ran in several directions. Nabataean final forms and the Hatran daleth-resh are separate characters that you choose yourself, as there is no automatic shaping.

Most phones and computers have no font for them, so expect empty boxes until you install one. Google's free Noto family has a font per script: Noto Sans Phoenician, Noto Sans Imperial Aramaic, Noto Sans Palmyrene, Noto Sans Nabataean, Noto Sans Hatran, Noto Sans Old South Arabian and Noto Sans Old North Arabian. Windows ships Segoe UI Historic, which covers Phoenician, Imperial Aramaic and Old South Arabian but not the four 2014 and 2015 blocks. To type a letter, tap it here to copy it, or in Microsoft Word type the code and press Alt+X (10840 Alt+X gives 𐡀). Two cautions: use the Phoenician block for ancient inscriptions only, never as a decorative font for modern Hebrew, which has its own letters; and remember that Unicode's letter names (alf, gaml, rosh for Phoenician; heh, meem for Old North Arabian) are labels for lookup, not the pronunciation of a word.