The Spread of Aramaic in the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires

chapter 3 The Spread of Aramaic in the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires

In the seventh and sixth centuries b.c.e., the rise of Aramaic as a medium for supra-regional communication continued on a global scale. The emergence of first the Neo-Assyrian, then the Neo-Babylonian empire, both heirs to a strong and prestigious Akkadian scribal culture, gave a boost to an erstwhile local language that was already widely used among the Syrian principalities who joined them in vassalage. Central Syrian Aramaic in particular had by then acquired the function of a nascent koiné in the region, begun to replace local varieties such as the ones attested in mid-ninth-century Tell-Fekheriye and mid-eighth- century Samʾal, and even outlived, at least for a few decennia, the collapse of the kingdom of Damascus, hence it could still be used as an official language in distant Bukān in Azerbaijan around 700 b.c.e. Yet the new imperial context also changed the profile of the textual record: royal inscriptions do not befit dependent allies of great kings, and the Assyrian and Babylonian rulers continued to adhere to the venerated use of Akkadian for the monumental accounts of their deeds. Akkadian, after all, was indissolu- bly connected with Assyrian and especially Babylonian culture and lore. Instead of providing a medium of expression for independent and ambitious local princes to celebrate their achievements and demonstrate their piety in public epigraphs, Aramaic grew strong roots in imperial administration and, as a written language, became increasingly visible in the private domain. Excepting perhaps the Bukān inscription, it ceased to act as a vehicle of Syrian culture as it previously did. As a consequence, economic notes, legal agreements, and private letters dominate the textual evidence from this period. They exhibit a good deal of orthographic and linguistic variation, which indicates that Central Syrian dis- integrated quickly into local traditions that were less subject to a centralized linguistic standard. The different sociolinguistic context, the relatively higher frequency of non-standard spellings, the coexistence of morphological by- forms, and the emergence especially of certain word-order changes on the one hand and the relative linguistic homogeneity of Achaemenid Official Aramaic in the subsequent period with its orthographic and linguistic inno- vations on the other support a classification that assigns a place in its own right to the “late” Old Aramaic witnesses of the seventh and sixth centuries

The Spread of Aramaic in the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires 105 b.c.e.290 It should be stressed, however, that these changes were gradual and not the result of an imperial language policy. In the absence of decisive linguistic or historical reasons for completely separating the seventh- from the eighth-century material, the common denominator “Old Aramaic” therefore seems justified. Since Aramaic began to advance in the bureaucracies of three successive empires with a reasonable degree of administrative and procedural continuity, the entire phase of the Aramaic language from the Neo-Assyrian until the end of Achaemenid rule is now often labelled “Imperial Aramaic” or “Official Aramaic.”291 “Imperial Aramaic” derives from the German designation Reichsaramäisch. The latter originally referred to the use of Aramaic in Achaemenid administration in particular, because its important role in the preceding Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires was much less well- known at the time Reichsaramäisch was coined, but “Imperial Aramaic” has a broader meaning in most present-day scholarship. A more fine-grained linguistic analysis supports the basic idea not only of administrative, but, in some respects, also of linguistic continuity after Babylonian rule, since it emphasizes that the Aramaic variety used by Darius and his succes- sors has its roots in the complicated dialect landscape of pre-Achaemenid Babylonia. Yet the striking linguistic standardization that resulted from a wider Achaemenid administrative reform constitutes a clear caesura within the inter- nal classification of Aramaic. In order to account for the important linguistic dif- ferences between both phases, and to avoid terminological confusion caused by the mismatch between the original meaning of Reichsaramäisch and the con- temporary use of its English derivative “Imperial Aramaic,” the Persian chancel- lery language will be called “Achaemenid Official Aramaic” here and distinguished more sharply from the preceding late Old Aramaic phase. Despite recent additional discoveries, the limited textual corpus of the seventh- and sixth-century material still does not fully represent the role of Aramaic under the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian world empires. Leaving aside seals and bullae (lumps of clay pressed against the cords surrounding folded documents in order to seal them), only a few dozens of mostly very short inscriptions from Syria-Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Egypt constitute the evidence on which research in the previous decades was based. To these, some hundred administrative documents from various Mesopotamian

290 So Beyer 1984: 27–28 and 1986: 12–14; Hug 1993: 139; Gzella 2004: 35–41. See also the intro- ductory paragraphs to the preceding Chapter. 291 Cf., for instance, Fitzmyer 32004: 30 (originally 11966: 19 n. 60); Hoftijzer – Jongeling 1995: xii–xiii (abbreviated as “OffAr”); Fales 2007a: 100 and 2007b: 141–142. However, this reason- ing rests on socio-cultural rather than on linguistic grounds.