A Cultural History of Aramaic: From the Beginnings to the Advent of Islam 9004285091, 9789004285095

Citation preview

A Cultural History of Aramaic

Handbook of Oriental Studies Handbuch der Orientalistik Section 1 The Near and Middle East Editor-in-Chief W.H. van Soldt (Leiden) Editors C. Leitz (Tübingen) H. Gzella (Leiden) C. Waerzeggers (Leiden) M. Weeden (London) D. Wicke (Mainz) C. Woods (Chicago)

volume 111

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hdo

A Cultural History of Aramaic From the Beginnings to the Advent of Islam By

Holger Gzella

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gzella, Holger, 1974 A cultural history of Aramaic : from the beginnings to the advent of Islam / by Holger Gzella.   pages cm -- (Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 1 The Near and Middle East, ISSN 0169-9423 ; volume 111)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-90-04-28509-5 (Hardback) -- ISBN 978-90-04-28510-1 (E-book) 1. Aramaic language--Social aspects. 2. Aramaic language--History. 3. Middle East--History. I. Title.  PJ5207.G94 2015  492’.2--dc23                        2014035098

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0169-9423 isbn 978-90-04-28509-5 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-28510-1 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

To the memory of Klaus Beyer (1929–2014)

∵

Contents Preface xi List of Abbreviations xiii 1  Introduction Aramaic among the Semitic Languages 1 1.1 History of Research 3 1.1.1 The Beginnings in Early Modern Europe 3 1.1.2 The Coming-of-Age of Aramaic Philology in the Nineteenth Century 6 1.1.3 Continuity in Twentieth-Century Aramaic Studies 9 1.2 Aramaic as a Semitic Language 16 1.2.1 Aramaic in its Northwest Semitic Setting 17 1.2.2 The Grammatical Core of Aramaic 23 1.2.3 The Evolution of Aramaic Grammar until the Seventh Century c.e. 37 1.3 Historical-Linguistic Method and Internal Classification 45 1.3.1 The Periodization of Aramaic 47 1.3.2 Aramaic as a Dialect Continuum 48 1.3.3 A Chronological, Geographical, and Social Matrix 50 2  The Emergence of Aramaic Dialects in the Fertile Crescent 53 2.1 The First Appearance of the Aramaeans in the Ancient Near East 56 2.2 The Rise of Aramaic Chancellery Languages in Ancient Syria 57 2.2.1 Eastern Syria: The Tell Fekheriye Inscription 63 2.2.2 Central Syria: An Aramaic koiné 67 2.2.3 North-Western Syria: Samʾalian and Aramaic at Zincirli 72 2.3 The Influence of Aram-Damascus and the Spread of Central Syrian Aramaic 78 2.3.1 The Tell Dan Stele from Northern Galilee and Damascene Authority 79 2.3.2 The Deir ʿAllā Plaster Text and the Aramaicization of Traditional Literature 87 2.3.3 The Bukān Inscription and the Cultural Prestige of Central Syrian Aramaic 91 2.4 Aramaic-Canaanite Multilingualism in Syria-Palestine 93 2.4.1 Phoenician and Aramaic 94

viii

Contents 

2.4.2 Aramaic and Hebrew 95 2.5 Conclusion 102 3  The Spread of Aramaic in the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires 104 3.1 Aramaic as an International Language 106 3.1.1 The Textual Corpus of Aramaic in the Neo-Assyrian and the Neo-Babylonian Periods 109 3.1.2 The Linguistic Profile of Seventh- and Sixth-Century Aramaic 112 3.1.3 Aramaic and Akkadian in Contact 119 3.2 Aramaic in Bilingual Imperial Administration 124 3.2.1 The Neo-Assyrian Tablets and Epigraphs 125 3.2.2 Administrative Continuity in the Neo-Babylonian Period 134 3.2.3 Aramaic as a Diplomatic Language and its Use in Official Letters 139 3.3 Aramaic in the Private Domain 144 3.3.1 Funerary Inscriptions 145 3.3.2 Private Letters 147 3.4 Aramaic Literature: The Aḥiqar Tradition 150 3.5 Conclusion 153 4  Official Aramaic and the Achaemenid Chancellery 157 4.1 Aramaic in the Achaemenid Empire 162 4.1.1 The Corpus of Achaemenid Official Aramaic 165 4.1.2 Achaemenid Official Aramaic as a Standardized Chancellery Language 168 4.1.3 Aramaic and Other Languages in the Achaemenid Empire 178 4.2 Domestic Administration 182 4.2.1 Economic Documents 183 4.2.2 The Bisotun Inscription and Achaemenid Royal Ideology 184 4.3 Aramaic in the Provinces 185 4.3.1 Egypt 186 4.3.2 Palestine 190 4.3.3 North Arabia 193 4.3.4 Asia Minor 195 4.3.5 Bactria 198 4.4 National Literatures in Aramaic 201 4.4.1 Egypt: Aḥiqar, Bar Puneš, and Papyrus Amherst 63 203 4.4.2 Palestine: Biblical and Jewish Literary Aramaic 205 4.5 Conclusion 208

C ontents

5  Aramaic in the Hellenistic and Early Roman Near East 212 5.1 Achaemenid Heritage and Local Dialects 217 5.1.1 The Internal Classification of Post-Achaemenid Aramaic 217 5.1.2 Multilingualism in the Hellenistic and Roman Near East 221 5.2 Palestine 225 5.2.1 The Languages of Hellenistic and Roman Palestine 226 5.2.2 The Hasmonaean Literary Language 230 5.2.3 Early Forms of Jewish Palestinian 234 5.3 North Arabia: Nabataean 238 5.3.1 The Profile and Function of Aramaic in North Arabia 239 5.3.2 Nabataean Aramaic in Contact with Greek and Arabic 242 5.4 Syria 246 5.4.1 Palmyra and Palmyrene Aramaic 248 5.4.2 Edessa and the Osrhoene: Old Syriac 256 5.4.3 Dura Europos 261 5.5 Eastern Mesopotamia 264 5.5.1 Early Forms of Eastern Aramaic 265 5.5.2 Babylonia 268 5.5.3 Assur, Hatra, and the Rest of Eastern Mesopotamia 271 5.6 Aramaic Linguistic Heritage in Post-Achaemenid Iran 276 5.7 Conclusion 279 6  Western Aramaic in Late Antique Palestine 281 6.1 Western Aramaic and the Languages of Hellenistic and Roman Palestine 285 6.1.1 The Appearance of Western Aramaic 286 6.1.2 Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek: The Historical Language Situation 290 6.2 Jewish Palestinian Aramaic 296 6.2.1 The Dialectal Underpinnings of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic 297 6.2.2 Jewish Palestinian Aramaic and the Language of the Targumim 304 6.3 Samaritan Aramaic 310 6.3.1 Samarian and Samaritan Aramaic 311 6.3.2 The Languages of the Samaritans 315 6.4 Christian Palestinian Aramaic 317 6.4.1 Christian Palestinian Aramaic: Language and Use 318 6.4.2 Aramaic, Greek, and Arabic among Palestinian Christians 322 6.5 Conclusion 327

ix

x

Contents

7  Eastern Aramaic in Late Antique Syria and Mesopotamia 330 7.1 Eastern Aramaic in the Roman-Sassanian Border-Zone 334 7.1.1 Points of Contact between Eastern Aramaic Dialects 336 7.1.2 Aramaic, Greek, and Iranian: The Historical Language Situation 342 7.2 Jewish Babylonian Aramaic 348 7.2.1 Jewish Babylonian and the Dialect Landscape of Mesopotamia 350 7.2.2 Linguistic Variation in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic 357 7.3 Classical Mandaic 359 7.3.1 Mandaic and its Babylonian Aramaic Background 361 7.3.2 Linguistic Evidence and the Origin of the Mandaeans 365 7.4 Classical Syriac 366 7.4.1 Syriac as a Standardized Literary Language 368 7.4.2 The Rise of Classical Syriac Literature 374 7.5 Conclusion 379 8  Epilogue 382 8.1 History and Internal Classification 383 8.2 Spoken and Written Language 387 8.3 Language Contact 388  Bibliography 391  Modern Authors  430  Index of Subjects 436  Sources  445

Preface Aramaic is a central topic in the study of the Bible, the Ancient Near East, Semitic Linguistics, the Jewish and Christian religions, the early history of Arabic and Islam, cultural and religious diversity in the Hellenistic, Roman, and Sassanian periods, and minorities in the Modern Middle East. Despite its vital contribution to many different fields and an unbroken interest ever since the genesis of the Western academic tradition in Early Modern Europe, however, Aramaic generally performs an ancillary, though essential, function in providing, first and foremost, access to source texts; it thus subsists in different academic disciplines, each with its own infrastructure, whereas only few scholars make Aramaic itself the focus of their research. And yet the study of a language as a tool for exploring a culture necessarily depends on the depth, precision, and independence of a linguistic analysis that is geared towards understanding the language in question in its own right and thereby sets the standards for more practical objectives. This book provides such first-hand information on the history of the Aramaic language in all its variety and against its changing cultural backgrounds, but as an ongoing linguistic evolution, from the earliest textual attestations in the ninth century b.c.e. down to the spread of Arabic and the ensuing transformation of the language situation in the entire Near East around the seventh century c.e. It is the author’s hope that the present manual facilitates the informed use of Aramaic as well as its historical-linguistic underpinnings in a broader academic context and offers interested non-specialists a survey of the state-of-the-art. Constant attention has therefore been given to outlining the wider historical bearing of technical issues like the interaction of vernaculars and literary idioms with their entrenched scribal traditions, the employ of Aramaic in multilingual situations, and the continuous tension between the unity and diversity of its manifestations over time. Much of the material here gathered and presented in a more or less integrated form has originally been prepared during the past ten years for the purpose of teaching numerous undergraduate and graduate classes, elementary, intermediate, and advanced, on most pre-modern Aramaic languages and an annual lecture course on the cultural history of Aramaic. Myrthe Bartels, Kathrin Göransson (née Egger), and Ahmad Al-Jallad have read and commented extensively upon the entire manuscript, Paul Noorlander and Benjamin Suchard on individual chapters. Their help, inspiration, and moral support have proved invaluable over the years, but I alone accept responsibility for the final text.

xii

Preface

As I write these lines in the Johannisnacht, my thoughts go out to the late Klaus Beyer, der ist mein Meister gewesen. The present work is intended as a collection of notes to the golden pages of his monumental Die aramäischen Texte vom Toten Meer (1984–2004). He did not live to see the completion of the manuscript but followed the preparatory research leading up to it with his characteristic dignified acumen; I dedicate it to his cherished memory. Holger Gzella Leiden, Feast of Saint John the Baptist 2014

List of Abbreviations adpv Abhandlungen des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins AfO Archiv für Orientforschung Aion Annali dell’Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli ajsl American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures akm Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes AnBib Analecta Biblica anes Ancient Near Eastern Studies anes[s] Ancient Near Eastern Studies (Supplements) anrw Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt aoat Alter Orient und Altes Testament AoF Altorientalische Forschungen as Aramaic Studies AulOrS Aula Orientalis. Supplement basor Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research batsh Berichte der Ausgrabung Tall Šēḫ Ḥamad/Dūr-Katlimmu bbvo Berliner Beiträge zum Vorderen Orient BEThL Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium Bib Biblica BibOr Biblica et Orientalia BiOr Bibliotheca Orientalis bn Biblische Notizen bzaw Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft cbq Catholic Biblical Quarterly cdog Colloquien der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft chane Culture and History of the Ancient Near East craibl Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres csco Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium Diss. Dissertation djd Discoveries in the Judaean Desert dmoa Documenta et Monumenta Orientis Antiqui dsd Dead Sea Discoveries eb.ns Études Bibliques. Nouvelle Série. ebr H.-J. Klauck et al. (eds.), Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, 1ff, Berlin – New York 2009– fat Forschungen zum Alten Testament FoSub Fontes et Subsidia ad Bibliam Pertinentes [sic] hane History of the Ancient Near East

xiv

List of Abbreviations 

hbs Herders Biblische Studien HdO Handbuch der Orientalistik hsao Heidelberger Studien zum Alten Orient hs Hebrew Studies hss Harvard Semitic Studies iej Israel Exploration Journal ios Israel Oriental Studies ipa International Phonetic Alphabet ja Journal Asiatique janes Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society jaos Journal of the American Oriental Society jbl Journal of Biblical Literature jea Journal of Egyptian Archaeology jjs Journal of Jewish Studies jnes Journal of Near Eastern Studies jrs Journal of Roman Studies jsai Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam jsj Journal for the Study of Judaism Journal for the Study of the New Testament jsnt jsots Journal for the Study of the Old Testament. Supplements JSPSup Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha. Supplements jss Journal of Semitic Studies jss Suppl. Journal of Semitic Studies. Supplements jts Journal of Theological Studies kai H. Donner – W. Röllig, Kanaanäische und aramäische Inschriften, 3 vols., Wiesbaden, 3–51971–2002 laos Leipziger Altorientalistische Studien lapo Littératures anciennes du Proche-Orient lhbots Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies maibl Mémoirs de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres mdog Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft nese Neue Ephemeris für Semitische Epigraphik ntoa Novum Testamentum et Orbis Antiquus nts New Testament Studies ola Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta olz Orientalistische Literaturzeitung Or ns Orientalia Nova Series pat D.R. Hillers – E. Cussini, Palmyrene Aramaic Texts, Baltimore, Md., 1996 piash Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities

 List of Abbreviations

xv

pihans Publications de l’Institut historique-archéologique Néerlandais de Stamboul ra Revue d’assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale rb Revue biblique RdQ Revue de Qumran rgrw Religions in the Graeco-Roman World rsf Rivista di Studi Fenici rso Rivista di Studi Orientali saa State Archives of Assyria saab State Archives of Assyria Bulletin sel Studi epigrafici e linguistici Sem Semitica sjsj Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism ssl Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics stdj Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah StPh Studia Phoenicia tad B. Porten – A. Yardeni, Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt I–IV, Jerusalem 1986–1999 tsaj Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism uf Ugarit-Forschungen vok Veröffentlichungen der Orientalischen Kommission vt Vetus Testamentum vts Vetus Testamentum. Supplements WdO Welt des Orients wvdog Wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft wzkm Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes za Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie zah Zeitschrift für Althebraistik zaw Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft zdmg Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft zpe Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik < comes from > changed into * hypothetical proto-form /…/ phonemic reconstruction […] actual pronunciation

chapter 1

Introduction

Aramaic among the Semitic Languages

Aramaic is a constant thread running through the various civilizations of the Near East, from the beginning of the textual record in royal inscriptions shortly after 1000 b.c.e. across different religious and literary traditions down to minority languages that have survived in isolated pockets and are now spoken by small numbers of immigrants all over the world. During these three t­ housand years, it has acted as a means of representation for ambitious and self-conscious rulers of small principalities in Ancient Syria, spread rapidly throughout the Fertile Crescent between Egypt and Afghanistan, was adopted as an administrative language by three successive world empires, and has become inextricably connected to the normative texts of three living religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Mandaism. This makes Aramaic not only the most important idiom of the Near East between the great empires in the early centuries of the first millennium b.c.e. and the advent of Islam some fifteen-hundred years later, but even “a language that holds the key to a good deal of the world’s intellectual history.”1 And although “the history of Aramaic represents the purest triumph of the human spirit as embodied in language (which is the mind’s most direct form of physical expression) over the crude display of material power,”2 because it became the language of empires and outlived them while its speakers never established any major political power themselves, its cultural history has not yet been described. The lack of a comprehensive yet readable account of the linguistic evolution of Aramaic and its socio-cultural underpinnings has long been felt but never been addressed systematically. After all, the study of Aramaic belongs to distinct academic disciplines not necessarily associated with one another, such as Biblical Exegesis, from which it has evolved, Semitic Linguistics, Jewish Studies, Patristics, Greek and Roman History, and Ancient Near Eastern Studies. Hence it proves increasingly difficult for specialists in other areas to follow progress in a field as technical as the investigation of Aramaic with its bewildering diversity of numerous distinct idioms, literary traditions, and matrix cultures, or indeed to evaluate the ancient sources with the help of 1 Rosenthal 72006: 2. 2 Rosenthal 1978: 81.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004285101_002

2

chapter 1

more advanced linguistic methodology. The only existing monograph-length overview is Klaus Beyer’s brief and rather technical philological sketch The Aramaic Language (Beyer 1986, translated and updated from Beyer 1984: 23–71), a work that betrays full command of the data and contains many important insights of lasting value, but also one which even specialists find hard to use because of its extremely dense presentation.3 For that reason, it is the ambition of this book to promote knowledge of Aramaic and its history in its various manifestations as an integral part of Near Eastern civilizations from the beginnings until the spread of Arabic. Since the main language of Islam forms an important vehicle of its religious and cultural values, Aramaic eventually gave way to Arabic as a lingua franca in the Fertile Crescent. This makes the seventh century c.e. an obvious caesura. The chronological divide is further reinforced by pragmatic factors such as the boundary line currently separating Ancient Near Eastern departments and programmes with their still strong philological tradition from their Middle Eastern counterparts that have acquired a more prominent social-science profile during the past hundred years. Yet it should be borne in mind that, besides an unbroken use of Aramaic for literary expression and as a minority language, its influence can still be traced in written and spoken varieties of Arabic. So there is quite some continuity between the Ancient Near and the Modern Middle East, and Aramaic plays a major role in it. More specifically, the present study attempts to interpret the emergence of the Iron Age dialects of Aramaic, its subsequent rise to an imperial language and, in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods, to a variety of official idioms used by local chancelleries as a sign of national awareness and cultural identity which then evolved into the vehicles of religious affinity in Late Antiquity. The seven Chapters will investigate such cultural encounters in direct contact with the primary sources and their broader socio-historical environment, with a clear focus on the linguistic facts themselves. Since Aramaic was not used by one well-defined speech community but by very different groups and in quite distinct social contexts, this work does not focus on the history of Aramaean peoples and their culture throughout the ages.4 Rather, it follows the language in its meanderings from the Ancient Near Eastern city-states and empires via the Greco-Roman matrix cultures into the Islamic period. It thus seeks to present a unified vision on the continuous development of Aramaic throughout Antiquity in its numerous manifestations 3 A brief portrait of the man and his work can be found in Gzella 2015. 4 Much up-to-date information on their origins, society, literature, religion, and material culture is now available in Niehr (ed.) 2014.

Introduction

3

by connecting the results of research in various disciplines. It does not, however, serve as a complete bibliographical manual that systematically assembles the entire secondary literature but engages, first and foremost, with discussions that have either proved to be of enduring relevance or have but recently arisen. References to earlier publications considered less representative of current approaches by the present author can be easily found in the summaries and overviews that are regularly cited. In order to cater for the needs of a diverse readership, the most important sources and tools will be explicitly presented in the opening paragraphs to each Chapter or in the main text. 1.1

History of Research

Since the study of Aramaic constitutes a proper subfield only in terms of subject matter, but does not feature a full-blown academic infrastructure with proper programmes, top-level positions, or even Departments, it does not come as a surprise that its history has not yet been written. Such a history would be hard to isolate from wider-ranging developments in the many disciplines with which Aramaic is intimately connected. Its role in the formative period of nineteenthcentury Semitic scholarship and the work of the most important practitioners of the field at that time, especially Theodor Nöldeke (1836–1930), has recently been outlined by Gzella 2012a. Subsequent progress in the whole branch of Aramaic Studies from Nöldeke until the Second World War (which marked, or rather caused, the end of the heydays of German Semitic Philology) has been delineated in a monograph-length treatment and with very sound judgment by Rosenthal 1939 (to which a fairly general post-scriptum in Rosenthal 1978, without references to specific items of secondary literature, can be added). This is followed by the more concise Forschungsbericht in Kutscher 1971, which discusses a significant number of individual publications on the older varieties of Aramaic, some in greater detail, others rather apodictically, though always informed by intimate knowledge of the material, without actually outlining wider tendencies in the field. The considerably broader but less detailed overview by Brockelmann 1964 collects additional references to older studies covering the entire period of attestation up to the modern vernaculars. More recent bibliography can be found in the introductory chapters in Beyer 1984–2004, yet by and large without a discussion, and now in Lipiński 2014: 37–288. 1.1.1 The Beginnings in Early Modern Europe Aramaic never ceased to be read, or even to be spoken, until today and became the object of study in Jewish and Syriac-Christian learning already in Antiquity.

4

chapter 1

The latter in particular developed a native grammatical and lexicographical tradition that culminated in the thirteenth-century works of Barhebraeus.5 Reference was sometimes made to Jewish writings in Aramaic for polemical or apologetic purposes in the Christian West during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but it did not normally rest on a first-hand knowledge of the sources. The situation changed for good with the upswing of Hebrew Studies during the sixteenth century. When genuine scholarly interest in Semitic languages awakened in Early Modern Europe, Syriac and Jewish varieties of Aramaic, written in different scripts and transmitted within distinct religious communities, were kept apart as two separate branches.6 Because of their grammatical and lexical similarities, Biblical and Targumic Aramaic were generally subsumed under the term “Chaldaean” (since Biblical Aramaic was associated with the Chaldaeans in Daniel 2:4) until the early twentieth century.7 Jewish and Christian Aramaic had a similarly strong bearing on the philologia sacra, that is, the use of the ancient versions of the Bible in order to establish, by way of comparison, the correct reading of the original text and the true meaning of Hebrew words as well as grammatical constructions. This tradition culminated first in the Complutensian and the Antwerp Polyglot Bibles (1514–1517 and 1558–1573), which included Targumic versions in Aramaic, the latter also the New Testament in Syriac; then in their expanded Paris and London counterparts (1628–1655 and 1654–1657), which featured Syriac translations of the Old Testament as well.8 In addition, the study of Syriac as the principal theological and liturgical language of the Christian churches of the Near East was especially encouraged within Roman Catholicism for dogmatic and diplomatic purposes.9 Maronite scholars working in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italy greatly stimulated the investigation of Syriac texts and hence a practical knowledge of the language as a means to an end; Joseph Simon Assemani (1687–1768) in particular acquired many manuscripts for the Vatican Library and laid the foundation for the entire subsequent exploration of Syriac literature in Europe with his Bibliotheca Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana (1719–1728). Concurrently, a Western tradition of the philological study of Aramaic slowly emerged and gradually 5 See Merx 1889. 6 Hence “Aramaic” is sometimes still distinguished from “Syriac” (as if one were to contrast “Romance” with “French”), although the latter of course also belongs to the Aramaic group. 7 In some fifteenth- and sixteenth-century studies, however, “Chaldaean” could also denote Ethiopic (see Bobzin 1994: 86–92), but this short-lived nomenclature is now long obsolete. 8 Miller 2001a,b. 9 Brock 1994a: 94–98. See also Strothmann 1971; Contini 1994; Burnett 2012: 39–40.

Introduction

5

became more independent of its origins in native Jewish and Syriac-Christian scholarship: Syriac as well as Jewish Aramaic languages increasingly turned into the objects of specialized grammars and dictionaries during the second half of the sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth century. Most of the Aramaic grammars that were produced in this period focused on descriptions of Biblical Aramaic. The first Aramaic dictionary, by Santes Pagninus, appeared in 1523, and Sebastian Münster published the first grammar as well as another dictionary in 1527. Targumic material was amply covered by Elias Levita’s dictionary Meturgeman (1541), later followed by Buxtorf’s famous Lexicon Chaldaicum, Talmudicum et Rabbinicum (1639 or 1640).10 The study of Aramaic remained in the shadow of Hebrew but flourished in particular among German Protestants,11 and a philological apparatus for post-biblical Aramaic had thus appeared by the end of the sixteenth century. While these works largely evolved out of Jewish lexicographical traditions communicated by the Jewish informants of the first Christian Hebraists, various Syriac grammars and especially dictionaries were also produced and partly combined with evidence from Biblical and Targumic Aramaic. This was the case with Buxtorf’s influential Grammaticae Chaldaicae et Syriacae (1615) as well as his Lexicon Chaldaicum et Syriacum (1622) and similar manuals written by others along the same lines. Within a broader comparative framework, Syriac and Jewish Aramaic languages occupied a firm place together with the related Semitic idioms Hebrew and Arabic, later also Ethiopic, in grammatical synopses and multilingual dictionaries that kept appearing since Angelo Canini’s Institutiones from 1554.12 Such compendia were less geared towards understanding the mutual interconnections even if a common descent and thus a family-like relationship (consanguinitas) of the Semitic idioms13 were widely accepted on grounds of their structural similarity, but furnished practical tools for assessing the biblical text in its various manifestations and thus facilitated access to the major Polyglot Bibles. As a consequence, they basically provided parallel elenchi of grammatical features or series of synchronic grammatical descriptions according to a similar template but did not address the exact historical-linguistic ties that united them. Most scholars subscribed to the view that Hebrew was the primordial language from which the others descended. 10 11 12 13

Tamani 1996; Burnett 2005; cf. 2012: 109–111. Burnett 2005: 432–434. Cf. Weinberg 2006: 238–250. So Albert Schultens in his Origines hebraeae sive hebraeae linguae antiquissima natura et indoles, second edition from 1761, page 177.

6

chapter 1

1.1.2 The Coming-of-Age of Aramaic Philology in the Nineteenth Century Aramaic scholarship maintained its didactic focus until the nineteenth century, which saw the publication of Johann Severin Vater’s Handbuch der Hebräischen, Syrischen, Chaldäischen und Arabischen Grammatik (first edition 1801, second edition 1817), a work still quite in the spirit of Canini, and many teaching grammars with chrestomathies as well as concise glossaries.14 Nonetheless, knowledge of other Aramaic varieties increased steadily: already in the seventeenth century, Carmelite missionaries collected manuscripts from Mandaean communities and published studies on the Mandaic language, an Aramaic dialect closely related to Syriac but written in a different script15; the Abbé Jean Jacques Barthélemy (1716–1795) in Paris initiated the decipherment of Palmyrene Aramaic and thus laid the groundwork for Semitic epigraphy16; and some older Aramaic inscriptions like a stele from Achaemenid Egypt, now in Carpentras in Southern France (kai 269), reached Western museums and libraries. During the nineteenth century, however, the profile of Semitics changed radically from an auxiliary discipline of Theology to a self-conscious, occasionally even elitist, and secular historical-philological branch of learning with its own infrastructure: professorships were established, scholarly journals initiated, and learned societies founded.17 This process has been reinforced by a wealth of new discoveries, especially Syriac and Arabic manuscripts, which reached Europe in great numbers from the Near East. They significantly broadened the textual basis, which was formerly confined to rather small selections in chrestomathies, and gave access to vast literatures yet to be discovered by inquisitive minds; many text editions authored by the scholar librarians of those days are still used, and the points of contact between Syriac writings and  other Eastern Christian traditions like Ethiopic, Coptic, Armenian, and Georgian also began to attract attention.18 At the same time, excavators unearthed ancient inscriptions and thus brought back to life the languages of pristine civilizations previously known only from biblical and classical history: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Pre-Islamic Arabia, and the Syro-Palestinian neighbours of the Israelites.19 And towards the end of the same century, even modern 14 15 16 17 18 19

See Nestle 1881: 2–13 (of the section “Litteratura”) for an extensive list consisting of 175 items since 1539. Häberl 2009: 13–29. Daniels 1988. Gzella 2012a: 135–145, with further bibliography. Chabot 1922; Brock 1994a. See, from the point of view of West Semitic epigraphy, Lidzbarski 1898: 89–110.

Introduction

7

Arabic, Aramaic, and Ethiopic vernaculars became the object of academic investigation rather than being restricted to the practical training of traders and diplomats.20 The enormous growth of the available material was paralleled by a more refined linguistic method that singled out the Semitic languages as a genetic unit historically distinct from other “Oriental” idioms like Sanskrit, Persian, and Turkish. Their relatedness could be corroborated on the basis of regular sound correspondences, as had been convincingly demonstrated for the IndoEuropean family by the “Neogrammarian” school around 1850. As a consequence, the still prevailing general framework according to which Aramaic and Hebrew (together with the other “Canaanite” languages Phoenician and Moabite) constituted two sister-branches of a common “Northwest Semitic” subgroup in Semitic had been developed by 1900 and was subsequently refined, but not overthrown, in the light of new discoveries during the coming decades. Hebrew was thus no longer the original language of mankind, nor the hermeneutic centre of Semitics, but the comparative mindset of the new historical and secular discipline continued the traditional quest of the sacra philologia for the original meaning behind the many reflexes of the biblical text. It thereby helped preserve the close connections between Exegesis and Semitics in nineteenth-century Protestant Theology. More practically, Syriac and Targumic Aramaic remained essential tools for the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, while the fresh epigraphic discoveries added a new dimension by allowing scholars to place biblical Israel more systematically in its Ancient Near Eastern setting. The large number of Theological Faculties in Germany, especially the Protestant ones with their main focus on Exegesis, continued to educate many future Semitists. Unlike Indo-European Linguistics, then, Comparative Philology in Semitics and the first-hand study of civilizations in the light of languages and texts never parted ways. Aramaic, being attested for thousands of years, could fully profit from this growing interest in the ancient, the medieval, and the modern material and came to age as an independent branch within Semitics, even though it did not develop the same infrastructural apparatus as disciplines like Assyriology. Theodor Nöldeke, who excelled in the study of all stages of Aramaic (in addition to being one of the foremost Arabists), very much embodies the modern type of the secular philologist in coming from the Greek and Latin classics rather than from Theology. He wrote the authoritative standard grammars of 20

Gzella 2012a: 139–140.

8

chapter 1

Classical Mandaic and Syriac (Nöldeke 1875 and 21898), described the NeoAramaic dialect of Lake Urmia (Nöldeke 1868), and contributed numerous specialized articles to the elucidation of other forms of Aramaic that emerged from newly-discovered inscriptions. The latter in particular brought to light the vast internal complexity of Aramaic, replaced the customary bipartite division into “Chaldaean” and “Syriac” by a more fluid dialectal matrix that gradually crystallized into a clearly recognizable “Western” and “Eastern” branch, and eventually promoted the emancipation of Biblical Aramaic from an appendix of Biblical Hebrew to a Semitic variety in its own right. The two editions of Brockelmann’s Lexicon Syriacum (the first appeared in 1895, the second in 1928) witness to the growth in Syriac sources, but the bonds with the living Syriac traditions had been severed in favour of a primarily academic investigation of dead languages and were only rebuilt in the past few decades.21 Post-biblical Jewish Aramaic languages, by contrast, featured less prominently in secular universities and were eclipsed by an increasing interest in historical-critical Biblical Exegesis, Classical Arabic, Syriac, and the epigraphic finds from the Ancient Near East. Nonetheless, they received considerable attention in the context of envisaged missionary activities under Jews by German Protestants.22 These varieties have also been included in important lexicographical work between the centuries (Levy 1867; 31924; Löw 1881; 1928– 1934; 1969; Fraenkel 1886; Krauss 1898). Like their forerunners in the sixteenth century, nineteenth-century Semitic philologists employed by state universities made occasional use of the traditional learning some of their Jewish students had enjoyed in their upbringing for gleaning Lesefrüchte from Targumic and Talmudic material, even if they generally did not venture into more systematic investigations of this type of Aramaic themselves. The epigraphic turn of the “great” nineteenth century, as Thomas Mann used to call it, at any rate anchored the literary varieties of Aramaic like Biblical Aramaic, Syriac, Targumic and Talmudic Aramaic, and Mandaic, all preserved in manuscript traditions and thus subject to continuous (albeit often minute) modifications, in the historical evolution of the language as documented by epigraphic “snapshots” that remained untouched by later scribes. This new perspective and the ensuing historical repositioning of the classical Aramaic varieties, which is still ongoing in present-day scholarship, contributed significantly to the establishment of a secular Aramaic philology, focused on grammatical and lexical details rather than on theological ideas, as a sub-discipline 21 22

Brock 1994a: 100–104, who himself contributed immensely to building bridges between Western and native Syriac-Christian scholarship. Gzella 2012a: 142–143; 166.

Introduction

9

within Semitics. Its legacy also includes a strictly empirical and theory-light grammatical framework patterned after the description of Classical Greek and Latin.23 Both languages belonged to the general culture of almost everybody who would embark on an academic career in nineteenth-century Europe and constituted the core part of secondary education, but they are still so entrenched in the tradition of the field that it proves difficult to replace functional labels like futurum instans, futurum perfectum, and many others by notions more in tune with progress in the study of language in general. 1.1.3 Continuity in Twentieth-Century Aramaic Studies Since only relatively few Aramaic inscriptions from the first millennium b.c.e. were known at the turn of the twentieth century,24 the period of discovering, editing, and publishing new material gained momentum during the following decennia. Only afterwards could comprehensive grammars as well as dictionaries be written and, eventually, more precise subclassifications of Aramaic be proposed. Much of the material that helped outline the earlier history of Aramaic was brought to light in the opening decades of the twentieth century: the papyri and ostraca from Elephantine, which constitute the main documentation of Achaemenid Official Aramaic (Sachau 1911; Cowley 1923; Kraeling 1953; Driver 1954; 1965); the Sfire stelae as well as other smaller Old Aramaic inscriptions25; and more texts from Palmyra, Hatra, Edessa, and the Nabataean kingdom during the Roman period. This phase was succeeded by the discovery of the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls and documentary material around the middle of the same century. The enormous increase in epigraphic witnesses gradually put Aramaic palaeography on a firmer footing and made it possible to better trace the continuous development of the many different Aramaic scripts (Naveh 1970, which is now in need of a successor). Contrary to its impact on the study of Hebrew and Phoenician, however, the ongoing investigation of Syria-Palestine in the Late Bronze Age, with the discovery and decipherment of Ugaritic in 1929–1930 as its climax, did not shed much light on the linguistic prehistory of Aramaic; since occasional attempts at connecting Aramaic with Ugaritic proved unconvincing, its origins are still little known (see Section 2.1 for a summary). Achaemenid Official Aramaic as represented first and foremost in the numerous and relatively long letters, contracts, accounts, and other documents 23 24 25

Gzella 2005a (especially 74–75); 2012a: 144. Cf. Lidzbarski 1898: 440–448 and now Lipiński 2014: 89–97 (Old Aramaic) and 103–111 as well as 113–128 (Official Aramaic). Summarized by Rosenthal 1939: 24–38.

10

chapter 1

on papyrus from Elephantine came to form the historical-linguistic backdrop against which the basic layer of Biblical Aramaic (excepting its later vocalization traditions) took on its shape. As a result, it is in particular this material which contributed to placing Biblical Aramaic in a roughly contemporaneous context and to further elucidating its grammar and lexicon. Such a connection is systematically made in the magisterial and still unrivalled grammar of Biblical Aramaic by Bauer – Leander (1927), which surpasses all its predecessors in both historical depth and descriptive acumen, and also continues to influence smaller teaching grammars like the one by Rosenthal (72006). A similar situation applies to the dictionaries of Biblical Aramaic and the Aramaic sections of the modern lexica of Biblical Hebrew. The ongoing investigation of the Aramaic texts from the Dead Sea added another point of reference, with which Biblical Aramaic is now more closely associated by some, but Achaemenid Official Aramaic remained the most important representative of the older phases of the language. It is attested over a vast geographical area between Egypt and Afghanistan, covers texts in many different genres, and lives on as a superstrate or adstrate in basically all successive varieties of Aramaic–and presumably in some other languages as well– written or spoken in the former multilingual territory of the Achaemenid empire. Despite the significance of Achaemenid Official Aramaic, the only grammar available for several decades was the brief but insightful sketch by Leander 1928, now partly (though not entirely) superseded by Muraoka – Porten 22003. Unfortunately, both grammars only describe the Aramaic texts from Egypt,26 whereas Degen published a compact but full descriptive grammar of the earliest Old Aramaic texts already in 1969. Lexicography has fared better: the entire Old and Achaemenid Official Aramaic material then available has been included in Jean – Hoftijzer 1965, now replaced by Hoftijzer – Jongeling 1995. The past few years have seen substantial additions to the corpus of Achaemenid Official Aramaic, especially the dozens of letters and economic texts from late Achaemenid Bactria (Naveh – Shaked 2012), and, after a century, the publication of the almost three-hundred ostraca of the Clermont-Ganneau collection from Elephantine (Lozachmeur 2006). While the additions to the already considerable corpus of Achaemenid Official Aramaic chiefly confirm earlier grammatical analyses and corroborate the idea of a basically standardized chancellery language, although they do yield a number of previously unattested words, the linguistic profile of the oldest attested stage of Aramaic has changed considerably thanks to only a handful of substantial discoveries during the past forty years. A comparison between 26

Cf. Gzella 2011b for a grammatical sketch that covers the entire corpus.

Introduction

11

Degen’s grammar from 1969, which adequately reflected the state-of-the-art at the moment of its publication, and a more recent summary, such as Gzella 2014a, may illustrate the progress made. The Old Aramaic material treated in the former still gives the idea of a highly homogeneous language in the garb of a unified scribal tradition; yet after the publication of the Deir ʿAllā plaster text (Hoftijzer – van der Kooij 1976), the Tell Fekheriye statue (Abou-Assaf – Bordreuil – Millard 1982), the Tell Dan victory stele (Biran – Naveh 1993 and 1995), the Bukān inscription (Sokoloff 1999), and the Kuttamuwa funerary inscription (Pardee 2009), it is now reasonably clear that the corpus previously known only represents a subset, here termed Central Syrian and viewed as the standard language of Damascus, of the actual diversity that appears already in ninth- and eighth-century Aramaic. Besides improved readings of new and known texts, the ensuing discussion has focused on fine-tuning the Northwest Semitic matrix of early Canaanite and Aramaic (chiefly in the light of alleged or actual “imperfect consecutive” forms in the Deir ʿAllā and the Tell Dan inscriptions), on the contribution of the local Aramaic variety used at Tell Fekheriye to the wider history of Aramaic, on the early spread of Aramaic to Bukān in Western Azerbaijan, and on multilingualism or language shift at Samʾal. Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, there has also been a renewed interest in the role of Aramaic in Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian administration (see Fales 1986: 29–36). Akkadian influences on Aramaic at large have been studied on a monographic scale (Kaufman 1974); Aramaic administrative tablets as well as epigraphs, which had already been known for more than a hundred years by then but remained largely cocooned from a comprehensive philological and sociolinguistic investigation of Aramaic, saw new editions (Fales 1986; Blasberg 1997) and an increasing number of socio-historical accounts (e.g., Fales 2000; 2007a; Röllig 2005; Millard 2011; Jursa 2012); in addition, much fresh material has been made accessible in recent years (Lemaire 2001; Röllig 2002a,b; Fales – Radner – Pappi – Attardo 2005; Lipiński 2010). This has resulted in a better knowledge of seventh-century Aramaic and its social underpinnings in an increasingly bilingual system of administration. It was further fuelled not only by a growing interest in the post-classical Assyrian and Babylonian varieties of Akkadian, but also by a socio-historical turn in several branches of both Semitics and Assyriology that widened the scope of two traditionally strongly philological disciplines. Attempts at integrating the diversity of the Aramaic material of the seventh and sixth centuries b.c.e. into a continuous history of the language are still very preliminary, however; they will no doubt profit from future discoveries and from connections with varieties that are rooted in this period or earlier or appear in the textual record only at a much later stage.

12

chapter 1

Noteworthy progress in epigraphic, grammatical, and lexicographical ground­ work that begins to feed into wider-ranging issues of cultural and linguistic contact has been achieved in the investigation of post-Achaemenid varieties in Palestine, North Arabia, Syria-Mesopotamia, and Iran. These turned into local written languages (now often subsumed under the umbrella term “Middle Aramaic”) in the Hellenistic or early Roman period as a result of a new cultural self-awareness and were at least to some extent patterned after Achaemenid standards in orthography and diction but also interacted with Greek and other regional idioms (such as Arabic or Ancient North Arabian) in a multilingual and multicultural environment. A fair number of Palmyrene and Nabataean Aramaic inscriptions had already been long known and received earlier booklength treatments (Cantineau 1930–1932; 1935; Rosenthal 1936), but other corpora like the many hundreds of (albeit mostly short and formulaic) epigraphic texts from Hatra with their distinctively Eastern Aramaic traits have only been discovered in the past decades. The extensive Nabataean contracts from the Dead Sea region made a substantial addition, too. Work in previous years has concentrated on assembling (and partly also on collating) the material that was scattered widely across specialized articles into comprehensive corpora (Healey 1993; Hillers – Cussini 1996; Beyer 1998; Drijvers – Healey 1999; Hackl – Jenni – Schneider 2003); some of them feature much-needed historical and philological notes, but full commentaries on the Palmyrene and Hatran inscriptions are still lacking. A new line of research integrates this evidence into a wider cultural-historical discourse about diversity and shifting identities in the Roman provinces (Gzella 2005c and 2006a; Healey 2009a: 1–25; Andrade 2013). Since the texts are difficult to access for non-specialists, up-to-date reference grammars especially for Palmyrene and Nabataean Aramaic, which also address the wider Aramaic background, and informed studies on language contact and multilingualism rank high on the list of desiderata.27 The competition between the Achaemenid Official Aramaic heritage and Aramaic vernaculars that increasingly encroached on writing constitutes the background against which the later Western and Eastern literary languages of Aramaic have taken on their shape. Yet much of their investigation is conducted in other disciplines, such as Jewish Studies (in the case of the Targumim, being Jewish-Aramaic Bible translations) or Patristics and an ever more interdisciplinary study of Eastern Christianity (as far as Syriac literature is 27

See Gzella 2011c for a recent grammatical sketch and Taylor 2002 for some general issues. Recent scholarship shows quite some interest in multilingualism in the Roman empire, but the use of the Aramaic material by Ancient Historians would certainly benefit from more specialized research.

Introduction

13

concerned), hence it is geared towards accessing the religious texts composed in them and not primarily as an end in itself. Consequently, these literary traditions have been affected less immediately by progress in the study of other Aramaic varieties and in Semitic Linguistics in general, but they are currently undergoing a gradual historical repositioning that also includes less wellknown varieties of both Western and Eastern Aramaic. Targumic Aramaic, at any rate, has been intimately connected with Biblical Aramaic ever since and profited greatly from the Dead Sea material and other witnesses from the Greco-Roman period, which offer glimpses into its linguistic basis. The continuous production of basic tools like editions, philological grammars according to the traditional descriptive framework, and dictionaries as well as topical studies in Targumic exegesis, translation technique, and the relation to other ancient versions of the Bible is therefore accompanied by a likewise ongoing discussion about the linguistic background of those Targumim, for their complex history precludes a simple association with one particular dialect group of Aramaic.28 The rediscovery of Codex Neophyti 1 in the Vatican Library, announced in 1956, prompted a renewed interest in Targumic Studies in general and in the Palestinian Targumim in particular. An increasing knowledge of dialectal diversity in Aramaic, beginning in the nineteenth century, has eventually triggered a shift from printed editions as the basis of language description to the most reliable manuscripts, the value of which can now be gauged more easily by means of a comparison with the early Jewish Palestinian inscriptions (Kutscher 1976). This, in turn, promoted a clearer focus on identifiable linguistic varieties such as Jewish Palestinian or Jewish Babylonian Aramaic instead of an indiscriminate treatment of textual corpora that include material in several forms of Aramaic (Sokoloff 22002; 2002). Recent grammatical and lexicographical work on Christian Palestinian (Beyer 1995; Morgenstern 2011b) and Samaritan Aramaic (Tal 2000; 2011; Stadel 2013b), two hitherto understudied Western Aramaic languages, especially as far as the strictly linguistic side is concerned, has contributed to a clearer picture of Western Aramaic in general. A similar paradigm shift is underway in the investigation of the Eastern Aramaic varieties, notably in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. Its study flourished in traditional Jewish learning but had been eclipsed in the curricula of Theological Faculties and Near Eastern Departments at secular universities by

28

Targum Onqelos is a case in point; a concise summary of the main positions in the debate can be found in Section 6.2.2.

14

chapter 1

historical-critical Biblical Exegesis, Classical Arabic and Syriac, and Semitic epigraphy since the nineteenth century. In addition, the complexity of the Babylonian Talmud as well as its often technical jargon preclude a quick use for comparative purposes. Most recent scholarship, however, put into practice a similar programme as had been advocated for by Kutscher in the case of Jewish Palestinian: the printed editions and late manuscripts, on which the existing resources are largely based, do not reflect genuine Babylonian Aramaic but a form of the language that bears the mark of later developments and interference from other Aramaic dialects; hence a more reliable fundament has to be created in the light of the best textual witnesses (Sokoloff 2002, which also has to include later sources for the sake of completeness, and especially Morgenstern 2011a). This line of research will hopefully produce modern and historicallyinformed comprehensive grammars of Jewish Palestinian and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic in the foreseeable future. It also affects Classical Mandaic (Morgenstern 2010, with an extensive reassessment of scholarship during the past fifty years), a sister-language of Jewish Babylonian used by the religious group of the Mandaeans and predominantly studied by historians of ancient Gnosticism. As Mandaic has deep roots in the Aramaic dialect landscape of  Babylonia, a much-needed revision of grammatical and lexical tools (Morgenstern 2009) will no doubt make a significant contribution to uncovering the exact relationships between the different Eastern Aramaic idioms and their historical ties. The linguistic material in the late antique magical bowls and amulets from Babylonia can fill in important gaps in the more standardized literary languages of the Eastern Aramaic branch, because it seems to contain vernacular or dialectal spellings, forms, and words (Morgenstern 2007). Syriac, by contrast, has not yet profited to the same degree from progress in Aramaic historical-comparative philology and linguistics. Although a fair share of specialized articles on individual grammatical subjects have appeared,29 the most exhaustive grammar and lexicon are still Nöldeke 21898 and Brockelmann 21928 respectively.30 The mere existence of such comprehensive standard works alone can promote stagnation, because they give the impression that all relevant facts for a practical use of the language have already been sufficiently described, but the highly standardized nature of Classical Syriac, buttressed by a strong native grammatical tradition, and the vast body of material, too, may discourage fresh approaches. Besides an unbroken stream of text editions and 29 30

Cf. the bibliography by Brock in Muraoka 22005: 130–138. Nonetheless, the grammar by Brockelmann 101965 contains a number of valuable historical-comparative observations.

Introduction

15

a growing interest in appreciating the richness of Syriac literature in its own right, much important work has been devoted to the Syriac versions of the Bible, their textual history, their translation technique, and their theological orientation. This has also brought to light instances of linguistic variation that help better contextualize the earliest stages of Classical Syriac in the matrix of Achaemenid and post-Achaemenid Aramaic.31 Editing texts and compiling grammars, or at least grammatical sketches, as well as dictionaries of the older and an increasing number of modern varieties of Aramaic has thus dominated the field for most of the twentieth century. They continue a scholarly tradition that has its most immediate origin in the nineteenth century and still reflects the then prevailing climate of historical positivism. The present state in different subfields of Aramaic linguistics has crystallized into numerous shorter grammatical outlines of varying length, depth, and complexity in Weninger (ed.) 2011. The mutual interconnections of the individual members of the Aramaic sub-family, however, are still far from clear, and various proposals for a more sophisticated internal classification of Aramaic have been formulated in the second half of the twentieth century (see Section 1.3 below). At the same time, the gap between the philologicalhistorical investigation of the older varieties and descriptive-linguistic research on modern Aramaic has widened: the former bears greater resemblance to the text-based study of other ancient languages that focuses on individual details, whereas the latter connects more closely with the systematic analysis of other unwritten far-away idioms. A survey of the ground covered thus far suggests that future research on Aramaic will increasingly address more specific and comparative issues that feature less prominently in the time-honoured framework of philological grammars. Comprehensive diachronic works are still very few, also because of the disparity of the data, and Beyer’s analysis of the evolution of Aramaic phonology and morphology in the light of a rigorous chronology of the underlying sound laws from the beginnings to the eighth century c.e. (Beyer 1984–2004) remains an isolated monument. However, there is a slow increase in topical studies on individual linguistic phenomena (such as Gzella 2004 on the interaction of tense, aspect, and modality in Achaemenid Official Aramaic against its wider Aramaic background; similarly Kuty 2010 for Targumic Aramaic). Such work is now facilitated by electronic resources (see Kaufman 2008).

31

An early but still very rewarding study along these lines is Beyer 1966; see now also the recent survey by van Peursen 2008 and the balanced discussion of diversity in the preclassical Syriac inscriptions by Healey 2008.

16

chapter 1

Bridging the gap between ancient and modern Aramaic can be instructive simply for assessing the true variety of vernacular forms with their manifold nuances of pronunciation and the internal diversity that may hide behind the often standardized garb of the imperfect scripts in which the written evidence has been transmitted, or for furnishing sharper categories that benefit a refined functional analysis. Modern language description of the recent past has not only pointed out how great the differences are between spoken and written utterances, which enables one to better assess whether an irregular spelling represents a phonetic peculiarity or results from a mistake. The availability of much more comparative typological material has also identified the grammatical encoding of formerly unknown conceptual notions such as epistemic modality and evidentiality, the cognitive underpinnings of verbal semantics, and general tendencies in their association with specific forms. On a larger scale, a combination of ancient and modern can trace the evolution of grammatical structures over time and exploit the potential of enduring contact, such as in the fundamental change of alignment patterns in Eastern Aramaic under the influence of Iranian idioms. This makes Aramaic such an interesting long-term linguistic experiment. A clearer view of the enormous diversity in the spoken forms (Jastrow 2002 presents a comprehensive summary) also draws attention to the fact that the creation of the few long-lasting standardized literary languages in Antiquity is a major cultural achievement. There can be no doubt that the study of Aramaic at large still has much to offer to the numerous disciplines in which it partakes. In order to achieve its potential, however, it has to be situated in a broader Arts and Humanities context. 1.2

Aramaic as a Semitic Language

Between the first textual attestations in royal inscriptions from Syria in the ninth century b.c.e. and the highly diverse modern vernaculars, Aramaic32 has undergone a creative evolution that exhibits a strong tendency towards the emergence of many variations in complex grammatical sub-systems. Phonemes merged and allophones turned into phonemes again; nominal dimensions like 32

This label derives from the name “Aram,” which refers to a population group in biblical as well as Assyrian sources and a region in Syria in the Old Aramaic inscriptions, but its etymology is debated (Lipiński 2000b: 132–133 suggests an internal plural of the Semitic word for ‘wild bull’ as an original totemic animal). No common self-designation of the speakers of Aramaic languages is attested (see Nöldeke 1871a). The older term “Chaldaean,” once frequent in older studies (see Section 1.1.1 above), has long become obsolete.

Introduction

17

definiteness or direct object marking appeared, gradually lost their function, and returned again; and tense-aspect-modality marking has shifted from an already restricted set of morphological categories via the further loss of some conjugations to an elaborate array of entirely new finite forms following a proliferation of the participle after it had entered the verbal system.33 No single principle can fully account for this outcome, yet the potential for many developments will have been inherent in the structure itself and realized by specific triggers such as long-lasting contact in multilingual areas and convergence. As a result of such a striking grammatical and lexical diversity of Aramaic languages, past and present, in their unfolding over time, only few specific linguistic traits can be posited for the entire chronological and geographical range. Genuine Aramaic words and expressions regularly crop up in the many historical manifestations of this intriguingly complex sub-family, but they do not yield a clear definition of what actually constitutes Aramaic as opposed to other Semitic languages. The pharyngeal and “emphatic” sounds, for instance, which can be reconstructed for the earliest developmental stages of Semitic and are thus often viewed as distinctive features of the Semitic language type in general,34 have undergone major changes or disappeared in several forms of Aramaic. And even core features of morphological and syntactic typology, which have been adduced in the past as linguistic indications of the “Semitic” character of a language, exhibit a noteworthy volatility: the root an