Palmyrene Alphabet Table
| Sign | Kind | Name | Transliteration | Sound |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 𐡠 | letter | Aleph | ʳ (or silent) | [ʔ] or silent |
| 𐡡 | letter | Beth | b / b-soft | hard [b], soft [v] or [w] |
| 𐡢 | letter | Gimel | g / g-soft | hard [ɡ], soft [γ] |
| 𐡣 | letter | Daleth | d / d-soft | hard [d], soft [ð] |
| 𐡤 | letter | He | h | [h] |
| 𐡥 | letter | Waw | w / u-mater | consonant [w]; vowel-carrier [u] |
| 𐡦 | letter | Zayin | z | [z] |
| 𐡧 | letter | Heth | h-dot | [ħ], [x], or [χ] |
| 𐡨 | letter | Teth | t-dot | [tˌ] |
| 𐡩 | letter | Yodh | y / i-mater | consonant [j]; vowel-carrier [i] |
| 𐡪 | letter | Kaph | k / k-soft | hard [k], soft [x] |
| 𐡫 | letter | Lamedh | l | [l] |
| 𐡬 | letter | Mem | m | [m] |
| 𐡭 | letter | Final Nun | n (final form) | [n] — word-final shape |
| 𐡮 | letter | Nun | n | [n] |
| 𐡯 | letter | Samekh | s | [s] |
| 𐡰 | letter | Ayin | ʹ | [ʔ] |
| 𐡱 | letter | Pe | p / p-soft | hard [p], soft [f] |
| 𐡲 | letter | Sadhe | s-dot | [sˌ] |
| 𐡳 | letter | Qoph | q | [q] |
| 𐡴 | letter | Resh | r | [r] |
| 𐡵 | letter | Shin | sh | [ʃ] |
| 𐡶 | letter | Taw | t / t-soft | hard [t], soft [θ] |
| 𐡷 | fleuron | Left-Pointing Fleuron | — | decorative flower sign near numbers |
| 𐡸 | fleuron | Right-Pointing Fleuron | — | decorative flower sign near numbers |
| 𐡹 | number | Number One | one | non-positional system |
| 𐡺 | number | Number Two | two | non-positional system |
| 𐡻 | number | Number Three | three | non-positional system |
| 𐡼 | number | Number Four | four | non-positional system |
| 𐡽 | number | Number Five | five | non-positional system |
| 𐡾 | number | Number Ten | ten | non-positional system |
| 𐡿 | number | Number Twenty | twenty | non-positional system |
The Palmyrene alphabet is the script of Palmyra, the caravan metropolis of the Syrian desert, used from about 100 BCE to 300 CE to write Palmyrene Aramaic. It is known from more than 3,000 inscriptions - temple dedications, honorific statues, and above all the city’s distinctive funerary busts and tower tombs - from the oldest surviving text (44 BCE) to the last (274 CE, two years after Emperor Aurelian sacked Palmyra and ended Zenobia’s short-lived Palmyrene Empire). The script derives from cursive Aramaic and comes in two faces: a rounded everyday hand and a decorative monumental form, both fond of ligatures. Its texts normally run with no spaces or punctuation at all - scriptio continua - and its numbers build from seven non-positional signs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 and 20), all on this chart.
The chart lists the complete Unicode block (U+10860, version 7.0): 23 letters with the scholars’ transliterations - including the hard/soft pairs that mark Aramaic’s consonant splits (b/v, d/dh, k/kh, p/f, t/th) - two fleurons (decorative flowers that hover near numbers), and the number signs. Palmyrene also owns one of decipherment’s best stories: accurate copies of the city’s Palmyrene-Greek bilingual inscriptions only became available in 1753, and in 1754 the Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy cracked the alphabet “literally overnight” - one of the fastest decipherments on record, possible because the bilinguals did the crossword for him.
How to use
- Read the table by kind. The 23 letter rows give the transliteration and reconstructed sounds; note the vowel-carrier rows (waw for u, yodh for i, aleph often silent or a-glottal) - Palmyrene is an abjad, so long vowels ride on consonant letters while short vowels go unwritten. The dotted letters (h-dot, t-dot, s-dot) spell the Aramaic emphatic consonants that Hebrew and Arabic still keep as separate letters. The two fleuron rows are pure decoration (they cluster around numbers), and the seven number rows build values additively: three-sign plus ten-sign reads 13.
- Practice on the city’s signature genre: the funerary busts. Thousands of limestone portrait busts from Palmyra’s tower tombs carry short Palmyrene inscriptions naming the deceased - a name, a patronymic, sometimes an endearment - and published examples with translations are easy to find. Take one transliteration, match it letter by letter against this chart, and remember the two parsing rules: no spaces between words, and watch the r/d pair (in some styles resh is just dalesh with a dot above).
- Then place the script in its family and fate. Palmyrene is the sibling of the Nabataean alphabet of Petra - both Aramaic children of the desert trade routes - but where Nabataean’s cursive grew into the Arabic alphabet, Palmyrene died with its city: after Aurelian’s sack of 272-273 CE, Greek and Latin took over, and the script survives only in stone. Read the last inscriptions on this chart as an epitaph in both senses - and compare the sibling charts on this site to see two different futures for the same Aramaic inheritance.
Frequently asked questions
Who deciphered the Palmyrene alphabet?
The Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, in 1754 - and fast. Palmyrene examples had been printed in Europe since 1616, but accurate copies of Palmyrene-Greek bilingual inscriptions only appeared in 1753 (from Robert Wood’s ruins-of-Palmyra project). Working from those bilinguals, Barthélemy deciphered the alphabet “literally overnight” - the bilingual texts let him match known Greek names to unknown Palmyrene signs, and he went on to crack Palmyrene numbers and, later, Phoenician.
Why do some letters have two sounds?
They carry the Aramaic consonant splits. Over the first millennium BCE, several Semitic consonants split into hard and soft pronunciations (b/v, g/gh, d/dh, k/kh, p/f, t/th), and the alphabet kept one letter for both, which scholars transliterate with an underdot for the soft member. The three dotted letters on this chart (h-dot, t-dot, s-dot) are separate letters for the old emphatic consonants - sounds Arabic and Hebrew still write as distinct letters today.
What are the fleurons?
Two decorative flower signs - left-pointing and right-pointing - that tend to appear near numbers in inscriptions, probably as separators or ornaments in dating formulas. They are a Palmyrene signature: few alphabets encode pure decorations, but Palmyrene dated its inscriptions so consistently that the flowers earned their own codepoints. On this chart they sit between the letters and the number rows.
How do Palmyrene numbers work?
Additively and non-positionally: signs for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 and 20 combine to build any value up to their inscribed range - a three plus a ten reads 13, two tens a five and a one reads 26 - with the fleurons often framing the group. It is the same logic as the Aramaic number system (which also had signs for 100 and beyond), and unlike the place-value systems of India, order does not matter, only the total.
What happened to Palmyrene after 274 CE?
The city fell, and the script fell with it. Aurelian’s sack (272-273 CE) ended the Palmyrene Empire of Queen Zenobia; the last surviving Palmyrene inscription dates to 274 CE, and Greek and Latin - already the languages of administration - replaced the local script entirely. Palmyrene thus has the cleanest boundaries of any Aramaic relative on this site: a 400-year run from 100 BCE, a few thousand stone inscriptions, and a decipherment so fast (1754, overnight) that it feels like the script was only waiting for better photographs.