The language in greatest use in the empire was Aramaic as belongs to the Afro-Asiatic language family. Aramaic is a part of the Northwest Semitic group of languages, which also includes the Canaanite languages including Hebrew. It is the original language of large sections of the biblical books of Daniel and Ezra, and is the main language of the Talmud. As the language grew in importance, it came to be spoken throughout the Mediterranean coastal area of the Levant, and spread east of the Tigris wich flows from the mountains of Anatolia through Mesopotamia; the land between the rivers.
The earliest Aramaic alphabet was based on the Phoenician script, a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet; a linear, non-Cuneiform abjad of acrophonic glyphs found in Levantine texts of the Late Bronze Age to 1050 BC. Its cities and colonies around the Mediterranean is Byblos (Lebanon) and Carthage, North Africa. The immediate offspring of Phoenician were the old Hebrew alphabet, and Aramaic, as well as Archaic Greek. The Hebrew alphabet was also used by Moabites as well as Israelites. This alphabet, though, eventually disappeared from the mainstream, and survived as the Samaritan script. Originally Aramaic was spoken and written only in the region whose modern name is Syria. However, during the late Assyrian empire, and subsequently during the Babylonian and Persian empires, Aramaic became an international language, written and spoken in Anatolia, the Levantine coast, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Persia. In Israel, it became the Jewish alphabet, the direct descendant of which is the modern Hebrew alphabet. It also became much more cursive as time goes on, such as the Nabatean alphabet, which eventually became Arabic.
In Akko or Acre in Western Galilee, though the Philistines adopted local Canaanite and Amurru cultures, suggested early cultural links with the Mycenaean world in mainland Greece, but it is certainly the Akka of the Amarna letters from the reign of pharaoh Amenhotep IV. Akhenaten's chief wife was Nefertiti. Amenhotep IV introduced Atenism in the first yeare of his reign, raising the previously obscure god Aten (Aton) to the position of supreme deity. The early stage of Atenism appears to be a kind of henotheism familiar in Egyptian religion and considered to be an aspect of the composite deity Ra-Amun-Horus. Amun was identified with Ra, who was also identified with Horus. In a varying myth, Hathor and Ra once argued, and she left Egypt.
Amarna letters, consisting of cuneiform tablets mostly written in Akkadian, the language of diplomacy for this period on Egyptian relations with Babylonia, Assyria, the Mitanni, the Hittites, Syria, Palestine and Cyprus (Alashiya), and his representative in the Canaan region to the ancient Near East. Letters from the Babylonian king Kadashman-Enlil I anchor Akhenaten's reign to the mid-14th century BCE. To the Hebrews it was known as Acre but it is mentioned only once in the Old Testament, namely Judges 1:31, as one of the places from which the Israelites did not drive out the Canaanite inhabitants.
Throughout the period of Hebrew domination connections were always with Syria rather than with the Philistines about 725 B.C. it joined Sidon and Tyre in a revolt against governor Shalmaneser V in Phoenicia. The biblical governor's name in Akkadian cuneiform was Shulmanu-asharid. Ashar is also a place in Israel. It was the capital of the Assyrian Empire during its early years. Asher's daughter, Serach, is the only granddaughter of Jacob mentioned in the Torah.
In theory, Linear A enumerates only examples of Indo-European on a continuum to the Greek alphabet as the latter is unrelated to Linear B and some Phoenician letters are obsolete Greek letters. In fact most alphabets that contain vowels are derived ultimately from Greek, although there are exceptions Hangul, Orkhon script, Ge'ez alphabet, Indic alphabets, and Old Hungarian script. The Orkhon monuments are the oldest known examples of Turkish writings; they are inscribed on obelisks and have been dated to 720 (for the obelisk relating to Tonyukuk), to 732 (for that relating to Kültigin), and to 735 (for that relating to Bilge Kagan). Originally there were several variants of the Greek alphabet, most importantly western (Chalcidian) and eastern (Ionic) Greek; the former gave rise to the Old Italic alphabet and thence to the Latin alphabet. The Phoenician adaptation of the alphabet was extremely successful, and variants were adapted around the Mediterranean from ca. the 9th century, notably giving rise to the Greek, Old Italic, Anatolian and Iberian scripts.