U+10840 "𐡀" Imperial Aramaic Letter Aleph Unicode Character

U+10840 "𐡀" Imperial Aramaic Letter Aleph is the first letter of the Imperial Aramaic script, an ancient abjad used primarily from the 7th century BCE to the 3rd century CE for administrative and religious texts across the Achaemenid Persian Empire. As the initial character of the alphabet, it denotes the glottal stop consonant sound and is represented by a glyph that resembles a stylized "X" or angled cross, derived from earlier Phoenician forms. This letter holds historical significance because Imperial Aramaic served as a lingua franca for much of the Near East, influencing later scripts including Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac, making U+10840 a key piece for encoding ancient Semitic writing systems in digital text.