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Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
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Wilmington, North Carolina once had a thriving Black middle class and an elected interracial government. In 1898 white supremacists used violence to overthrow that government, kill Black residents and drive many others from the city.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
Aramaic square script is the 22-letter consonantal alphabet script, or an abjad, that developed during the rule of the Achaemenid empire to write the Aramaic language. It is loosely called "square" because its letters can be fit into the shape of a square (rather than rectangle, etc).[1]
The earliest known examples of square script are the Elephantine Papyri and Ostraca, a cache of Jewish and non-Jewish documents from the 5th to 4th centuries BCE. By the first centuries CE, Jews had begun to use square script or "ktav Ashuri" (Assyrian script) for all purposes, in both Hebrew and Aramaic. It is still the main script used for Modern Hebrew and other Jewish languages,[2][3] and also survives in the square Maalouli alphabet used for Western Neo-Aramaic.[4]
The Neo-Assyrian empire adopted use of the Aramaic language and early Aramaic script alongside their native Akkadian language after conquering the Aramaean city-states and kingdoms in the 9th and 8th centuries BC.[5] The (non-square) script then used was simpler than their own cuneiform script, and first adopted in the provinces where Aramaic was widely spoken and then eventually in Assyria itself.[6] Aramaic "square script", so called because the letters fit into the shape of a square, is first known from the Elephantine papyri.[7]
The Hebrew Bible was originally written using the Phoenician alphabet script (also known as Paleo-Hebrew).[8][2] Possibly as early as the late Persian or the Hellenistic Period, Jewish scribes began using square script to write Hebrew,[9][10][11] and this practice was in widespread use by the 3rd century BCE.[12] Some scholars attribute this shift to the influence of the Babylonian exile where Aramaic was also the language of daily life.[13][14]
The Talmud refers to square script as k'tav ashuri ("Assyrian script"),[15][16] distinguishing it from Phoenician/Paleo-Hebrew script Ktav 'Ivri ("Hebrew script").[15]
Today, only the Samaritans continue to use a form of Phoenician/Paleo-Hebrew for their written language.[15]
Study of the early development of the square Aramaic script (and its Hebrew counterpart), is important to categorizing, analyzing and dating the many thousands of Aramaic and Hebrew inscriptions made in the Middle Aramaic period, including those of the Dead Sea Scrolls.[17] There is a great deal of debate among paleographists over the terminology and typologies to be used in classifying the various texts that is complicated by the lack of definitively dated texts outside of this corpus from the late Hellenistic to early Roman periods.[18]
Almost all of the Dead Sea Scrolls are written in square script, including both Hebrew and Aramaic texts. However, several Hebrew manuscripts use Paleo-Hebrew for the Tetragrammaton, and one Aramaic manuscript (4Q243) uses Paleo-Hebrew for "Elohekha".[19]
Jewish Babylonian Aramaic and Mandaic differ only in script: Jewish Babylonian Aramaic uses square script.[20]
Immanuel Tremellius' 16th-century edition of the Peshitta used square script,[21] as did Chaim Heller's 1927-1929 edition.
Square script was used to inscribe incantation bowls in various languages, and while many of these clearly reflect a Jewish religious or cultural milieu, there are several that do not.[22] Some are written in an Aramaic koine language with in some cases a Mandaic context and prototype.[23][24] Several others use Aramaic square script for expression in Standard Literary Babylonian Aramaic, and display remarkable syncretism, with closing formula banning "the evil elements in the name of your God Sadday, YHWH, Jesus, Ruha Qaddista".[25] Ruha Qaddista is a feminized form for the Holy Spirit, reflecting the early Eastern churches transmission of Mesopotamian legacies which used qadistu as an epitaph of the goddess Ishtar.[25]
Several other alphabets were born out of Imperial Aramaic that resemble the Aramaic square script, yet exhibit differences in the letter shapes tending towards being more rounded or cursive. Among these are Hatran Aramaic, Palmyrene Aramaic and Nabataean Aramaic.[5]
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Aramaic square script is the 22-letter consonantal alphabet script, or an abjad, that developed during the rule of the Achaemenid empire to write the Aramaic language. It is loosely called "square" because its letters can be fit into the shape of a square (rather than rectangle, etc). The earliest known examples of square script are the Elephantine Papyri and Ostraca, a cache of Jewish and non-Jewish documents from the 5th to 4th centuries BCE. By the first centuries CE, Jews had begun to use square script or "ktav Ashuri" (Assyrian script) for all purposes, in both Hebrew and Aramaic. It is still the main script used for Modern Hebrew and other Jewish languages, and also survives in the square Maalouli alphabet used for Western Neo-Aramaic.
The ancient Aramaic alphabet was used to write the Aramaic languages spoken by ancient Aramean pre-Christian peoples 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 the Assyrians and Babylonians 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, which they call "Ktav Ashuri", 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. Writing systems, like the Aramaic, that indicate consonants but do not indicate most vowels other than by means of matres lectionis or added diacritical signs, have been called abjads by Peter T. Daniels to distinguish them from alphabets such as the Greek alphabet, that represent vowels more systematically. The term was coined to avoid the notion that a writing system that represents sounds must be either a syllabary or an alphabet, which would imply that a system like Aramaic must be either a syllabary, as argued by Ignace Gelb, or an incomplete or deficient alphabet, as most other writers had said before Daniels. Daniels put forward that this is a different type of writing system, intermediate between syllabaries and 'full' alphabets. 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 Empire and Neo-Babylonian Empire, and their successor, the Achaemenid Empire. Among the descendant scripts in modern use, the Jewish Hebrew alphabet bears the closest relation to the Imperial Aramaic script of the 5th century BC, with an identical letter inventory and, for the most part, nearly identical letter shapes. By contrast the Samaritan Hebrew script is directly descended from Proto-Hebrew/Phoenician script, which was the ancestor of the Aramaic alphabet. The Aramaic alphabet was also an ancestor to the Syriac alphabet, Mongolian script, Kharosthi, and Brahmi, and the Nabataean alphabet, which is ancestral to the Arabic alphabet.
The Samaritan Hebrew script, or simply Samaritan script, is the alphabet used by the Samaritans for their religious and liturgical writings. It serves as the script of the Samaritan Pentateuch, of texts in Samaritan Hebrew, and of commentaries and translations in Samaritan Aramaic and occasionally Arabic. Historically, the Samaritan script is a direct descendant of the paleo-Hebrew alphabet, the script in which much of the Hebrew Bible was originally written and which was used by the people of Israel and Judah during the Iron Age. In classical antiquity, the better-known "square" Hebrew alphabet—a stylized form of the Aramaic script known as Ashurit (אשורי, “Assyrian”)—came into use and, from the period of the Babylonian exile onward, became the standard script of Jewish writing. Paleo-Hebrew letter forms, however, continued to appear on Jewish coinage and in certain sacred contexts, while both paleo-Hebrew and Aramaic scripts are attested among the Samaritans in this period. The precise date of the Samaritan script's emergence is debated. Some scholars have argued that it diverged from paleo-Hebrew in the late Hasmonean or early Roman period. More recent epigraphic and archaeological research, however, indicates that the script was developed in the 4th century CE. Inscriptions, mosaic texts, and inscribed pottery lamps attest to its use from Late Antiquity onward.
Pahlavi is an exclusively written form of various Middle Iranian languages, derived from the Aramaic script. It features Aramaic words used as heterograms (called huzwārišn, "archaisms"). Pahlavi compositions have been found for the dialects/ethnolects of Parthia, Persis, Sogdiana, Scythia, and Khotan. Independent of the variant for which the Pahlavi system was used, the written form of that language only qualifies as Pahlavi when it is both Aramaic-derived and features huzwārišn. Pahlavi is then an admixture of: written Imperial Aramaic, from which Pahlavi derives its script, logograms, and some of its vocabulary. spoken Middle Iranian, from which Pahlavi derives its terminations, symbol rules, and most of its vocabulary. Pahlavi may thus be defined as a system of writing applied to (but not unique for) a specific language group, but with critical features alien to that language group. It has the characteristics of a distinct language, but is not one. It is an exclusively written system, but much Pahlavi literature remains essentially an oral literature committed to writing and so retains many of the characteristics of oral composition.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →The Greenwood District.
