VVELLIHOPEVVEVVILL... ahem... Well, I hope we will count ancient Roman as Latin script rather than add to Unicode yet another new script which is almost identical to an existing one. But then it would make more sense than proposals to add new scripts or partial scripts for biblical Hebrew and for Aramaic, for at least ancient Roman inscriptions can be distinguished from nearly all modern texts by being in a different language.
Nope. The Aramaic ranged far beyond the middle east and itself -- not Hebrew -- was the forerunner of Syriac, Manichaean, Sogdian, Mandaean, Parthian, Avestan, Pahlavi, and other scripts.
But the existing Hebrew characters in Unicode are already in use for biblical Hebrew texts, as well as for what are probably the majority of surviving examples of ancient Aramaic which is not Syriac - the Aramaic portions of the Hebrew Bible, and presumably also the Aramaic parts of the Talmud and other ancient Jewish writings.
Aramaic is not only attested in Biblical texts. From Daniels & Bright: "Aramaic was the lingua franca of Southwest Asia from early in the first millennium BCE until the Arab Conquest in the mid seventh century CE."
Otherwise we end up with a new script for a few ancient inscriptions which are only slightly different in glyph shapes and repertoire and in language from an extensive corpus in an existing Unicode block.
We need to do further research on the subject, but it seems to me that Late Aramaic is still a candidate for encoding.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
