In the remaining pages the course of the history of the Phœnician alphabet, as we may for convenience still call it, must now be outlined, and for this purpose the following table, an abstract of that given in Canon Isaac Taylor's _History of the Alphabet_ (i. 81), is a convenient guide. The several alphabets, it will be seen, are grouped under three principal heads: (_a_) ARAMEAN, whence most of the alphabets of Western Asia are derived; (_b_) SABÆAN, the source of the alphabets of India; and (_c_) HELLENIC, the source of the alphabets of Europe. /---------------------------- Phœnician. ---------------------------\ /------------------ Sabæan. ------------\ /---------- Indian. -----------\ Hellenic. Dravidian. Nagari. Pali. Ethiopic. Aramean. Greek. Tamil. Tibetan. Burmese. Amharic. Hebrew. Latin. Telugu. Kashmiri. Siamese. Syriac. Russian. Canarese. Gujarati. Javanese. Mongolian. Coptic. Marathi. Singalese. Arabic. Bengali. Corean. Pehlevi. Malayan. Armenian. Georgian. (_a_) ARAMEAN, so called from "Aram," the hilly district of Mesopotamia, became, from the seventh century B.C., the commercial script of Asia, Aram lying in the line of trade between Egypt and Babylonia. Later on that script was used for official purposes at the Babylonian court, and "ultimately broke up into a number of national alphabets, for which, owing to religious causes, a separate existence became possible. The later alphabets--Parsi, Hebrew, Syriac, Mongolian, and Arabic--were at first local varieties of the Aramean. Owing to accidental circumstances they became the sacred scripts of the five great faiths of Asia--Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Northern Buddhism, and Islam. Hence the descendants of the Aramean alphabet occupy a space on the map second only to that filled by the Latin alphabet itself." (Taylor, i. 249.) They are, as indicated in the table: (1) the _Hebrew_, in whose modern square characters copies of the Scriptures in that language are printed, and the rolls of the Law inscribed; (2) the _Syriac_, once an important script of Christian literature, but now only in use among some obscure sects; (3) the _Mongolian_, which has a curious history, narrated at length in Canon Taylor's volumes (i. pp. 297-312). It is derived from the Syriac, which was carried by Nestorian missionaries throughout Asia. Condemned by the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D. for certain heresies concerning the dual nature of Christ, these Nestorians fled to Persia, and thence travelling eastward, preached their gospel with such success that the alphabet in which it was written became the dominant script until its supersession by Arabic on the spread of Mohammedanism.