Like the Phoenician, these Hebrew signs are distinctly cursive in character but, as the legend on the coins of the Maccabees shows, became stereotyped for monumental use, while the Jews after the exile gradually adopted the Aramaic writing, whence the square Hebrew script is descended. The Samaritans alone stuck fast to the old Hebrew as part of their contention that they, and not the Jews, were the true Hebrews.
The oldest records in Aramaic were found at Sindjirli, in the north of Syria, in 1890, and date to about 800 B.C. At this epoch the Aramaic alphabet, or at any rate the alphabet of these records, is but little different from that shown upon the Moabite stone. Either two sounds are confused under one symbol, or these records represent a dialect which, like Hebrew and Aramaic.Assyrian, shows sh, z, and ç, where the ordinary Aramaic representation is ṭ, d and ṭ the Arabic tḥ, dh, and ṭh. The Aramaic became in time by far the most important of the northern Semitic alphabets. Even while long and important documents in Assyria were still written on clay tablets, in cuneiform, a docket or précis of the contents was made upon the side in Aramaic, which thus became the alphabet of cursive writing—a fact which explains its later development. Two changes, the inception of which is early, but the completion of which belongs to the Persian period, gave the impulse which Aramaic obeyed in all its later developments. These were (a) the opening of the heads of letters, so that beth 
, daleth 
, and resh 
become respectively 
, and 
, while 𐤏 becomes first U and ultimately V. In the later development the heads tend to be reduced in size, and finally to disappear. (b) As was natural in cursive writing, angles tend to become rounded, and the tails of the letters, which in, Phoenician are very long are curved round in the middle of words so as to join on to the succeeding letter. These characteristics were naturally emphasized in the Aramaic writing on papyrus which, beginning about 500 B.C., during the Persian sovereignty in Egypt, lasted on there till about 200 B.C. The gradual development of this script into the square Hebrew, and the more ornamental writing of Palmyra, may be traced in the works of Berger and Lidzbarski.[1]
In the land of the Nabataeans, a people of Arabian origin, the Aramaic alphabet was employed in a form which ultimately developed into the modern Arabic alphabet. Probably the earliest example of the Aramaic script in Arabia is the stele of Tema, in north-western Arabia, whereon is commemorated the establishment of a worship of an Aramaic divinity. This Arabic.monument, now in the Louvre, is not later than the 5th century B.C. In it the writing preserves its ancient form, the heads of the closed letters being only very slightly opened. The Nabataean inscriptions belong to a different epoch and a different style. They were first discovered by Charles Doughty in 1876–1877, who was followed between 1880 and 1884 by Huber and Euting, to whom a complete collection of these records is due. The records are fortunately dated, and belong to the period from 9 B.C. to A.D. 75. A further development can be traced in the graffiti with which pilgrims adorned the rocks of Mount Sinai down to the 2nd or 3rd century A.D. By the help of these inscriptions it is possible to trace the development of the modern Arabic where so many of the forms of the letters have become similar that diacritic points are essential to distinguish them, the original causes of confusion being the continuous development of cursive writing and the adoption of ligatures. Arabic writing, as known to us from documents of the early Mahommedan period, exhibits two principal types which are known respectively as the Cufic and the nashki. The former soon fell into disuse for ordinary purposes and was retained only for inscriptions, coins, &c.; the latter, which is more cursive in character, is the parent of the Arabic writing of the present day. Another form of the Aramaic alphabet, namely, the so-called Estrangela writing which was in use amongst the Christians of northern Syria, was carried by Nestorian missionaries into Central Asia and became the ancestor of a multitude of alphabets spreading through the Turkomans as far east as Manchuria.
There still remains a branch of the Semitic languages which, except for one or two of the languages belonging to it, was practically unknown till recent years. This is the South Semitic. Till the 19th century the earliest form known of this alphabet was the Ethiopian or Geez, in which Christian documents have been preserved from the early centuries of our era, South Semitic.and which is still used by the Abyssinians for liturgical purposes. The travels of two English naval officers, Wellsted and Cruttenden, through Yemen in southern Arabia in 1835, first called attention to the earlier monuments of Arabia. Fulgence Fresnel first established the importance of the inscriptions discovered by these Englishmen, and in 1843, when French consul at Jeddah, obtained through a French traveller, François Arnaud, information about other monuments of the same kind. In 1869 Joseph Halevy brought back nearly seven hundred inscriptions from Yemen, and this number has been increased from other quarters by several thousands, through the energy of several adventurous scholars, but chiefly by Eduard Glaser’s repeated journeys. The south Arabian inscriptions to which the terms Himyaritic and Sabaean are applied fall into two groups, the Sabaean proper and the Minaean. These are distinguished by differences in grammar and phraseology rather than in alphabet. The relative age of the Minaean and Sabaean monuments is a matter of dispute amongst Semitic scholars. Inscriptions in a kindred dialect were brought from El-Ola, in the north of the Hedjaz, by Professor Euting. To these D. H. Müller[2] gave the title of Lihyanite, from the name of the tribe (Liḥjān) to which they belong. Their date is supposed to be earlier than that of the Sabaean and Minaean. Minaean inscriptions were found at the same place, the Minaeans having had a trading station there. In 1893 J. Theodore Bent copied carefully at Yeha in Abyssinia a few inscriptions, some of which had been already copied in 1814 by the English traveller Salt. These inscriptions are of the greatest importance, because they demonstrate, according to D. H. Müller,[3] that the Sabaeans had colonized Abyssinia as early as 1000 B.C. Other inscriptions copied by Bent at Aksum belong to the 4th century A.D. and later. Two of the earliest are written in Sabaean characters, but in the language which is known as Geez or Ethiopic. From about A.D. 500 Ethiopic was written in an alphabet which according to Müller was no gradual growth but an ingenious device of a Greek scholar of this period at the court of Abyssinia. The Sabaean, like other Semitic, inscriptions are generally written from right to left, but a few are βουστροφηδόν; the Ethiopic is written from left to right, and makes a marked advance upon the ordinary Semitic manner of writing by indicating the vowels. This is done by varying the form of the consonant according to the vowel which follows it. The Ethiopic system is thus rather a syllabary than an alphabet. It is noticeable that the changes thus established were made upon the basis of the old Sabaean script, which in its oldest form is evidently closely related to the old Phoenician, though it would be premature to say that the Sabaean alphabet is derived from the Phoenician. It is as likely, considering the date of both, that they are equally descendants from an older source. The characteristics of the Sabaean are great squareness and boldness in outline. It has twenty-nine symbols, whereby it is enabled to differentiate certain sounds which are not distinguished from one another in the writing of the northern Semites. As we have seen, it is a tendency in northern Semitic to open the heads of letters, and therefore it is possible that the Sabaean form for Jod 𐩺 may be older[4] than the Phoenician 
. Similarly if Pē means mouth, Hommel is right in contending that the Sabaean 𐩰 is more like the object than the Phoenician 
, if we suppose the form, like 𐩦 or the Phoenician 𐤔 and 𐩣 for the Phoenician 𐤌 turned through an angle of 90°. So also if Kaf corresponds to the Babylonian Kappu, “hollow-hand,” the Sabaean form 𐩫 which Hommel[5] interprets as the outline of the hand with the fingers turned in and the thumb raised is a better pictograph than the various meaningless forms of k (𐤊, &c.).
The rock inscriptions in the wild district of Safah near Damascus which have been collected by Halévy are also written in an Arabic dialect, but, owing chiefly to their careless execution, they are to a large extent unintelligible. The character appears to be akin to the Sabaean. It has been suggested that they were the work of Arabs who had wandered thus far from the south.
There still remain for discussion the alphabets of the Indo-European peoples of Persia and India from which the other alphabets of the Farther East are descended. When Darius in 516 B.C. caused the great Behistun inscription to be engraved, it was the cuneiform writing, already long in use for the languages of Mesopotamia, that was adopted for this purpose. We have seen that Persia.at Babylon itself the Aramaic language and character were well known. It is probable therefore, a priori, that from the Aramaic alphabet the later writing of Persia should be developed. The conclusion is confirmed by the coins, the only records with Iranian script which go back so far; but the special form of Aramaic from which the Iranian alphabet is derived must at present be left undecided. The later developments of the Iranian alphabet are the Pahlavi and the Zend, in which the MSS. of the Avesta are written. Of these manuscripts none is older than the 15th century A.D. The Pahlavi is properly the alphabet of the Sassanid kings who ruled in Persia from A.D. 226 till the Arab conquest in the 7th century A.D. Under the Sassanids the old Persian worship, which had fallen with the Achaemenid dynasty in Alexander’s time, and
- ↑ See Berger’s Histoire de l’écriture dans l’antiquité, p. 252 ff.; Nordsemitische Epigraphik, p. 186 ff., from whom this summary is taken. Lidzbarski’s second volume and G. A. Cooke’s Textbook of North-Semitic Inscriptions (Oxford, 1903) contain the most convenient collections of Northern Semitic inscriptions for the student’s purposes.
- ↑ Müller, Epigraphische Denkmäler aus Arabien (Vienna, 1889).
- ↑ Epigraphische Denkmäler aus Abessinien (Vienna, 1894). Praetorius (Z.D.M.G. lviii. p. 724) holds that the oldest Sabaean inscriptions may date from about 700 B.C., that the Lihyan inscriptions are at earliest of the Hellenistic period and the Safa inscriptions still later.
- ↑ Praetorius (Z.D.M.G. lviii. p. 461 f.) attempts to trace the development of the Sabaean form from the Phoenician.
- ↑ Hommel, Süd-arabische Chrestomathie (Munich, 1893), p. 5.
