Phoenician gave way to a number of new writing systems, including the Greek alphabet and Aramaic, a widely used abjad.

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

Under Seleucid rule ( 330 BC – approximately 150 BC ), however, Aramaic gave way to Greek as the official administrative language.

The marshes in the south, like the adjoining desert, were frequented by Aramaic tribes ; of these, the most famous were the Kaldä or Chaldaeans who under Merodach-baladan made themselves masters of Babylon and gave their name in later days to the whole population of the country.

Coverdale's failure to translate from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts gave impetus to the Bishops ' Bible.

Believing that the words of Scripture as originally penned in the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek were inspired by God, the translators gave to this version a beauty which affects the English language to this day.

Meanwhile, Aramaic or Arabic features such as whb (" gave ") and tgr " merchant " entered the language, with whb becoming especially common in proper names.

It is thought that the Arabic alphabet is a derivative of the Nabataean variation of the Aramaic alphabet, which descended from the Phoenician alphabet, which among others gave rise to the Hebrew alphabet and the Greek alphabet ( and therefore the Cyrillic and Roman alphabets ).

He was given the surname Bar Kokhba ( Aramaic for " Son of a Star ", referring to the Star Prophecy of, " there shall step forth a star out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite through the corners of Moab ") by his contemporary, the Jewish sage Rabbi Akiva.

Qūm is the Aramaic verb ' to rise, stand, get up '.

Following the rise of Islam and ensuing mass conversions of the local indigenous populations, cultural and linguistic Arabization of the new Muslims, but also the remaining Christians, soon followed, and the Arabic language displaced various Aramaic languages ( including the Western Aramaic varieties ) as the mother tongue of the majority of the people.

In their book Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, Crone and her associate Michael Cook, working at SOAS at the time, provided an analysis of early Islamic history by looking at the only surviving contemporary accounts of the rise of Islam, written in Armenian, Greek, Aramaic and Syriac by witnesses.

The Arabic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet, and other abjads of the Middle East are developments of the Aramaic alphabet, but because these writing systems are largely consonant-based they are often not considered true alphabets.

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.

However, most modern abjads, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic and Avestan, are " impure " abjads, that is, they also contain symbols for some of the vowel phonemes.

Among the scripts in modern use, the Hebrew alphabet bears the closest relation to the Imperial Aramaic script of the 5th century BCE, with an identical letter inventory and, for the most part, nearly identical letter shapes.

Its widespread usage led to the gradual adoption of the Aramaic alphabet for writing the Hebrew language.

The Hebrew and Nabataean alphabets, as they stood by the Roman era, were little changed in style from the Imperial Aramaic alphabet.

Today, Biblical Aramaic, Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects and the Aramaic language of the Talmud are written in the Hebrew alphabet.

Due to the near-identity of the Aramaic and the classical Hebrew alphabets, Aramaic text is mostly typeset in standard Hebrew script in scholarly literature.

This word is usually conceded to be derived from the Hebrew ( Aramaic ), meaning " Thou art our father " ( אב לן את ), and also occurs in connection with Abrasax ; the following inscription is found upon a metal plate in the Carlsruhe Museum:

He heard a voice in the Hebrew language ( probably Aramaic ): " Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?

It was named for its original capital, the ancient city of Assur ( Akkadian: ; Aramaic: ; Hebrew: ; Arabic: ).

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.

* Bar, a patronymic prefix in Aramaic and Hebrew

It is called the Hebrew Bible in some scholarly editions, even though it is not written entirely in Hebrew, but in Hebrew and Aramaic.

The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox receive several additional books in to their canons based upon their presence in manuscripts of the ancient translation of the Old Testament in to Greek, the Septuagint ( although some of these books, such as Sirach and Tobit, are now known to be extant in Hebrew or Aramaic originals, being found amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls ).

By the tenth century two other forms can be distinguished namely Canaanite and Aramaic.

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 Greek alphabet evolved into the modern western alphabets, such as Latin and Cyrillic, while Aramaic became the ancestor of many modern abjads and abugidas of Asia.

Aramaic spread across Asia, reaching as far as India and becoming Brahmi, the ancestral abugida to most modern Indian and Southeast Asian scripts.

The Syriac script was a cursive variation of Aramaic.

The Aramaic alphabet is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet and became distinctive from it by the 8th century BCE.

The Aramaic alphabet is historically significant, since virtually all modern Middle Eastern writing systems use a script that can be traced back to it, as well as numerous non-Chinese writing systems of Central and East Asia.

This is primarily due to the widespread usage of the Aramaic language as both a lingua franca and the official language of the Neo-Assyrian, and its successor, the Achaemenid Empire.

Writing systems that indicate consonants but do not indicate most vowels ( like the Aramaic one ) or indicate them with added diacritical signs, have been called abjads by Peter T. Daniels to distinguish them from later alphabets, such as Greek, that represent vowels more systematically.

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 earliest inscriptions in the Aramaic language use the Phoenician alphabet.

Aramaic gradually became the lingua franca throughout the Middle East, with the script at first complementing and then displacing Assyrian cuneiform as the predominant writing system.

Around 500 BCE, following the Achaemenid conquest of Mesopotamia under Darius I, Old Aramaic was adopted by the conquerors as the " vehicle for written communication between the different regions of the vast empire with its different peoples and languages.

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.

Imperial Aramaic was highly standardised ; its orthography was based more on historical roots than any spoken dialect and was inevitably influenced by Old Persian.