including the stone base of the pillars supporting the main structure of the ancient Friday Mosque in Malé. British researcher H. C. P. Bell obtained an astrology book written in Divehi Akuru in Addu Atoll, in the south of Maldives, during one of his trips. This book is now kept in the National Archives of Sri Lanka in Colombo. The modern script Thaana is the first Dhivehi script written from right to left. It was inspired by numbers. It uses numerals as consonants and adds the diacritical (vowel) marks of the Arabic language. The first Thaana manuscripts are written in a crude early version of this script, where the Arabic numerals have not yet been slanted 45 degrees and still looked like numbers. The oldest inscription in Thaana dates from 1599. The main reason why the Divehi Akuru were abandoned in favour of the Thaana script was owing to the need the learned Maldivians had to include words and sentences in Arabic while writing in the Dhivehi language. The most intriguing fact about the Thaana alphabet is its order (hā, shaviyani, nūnu, rā, bā, etc.). Its sequence does not follow the ancient order of the other Indic scripts (like Sinhala or Tamil) or the order of the Arabic alphabet. This points to a likely esoteric origin of Thaana, namely to a script that was scrambled on purpose in order to keep it secret from average islanders. At their origin the Thaana characters, which are based on Arabic and Dives Akuru numerals, were used in fanditha (local magic or sorcery) to write magical spells. Many of these arcane incantations included Arabic quotations from the Qur'an, which were written from right to left. This script is currently in use as the only Dhivehi writing system. While at their origin documents written in Thaana were full of Arabic words and quotations, the tendency is now to include as little Arabic script as possible, especially since special Thaana letters () with dots were introduced to replace Arabic letters. The Thaana script is widely used nowadays by Maldivians both in official and unofficial documents. Abolishment of the letter ṇaviyani The letter ṇaviyani (), representing the retroflex nasal , was abolished from official documents in 1950 by Mohamed Ameen, the president of Maldives. The former position of the letter Naviyani in the Thaana alphabet was nineteenth, between letters Daviyani and Zaviyani. It is still seen in