Official Aramaic and the Achaemenid Chancellery

chapter 4 Official Aramaic and the Achaemenid Chancellery

Linguistic diversity in seventh- and sixth-century b.c.e. Aramaic results from geographical, chronological, and social variation. This is the background against with Achaemenid Official Aramaic has to be placed. The somewhat extensive debate concerning the origin of the Aḥiqar proverbs (see Section 3.4), which acts as a case study for what can currently be said about coexisting local forms of the language during the late Old Aramaic period, shows that attempts at delineating dialect boundaries still generally rest on very few and ambigu- ous grammatical traits. It is nonetheless likely that certain allomorphs first attested in the seventh century have a basis in regional variation. Divergences in orthography may further point to distinct scribal schools. Some Aramaic varieties or spelling traditions seem to be closer to the ninth- and eighth-century material, while others exhibit either linguistic innovations or by-forms that were not formerly attested in the written languages. In addi- tion, official and private documents reflect separate registers, as the former would be closer to formal and the latter to spoken language. The amount of diversity in the written evidence is therefore indicative not only of coexisting regional vernaculars, but also of different scribal idioms. Aramaic thus spread in Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian administration without betraying any traces of standardization or other effects of conscious language planning. The situation changed markedly with the rise of the Achaemenid empire (ca. 550–330 b.c.e.). Its chancellery continued the by then deeply-entrenched use of Aramaic in local and provincial administration when the Persians under Cyrus the Great took over from the Babylonians, but the Achaemenid func- tionaries thoroughly reformed and streamlined bureaucratic procedures under Darius I (ca. 550–486 b.c.e.) and his successor Xerxes (519–465 b.c.e.).496 The measures taken apparently resulted in a greater unification of protocols as well as the format of the respective documents and, consequently, of scribal training throughout the imperial territory. This, in turn, left its mark in a sig- nificantly higher linguistic homogeneity of Aramaic written material after ca. 500 b.c.e. until the end of Persian authority: it caused a reduction of optional variation in the language (see Section 4.1.2 below) and a likewise by and large uniform script from which most of the later Aramaic alphabets then branched off. Many dated texts, the earliest from 495 b.c.e. (tad B5.1), provide a

496 Briant 2002: 507–511.

158 chapter 4 reasonably reliable diachronic framework for assessing linguistic differences as opposed to earlier and later stages. A number of distinctive traits in spelling and grammar in this material constitute the rationale for singling out the Persian chancellery language, here termed “Achaemenid Official Aramaic,” from the preceding varieties and thus for positing a new phase of the Aramaic language after the seventh and sixth centuries. It is this language to which the term Reichsaramäisch, coined by Joseph Markwart in 1927 in a footnote whose impact outlived the article in which in was placed, originally referred.497 Since the discoveries at Elephantine at the beginning of the twentieth century had brought to light a considerable amount of Aramaic material from the Persian period, while only a handful of dockets and epigraphs from Neo- Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian times were then known, Reichsaramäisch unambiguously referred to the Achaemenid Reich when the term was first employed. Yet subsequent findings further emphasized the growing role Aramaic played already in the administration of the preceding empires. As a consequence, especially the corresponding English calque “Imperial Aramaic,” later also “Official Aramaic,”498 was soon extended to the beginnings of Aramaic as an official global language in Neo-Assyrian bureaucracy as opposed to its use as a basically regional idiom of Syria; hence it is now mostly applied to the function of Aramaic in the Assyrian, the Babylonian, and the Persian empires.499 However, “Imperial Aramaic” as a broader sociolinguistic category according to current majority nomenclature does not sufficiently account for the clear orthographic and grammatical peculiarities that distinguish the Aramaic vari- ety propagated by the Achaemenid chancellery from its functional predeces- sors which do not exhibit such distinctive traits. The vague notion “Imperial Aramaic” will therefore be avoided here, whereas “Achaemenid Official Aramaic” will be treated as a more narrowly-defined form of the language. A periodization of Aramaic based on linguistic features rather than on functional roles and general historical circumstances would thus have to separate the Achaemenid lingua franca from the earlier “late Old Aramaic” phase and view the former’s appearance as the beginning of a new developmental stage.500

497 Markwart 1927: 91 n. 1. 498 Following Ginsberg 1933: 3. 499 So already Ginsberg 1933: 3. The same terminology underlies Fitzmyer’s widespread periodization of Aramaic, where the “Imperial Aramaic” stage succeeds the “Old Aramaic” one around 700 b.c.e.: Fitzmyer 32004: 30 (originally 11966: 19 n. 60; cf. Section 1.3.1); Kutscher 1971; Hoftijzer – Jongeling 1995: xii–xiii. 500 So Beyer 1984: 28–33 and 1986: 14–19; Gzella 2004: 35–36, 2008a, and 2011b: 574–575.