Most alphabetic scripts of India and Eastern Asia are descended from the Brahmi script, which is often believed to be a descendant of Aramaic.

The earliest known alphabet in the wider sense is the Wadi el-Hol script, believed to be an abjad, which through its successor Phoenician is the ancestor of modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin ( via the Old Italic alphabet ), Cyrillic ( via the Greek alphabet ) and Hebrew ( via Aramaic ).

The Phoenician letter names, in which each letter was associated with a word that begins with that sound, continue to be used to varying degrees in Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew, Greek and Arabic.

In the Middle East, Aramaic gave rise to the Hebrew and Nabataean abjads, which retained many of the Aramaic letter forms.

This is to avoid the notion that a writing system that represents sounds must be either a syllabary or an alphabet, which implies that a system like Aramaic must be either a syllabary ( as argued by Gelb ) or an incomplete or deficient alphabet ( as most other writers have said ); rather, it is a different type.

The use of a single official language, which modern scholarship has dubbed Official Aramaic or Imperial Aramaic, can be assumed to have greatly contributed to the astonishing success of the Achaemenids in holding their far-flung empire together for as long as they did.

The texts, which were rendered on leather, reflect the use of Aramaic in the 4th century BCE Achaemenid administration of Bactria and Sogdiana.

Assyria continued to exist as a geopolitical entity until the Arab-Islamic conquest in the mid 7th century AD, and Assyrian identity, personal names and both spoken and written evolutions of Mesopotamian Aramaic ( which still contain many Akkadian loan words ) have survived among the Assyrian people from ancient times to this day.

In the Neo-Assyrian period the Aramaic language became increasingly common, more so than Akkadian — this was thought to be largely due to the mass deportations undertaken by Assyrian kings, in which large Aramaic-speaking populations, conquered by the Assyrians, were relocated to Assyria and interbred with the Assyrians.

Abba Arikka ( 175 – 247 ) ( Talmudic Aramaic: ; born: Abba bar Aybo, Hebrew: רבי אבא בר איבו ) was a Jewish Talmudist who lived in Sassanid Babylonia, known as an amora ( commentator on the Oral Law ) of the 3rd century who established at Sura the systematic study of the rabbinic traditions, which, using the Mishnah as text, led to the compilation of the Talmud.

The word is thought to have its origin in the Aramaic language, in which ibra ( אברא ) means " I have created " and k ' dibra ( כדברא ) which means " through my speech ", providing a translation of abracadabra as " created as I say ", thus its use in magic.

It is an ancient spell in Aramaic, and it is the original of abracadabra, which means ' let the thing be destroyed.

Evaluating Collins ' approach, he considers " the wide geographical spread from which the material comes and the implicit assumption that linguistic developments would have occurred uniformly throughout this area " a weakness and concludes, " The character of the Hebrew and Aramaic could support a date in the fifth or fourth century for the extant written form of the book, but does not demand a second-century date.

The first chiasm is written in Aramaic and the second in Hebrew which explains why Aramaic continues to be used in chapter 7 rather than ending in chapter 6.

* Several Aramaic targums of Esther were produced in the Middle Ages of which two survive-the Targum Rishon (" First Targum ") and Targum Sheni (" Second Targum ") dated c. 500-1000 CE.

However, the Jews at Jesus ' time were actually speaking Aramaic, in which language there would not have been a double meaning.

Chaldea or Chaldaea (), from Greek, Chaldaia ; Akkadian ; Hebrew כשדים, Kaśdim ; Aramaic: ܟܐܠܕܘ, Kaldo ) was a marshy land located in south eastern Mesopotamia which came to rule Babylon briefly.

In everyday Aramaic, Mari was a very respectful form of polite address, which means more than just " Teacher " and was somewhat similar to Rabbi.

In 1498, Annio published his antiquarian miscellany titled Antiquitatum variarum ( in 17 volumes ) where he put together a fantastic theory in which both the Hebrew and Etruscan languages were said to originate from a single source, the " Aramaic " spoken by Noah and his descendants, founders of Etruscan Viterbo.

Among the arguments scholars give for a later dating of the book are language and style ( i. e. the vocabulary and syntax as compared to the late Hebrew and Aramaic, which suggest that the book should be dated later ).

Other examples of late Biblical Hebrew include the qetAl pattern form nouns, which would have dated after an Aramaic influence, the frequent use of the relative sh (- ש ) alongside asher ( אשר ), the Ut ending ( ות -), the frequent use of the participle for the present ( which is later developed in Rabbinic Hebrew ), using the prefix conjugation in the future ( vs. the older preterite use ), and terms that appear to specifically fit a Persian / Hellenistic context ( e. g. Shallit ).

Since Daniel was a statesman during the Persian conquests, the Book of Daniel could have been written in a period when the Persians had their greatest influence on Aramaic, believed to be in the mid 6th century BC.

Despite this, the tradition of most Ashkenazi Orthodox synagogues is to use Hebrew ( usually Ashkenazi Hebrew ) for all except a small number of prayers, including the Kaddish, which had always been in Aramaic, and sermons and instructions, for which the local language is used.

It contains loan words from languages with which Hebrew had contact in post-exilic times, such as Persian, Greek, and Aramaic, and contains numerous items of vocabulary that are otherwise unknown in Biblical Hebrew but are known from Rabbinic Hebrew, and these expressions give the impression of being part of a living language and not the result of an archaic or artificial style.

In post-talmudic times, when most Jewish communities had ceased speaking Aramaic, the public reading of Targum along with the Torah and Haftarah was abandoned in most communities.

The private study requirement to review the Targum was never entirely relaxed, even when Jewish communities had largely ceased speaking Aramaic, and the Targum never ceased to be a major source for Jewish exegesis.

This meaning is lost when the Greek Gospels are translated into modern Hebrew: the Hebrew meaning relates much more closely to the presumed Aramaic of the period which is the actual language in which Judas Iscariot had his name.

Under the second Assyrian empire, when Nineveh had become a great centre of trade, Aramaic — the language of commerce and diplomacy — was added to the number of subjects that the educated class was required to learn.

He points out that in Galilean Aramaic, the word talya, literally " lamb ", had the common meaning of " male child ".

He had his son, crown-prince Sennacherib, married to the Aramaic noblewoman Naqi ' a, and stayed in the south to pacify the Aramaic and Chaldean tribes of the lower Euphrates as well as the Suti nomads.

When the Son of God incarnated and became the Christ, he had to speak Aramaic ; he could only conduct himself as a Hebrew of his times [...] His religious message, however universal it might be, was conditioned by the past and present history of the Hebrew people.

As a Hebrew scholar he made a special study of the history of the Hebrew text, which led him to the conclusion that the vowel points and accents are not an original part of the Hebrew language, but had been inserted by the Massorete Jews of Tiberias, no earlier than the 5th century ; he also concluded that the primitive Hebrew characters are those now known as the Samaritan, while the square characters are Aramaic and were substituted for the more ancient at the time of the captivity.

Persian became to a great extent the language of everyday life among the Jews of Babylonia ; and a hundred years after the conquest of that country by the Sassanids an amora of Pumbedita, Rab Joseph ( d. 323 ), declared that the Babylonian Jews had no right to speak Aramaic, and should instead use either Hebrew or Persian.

For example, Aramaic did not distinguish dental stops such as from retroflex stops such as, and in Brāhmī the dental and retroflex series are graphically very similar, as if both had been derived from a single Aramaic prototype.

The literary language of the tribes which had founded this kingdom, was Aramaic, whence came the Syriac.

# The first, called Mihryazd by the Persians, was the " The Living Spirit " ( Aramaic ), a savior-figure who rescues the " First Man " from the demonic Darkness into which he had plunged.

# The second, known as Mihr or Mihr yazd among the Parthians, is " The Messenger " ( Aramaic īzgaddā ), likewise a savior figure, but one concerned with setting up the structures to liberate the Light lost when the First Man had been defeated.

Many scholars suggest that they may have actually had access to a Biblical Aramaic paraphrase of the work — but one should be aware of a " creeping Aramaicism ", finding evidence for a vaguely Aramaic text when there is nothing definite to point to.

Proper names on their inscriptions suggest that they were true Arabs who had come under Aramaic influence.

The language of the Nabataean inscriptions, attested from the 2nd century BCE, shows a local development of the Aramaic language, which had ceased to have super-regional importance after the collapse of the Achaemenid Empire ( 330 BC ).

By the third century, the Nabataeans had stopped writing in Aramaic and begun writing in Greek instead, and by the fourth century they had converted to Christianity.