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The Palmyrene alphabet was derived from cursive versions of the Aramaic alphabet and shares many of its characteristics: [3] [4] Twenty-two letters with only consonants represented; Written horizontally from right-to-left; Numbers written right-to-left using a non-decimal system
Approximate historical distribution of the Semitic languages in the Ancient Near East.. Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples or Proto-Semitic people were speakers of Semitic languages who lived throughout the ancient Near East and North Africa, including the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula and Carthage from the 3rd millennium BC until the end of antiquity, with some, such as Arabs ...
The old Aramaic period (850 to 612 BC) saw the production and dispersal of inscriptions due to the rise of the Arameans as a major force in Ancient Near East.Their language was adopted as an international language of diplomacy, particularly during the late stages of the Neo-Assyrian Empire as well as the spread of Aramaic speakers from Egypt to Mesopotamia. [12]
It is spoken in modern dialects with an estimated one million fluent speakers by endangered indigenous populations scattered throughout the Middle East, most commonly by the Assyrians, Gnostic Mandeans, the Arameans (Syriacs) of Maaloula and Jubb'adin, and Mizrahi Jews. There is also an Aramaic substratum in Levantine and Mesopotamian Arabic.
A Judeo-Aramaic inscription from Mtskheta, Georgia, dating to the 4th-6th century CE. The conquest of the Middle East by Alexander the Great in the years from 331 BCE overturned centuries of Mesopotamian dominance and led to the ascendancy of Greek, which became the dominant language throughout the Seleucid Empire, but significant pockets of Aramaic-speaking resistance continued.
Syriac alphabet. Aramaic (Jewish Babylonian Aramaic: ארמית, romanized: ˀərāmiṯ; Classical Syriac: ܐܪܡܐܝܬ, romanized: arāmāˀiṯ [a]) is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, southeastern Anatolia, Eastern Arabia [3] [4] and the Sinai Peninsula, where it has been continually written ...
Numbers of fluent speakers range from approximately 300,000 to 575,000, with the main languages being Assyrian Neo-Aramaic (40,000 plus speakers), [14] [15] Chaldean Neo-Aramaic (220,000 speakers) [16] and Surayt/Turoyo (250,000 speakers), [17] together with a number of smaller closely related languages with no more than 5,000 to 10,000 speakers between them.
The sounds *ġ and *ḫ were always represented using the pharyngeal letters ʿ and ḥ, but they are distinguished from the pharyngeals in the Demotic-script papyrus Amherst 63, written about 200 BCE. [39] This suggests that these sounds, too, were distinguished in Old Aramaic language, but written using the same letters as they later merged with.