Imperial Aramaic

Script of the ancient Near East's international lingua franca. Used from the 8th century BC across the Achaemenid Persian Empire from Egypt to India. Believed to be the actual language Jesus spoke, with Biblical Aramaic passages surviving in this script. The common ancestor of Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and Nabataean scripts — the root of today's Middle Eastern writing systems. Modern Assyrian Christians still use it for Neo-Aramaic (Assyrian).