Aramaic Alphabet

This app can help you get to know the imperial Aramaic alphabet. Scroll through the letters and study their shapes and sounds. Practice tracing each one until you're familiar-- then quiz yourself on the letters! This writing system was adapted by the Arameans from Phonoecian in the 8th Century BC. Note it is written right-to-left, like most other Semitic writing systems. That is why the first letter is listed on the top right and they go right to left, up to down from Alaph to Taw. It was used to write the Aramaic languages spoken by ancient Aramean pre-Christian tribes throughout the Fertile Crescent. It was also adopted by other peoples as their own alphabet when empires and their subjects underwent linguistic Aramaization during a language shift for governing purposes—a precursor to Arabization centuries later—including among Assyrians who permanently replaced their Akkadian language and its cuneiform script with Aramaic and its script, and among Jews (but not Samaritans), who adopted the Aramaic language as their vernacular and started using the Aramaic alphabet even for writing Hebrew, displacing the former Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. (The modern Hebrew alphabet derives from the Aramaic alphabet, in contrast to the modern Samaritan alphabet, which derives from Paleo-Hebrew). The letters in the Aramaic alphabet all represent consonants, some of which are also used as matres lectionis to indicate long vowels. The Aramaic alphabet is historically significant since virtually all modern Middle Eastern writing systems can be traced back to it. That is primarily due to the widespread usage of the Aramaic language after it was adopted as both a lingua franca and the official language of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires, and their successor, the Achaemenid Empire. We provide transliteration equivalents for each letter in Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac scripts (all of which can be used in the quiz).