any present-day Hebrew reader. The ninth century saw the dawn of a new era of the so-called ‘Oriental’ script. This script was developed in the Levant, Egypt, and Babylon. It is well-documented in the manuscripts found in the Cairo Geniza (a storehouse that contained many thousands of Jewish manuscripts and fragments of writing). These manuscripts introduced letterforms by scribal artists. They were re- fined, homogeneous, and balanced. Hori- zontal stresses emerged for the first time. The dense, embroidery-like texture of these Hebraic texts showcased narrow let- terforms and extremely narrow spaces be- tween words. The Middle Ages brought two main in- fluential Hebrew script styles: the Ashke- nazic and the Sephardic. Both evolved from the Oriental script and are similar to to- day’s ‘square’ text faces. The Hebrew Ash- kenazic style developed in Germany and Northeastern France from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Jewish scribes used the quill as their writing tool and were in- fluenced by Gothic Latin. The script fea- tured extreme contrasts between thicks and thins (the contrast between width of the strokes that make up a letterform), heavy downward strokes, and lighter hori- zontal strokes. The Sephardic style was de- veloped and used in the Iberian Peninsu- la for three hundred years until the expul- sion of Spanish Jewry at the end of the fif- teenth century. This manuscript style was less frilly than its Ashkenazic counterpart, narrower, and reduced to the letter’s essen- tial parts. Sephardic Jewish scribes’ use of a pointed reed, popular among scribes of the region, created lettersforms with less con- trasting thicks and thins. Lastly, the Sep- hardic style showed some reminiscence of Arabic calligraphy with its typical flowing rounded curves. Within both of these scripts, three styles TOP, Fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The script is Aramaic ‘square’ style which is the same writing sys- tem one would recognize as written Hebrew today. MIDDLE LEFT, Sample biblical text in the original He- brew (top) and the same text in the Aramaic version of the script from 500 BCE (middle), and the same script as it appeared at the start of the Common Era (bottom). MIDDLE RIGHT, the Gezer tablet is one of the oldest known examples of Hebrew writing, dating to the 10th century BCE.
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