Aramaic

A sibling of Phoenician, Aramaic became the paperwork of empires — the shared administrative script and language of the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid Persian states, understood from Egypt to the borders of India.

Because it travelled with government rather than trade, its letters seeded a whole eastern family: Hebrew square script, Syriac, the Nabataean hand that became Arabic, and the Sogdian line that runs east to Old Uyghur and Mongolian.

Empires ruled in Aramaic and forgot it; its letters outlived every throne that used them.

Aramaic scribes also began writing certain weak consonants (w, y, h) to hint at long vowels — the matres lectionis, "mothers of reading," the first step toward marking vowels that Hebrew and Arabic would later formalise. The contested onward link to Brahmi is recorded, not resolved in the Hall of Lineages.

Aramaic sat at the centre of the eastern radiation of the alphabet. Its clerks worked from Egypt to the Indus, and wherever a scribe learned the chancery hand, a new script was waiting to be born from it.