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Old and Imperial Aramaic Old and Imperial Aramaic Margaretha Folmer 1. Introduction The extensive and greatly ramified Aramaic language group has a con- tinuous history from the tenth century bce to the present day, so that Aramaic has the longest documented history of any Semitic language (see Jastrow 2008: 1). Most twentieth-century scholars hold that among the Northwest Semitic languages, Aramaic represents a separate group distinct from Canaanite (which includes, for instance, Hebrew) and Ugaritic. Since the mid 1970s, following Robert Hetzron, the Northwest Semitic languages have been viewed as part of Central Semitic (which also includes Ara- bic). Central Semitic, in turn, is viewed as part of West Semitic (Huehn- ergard 2005). The earliest texts that can safely be identified as Aramaic are texts from the independent Aramaean city-states in Syria and Mes- opotamia (10th–8th c. bce). The use of Aramaic in these petty states is documented through many inscriptions, including treaties and royal, commemorative, and dedicatory inscriptions from Syria (Sefire: KAI 222–224; Afis:KAI 202; Ḥama: KAI 203–213), northern Mesopotamia (Tell Halaf: KAI 231), and northern Palestine (Tell Dan: Biran and Naveh 1993). The lengthy Aramaic-Akkadian bilingual text from Tell Fekheriye (end of the 9th c.; KAI 309) in northern Mesopotamia documents the Aramaic language of a city-state that had been conquered by the Assyrians only recently. It is not surprising, then, that the Aramaic of this inscription is permeated with influences from the Akkadian language. In the course of the eighth century, the expansionist Assyrians be- came acquainted with the Aramaeans and the Aramaic of the city-states. On the basis of this contact, a particular form of Aramaic developed into the lingua franca and administrative language of the Neo-Assyrian em- pire (Gzella 2008; cf. 2 Kgs 18:17–37). This type of Aramaic is well known from the inscription of King Barrakib from Zinçirli in southern Turkey (KAI 216–218), the funeral inscriptions from Nerab in Syria (KAI 225– 226), Aramaic inscriptions on administrative clay tablets from various centers in the Assyrian empire (Fales 1986; Hug 1993), and the famous DOI 10.1515/9781934078631.128, © 2 017 Margaretha Folmer, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. Old and Imperial Aramaic 129 Assur ostracon (KAI 233), which is a letter from an Assyrian high official addressed to an Assyrian colleague. The inscription recently discovered in Bukān, Iran (KAI 320), east of the Neo-Assyrian empire, also belongs to this period (Lemaire 1998; Sokoloff 1999). During theNeo-Babylonian period (626–539), Aramaic continued to be used as a language of interna- tional communication under Chaldaean rulers. In this period it was also the spoken language. The best-known text from this otherwise poorly documented period (as far as Aramaic is concerned; see Hug 1993) is a letter of Adon, king of Ekron, to the Pharaoh (KAI 266). The text was found in Saqqara. The use of Aramaic for all types of written communication reached its zenith in the Achaemenid period (538–331). Aramaic from this period is documented through many documents from Egypt (most of the docu- ments from this period), Palestine, Asia Minor, Babylonia, the Arabian desert, and Iran. The eastern provinces of this empire are not as well documented as the western provinces, but the growing corpus can be complemented with testimonies from the post-Achaemenid period (e.g. the Aramaic inscriptions of King Aśoka from present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the Aramaic heterograms in Middle Persian, from the 1st c. bce onward). This extensive corpus consists of heterogeneous texts. It comprises, for instance, official letters such as the correspondence Arsames,of satrap of Egypt (TAD A6.1–16), and the correspondence concerning the Jewish tem- ple in Elephantine in Upper Egypt (TAD A4.1–10); private letters, on both papyrus (TAD A) and ostraca (TAD D), such as the Hermopolis papyri ([HP] TAD A2.1–7); legal documents (TAD B), most from Elephantine but a few from other places in Egypt and from Palestine; literary texts, such as the proverbs of Aḥiqar (TAD C1.1); a historical text, the Aramaic version of the Bisitun inscription of King Darius I (TAD C2.1); as well as numerous administrative texts, such as the Memphis shipyard journal (TAD C3.7), funerary inscriptions, dedicatory inscriptions, and graffitiTAD ( D). As already indicated, most of these texts come from Egypt and date to the fifth century. The earliest evidence, such as the Hermopolis letters, were written toward the end of the sixth century, and the latest texts, such as the Wadi Daliyeh (near Samaria) legal documents (Gropp 2001) and the ostraca from Idumea (Lemaire 2006), date from the fourth century bce. This variety of Aramaic is often referred to as “Official Aramaic,” but the name does not do full justice to the heterogeneity of the textual material. There is no consensus among scholars on the classification, extent, or even the names assigned to individual Aramaic dialects. This also holds for Old Aramaic (OA) and Imperial Aramaic (IA) – that is, texts written between the tenth century and the end of the Achaemenid period in 331 130 Margaretha Folmer bce. The reasons behind this are the different assumptions that underlie the classification of these dialects by different scholars (chronologically distinct phases of the language, the sociopolitical framework, literary genre, linguistic characteristics, or all of these factors together). There is broad scholarly consensus that the Aramaic of the independent Ara- maean city-states should be called “Old Aramaic.” The Aramaic of the Achaemenid period is commonly referred to as “Imperial Aramaic.” In contrast, there is no consensus on the Aramaic of the regions under Neo- Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian administration. Some scholars consider it a part of OA (Degen 1969 [AG]), others a part of IA (Fitzmyer 1979: “Of- ficial Aramaic”), still others independent corpora (Fales 1986; Hug 1993: “jüngeres Altaramäisch,” referring to the materials from the 7th–6th c.). The end point of IA is much debated as well. The end of the Achaemenid empire is formally marked by the second defeat of Darius III in 331, and for some scholars this also marks the end of IA. Some scholars, how- ever, argue that IA continues until the third century ce (Beyer 1984–2004 [ATTM]: “nachachämenidisches Reichsaramäisch”). This comes from the insight that although with the fall of the Achaemenid empire a central administration ceased to control the Aramaic language and orthogra- phy, the use of Aramaic nevertheless was so profoundly rooted in so- ciety that even in the post-Achaemenid period, Aramaic continued to be used. While the Aramaic language gradually diversified in this period, its basic characteristics echo the Aramaic of the Achaemenid chancer- ies. This is particularly true for Nabataean Aramaic, Palmyrene Aramaic, Hatra Aramaic, and Qumran Aramaic (QA). The Biblical Aramaic (BA) portions of Ezra (4:8–6:18; 7:12–26) also belong to IA. The official documents incorporated into this book (let- ters and a royal decree) are probably based on originals from the Achae- menid period (a different opinion is found in Grabbe 2006). Redactors, however, edited these documents and modernized their orthography. When the Masoretes vocalized these texts in the middle of the first mil- lennium ce, the language of the texts drifted further from the original IA. Even though certain differences exist between the BA of Ezra and the BA of Daniel (2:4b–7:28), the Aramaic language of both books es- sentially reflects the same dialect of Aramaic. Notwithstanding that the final redaction of Daniel took place in the middle of the second century bce, considerably later than Ezra (4th c.), Daniel Aramaic has preserved linguistic features that ultimately go back to the Achaemenid period. On the other hand, the language of some eighth-century inscriptions from Zinçirli (ancient Samʾal, an Aramaean city-state in southern Turkey; KAI 214–215; another text discovered recently has been published by Pardee 2009) and the language of the Deir ʿAlla plaster inscription from Old and Imperial Aramaic 131 Jordan (KAI 312) are difficult to classify as Aramaic at all, let alone to assign to a specific Aramaic dialect. On the one hand, the language of these texts does attest to the common Aramaic innovationsbr ‘son’, ḥd ‘one’, and the 3masc.sg. pronominal suffixw - h (the latter only in theDeir ʿAlla text). On the other hand, these dialects do not provide evidence for the article *-aʾ, the loss of the N-stem, or the feminine ending -ān in verbs and nouns. For a balanced discussion of these innovations, see Huehnergard 1995: 280–281 (with bibliographical references). The language of the texts from Zinçirli and Deir ʿAlla is not included in the following description (see “The Languages of Transjordan,” below, Section 5). 2. The Alphabet Some time in the eleventh or tenth century bce, the Aramaeans adopted the alphabet from the Phoenicians. From the eighth century onward, the letters of the Aramaic alphabet took on their characteristic forms (see the chapter “The Alphabet” above, Section 3.2). During the subsequent Neo- Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Achaemenid administrations, the Ara- maic cursive script was widely distributed but nevertheless remained uniform in character. Only after the collapse of the Achaemenid empire were Aramaic and the Aramaic script able to develop local forms in sev- eral places in the Hellenistic world where they were used, as they were no longer propagated and controlled by a powerful central administration. The Aramaic alphabet contains 22 characters. Their primary func- tion is to indicate consonants. In addition, some of the signs can be used as vowel letters to indicate long vowels (also called matres lectionis).
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