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

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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)

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 and pattern system, which is so characteristic of all the older Semitic idioms and by means of which underlying combinations of the same (mostly three) basic consonants (that is, the abstract “root,” such as ktb ‘write’) surface in many verbal forms and derived verbal nouns, has a much more restricted prominence in the modern Aramaic dialects; the backbone of the verbal system has undergone a complete metamorphosis in the most innovative forms of Neo-Aramaic; and their alignment patterns have shifted from a deeply entrenched nominative-accusative system to ergative-like structures.35 As a consequence, it would be difficult to define an Aramaic Sprachtypus as such on grounds of a synchronic structural analysis alone. 1.2.1 Aramaic in its Northwest Semitic Setting The most obvious point of departure for distinguishing Aramaic from other Semitic languages and for assessing its relation with them is thus not its typological profile but its historical position in the Semitic “family tree.” This 33 34 35

See Jastrow 2008 for a brief survey. Cf. Hoberman 1995. See Hopkins 2005: 72–77.

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approach operates on the idea that systematic correspondences between languages, especially in the phonemic inventory (as in English father, German Vater, Latin pater, and so forth), result from common parentage; migration of a group of speakers would lead to an independent linguistic development and eventually cause a “daughter language” to branch off from its parent. A hypothetical ancestor can be reconstructed by comparing the shared heritage in the historical idioms (“shared retentions”), while new branches can be grouped together on the basis of common regular and non-coincidental changes (“shared innovations”) that distinguish them from more distant members of the same family. Since contact situations and even unconnected parallel developments can once again lead to structural assimilation in members of distinct branches, genetic relatedness is only one way to account for linguistic similarities. Alternatively, subgrouping can be based on the wave-like diffusion of innovations from centre to periphery along the axes of social contact, which leads to a continuum of dialects in a given area with mutually intelligible border idioms. Such a synchronic dialect-geographical approach is not necessarily better or worse than a diachronic genealogical one; both explain different aspects, much like the attempts to understand the phenomenon of light as either particles or waves. A family-tree model works best at a fundamental level of grammatical structure and in social contexts with limited contact between the daughter languages, whereas areal diffusion can explain individual secondary correspondences across historical dialect boundaries that affect even distantly or unrelated languages.36 Both can be integrated into a more holistic model, but it is at times impossible to decide with certainty whether some similarities are inherited or contact-induced. Typology may offer occasional clues: features that do not conform to otherwise well-known general tendencies in the evolution of languages are more likely to be borrowed. Within a diachronic perspective, the Aramaic languages would originally derive from one common ancestor, just like the different Canaanite varieties, which coexisted with Aramaic in the first half of the first millennium b.c.e., such as Hebrew, Phoenician, and the small-corpus idioms from Transjordan (Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite). Together with Ugaritic, a regional dialect spoken in a Late Bronze Age city-state on the Syrian coast and attested by many documentary as well as literary texts of local production, Aramaic and Canaanite are now widely considered to constitute three distinct branches of  yet another parent, traditionally termed “Northwest Semitic” since the 36

See Huehnergard – Rubin 2011 (especially 264–267) for a balanced and up-to-date account.

Introduction

19

beginning of the twentieth century.37 The common features of Northwest Semitic are somewhat elusive, however, and essentially consist of a shift of word-initial */w/ to /y/ (excepting the conjunction /wa-/ ‘and’), a bisyllabic plural basis /qVtal/ of nouns according to the pattern /qVtl/ before external endings, and assimilation of /n/ in contact (though the latter occurs naturally and is also attested in other Semitic languages). Northwest Semitic, Arabic, and some other ancient Arabian languages are, according to current majority opinion, subsumed under “Central Semitic” because of their largely similar system of finite conjugations as well as a few other phonological and morphological hallmarks, although the debate about the validity of this latter notion has not yet been resolved.38 “Central Semitic,” Ethiopian, and the non-Arabic Modern South Arabian languages of the Arabian Peninsula, all of which have integrated the “perfect” into the verbal system, would then constitute “West Semitic,” the sister branch of “East Semitic,” to  which Akkadian belongs, and result from the earliest split from Proto-Semitic.39 37

38

39

Cf. Gzella 2011a for a synopsis. Even scholars who do not posit a proper category “Northwest Semitic” but distribute the Semitic languages across slightly different geographical branches, still accept the close relationship of Aramaic and Canaanite (e.g., Beyer 1984: 23 n. 1 and 2004: 13 or Lipiński 22001: 59–74; both group them together as the two branches of “West Semitic” as opposed to North, South, and East Semitic, whereas Ugaritic would belong to North Semitic; Lipiński 2014: 6–7, however, now accepts a “Northwest Semitic” branch). There are also attempts to associate Sabaic, one of the ancient languages of South Arabia, with Northwest Semitic, and especially with Aramaic, but the matter still awaits closer scrutiny (cf. Stein 2012, who draws particular attention to the symmetrical system of verbal stems, but similarly regular configurations could presumably result from independent developments, so this argument is unconvincing). Huehnergard 2005 gives a particularly clear and recent summary. Opponents of the Central Semitic theory (e.g., Corriente 2013: 354–357, with a very passionate attack, although it is based on some questionable assumptions; for a more moderate critique, see also Lipiński 2014: 6–7) chiefly refer to the ambiguous position of Arabic and would attach diagnostic weight to two important structural parallels with Ethiopian, that is, the third stem (or Zielstamm) and broken plurals. According to supporters of Central Semitic, however, these would constitute shared retentions inherited from an earlier stage of Semitic and not shared innovations, which would render them unsuitable for positing a new subgroup. Huehnergard 2006. Note that “West Semitic” in this framework has a different meaning than the same term in other models (Beyer 1984: 23 n. 1 and Lipiński 22001: 59–74 confine “West Semitic” to Canaanite and Aramaic, whereas Ethiopian and the non-Arabic idioms of South Arabia would be grouped together with Arabic, Ancient North Arabian, and Ancient South Arabian as “South Semitic”; Lipiński 2014: 7, however, now includes the

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A geographical framework, by contrast, would integrate Aramaic and Canaanite in their various forms into a common speech area of “SyroPalestinian” languages spoken and written during the first half of the first millennium b.c.e. and thereby stress the gradual transition between them during a given period rather than their historical demarcations.40 This model can also account for some important structural parallels of a clearly secondary nature that cannot have been inherited from a common ancestor, such as the breakdown of morphological case distinctions, the simplification of the different “imperfect” conjugations as well as the concomitant changes in tense-aspectmood marking, and the rise of definiteness as well as direct object marking.41 Convergence of use patterns occurs even more easily if the underlying structure is already similar, as is the case with the Syro-Palestinian group. Historicalgenealogical and contact linguistics can thus complement each other. Like variant readings in textual criticism, however, not all features bear the same diagnostic weight: individual items of vocabulary or stylistic phenomena can be borrowed without difficulty and do not presuppose the same degree of contact as core items of phonology, morphology, and syntax. The situation in Syria-Palestine during the opening centuries of the first millennium b.c.e., that is, the Early Iron Age, thus seems to be the result, at least to a certain degree, of interaction between speakers of distinct, though historically related, idioms and the resulting workings of multilingualism. Various local dialects of Syria-Palestine are directly attested since the tenth and ninth centuries b.c.e. They acquired the status of written official languages as a result of state-formation, when, after a period of de-urbanization and recession, a number of tribal confederations across the entire area progressively evolved into more complex societies (see Section 2.2). At that point, Aramaic clearly differed from Canaanite in many important aspects of phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. Linguistic boundaries, however, do not necessarily correspond to ethnic demarcations, and many of the territorial states that resulted from this process may have been multiethnic. Yet an apparently conscious attempt at shaping local chancellery languages, which obscure more fluid transitions in the regional vernaculars, reinforces (even if only artificially) the respective differences in the grammatical garb of the surviving evidence and may have contributed to a sense of cultural self-awareness among

40 41

former “North Semitic” group, consisting of Eblaite, Amorite, and Ugaritic, as well as North Arabian and Arabic, into Northwest Semitic, thereby stressing the noteworthy similarities of the Semitic languages spoken between Northern Syria and North Arabia). So, among others, Garr 1985. See Gzella 2011a: 426 for further bibliographical indications. Gzella 2011e: 5–8; 2013c.

Introduction

21

the ruling elites. The evolution of the Aramaic language therefore has to be distinguished from a purported Aramaean ethnic or cultural affiliation that is very hard to grasp in the material culture (no matter how important Aramaic and its linguistic history still is as an identity-marker among present groups of speakers). Aramaic has no known linguistic predecessors in the Late Bronze Age, presumably because of a more limited degree of scribal activity in Syria than in Palestine during that period, but it had taken on its distinctive shape when the earliest attestations appear in the textual record. A number of typical traits that set it apart from Canaanite and Ugaritic occur already consistently in the oldest inscriptions, despite the small size of the corpus and the largely consonantal writing system: the reflex of the Proto-Semitic lateral */ṣ́/ was written with the grapheme q, which points to a distinct realization than Canaanite /ṣ/ or Arabic /ḍ/; the third-person masculine singular possessive suffix attached to a vocalic base */-ay-hū/ had changed into /-aw-hī/ (following dissimilation of the final /ū/); feminine plural forms have the ending /-ān/ in the absolute state as opposed to etymological /-āt-/ in the rest of Semitic; the final vowel of verbal roots ending in /-ī/ in the “long imperfect” and the “short imperfect” shows different vocalic reflexes (contrary to the reduction and subsequent loss of that vowel in the Canaanite “short imperfect”); there is no productive N-stem for medio-passive or otherwise detransitivizing nuances; the numeral ‘one’ /ḥad/ (from original */ʾaḥad/) exhibits loss of the first syllable; original */n/ shifted to /r/ in the word /bar/ ‘son’ and the numeral */t(e)rayn/ (the reconstruction is not entirely clear) ‘two’; and a few other lexical items do not occur, or not with the same meaning, in other Semitic languages; Aramaic later also developed a post-positive definite article in /-āʾ/ > /-ā/ vis-à-vis the pre-positive article /ha-/ (presumably from the deictic marker */han-/) in Canaanite.42 While some of these phenomena could possibly also have appeared independently in unattested Northwest Semitic dialects (see Section  2.4.2 for a more extensive case study), it is especially their cumulative occurrence that allows one to classify a certain text as Aramaic with a reasonable degree of confidence. Other distinctive traits that appear but later may already have existed in the earliest attested period but have no reflex in the consonantal orthography (for instance, “imperfect” forms of verbs with root-initial /y/ or a long second root consonant; both are discussed at greater length in Section 1.2.2 below); the list given above is thus not exhaustive. A third group of features, by contrast, have only emerged over time in the whole of Aramaic by way of wavelike diffusion but are not yet present in the oldest material (such as the loss of 42

Gzella 2014a: 71–72; cf. Beyer 2011: 124–125.

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unstressed short vowels in open syllables or the extension of basic-stem infinitives with /m-/ prefix; see Section 1.2.3 below).43 A few texts, it is true, combine characteristically Aramaic features with Canaanite ones and thus seem to resist a straightforward classification. The most important of these are the eighth-century b.c.e. inscriptions from Samʾal in Anatolia that are neither unambiguously Phoenician nor unambiguously Aramaic (see Section  2.2.3) and the plaster inscription from Deir ʿAllā in Transjordan around 800 b.c.e. (see Section 2.3.2). They clearly show that the customary bifurcation of Northwest Semitic since the first millennium b.c.e. into an Aramaic and a Canaanite branch, each distinguished by its own linguistic traits, represents a simplification of the linguistic reality and does not necessarily cover all the available evidence. There is, however, no consensus about the exact status of these witnesses, since their linguistic affiliation depends on the methodological position on adopts. Within a genealogical framework, they could be viewed as late offshoots of an erstwhile common branch prior to the split into Canaanite and Aramaic,44 whereas a dialect-­ geographical approach would rather see them as instances of convergence in border areas.45 The discussion of the matter along these lines has reached a dead end. The choice one makes has obvious implications for one’s definition of Aramaic, but a closer investigation shows that these two “mixed” varieties actually represent quite different cases: lexical and stylistic Canaanite veneer in a singular literary composition like the Deir ʿAllā text may have a different origin than more deeply-rooted Canaanite words and forms in a local language like Samʾalian that has grown organically. More specifically, it will be argued here that the former constitutes an Aramaic adaption of a piece of Canaanite traditional literature and that the latter combines a basically Aramaic garb with some archaic Northwest Semitic features and perhaps some influence of Phoenician as the former prestige language of ninth-century Anatolia. This view seems to account better for the actual distribution of the different linguistic traits and their respective diagnostic weight. As a consequence, neither Samʾalian nor the Deir ʿAllā plaster inscription are considered representative of Aramaic here. Although they both contain, for whatever historical reason, a substantial Aramaic stratum that brings them closer to Aramaic than to any other known Semitic language, they will thus not be adduced in support of a classification of Aramaic and the reconstruction of its common grammatical core. 43 44 45

Huehnergard 1995 presents such an expanded trait list. Cf. especially Huehnergard 1991. So Kaufman 1988.

Introduction

23

1.2.2 The Grammatical Core of Aramaic A brief sketch of the basic grammatical system underlying the Aramaic languages from the first textual attestations down to the literary idioms of Late Antiquity can serve as an Archimedean point for relating the diachronic developments that evolved during the time frame covered here and that will be discussed in the respective Chapters. The following overview is not meant as a reconstruction of a hypothetical “Proto-Aramaic” (a concept of extremely dubious value given the unclear status of Samʾalian on the one hand and the amount of linguistic convergence in Syria-Palestine on the other, as has been outlined in the previous Section), but rather focuses on the earliest historical stage of Aramaic as it appears in direct and unambiguous evidence. This evidence consists of Central Syrian Aramaic and the variety attested in the Tell Fekheriye inscription, which, despite occasional by-forms, share the same overall structure, relate to the Aramaic languages attested in later periods, and illustrate an ongoing evolution of the grammatical system. By contrast, the local language of Samʾal exhibits a number of peculiarities in nominal morphology that do not recur elsewhere in Aramaic, so it is less representative of a prototypical form of Aramaic. Paradigm tables have been supplemented by evidence from successive stages, because not all forms given here actually occur in Old or Achaemenid Official Aramaic due to the accident of attestation, but there is no reason why they should not have existed.46 Some salient developments will be discussed more systematically in the following Section. Together, this part of the present volume can be seen as a prolegomenon to a still unwritten comprehensive historical grammar of Aramaic down to the spread of Islam, with a focus on the early period. The phonemic reconstructions suggested here are of course hypothetical and have been gained from a combination of vowel letters (indications of long vowels by means of certain consonantal signs), transcriptions of Aramaic words and names (for instance, in syllabic cuneiform script), later pointing 46

Historically sensitive synchronic grammatical outlines for different periods of Aramaic preceding the emergence of vocalization traditions can be found in Gzella 2014a (early Old Aramaic); 2011b (Achaemenid Official Aramaic); and especially Beyer 1984: 423–497 (focusing on Judaean Aramaic around the middle of the second century b.c.e.). They are all illustrated by examples from the primary sources themselves that can compensate for the more abstract and purposefully generic presentation here. Tsereteli 1995 provides a brief overview of the grammatical essentials of several epigraphic and literary varieties of Aramaic on the one hand and modern vernaculars on the other, but it is rather indebted to the elenchi of parallel features in older manuals (see Section 1.1.1 above) and does not offer any consistent historical reconstruction.

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traditions (as in vocalized medieval manuscripts), and comparative Semitic data (especially from closely-related languages). They represent abstractions, that is, the “pure” sounds, and should not be confused with the actual pronunciation of the language. Nonetheless, they breathe life into the consonantal skeleton of the script and help distinguish forms that appear identical due to the imperfections of the writing system. Aramaic in its earliest manifestations had a more extensive and more conservative inventory of consonantal phonemes (that is, phonetic units which can convey a distinction in meaning) of at least twenty-seven sounds than the contemporaneous Canaanite languages: the voiced and unvoiced laryngeals /ʾ/ (glottal stop, ipa /ʔ/) and /h/, the pharyngeal fricatives /ʿ/ (glottalic pressure sound, ipa /ʕ/) and /ḥ/ (ipa /ħ/, pronounced in between ch in Scottish loch, or German ach, and plain h), the velars /g/ and /k/, the sibilants /z/ and /s/,47 the dentals /d/ and /t/, the interdentals /ð/ (as in English ‘this’) and /θ/ (as in English ‘thin’), the bilabials /b/ and /p/; further the palatovelar /š/ (ipa /ʃ/, as in English ‘ship’), the lateral /ś/ (the pronunciation of which in Aramaic before its later merger with /s/ remains unclear), and a reflex of the Proto-Semitic voiced velar or uvular affricate */ṣ́/ (which was presumably close to a voiced and fricative /q/ in pronunciation, as transcriptions suggest); the “emphatic” counterparts of the unvoiced velar, sibilant, dental, and interdental, i.e., /q/, /ṣ/, /ṭ/, and /θ̣/; the lateral resonant /l/ and the dental trill /r/, the dental and bilabial nasals /n/ and /m/, and the palatal and bilabial semi-vowels /y/ and /w/. The articulation of the “emphatics” (now often reconstructed as original glottal ejectives such as [tʾ] in Semitic, /ṣ/ also as an affricate [tsʾ]) is controversial for early Aramaic, but they were later pharyngealized or velarized. It is also supposed that Aramaic preserved the distinction between Proto-Semitic /ḥ/ and /ḫ/ (ipa /x/, as in German ach) on the one hand and between /ʾ/ and /ġ/ (ipa /ɣ/, spirantized g, as in Modern Greek) on the other for several centuries, in which case it would contain reflexes of all twenty-nine Proto-Semitic consonantal phonemes (though of course not necessarily in their original articulation). This is more difficult to establish on the basis of the surviving evidence, but at least the existence of /ġ/ can possibly be corroborated by cuneiform transcriptions.48

47

48

An affricated pronunciation of the non-emphatic sibilants /s/ as [ts] and /z/ as [dz], as is currently reconstructed for older stages of Semitic (cf. Huehnergard 2006: 2 with n. 5), is not impossible for the earliest known forms of Aramaic, but difficult to verify. See also below on /ṣ/. Beyer 1984: 101.

Introduction

25

All consonants could be lengthened (“geminated”) with a somewhat longer time between onset and release, as in Italian mamma; regressive assimilation of /n/ to the following consonant, as in other Semitic languages, also caused consonantal length, similarly assimilation of /l/ in some verbal roots (cf. Sections 2.2.1 and 2.2.2). Since the specific form of the alphabet taken over by the Aramaeans was geared towards Canaanite languages with a reduced inventory of consonantal phonemes and thus only had twenty-two letter signs, some of them rendered several consonantal phonemes in older Aramaic (see Sections  2.2.1 and 2.2.2). This system was modified in various stages throughout the first millennium b.c.e. due to the loss of some sounds and the rise of new allophonic variants of the plosive stops (see Section  1.2.3 below). Aramaic preserved reflexes of the Proto-Semitic short vocalic phonemes */a/, */i/, and */u/, as well as their long counterparts */ā/, */ī/, and */ū/ (conventionally marked by a macron), and the diphthongs */aw/ and */ay/. Phonemic vowel quantity was maintained for many centuries in Aramaic, and its breakdown, perhaps some time in Late Antiquity, is hard to pinpoint. Transcriptions and later vocalizations indicate that original short */i/ was realized as [e] and */u/ as [o] in pronunciation (their renderings in cuneiform transcriptions are ambiguous). This may already have been a feature of early Aramaic, but it is less easy to decide whether [e] and [o] were allophones of the phonemes /i/ and /u/ in Aramaic, or whether original */i/ and */u/ shifted to /e/ and /o/ at some stage. Little can be said about allophonic variation and other inconsistencies in pronunciation based on the written material, except for a few glimpses thanks to transcriptions and scribal mistakes. The phoneme /ɛ̄/ (a long open e like German [ä:]) cannot be reconstructed for Proto-Semitic but occurs throughout first-millennium Northwest Semitic languages and presumably originates from stressed long word-final /-ī/. In the course of time, short unstressed vowels in open syllables were reduced (cf. Section 1.2.3 below). Stress mostly rests on the final syllable, excepting penultimate stress in a few pronouns and forms with certain suffixes or endings; there seem to be no special forms for sentence-final intonation (“pause”). The Aramaic pronominal system, too, is basically conservative. Independent personal pronouns mark the subject in nominal clauses (with the third person also serving as a kind of copula) or reinforce it in verbal ones: Some forms are first attested in Achaemenid or post-Achaemenid Aramaic. The feminine second and third-person plurals in particular only occur in postAchaemenid Aramaic due to the nature of the earliest texts, in which women do not feature prominently or not at all, and later exhibit levelling of the /n/ to the masculine (see Section 1.2.3 below). Phonetically reduced enclitic versions

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Person

Singular

Plural

1 masc./fem. 2 masc. 2 fem. 3 masc. 3 fem.

/ʾanā/ ‘I’ /ʾáttā/49 ‘you’ /ʾáttī/ ‘you’ /hūʾ/51 > /hū/ ‘he’ /hīʾ/ > /hī/ ‘she’

/ʾanáḥnā/ ‘we’ /ʾattom/ ‘you’ /ʾattenn/50 ‘you’ /hóm(ū)/ ‘they’ /hénnī/ ‘they’

of the independent pronouns appear in writing in some later Aramaic languages such as Syriac but may have arisen much earlier in speech. Demonstratives, by contrast, differ significantly within Semitic. Aramaic originally had the proximal deictics (‘this’) /ðenā/ (masculine singular), /ðāʾ/ > /ðā/ (feminine singular), and /ʾellɛ̄/ (common plural), which were later expanded by /hā-/, and reflexes of the distal deictics (‘that’) */ðek/ (masculine singular; later by-forms derive from */ðenāk/ and */ðokom/52), */ðāk(ī)/ (feminine singular), and /ʾellɛk/ (plural), attested at least from Achaemenid Official Aramaic onwards; otherwise, the third-person independent pronouns could act as distal deictics. The relative marker /ðī/ (actually a fossilized genitive of older Semitic */ðū/) connects words in a possessive relationship (‘A of B’) as an analytical genitive marker, introduces relative as well as object clauses, and, together with prepositions, forms the majority of clausal connectors in Aramaic. The two interrogatives preserve an archaic distinction between animate and inanimate, or persons and things: /man/ ‘who?’ and /mā/ ‘what?’. There is no common indefinite pronoun; later Aramaic languages use a form 49 50

51

52

Long /-tt-/ in the second-person singular and plural forms results from original /-nt-/, cf. Arabic ʾanta. The plural forms with long final /-nn/ are reconstructed on the basis of Arabic ʾantunna for the second person feminine and hunna for the third person feminine (see Bauer – Leander 1927: 70–71), if indeed these are original and not the result of a later, and only partial, levelling in Arabic (as A.M. Al-Jallad kindly points out to me). However, word-final long consonants were subsequently simplified in the history of Aramaic, a change that was apparently operative between 200 and 150 b.c.e. at the latest (see Section  1.2.3 below). The earlier etymological spelling hʾ for the masculine and feminine third-person singular forms points to an original final glottal stop, which nonetheless disappeared already during the early Old Aramaic period. On forms in /-m/, which are used in the sense of ‘the same’ or ‘the above-mentioned’ in Achaemenid Official Aramaic, see now Naveh – Shaked 2012: 208–209.

27

Introduction

originally spelled mndʿm and mdʿm (Syriac /meddem/) ‘anything’ but of debated etymology (see Sections 3.1.2 and 3.3.2 for a brief discussion). As in other Semitic languages, nouns and adjectives basically belong to a series of fixed templates of abstract, mostly consonantal, roots with different vowel sequences and partly also pre- and affixes. They inflect for masculine and feminine gender, singular and plural number (with vestiges of the older dual in natural pairs), and absolute, construct, and “emphatic” state. Morphological case marking by means of endings disappeared around 1000 b.c.e in the whole of Northwest Semitic and has left no clear traces in Aramaic,53 but a direct object marker, the form of which varies in the historical languages, could optionally distinguish an animate or definite object from the subject (since the subject of a transitive verb would often also be animate; animacy and definiteness generally interact in languages).54 The feminine plural absolute ending /-ān/, patterned after the masculine as opposed to common Semitic */-āt-/ (still preserved in Samʾalian, see Section 2.2.3),55 and the emphatic (or “determinative”) state are hallmarks of Aramaic. Presumably, the noun patterns qatl, qitl, and qutl had a bisyllabic plural base  /qatal-/, /qital-/, and /qutal-/ in addition to plural endings, as in other Northwest Semitic languages, but the disappearance of short unstressed vowels in open syllables that precedes Aramaic vocalization traditions and subsequent levelling makes this difficult to prove. The following endings mark the nominal dimensions of gender, number, and state:

masc. abs. masc. cstr. 53

54

55

Singular

Dual

Plural

/-Ø/ /-Ø/

/-ayn/ /-ay/

/-īn/ /-ay/

Remnants of the old feminine-singular ending in /-at/ in the Hermopolis letters and in Achaemenid Official Aramaic have occasionally been explained as accusative markers in a few older studies, but this view could not be corroborated and has been abandoned in the meantime (cf. Gzella 2011b: 578 and 583 for simpler and more plausible explanations). Already the earliest Phoenician inscriptions from the tenth century b.c.e. may point to a loss of case inflection (see Gzella 2013f: 176–182). Cf. Gzella 2013e. The typologically more frequent use of the indirect object marker for highlighting a direct object becomes common in Achaemenid Official Aramaic and later Eastern Aramaic, whereas Western Aramaic and Samʾalian each have specific particles. Vestiges may occur in formulaic expressions in early Old Aramaic, cf. Gzella 2014a: 88 n. 46.

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masc. emph. fem. abs. fem. cstr. fem. emph.

Singular

Dual

Plural

/-āʾ/56 > /-ā/ /-ā/ (< /-(a)t/) /-at/ /-tāʾ/ > /-tā/

--/-tayn/ /-tay/ ---

/-ayyāʾ/ > /-ayyā/ /-ān/ /-āt/ /-ātāʾ/ > /-ātā/

The gender of a noun appears from its agreement with adjectives and verbs; a number of feminines (especially paired body parts and many place names) are not marked by the corresponding endings, and gender endings may differ between singular and plural in some words. Only remnants of the older feminine singular ending /-at/ or /-t/ (the distribution of the two allomorphs seems essentially lexical) are preserved in unbound forms, especially a few nouns serving as adverbs.57 State, by contrast, belongs to the typical features of Semitic nominal morphology. The “absolute” state (or “unbound form”) acts as the unmarked form; when the emphatic state emerged as a postpositive definite article, the absolute state came to signal indefiniteness. It is generally used with the quantifier /koll/ ‘all’, adverbial and numerical constructions, and predicative adjectives. Morphological definiteness marking spread gradually during the opening ­centuries of the first millennium b.c.e., following a common tendency in Northwest Semitic, but the “emphatic state” lost this function in later Eastern Aramaic (for instance in Syriac) again and became the unmarked form, whereas new definiteness markers then evolved from demonstratives in NeoAramaic languages. Conversely, the “construct” state (or “bound form”) occurs in a stress unit with the following noun, hence it preserves the inherited feminine endings, and expresses a genitive relationship. Construct nouns sometimes appear in chains, but they usually modify one non-construct element only. When the last element of a construct phrase counts as semantically definite (that is, a proper name, a suffixed noun, or a noun in the emphatic state), it affects the definiteness status of the entire phrase. Aramaic agrees with other Northwest Semitic languages attested after 1000 b.c.e in extending the morpheme /-ay/ as in the dual to the masculine plural, thereby replacing the older 56 57

The original vowel has to be reconstructed as long, because */aʾ/ would result in /ē/ in Aramaic, not in /ā/ (see Beyer 1984: 138 for a number of examples). See Gzella 2011b: 578 for examples from Achaemenid Official Aramaic and 2014a: 88 n. 45 for early Old Aramaic.

Introduction

29

endings */-ū/ (nominative) and */-ī/ (genitive-accusative). The construct was gradually supplemented and later widely replaced by periphrastic genitive marking with the particle /ðī/. Some noun patterns exhibit certain peculiarities throughout the history of Aramaic. Adjectives in /-āy/, which mainly act as gentilics and other forms denoting relation (traditionally termed nisbe), replaced the emphatic masculine plural /-ayyā/ by what seems to be the Assyrian form /-ɛ̄/, supposedly because of euphonic reasons instead of expected /-āyayyā/.58 This ending /-ɛ̄/ became universal for the masculine plural emphatic state in later Eastern Aramaic. Feminines in */-āt/, */-īt/, and */-ūt/ (the latter two being particularly productive in Aramaic for abstract nouns) lost the /-t/ in the absolute singular and plural but preserve the long vowel of the stem, which would then triphthongize before vocalic endings in the plural, hence, absolute /-awān/, construct /-awāt/, emphatic /-awātāʾ/ > /-awātā/ for */-āt/; /-iyān/, /-iyāt/, /-iyātāʾ/ > /-iyātā/ for */-īt/; and /-uwān/, /-uwāt/, /-uwātāʾ/ > /-uwātā/ for */-ūt/.59 Nouns originally ending in */-ī/ > /-ɛ̄/ exhibit a similar tendency: absolute and construct masculine singular /-ɛ̄/, emphatic /-iyāʾ/ > /-iyā/; absolute plural /-ayn/, construct /-ay/, emphatic /-ayyāʾ/ > /-ayyā/; absolute feminine singular /-iyā/, construct /-iyat/, emphatic /-ītāʾ/ > /-ītā/; absolute plural /-iyān/, construct /-iyāt/, emphatic /-iyātāʾ/ > /-iyātā/.60 This does not affect the small group of nouns in */-y/ with a consonantal realization of the glide.61 Suffixes attached to prepositions and nouns in the construct state express a genitive relationship with a pronominal possessor. Depending on whether the construct form ends in a consonant (as in most singulars and the feminine plural) or a vowel or diphthong (as in the masculine plural, the dual, and some vocalic singular bases), they undergo certain changes that, from a synchronic point of view, lead to two different sets of suffixes. A short linking vowel, which is usually considered a remnant of the former case ending, separates noun bases ending in a consonant from a suffix with an initial consonant. Vocalized traditions of Aramaic suggest that this vowel, after it had lost its function, had the same quality as the final vowel of the respective suffix, but there is no independent evidence for earlier phases of the language. The following paradigm is, again, generic in that it combines evidence from various stages:

58 59 60 61

Kaufman 1974: 127–128; Beyer 2004: 50. Beyer 1984: 454–456. Direct evidence is late, however; see Beyer 1984: 456–458. Cf, Gzella 2014a: 92 with n. 64.

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3 masc. sg. 3 fem. sg. 2 masc. sg. 2 fem. sg. 1 masc./fem. sg. 3 masc. pl. 3 fem. pl. 2 masc. pl. 2 fem. pl. 1 masc./fem. pl.

After consonants (sg./f.pl.)

After vowels (m.pl./dual)

(“singular suffixes”) /-eh/ /-ah/ /-ákā/ /-ékī/ /-ī/ /-ohūm/ /-ehenn/63 /-okūm/ /-ekenn/ /-ánā/

(“plural suffixes”) /-áw-hī/62 /-áy-hā/ /-áy-kā/ /-áy-kī/ /-ayy/ /-ay-hūm/ /-ay-henn/ /-ay-kūm/ /-ay-kenn/ /-áy-nā/

Finite verbs express the intersecting semantic notions of tense, aspect, and modality: tense refers to the location of an event or a state in time in relation to some reference point; aspect denotes the “internal” viewpoint of a situation as completed (“perfective”) or in progress (“imperfective”) regardless of its location on the time line; and modality covers nuances of possibility, obligation, or doubt. They overlap in many respects, such as future tense and modality (due to the common idea of uncertainty), present tense and imperfective aspect (both are ongoing), past and inferentials (by means of reference to results of a past event), and so forth, hence the traditional and often heated debate between temporal and aspectual approaches is futile when placed in a  wider linguistic perspective that accounts for the common cognitive underpinnings.64 The “perfect” (or “suffix conjugation”) and two principal forms of the “imperfect” (or “prefix conjugation”) constitute the backbone of the verbal system in older Aramaic but were in the course of time enriched and, in some modern dialects, replaced by the participle (see Section  1.2.3 below). Afformatives 62 63

64

This form is a typical feature of Aramaic (see Section 1.2.1 above), but /-aw-/ has later been levelled to /-ay-/ in Babylonian Eastern Aramaic (Section 5.5.1). Feminine plural forms of the suffixes ending in a long /-nn/ are reconstructed on analogy with the corresponding independent personal pronouns (see the note above and Bauer – Leander 1927: 80). A more extensive discussion can be found in Gzella 2004: 57–110 and 2012c (the latter with a focus on Hebrew but including some general linguistic issues and further references to recent theoretical and typological studies).

31

Introduction

(for the “perfect”) or a combination of pre- and afformatives (for the “imperfect”) distinguish person, number, and, excepting the first person, gender. The following original forms of the “perfect” for sound verbal roots like ktb ‘to write’ in the unmarked stem can be posited, though, again, some are only attested in later material: Person

Singular

Plural

3 masc. 3 fem. 2 masc. 2 fem. 1 masc./fem.

/katab-Ø/ /katab-at/ /katáb-tā/ /katáb-tī/ /katab-t/(< */-tu/)

/katab-ū/ presumably /katab-ā/65 /katab-tūm/ /katab-tenn/ /katáb-nā/ (< */-nu/)

The base vowel in the second syllable of the stem is lexical. Verbs denoting events mostly have /a/, whereas /e/ (< */i/) and, rarely, /o/ (< */u/) occurs with states (owing to the origin of this form in a conjugated adjective). Migration to the /a/-class in the course of time obscured such a neat distribution, so the base vowel is synchronically unpredictable. The “perfect” with dynamic verbs usually refers to anterior events of various types (completed, resultative, and others) and can also feature in performative or “gnomic” expressions, but it is debated whether the form as such anchors an event in time and thus marks relative tense or simply describes it as completed and thus expresses perfective aspect. With stative verbs, the “perfect” renders timeless states, just as adjectives do. Contrary to the “perfect,” the term “imperfect” refers to two historically distinct conjugations, a “long” and a “short” form, each with its proper functional range. They were once distinguished by a final /-u/ in the long form where the short one has a zero ending, but the disappearance of short unstressed wordfinal vowels around 1000 b.c.e. levelled the morphological difference in most persons with sound roots. However, the presence or absence of the final /-n/ in certain persons of the “long” form makes it possible to distinguish them even in consonantal writing:

65

A proper third-person feminine plural “perfect” form can be reconstructed on comparative grounds, even though its earliest attestations postdate Achaemenid Official Aramaic (see Section 4.1.2).

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Person

‘Long form’

‘Short form’

3 masc. sg. 3 fem. sg. 2 masc. sg. 2 fem. sg. 1 masc./fem. sg. 3 masc. pl. 3 fem. pl. 2 masc. pl. 2 fem. pl. 1 masc./fem. pl.

/ya-ktob-Ø/ /ta-ktob-Ø/ /ta-ktob-Ø/ /ta-ktob-īn/ /ʾa-ktob-Ø/ /ya-ktob-ūn/ /ya-ktob-(ā)n/66 /ta-ktob-ūn/ /ta-ktob-(ā)n/ /na-ktob-Ø/

/ya-ktob-Ø/ /ta-ktob-Ø/ /ta-ktob-Ø/ /ta-ktob-ī/ /ʾa-ktob-Ø/ /ya-ktob-ū/ /ya-ktob-n(ā)/ /ta-ktob-ū/ /ta-ktob-n(ā)/ /na-ktob-Ø/

As with the “perfect,” the vowel of the “imperfect” base is lexical. Most transitive verbs have /o/ (< */u/). The preformative vowel shifted to /e/ in the course of time as a result of the “Barth Ginsberg Law” (see Section 1.2.3 below), and the preformative consonant /y-/ was replaced by /l-/ (as already with the nonnegated “short imperfect” in the Tell Fekheriye inscription, see Section 2.2.1) or /n-/ in Eastern Aramaic languages (see Section 5.5.1). The “short imperfect” expresses deontic modality, that is, commands, wishes, and permissions, hence it is often called “jussive,” and requires the negation /ʾal/.67 It was replaced by the “long” form in post-Achaemenid Aramaic (see Section  1.2.3 below), presumably in part due to overlaps in the modal domain (since also English ‘must’ and ‘may’ can be either deontic or epistemic, depending on the context), which finally reduced morphological marking and caused the loss of the more restricted deontic “short” form in favour of the “long” one. The latter has a much broader functional range that comprises present-future (or non-past), ongoing situations (imperfective aspect) independent of a specific location in time, and mostly epistemic modal nuances like certainty, doubt, or ability. These are semantically related and thus often difficult to distinguish, hence no straightforward temporal, aspectual, or modal 66

67

Apparently first discovered by Beyer 1984: 147; Huehnergard 1987 has an extensive analysis that essentially confirms Beyer’s view. It is unclear at which stage exactly secondary /-ān/, as attested by later vocalization traditions, became the normal feminine-plural afformative in the “long imperfect” instead of common /-n/. A past-punctual function of the “short imperfect” as in Canaanite wayyiqtol is sometimes assumed but cannot be reconstructed for Aramaic, see Section 2.3.1 for a comprehensive discussion of the evidence and further bibliography.

Introduction

33

marking at the expense of the other categories can be posited. When used for past-tense events, the “long imperfect” may indicate durative-iterative situations or act as a kind of “historical present” for dramatic vividness (see Section 2.3.1). The second persons of the “short imperfect” without the respective preformative also underlie the imperative, although the resulting word-initial consonant cluster of the base /ktob-/ may have been resolved by a non-systematic helping vowel in pronunciation. Imperatives cannot occur with negations; instead, the second person of the “short imperfect” after /ʾal/ and, after the latter’s disappearance, the long form after the negation /lā/ takes its place. Suffixes attached to finite verbs express pronominal direct objects. Except for the first person singular /-nī/ ‘me’, these correspond to the possessive suffixes. Forms of the “perfect” that end in a consonant take a linking vowel, whereas suffixed “imperfects” with an /-n-/ intervening between the verbal base and the suffix are customarily interpreted as “long” forms plus a remnant of the old “energic” ending /-an/ or /-anna/. No such /-n-/ appears to have been used with suffixed forms of the “short imperfect” and the imperative. Later vocalization traditions point to many secondary developments in suffixed verbs in the historical languages. In addition to these finite conjugations, Aramaic also disposes of several verbal nouns. The active participle corresponds to the etymological pattern /kāteb/ in the basic stem and inflects like a noun, but construct and “emphatic”state forms only occur when it acts as a substantive, and participles serving as predicative adjectives always appear in the absolute state. The latter have been increasingly integrated into the verbal system since the Achaemenid period (Section 1.2.3 below). Basic-stem passive participles have the form /katīb/, but some may express active nuances. Infinitives, serving as verbal complements, are attested in several noun patterns, of which /maktab/ (later /mektab/) became the dominant basic-stem form in Aramaic since the seventh century b.c.e. and replaced the unprefixed variant (spelled ktb and arguably to be read /ktab/, but this is impossible to verify)68 that was once common in Central Syria. The patterns employed for the passive participle and the infinitive differ in the historical Semitic languages and thus attest to a looser paradigmatic relationship than the finite forms. When preceded by a preposition like /la-/, the infinitive expresses purpose or object clauses. Owing to their double nature, infinitives can be construed verbally in the absolute state with a direct 68

It would be confirmed by the seemingly archaic libnē ‘to build’ (< */la-bnaʾ/) in Ezra 5:3.13 (cf. Vogt 1971: 10, s.v. ʾmr), but this form may be a scribal mistake for expected lmiḇnē (Bauer – Leander 1927: 156).

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object or nominally in the construct state, where they form a genitive relationship with a following noun. Factitive and causative situation types as well as active and medio-passive diathesis are expressed by the so-called verbal stems, that is, derivational categories of abstract verbal roots which underlie the finite conjugations and verbal nouns.69 Not all stems are productive for each root, and their meaning can differ per verb. The unmarked form is called the basic- or G(round)-stem. The D(oubling)-stem is characterized by a lengthened middle root consonant and marks verbal plurality or, with intransitive roots, factitivity. The C(ausative)stem has a prefix /ha-/, which later shifted to /ʾa-/ (see Section 1.2.3 below), and often renders a causative nuance, but the difference as opposed to factitivity is not always transparent. G, D, and C each have a medio-passive variant with an infixed or, later, prefixed /-t-/ (Gt, Dt, Ct) and often express a reflexive or reciprocal nuance; the /-t-/ normally swaps position with a root-initial sibilant and is partially assimilated to /z/ and /ṣ/ in contact (*/tz/ > /zd/, */tṣ/ > /ṣṭ/), but exceptions (such as assimilation of /t/ to a non-sibilant or lack of metathesis) are also attested and may result from sub-standard pronunciation. Each active stem originally had an apophonic (“internal”) passive (Gp, Dp, Cp) as well, which was distinguished by a different vowel sequence. The passive function was gradually absorbed by the t-stems, and the internal passives had disappeared in Aramaic by the end of the first millennium b.c.e. A  complete generic paradigm has to combine data from throughout preChristian Aramaic: Stem

“Perfect”

“Imperfect”

Imperative

Participle

Infinitive

G

/katab/

/yaktob/

/ktob/

/kāteb/

Gp Gt D Dp

/katīb/ /ʾetkateb/70 /katteb/ /kotteb/

/yoktab/ /yetkateb/ /yakatteb/ /yakottab/

--/ʾetkateb/ /katteb/ ---

/katīb/ /metkateb/ /makatteb/ /makattab/

/maktab/ (/ktab/) --/ʾetkatābā/ /kattābā/ ---

69 70

See Gzella 2009a for a survey. Comprehensive functional analyses of the individual stems in Aramaic are still lacking. The very few, partly unclear, forms with an /h/ prefix in Old and Achaemenid Official Aramaic can be explained as pseudo-corrections patterned after the C-stem (cf. Morgenstern 2003: 145), those in later Jewish Aramaic varieties may have been influenced by Hebrew (Stadel 2008: 79–80).

35

Introduction Stem

“Perfect”

“Imperfect”

Imperative

Participle

Infinitive

Dt C Cp Ct

/ʾetkattab/ /hakteb/ /hokteb/ /ʾethakteb/

/yetkattab/ /ya(ha)kteb/ /y(ah)oktab/ /yethaktab/

/ʾetkattab/ /hakteb/ --/ʾethaktab/(?)

/metkattab/ /ma(ha)kteb/ /ma(ha)ktab/ /mathaktab/

/ʾetkattābā/ /haktābā/ --/ʾethaktābā/

Some forms exhibit variation in the course of time, such as by-forms of the derived-stem infinitives with an/m-/ prefix in several forms of Aramaic since the seventh century b.c.e. and a new Ct-form /ʾettaktab/ in Syriac (cf. Section 1.2.3 below). Contrary to all other known Northwest Semitic languages, Aramaic has no productive N-stem. Not all roots consist of three stable consonants (“radicals”; their position in the root is usually indicated with a Roman numeral); those with sounds prone to assimilation, glides, and long vowels exhibit a number of peculiarities. Initial /n/, and /l/ in lqḥ ‘to take’, assimilates to the following consonant, and the imperative is formed on a biradical basis (/qaḥ/). This was then analogically extended to roots with initial /y/ (see also Section 1.2.3 below on the “imperfect”). Some roots with a base vowel other than */i/ have sound “imperfect” forms that preserve initial /y/, such as yyṭb ‘it pleases’ (Ezra 7:18). Original rootinitial */w/, which had merged with initial /y/ in the whole of Northwest Semitic, was preserved in C-stem forms. Verbs with a long second radical (“geminate roots”) lengthen the first instead of the second root consonant in some forms (cf. Section 1.2.3 below), but Gt, D, and Dt forms (and perhaps also the basic-stem participle, as in later Aramaic) inflect like sound roots. “Hollow roots” with a long vowel in the middle position preserve that vowel in forms based on the basic-stem “imperfect” and replace it with the corresponding long vowel of the sound verb elsewhere. The spelling of the Tell Fekheriye inscription may reveal a morphological difference between “long” and “short imperfect” of such roots.71 Yet the basic-stem active participle and the entire D-stem of most verbs inflect like sound roots. Some verbs, however, have a L(engthening)-stem with a long vowel in the first syllable and reduplication of the second consonantal radical instead. There are some overlaps between geminate and hollow roots. Verbs with a root-final long vowel /ī/ preserve that vowel in all “perfect” and imperative forms (resulting in /ay/ with /-ī/ and /aw/ with /-ū/ of the respective afformatives), but shift it to /ɛ̄/ in all “imperfect” and participle forms as 71

Cf. Gzella 2014a: 96–97.

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well as in the basic-stem infinitive. Many of such verbs, however, have a “perfect” in /-ā/ (which becomes /-ay-/ before consonantal afformatives, /-āt/ in the third-person feminine singular, and /-aw/ in the third-persons plural). A morphological distinction between “long” and “short” imperfects of roots with final /ī/ is preserved in early Old Aramaic but was later lost.72 Vocalic forms of such verbs dissolve into diphthongs before the linking vowel. Among the prepositions, proclitic /ba-/, /la-/ (the /a/ < */i/ is due to paradigmatic levelling), and /ka-/ are particularly common. They express spatial, temporal, or logical relations and govern a noun or a possessive suffix; some prepositions take suffixes attached to the ending /-ay-/, perhaps because they result from plural nouns. Function words like coordinating (especially /wa-/) and subordinating conjunctions (such as /hen/ ‘if’) connect clauses. Aramaic also has a number of modal and deictic particles; the existence marker /ʾīt(ay)/ ‘there is’ and its negation /layt(ay)/, together with an indirect object marked by the preposition /la-/ (literally ‘there is to’), act in lieu of a verb ‘to have’ which is lacking in Aramaic and other Semitic languages. Modal verbs compensate for the lack of adverbs, but later varieties also develop productive adverbial classes, such as the ending /-āʾīṯ/ (presumably based on nisbe forms in /-āy/, indicating relation) in Syriac. Verb – Subject – Object is usually considered original for verbal clauses and Subject – Predicate for nominal ones, but the material from the seventh century b.c.e. onwards exhibits much greater variation, presumably at least in part due to language contact (see Section 3.1.3). Agreement is usually straightforward (excepting the numerals from three to ten, which have the opposite gender of the counted noun, as in other older Semitic languages) but can be ad sensum with coordinative subjects, passive predicates, and collectives. Double subordination is avoided in favour of parataxis, and there are a few other stylistic idiosyncrasies, especially in the syntax of conditional constructions.73 Finally, Aramaic has a number of typical lexemes, such as /ʾenāš/ ‘man, person’, ʾzl ‘to go’, yhb ‘to give’, /māreʾ/ ‘lord’, slq ‘to go up’, or /qodām/ ‘in front of’, and peculiar meanings of some verbs or nouns, like ʿbd ‘to make’ (instead of ‘to serve’) or /nūr/ ‘fire’ (instead of ‘light’), which otherwise belong to the common Semitic stock, or at least have cognates elsewhere, for instance ʾtī ‘to come’, nḥt ‘to go down’, and šbq ‘to leave’.74 Variation in the vocabulary already within the 72 73 74

See Gzella 2014a: 96 and 103. Cf. the convenient survey in Beyer 1989: 27–30. See Millard 1995. The most reliable source for basic etymological information on Aramaic words is the glossary in Beyer 1984–2004. Sokoloff’s edition of Brockelmann 21928 is especially useful for loanwords.

Introduction

37

earliest witnesses and the existence of distinctive by-forms in the vocabulary of Eastern (zdq ‘to be just’ and /ṭoll/ ‘shadow’ as opposed to ṣdq and /ṭell/ respectively) and Western (ḥmī ‘to see’ vis-à-vis ḥzī) dialects obviously preclude the idea of a total lexical unity of Aramaic but correspond to the phonological and morphological diversity that surfaces already at the outset of the textual record. 1.2.3 The Evolution of Aramaic Grammar until the Seventh Century c.e. Due to the considerable amount of internal diversity, the basically consonantal writing system, and the formal nature of the evidence, any attempt at tracing the evolution of pre-modern Aramaic remains by necessity incomplete. Certain tendencies can already be observed in the material that has survived from the first half of the first millennium b.c.e., but the natural development of the language was then eclipsed by the essentially homogeneous character of Achaemenid Official Aramaic and the unifying force of the Persian chancellery standard to which scribes in the various parts of the empire conformed. The wider impact of a number of phonological and morphological changes, however, becomes apparent when regional dialects, which continued to evolve beneath the surface of Achaemenid Official Aramaic, acquired the status of written languages and thereby appeared, although in a fashion to varying degrees influenced by the Persian chancellery idiom, on the stage of history. Since the three successive empires of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Persians, accompanied by a considerable degree of continuity in administrative and bureaucratic procedures, had further corroborated contacts between different Aramaic-speaking regions, Aramaic varieties throughout the entire speech area formed part of an extensive continuum across which linguistic innovations could quickly spread in waves. The vocalization traditions later applied to Jewish and Christian literary corpora record further phonological features in the pronunciation of the vernaculars spoken by the scribes that would mostly go unnoticed in consonantal writing and confirm that a number of secondary developments crossed the boundaries between individual dialects and thereby affected Aramaic at large. Such developments occurred over time; an innovation in pronunciation, morphology, or usage appeared among some speakers, coexisted for some time with its older counterpart after gaining currency, and was then generalized or lost again. A tentative absolute chronology of the phonetic laws that were operative in Aramaic has to be established on the basis of a combination of texts written in consonantal script (which merely indicates long vowels by means of matres lectionis, and even then in certain cases only), transcriptions of names or ­individual words into other writing systems (such as syllabic cuneiform and

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subsequently Greek or Latin), later pointing traditions, and historical-comparative Semitic philology. However, these various, and often ambiguous, bits and pieces of information do not always add up to a coherent picture but merely permit a rough approximation with at times a large margin of error; some instances of phonetic fluctuation that can be observed in transcriptions, for instance, may simply reflect allophonic variation not governed by any specific rules. The only rigorous and comprehensive study so far is Beyer 1984: 77–153 (with additions in 2004: 45–66). Essential aspects of the historical evolution of Aramaic phonology, morphology, and syntax from its earliest attested stages (as outlined in Section  1.2.2 above) will be discussed against a wider background in the respective Chapters, but they include in particular the following phenomena, which in the course of time shaped the distinctive phonetic profile of Aramaic familiar to learners of Biblical Aramaic or Syriac.75 Syllable-final glottal stops began to disappear presumably at some point between the ninth and eighth centuries b.c.e., during the early Old Aramaic period, and caused compensatory lengthening of a preceding short vowel (with the typically Aramaic shift of /aʾ/ to /ē/, which suggests that /a/ sounded like [e] before /ʾ/).76 Owing to their realization as /e/ and /o/, the lengthened grades of */i/ and */u/ are /ē/ and /ō/ respectively. As a consequence, verbs with root-final /ʾ/ eventually merged with vocalic verbs, although this was completed only in the course of time.77 Phonetic spellings of such forms with h instead of ʾ, which attest to the change in question, occur more frequently from the sixth century b.c.e. onwards, whereas earlier examples are still rare and in part ambiguous. Several other important consonantal shifts occurred in the late Old Aramaic period. The etymological voiceless, voiced, and “emphatic” interdentals /θ/, /ð/, and /θ̣/ had largely or even completely merged with their dental counterparts /t/, /d/, and /ṭ/ by the seventh century b.c.e. (see Section 3.1.2), when phonetic spellings like kdy ‘as long as’ instead of kzy or tql ‘shekel’ instead of šql begin to appear with a certain regularity besides historical ones that were preserved in 75

76

77

These changes are amply illustrated in Beyer 2013a by means of a rich selection of representative texts from different regions and registers, each with a historical reconstruction of the pronunciation, between the ninth century b.c.e. (Tell Fekheriye inscription) and the fifth century c.e. (consonantal text of Targum Onqelos). His examples bring to life the somewhat abstract and technical discussion of the evidence in Beyer 1984: 77–153. Hence the original vowel of the “emphatic state” should be reconstructed as long, i.e., */-āʾ/ (> /-ā/). Cf. Beyer 1984: 138 for other examples (e.g., */raʾš/ > /rēš/ ‘head’ or */śaʾn/ > /śēn/ ‘shoe’). Beyer 1984: 104–106.

Introduction

39

conservative orthography (especially with high-frequency words), but this process may have been underway for at least a century and is first attested for /θ/ > /t/.78 A similar explanation applies to the loss of intervocalic /-h-/ in causative-stem forms, which eventually triggered the shift from /ha-/ to /ʾa-/ in the causative-stem prefix due to levelling.79 In addition, the writing ʾrʿ instead of ʾrq ‘land’ in Mesopotamian documents suggests that the Aramaic reflex of */ṣ́/ had merged with /ʿ/ around the mid-seventh century b.c.e. (see Section 3.1.2). One could possibly suppose that the loss of the interdentals and the reflex of */ṣ́/ has been influenced by the phonetic systems of the other, Canaanite, languages of Syria-Palestine and by Akkadian, in which they had already disappeared at an earlier stage. Contact with Akkadian may also have caused an early weakening of /ʿ/ to /ʾ/ and of /ḥ/ to /h/ in the pronunciation of AkkadianAramaic bilinguals in parts of the speech area already during the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods and spread to some other regions as a result of deportations. The effects, at any rate, appear only in much later material from Palestine (in particular in Samaria and Galilee, though rather sporadically) and Babylonia (especially in Mandaic).80 Most of the material from the Achaemenid period, covering the fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e., illustrates the use of Aramaic as a written lingua franca and largely obscures phonetic changes in the coexisting vernaculars. Yet some transcriptions of Aramaic names in cuneiform documents occasionally anticipate a few developments in the Aramaic vernaculars that are then partly confirmed by direct evidence from later periods (see Section 4.1.2): first, the initial stage of the “Barth Ginsberg Law” with dissimilation of original /a/ to /i/ (actually realized as /e/) in the basic-stem “imperfect” preformative before the thematic vowel /a/, as in -li-in-ṭár for /lenṭar/ ‘may he protect!’;81 and second, anaptyxis of word-final consonant clusters, as in -ša-am-iš or -ša-mi-iš for /šaməš/ ‘sun’.82 By contrast, the occasional shift of /a/ to /e/ before syllable-final /ʿ/, /h/, or /ḥ/, as in the verbal form -ia-di-iʾ or -ia-di-ḫi for /yadeʿ/ ‘he knew’ besides -ia-ada-ḫu- for /yadaʿ/ until the fifth century b.c.e.83 is somewhat elusive as to its regularity. It ceased to be operative when vocalic phenomena became better attested in Aramaic thanks to a more extensive use of vowel letters and vocalized texts; hence it may simply represent the realization of these sounds in 78 79 80 81 82 83

Beyer 1984: 100 and Section 2.3.3. Beyer 1984: 148 and 2004: 64–65. Beyer 1984: 103 and 2004: 52. Beyer 1984: 109–110. Beyer 1984: 112. Cf. also Blasberg 1997: 92. Beyer 1984: 107–108.

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articulation and not a regular development. It should also be emphasized that a significant part of the cuneiform evidence is ambiguous, and one cannot say with certainty how typical such occasional spellings are of Aramaic at large. After the fall of the Persian chancellery, a number of regional spoken idioms in the former territories of the Achaemenid empire (especially Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia) were transformed into the written languages of newlyemerging political entities. They preserve a more representative snapshot of the pronunciation of Aramaic in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods, between the third century b.c.e. and the third century c.e., than stray forms in cuneiform material from Achaemenid times. Such changes in pronunciation amply illustrate the universal workings of various developments that determine the characteristic phonetic profile of Aramaic as it was later codified in the Jewish and Christian pointing traditions. Some of these changes clearly continue tendencies that can first be observed in transcriptions during the Achaemenid period, in particular the extension of the preformative vowel /e/ as a result of the “Barth Ginsberg Law” throughout the basic-stem “imperfect” (independent of the thematic vowel), as in lypwq for /leppoq/ ‘may he go out’ in a papyrus from Dura Europos dating to about 200 c.e.,84 and the reanalysis of anaptyctic vowels in word-final consonant clusters as short full vowels that were occasionally even indicated by matres lectionis, such as ʾrwk for /ʾorok/ ‘length’ (from */ʾurk/) or ktwl for /kotol/ ‘wall’ (from */kutl/) in Aramaic material from Qumran.85 Others, by contrast, appear here for the first time: the shift of */i/ (pronounced as /e/) to /a/ before root-final /h/, /ḥ/, /ʿ/, and /r/ between ca. 200 b.c.e. and the seventh century c.e. at the latest, as in participle forms like σαφαρα for /sāpar/ (in the “emphatic state”) ‘scribe’ in Greek inscriptions of this period instead of older /sāper/86; the shift of /a/ to /e/ before sibilants in the third century b.c.e., as later in /nešar/ ‘vulture’ instead of /našar/ (from original */našr/, with anaptyxis) in a personal name from Dura Europos87; monophthongization of the original diphthongs /aw/ and /ay/ to /ō/ and /ē/ respectively, either in closed syllables or consistently, between 200 and 150 b.c.e., first in Western, then in Eastern Aramaic, hence bt and in Greek transcriptions βηθ for */bayt/ ‘house’ (contrast Βηθσαϊδα ‘House of Hunting’ in 84 85 86 87

Beyer 1984: 110–112. Beyer 1984: 113–115 and 2004: 54. The same phenomenon underlies the appearance of the so-called “segolates” in vocalized Hebrew. Beyer 1984: 107–108 and 2004: 53. Beyer 1984: 115–116 and 2004: 54.

Introduction

41

Matthew 11:21, with preservation of /ay/ in the second, open, syllable)88; and at the same time shortening of word-final long consonants, which explains the rare variant spelling gh for /gō/ ‘inner’ (from */gaww/ via /gaw/, since long glides are otherwise preserved) in a contract from the Dead Sea region.89 Evidence for the independent etymological phonemes /ḫ/ and /ġ/ in preceding stages of Aramaic is indirect, because they were right from the outset spelled with the same graphemes as the pharyngeals /ḥ/ and /ʿ/, with which they later merged. It has been suggested that the shifts of /ḫ/ to /ḥ/ and of /ġ/ to /ʿ/ were completed by the second century b.c.e. as well.90 This is also the time when the shift of original /ś/ to /s/ appears from an increasing number of writings with s instead of earlier š.91 Either, however, may only be the end-point of a longer process. Another group of phonetic changes seems to have occurred gradually in the course of this period and was only completed towards its end: the shortening first of long word-medial /r/, /ʾ/, and /ʿ/ around 150 b.c.e. due to weak articulation with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel in order to preserve the syllable structure and, subsequently, of word-medial /h/ and /ḥ/ (though without compensatory lengthening) after about 300 c.e., as it is attested, for instance, by forms like ḥwryn for /ḥōrīn/ ‘free persons’ (from */ḥurr/) in a contract from the Dead Sea that does not otherwise use w as a vowel letter for short /o/92; increasing loss of unstressed word-final long vowels (presumably via shortening) since the end of the second century b.c.e. at the earliest, hence occasional phonetic spellings like ʾqym besides more frequent historical ʾqymw for the third-person plural /ʾaqīm/ (from earlier /ʾaqīmū/) ‘they erected’ in Palmyrene and Hatran inscriptions and later in the orthography of Classical Syriac93; aspiration of the voiceless stops /k/, /p/, and /t/ around 250 b.c.e. and 88

89 90 91 92

93

Beyer 1984: 116–120 and 2004: 54–55. This shift occurs naturally and may already have been underway for some time in earlier varieties, but direct evidence in favour of such a view (collected by Beyer 1984: 119–120 2004: 55) is only very sporadic. It may thus have been further advanced in some forms of older Aramaic than in others. Beyer 1984: 120–122; cf. Stadel 2013d: 175. Beyer 1984: 101–102. Beyer 1984: 102–103. Beyer 1984: 122 and 2004: 56. This is also the reason why these sounds cannot be geminated in Tiberian Hebrew, whereas transcriptions of personal names in the Septuagint Pentateuch preserve older forms (compare Σαρρα ‘Sarah’ from */śarrat-/ ‘princess’ with Tiberian Śārā); the fact that the same phenomenon also affects /r/ suggests a similar uvular or voiceless articulation like French r. Beyer 1984: 122–125 and 2004: 56. Such vowels were apparently preserved in the liturgical recitation of Biblical and Targumic texts. Van Beek 2013 argues a strong case, on the basis

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subsequent spirantization of /b/, /g/, /d/, /k/, /p/, and /t/ to their fricative allophones /ḇ/, /ḡ/, /ḏ/, /ḵ/, /p̄ /, and /ṯ/ in post-vocalic position between the first century b.c.e. and the third century c.e., which underlies spellings of /b/ with w instead of expected b (as in the Aramaizing rendering of the name bt šwʿ instead of bt šbʿ in 1 Chronicles 3:5).94 Spirantization also affected consonants resulting from a shortening of original word-final geminates, but the plosive pronunciation was analogically restored in some cases (hence the plosive /t/ in the second-person singular pronoun /ʾat/ ‘you’ from older /ʾatt/, original */ʾant-/, in Syriac and Tiberian Hebrew vocalization under the influence of the corresponding plural form). The ensuing loss of unstressed short vowels in open syllables around the middle of the third century c.e. is of particular importance. It belongs to the most distinctive features of the Aramaic literary languages as they appear in vocalization traditions, such as Biblical Aramaic and Classical Syriac,95 in contradistinction to Biblical Hebrew and Classical Arabic. These have occupied a central place in research and teaching ever since the beginnings of Aramaic scholarship in Early Modern Europe, hence it should be emphasized that this characteristic hallmark is historically conditioned and does not apply to earlier forms of the language.96 Shifts in the spelling of forms with matres lectionis for etymological short vowels in datable texts both from Qumran in the western periphery and Hatra in the east, such as qdm /qḏām/ ‘before’ instead of slightly earlier qwdm /qoḏām/, demonstrate that the deletion of these vowels had spread across the entire speech area by about 250 c.e.97 Stops previously

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of evidence from Homeric Greek, for the view that the pronunciation of traditional literature could lag behind developments in the vernacular, and a similar phenomenon may have been operative here. Beyer 1984: 125–128 and 2004: 56–57. A fresh investigation of all Aramaic personal names in Greek script from this period may further fine-tune the general picture. (Some possible, though debated, instances of spirantization in earlier material do not indicate a regular phonetic change, cf. Lipiński 2000b: 140–141. Occasional attempts at positing spirantization for Achaemenid Official Aramaic rest on a shaky foundation, see Morgenstern 2003: 143.) Hence it coincides with the beginning of the “Middle” period of Aramaic according to Beyer’s classification, see Beyer 1984: 59–69. Ignorance of this crucial fact underlies the once widespread but misguided attempt, especially in earlier studies, but occasionally still in teaching manuals written by non-specialists, to vocalize pre-Christian epigraphic Aramaic as if it corresponded to the phonetic laws of Biblical Aramaic or Classical Syriac. Beyer 1984: 128–136 and 2004: 57–60. Kaufman 1984, while agreeing with Beyer’s date as a terminal point, proposes an onset of the same development already in the Achaemenid period, but there is no conclusive evidence for this suggestion (see also Section 4.1.2).

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spirantized as a result of their former post-vocalic position retain their fricative articulation; non-systemic helping vowels facilitated pronunciation, such as in word-initial consonant clusters, especially with an increasing degree of sonority (such as /tr/) and with initial glottal stops; and word-initial /w-/ and /y-/ were pronounced [u] and [i] after the disappearance of the following short vowel. Finally, a few developments seem to appear more frequently, though not always systematically, in the Aramaic literary languages of Late Antiquity: raising of word-medial /ū/ and /ē/ to /ō/ and /ɛ̄/ respectively in a few cases before 400 c.e.98; backing of long vowels in some words and, more regularly, of /e/ and /o/ to /i/ and /u/ in the seventh and eighth centuries c.e. according to Eastern Aramaic pointing traditions (such as the Eastern vocalization of Syriac)99; and raising of short stressed /i/ to /a/ before a double consonant (“Philippi’s Law”).100 With the rise of “classical” literary traditions that were transmitted over generations in manuscripts, Aramaic vernaculars withdrew once again from the written surface. Ensuing changes in the spoken language may prefigure certain features of Neo-Aramaic dialects, but their effects crop up only occasionally in Syriac, Babylonian Talmudic, or Mandaic texts. This is a still little-known area that has yet to be investigated and could bridge the gap between the study of Ancient and Modern Aramaic. Many concomitant morphological and morpho-syntactic changes will also be discussed at greater length in the respective grammatical sections of the following Chapters.101 The most important ones can be summarized as follows: basic-stem infinitives with an /m-/ prefix, already attested in the ninth-century Tell Fekheriye inscription, have replaced their unprefixed counterparts in the whole of Aramaic by the seventh century b.c.e., whereas by-forms of derivedstem infinitives with such a prefix occur at least in certain late Old Aramaic texts and in some forms of post-Achaemenid Western Aramaic (Section 3.1.2). Pronominal third-person plural object suffixes are replaced by the corresponding independent pronouns first in the seventh-century Assur ostracon and then in Aramaic at large since the Achaemenid period (Sections  3.2.3 and 98 Beyer 1984: 136 and 2004: 60–61. 99 Beyer 1984: 137–140 and 2004: 61. 100 Beyer 1984: 140–141 and 2004: 62, who, in contradistinction to most Semitists, considers this change a purely Aramaic phenomenon that was operative in the eighth century c.e. A late date of Philippi’s Law in Tiberian Hebrew has now been confirmed by B. Suchard in his forthcoming doctoral dissertation. 101 The concept of “morpho-syntax” stresses the firm connection between syntactic processes and distinctions in morphology; morphology and morpho-syntax can also be subsumed under the notion of “grammar.”

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4.1.2). The Achaemenid period also provides evidence for the lengthening of the first instead of the second radical in forms of geminate roots with preformatives or prefixes ending in a vowel, for the lengthening of the second radical in the basic-stem “imperfect” and infinitive of some high-frequency verbs with root-initial /y/, and for a growing integration of the predicative participle as a present and later future-tense form into the verbal system (Section 4.1.2). This last development triggered a fundamental restructuring of tenseaspect-mood marking and its morphological categories in subsequent forms of Aramaic: the “long imperfect” became increasingly confined to various nuances of modality instead of its broader functional range of present-future, imperfective aspect, and epistemic modality; both unsuffixed “energic” conjugations and energics in /-an/ (“energic II”) with suffixes disappeared; and the “short imperfect,” which marked deontic modality in earlier Aramaic, was lost by the time of Christ, since its function had been increasingly absorbed by the “long” form.102 The integration of the participle into the verbal system and the ensuing rearrangement of the verbal conjugations partly resolved the imbalance in markedness between the more specific “perfect” for various past-tense nuances and the rather ambiguous “imperfect.” Around the same period, the waning “internal” passives finally dropped out of use in favour of the t-stems, which had stronger morphological marking and further expanded their older reflexive-middle meaning by genuine passive nuances.103 Later Aramaic varieties also saw the rise of new inflectional paradigms based on the active and passive participle as well as innovative alignment patterns that produced ergative-like structures; they are fully developed in Eastern Neo-Aramaic but have predecessors, albeit in an embryonic stage, in the Eastern Aramaic varieties of Late Antiquity and even in the Achaemenid chancellery idiom (compare Achaemenid Official Aramaic /šamīʿ lī/ ‘it is heard by me’ for ‘I have heard’ with North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic /ptix-le/ ‘he opened’, originally ‘it is opened by him’).104 The emergence of such paradigms can be traced in the increasing grammaticalization of periphrastic constructions consisting of a participle and a pronominal phrase (for instance, from /kāṯeḇ ʾenā/ ‘I am writing’ to /kāṯeḇ-nā/ in Syriac)105 or of participial forms to uninflected 102 Gzella 2004: 326–330; 2008a: 104–105. 103 Beyer 1984: 152; cf. Gzella 2009a: 301. The vowel sequence of the t-stem of the C(ausative) series according to the pattern /ʾettaqtel/ (from earlier /ʾethaqtel/ via /ʾetʾaqtel/; first attested in Achaemenid Official Aramaic) was subsequently assimilated to its D-series pendant and shifted to /ʾettaqtal/ in Aramaic from the third century c.e. onwards (cf. Beyer 1984: 150). 104 Gzella 2004: 184–194 and 2008a: 92–93 with n. 23. See also Sections 7.1.1 and 7.1.2. 105 Nöldeke 21898: 44–45.

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markers (such as the erosion of /qāʾem/ ‘standing’ via /qā-/ in Jewish Babylonian to a preverbal particle /k-/ signalling present continuous in the modern dialects).106 They radically altered the inherited West Semitic structure of the Aramaic verbal system to an extent that is unparalleled in Semitic. Moreover, the afformative /-na/ of the feminine third- and second-person plural “imperfect” forms was replaced by /-ān/ on analogy with the masculine, and its counterpart in the imperative by /-ā/ around the second century b.c.e. at the latest.107 Perhaps reinforced by these “imperfect” forms, the original gender difference between /-m/ in the masculine and /-n/ in the feminine of the corresponding pronouns was gradually levelled since the sixth century b.c.e., and /-n/ came to prevail.108 Demonstrative pronouns were expanded by the presentative marker /hā/ in post-Achaemenid Aramaic, especially in Eastern Aramaic.109 Syntax proper, by contrast, has not yet been comprehensively studied across the diachronic range of Aramaic.110 Contact-induced changes in word-order patterns since the seventh and sixth centuries b.c.e. seem to underlie, since the fifth century, the emergence of the pragmatically redundant “proleptic suffixes” (e.g., brh zy pn ‘his son, the one of pn’, which simply means ‘pn’s son’) that are so typical for Aramaic from that point onwards. Again, the potential of Aramaic for large-scale historical-linguistic investigations has hardly been realized so far; the gradual evolution of the core areas of phonology and morphology in the essentially conservative written material maintains a recognizable basic shape of the language in its different manifestations during the period in question here, but it may eclipse other, much more radical changes that took place beneath its surface. 1.3

Historical-Linguistic Method and Internal Classification

As has been demonstrated above (see Section 1.1), the increase of epigraphic discoveries and the development of a more rigorous historical-linguistic method beginning in the nineteenth century triggered a paradigm shift in 106 107 108 109 110

See Section 7.1.1. Beyer 1984: 147 and 2004: 64. Beyer 1984: 150. Beyer 1984: 151 and 2004: 65; Nebe 2006. A recent study on a few unconnected phenomena along such lines, while quite commendable in its broad scope, is often inaccurate in the interpretation of the philological data and thus remains unconvincing in its specific results, see Gzella 2014c.

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Aramaic studies. Earlier work focused on canonical corpora and kept the literary traditions of Jewish and Christian varieties of Aramaic mainly apart, as is exemplified in the traditional bifurcation of “Chaldaean” and “Syriac.” Yet the historical repositioning of the material in the light of inscriptions gradually replaced linguistically heterogeneous textual collections as a point of departure by geographically and chronologically identifiable language varieties with roots in the earlier diversity of Aramaic. In the course of time, they clustered into a Western (Chapter 6) and an Eastern (Chapter 7) branch, but neither was confined to the language of one particular group, let alone one scribal tradition, that manifests itself in a clearly-defined textual corpus. Jewish forms of Aramaic thus include both Western (Jewish Palestinian) and Eastern (Jewish Babylonian) material, just as Christian Aramaic appears not only in Eastern (Syriac), but also in Western (Christian Palestinian) texts. Likewise, both Western and Eastern Aramaic include literary languages of religious traditions that belong neither to Judaism nor to Christianity, that is, the Samaritans in the  West and the Mandaeans in the East. As a consequence, the internal ­classification of Aramaic has changed radically since the last decades of the nineteenth century. The two main branches of later Aramaic, which have dominated scholarly investigation for many centuries, can now be further contextualized on grounds of the manifold interactions between local dialects and universal standard languages during the first millennium b.c.e.111 Different regional varieties appeared already with the first textual witnesses in Syria in the ninth and eighth centuries b.c.e. (see Chapter 2) and subsequently fed into a more global diversity of Aramaic when it spread quickly during the Neo-Assyrian and the Neo-Babylonian period (Chapter 3). Diversity was significantly reduced in the written record with the standardization and promotion of one

111 Linguists have proposed various definitions of the categories “dialect” and “language,” based on different linguistic or social criteria (cf. Haugen 1966; Joseph 1987: 1–7). Terminology within Semitics, too, varies greatly. For convenience’s sake, “language” will generally be understood here as a linguistic variety that enjoys an official status in a political entity and has normally undergone a certain process of regularization, or standardization (such as general orthographic and morphological consistency), whereas “dialect” is used for a regional vernacular that remained largely unwritten in the Ancient Near East but may have influenced attempts at composing in a standard language. The term “variety,” by contrast, serves as a neutral designation for different written and unwritten forms of Aramaic regardless of their status. (While some linguists employ the terms “local” and  “regional” for distinct geographical extents, both are largely synonymous in the ­present work.)

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existing variety to the universal lingua franca by the Achaemenid chancellery (Chapter 4). Local dialects did, however, continue to be spoken and surfaced again in different parts of the former Achaemenid territory, especially in Judaea, Syria and Mesopotamia, and North Arabia, when they themselves were promoted to the status of written languages of newly-emerging autonomous kingdoms (Chapter 5). 1.3.1 The Periodization of Aramaic As a result of geographical, chronological, and social factors that caused much diversity within the Aramaic language group, its internal classification remains debated. The earlier distinction of an “older” and a “younger” phase demarcated by the emergence of the Aramaic literary languages that allegedly derive from Official Aramaic,112 at any rate, has been replaced by more fine-grained arrangements. Existing models now operate on the basis of a temporal succession of language phases generally related to changes in the political or cultural situation (such as Old, Middle, Late, and Modern Aramaic), of geographical traits (Western versus Eastern Aramaic), or of a combination of historically evolving dialectal features and a fluid area of tension between spoken and written forms (such as the idea of a lasting Official Aramaic heritage interacting with evolving regional varieties).113 Since they all use different methodological approaches, they obviously lead to dissimilar results. The model most widely cited in current scholarship is Joseph Fitzmyer’s linear distinction of five subsequent phases. It was first proposed in a footnote in his edition of the Aramaic Genesis Apocryphon from Qumran114 and later expanded to an article (Fitzmyer 1979). He distinguishes between Old Aramaic (ca. 925–700 b.c.e.), Official Aramaic (ca. 700–200 b.c.e., including the preMasoretic Aramaic of Ezra and perhaps that of Daniel as well), Middle Aramaic (ca. 200 b.c.e.–200 c.e., subdivided into the material from Palestine and Arabia on the one hand and Syria and Mesopotamia on the other), Late Aramaic (ca. 200–700 c.e., consisting of Western and Eastern Aramaic, that is, Jewish Palestinian, Christian Palestinian, and Samaritan on the one hand and 112 So Rosenthal 1939: 104–105 and still in 1978: 85, although he curiously treats “Eastern Aramaic” (consisting of Syriac, Jewish Babylonian, Mandaic, and Eastern Neo-Aramaic) on par with his “Jungaramäisch” (which, for the most part, corresponds to Western Aramaic and comprises Jewish Palestinian, Samaritan, Christian Palestinian, and Western Neo-Aramaic; see also the beginning of Chapter 6). 113 Cf. Gzella 2008a: 87–89. 114 Fitzmyer 32004: 30–32; originally 11966: 19 n. 60. It has been taken over by, among others, Vogt 1971: 6*–8*; Kutscher 1971; Degen 1979: 10. This model is now often presupposed, but it is important to note that it has never been defended on linguistic grounds.

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Jewish Babylonian, Syriac, and Mandaic on the other), and the many different forms of Modern Aramaic (spoken today). The terms chosen are far from ideal, as will be seen in the introductory sections to each of the following Chapters, but widely-employed especially in scholarly literature in English, since the success of Fitzmyer’s scheme lies in the reduction of complexity that it offers. Although these five consecutive stages form a convenient general summary of the changing social macro-contexts in which Aramaic was used, they cannot serve as a classification of linguistic varieties strictly based on grammatical criteria. Fitzmyer’s model therefore fails to give an adequate account of the historical development of the language, because it presupposes a basic unity that does in fact not exist: the demarcations relate to political and cultural history alone, such as the consolidation of the Neo-Assyrian empire around 700 b.c.e. or the spread of Arabic around 700 c.e., whereas important linguistic developments such as a standardization of Achaemenid Official Aramaic have no bearing on the subdivision. More seriously, several phases cover extremely diverse Aramaic languages, notably the “Middle Aramaic” stage, in which Achaemenid linguistic heritage lingered on to very varying degrees in the post-Achaemenid forms of Aramaic and shaped their profile: “Middle Aramaic” according to Fitzmyer thus includes a broad spectrum ranging from conservative Nabataean, that is, a form of Aramaic that seems almost identical to the Achaemenid Official language, to innovative Edessan and Hatran Aramaic, which exhibit a considerable influence of Aramaic vernaculars. Lastly, the production of Classical Syriac literature, subsumed under “Late Aramaic,” continues well after 700 c.e., and the impact of Arabic has not left any significant amount of obvious traces in the highly standardized literary language in which Syriac texts were still produced in later periods, so these chronological demarcations are also problematic. Despite its widespread reception, the linguistic underpinnings of Fitzmyer’s model are manifestly insufficient and in need of revision.115 1.3.2 Aramaic as a Dialect Continuum From a different point of view, the later literary traditions of Aramaic, which cluster into a Western and an Eastern branch, have been related to a continuum of distinct regional dialects with fluid boundaries that cannot be traced back to a common origin in the Achaemenid period by way of a family tree (Boyarin 1981 and, in a more simplified form, Cook 1992116). This approach 115 It has already been criticized by Gzella 2008b: 126–127; 2011c: 599; and Moriggi 2012. 116 Cook explicitly addresses Beyer’s classification (see below) but misrepresents the latter’s (complicated) views in a number of important respects, as has rightly been pointed out by Nebe 1993.

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chiefly rests on some alleged Western features in Syriac, which otherwise belongs to Eastern Aramaic, but its basic methodological assumptions remain valid.117 Such dialects would only differ slightly in adjacent areas, yet differences would accumulate with increasing distance and eventually result in mutually unintelligible varieties at the polar ends of the continuum. Linguistic innovations could spread over time across the entire dialect continuum. Since the surviving evidence consists of written material in more or less formal language, a purely dialect-geographical perspective would have to be ­supplemented by acknowledging the crucial fact that the Aramaic vernaculars developed alongside and in interaction with a supra-regional standard language. The existence of such a written koiné has been repeatedly proposed and underlies concepts such as “Universal Aramaic”118 or the more popular notion of “Standard Literary Aramaic.”119 Neither has ever been defined precisely, however, so the existence of such a standard literary idiom besides the Achaemenid chancellery language as a medium of administration remains doubtful. Consequently, the most plausible hypothesis would be that this koiné was actually identical to Achaemenid Official Aramaic (the Aḥiqar story, among others, demonstrates that literary works were composed or at least redacted in this form of Aramaic).120 Similar attempts on a much smaller scale, and generally in passing, have been made at further delineating the dialect landscape of Aramaic in the seventh and sixth centuries b.c.e. They serve the purpose of placing restricted epigraphic corpora in a somewhat broader framework but have not been worked out to more comprehensive classifications. Notable examples include a purported distinction of Northern and Southern Syrian varieties centred on the Aḥiqar proverbs (Kottsieper 1990: 241–246) and the hypothesis of a longerlasting “Mesopotamian” dialect (Kaufman 1974: 8–9). Neither, however, rests on firm linguistic grounds.121 Likewise, the hypothesis of Western and Eastern dialect variation within Aramaic from the Achaemenid period, as it was formulated in some older studies, can be falsified.122 117 See the more extensive discussion of the position of Classical Syriac in Section 7.4.1. 118 Ginsberg 1933; 1936. 119 Greenfield 1974: 284–289. According to Greenfield 1978: 97, this refers to the “literary style of Official Aramaic which would, in the course of time, become Standard Literary Aramaic.” 120 This has already been pointed out by Beyer 1966. 121 See Section  3.4 on the seventh-century Syrian dialects and 3.2.1 on “Mesopotamian Aramaic.” 122 Cf. the more extensive discussion in Section 4.1.

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1.3.3 A Chronological, Geographical, and Social Matrix It is Klaus Beyer’s combination of dialect geography with dialect history on the one hand and with the distinction between chancellery languages and vernaculars on the other that still accounts best for the complexity of the data (Beyer 1984: 23–71 and the updated English version that was published in 1986, with additions in 2004: 13–41).123 He proposes a tripartite chronological division into an “Old” period (until the third century c.e.) that is characterized by the prominence of common literary languages, a “Middle” one (until the breakthrough of Arabic in the seventh century c.e.) that exists in a Western and an Eastern branch (with roots in the “Old” period, but without a unifying literary tradition), and a “Modern” one that covers the Aramaic languages still spoken today. These stages are affected by common developments in phonology and morphology (see Section 1.2.3 above for a survey), especially the disappearance of short unstressed vowels in open syllables in the whole of Aramaic at the beginning of the “Middle” phase. Each can be further divided into several regional varieties, which in turn consist of local or cultural (pagan, Jewish, and Christian) dialects. The “Old” and the “Middle” phases also have given rise to numerous local literary languages, some of which continue older ancestors. One should note, however, that “Old” and “Middle” have different meanings in Beyer’s terminology than in most contemporary scholarship, which has been strongly influenced by Fitzmyer’s categories (see the introductory sections to Chapters 2, 4, and 5 for further clarifications). More specifically, the “Old” phase includes “Ancient Aramaic” (ninth to sixth centuries b.c.e.), Imperial or Official Aramaic under the Achaemenid chancellery (fifth to third centuries b.c.e.), and its regionally diversified post-­ Achaemenid offshoots with a common superstrate in the different Old Eastern and Old Western local languages that previously existed as vernaculars (all attested in texts since the second century b.c.e.).124 The “Middle” phase (corresponding to Fitzmyer’s “Late Aramaic”), by contrast, is affected by a clear bifurcation into a more progressive Eastern and a more conservative Western group, which coexisted until they both had to yield to Arabic in the Islamic period and the ensuing interruption of the Aramaic dialect continuum. “Modern” Aramaic, which is still spoken in various pockets of the Middle East 123 A brief summary of the essence of this model can be found in Beyer 2013a: 13–14. In order to facilitate access to a wider public of readers, the English translation of Beyer’s historical précis will also be cited consistently in the present work. 124 Palmyrene Aramaic, for instance, furnishes an example of a post-Achaemenid variety with “double affiliation” (Beyer 2013a: 25: “doppelte Zugehörigkeit”), because it combines Achaemenid with Eastern Aramaic features.

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and in expatriate communities, also preserves the earlier distinction into an Eastern and a Western branch. Demarcations are established on the basis of linguistic traits, even though these are often few, given the relatively small amount of textual evidence that has survived, and sometimes even one variant form underlies the hypothesis of a different dialect. Whereas Fitzmyer’s division of Aramaic into five developmental phases is obviously too simple to do full justice to the enormous amount of diversity reflected in the data, not everybody will agree with the sheer multitude of different dialects and dialectal variants proposed by Beyer. Such a high degree of micro-variation would normally presuppose a body of evidence comparable to what is available in the dialect geography of living languages. Complex phenomena such as the history of Aramaic nonetheless require complex explanations. The present work owes much to the comprehensive data Beyer has marshalled, to his intimate knowledge of the texts, and to his admirable analytical rigour. At the same time, it seeks to connect with past scholarship in maintaining a basic distinction of several developmental phases in chronological order on the one hand and a division of the sufficiently attested postChristian literary languages into a Western and an Eastern branch on the other; both dimensions of such a general matrix have proved helpful. The reasons that govern the division of the material adopted here will be addressed briefly at the beginning of each Chapter; the rise and fall of official languages, as well as the concomitant appearance of linguistic innovations in the written record, acts as an important general principle for determining caesurae between preceding and subsequent phases. In a further step, diversity in the material of each phase will be accounted for in historical, dialectal, and social terms (including linguistic prestige, imperfect learning, and the use of different forms of language according to situation) as the most important dimensions of variation, yet not every text or other reflex of a given Aramaic variety will be assigned to a proper dialect or receive a particular label. Instead of trying to fit all the different “Aramaics” existent at any given moment into a coherent system, the present approach attempts to allow for a more flexible dynamics of scribal standards, regional diversity, and historical evolution that takes into account the restrictions of the surviving evidence. Particular attention will be devoted to the interaction of literary languages and vernaculars in the light of developing scribal traditions (including the ideological significance of scripts and spelling standards), to the different multilingual fabrics into which Aramaic was integrated, and to the workings of contact between different forms of Aramaic as well as between Aramaic and other languages. The link between languages and functional uses in particular is a recurrent theme in the present volume, hence reference will also be made to research in

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sociolinguistics and the study of language contact in order to illustrate points of general significance. The structure that underlies this work thereby tries to develop more precise linguistic criteria for distinguishing between the various developmental phases of the language than in Fitzmyer’s somewhat impressionistic survey, while it also attempts to put greater emphasis on the chronological evolution of Aramaic as well as its socio-historical underpinnings and the limitations of the direct evidence than Beyer’s compact but exhaustive discussion of dialectal variation. It thus seeks to unite the chief virtues of a broader cultural-historical and a highly technical philological-linguistic approach. This makes it possible to emphasize the ongoing unfolding of Aramaic and its role in the different cultures that adopted it. Frequent “sign-posting” is meant to facilitate access for non-specialists and guide philologists, historians, and linguistics with primary interests in other disciplines through the intriguingly complex development of one of the world’s major languages.

chapter 2

The Emergence of Aramaic Dialects in the Fertile Crescent Aramaic first appeared in written documents in Syria, composed in the alphabetic script, soon after the beginning of the ninth century b.c.e. While there is little evidence for its earlier linguistic history, it may previously have been confined to a vernacular, with a certain amount of dialectal diversity, spoken by tribal groups that eventually settled in Syria and Western Mesopotamia and only then promoted their local dialects to official languages. Several linguistic varieties subsequently used for public display in Eastern, Central, and NorthWestern Syria can be clearly distinguished from neighbouring Semitic idioms, such as Hebrew and Phoenician, and among themselves, on the basis of phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. Aramaic texts from Central Syria constitute the lion’s share of the evidence and may point to a higher density of administrative centres there than at the periphery of the speech area. Regular local spelling conventions reflect conscious standardization and thus early forms of institutionalized scribal training, which indicates that Aramaic dialects must have taken on their shape at least some time before. This earliest known stage of Aramaic until the rise of Assyrian provincial administration is now almost universally referred to as “Old Aramaic” (Altaramäisch)125 or, less frequently, “Ancient Aramaic”126; scholars who extend

125 E.g., Koopmans 1962: 6–8 (“Altaramäisch,” confined to texts of the ninth and eighth centuries); Degen 1969: 1–2 (“Altaramäisch,” with references to several older studies); Kutscher 1971: 348–360; Hoftijzer – Jongeling 1995: xii (abbreviated as “OldAr” in the individual lemmata); Fitzmyer 32004: 30 (originally 11966: 19 n. 60); Fales 2011a: 555. Additional references have been collected by Yun 2006: 19–20. 126 Beyer 1984: 24–28; 1986: 10–14. Beyer uses the term “Old Aramaic” (“das alte Aramäisch”) in a much broader sense for all Aramaic languages up to the third century c.e., when the influence of post-Achaemenid Official Aramaic scribal conventions waned, while his “Ancient Aramaic” (“das Altaramäische”) corresponds to the majority use of “Old Aramaic.” Rosenthal 1939: 1, by contrast, employs the term “das Altaramäische” with the same chronological scope as Beyer’s “das alte Aramäisch” (and thus not synonymously with the latter’s “Altaramäisch,” for which Rosenthal has no specific label). In order to avoid further confusion, the label “Old Aramaic” as in the major part of contemporary English-speaking scholarship will be adopted here.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004285101_003

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the “Old Aramaic” period also to the seventh and sixth centuries (subsumed under “Imperial Aramaic” by others), prefer the term “early Old Aramaic” (as opposed to “late Old Aramaic”) for additional precision.127 Despite some internal variation, Old Aramaic as such can be distinguished from Achaemenid Official Aramaic on linguistic grounds due to the lack of the latter’s few but significant innovations in spelling and grammar, while certain changes in word order patterns, such as increasing fronting of direct objects and appositions, set its later stage apart from earlier Old Aramaic (see also Section  3.1.2).128 Moreover, the diffusion of some common Northwest Semitic developments, especially definiteness and direct object marking, is still unequal in texts from the earliest period. The corpus of early Old Aramaic in the strict sense consists of some fifteen inscriptions with a total of a few hundred lines, including several lengthy ones with twenty lines or more, generally chiselled on stone and issued by local kings, as well as a number of short graffiti and some stray material like seals. Most of them come from Central Syria and, due to the impact of regional chancellery traditions, exhibit a largely standardized spelling. They have all been unearthed since the end of the nineteenth century, though some of them only in the past few decades or years, and are, for the major part, conveniently accessible in several modern collections of older Aramaic texts with translation and commentary. By and large, the most reliable one is still Donner – Röllig 3–51971–2002 (kai, whose sigla will be used here for convenience’s sake, nos. 201–224, 231–232, and 309–312).129 Regrettably, discoveries from the last quarter of the twentieth century (nos. 309–312) only feature in the new edition of the first volume containing the bare texts (in square script instead of the more modern Latin transliteration), not in the German translation with commentary, which has not been updated.130 Annotated English translations of the monumental inscriptions with further references can also be found in

127 Following Beyer’s distinction between “frühes Altaramäisch” (“early Ancient Aramaic”) and “spätes Altaramäisch” (“late Ancient Aramaic”); cf. also the preceding note. So, too, Hug 1993: 139 and Gzella 2004: 35–41, both of whom have been trained by Beyer. 128 Degen 1969: 2; Hug 1993: 139 with the respective examples on pages 103–105; 127; 95–97. 129 For a number of corrections, bibliographical additions, and alternative proposals on points of detail, see Degen 1971. 130 Similar restrictions apply to Koopmans 1962 and Gibson 1975. Unfortunately for Englishspeaking readers, the latter contains many mistakes and should only be consulted together with other studies. Some of the older manuals (see Degen 1971: 122 for references) have valuable philological notes, too.

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Hallo (ed.) 2003: II, 152–163 and 213–217. More specialized editions are mentioned in the respective sections on the individual sub-corpora below.131 A recent and reasonably comprehensive grammatical précis can now be found in Gzella 2014a; Fales 2011a gives a more general overview, while Folmer 2011, likewise a brief outline of the grammar, highlights similarities and differences with Official Aramaic including Biblical Aramaic.132 The entire vocabulary with full scholarly bibliography has been incorporated in Hoftijzer  – Jongeling 1995, the authoritative standard dictionary; Schwiderski 2008 serves as a concordance. Part of the lexicon has also been included in Beyer 1984: 503–728 with additions in 2004: 341–506, who places it in the wider Aramaic context, carefully distinguishes between different dialects, and supplies much precious grammatical information not easily found elsewhere, such as etymological noun patterns or the thematic vowels of verbal roots and a reconstructed vocalization of many lexemes. No monographic reference grammar of the entire material exists. Since discoveries published in the past thirty years, especially the inscription from Tell Fekheriye, have added considerably to the amount and diversity of the most ancient textual witnesses of Aramaic, older manuals cover but a selection of the evidence available nowadays.133 Among those, Degen 1969 with its very crisp and clear, though at times exceedingly brief, synchronic presentation of Central Syrian Old Aramaic, the most important but certainly not the only variety, may still count as particularly useful.134 Borobio 1996 and 2003 also treats more recent texts but furnishes mainly a description of the basic grammatical facts without an in-depth analysis of the language. The coexistence of distinct varieties of Aramaic in ninth-century Syria as well as their internal homogeneity results from the settlement history of Aramaean tribes and the subsequent linguistic standardization by the chancelleries of newly-emerging local kingdoms. Groups of speakers of Aramaic

131 Further bibliographical information can be retrieved from the respective sections in Fitzmyer – Kaufman 1992. The original texts without translation but with select references to secondary literature have also been assembled in Schwiderski 2004 and are electronically accessible on the website of the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon project (http:// cal1.cn.huc.edu/), on which see Kaufman 2008. 132 Segert 1975 takes a similar approach on a monographic scale, but this work is based on an outdated corpus and linguistic framework, hence it should be used with caution, cf. the reviews by Kaufman 1977; Degen 1979. 133 Several older works, most of which are now obsolete, are briefly discussed and evaluated by Kutscher 1971: 348–360. 134 See also the corrections and additional remarks in Beyer 1970.

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who settled in Syria between the Late Bronze and the Early Iron Ages thereby participated in similar socio-economic developments as other peoples that crystallized into territorial states in Canaan and Transjordan around 1000 b.c.e.135 A brief summary of their emergence may further illustrate the sociolinguistic background of the earliest specimens of Aramaic.136 2.1

The First Appearance of the Aramaeans in the Ancient Near East

The linguistic history of Aramaic prior to the appearance of the first textual sources in the ninth century b.c.e. remains unknown. Earlier scholarship tried to identify Aramaic language material in other Ancient Near Eastern sources before that date, but none of these attempts has survived into the present debate.137 Enigmatic references in the biblical text to ‘Laban the Aramaean’ (Genesis 31:20.24.47) and the famous designation of Abraham as a ‘wandering Aramaean’ (Deuteronomy 26:5) cannot be placed historically. People bearing the gentilic term Aramayu “Aramaeans” first occur in Assyrian sources as ­semi-nomadic tribes encountered by king Tiglath-pileser I (1115–1077 b.c.e.) in the Upper Euphrates region. These seem to have later crystallized into fragmented clans of agro-pastoralists that, under the influence of growing economic power and trade, clustered into extended chiefdoms throughout Syria and Mesopotamia with, eventually, state-like structures.138 It is unclear which language these people spoke, since there is no direct linguistic connection between Aramaic as it can be defined in the light of several characteristic features of phonology, morphology, and lexicon (see Section 1.2.1) and any attested specific form of Bronze-Age Northwest Semitic.139 Aramaic, however, can be clearly distinguished from other closely-related Semitic 135 For the broader political and cultural history of these tribes and the resulting kingdoms, see Dion 1997; Lipiński 2000a; and now the recent summary, focusing on the formative period, by Sader 2014. 136 See Gzella 2014b for the wider linguistic context. 137 Summarized by Rosenthal 1939: 14–23. 138 See Younger 2007 for a concise yet nuanced account of this process with translations of  the relevant Akkadian texts, now to be supplemented by Fales 2011b on Southern Mesopotamia. 139 An association with Ugaritic, as suggested by Segert 1965, rests on a shaky linguistic foundation (see Kutscher 1971: 354–355), while an alleged connection with the Amorites and their Northwest Semitic language merely derives from a possible link between the Aramayu and the so-called Aḫlamū in cuneiform texts (cf. Fales 2011a: 556–557) and has no linguistic basis either.

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languages as soon as the textual transmission begins, so it must have taken on its shape some time before. Since the names of several of the Aramaean clans can be associated with places where the use of Aramaic is later attested, such as Gozan and Arpad, it seems quite plausible that at least some were speakers of Aramaic or its immediate predecessor and descended from the earlier Late Bronze Age population of the region.140 This does not necessarily entail that the inhabitants of these regions formed a particular ethnic group: ethnicity is always difficult to establish, because it interacts with social constructs and identity-formation. The later use of the common designation “Aram” (ʾrm) for a territory in Syria that was occupied by different Aramaic-speaking principalities therefore does not necessarily reflect a common origin but could also have been used in order to consolidate an invented past as a cultural and political bond under new social conditions. As Aramaic was diversified right from its beginnings, the Aramaean city-states of the ninth and eighth centuries b.c.e. presumably evolved in regions where speakers of distinct Aramaic dialects had settled. 2.2

The Rise of Aramaic Chancellery Languages in Ancient Syria

When Aramaean tribes had formed new population groups in various regions in Syria and Mesopotamia during the transition period between the Late Bronze and the Early Iron Ages, they underwent the same process of gradual state-formation as other peoples of Syria-Palestine during the first centuries of the first millennium b.c.e.141 As a consequence, local kingdoms were founded throughout the area, royal building programmes were executed, and more centralized forms of domestic administration were established. Aramaic influence spread quickly in tenth- and ninth-century Syria: Damascus in the south and Arpad near Aleppo in the north were early urban centres, soon to be joined by Hamath in the middle region. The reasons underlying this development remain controversial, but it seems feasible to assume an interplay of economic and demographic changes. Following an increase in organizational complexity, and presumably a renewed cultural self-awareness of the ruling elites as well, the need for writing appeared once again. This need resulted in the 140 Cf. Sader 2014: 18–20 for evidence from the material record in favour of a population continuum. 141 The discussion revolves around the origins of Ancient Israel and has produced an unmanageable amount of secondary literature; for an accessible overview, see, e.g., Killebrew 2005 (especially 21–49 for the transition period from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age).

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emergence of new official languages all over the wider area: Phoenician in the Phoenician city-states along the Mediterranean coast, Israelian and Judaean Hebrew in the Northern and the Southern Kingdom, Aramaic in the Aramaean cities, and several other small-corpus idioms from several principalities in Transjordan (Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite) as well as from the Philistine pentapolis. The use of erstwhile spoken vernaculars in written documents, produced in royal chancelleries, coincided with the breakthrough of the alphabetic script and thus with a novel form of scribal culture.142 While writing certainly had a long tradition in the region, as hundreds of cuneiform tablets with letters, contracts, and economic documents composed in the Akkadian language and its syllabic script in different Syro-Palestinian city-states throughout the Bronze Age demonstrate,143 the rapid expansion of the alphabet shortly after ca. 1000 b.c.e. co-occurs with a significant change in the underlying socio-economic conditions. Cuneiform writing and the highly professionalized infrastructure that upheld it, with its scribal schools, formal curricula (consisting of exercises, word lists, later also religious and literary texts), and administrative centres,144 disappeared when the withdrawal of the Egyptian and the Hittite empires shortly before 1200 b.c.e. caused a power vacuum, leading to a subsequent exhaustion of economic resources, a collapse of international trade, and a decline of the urban population. Alphabetic writing, by contrast, seems to have been less dependent on established institutions like schools and chancelleries than the cuneiform tradition. A small number of scribal exercises and property marks on every-day items or short dedicatory inscriptions indicates that it was already known in several local forms in the Bronze Age. At least according to the available evidence, however, it seems to have been largely confined to low-profile usages, excepting the city-state of Ugarit, where it merged with Mesopotamian writing traditions into a “cuneiform alphabet” for domestic letters, economic lists, and indigenous religious literature.145 The discovery of abecedaries as well as graffiti on vessels and arrow or javelin heads outside major city centres during the twelfth and eleventh centuries b.c.e.146 may suggest that alphabetic writing was usually 142 Gzella 2011e provides a brief sketch of the resulting changes in the language situation. A more rigorous study of this process on the basis of a combination of historical, archaeological, and linguistic evidence remains yet to be executed. 143 A convenient summary can be found in van Soldt 2013; cf. also Millard 2011: 14–15. 144 Cf. van Soldt 2011: 206–211 on the curriculum of scribal training in Syria during the Late Bronze Age. 145 Summarized by Gzella 2013a: 4–5, with a survey of the evidence. Sanders 2009: 36–102 has a much more comprehensive discussion. 146 Millard 2011: 17–19.

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transmitted in the domestic sphere, or at least in non-professional environments, hence it circulated more widely and could survive socio-economic crises more easily.147 Enjoying a reasonable independence from Mesopotamian and Egyptian administrative traditions, the alphabet was thus a medium readily available when the new Syro-Palestinian kingdoms with their palace-oriented organization began to be established. In the light of the specific letter forms and certain spelling conventions, it seems to have spread from the Phoenician city of Byblos, presumably an early centre of alphabetic writing, into the eastern and southern parts of Syria-Palestine. Byblos yields the earliest continuous texts in a first-millennium Semitic alphabet, a handful of archaic Phoenician inscriptions (kai 1–8),148 beginning in the tenth century. The use of twenty-two different letter signs for twenty-two phonemic consonants was more suitable for a Phoenician dialect than for Aramaic, which apparently had a slightly larger set of consonantal phonemes, hence some letters had to serve double duty there.149 It seems nonetheless quite likely that vowel letters (matres lectionis in traditional grammar), that is, the non-obligatory use of certain consonantal signs also for long vowels (at first h for /ā/ and /ɛ̄/; w for /ū/; y for /ī/), have to be considered an Aramaean invention, even if they could elaborate on a tendency already inherent in the writing system. Phoenician spelling, after all, remained almost exclusively consonantal throughout the first half of the first millennium b.c.e., whereas a regular use of this device occurs already in the earliest Aramaic texts.150 Vowel letters can remove some of the ambiguity of an otherwise consonantal text and, judging from their employ in early Moabite and Hebrew inscriptions, quickly came to be used in Southern and Eastern Canaan as well.151 The exact modalities by which the use of the alphabet spread throughout Syria-Palestine and eventually reached the Greek islands, remain obscure,152 147 As has been suggested by Gzella 2011e: 3–4 and 2013a: 5. 148 Their linguistic profile and position within Semitic have recently been described by Gzella 2013f, with further bibliography. 149 The most recent synopsis is Gzella 2014a: 77 and 79–80; see also Sections 2.2.1–2.2.3 on the individual sub-corpora below. 150 Millard 2011: 24–25; Gzella 2014a: 76–79. They seem to originate from historical spellings of word-final glides (a name like pnmw /Panamuwa/ would lead to w for /ū/ once the etymological triphthong /-uwa/ has shifted to /ū/) and were subsequently extended, see Beyer 1967: 14. 151 For a still serviceable summary of the discussion, cf. Zevit 1980: 1–10. 152 It has occasionally been suggested that Aramaeans rather than Phoenicians were involved in the transmission of the alphabet to the Greeks, but see Krebernik 2007 for a thorough critique of the arguments adduced in support of this view.

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but local forms of the letter signs with regional peculiarities began to evolve in due course: the first distinctive features of the Aramaic branch of the alphabetic script, namely a d with a somewhat elongated final stroke and a z in the form of a modern zed with a wavy middle bar, appeared already at the end of the ninth century and grew into a fully recognizable Aramaic script around 750 b.c.e. Cursive styles for daily use in administration and suitable for documents written with ink on flat surfaces, as opposed to the “lapidary” styles geared towards letters chiselled in stone, by contrast, gained more ground in the seventh century, but nascent cursive forms of individual letters like ṭ, q, and ḥ appear already in the plaster inscription from Deir ʿAllā.153 Record-keeping, such as the registration of traded goods or the collection of taxes in natura, will have been an obvious purpose for writing, although this is not yet attested for the earliest period of Aramaic: economic documents like lists and receipts, letters between individuals, and texts relating to private law in Aramaic only begin to appear some hundred-fifty years after the first inscriptions. Even if the absence of such material could be attributed to chance and a widespread use of perishable writing materials, it curiously matches the situation in other Syro-Palestinian kingdoms and may illustrate the gradual evolution of administration during the first two centuries of the first millennium. The earliest tangible evidence for palace economy in the area is furnished by a group of 102 ostraca discovered in Samaria, the capital of the Northern kingdom of Israel, and written in the local form of Hebrew presumably some time during the second quarter of the eighth century154; they seem to record fixed quantities of wine and oil together with information on dates and places, hence they are often connected with tribute paid by the agrarian population to the court and delivered by an official functionary. By that time, writing in Aramaic and its sister-idioms for reasons not strictly related to economy had already existed for at least several decades. Perhaps even more importantly, then, the emergence of several royal inscriptions throughout the area already by the mid-ninth century b.c.e. suggests that public display as an expression of local self-consciousness also played a role in the creation of these national languages. They record a king’s achievements in war and peace and emphasize his devotion to his divine protector, composed in a literary prose style in the respective official idiom. No monumental inscriptions of a similar type have been discovered in Late Bronze 153 Millard 2011: 19–24; see also Naveh 1970 (partly in need of revision but still useful). Further references on the development of the Aramaic scripts have been collected by Beyer 1984: 24 n. 1 and 2004: 14. 154 Renz – Röllig 1995: 79–109.

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Age Syria-Palestine, and the ample evidence for writing in the vassal states of that period is largely confined to administration. Consequently, the formation of small, independent Syro-Palestinian territorial states with their administrative centres at the beginning of the first millennium seems to go hand in hand with the appearance of royal propaganda in texts that were meant to create local history and last for ages rather than until the next administrative cycle.155 This does not necessarily imply widespread literacy, since a king’s selfexpression by recording his res gestae or his loyalty to his personal god could simply have formed part of the cultural and religious codes of the ruling elite, independent of the number of possible readers. Writing may thus have served as a demonstration of power and piety no less than as a tool for bookkeeping, both in the Aramaean city-states and elsewhere in the region. It is not altogether impossible that biblical history-writing, too, ultimately has roots in these nascent experiments with official prose accounts by scribes at the service of self-conscious sovereigns.156 The social background of these activities, however, remains largely unknown, but comparative evidence from both earlier Late Bronze (Ugarit or Emar in Syria) and later Iron Age (Arad in Palestine) archives confirms that they were primarily associated with royal bureaucracy in this period.157 A common competitive rhetoric further illuminates the place of ninth- and eighth-century public epigraphy in the self-awareness of the new and ambitious ruling dynasties. Assyrian conquest stelae visible in the region (such as the ones erected by Sargon II in Hamath, Samaria, Ashdod, Ben Shemen, and Qaqun) could have served as a general model,158 but the specific wording often betrays the eagerness of small kings to outshine their peers and thus displays the ideology as well as the narrative strategies of the local courts.159 The Aramaean king Zakkur of Hamath recounts how his divine protector BaʿlŠamayn, the Lord of the Heavens, helped him prevail over a coalition of ten kings led by his equal Hazaʾel of Damascus (kai 202, combined with a 155 Cf. Sanders 2009: 120–122. Röllig 2005: 121, too, attributes the emergence of local monumental inscriptions to the new historical self-consciousness of the Aramaean kings. 156 As proposed by Emerton 2006. Smith 2007: 8–9 suggests somewhat en passant an influence of the Mesopotamian chronicle form, followed by Sanders 2009: 120–122 (cf. 36). 157 General information on 253 Ancient Near Eastern archives and libraries can be found in Pedersén 1998. 158 See Horowitz – Oshima – Sanders 2006: 19–22 for an overview of the evidence from Palestine; however, the cultural impact of Neo-Assyrian rule on Syria-Palestine should not be overestimated (cf. Section 3.2). 159 Green 2010 presents a comparative overview.

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summary of his building activities). It uses phrases quite similar to those employed in other, roughly contemporary compositions: one by (presumably) Hazaʾel, in which he tells the story of his victory against the kings of Israel and Judah by the grace of the god Hadad (kai 310, only preserved in fragments); another one by Kilamuwa from Samʾal in the north, in Phoenician, proudly declares how he stood up against “mighty kings” and established social order, in which his predecessors had failed (kai 24); and one by the Moabite king Mōšaʿ, from Transjordan in the south-east, celebrates, again in the local language, his and Kamoš’s, his god’s, triumph over the house of Omri of Israel after a long-standing enmity (kai 181, also followed by a building account).160 The dedicatory and self-introduction formulae at the beginning, too, are often similar and suggest a shared basic pattern. Recurrent references to other, older, members of the royal family and the respective patron deity highlight the importance of a local capital with its dynastic line and a proper temple for the family’s divine protector as fundamental markers of cultural self-awareness of these kings. Certain linguistic and orthographic features of these various chancellery idioms, like “trait lists” employed in old-fashioned ethnography, usually permit an identification of the resulting monumental inscriptions with different forms of Aramaic, Phoenician, or Moabite even in consonantal writing (similar royal inscriptions in Hebrew have not yet been discovered but may well have existed). Hence the use of a standardized and recognizable official language for public display may constitute yet another such hallmark: it belongs to the culturally-patterned regularities in the self-image of the ruling elites. Besides an area of tension between participation in a regional matrix culture and the assertion of one’s local identity, which characterizes the early Syro-Palestinian royal inscriptions, the epigraphic record seems to point to an ongoing process of linguistic standardization and the consolidation of scribal training. Some local chancellery languages evolved into supra-regional idioms, like the Aramaic variety of Central Syria or the Phoenician dialect of Tyre and Sidon along the Mediterranean coast, and gradually influenced or even eclipsed others. Before the various Aramaean kingdoms in Syria lost their independence with the Assyrian conquest of the region, three different written varieties of Aramaic employed in the chancelleries of the region can be distinguished: first, the language of the Tell Fekheriye inscription from Eastern Syria; second, a dialect attested in texts from several places in Central Syria; and third, an Aramaic layer in a handful of public inscriptions from Samʾal in 160 Cf. also Sanders 2009: 113–120.

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North-Western Syria, whose exact relation with Aramaic is still a matter of debate. One should bear in mind, however, that, in all likelihood, many more Aramaic dialects remained in use as unwritten vernaculars, so the picture of the historical-linguistic situation is far from complete, and not all later forms of Aramaic can be deduced from the attested ninth- and eighth-century varieties. Right from the outset of the documentation, Aramaic thus exhibits a reasonable amount of internal diversity. A close investigation of the relevant linguistic features can shed further light on the historical language situation of Old Aramaic and its socio-cultural underpinnings. 2.2.1 Eastern Syria: The Tell Fekheriye Inscription With the discovery of a comparatively long Aramaic-Akkadian bilingual inscrip­ tion on a life-size basalt statue at Tell Fekheriye near Gozan (Tell Ḥalaf) by the Ḥabur river (kai 309), dated on grounds of palaeography around the middle of the ninth century or slightly later, Eastern Syria has yielded what is now often thought to be the oldest Aramaic text.161 Both versions record, in virtually identical terms, the dedication of an image by the otherwise unknown162 local ruler Hadad-yethʿī to the storm-god Hadad. Its publication in 1982 suddenly changed the then prevailing notion of Old Aramaic as identical with the Central Syrian variety that had previously been known from the Sfire stelae and several shorter witnesses. The exact relation to a possible rival to its chronological primacy, the fragment of an altar piece in gypsum from Tell Ḥalaf itself (kai 231), is hard to gauge, since the latter contains only one short word and has been destroyed in World War ii.163 Notable differences of the Tell Fekheriye inscription vis-à-vis the rest of Old Aramaic not only in spelling practice, but also in various aspects of the 161 The editio princeps by Abou-Assaf – Bordreuil – Millard 1982 has soon been supplemented by a series of review articles and other philological studies, among which Kaufman 1982, Gropp – Lewis 1985, and Huehnergard 1986 (with references to other reviews) are particularly useful. A new annotated English translation is available in Hallo (ed.) 2003: II, 153–154 (edited by A.L. Millard). Beyer 2013a: 14–16 provides a reconstructed vocalization with a fresh German translation. 162 Cf., however, Sader 2014: 28–29 for possible identifications in cuneiform sources. 163 Archaizing features of the script may also point to a mid-ninth century date, but the four letters themselves do not contain any linguistic traits that could corroborate or disprove an association with the Tell Fekheriye inscription. Contrary to the various proposals ­discussed in the commentary to kai 231, it is now generally read dmwt ‘image’ (Dankwarth – Müller 1988; see Fales 2011a: 563). Although some scholars consider the Tell Ḥalaf altar piece the oldest Aramaic text (e.g., Fales 2011a: 563), there are no clear indications why it should be older (or, for that matter, slightly younger) than the Tell Fekheriye inscription.

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language, reveal both a distinct, though internally consistent,164 scribal tradition and a formerly unknown variety of Aramaic that underlies it.165 Occasional Akkadian influences owing to Assyrian political dominion crop up in the Aramaic text, especially in the first section with its hymnic description of the local manifestation of the storm-god Hadad by means of a series of traditional epithets, and some deviations from the verb-initial word order that is otherwise fairly common in Old Aramaic. Most departures from Central Syrian usage (see Section 2.2.2 below), however, cannot be explained as contact-induced, and the latter part of the text with a series of curse formulae that recur in other Old Aramaic inscriptions has been considered genuine Aramaic anyway.166 Evidently, then, this inscription reflects the chancellery language of the city-state of Gozan shortly after its conquest by the Assyrians. It seems to have remained in use for some time as a token of local prestige by members of the royal house. Note also that Hadad-yethʿī calls himself ‘king’ (mlk /malk/) in the Aramaic version (lines 6.12–13) but ‘governor’ (šakin māti) in the Akkadian one (lines 8.19). The letter-forms still resemble their older Phoenician models and therefore have a distinctively archaic ring,167 but various orthographical modifications may be best understood as local improvements of the spelling practice borrowed from the Phoenicians. They could result from independent experiments with spelling at the peripheral chancellery of Gozan not yet affected by nascent standardization efforts in Central Syria. First of all, word-medial vowel letters occur already regularly here, as opposed to their marginal use elsewhere in ninth- and eighth-century Syria, and thereby further disambiguate the consonantal text, perhaps under the influence of Mesopotamian syllabic cuneiform. In addition, the grapheme s is used for the etymological interdental /θ/ (preserved in Old Aramaic but merged with /š/ in Canaanite and thus also in Phoenician) instead of š as elsewhere, compare swr for /θa⁠wr/ ‘bull, cow’ and sʾwn for /θa⁠ʾawān/ ‘ewes’ in line 20 with šwrh /θawrā/ and šʾn /θaʾān/ in an almost identical curse formula in Sfire (kai 222 A: 23; see below on the variant plurals forms).168 This particular correspondence between sign and sound is 164 Cf. Andersen – Freedman 1988. 165 Beyer 1984: 27; 1986: 12; 2004: 15; Gzella 2014a: 72–73. 166 Fales 1983, briefly summarized also in 2011: 563. There is, however, no evidence that this latter part is composed in a variety of Aramaic closer to the regional colloquial, as maintained by Fales 1986: 41. 167 See Cross 1995, who, however, prefers a date in the second half of the eighth century and thus slightly later than is usually assumed. 168 The use of other double-duty letters corresponds to common Old Aramaic practice, hence z for /ð/ as in the relative marker zy and q for the Aramaic reflex of */ṣ́/ as in ʾrq ‘earth’ in line 2 or mrq ‘sickness’ in line 9.

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not only closer to the expected pronunciation of the respective phoneme (namely like th as in thin), but also reduces the functional load of the letter š from three (/š/, /θ/, and at least in etymological spelling for */ś/, even if the latter may have already merged with original */s/ in pronunciation) to two values (/š/ and */ś/).169 Despite its innovative features, this local scribal tradition disappeared soon afterwards; it is unclear whether it had any influence on the growing use of word-medial vowel letters in subsequent stages of Aramaic. An analysis of the grammar adds further support to the idea that the language used in the chancellery of Gozan is based on a different form of Aramaic than the other textual witnesses from Syria, and presumably reflects the local dialect that has been standardized for official purposes. Clear differences are the loss of intervocalic /h/ in the masculine and feminine third-person plural suffixes in the words klm und kln ‘they all’ (lines 3, 4, and 5) instead of usual klhm and klhn; the historical spelling, instead of disappearance due to assimilation, of /l/ in all attested forms of the root lqḥ ‘to take’ (ʾl ylqḥ ‘may he not accept’ in line 17 and ʾl tlqḥ ‘may she not accept’ in line 18; also lmlqḥ, cited below; parallels rarely occur in Central Syrian Aramaic) and of /n/ immediately before a pharyngeal (mhnḥt ‘he who brings down’ in line 2, this being the only instance of /n/ in contact with another consonant); the feminine singular near-deictic zʾt ‘this one’ (line 15) instead of the usual form zʾ; infinitives of the basic stem with an /m-/ prefix (e.g., lmšmʿ ‘in order to hear’ and lmlqḥ ‘in order to accept’ in lines 17–18; as in later Aramaic, but unlike the rest of Old Aramaic)170; a presumably archaic form of the reflexive stem to the basic stem ʾl ygtzr ‘may it not be cut off’ (line 23) with infixed (instead of prefixed) /-t-/171; and, most remarkably, the preformative /l-/ in all non-negated “short imperfects” (e.g., lzrʿ ‘let him sow’ in lines 18 and 19) instead of original /y-/ as in the entire rest of older Aramaic. The lexicon, too, exhibits a few peculiarities, in particular the by-forms nšwn ‘women’ and sʾwn ‘ewes’ instead of expected nšn 169 As pointed out by Beyer 1984: 27; 1986: 12. His reference to the use of y for word-final /-ɛ̄/ (otherwise spelled with h), as in rʿy ‘pasture’ in line 2, while entirely plausible, is slightly less certain, though, since one could also argue that the underlying vowel may still have been /-ī/ in this form of Aramaic (as word-final /-ɛ̄/ in Northwest Semitic developed from stressed /-ī/, cf. Gzella 2011a: 434), in which case the vowel letter y would have been perfectly normal. 170 Possible instances of factitive-stem infinitives without /m-/ prefix occur in lines 7–8 (kbr, šlm, and ḥyy), but these may also be abstract nouns that do not necessarily act as paradigmatic infinitives (so rightly Fassberg 2007: 242–243). 171 Cf. Kaufman 1982: 150 and 173. This feature has also been attributed to Akkadian influence (Beyer 1984: 464), but given the more widespread tendency of infixes to turn into prefixes, an archaism seems more plausible (see also Gzella 2009: 302).

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and šʾn. Finally, some nouns like nhr klm ‘all the rivers’ (line 4) or mt kln ‘all the lands’ (lines 3 and 5) refer to more than one entity despite the lack of external plural marking. These have been understood either as collectives or as archaic vestiges of “internal” plurals with a different vowel pattern than the singular,172 but neither explanation corresponds to the situation in the rest of Aramaic. Two syntactic features add to a generally archaic profile of this text: definiteness marking by means of a post-positive definite article (the “emphatic state”) is still rare, and the few relevant examples seem largely constructionbound173; in addition, no special marker that highlights a direct object is attested, not even with definite direct objects as in lines 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, and 18, where its use would be especially likely if it had existed. Since both definiteness and direct object marking were gradually developing by way of a wavelike spread in the first-millennium Semitic languages of Syria-Palestine,174 their embryonic stage in the language of Tell Fekheriye, as opposed to their more extensive use in Central Syrian Aramaic, may be due to both the early date and the peripheral location of the former. However, one should not exclude that Akkadian, which did not have a definite article, may also have exercised some influence in checking its integration into the grammatical system of the local Aramaic variety. Despite all these remarkable traits, it is currently impossible to relate the dialect of Tell Fekheriye to other known forms of Aramaic. Although the “imperfect” preformative /l-/ recurs about a millennium later in Eastern Aramaic (see Section 5.5.1), this does not make the language underlying the Gozan inscription a direct precursor of Eastern Aramaic, as the latter only crystallized into a recognizable dialect group many centuries later.175 Such a link appears all the more unlikely since the respective distributional patterns of the morpheme differ: it has completely replaced older /y-/ in the “imperfect” conjugation in Eastern Aramaic, whereas at Gozan, it only occurs in non-negated “short” forms of the “imperfect” (which were lost in Aramaic around the time of Christ). Likewise, it seems thoroughly implausible that the later prevailing basic-stem infinitives with prefixed m- have been passed on to all ensuing varieties of Aramaic specifically by this peripheral local idiom. Both features therefore presumably enjoyed a more widespread distribution among regional, 172 173 174 175

See Lipiński 2008 for an extensive discussion. Gzella 2014a: 89–90. Gzella 2013e. Beyer numbers this feature among the “first differences between Eastern and Western Aramaic” (1984: 25 and 97–99; 1986: 11), but, upon closer reading, he never subsumes the Tell Fekheriye dialect under Eastern Aramaic. See also Gzella 2008a: 103.

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though unwritten, vernaculars of Mesopotamia, which later fed into the linguistic diversity of Aramaic in the Neo-Assyrian empire (see Section 3.1). The Tell Fekheriye inscription, it may be concluded, is composed, according to native spelling practice, in the language of the district chancellery and reflects a standardized form of the local dialect that has otherwise disappeared from the written record. 2.2.2 Central Syria: An Aramaic koiné The written language used in the region between Aleppo in the north and Damascus in the south is the most widely-attested and best-known of the Old Aramaic varieties, to the extent that it has been considered representative of this stage of Aramaic in general.176 Fragments of three stelae with lengthy treaties (including elaborate curse formulae) between Matiʿ-el king of Arpad and Bar-gaʾyah king of an obscure place spelled ktk, which were discovered at Sfire near Aleppo and date to ca. 750 b.c.e., furnish the backbone of the evidence (kai 222–224).177 They have been known since 1930 and are now supplemented by several smaller, slightly older official dedicatory and memorial inscriptions from other places of the same region: a short dedication on a basalt stele to the Phoenician god Melqart by king Bar-Hadad, found near Aleppo (kai 201); a longer battle narrative with a building account, again inscribed on a basalt stele, by king Zakkur of Hamath and found in Afis, some forty-five kilometres southwest of Aleppo (kai 202), both from ca. 800 b.c.e.178; the fragment of another basalt stele from Tell Afis that was recently unearthed and exhibits letter forms very close to those of the preceding two texts, though its contents remain unclear since in each of the seven surviving lines, only one to four letters can be read179; and a series of fifty graffiti with personal names of what seem to be royal functionaries, or simply individual letters, also from Hamath and presumably belonging to the same period (a selection of which has been published in kai 203–213).180

176 Degen 1969; Beyer 1984: 25–27; 1986: 11–12; Gzella 2014a: 73. 177 Edited by Fitzmyer 21995, with an English translation, an extensive commentary, and a grammatical synopsis; a translation by the same author with brief notes and further references has been included in Hallo (ed.) 2003: II, 213–217. 178 Annotated English translations can also be found in Hallo (ed.) 2003: II, 152–153 (BarHadad, by W.T. Pitard) and 155 (Zakkur, by A.R. Millard). Cf. Amadasi Guzzo 2009: 338 with n. 4 and 339 with n. 10 on the dates and Mazzoni 2001 for the historical background. 179 Amadasi Guzzo 2009. 180 See Otzen 1990 for a complete edition.

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Although these texts come from different principalities in Central Syria, they are very homogeneous in terms of spelling and language: the same double-duty letters consistently render sounds for which no proper graphemes were available, that is, š for /θ/, z for /ð/, ṣ for /θ̣/, and q for the Aramaic reflex of */ṣ́/; /n/ in contact with another consonant always seems to assimilate in pronunciation and consequently remains unwritten; the use of word-medial vowel letters occurs but very exceptionally and generally in the latest texts from this period only. Hence, the writing ymwt for /yamūt/ ‘he will die’ instead of ymt in Sfire (kai 224:16) reflects an instance of a more innovative, and possibly sub-standard, spelling that finally began to encroach on established orthography towards the end of the early Old Aramaic period.181 The same applies to phonetic developments that will already have been operative in the spoken language and, once in a while, appeared as phonetic spellings at variance with an otherwise conservative orthographic practice. A case in point is  the causative-stem form yskr for /yasker/ ‘he shall deliver’ instead of */yahasker/ (spelled yhskr) with loss of intervocalic /h/, again in the same later Sfire stele from around 750 b.c.e. (kai 224:3).182 Historical spellings of forms of the root lqḥ ‘to take’ with unassimilated /l/ in contact (kai 222 B: 35 bis), as in the Tell Fekheriye inscription (see Section 2.2.1 above), are less frequent than assimilated ones.183 Contrary to later Aramaic, the negation /lā/ regularly occurs as a prefix l- in the Sfire inscriptions, but due to the lack of comparative examples in other early Old Aramaic texts,184 one cannot assess how representative this feature is. 181 An earlier reluctance to accept word-medial vowel letters for eighth-century Old Aramaic has given rise to complicated alternative interpretations of this form that require substantial special pleading in previous studies (e.g., the hypothesis of an entirely different verbal conjugation by Degen 1969: 28). However, since the Tell Fekheriye inscription now proves that similar spellings did exist already in the ninth century, it is clear that the w in ymwt must be a vowel letter (Beyer 1970: 299; Kutscher 1971: 349, with further examples; Fitzmyer 21995: 154; Gzella 2004: 322 n. 60; 2014a: 78). 182 Beyer 1984: 148; Fitzmyer 21995: 145; Gzella 2014a: 84 and 101. Degen 1969: 19 n. 79 considers this form a scribal mistake, but even then, it seems to be a mistake that was caused by an incipient change in contemporary pronunciation. 183 Degen 1969: 40; Fitzmyer 21995: 98 and 112; Gzella 2014a: 82. It is unclear which of the two spellings corresponds to actual pronunciation; the fragmentary context of the unassimilated writings reveals no difference in meaning. 184 Degen 1969: 64; Fitzmyer 21995: 213–214; Gzella 2014a: 106. Vestigial traces of the same spelling practice recur in the late Old Aramaic Nerab inscriptions (kai 226:4.8 and 6), but l- has soon been replaced by the writing lʾ from ca. 700 b.c.e. on (or lh in sub-standard phonetic spelling), cf. Hug 1993: 74 and Section 3.1.2.

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Such a reasonably high degree of orthographic consistency, both chronologically and geographically, indicates that the same scribal traditions were used throughout the area over time. The exceptional appearance of non-standard forms like yskr in later texts that may well reflect contemporary pronunciation supports the idea of a conservative and normalized spelling employed for official texts that was apparently at variance with the local vernacular.185 Linguistic standardization had thus produced different results in Central Syria and at Gozan. As the internal organization of the Aramaean kingdoms between Aleppo and Damascus is unobtainable, the social reality that underlies this homogeneity in the orthographic garb defies further explanation: perhaps scribes working in different local chancelleries had been trained in the same scribal school or at least according to the same curriculum; alternatively, the production of these monumental inscriptions was outsourced to shared administrative centres. The language of the Central Syrian witnesses, too, seems reasonably uniform and contains no trace of regional variation. Even the one instance of dissimilation of the first of two “emphatic” consonants in kyṣʾ ‘summer’ (kai 216: 19, a Central Syrian Aramaic text from Samʾal, see below) instead of the expected *qyṣʾ from the original */qayθ̣-/ cannot count as a distinctive local dialectal trait, because the very same text also contains the non-dissimilated form ṣdq ‘justice’ (kai 216:4–5).186 The one instance of the original feminine plural ending */-āt/ of the unbound state in mln lḥyt ‘evil words’ (kai 224:2), otherwise replaced by /-ān/ in the whole of Aramaic, seems to be an exceptional archaism retained in a formulaic expression.187 Definiteness marking by means of the “emphatic state” was more widespread in Central Syria than in Tell Fekheriye (where it remained embryonic) or Samʾal (where it apparently did not exist). Most instances are of course to be found in the long Sfire treaties that have been written towards the end of the early Old Aramaic period and even there, the use of the “emphatic state” was to some extent still construction-bound.188 In addition, Central Syrian Aramaic exhibits a certain tendency 185 Cf. del Río Sánchez 2006: 179. 186 Degen 1969: 42; Gzella 2014a: 83. 187 Gzella 2014a: 88 with n. 46; other alleged examples are less clear, see n. 45. A colloquialism, by contrast, as originally suggested by Greenfield 1978: 95 (so, too, Young 2002: 99–102; del Río Sánchez 2006: 179), seems unlikely here, since there is no evidence in contemporaneous or later Aramaic for a variety that has regularly preserved the original Semitic ending */-āt/. 188 See the examples for semantically definite nouns in the absolute state in Degen 1969: 83, especially ʾlhn ‘(the) gods’; cf. Gzella 2014a: 89–90. Del Río Sánchez 2006: 179 relates this to the influence of the vernacular.

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towards marking a definite, and often animate, direct object by way of the distinctively Western Aramaic particle ʾyt, presumably to be vocalized /ʾiyyāt/ or /ʾīyāt/.189 This differs from both the lack of direct object marking in the Tell Fekheriye inscription and the use of the variant form wt at Samʾal. The still inconsistent appearance of ʾyt in Sfire even in similar expressions in the same context (as in lšgb b[y]ty…lšgb ʾyt ʿqr[y ‘to strengthen my house…to strengthen my offspring’, kai 222 B: 32)190 suggests that, like the emphatic state, its use had not yet crystallized into coherent patterns by the mid-eighth century. As both definiteness and direct object marking evolved gradually in first-millennium Syro-Palestinian Semitic and betray traces of a common, areal development, the situation in Central Syrian Aramaic may have been influenced by its closer proximity to other idioms that underwent similar processes. In the light of this lack of identifiable dialectal variation in textual witnesses from a larger region, Central Syrian Aramaic can be described as an early Aramaic koiné. Even though no Old Aramaic texts have yet been discovered at 189 Gzella 2013e. This marker is confined to Aramaic material from Central Syria as well as texts from other places but composed in Central Syrian (such as the Tell Dan and the Bukān inscriptions), and later surfaces as yt in other Western varieties, especially in Judaea (cf. Beyer 1984: 601, s.v.). Clear formal similarities with the object markers in other Syro-Palestinian languages (Hebrew and Moabite ʾt; Phoenician ʾyt and ʾt; Samʾalian wt) also support its Western provenance, since the extension of the preposition l for highlighting an indirect object to a direct one, as in Achaemenid Official Aramaic, would be typologically more frequent (compare, e.g., a in Spanish and also the emergence of new direct object markers from indirect object markers in North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic languages). 190 Cf. Fitzmyer 21995: 111–112. It is, however, fairly clear that Old Aramaic corresponds to the general tendency in Northwest Semitic to specifically highlight definite objects. Of the relatively few instances of ʾyt in the corpus (besides Sfire also in the Zakkur inscription, kai 202 B: 5.10.11.16.27, and in the Bukān stele, kai 320:1), the unambiguous ones all occur with noun phrases that are either proper names (including place names) or marked as definite by means of a possessive suffix. Several others appear in broken context (kai 202 B: 10.27), hence the noun that acts as direct object and its definiteness status are unknown. As has universally been accepted, the material reading of kai 320:1, however, must be  corrected to ʾyt nṣb znh(?) ‘this(?) stele’ (after a transitive verb) in the light of the parallel expression nṣbʾ znh after the preposition ʿl ‘on’ in line 11 and nṣ[b]ʾ znh in line 13, where nṣbʾ occurs in the expected emphatic state with the aleph spelled out (cf. also Beyer 2004: 15). Hence, object marking by ʾyt would of course also have been perfectly normal with a nominal object singled out as definite by the post-positive article in Aramaic, so the statistically insignificant absence of uncorrected examples is very obviously merely a result of coincidence, due to the fragmentary nature of the evidence and scribal mistakes, and has no bearing on the underlying use pattern.

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Damascus,191 presumably not least due to the limited possibilities for archaeological excavations in a major city that has been continuously inhabited up to the present day, it is quite likely that the same Aramaic variety also served as the chancellery language of the kingdom of Aram-Damascus. The latter quickly rose to greater power during the ninth century b.c.e., so one may assume that the concomitant spread of Central Syrian Aramaic beyond its homeland, to Samʾal in the north and to Palestine in the south (see Section 2.3), was reinforced by the political impact of Damascus and, consequently, the linguistic prestige of its official written idiom. It can be partly reconstructed on the basis of Aramaic material from other regions that were under the authority of Damascus, although the witnesses discovered on Palestinian territory seem to contain traces of language contact with Canaanite, too. As a result, the Aramaic inscriptions from Samʾal (kai 216–221),192 the victory stele from Tell Dan (kai 310), and the Aramaic material in the Deir ʿAllā plaster text may, with all due caution, also be considered representatives of Central Syrian Aramaic and further reinforce its status as a regional koiné that began to extend beyond Syria proper during the latter half of the eighth century b.c.e. A group of so-called “booty inscriptions” ascribed to Hazaʾel of Damascus and dated to the second half of the ninth century may belong here as well; they bear apparently the same dedicatory formula that was reproduced on different and later widely-disseminated booty-items: a horse’s nose and cheek pieces, which were eventually discovered in the Greek temples of Samos and Eretria (kai 311), as well as an ivory ornament from Arslan Tash in Mesopotamia (kai 232).193 The supra-regional character of this particular Central Syrian variety also lies at the heart of the older concept of “Standard Early Aramaic.”194 However, the idea of a regional Syrian standard language with a more restricted scope that enjoyed a short-lived bloom until the creation of Assyrian provinces in Syria seems to account more adequately for the diversity of the oldest material currently available. At any rate, Assyrian control over the region brought an 191 See Niehr 2011 for an outline of political history of Damascus during the days of Hazaʾel and the possible geographical boundaries of his kingdom. 192 The reconstructed vocalization of kai 216 in Beyer 2013a: 16–17 can serve as an illustration of what Central Syrian Aramaic may have sounded like. 193 See Bron – Lemaire 1989 and Ephʿal – Naveh 1989, re-edited by Younger 2005: 257–261; see also Fales 2011a: 565 for the historical context. The reading presented under kai 232 is outdated. 194 As formulated by Greenfield 1978, similarly Young 2002: 100–102 (the latter’s “South Syrian” corresponds to what is called “Central Syrian” here).

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end to this highly standardized chancellery idiom and its underlying scribal traditions when Damascus fell in 732 b.c.e., but it did not eradicate the Western Aramaic dialect matrix in which Central Syrian Aramaic was rooted. Spelling variation clearly increases, by-forms emerge, and strict word-order patterns dissolve in the Aramaic textual witnesses of the Neo-Assyrian and the Neo-Babylonian periods. In spite of this, even after the downfall of the Achaemenid empire and the ensuing weakening of the former imperial language, some old Western Aramaic features like the object marker yt, no doubt related to older Central Syrian ʾyt but unknown in Achaemenid Official Aramaic (which consistently uses the preposition l instead) reappear in later Western varieties that themselves turned into written languages, such as different forms of Palestinian Aramaic. Similar to their likewise unwritten and thus largely invisible Eastern counterparts, Western Aramaic vernaculars will no doubt have contributed to linguistic diversity in the following age of three successive world empires. The unclear association with either early or late Aramaic of some texts, in particular the two funerary inscriptions from Nerab in Northern Syria (kai 225–226),195 to be dated around 700 b.c.e. and thus only a few decades later than the last uncontested Central Syrian Aramaic witnesses, suggest that, at least in Syria (where just about sufficient evidence is available), the transition from early to late Old Aramaic was rather smooth. Moreover, the Bukān inscription from Azerbaijan (see below, Section 2.3.3) shows that the use of Central Syrian language and style for public epigraphy still continued in some distant principalities around 700 b.c.e. 2.2.3 North-Western Syria: Samʾalian and Aramaic at Zincirli While the Tell Fekheriye stele and the material from Central Syria can be confidently regarded as manifestations of two different Old Aramaic chancellery languages, the status of several texts from the kingdom of Samʾal in the northwestern periphery of Syria (modern Zincirli in Turkey) and the respective socio-linguistic situation in this multilingual area has been the object of a century-old debate.196 The main evidence are two extensive royal inscriptions erected by local kings: Panamuwa’s praise of the weather god Hadad around 195 Cf. Yun 2006, who basically subsumes them under early Old Aramaic, but his grammatical analysis and the underlying historical-linguistic framework leave room for alternative views. In accordance with the general caesura around the mid-eighth century b.c.e. employed here, the Nerab inscriptions are classified as late Old Aramaic (with, e.g., Hug 1993) and will be treated in the following Chapter. 196 The language has been described extensively by Dion 1974; cf. Gzella 2014a: 74–75 for a summary and see also Fales 2011a: 560–562.

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the middle of the eighth century b.c.e. (kai 214) and Bar-Rākeb’s (sometimes also called Bar-Rakkāb)197 account of the political situation, focusing on his father, in the second half of the same century b.c.e. (kai 215).198 They have given rise to various attempts at redefining either the internal history of Aramaic, if they are to be included in this family, or the traditional binary subdivision of first-millennium Northwest Semitic into an Aramaic and a Canaanite branch, if one prefers to subsume them under a separate dialect.199 To these, a third inscription by a royal functionary called Kuttamuwa and reflecting yet another language variety somewhat closer to what is generally known as Aramaic must now be added; it further complicates the picture.200 The “Samʾalian” language underlying the Panamuwa and Bar-Rākeb inscriptions, whatever its position within Aramaic in particular or in Northwest Semitic in general may be, seems to have succeeded the Phoenician standard dialect of Tyre and Sidon that is attested in the earliest textual witness from Samʾal (kai 24, about 825 b.c.e.). Already the latter’s author Kilamuwa uses the Aramaic word br /bar/ ‘son’ in his filiation instead of the Phoenician counterpart bn /bin/. Hence it could well be the case that the local ruling dynasty originally spoke a dialect of Aramaic (or at least a language sharing certain features with Aramaic) but used Phoenician as a prestigious means of expression for public display in the early days before they decided to promote their own idiom to a written language subsequently employed for royal inscriptions. A short sceptre inscription associated with the same Kilamuwa (kai 25) combines the Phoenician masculine singular near-deictic z ‘this’, which is unknown in Aramaic, with the Aramaic spelling of the third-person masculine singular possessive suffix ‘his’ with h that is unusual in Standard Phoenician. It may therefore represent a transitional stage and further corroborate the presence of Semitic languages other than Phoenician in the area already at that time.201 The cultural presence of Phoenician, as it appears from royal inscriptions in Northern Syria and Anatolia at large, lasted into the eighth century b.c.e., its 197 Either noun pattern is possible: the first would be a participle (‘riding a chariot’), the second a nomen professionis (‘charioteer’). 198 A new translation is also included in Hallo (ed.) 2003: II, 156–160 (edited by K.L. Younger). 199 Both options and their broader consequences have been surveyed in Chapter 1. For the best recent synthesis of the data currently available, see Noorlander 2012. 200 The official editio princeps is Pardee 2009, but see Nebe 2010 for additional remarks. This text also features in the grammatical description by Gzella 2014a. Tiny fragments of two other inscriptions (Boyd et al. 2009) contain a few letters in alphabetic writing, but these do not permit any linguistic identification. 201 Cf. Gzella 2014a: 74 n. 10.

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latest expressions being the long Phoenician-Luwian bilingual from Karatepe (kai 26) and the one from Çineköy.202 If the enigmatic references to civil discord under Kilamuwa’s predecessors according to his own inscription (kai 24: 9–16) are related to conflicts between the autochthonous population and a ­ruling class of Aramaean conquerors, Phoenician would have acted not only as a prestigious, but also as an ideologically neutral language.203 In addition, Anatolian cultural influence around Samʾal emerges from the discovery of a Luwian seal, Anatolian personal names ending in -uwa besides West Semitic ones, and the writing of letters in raised relief according to Luwian custom also in the Phoenician and Aramaic texts.204 Yet the distribution of Phoenician, the  Aramaic-like local idiom Samʾalian, and Luwian among distinct parts of  the  population or across different communicative situations remains unknown.205 It is, at any rate, less likely that the actual language situation was immediately affected by politically-motivated changes in the idiom used for public epigraphy. Many distinctive features of Samʾalian phonology and morphology agree with Aramaic rather than with Canaanite Phoenician and thus reflect an evident shift in the idiom used for official inscriptions after the mid-ninth century: the spelling of the interdentals as well as the reflex of */ṣ́/, the assimilation of /n/ and, with the root lqḥ ‘to take’, of /l/ all correspond to Central Syrian Aramaic and perhaps other varieties. This basically matches the use of wordfinal vowel letters only, although, possibly under the lingering influence of the original, entirely consonantal, Phoenician orthography, they occur less frequently than in other early varieties of Aramaic (so, for instance, the near-deictic masculine singular demonstrative zn ‘this one’ instead of znh).206 Moreover, like Central Syrian, Samʾalian has basic-stem infinitives without the /m-/ prefix and a non-compulsory direct object marker wt, related in function and perhaps also in form to Western Aramaic ʾyt (later yt).207 A few lexical items, by contrast, seem to agree with Canaanite despite the clearly Aramaic character of most of the vocabulary: the pervasive firstperson singular independent personal pronoun ʾnk ‘I’, presumably pronounced 202 203 204 205 206

Tekoğlu – Lemaire 2000. Young 2002: 94–99. Fales 2011a: 560. See also Lipiński 2000b: 127–130 for an overview of stray material in names. Nonetheless, the more advanced Aramaic spelling practice was gradually encroaching on them, as can be observed in the variation between regular ʾbh for /ʾabūhī/ ‘his father’ (kai 214:29; 215:1.3.7) and exceptional ʾbwh (kai 215:2). 207 The etymology is contested, cf. Gzella 2013e: 116–117.

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/ʾanōkī/ judging from the full spelling ʾnky (kai 215:19),208 as opposed to Aramaic ʾnh /ʾanā/; further the particle gm ‘also’ (kai 214:8.9; 215:5), the adverb mt ‘truly’ (though the meaning is debated; kai 214:12.13.14; 215:4.10), and the noun ṣr ‘enemy’ (kai 214:30) with the Canaanite reflex of */ṣ́/ (from the root *ṣ́rr) as /ṣ/ and not with the sound written q as in Aramaic; so, too, perhaps the reconstructed alleged N-stem participle nḥ[š]b ‘esteemed’ from ḥšb ‘to reckon’ (kai 215:10), whereas no N-stem exists in languages unambiguously classified as Aramaic.209 These lexemes may have been borrowed from Phoenician, although not all of them are attested there210; others remain debated because of palaeographic or semantic uncertainties.211 Since individual words can be transferred easily, they have little value for classification anyway. More importantly, three basic aspects of nominal morphology and morphosyntax disagree with both Aramaic and Canaanite. Since they are all archaic, they furnish core arguments for associating Samʾalian with an older stage of Northwest Semitic rather than with Aramaic.212 The complete lack of the emphatic state for definiteness marking even with clearly definite noun phrases like nṣb zn ‘this stele’ (kai 214:1; 215:1.20)213 is perhaps less significant: definiteness marking spread gradually during the early first millennium, hence its absence in the regional dialect may simply be related to the peripheral location of Samʾal, even if it exists in the almost contemporaneous Old Aramaic inscriptions kai 216–221. However, this does not apply to the regular use of the old feminine plural ending /-āt/ in the unbound form (e.g., msgrt /masgirāt/ ‘prisons’ in kai 215:4.8) as opposed to common Aramaic /-ān/214 and, 208 Where vocalized evidence is available, the final /-ī/ always occurs together with the preceding /ō/, but the latter is a result of the “Canaanite Shift” and thus un-Aramaic. Cf. Gzella 2014a: 85 and 2011a: 435–436. 209 Gzella 2014a: 101–102. 210 See Beyer 2004: 15. Still, gm is known from Hebrew and Moabite, which also belong to the Canaanite group, whereas mt ‘certainly’, ṣrt ‘enmity’, and possibly gm (albeit in a broken context) occur at least in Ugaritic, which, whatever its position within Semitic may be, is relatively closer to Canaanite, and especially to Phoenician, than to Aramaic. See also Gzella 2014a: 106. 211 An alleged feminine singular relative pronoun ʾzh (kai 215:2), for instance, is sometimes referred to even in recent studies (e.g., Fales 2011a: 563), but this appears to be a ghost word (Kutscher 1971: 352; Gzella 2014a: 86 with n. 40; Hoftijzer – Jongeling 1995: 61 read ʾlh ‘conspiracy’(?) instead). 212 As has been argued convincingly by Huehnergard 1991. 213 Gzella 2014a: 89. 214 Gzella 2014a: 87; only vestigial traces of /-āt/ have been preserved in Central Syrian Aramaic (see Section 2.2.2 above).

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especially, to the curious preservation of the pristine difference between a nominative and a genitive-accusative case at least in the masculine plural (where they can be distinguished in the writing system).215 The latter is particularly striking in that it combines archaic and innovative features. In unbound forms, the consonantal spelling marks a clear difference between the old nominative ʾlhw /ʾelāhū/ ‘the gods’ for the subject (kai 214:2) and the genitive-accusative bʾbny /ba-ʾabanī/ ‘with stones’ after a preposition (kai 214:31), in contradistinction to the former genitive ending /-īn/ (with final “nunation,” that is, ending in /-n/) that has been levelled in Aramaic. All unambiguous bound masculine plural forms, by contrast, occur only in syntactic contexts where a genitive would be expected, like bmṣʿt mlky ‘amidst of kings’ (kai 215:10, to be contrasted with Aramaic bmṣʿt mlkn in kai 216:9–10); the possible nominative /ʾelāhū/ in ʾlh yʾdy ‘the gods of Samʾal’ for the subject of a transitive verb (kai 215:2, like unbound ʾlhw in kai 214:2) is unfortunately spelled without a vowel letter. Unlike the rest of the known first-millennium Semitic languages of SyriaPalestine, the case distinction in the plural thus still seems productive at least in official Samʾalian, as it was in second-millennium Northwest Semitic. In contrast to the earlier situation, however, the unbound plural resembles the bound form in that it has neither final /-m/ (“mimation,” as in Ugaritic and later in Hebrew and Phoenician) nor final /-n/ (“nunation,” corresponding to the original ending, preserved in Aramaic and Moabite). This makes Samʾalian unique among the attested Semitic languages. If it is to be associated with Aramaic, it would be based on a very archaic dialect, but one that has developed to a certain extent independently from the rest of Aramaic in levelling the bound and unbound forms while still preserving the two different cases. Hence, the classification of Samʾalian as a proper Northwest Semitic language proves to be the most elegant one. As elsewhere in Syria-Palestine, cultural self-awareness, fuelled by a short-lived political autonomy, seems to furnish a suitable background against which a local idiom could be transformed into a standardized written language.216 The newly-discovered stele of Kuttamuwa was erected not by a king but by a royal functionary; however, it also seems to date from around the mid-eighth century. It appears to represent a linguistic stage between Samʾalian and “normal” Aramaic in that it uses the first-person singular independent pronoun ʾnk as well as the object marker wt and lacks definiteness marking. On the other 215 Gzella 2014a: 90–91. 216 So, too, Young 2002: 99–102. This remains a plausible but speculative scenario, however, since the historical underpinnings of the language shift remain unknown.

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hand, it has replaced Samʾalian’s most distinctive feature, the case distinction and lack of nunation in the masculine plural, by the usual Aramaic form /-īn/ (so especially in ywmn lywmn /yawmīn la-yawmīn/ ‘days after days’ in line 10). In addition, it also has a masculine singular near-deictic znn ‘this one’ (line 9, besides zn in line 5) as it surfaces again only much later in Aramaic legal texts from the Dead Sea. This intermediate position could either be a sign of a more advanced progression of the local language towards mainstream Aramaic, or it could reveal the use of a language that was basically Aramaic (though influenced by some non-Aramaic lexical items inherited from Samʾalian) in contexts outside the prestigious, and presumably conservative, register of royal monumental inscriptions. A slightly younger group of texts that have been issued only about a generation later (kai 216–221), by contrast, closely correspond to Central Syrian Aramaic.217 Owing to the rising prestige of Damascus, its chancellery language has finally replaced the ephemeral use of the local written idiom of Samʾal in public epigraphy and thereby caused its disappearance; language, after all, is easily susceptible to changes in prestige. It is unknown how long the underlying idiom survived as a vernacular, if indeed it was ever spoken among significant parts of the population. The six genuine Aramaic inscriptions from Samʾal are associated with the same local king Bar-Rākeb, a contemporary and ally of the Assyrian great king Tiglath-pileser who ruled from 745 to 727 b.c.e. Among them, kai 216 is the most extensive one, containing a declaration of loyalty to the Assyrian crown, a building account, and the proud assertion that BarRākeb surpassed his ancestors. The others are either very short or almost completely destroyed. Together, they mark the end of the early Old Aramaic period. Bar-Rākeb’s decision to yield to the growing use of Central Syrian Aramaic as an emerging global medium of communication instead of the earlier regional idiom shows how the language policy of local rulers with their imperial loyalties has contributed to preparing the further spread of the new world language in the seventh and sixth centuries b.c.e.

217 Strangely enough, these have been subsumed under “Mesopotamian Aramaic” by Greenfield 1978: 95, but since there are no common isoglosses between these inscriptions and the later Neo-Assyrian tablets and epigraphs (see Section 3.2) vis-à-vis other varieties of Aramaic, his classification is unwarranted and can no longer be upheld. The one instance of dissimilation of emphatics in *qyṣʾ ‘summer’ to kyṣʾ adduced by Greenfield, although it occurs side by side with non-dissimilated ṣdq in the very same text (see Section 2.2.2 above), cannot be compared to the regular workings of such a dissimilation in much later Mandaic.

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The Influence of Aram-Damascus and the Spread of Central Syrian Aramaic

Evidence for Aramaic outside Syria proper is still rather limited for the ninth and eighth centuries b.c.e. The geographical distribution of the relevant textual material, some of which has only recently been discovered, however, suggests that knowledge of this language and its accompanying written tradition had already spread to adjacent regions during the earliest attested period. In addition, Aramaic writing may have slowly emerged in even more distant parts of the Ancient Near East some time before it began to encroach systematically on Neo-Assyrian administration in the heart of the empire, but this cannot be corroborated on the basis of the available evidence. Linguistically, the known ninth- and eighth-century Aramaic inscriptions from areas outside Syria can be related to the Central Syrian variety and may testify to the latter’s growing prestige when the kingdom of Damascus extended its sphere of political influence. One can thus make a reasonable case for the hypothesis that Damascus as the preeminent power in the region also employed the same Central Syrian form of Aramaic as its official language. The lack of textual witnesses directly associated with this particular kingdom can to some extent be compensated for by the relative homogeneity of all available discoveries from Central Syria and their close proximity with Aramaic material attested in adjacent territories that, according to historical sources, were under the sway of Damascus during the second half of the ninth century (cf. 2 Kings 10:32–33; 13; Amos 1:3–4; 6:13). There is thus good reason to believe that Central Syrian was also used in the chancellery of Damascus. The main sources from outside Syria for this period are the Tell Dan victory stele from Dan in Northern Galilee and a plaster inscription with a literary text from Deir ʿAllā in Jordan. Both exhibit interesting and significant linguistic peculiarities that may further fine-tune the description of Old Aramaic as well as its interaction with other Syro-Palestinian idioms in the domain of official representation and literary production, so they will be discussed at greater length in the following two Sections. Moreover, several small inscriptions on jars are known but remain indifferent as to their linguistic affiliation. The language of a text, after all, does not have to agree with distinctive local features in the letter forms, because their graphic shape only mirrors the local tradition in which its author has learned to spell. Hence, neither the two inscribed jars from Beth Saida some two kilometres to the north of the Sea of Galilee218 nor 218 The first (Wimmer 2000; Schorch 2000) contains the phrase lšm ‘to the name of’ followed by a sign that looks like an Egyptian Ankh-hieroglyph; the second (Betz et al. 1997: 225) the string of letters ʿqbʾ, perhaps the name of a person or a place.

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the one from Tell Zeror on the western coast, both perhaps from the eighth century, necessarily have to be attributed to Aramaic and can also be read as Canaanite; yet at least the jar inscription from ʿEin Gev on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, placed in the ninth century on grounds of palaeography, may contain a noun in the typically Aramaic emphatic state, lšqyʾ ‘to the cupbearer’, and could be related to the Aramaean occupation of the place.219 None of these small texts can be adduced as proof for the use of Aramaic among the local population, but the paucity of the evidence is possibly a result of a comparatively low degree of literacy in this region. There may have been many more speakers of Aramaic. A recently-discovered inscription from Bukān in West Iran from the late eighth or the early seventh century adds further support to the idea that the limited quantity of surviving material does by no means correlate with a restricted use of Aramaic. Rather, it shows that the Central Syrian koiné, at least as a means of public representation, had spread to Lake Urmia and was adopted there by a non-Aramaean ruling dynasty only a few decades after the youngest surviving witnesses from Central Syria itself. The three major Aramaic inscriptions from this period that were found outside Syria thus illustrate three different socio-linguistic aspects of Central Syrian Aramaic: its use for official propaganda, its impact on traditional literature, and its far-reaching cultural prestige. These were important driving forces that accelerated its spread. 2.3.1 The Tell Dan Stele from Northern Galilee and Damascene Authority The most extensive pre-Achaemenid witnesses for Aramaic in the whole of Palestine are now the three fragments of thirteen lines of a victory stele from Tell Dan in Upper Galilee that were discovered in 1993 and 1994 (kai 310).220 They supplement a previously-known bowl inscription from Dan, presumably dating from the same period, which is usually thought to read lṭb[ḥ]yʾ ‘for the cooks’ with the unambiguously Aramaic ending of the masculine plural “emphatic state,” although some uncertainties remain.221 A plausible terminus ante quem for the stele is established by traces of the Assyrian destruction of 219 Gibson 1975: 5–6. This analysis is not entirely certain, however. 220 It has produced an enormous amount of secondary literature after the first edition by Biran – Naveh 1993 and 1995, chiefly due to the possible mention of the Davidic Dynasty as bytdwd ‘House of David’, the most plausible interpretation currently available. A comprehensive bibliography on matters historical, linguistic, and others can be found in Suriano 2007: 163–164, n. 1–4. Lemaire 2006a: 181 n. 13 has a selection of titles that feature most prominently in the discussion. 221 Gibson 1975: 5–6.

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the city, still visible in the archaeological remains, in 733 or 732 b.c.e.; as the most likely reconstruction of two names of kings in lines 7 and 8 points to Joram of Israel and Ahaziah of Judah on grounds of combinatory reasoning, the text is often associated with the war against Hazaʾel of Damascus around the middle of the ninth century b.c.e. which is also documented in biblical history (1 Kings 20:1–34; 22:1–36; 2 Kings 6:8–23; 6:24–7:20).222 Phonology, morphology, and lexicon of the surviving parts of the inscription agree exactly with what is known about Central Syrian Aramaic.223 This supports the usual hypothesis that its author was Hazaʾel who, according to Assyrian sources, ruled between 845 and 841 b.c.e. An instance of the characteristically Western Aramaic direct object marker [ʾ]yt (lines 9–10), whose initial aleph can be reasonably safely reconstructed, provides an important indication, since among the surviving early Old Aramaic witnesses, it is so far only attested in Central Syrian. The lack of words in the “emphatic state” in this text, by contrast, is irrelevant for classification,224 since explicit definiteness marking would not be expected on grammatical or semantic grounds anywhere in the fragments that have been preserved. In addition, an “emphatic state” form is attested in the Tell Dan bowl from presumably the same time and place, which further supports the view that its absence in the Tell Dan stele must be a result of pure coincidence. This suggests that the Tell Dan victory stele was erected as a token of Damascene political authority and composed in the king’s official language. A curious syntactic feature, however, has a direct bearing on the association of the Tell Dan stele with Central Syrian Aramaic, and on early Northwest Semitic verbal syntax in general: the author of the text made comparatively frequent use of the “imperfect” conjugation together with the conjunction w /wa-/ ‘and’ for rendering a sequence of consecutive past events that constitute the narrative backbone or main line of the action (lines 3 [twice], 4(?), 5 [twice], 6, and 9(?); including partly reconstructed forms, here highlighted with a question mark), although the normal verbal form employed for past events in the whole of older Aramaic is the “perfect.” The two asyndetic “imperfects” without /wa-/ in lines 2–3 may belong to a different syntagm and can also be understood as marking contemporaneous circumstantial or 222 For a summary of the political history, cf. Pitard 1987: 114–122, Niehr 2011, and Berlejung 2014: 351–356. Alternative dates have never been adequately defended but strongly rely on implausible reconstructions of the text and thus remain unconvincing. 223 See also Lemaire 2006a: 181, who explicitly classifies it as ‘a good example of an inscription in the Damascus Aramaic dialect’. 224 Pace Fales 2011a: 559.

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subordinate situations or events elaborating on preceding main events, as is normal in Aramaic, and thus should be distinguished from the syndetic ones.225 Still, the very high frequency of this use of the “imperfect” in the short fragments of the Tell Dan stele deviates from the situation not only in the rest of Old Aramaic but also in the whole of later Aramaic: only three more examples occur in the slightly younger but much longer Zakkur inscription (kai 202:11.15),226 which otherwise has the “perfect” as the default narrative form. Several other instances are attested in the Deir ʿAllā plaster text, but given both the unclear linguistic classification of this literary composition and some doubts as to whether the similar forms there are really comparable, these merit a separate discussion (see Section 2.3.2). While at least the noteworthy concentration of this phenomenon in the Tell Dan inscription is obviously at variance with known Old Aramaic verbal usage (the Zakkur stele with remnants of in total some forty lines shows such a different frequency in relation to its size that it cannot be directly compared to the thirteen fragmentary lines of the Tell Dan stele), it does seem to correspond, at least at first glance, to the “imperfect consecutive” that is so characteristic of Classical Hebrew prose and also appears in the war account in the first half of the mid-ninth-century Moabite royal inscription (kai 181) from the immediate vicinity of the Hebrew speecharea. So how can its occurrence in an otherwise clearly Aramaic text be explained? Is it a shared Aramaic-Canaanite isogloss in the earliest texts, a native feature of Aramaic at large, or an instance of language contact in a border region? After a short but vivid discussion immediately after the discovery of the Tell Dan inscription,227 a consensus view has emerged some ten years ago. Accordingly, the “imperfects” with past-tense reference in the Aramaic Tell Dan and Zakkur stelae, in the Deir ʿAllā plaster text, in Hebrew, and in Moabite all reflect the very same linguistic phenomenon, namely the “imperfect 225 Correctly emphasized at least as a possibility by Emerton 1997: 432–435 and 2000: 27–33 (although he does not exclude other interpretations); cf. Gzella 2004: 322–323 with n. 65. This is at any rate plausible for yhk in wyškb ʾby yhk (line 3), which does not seem to mark a new event but to elaborate on the preceding wyškb (‘then my father lied down, departing/ in order to depart [i.e., dying]’). The form ysq in line 2, by contrast, remains doubtful due to the broken context. 226 See Emerton 1994: 255–256. 227 See Gzella 2004: 322–324 for a brief summary of the main positions and now Knapp 2014: 106–109 for a more extensive discussion. Some side lines that proved less relevant have now been abandoned.

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consecutive.” As a consequence, Old Aramaic and some Canaanite languages would share a common grammatical and stylistic feature in narrative.228 This is no doubt a simple solution and has become popular for that reason, but while future discoveries may perhaps prove it correct, it is so far insufficiently supported by the available evidence and, indeed, difficult to square with the known facts. Given its importance for an adequate understanding not only of the Tell Dan inscription and its specific language, but also of the respective verbal systems of Old Aramaic and Canaanite as well as their historical background as such, the question should be addressed afresh. It will turn out that all three cases are different: the “imperfects” in the Zakkur stele can easily be explained in the light of what is otherwise known about older Aramaic; the verbal system of the Deir ʿAllā plaster text (see Section 2.3.2 below) closely corresponds to Classical Hebrew and Moabite; and the “imperfects” in the Tell Dan inscription are ambiguous in that they could reflect either an extension of a native Aramaic usage or a non-obvious Canaanite influence. First of all, the correct interpretation of the verbal forms in question and the assessment of their wider bearing depends on the underlying morphological categories. Aramaic and Canaanite originally each had two different “imperfect” conjugations which have been shown to be morphologically distinct, exhibit complementary functional ranges, and basically coexist in the respective grammars during much of the first millennium b.c.e.229 The consonantal spelling, however, only differentiates between both conjugations in forms of the second person feminine singular as well as in the third and second persons plural, and in Old Aramaic also in roots ending in a long vowel. Since no unambiguous forms are attested in either the Tell Dan or the Zakkur inscription, all “imperfects” there, which are confined to the third person masculine plural and the first person singular, could either be “long” or “short.”230

228 So already Degen 1969: 114 with n. 21 and Garr 1985: 185 regarding the Zakkur inscription, later seconded, also with reference to the Tell Dan stele, by, e.g., Emerton 1994, Sasson 1997, Rainey 2003: 404–405, Fales 2011a: 559 and 568, and others. 229 See Section 1.2.2 and the bibliographical references there. 230 Rightly noted by Beyer 2004: 15, who views them as “long imperfects”; cf. Gzella 2014a: 97 n. 80. Kottsieper 2007a: 116, by contrast, parses the participle ʾsry ‘harnessing’ (relating to the well-known root ʾsr ‘to bind’; see Hoftijzer – Jongeling 1995: 91 for its use with chariots in Aramaic) in line 6 as a first-person “short imperfect” of a purported D-stem of an otherwise unattested Aramaic root srī ‘I lead away’ and views this as evidence that all other “imperfects” in the Tell Dan inscription are “short” forms. Since it is of course methodologically flawed to discard a morphologically, syntactically, and semantically unproblematic form in favour of a merely hypothetical one that belongs to a root derived from

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Unfortunately, this essential fact has been largely overlooked in the discussion.231 The comparison with the “imperfect consecutive” in Hebrew, Moabite, and the Deir ʿAllā text, conversely, presupposes that the respective “imperfects” in Old Aramaic are “short” forms. As is well known, this conjugation preserves an archaic use of the “short imperfect” for completed events in the past, which is also attested in Ugaritic poetry, and creates a new verbal paradigm by combining it with obligatory /wa-/. By contrast, the plain “short imperfect” has otherwise been reduced to the “jussive” for rendering deontic modality in the attested Semitic languages of Iron-Age Syria-Palestine, including Classical Hebrew.232 As the firm juncture of “short imperfect” and /wa-/ does not seem to constitute a feature of a preceding stage of Northwest Semitic (as is basically represented by Ugaritic poetry, where, however, free-standing “short imperfects” without /wa-/ occur in the same function as syndetic forms), it is unlikely to have been inherited by both Aramaic and Canaanite from a common ancestor. In addition, a productive use of the “imperfect consecutive” in Canaanite appears to be confined to Hebrew and Moabite official prose, whereas it does not occur in Phoenician.233 If one accepts the interpretation of the unusually frequent syndetic “imperfects” in the Tell Dan inscription as “imperfect

conjecture alone, his proposal should be disregarded and cannot bear on the discussion. No “short imperfects” can be identified in the Tell Dan stele. 231 The distinction between “long” and “short” forms in general has been misunderstood by DeCaen 2001. 232 Gzella 2011a: 441–442. The archaic use still surfaces in a few instances of Early Hebrew Poetry, see, for instance, the free-standing “short imperfect” yarʿεm ‘he thundered’ (2 Samuel 22:14) as opposed to its later interpretation as an “imperfect consecutive” wayyarʿεm (as would be normal in prose) in the parallel passage Psalm 18:14. 233 It should also be noted that Hebrew and the language of the Moabite royal inscription share at least one more clear innovation not attested elsewhere in Northwest Semitic, that is, the relative marker ʾšr (kai 181:29, Hebrew ʾăšεr; the etymology is debated, on which see Holmstedt 2007 with further references, but this specific form is a HebrewMoabite isogloss) besides several common Canaanite developments (prepositive definite article /ha-/, direct object marker ʾt) and a few lexical items (cf. Gzella 2011f: 162–163; Fassberg 2013). The co-occurrence of “imperfect consecutives” and direct object marking with ʾt in the conquest story in the first half of the Moabite inscription (kai 181:5–18) might also suggest that this part of the text is linguistically more innovative, whereas the building account in the second half (kai 181:21–29) has a more traditional ring in its consistent use of the “perfect” and its lack of object marking. Consider the variation between wʾb[n] ʾt qrytn ‘and I built Kirjathon’ in lines 9–10 and ʾnk bnty ʿrʿr ‘I build Aroer’ in line 26. This, too, argues against the “imperfect consecutive” as a common Canaanite-Aramaic feature and in favour of its innovative nature.

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consecutives,” the distributional pattern of this syntagm in Canaanite and Aramaic suggests that the “imperfect consecutive” may have been a contactinduced areal phenomenon that essentially spread from Southern Canaanite to Northern Galilee.234 Exactly this distributional pattern, both historically and geographically, militates against the hypothesis that the “imperfect consecutive” belongs to a common Canaanite-Aramaic stock. Instead of simply but indiscriminately lumping together the Aramaic evidence with other Northwest Semitic material, one could also try to explain the syndetic “imperfects” in the Zakkur and the Tell Dan inscriptions in the light of Aramaic only. As has been seen, all relevant forms could be “long imperfects,” in which case they would be distinct from the genuine “imperfect consecutive” in Hebrew, Moabite, and Deir ʿAllā, but correspond to other usages in various older Aramaic texts. For the “long imperfect” with its functional range of the intersecting notions of present-future, imperfective aspect, and epistemic modality is occasionally employed for past main events as well and thus serves as a kind of “historical present.” Historical presents are common in a variety of different languages, including Greek, Latin, and the modern European idioms, and can be found in several stages of pre-modern Aramaic as well. They reflect the universal tendency to employ verbal categories otherwise related to a functional range that covers the conceptually related notions present tense or imperfectivity for past events, which causes dramatic vividness.235 Arguably the two best examples are the unambiguous third-person masculine plural forms (both are marked as “long imperfects” by to the final /-n/) yqrqn wyksʾn ‘they fled and they pursued’ in the Assur ostracon (kai 233:16); the context demands a past-time reference, and there is no reason why these events should be described as ongoing or repeated.236 Hence, all relevant “imperfects” in Old Aramaic could also be explained as long forms without additional special pleading but according to a 234 Cf. Young 1993: 56; Emerton 1997: 438–439; Gzella 2004: 323–324 (with further bibliography in n. 67). 235 The concept of historical presents is well-established in Semitic grammar, too; see Gzella 2005b for a general overview, with further bibliography. 236 See Gzella 2005b: 404–405 and 2008a: 99–100; cf. also (though only in passing) Beyer 2004: 15. The durative rendering proposed by Fales 2010: 197 (‘year] after year they escaped and they used to pursue them’) is based on the questionable reconstruction and analysis of šnh in šnh] mn šnh as ‘year’. However, since ‘year after year’ would rather be rendered šnh b šnh in early Aramaic (cf. the examples in Schwiderski 2008: 802) and not as šnh mn šnh, one should interpret šnh as the adverb /θanā/ ‘there’. It seems thus more plausible to view this sentence as a rhetorical climax with a switch to forms otherwise associated with present-time significance for a particular dramatic effect.

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typologically common tendency.237 Occam’s razor would strongly support this explanation. Indeed, such an analysis would make perfect sense especially for the two (out of three) examples with verbs of speaking in the Zakkur stele (namely wyʿnny ‘and he answered me’ in kai 202A: 11 and wyʾmr ‘and he said’ in l. 15). Historical presents, after all, tend to crop up but occasionally and to be employed besides forms used more regularly for past events, such as the Aramaic “perfect” that also predominates in the Zakkur inscription. In addition, cross-linguistic investigations have shown that verbs introducing direct speech in particular regularly appear in forms otherwise associated with present tense or imperfectivity, such as the Northwest Semitic “long imperfect” or, in later Aramaic varieties, the predicative participle.238 It is no doubt significant that the very same roots as in the Zakkur inscription, ʾmr ‘to say’ and ʿnī ‘to answer’, occur with forms serving as historical presents in later Aramaic as well.239 However, the concentration of syndetic “imperfects” in the Tell Dan stele, even if they can be explained as long forms, remains puzzling. Admittedly, the Old Aramaic corpus contains but few narrative texts, but, leaving aside the few departures from the norm in the Zakkur inscription, they all employ the “perfect” with noteworthy consistency. Given the available evidence, an interpretation of these forms as “long imperfects” can thus adequately account for their occurrence in the Tell Dan stele, but not for the specific distributional pattern. If one does not want to cocoon the otherwise unknown standard Aramaic idiom of Damascus from the rest of Central Syrian in crediting it with an unusually high frequency of syndetic “imperfects” for past events (the only obvious alternative), the latter may thus be due to contact with local Canaanite scribal traditions, where such forms in official prose were perfectly normal, in a border area.240

237 As a corollary, the syndetic and the asyndetic “imperfects” in the Tell Dan inscription would reflect the same morphological category, with the former being employed as historical presents for the narrative mainline and the latter for circumstantial past situations. Both usages are sufficiently attested in Old Aramaic. 238 See Gzella 2004: 95 with n. 125 and the more general linguistic studies cited there. This has also been recognized by more traditional grammars of various Aramaic languages, cf., e.g., Nöldeke 1875: 371 and 21898: 206. 239 Gzella 2005b: 406–407; Nöldeke 1875: 371; 21898: 206. 240 Even if one sees the “imperfect consecutive” as an originally Southern Canaanite (i.e., Judaean and Moabite) innovation, its presence in Galilee can be explained against the background of a common literary language and style; after all, the letter forms in Hebrew

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Such an explanation does not necessarily imply that the respective Aramaic “imperfects” were all morphologically “short” forms, but the predominance of the Southern Canaanite “imperfect consecutive,” originally based on the “short” variant, could have been replicated in Aramaic by further extending an existing but marginal use of the “long imperfect” there. This is how linguistic convergence often works241: instead of creating new use patterns, it generally leads to a functional spread of available ones with an erstwhile very restricted scope. An instance of pattern replication by means of native morphological and morphosyntactic matter may also be easier to explain than the borrowing of an entire verbal paradigm, although that cannot be excluded either. To sum up, it has been seen that the unquestioned assumption of a native and productive “imperfect consecutive” in Old Aramaic comparable to Hebrew and Moabite, as often in the secondary literature up to this day, is methodologically unsound: first, the “imperfect consecutive” with its obligatory /wa-/ ‘and’ does not belong to the common Canaanite-Aramaic stock but evolved secondarily, though on the basis of an archaic use of the inherited “short imperfect” for narrative past, and occurs regularly in Hebrew and Moabite only; second, the relevant forms in Old Aramaic proper, that is, the Zakkur and the Tell Dan inscriptions, are all morphologically ambiguous and may be either “long” or “short” forms; third, the use of the “long imperfect” as a kind of historical present for past main events is sufficiently well attested in various stages of older Aramaic, and typologically plausible especially with verbs of speaking, as in the Zakkur inscription, whereas no unambiguous “short imperfects” with past-time reference occur anywhere in the entire corpus; fourth, “imperfect consecutive” forms based on the “short imperfect” in the Deir ʿAllā plaster text cannot be employed as a benchmark for normal Old Aramaic usage due to the special status and unclear classification of this particular text; fifth, the distributional pattern of syndetic “imperfects” in Old Aramaic, be they “long” or “short,” differs significantly in the two texts that contain them. Unless further evidence with unambiguous verbal forms in Aramaic becomes available, the unique use pattern in the Tell Dan-inscription can best be explained either as a borrowing of the genuine Southern Canaanite “short imperfect” employed as a syndetic “imperfect consecutive” or, perhaps slightly more plausibly, as an extension of the native but sporadic Aramaic use of the “long imperfect” for the historical present, maybe partly reinforced by the

inscriptions from the Northern and the Southern Kingdom do not differ either. The few known phonetic and morphological distinctions between Israelian and Judaean Hebrew, by contrast, do not bear on syntax and register. 241 Cf. Gzella 2013b.

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pervasive “imperfect consecutive” in the adjacent Canaanite idioms. This may seem a pedantic distinction, but it has some relevance for the linguistic and cultural history of Canaanite and Aramaic in ninth-century Syria-Palestine. Since the Tell Dan inscription otherwise perfectly agrees with Central Syrian in all respects of phonology, morphology, and lexicon, its deviation in an important point of syntax and style could be seen as an instance of contact between Aramaic and Canaanite scribal traditions.242 If that is true, it would not only document the spread of Central Syrian Aramaic further to the south during the ninth century, following military conquests of Aram-Damascus, but also its interaction with local scribal practice. This analysis fits in with other possible instances of Aramaic-Canaanite contact (see Sections 2.3.2 and 2.4 below). The Deir ʿAllā Plaster Text and the Aramaicization of Traditional Literature A plaster text from Transjordanian Deir ʿAllā in Gilead (kai 312), often identified with biblical Succoth, that has been discovered in 1967 proves more difficult to pinpoint in terms of language than the Tell Dan inscription, but it furnishes clearer instances of interaction between Aramaic and Canaanite languages and literary expression.243 It is generally dated around 800 b.c.e., on grounds of both archaeology and palaeography. The site seems to have served as a sanctuary in earlier periods, but its purpose during the time when this text was produced is unclear. Nonetheless, the inscription, painted on a wall in the form of a book scroll and written in black ink with red headings, belongs to religious literature. Since the wall collapsed already in Antiquity, the 119 small fragments had to be arranged in two “Combinations” of 18 and 37 lines respectively by the editors. “Combination I” contains the nocturnal vision of the seer

2.3.2

242 It is thus unclear in how far the Tell Dan stele reflects the verbal syntax of Damascene Aramaic as such, even if an influence of Canaanite literary style on the chancellery language of Damascus in general cannot be excluded. In the latter case, the narrative style of the Damascene variety would have had very little impact on later Aramaic, although a few other features of Central Syrian Aramaic do survive into later Old Aramaic. 243 The still unsurpassed first edition is Hoftijzer – van der Kooij 1976. Various attempts at a specific linguistic classification from different methodological vantage points are represented in the contributions in Hoftijzer – van der Kooij (eds.) 1991; for bibliographical information on improved readings and interpretations see Gzella 2013c; the survey by Blum 2008 with several new proposals is especially helpful. A few minute inscriptions on jars and stone from the same period consist of no more than a few individual letters, but they seem to contain at least the Aramaic relative marker zy (the first four have been published by Hoftijzer – van der Kooij 1976: 167 and 267, a fifth one by Lemaire 1984: 254–255).

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Balaam son of Beor (previously known from Numbers 22–24) who forecasts a reversal of natural order to his people; “Combination II” remains elusive but seems to include wisdom notions relating to death and the netherworld. Notwithstanding difficulties of palaeography and interpretation, it becomes evident from uncontested readings that phonology and morphology reflect almost all distinctive features of Old Aramaic as opposed to all other known Northwest Semitic languages. The most reliable ones are: 1) the regular spelling of the reflex of original */ṣ́/ with q (I:11.12.14.15; 2:5.12.14); 2) the suffix -wh /-awhī/ ‘his’ (secondarily derived from */-ayhū/) with noun bases ending in a vowel or diphthong (I:1); 3) the original ending /-at/ of the third-person feminine singular “perfect” (I:7–8.11.15), whereas the feminine singular absolute state of nouns already has /-ā/ (I:8.11; II:9); 4) the third person masculine plural perfect ending -yw /-iyū/ or /-īw/ with roots ending in a long vowel (I:10); 5) a reflex of the third radical of such roots, indicated by -y, in imperative and “short imperfect” forms without endings (II:6). In addition, many basic lexical items are Aramaic: ḥd ‘one’ (II:10), br ‘son’ (I:2), ḥwī ‘to tell’ (I:5), yhb ‘to give’ (I:7), mn ‘who’ (II:12), ʿbd ‘to make’ (II:7). Especially their clustering supports a close association of this text with Aramaic. Lexicon and style, by contrast, also seem to contain a few Canaanite traits.244 The Aramaic material thus constitutes the core of the grammar and generally corresponds to what is otherwise known about Central Syrian Aramaic.245 However, no words in the “emphatic state” are attested, even where they would be expected,246 similar to Samʾalian, but this does not have to be considered a strong counter-argument: as has been seen, definiteness marking was but gradually expanding in ninth- and eighth-century Aramaic, and a grammatical system can follow its own syntactic principles under the influence of language contact, especially if the text, as will be argued here (see below), goes back to a Canaanite original that may have been composed in a style similar to Early Hebrew Poetry with its very limited use of the definite article. Canaanite hallmarks, by contrast, are confined to lexical items and stylistic features, that is, the “flesh” of the language, and do not affect the grammar as 244 Such a distribution has been suggested by Beyer 2011: 123–125 (with references) and Gzella 2013c: 692. 245 Cf. Lemaire 2006a: 181, who views this text as a representative of the Aramaic of Damascus, similarly Blum 2013: 476. 246 Words like ‘gods’ or ‘heavens’ may have been viewed as internally definite, as in the Sfire inscriptions, but definiteness marking would be more natural in the similes in II:8 ff. if it had existed, just as in the animal similes in the Aḥiqar proverbs (where it is regularly ‘the lion’, ‘the ass’, etc.; cf. Lindenberger 1983: 60–63).

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its “backbone.”247 Excluding again palaeographically dubious readings and words that are ambiguous in the consonantal text, one can at least identify an instance each of the typically Canaanite roots dbr ‘to speak’ (II:7; Aramaic would use mll), rʾī ‘to see’ (I:5; as opposed to Aramaic ḥzī, which occurs four times), and a participle of the N-stem (inexistent in Aramaic) of the root ʾnḥ ‘to groan’ (twice in II:12).248 A few stray forms, too, agree with Canaanite against Aramaic, but they may also count as lexical rather than morphological elements: the imperative lkw ‘come!’ from hlk (I:5; replaced by the imperative of the root ʾzl in Aramaic)249 and the infinitive dʿt ‘to know’ from ydʿ in the form of a feminine verbal noun as is typical for verbs Iy in Canaanite and Ugaritic (II:17; unknown in Aramaic). In addition to these individual Canaanite words and forms that are interspersed throughout the text, it features a number of “imperfect consecutives” unambiguously based on the “short imperfect” for narrative past, such as wyʾtw ‘and they came’ (I:1; the “long imperfect” would be wyʾtwn), wyḥz ‘and he saw’ (I:1; “long form” wyḥzh), or wyʾmrw ‘and they said’ (I:2; “long form” yʾmrwn). The “perfect,” as would be normal in Aramaic, also occurs (I:6.13), as does the “long imperfect” for durative-iterative past (e.g., ybkh ‘he was weeping’ in I:4). All this corresponds exactly to Classical Hebrew and Moabite verbal syntax. Since the combination of /wa-/ plus the “short imperfect” with past-time reference is so far only positively attested in Hebrew and Moabite, it must count as an important hallmark of Canaanite literary style. The few examples in Aramaic, by contrast, are ambiguous and could be either “long imperfects” acting as historical presents, so two of the three instances in the Zakkur inscription (a usage, as has been seen, sufficiently well-attested in other older Aramaic witnesses), or, as far as their cumulative appearance in the Tell Dan inscription from the border area between Syria and Northern Galilee is concerned, may even reflect the influence of Canaanite style (see Section 2.3.1 above), although this texts lacks other, lexical, Canaanisms such as they occur in the Deir ʿAllā inscription. Once again, it has to be stressed that there is thus no hard evidence supporting the 247 See also Campbell – Poser 2008: 165–172 on the limited value of lexical comparison for classification. 248 Aramaic also has a cognate of the same root, where it appears in t-stem forms instead, see Beyer 2004: 350, s.v., but since no known Aramaic variety has a productive N-stem, this is best understood as an individual lexical feature. The same applies to another isolated N-stem participle in Samʾalian (see above, Section 2.2.3). Both instances can be viewed as either lexicalized relics (as perceptively suggested to me by A.M. Al-Jallad) or individual lexical borrowings; neither the Deir ʿAllā text nor Samʾalian contains evidence for an inherited N-stem as a living feature. 249 Beyer 1984: 562, s.v. hk.

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hypothesis that the “imperfect consecutive” with a past-tense “short imperfect” was native to Old Aramaic. Its occurrence in the Deir ʿAllā text, however, agrees with a number of distinctively Canaanite lexical items, the literary character of the work (which is reinforced by the title spr ‘book’ at the beginning in I:1, the graphic lay-out in the form of a book scroll, and the use of black as well as red ink), and allusions to biblical passages (compare I:1–3 with Numbers 22 and I:5 with Psalm 66:5). This conflicting evidence has lead to very different explanations. Initial, though inconclusive, attempts at classifying the text as either Aramaic (according to the original editors) or Canaanite were generally based on counting the respective traits.250 A second generation of approaches operated on a model beyond the conventional bifurcation of first-millennium Northwest Semitic into Aramaic and Canaanite by associating the underlying language with a local dialect that either, historically-genealogically, preserved in a peripheral area traces of an older linguistic stage before that bifurcation had emerged,251 or, synchronically, combined Aramaic and Canaanite features due to its intermediate position on a dialectal map.252 The surprisingly neat distribution of Aramaic phonology, morphology, and the basic lexicon on the one hand and Canaanite narrative style as well as some isolated items of vocabulary on the other, however, would seem to support another analysis that has recently been gaining ground against the background of the political and cultural history of the region: originally belonging to the Northern Kingdom of Israel, it was conquered around 837 b.c.e. by Damascus253 and thus came under the influence a new prestige culture.254 Since the text is presumably a copy of an older work, it may represent a piece of Canaanite literature from the Israelite period that was, following the Aramaean conquest, either translated or redacted (if it was previously transmitted orally) into the Central Syrian official language, but in accordance with its original Canaanite narrative style.255 This explanation 250 A convenient overview is presented by Seebass 2007: 57. 251 Huehnergard 1991; similarly still Blau 2007. From that point of view, the Deir ʿAllā inscription resembles Samʾalian, though with the important exception that all Canaanite and Aramaic features in the former can be connected with Iron-Age languages, whereas an unambiguous archaism like the latter’s case distinction in the plural is absent in Deir ʿAllā and constitutes a strong argument in favour of a proper place of Samʾalian within Northwest Semitic. 252 Kaufman 1988; McCarter 1991. 253 See Lemaire 1991. 254 Cf. Seebass 2007: 57; Blum 2008: 597–598; Beyer 2011: 123–126; Gzella 2013c. 255 So Beyer 2011: 125–126; Gzella 2013c: 692. The Canaanisms in verbal syntax and lexicon render it unlikely that the Deir ʿAllā inscription faithfully represents official Damascene

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would agree with the unique nature of this text, its rich mythological background, and its professional layout, all of which bear the mark of an existing scribal tradition. Conversely, the total absence of traces of state-like structures in the archaeological and historical record during the period in question, which could have produced a scribal school or a chancellery, would also argue against a local literary language in Gilead.256 In short, the hypothesis of a natural dialect with an organic mixture of Aramaic and Canaanite features as the linguistic basis of the Deir ʿAllā inscription, while basically possible, seems less likely than a specific historical scenario that prompted the transformation (albeit inconsistently) of a unique piece of traditional literature from Canaanite into Aramaic. Its style would thus resemble the heavily Latinized prose of writers like Boccaccio or perhaps even the author of the fifteenth-century Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, who invented an entirely new Latin-Italian mixed code. Such an explanation, however, presupposes a fair degree of bilingualism at least in the learned circles that may have created the Deir ʿAllā text as it has survived. The change in political authority, from Israelite to Damascene rule, would then also have affected the scribal milieu in which such religious literature originated. This, in turn, would furnish an example of Aramaic-Canaanite interaction and bilingualism among a group that otherwise remained largely invisible in ninth- and eighthcentury Syria-Palestine, that is, scholars and religious authorities.257 The Bukān Inscription and the Cultural Prestige of Central Syrian Aramaic The previous two Sections discussed the use of Central Syrian Aramaic outside Syria proper for asserting the authority of the king of Damascus in conquered

2.3.3



Aramaic: such a view would cocoon the dialect of Damascus from the rest of Central Syrian, which is otherwise very homogeneous; it could not explain why no traces of this particular verbal syntax are found in later Aramaic, despite the importance of Damascene Aramaic and the survival of other Western hallmarks; and, though less importantly, it leaves the question unanswered why exactly the representational idiom of a powerful Aramaic state should feature a number of Canaanite syntactic and lexical traits. It is thus more feasible to assume that the official written language of Damascus basically resembled the rest of Central Syrian Aramaic and that the Deir ʿAllā text, because of its special nature, reflects a Canaanized form of this Aramaic variety. 256 Rightly emphasized by Blum 2008: 597 (and often overlooked in the previous discussion). 257 From a sociolinguistic point of view, such a milieu would be more likely to produce an Aramaic text that is interspersed with Canaanisms than a scholastic context geared towards the training of administrators for the Damascene government (so Blum 2013: 476), even though it remains unclear if such a distinction is valid for the ninth and eighth centuries b.c.e.

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territories, as demonstrated by the victory stele from Tell Dan, and its subsequent impact on traditional religious literature in newly-Aramaicized regions, such as the Deir ʿAllā plaster text. A third facet now appears from an Aramaic inscription on a stone stele discovered in 1985 at Bukān in Western Azerbaijan (kai 320).258 Only the last thirteen lines with conventional curse formulae have been preserved, but the similarity of the letter forms with the Sfire inscriptions and, especially, an instance of the Western Aramaic direct object marker ʾyt (line 1) argue for an association of this text with Central Syrian Aramaic. As the inscription is usually dated around 700 b.c.e., it would belong to the later Old Aramaic period in purely chronological terms, yet its typological proximity to Central Syrian, which otherwise began to disintegrate in NeoAssyrian times, stresses its links with early Old Aramaic. This is supported by the wording of the curse formulae that has striking parallels in the Sfire stelae and in the Tell Fekheriye inscription: the knowledge of Aramaic orthography and grammar did not spread in isolation but together with certain patterns and traditional expressions that apparently also featured in scribal curricula. Conversely, a possible inconsistency in the spelling of the etymological interdentals can be attributed to changes in pronunciation that may already have been underway for some time but were eclipsed by conservative orthography.259 It does not disprove a close linguistic affiliation with Central Syrian Aramaic but, on the contrary, agrees with occasional phonetic spellings as they also crop up in the Sfire inscriptions (see Section 2.2.2). Bukān, however, did not belong to the immediate sphere of influence of Damascus; it was apparently ruled by a non-Semitic Mannaean dynasty that maintained closer cultural links with Urartu than with Syria-Palestine. Such links also emerge from the reference to the local chief deity Ḥaldi (lines 5 and 12) besides the Syrian weather god Hadad (lines 11 and 12), whereas the curious violation of usual Aramaic gender concord (masculine instead of expected feminine jussive forms in line 7) could reveal the use of Aramaic by speakers of 258 Lemaire 1998; Sokoloff 1999. See also Fales 2011a: 565 for further bibliography on the possible historical background. A new English translation can be found in Hallo (ed.) 2003: III, 219 (edited by K.L. Younger). 259 See the variation between traditional š for */θ/ in šwrh /θawrā/ ‘cow’ (line 5) and t for what seems to be the same etymological sound in tnn (as in later Aramaic) */θanān/ ‘smoke’ (line 8), then presumably already pronounced /tanān/ (Beyer 2004: 51; Gzella 2014a: 80–81). The hypothesis of an etymological */θ/ in */θanān/ is based on a possible relation with Arabic ʿaθn (Brockelmann 21928: 828; so, too, in Sokoloff’s English edition, 1656) and may not be entirely certain. The graphemes z for */ð/ (as in the relative marker zy) and q for */ṣ́/ (as in ʾrqʾ ‘the earth’) conform to the usual situation in Old Aramaic.

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another language that did not have a similar gender system.260 Consequently, it has been suggested that this stele was produced in the context of international relations between a local state and a Syrian principality.261 The cultural prestige of Central Syrian Aramaic may thus have outlived the political power of the Aramaean city-states in Syria, so that it could still be employed as an official diplomatic language by a ruling elite in the Eastern periphery. 2.4

Aramaic-Canaanite Multilingualism in Syria-Palestine

Aramaic-speaking Syria clearly did not remain isolated from its Canaanite neighbours in the west and in the south. Leaving aside the military campaigns of Damascus that brought Aramaic to Dan in Galilee and to Gilead in Transjordan and may have caused some interaction with local representational and literary traditions (see Sections  2.3.1 and 2.3.2), continuous economic as well as cultural contacts already in the ninth century can be envisaged with a high degree of plausibility based on scattered textual and material remains. Their existence helps create a backdrop against which faint traces of multilingualism in the area emerge more clearly and appear less ambiguous than when studied in isolation. Such a backdrop, however preliminary and conjectural, can partly compensate for the lack of direct evidence for polyglot scribes, for instance multilingual word-lists similar to those that have been discovered at Ugarit in Late-Bronze-Age Syria. It also provides a framework that can more adequately account for various instances of structural convergence in the linguistic systems of Aramaic and Canaanite, in particular the rise of definiteness and object marking262: the replication of grammatical patterns by means of different morphological matter (like distinct lexical items serving as

260 Cf. Gzella 2014a: 72 n. 4. As is well documented by modern studies on language acquisition, speakers of languages without a gender system are especially likely to make mistakes in nominal agreement when using a language that marks gender distinctions (for recent bibliography, see, e.g., Montrul 22013: 174). For similar cases in the Achaemenid Official Aramaic inscriptions from Asia Minor, see Section 4.3.4. 261 Fales 2003. 262 See Gzella 2011e: 5–7; 2013b; 2013e; and Section 1.2.1 of the present work. Earlier scholarship contains occasional though vague references to alleged “Canaanisms” in Old Aramaic (so still del Río Sánchez 2006: 177, with further bibliography, but cf. already the brief evaluation in Degen 1969: 2–3), yet, contrary to the common structural developments in firstmillennium Northwest Semitic discussed here, these have in general not been defined precisely.

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definite articles or object markers) generally presupposes multilingual speakers, because it facilitates communication, while it also contributes to language maintenance due to the preservation of distinct surface forms. This would only be expected with competing regional prestige idioms. General considerations along such lines derive further support from bits and pieces of actual historical evidence for contact. 2.4.1 Phoenician and Aramaic Although the social, cultural, and institutional underpinnings of PhoenicianAramaic language contact cannot be reconstructed, these languages manifestly crossed political boundaries. The alphabet, the most important legacy of the Canaanites, was presumably taken over prior to an advanced degree of state-formation of the Aramaean kingdoms and says little about relations from the ninth century on. Evidence from the official sphere during the period in question is lacking, but this does not come as a surprise: the Phoenicians were Seeschäumer and not Landtreter (in Carl Schmitt’s dichotomy),263 they focused on the Western Mediterranean and showed little ambition in competing with the Aramaeans for power in Syria. However, the correct use of a standardized and de-regionalized form of Phoenician for a fairly long royal monumental inscription in Samʾal in the north-western periphery of the region during the latter half of the ninth century (kai 24) is indicative of knowledge of this prestigious idiom at least among the ruling elite and its clerks. Since the letters were executed in raised relief according to local Luwian custom, it is unlikely that the artefact has been commissioned in Phoenicia, even if Phoenician scribes may have resided at the Samʾalian court. A few Canaanite lexical items in the by and large more Aramaic-like local language that appeared in two later royal inscriptions (kai 214 and 215), as has been seen, could thus be explained as contact-induced on the assumption of some degree of multilingualism. Yet this is by no means certain for the entire period: alternatively, such Canaanisms may soon have been fully incorporated into the native vocabulary also of monolingual speakers, and entirely different models such as a peripheral native dialect that preserved common Canaanite and Aramaic features before their split into two branches cannot be ruled out either. Whatever stance one takes on the history and classification of Samʾalian, the  elites in Central Syria, too, seem to have been at least in some contact with  Phoenician culture. Evidence is scarce and points to local, sporadic, 263 Schmitt 31981.

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encounters at best,264 but their existence can still be demonstrated in the religious sphere. This emerges from the dedication of an inscription near Aleppo by king Bar-Hadad to the Phoenician god Melqart, written around 800 b.c.e. (kai 201), and from the roughly contemporaneous reference of his peer, king Zakkur of Hamath, to the support he enjoyed from the Lord of Heavens, also originally a well-known Phoenician deity. It is quite attractive to suppose that their worship may have entered Central Syria via established trade routes.265 A possibly Aramaic ninth-century cylinder impression reading ‘seal of Baraq servant of ʿAttarshamayn’ from Byblos266 may, with all due caution, support the idea of a mutual exchange. Such economic and cultural points of contact, even if they were not institutionalized, can easily lead to a certain degree of linguistic interference outside the domain of standardized official representation that governs the evidence for ninth- to eighth-century Aramaic and Phoenician; especially traders and craftsmen would presumably have communicated in more than one vernacular and thus have acted as intermediaries of linguistic interaction that otherwise remains invisible in the epigraphic record. 2.4.2 Aramaic and Hebrew Evidence from Palestine for early contacts with Aramaic is different from the Phoenician material both in size and in nature, though it is no less difficult to evaluate. A more detailed case study can illustrate a number of methodological problems with a wider bearing on the dialect landscape of Syria-Palestine and the composition of the Bible. Several passing references to encounters in biblical history-writing especially of the Northern Kingdom with the Aramaean principalities of Syria and other, rural, settlements not fully integrated into tribal confederations may preserve faint memories of the situation in the ninth century, yet their accuracy is of course hard to gauge and cannot be 264 So the rather negative assessment of Peckham 2001 after a survey of the history of the Phoenician mainland cities during the first centuries of the first millennium b.c.e. 265 So Niehr 2003: 89–96, and even Peckham 2001: 31, who otherwise does not find many traces of contact between the Phoenicians and the Aramaeans, detects influences of Phoenician religious practice in this inscription. Cf. also Fales 2011a: 560. 266 Seyrig 1955: 42–43, who classifies the seal as Phoenician on grounds of the letter forms. Beyer 1984: 26 n. 1, by contrast, subsumes it under Aramaic. This could be supported by the final /-n/ in the divine name ʿtršmn ʿAttarshamayn ‘ʿAttar of the Heavens’, since šmn agrees with the Aramaic form of the word “heavens,” whereas Phoenician would have šmm (cf. kai 15 and 27:13; further references in Hoftijzer – Jongeling 1995: 1160–1162). Since the name of a particular celestial deity says little about the language, or languages, used by one of its worshippers, and the rest of the text (ḥtm brq ʿbd ʿtršmn) could be either Aramaic or Canaanite, the matter remains inconclusive.

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corroborated by independent evidence.267 At least the Tell Dan inscription presumably relates to the war against Damascus around 845 b.c.e. (see above, Section 2.3.1); the existence of Aramaean warehouses in Samaria (1 Kings 20:34) or Ben-Hadad’s occupation of Galilean territory (1 Kings 15:20), by contrast, cannot be verified, let alone vague allusions to David’s connections with and Solomon’s conquests in Syria (2 Samuel 3:3; 2 Chronicles 8:3–4).268 The search for Aramaisms in Hebrew is a long-standing tradition,269 but the most extensive source, the Hebrew Bible, has grown in the course of a thousand years, was transmitted by generations of scribes, and exhibits much chronological, dialectal, and stylistic variation. As a consequence, the dating of specific biblical passages is often controversial and based on tentative reconstructions of the political, social, or religious conditions in which they may have been composed or redacted. So far, reasonably firm ground has only been established for the post-exilic biblical material like Chronicles, Nehemiah, or the Hebrew parts of Daniel, for which a later date can be demonstrated with the help of both literary and linguistic ­arguments.270 Indeed, these books contain a fair number of indisputable Aramaisms, but they reflect, by and large, the spread of Aramaic in the exilic and post-exilic period under the influence of Achaemenid administration and major demographic changes and are not immediately relevant for the situation in the ninth to the seventh centuries.271 Yet even if pre-exilic material can be identified with some confidence in the biblical corpus, one cannot simply attribute an isolated word or form to Aramaic with any degree of certainty based on a single linguistic hallmark, because the true extent of dialect diversity in Iron-Age Syria-Palestine remains unknown. There may have been many more spoken or written languages, including earlier varieties of Hebrew, that shared some characteristics with Aramaic without actually being Aramaic. As has been seen in the case of the Deir ʿAllā plaster inscription, only a cluster of telling features and their distribution can advance the discussion, but only few, if any, individual non-standard 267 Cf. Berlejung 2014: 342–345 for a summary of the few bits and pieces of information. 268 See Lemaire 1988: 10–11, with older bibliography. The underlying historical assumptions are now much more controversial than twenty-five years ago, when belief in a United Monarchy under David and Solomon was more widespread among historians of Ancient Israel. 269 See the recent summaries by Hornkohl 2013 and Stadel 2013a. 270 Hurvitz 2013. 271 Cf. Hurvitz 2003, who nonetheless argues that some Aramaisms may have entered Hebrew already during the Iron Age. They will be investigated more thoroughly here.

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words or forms in the Hebrew Bible exhibit more than one characteristic trait. The evaluation of such material for assessing the true amount of language contact is wrought with further difficulties, since traditions, songs, or individual phrases that became part of the biblical text may have circulated widely and are therefore not indicative of active multilingualism.272 It is also possible that untypical forms were artificial creations in order to convey a particular couleur locale.273 Despite these complications, the quest for possible early Aramaisms remains a worthwhile one: it may offer glimpses into Aramaic varieties, perhaps even genuine vernaculars, other than the standardized chancellery language of Central Syria. With the above-mentioned caveats in mind, the corpus of Early Hebrew Poetry (mostly defined as consisting of Genesis 49; Exodus 15; the Balaam oracles in Numbers 22–24; Deuteronomy 32 and 33; Judges 5; 1 Samuel 2; 2 Samuel 1; 2 Samuel 22 = Psalm 18; 2 Samuel 23; Psalm 68; Habakkuk 3) would appear as the least problematic source for pre-exilic Aramaisms in Hebrew.274 The remarkably high degree of non-standard grammatical forms and lexemes visà-vis Classical Hebrew contained in these compositions, as well as their often sharp demarcation from the prose narratives in which they have been incorporated, distinguish them more clearly from the rest than individual words in the Pentateuchal or the historical narratives. Recurrent motives and expressions add to the impression of a sub-corpus in its own right.275 Despite later redactions, then, the corpus of Early Hebrew Poetry is particularly likely to have preserved older material. It should be added that deviations from Classical Hebrew Prose, which is based on the Hebrew variety used for official and literary purposes in Judah, may be either pre- or post-classical: they may have been caused not only by an increasing influence of Aramaic, but also by the possible impact of older dialects of Hebrew that did not participate in the linguistic innovations of Classical Prose and thus bore a greater typological resemblance to Aramaic, but were previously eclipsed by the Judaean standard language. The “archaic” 272 Not everybody who uses a proverbial expression like mens sana in corpore sano necessarily has a working command of Latin, as the notoriously incorrect use of Latin terminology among Dutch academic administrators unmistakably demonstrates (e.g., the plural unica for the singular, as if it were a feminine, or ius promovendus instead of the correct ius promovendi). 273 A collection of possible examples from the Pentateuch can be found in Rendsburg 2006. 274 See the summary by Mandell 2013. 275 Cf., e.g., Judges 5:16–17 and Genesis 49:13–14; Judges 5:22 and Genesis 49:17; Judges 5:4–5 and Psalm 68:8–9.

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character of several of these poems has thus been disputed, but a careful evaluation of all the relevant arguments may facilitate a decision. In the case of Deborah’s Song in Judges 5, for instance, traditionally thought to be among the oldest strata of the Hebrew Bible, the discussion is particularly extensive, but the hypothesis of an archaic core (that may subsequently have been expanded or otherwise modified)276 can, as a whole, explain all the relevant linguistic peculiarities much more successfully and more comprehensively than postexilic Aramaic influence.277 Features that agree with Aramaic are of course only a necessary, not a sufficient condition: the situation in Aramaic could reflect an earlier developmental stage that may have been preserved independently in later languages (shared retention), while only a linguistic novelty common to all known Aramaic varieties (shared innovation) can carry the burden of proof. Grammatical elements that belong to the core of the language are obviously much more suitable than lexical items that can be borrowed easily or simply derive from a common stock.278 The ending /-īn/ of the unbound masculine plural in middīn “carpets” (Judges 5:10) is an instance of such a possible retention. It manifestly deviates from the usual Classical Hebrew form /-īm/ but agrees with all older varieties of Aramaic for which evidence is available. In addition, plurals in /-īn/ appear increasingly in Late Biblical Hebrew, Hebrew from the Dead Sea region, and Rabbinic Hebrew, that is, they occur in proportion with other, independent, traces of Aramaic influence. However, an interchange between the sounds /m/ and /n/ is phonetically easy to explain and also attested elsewhere in Semitic. More importantly, the ending /-īn/ corresponds to the original unbound masculine plural form in Semitic and has been preserved not only in Aramaic (and, for that matter, in Arabic), but also in Moabite, which is otherwise extremely close to its Canaanite sister-idiom Hebrew.279 Since the lexeme middīn as such does not constitute an Aramaic

276 So, from the point of view of redactional criticism, Levin 2003, but with little reference to the historical evolution of the Hebrew language. 277 See Rendsburg 2003: 122–127 and Knauf 2005, with constant reference to alternative proposals. 278 On the latter, see already Driver 1953: 36–38. Only a less fine-grained taxonomy would attribute indiscriminately to Aramaic everything that deviates from Hebrew (as in Young 1993: 60–63, whereas no specifically Aramaic features appear in his trait list of Early Hebrew Poetry on pages 120–130). Cf. also Campbell – Poser 2008: 176–194 on the importance of grammatical evidence for establishing relatedness. 279 Gzella 2011a: 439; Beyer 2011: 117.

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isogloss either,280 the word is indeed a possible early Aramaism but could just as well derive from another Syro-Palestinian dialect. The same applies to other rare grammatical by-forms in Early Hebrew Poetry: the third-person feminine singular “perfect” afformative /-at/ in ʾāzlaṯ ‘she departed’ (Deuteronomy 32:36) corresponds to the older West Semitic form that has been preserved in Aramaic and, again, in Moabite, whereas it shifted to /-ā/ in Hebrew (excepting suffixed verbs).281 Again, this can be due to influence from Aramaic, from another Canaanite language, or from an earlier developmental stage of Hebrew. The same is also true for the second person of the feminine singular in /-ti/ as in qamtī ‘you rose’ (Judges 5:7) and perhaps for an archaic vestige of a proper third-person feminine plural form in /-ā/ as in ṣāʿăḏā ‘they ascended’ (Genesis 49:22, the subject being a feminine plural noun) instead of the common masculine and feminine ending /-ū/ in Hebrew. All these forms could reflect the influence of Aramaic or another language variety.282 In contradistinction to such ambiguous instances of linguistic variation, at least one form in the corpus of Early Hebrew Poetry is of potentially great significance for exploring the possibility of an Aramaic component in the earliest biblical texts: the third-person feminine singular “perfect” māḥăqā ‘she struck’ (Judges 5:26) does not contain a shared retention like the plural ending /-īn/ or the older feminine “perfect” afformatives, but reflects the regular workings of a sound law that is currently only known from Aramaic, and hence must count as a shared innovation. A word that exhibits a deviation from otherwise systematic correspondences of etymological sounds in the language in which it occurs, but agrees with such systematic correspondences in a cognate language, is a very likely candidate for a loan, and this seems to be the case here.283 For the parallel with the usual Hebrew form māḥăṣā in the same verse suggests that both verbs ultimately derive from the common Semitic root *mḫṣ́ “to

280 Cf. Hebrew maḏ ‘garment’ (only attested with suffixes and in the plural) and Ugaritic md, hence this noun is common to all three branches of Northwest Semitic. 281 See Gzella 2011a: 442; Beyer 2011: 119. 282 Cf. Gzella 2011a: 442 for the historical-linguistic background of these morphemes. 283 The case of the root tnī ‘to repreat, praise’ in Judges 5:11 as opposed to usual Hebrew šnī, from earlier *θnī, could furnish another example but is more difficult to evaluate. In Old Aramaic, original */θ/ would have been preserved but spelled š (as in Central Syrian) or s (as in Tell Fekheriye). The more modern spelling with t, following the shift of /θ/ to /t/ in Aramaic, may occur in the Bukān inscription at the earliest (tnn ‘smoke’ in kai 320:8, see Section 2.3.3 above), hence it remains unclear how the Old Aramaic phoneme /θ/ would appear in Hebrew in a period when the interdentals were still pronounced.

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strike.” The etymological velar or uvular sound */ṣ́/, which occurs as the third radical here, has developed differently in Hebrew, where it shifted to /ṣ/, and Aramaic, where it appears as a phoneme with unclear pronunciation but which is consistently written with q in the early stages of the language.284 While the merger with /ṣ/, as in Hebrew, was common to the other Northwest Semitic languages (Canaanite and Ugaritic),285 a reflex that was spelled with q  is not attested outside Aramaic, whereas it appears consistently in all known varieties of Old Aramaic, including the Aramaic material of the Deir ʿAllā-inscription. It is a particularly intriguing fact, however, that the early Aramaic reflex of the specific root *mḫṣ́ ‘to strike’ does not appear as mḥq in the attested languages, as would be expected according to the sound law just outlined, but as mḥʾ, with a glottal stop as its third radical (which later shifted to mḥī following the loss of syllable-final glottal stops and, in sixth-century b.c.e. Aramaic at the latest, the merger of verbs originally ending in /-ʾ/ with those originally ending in a long vowel),286 as becomes clear from, e.g., mḥʾw ‘they struck’ in the Central Syrian Zakkur inscription (kai 202 A: 15–16), similarly half a century later in Sfire (kai 222 A: 42). The form mḥʾ has been explained as the result of an exceptional development in this particular verb due to secondary dissimilation after the pharyngeal fricative /ḥ/.287 If this is true, the shift of expected *mḥq to mḥʾ as already attested in Central Syrian Aramaic may have been a feature of the official language of that area or its underlying dialect, while other regional vernaculars would have preserved the expected root mḥq according to an otherwise regular Aramaic sound law. The form māḥăqā in Judges 5:26 would then reflect a dialectal variant, possibly from an older Aramaic vernacular and perhaps conserved in poetic diction,288 which was eclipsed by the Aramaic standard idioms of Syria and subsequently disappeared from the

284 See Gzella 2014a: 79–80 and the discussion in Chapter 1. As A.M. Al-Jallad points out to me, one could perhaps also associate the verb with the Arabic root mḥq ‘to be unfortunate’, ‘to diminish’, probably metaphorically extended from an original meaning ‘to beat’. However, this root may rather be a cognate of Aramaic mḥq ‘to extinguish’, ‘to eradicate’. 285 Cf. Gzella 2011a: 433. 286 The evidence has been collected by Beyer 1984: 104–106. 287 See Gzella 2013g: 638–639 (with further bibliography, including dissenting voices); cf. Kutscher 1971: 353; Beyer 1984: 621, s.v. 288 The linguistic and social status of the Hebrew variety underlying Early Poetry merits a closer study; it may be the case that it served as an oral poetic language into which forms from different regional dialects have been absorbed, similar to the Greek of the Homeric Poems.

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written record. In that case, the normal Hebrew form māḥăṣā may result from an explanatory gloss of a word that was equally unusual in standard Hebrew, Central Syrian Aramaic, and later Aramaic languages; the same gloss would then have been incorporated into the main text in the process of subsequent copying and editing, a phenomenon that happens with a certain regularity in the course of manuscript transmission in many different cultures. While one cannot exclude the existence of yet another, unknown, Canaanite dialect in which originally */ṣ́/ was written with q and not with ṣ, or even an artificial though not entirely successful attempt to imitate an Aramaic feature, māḥăqā in Judges 5:26 remains one of the more likely Aramaisms in pre-exilic Hebrew. In addition, it possibly preserves a reflex of a spoken Aramaic variety that has otherwise disappeared but that would be somewhat difficult to fake.289 Exactly this latter observation would also argue against a post-exilic Aramaism, since it is the dissimilated variant mḥʾ that underlies the form of this verb as mḥī (due to the Aramaic merger of roots with a final glottal stop with vocalic verbs from ca. 500 b.c.e. onwards, see above) in all later varieties of Aramaic. The occurrence of an original form like mḥq instead of mḥʾ would also be more plausible in a formative but badly-documented period like the ninth century, when the Syro-Palestinian languages were still in the process of taking on their later shapes. Consequently, a post-exilic Aramaism would supposedly not appear as māḥăqā but as *māḥăʾā. Despite all redactional-critical sophistication, then, a late date of Judges 5 as a whole seems difficult to square with some hard linguistic facts. Attention to details like these, and the methodological considerations applied here, can further fine-tune the current discussion about dating biblical texts in general. So what is the result of this philological tour de force? The evidence for early contacts between Hebrew and Aramaic is thus rather thin, yet it permits the conclusion that Aramaic could well have been present already in ninth- and eighth-century Palestine: certainly in the shape of the Central Syrian koiné as a result of the growing importance of the kingdom of Damascus and its visible impact on written material in Galilee (the Tell Dan inscription) and Transjordan (the Deir ʿAllā plaster text), but also below the level of administration and literature, in the form of vernaculars that did not reach the surface of the epigraphic record but may have spread below the radar of the modern historian. Looking for such features under the unifying garb of the Masoretic Text is by no means a futile exercise. 289 In order to produce this etymologically expected form despite the irregular shape of the corresponding word in attested Aramaic, an author would have to apply principles of Comparative Semitics.

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2.5 Conclusion A survey of the evidence for Aramaic from the ninth and eighth centuries b.c.e., the early Old Aramaic period, furnishes insights into the dynamic language situation of Iron-Age Syria-Palestine. Diverse Aramaean tribes without a common material culture settled throughout Syria, established local principalities in the region and promoted their vernaculars to official written languages by adopting and amending the Phoenician alphabetic script and spelling conventions. The texts largely seem to have served formal and representational purposes, being a display of local cultural self-awareness and political authority of newly-emerging ruling dynasties, whereas material in Aramaic unambiguously relating to economy and the private domain is still lacking. Among the distinct regional varieties employed for public epigraphy with their differences in dialect and scribal tradition, those used at Tell Fekheriye, which is clearly Aramaic, and Samʾal, which has at least a strong Aramaic layer although its classification remains controversial, eventually yielded to the Central Syrian form of Aramaic that was quickly developing into a regional koiné used throughout the chancelleries of Syria. Following the influence and presumably also the cultural prestige of the kingdom of Damascus, Aramaic began to spread outside its old Syrian heartland from the mid-ninth century onwards: to Galilee and Transjordan in the south, but, by around 700 b.c.e. at the latest, also to far-away West Iran. In addition to what seems to have been the Damascene chancellery idiom, though largely invisible from the epigraphic record, Aramaic vernaculars will also have found their way to distinct areas of the Near East along the axes of cultural and economic contact. This process will have resulted in at least a certain degree of multilingualism in different parts of society; traces can still be observed in variation in literary texts including the Deir ʿAllā plaster inscription, which can be related with some confidence to a Canaanite original, and, in all likelihood, a few early passages of the Hebrew Bible. They provide snapshots of the fluid situation during the ninth century b.c.e., when written traditions of Aramaic began to emerge. By way of a combination of the conscious language policy of ruling dynasties and an uncontrolled spread together with highly mobile speakers, Aramaic quickly evolved from a cluster of regional varieties to an international language. A limited degree of literacy implies that scribal traditions dominate the epigraphic record, but an increasing use as a vernacular in the private domain should be considered an important factor for its success, too, because otherwise the diversity of the seventh- and sixth-century material would be hard to explain. With the expansion of the Neo-Assyrian empire to the West, the roads

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into its Mesopotamian heartland will have opened up for craftsmen and builders from Syria (see also Section  3.1). Political and cultural contacts with the Assyrians can already be observed in the mid-ninth century inscription from Tell Fekheriye and subsequently surface in the later eighth-century material from Samʾal. The wide spread of Aramaic in the subsequent period thus had its onset early in the ninth and eighth centuries, even if this is but indirectly visible in the surviving material.

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-eighthcentury 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 indissolubly 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 disintegrated 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 byforms, 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 innovations 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 © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004285101_004

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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 wellknown 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 successors 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 internal classification of Aramaic. In order to account for the important linguistic differences between both phases, and to avoid terminological confusion caused by the mismatch between the original meaning of Reichsaramäisch and the contemporary use of its English derivative “Imperial Aramaic,” the Persian chancellery 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 introductory 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 reasoning rests on socio-cultural rather than on linguistic grounds.

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archives published or at least preliminarily described in the past few years now have to be added, even if the reading is still debated in a number of cases; however, the linguistic information contained in them is scanty, and especially the sixth century remains badly documented so far. Hug 1993 furnishes a convenient collection with translation of the texts known until 1992 (though without the Aḥiqar Proverbs), a concise but reliable full descriptive grammar, which can be supplemented by the more up-to-date comparative outline in Folmer 2011, and a complete glossary. A representative selection of inscriptions has also been included in Donner – Röllig 3–51971– 2002 (kai 225–227, 233–236, and, without translation or commentary, 313–317) and other collections with a similar outlook. New discoveries, such as the material from the Assyrian archives, have to be studied in the respective official editions,292 often published together with other results of archaeological excavations, but the mere texts (except for the most recent findings) together with essential bibliography are also available in Schwiderski 2004. Hoftijzer – Jongeling 1995 and Schwiderski 2008 are equally useful as a reference dictionary and concordance respectively for the late Old Aramaic period as they are for the preceding stage; some of the vocabulary, again, features in Beyer 1984: 503–728 and 2004: 341–506. Notwithstanding its small amount, the horizontal spread of the material across the entire Near East no less than the vertical one across different public and private uses reflects the high prominence of Aramaic in various layers of imperial bureaucracy and daily life. The study of these texts is closely linked with the currently very dynamic investigation of Neo-Assyrian as well as NeoBabylonian society and economy in a broader context of Ancient Near Eastern Studies, hence several general sociolinguistic conclusions presented here are but preliminary. Given the imperial framework that has replaced the local autonomy of the earlier individual Aramaic-speaking city-states, the discussion of the material will be structured essentially by text genre and functional domain, with certain chronological and geographical distinctions in each Section. 3.1

Aramaic as an International Language

As has been outlined in Chapter 2, official representation dominates the Aramaic epigraphic record until about the end of the eighth century b.c.e. 292 See Beyer 2004: 16; Lemaire 2008: 77–80 (to which now add the publication of the tablets in the Royal Museum of Art and History in Brussels by Lipiński 2010). The bibliographical indications there also act as a supplement to the corpus included in Hug 1993.

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The quick appearance of formalized patterns (linguistic variation notwithstanding) for diverse administrative and communicative purposes after that date shows that other genres with their respective conventions, such as legal formulae or fixed epistolary prescripts, had developed in the meantime and spread throughout the speech area. In addition to its growing importance in bureaucratic contexts, writing in Aramaic was increasingly adopted by individuals for personal inscriptions and private letters. The production of Aramaic literature also began, albeit apparently still on a modest scale. Since most of the surviving material is rooted in scribal contexts or at least presupposes some form of literacy, the true extent of Aramaic as a vernacular is hard to assess. However, the reflexes of certain linguistic developments such as phonetic changes in the written material reveal its ongoing evolution as a spoken language, and the use of Aramaic among highly mobile groups with restricted literacy such as nomads and craftsmen will significantly have contributed to its success.293 Indirect evidence for the latter is available already in the form of individual ninth- or eighth-century alphabetic letter signs, some of which betray distinctive Aramaic features. These were presumably used by ivory carvers and bricklayers who worked for the Assyrian palaces at Nimrud in order to highlight the correct sequence in which the carvings had to be fitted in the wooden furniture by the cabinet makers, or polychrome glazed bricks into panels.294 Later administrative documents from Sargon’s time also list Aramaean contingents in the Assyrian army.295 Relatively open borders between the vassal states of the Assyrian empire promoted trade and other forms of contact, as did deportations or voluntary migrations of groups of people from different social strata across the imperial territory and their integration into new social contexts.296 As a consequence, a growing number of West Semitic personal names is attested in Mesopotamia. Although the exact reasons underlying the rising popularity of Aramaic in the Near East remain a matter of debate, the nature of the evidence suggests that several factors were involved. Linguistic prestige, at any rate, seems to have been an important driving force in the early period: it can explain not only why an early koiné emerged in Central Syria during the ninth century, but  also why it was later adopted for representational purposes even in 293 See now Fales 2011b: 93–94 on mobile Aramaean groups in Southern Mesopotamia unter late Assyrian rule. 294 Millard 2009: 210–211. 295 Fales 2007b: 143; Streck 2014: 318. 296 Cf. Nissinen 2014: 274–276 and the prosopographical sample on pages 282–295.

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principalities outside Semitic-speaking territories such as Bukān (Section 2.3.3; as the Bukān inscription still represents Central Syrian Aramaic, it is discussed together with the rest of the early Old Aramaic material in the preceding Chapter). Yet the use of Aramaic was apparently not confined to reflecting the cultural self-awareness and political loyalties of the upper class. It is, in fact, quite likely that its subsequent role in Neo-Assyrian administration partly continued bureaucratic practices which the Mesopotamian conquerors found in the Syrian city-states when they incorporated them into the empire. Since no datable texts in Aramaic relating to economy and bookkeeping have so far been discovered in ninth- and eighth-century Syria, perhaps due to the use of perishable writing materials, this is at present impossible to prove, but the appearance of similar forms and genres underlying such documents in the seventh and sixth centuries could imply that they have common roots and were not necessarily all patterned exactly after Assyrian models. Assyrian administrative staff trained in the heartland, but residing in the provinces that were not formerly Aramaic-speaking, may have acted as disseminators.297 Conducting the provincial administration of Syria in Aramaic would also have presupposed a less extensive formal training at the bureaucratic base-level than educating all scribes, including lower-ranking clerks, in Mesopotamian cuneiform, and it could interact more easily with the other alphabetic scribal traditions of Palestine. Consequently, Akkadian remained confined to Assyrian domestic administration and legal deeds but did not gain much ground outside the heartland of the empire and the Syro-Mesopotamian border zone. A light and versatile grammatical system such as the Aramaic one would further recommend its employ as a contact idiom for facilitating communication between speakers of different tongues, especially with highly mobile groups such as itinerant workers. Slender morphology is obviously not a necessary condition for a world language, as Greek, Latin, Arabic, or Russian demonstrate, but it could facilitate the spread of a language without an empire necessarily enforcing it. Lastly, at least limited literacy in alphabetic writing, with which Aramaic was intrinsically connected (due to the firm links between languages and scripts that were bolstered by strong cultural conventions), would have been more easily accessible to people without a formal scribal training, such as traders and craftsmen, than Mesopotamian cuneiform. Aramaic was thus attractive because of its prestige, its efficiency, and its accessibility. 297 See Radner 2011: 393–394 for the role of Assyrian scribes dispatched from Mesopotamia in provincial administration.

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The Textual Corpus of Aramaic in the Neo-Assyrian and the Neo-Babylonian Periods The nature of the corpus mirrors the expansion of Aramaic throughout the Near East, across different layers of society and for diverse communicative situations. This process seems to have been in full swing when Aramaic was adopted for official administration in the Neo-Assyrian empire; it is thus characterized by both an uncontrolled spread and the policy of imperial bureaucracy that reinforced it. Syria-Palestine has produced two funerary inscriptions for local priests from Nerab in North Syria, the old homeland of Aramaic (kai 225–226, ca. 700 b.c.e.),298 a short dated note confirming the transaction of a certain amount of silver as debt or pawn from Sfire (kai 227, 571/570 b.c.e.),299 a diplomatic letter on papyrus found at Saqqāra but presumably dispatched from Ekron in Palestine (kai 266 = tad A1.1; ca. 604 or 603 b.c.e.),300 two very fragmentary debt notes from Tell es-Saʿidiyeh in Eastern Jordan (difficult to date but mostly assigned to ca. 700 b.c.e. or the sixth century on grounds of palaeography),301 and perhaps an edict against tax evasion or unlawful immigration of unclear provenance (kai 317; seventh century b.c.e.).302 The wisdom sayings of Aḥiqar that have been preserved, in a redacted form, in a papyrus from Achaemenid Elephantine are occasionally also thought to have originated in Southern Syria or, alternatively, North-Western Mesopotamia, some time between 750 and 650 b.c.e., but this is difficult to verify (see Section 3.4 below). With some two-hundred known administrative tablets and fragments in Aramaic as well as a number of mostly very short Aramaic labels on cuneiform tablets, Mesopotamia has yielded the lion’s share of the available evidence. Many of these tablets and epigraphs have only been published in recent years. They can all be dated to the seventh century and mostly come from Tell Barsip and Tell Shiukh el-Fawkani at the Upper Euphrates and from Tell Sheikh Hamad, or Dūr-Katlimmu, as well as Maʾallanāte in the region around Ḥauran

3.1.1

298 Hug 1993: 13–14. A fresh English translation has been included in Hallo (ed.) 2000: II, 184– 185 (edited by P.K. McCarter). The second one has been vocalized by Beyer 2013a: 17 (together with a new German version) according to a reconstruction of seventh-century b.c.e. Aramaic pronunciation. 299 Hug 1993: 16–17. 300 Fitzmyer 1965; Hug 1993: 15–16. 301 Pritchard 1985: 86–88 (edited by Greenfield and Naveh); Hug 1993: 14. 302 Caquot 1971; Lipiński 1975: 77–82; Hug 1993: 14–15 (against tax evasion); Kottsieper 2000 (against receiving foreign agents, but with a somewhat speculative reconstruction of the historical context). The difference in interpretation chiefly rests on the particular reading of a debated word in line 3.

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and the Ḥabur river.303 Four debt notes from Niniveh (around 670 b.c.e.) were previously known, including the oldest dated monolingual Aramaic text from 674 b.c.e.,304 as were eight triangular debt notes about grain or silver from Assur (around 650 b.c.e.; one of them is dated to 659 b.c.e.)305 and five from Tell Ḥalaf (between 649 and 612 b.c.e.)306; further a legal text of unknown provenance and purpose (dated to 635 b.c.e.).307 The growing use of Aramaic and alphabetic writing in an administration originally based on Akkadian and Mesopotamian cuneiform also resulted in short Aramaic notes scratched upon cuneiform tablets with legal deeds in order enable people who did not read Akkadian to identify them. Such clerical notes appear on dozens of seventhcentury documents especially from Niniveh, Tell Sheikh Hamad, Maʾallanāte, and others of unknown provenance.308 The same custom continued throughout the Neo-Babylonian until the Seleucid period; most of them come from Babylon, where Aramaic is attested from the sixth century onwards, a few others from Nippur.309 An ostracon with a comparatively long political letter of 21 lines dispatched from Babylon to Assur (kai 233; ca. 650 b.c.e.)310 demonstrates the employ of Aramaic as a language of communication between officials. Ownership marks on bronze bowls from Luristan (between ca. 700 and 600 b.c.e.)311 and on vessel fragments from Niniveh (seventh century b.c.e.)312 further attest to the use of Aramaic in the private domain even in the heartland 303 Not all of them have yet appeared; especially the majority of the 135 tablets from Tell Sheikh Hamad (contrary to 61 epigraphs on Assyrian tablets) still await publication. See the overview in Lemaire 2008: 77–78 and the edition of four new triangular tablets on pages 88–89. To these, the edition of the 24 Aramaic deeds and four Aramaic epigraphs from a bilingual archive from Maʾallanāte in the Ḥauran area by Lipiński 2010 (with a thorough historical and linguistic analysis) must now be added (Fales 2013 disagrees with the interpretations of O. 3714, 3672, and 3648, but according to his proposals, too, they are administrative texts). 304 Hug 1993: 17–19. 305 Fales 1986 nos. 46–52; re-edited by Hug 1993: 21–25 including a formerly unpublished one; a selection (corresponding to Fales 1986 nos. 47, 48, and 49) also appears in kai 234–236. 306 Fales 1986 nos. 53–57; Hug 1993: 25–27. The originals were lost during World War ii. 307 Bordreuil 1973; Fales 1976; Hug 1993: 25. 308 Fales 1986; Hug 1993: 27–29; Röllig in Radner 2002; Lipiński 2010. 309 See Oelsner 2006 for an overview. 310 Hug 1993: 19–21; Fales 2010: 193–199. 311 Dupont-Sommer 1964; Degen 1969: 23 (no. 1) and Hug 1993: 17 (nos. 2 and 3); cf. Gibson 1975: 12. 312 Hug 1993: 19.

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of the Neo-Assyrian empire. Moreover, about one-hundred stamp and cylinder seals with impressions in Aramaic are known from the seventh century b.c.e.313 Other stray material from the ensuing Neo-Babylonian period survives on bricks, seals, and other small inscriptions.314 A similar mix of administrative, legal, and epistolary documents in Aramaic has been discovered in Egypt. Most of them have been written on papyrus, which has survived in the dry desert climate, and several are close in time to Achaemenid Official Aramaic, from which they nonetheless differ in some linguistic respects. The amount of evidence increases in the sixth century b.c.e.; if this is not due to chance, it may indicate that the use of Aramaic in Egypt grew somewhat later than in Mesopotamia, presumably under the influence of mercenaries from Syria and Palestine who settled there. The bureaucratic sphere underlies a list of certain amounts of money of unknown but presumably Egyptian provenance (seventh century b.c.e.)315; a list of liquid measures, to be delivered by one individual to various others, from Saqqāra (also from the seventh century)316; a contract from 515 b.c.e. and thus the oldest dated Aramaic papyrus, but its place of discovery is unknown (the Bauer-Meissner papyrus, tad B1.1)317; and three very fragmentary legal documents from Elephantine, of two of which apparently only the lists of witnesses have survived (end of the sixth century b.c.e. or slightly later).318 Documents relating to private representation and communication include a funerary inscription of a Baʿl-priest with a Phoenician name from Memphis (end of the sixth century b.c.e.)319; eight letters between individuals on everyday matters from Hermopolis, with many linguistic and orthographic peculiarities (tad A2.1–7; presumably written shortly before 500 b.c.e. but clearly in pre-Achaemenid Aramaic)320; and an ostracon with a brief ownership mark (seventh century).321 Another ostracon from Elephantine with an epistolary prescript containing a salutation formula that refers to Babylonian gods, yet without the actual letter body (Clermont-Ganneau 277; tad D7.30), has previously also 313 Cf. Millard 2009: 208. 314 The brick inscriptions have now been edited by Sass – Marzahn 2010; for the rest, see Oelsner 1987. 315 Degen 1974a; Hug 1993: 29–30. 316 Hug 1993: 30. 317 Bauer – Meissner 1936; Hug 1993: 31–32. It has been acquired from an antiquities dealer in Egypt. 318 Hug 1993: 32–34. 319 Dupont-Sommer 1956; Hug 1993: 34–35. 320 Hug 1993: 35–41, with many other bibliographical references. 321 Hug 1993: 29.

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been included in the small group of pre-Achaemenid texts from Egypt,322 but this date is uncertain and will not be adopted here. The significant amount of variation in the corpus of Aramaic from the NeoAssyrian and the Neo-Babylonian periods can be explained in chronological, geographical, and sociolinguistic terms. Texts cover the period from ca. 700 to ca. 500 b.c.e., with the Nerab inscriptions from Syria at the one end of the spectrum and the Hermopolis letters from Egypt at the other. Both also illustrate the gradual transition and thus the evolution of Aramaic: the former continue a Syrian form of Aramaic as well as a local scribal tradition, whereas the latter show how sub-standard spelling conventions and presumably the local vernacular affected written forms of Aramaic. Moreover, the material comes from a number of different places in Syria-Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. While its restricted size and the lasting impact of previous local standardization does not allow one to exactly define dialectal subgroups, certain regional traits occasionally come to the fore. Dialectal diversity will have been much greater in vernacular Aramaic, which has left but indirect traces in the written record. Finally, documents relating to the private domain, such as letters between individuals, may not necessarily be subject to a similarly conservative linguistic register as texts produced within an institutional context. Even if variation thus often cannot be assigned to one specific factor, the chronological, the geographical, and the social dimension certainly exist and could even intersect. 3.1.2 The Linguistic Profile of Seventh- and Sixth-Century Aramaic The late Old Aramaic material from the seventh and sixth centuries b.c.e. shows a number of linguistic differences as opposed to texts from the earlier period, yet it also exhibits several features of language and orthography that can already be observed in the ninth- and eighth-century corpus. This indicates a certain measure of continuity of both dialectal varieties and scribal traditions. At the same time, modifications in spelling practice mirror, with some delay, ongoing changes in pronunciation that point to a considerably extensive use of Aramaic as a spoken language in Syria, Mesopotamia, and, somewhat later, also in parts of Egypt. Variation in the corpus indicates that written Aramaic was not enforced by the Assyrian authorities as a standardized national language but that it largely spread “bottom-up” in many forms.

322 So by Hug 1993: 30, based on an earlier palaeographic dating to the first half of the sixth century. Most scholars, by contrast, subsume it under the many Achaemenid ostraca from the same place, and this would be supported by the alternative date to the first quarter of the fifth century (so tad D7.30, p. 178). See now also Lozachmeur 2006: 410–412.

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The latest texts, while typologically still belonging to the late Old Aramaic stage, reveal already some Achaemenid influence. The increasing role of Aramaic in Neo-Assyrian and later Neo-Babylonian administration thus seems to be the result of a pragmatic decision to adopt an idiom that was already widely understood in the provinces of the emerging empire. The much greater linguistic heterogeneity in the written record during this period than under Achaemenid rule could be related to a less uniform bureaucratic system that did not attempt to standardize weights and measures across the provinces to the same extent as the Persians did, and that used existing roads instead of creating new ones.323 Aramaic varieties from different regions will have been in constant contact with each other due to the mobility of their speakers as well as their role in imperial administration, thereby gradually forming a continuum of areas in which Aramaic dialects were used. As a consequence, linguistic innovations could spread more easily between them. The general profile of the language that can be deduced from the surviving material corresponds to an idiom typically used in contact situations by multilingual speakers: limited morphology with mostly internal noun patterns,324 reasonably free word order, and restricted synonymy in the lexicon. Spelling practice, however, is by and large conservative in the official registers and may thus obscure the true extent of linguistic evolution.325 Word-internal vowel letters like zwz /zūz/ ‘half-shekel’ or ʾšwr ‘Assyria’ (kai 233:11) in texts from Mesopotamia and ʾyš /ʾīš/ ‘man’ in the edict from Syria (kai 317:1) are still very rare and only became more extensive in the subsequent stages.326 As a consequence, orthography says little about the development of Aramaic in this period. More significantly, the rendering of the etymological interdentals as well as of the reflex of */ṣ́/ basically, but not totally, conforms to the situation in early Old Aramaic. Evidently, then, such conventions persisted in the provinces and governed the emerging use of Aramaic in Mesopotamian administration. 323 Cf. Bagg 2013: 127. The degree of standardization in Neo-Assyrian administration is controversial, however; for a somewhat different emphasis, see Radner 2014. It remains unclear whether the fifteen Assyrian lion-weights from Nimrud with parallel cuneiform and Aramaic inscriptions recording the royal weight standards (Fales 1995; cf. also Fales 2007b: 144–145 with further bibliography in n. 17) were employed universally (differently Fales 1995: 54). 324 Cf. Hug 1993: 61–63 as opposed to the relatively greater number of nominal patterns with pre- and suffixes in the Central Syrian variety of early Old Aramaic alone (Degen 1969: 44–50). 325 See Hug 1993: 51 for a very concise summary. 326 Presumably, they were employed in particular with non-Aramaic words or names for easier identification.

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Yet occasional phonetic spellings across the corpus suggest that the merger of the interdentals with their dental counterparts and of */ṣ́/ with /ʿ/ had already taken place, or was at least fairly advanced, in pronunciation by the seventh century b.c.e. in different regions.327 The writing of */ð/ with d instead of older z occurs a few times in forms of the roots *ʾḥð ‘to take’ (edict from Syria, kai 317:8) and *ʿðr ‘to help’ (in the name yʿdrʾl in a seal from Damascus)328 as well as in kdy ‘as long as’ (sub-standard spelling in the Hermopolis letters, tad A2.1:4 and 2.3:4, around 500 b.c.e.) and dh ‘this one’ (again in Hermopolis, tad A2.5:7; see below on h instead of ʾ in this form). This indicates that the reflex of */ð/ was already pronounced /d/ at least in Syria and Egypt, although especially high-frequency forms like the relative marker zy and the near-deictic demonstratives znh and zʾ ‘this one’ preserve the traditional writing.329 In addition, an instance of t instead of š for */θ/ seems to be attested already in the Bukān inscription (see Section 2.3.3) and clearly underlies tql ‘shekel’ in the later Bauer-Meissner papyrus from Egypt (515 b.c.e.; tad B1.1:13), so it confirms the shift to /t/ throughout the entire speech area.330 Judging from the writing nṣr ‘he preserved’ in the Adon letter composed in Syria-Palestine (kai 266:8), the use of ṣ for */θ̣/ persisted until about 600 b.c.e., and no examples of the modern spelling with ṭ, corresponding to the later pronunciation /ṭ/, seem to be attested for this period. Likewise, q for */ṣ́/ is still used in Neo-Babylonian epigraphs, but the writing ʾrʿ instead of ʾrq ‘land’ in some earlier legal documents from Mesopotamia (see Section 3.2.1) points to a pronunciation as /ʿ/ already in the mid-seventh century.331 The corresponding phonetic spelling, however, only became reasonably widespread in Achaemenid times. Its non-“emphatic” counterpart */ś/ continues to be written with š (as in šhd ‘witness’), even if it may already have been pronounced /s/, a development which then caused the phonetic spelling s that began to appear more regularly in the second century b.c.e.332 Other phonetic changes that surface sporadically in the written material concern /-ʾ/ in syllable-final position and intervocalic/-h-/. Both can disappear easily in several Semitic languages. The loss of final /-ʾ/ resulted in the shift of the original “emphatic state” ending */-āʾ/ to /-ā/ and eventually triggered 327 Cf. Beyer 1984: 100. 328 Maraqten 1988: 84; Kottsieper 2000: 377. 329 However, see Section  3.2.1 below for the curious writing z instead of zy in some Mesopotamian epigraphs. 330 Conversely, šql may either be a traditional Aramaic writing or an Akkadian borrowing (cf. Gzella 2011b: 576). 331 It was formerly dated to around 600 b.c.e., see Beyer 1984: 101 and 2004: 51. 332 Beyer 1984: 103.

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the phonetic writing of this morpheme with h (the usual vowel letter for /ā/) in less formal orthography instead of the etymological spelling ʾ. The latter, conservative, writing continued to persist in standard orthography, but the former occurs regularly in the sub-standard register of the Hermopolis letters. This also applies to the shift of the third-person singular independent pronouns */hūʾ/ and */hīʾ/, etymologically written hʾ in early and most of late Old Aramaic, to /hū/ and /hī/ respectively. In the latter case, however, the phonetic spellings hw and hy were generalized in Achaemenid Official Aramaic, presumably also because they helped differentiate between the masculine and the feminine form, but again, such writings crop up in the Hermopolis letters and the Bauer-Meissner papyrus from Egypt as well. Intervocalic /-h-/, by contrast, may already have disappeared in “imperfect” verbs of the causative stem in Sfire, as emerges from the spelling yskr for /yasker/ ‘he shall deliver’ instead of */yahasker/ (see Section 2.2.2). Etymological writings with h in such cases continued well into Achaemenid Official Aramaic and also prevail in late Old Aramaic, but forms without a reflex of the original /h/ and with the concomitant shift of the causative-stem prefix /ha-/ to /ʾa-/ occur in the Hermopolis letters, at times in free variation with standard spellings (as in ʾwšrty ‘you [feminine singular] sent’ in tad 2.4:4 but hwšr ‘he sent’ in tad 2.5:4).333 The latter corresponds to the similar but sporadic change in individual words like hn /hen/ ‘if’ to ʾn /ʾen/ once in Hermopolis (tad A2.4:10).334 Etymological spellings of /n/ in contact with another consonant, where it would presumably assimilate in pronunciation, co-occur with more frequent phonetic ones without n (even in the same text), as they do occasionally in early Old Aramaic.335 These affect above all basic-stem “imperfect” forms of verbs with root-initial /n/, especially ntn ‘to give’ (so, for instance, formulaic yntn ‘he will give’ in several legal texts from Mesopotamia).336 It is important to note that such etymological spellings are not identical with the use of a nonetymological n in Achaemenid Official Aramaic in order to highlight long consonants in general, including cases where an original /n/ was no longer evident or never existed.337 This more extensive employ of n is not yet attested in 333 See Hug 1993: 78–88 for the data. 334 Hug 1993: 73. 335 Hug 1993: 53. 336 E.g., kai 235:6; Fales 1986 no. 53 (=Hug 1993: 26), line 9, and Fales 1986 no. 56 (=Hug 1993: 26), line 4 (reading and context not entirely clear). A few more examples from the Aḥiqar proverbs are debated (see Kottsieper 1990: 51–62), since they occur in an Achaemenid papyrus and may have at least in part been influenced by Achaemenid Aramaic spelling conventions. 337 See Section 4.1.2; cf. Gzella 2008a: 91–92 and 96–97.

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the corpus under review here; as a consequence, early and late Old Aramaic has exclusively ʾt for /ʾattā/ instead of Achaemenid ʾnt, while exceptional mndʿm ‘anything’ in a Hermopolis-letter (tad A2.5:4) may result from nascent Achaemenid influence in spelling practice around 500 b.c.e.338 Morphology and syntax, too, exhibit some differences vis-à-vis the general situation in early Old Aramaic. Even if the limited documentation precludes a full-scale grammatical comparison, these differences can generally be attributed either to an increasing visibility of erstwhile marginal dialects or to secondary linguistic developments. The most important instance of the former is the regular basic-stem infinitive with a prefix /m-/. This form appears already in the Aramaic of the Tell Fekheriye inscription (see Section  2.2.1), but it was eclipsed by the unprefixed infinitives in the rest of the early Old Aramaic corpus; from late Old Aramaic onwards, by contrast, forms with /m-/ became the norm, whereas the pattern without such a prefix only survives as a fossilized remnant in the lexicalized expression lʾmr ‘saying’ which mainly acts as a quotative marker (see also the corresponding remarks on the Assur ostracon in Section  3.2.3 below).339 Perhaps owing to the decline of the Central Syrian koiné and the spread of formerly unwritten dialects, the old variant form has replaced the earlier normal one even in Syria. Infinitives of the derived stems with a prefix /m-/ also begin to appear in late Old Aramaic, especially in the Aḥiqar proverbs (Section  3.4) and the Hermopolis papyri (Section 3.3.2). However, they have not completely replaced their unprefixed counterparts; these continued to exist in other varieties including the language of the Adon letter from Syria-Palestine and the dialect on which Achaemenid Official Aramaic is based, and cropped up again in post-Achaemenid forms of the language.340 As a consequence, derived-stem 338 However, the exact etymology of mndʿm remains debated. It is traditionally derived from a basic-stem infinitive of the root ydʿ ‘to know’ together with an apocopated form of the interrogative /mā/ ‘what?’, i.e. */maddaʿ-mā/ ‘something known’ (Beyer 1984: 149 and 594), in which case the n would reflect gemination of the /d/ (as became normal in the “imperfect” and infinitive of some frequent verbs with root-initial /y/ in order to compensate for the unstable first radical) as an early influence of Achaemenid spelling. According to the alternative explanation suggested by Kottsieper 1990: 51–54 (cf. Beyer 2004: 408), by contrast, the original form would have been */man yadaʿ mā/ ‘who knows what?’ with a genuine /n/ but with irregular loss of /ya-/, presumably due to phonetic erosion. Should the second explanation prove correct, even though it requires more special pleading, mndʿm could of course no longer count as a stray instance of Achaemenid spelling in the Hermopolis letters. 339 Hug 1993: 77. 340 Beyer 1984: 150; Fassberg 2007 (who has a very comprehensive discussion of the infinitive as an important feature for subdividing Aramaic dialects); Gzella 2008a: 95; Folmer 2011: 149.

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infinitives with /m-/ prefixes cannot act as unambiguous dialectal traits and thus have to be used with caution for determining the exact geographical provenance of a text. The evolution of sentence patterns in seventh- and sixth-century Aramaic, by contrast, does not seem to result primarily from internal diversity but from contact-induced change, even if the exact driving forces cannot easily be specified. Whereas verb-initial word order prevails in early Old Aramaic, the subsequent stage reflects a significantly higher amount of fronting of a direct object and an apposition.341 Since word order in general is easily susceptible to interference from other languages, one could assume that such changes were triggered or at least reinforced by contact with Akkadian, which (presumably also as a result of foreign influence in a much earlier period, in this case from Sumerian) does not normally have verb-initial word order. The same tendency can already be observed in the early Old Aramaic Tell Fekheriye inscription from the mid-ninth century and coincides with other instances of Akkadian influence there (see Section 2.2.1). Yet the actual role of Akkadian as a spoken language in the seventh and sixth centuries and, consequently, the amount of Aramaic-Akkadian bilinguals who could have promoted the gradual weakening of fixed, especially verb-initial, word order patterns remains unknown (see also Section 3.1.3 below). Because of the disparity of the data, the generally very short texts, and their essentially formulaic nature, it is currently impossible to comprehensively reconstruct regional varieties of Aramaic on the basis of variation in the corpus. Some instances may nonetheless bear on a slightly refined historical and geographical subclassification of the material. If the writing of the negation /lā/ as a prefixed l-, as in the Sfire inscriptions, constitutes a peculiarity of Central Syrian Aramaic (which cannot be confirmed or denied at the moment due to the lack of other early Old Aramaic examples), its consistent occurrence in one of the two funerary stelae from Nerab (kai 226:4.6.8; kai 225 does not contain any instance of this particle) may reflect the continuity of an older Syrian scribal tradition around 700 b.c.e. (see Section 3.3.1 below).342 Other texts from the same period have the writing lʾ according to what appears to be the standard spelling by then, so the edict from Syria-Palestine (kai 317:3.7.8), the Bauer-Meissner papyrus from Egypt (tad B1.1:10.14), and one of the 341 Contrast the situation in early Old Aramaic as described by Degen 1969: 2 with the remarks on late Old Aramaic by Hug 1993: 139 (examples are cited on pages 103–105; 127; 95–97). 342 Another instance in a docket from Tell Shiukh el-Fawkani is palaeographically doubtful, see Section 3.2.1 below.

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Hermopolis papyri (tad A2.1:8; cf. Section 3.3.2 below); the remaining instances in the Hermopolis letters have the sub-standard writing lh (tad A2.1:5.6; 2.2:3; 2.3:4.11; 2.4:5; 2.5:3.4.7.8), which also seems to occur in the formula hn lh ‘if not’ in Mesopotamian legal texts.343 The exact relation between the Nerab stelae and Central Syrian Aramaic, or another formerly unwritten Aramaic vernacular of Syria, remains largely unclear. Yet at least the occurrence of a causativestem infinitive with a prefixed /m-/ (mmtth ‘his dying’, kai 226:10), which is unattested in Central Syrian, shows that the Aramaic of these inscriptions, despite what may seem a related scribal tradition, does not exactly correspond to the former koiné of ninth- and eighth-century Syria. The Assur ostracon from Babylonia (see Section 3.2.3 below), by contrast, clearly agrees with Achaemenid Official Aramaic against early Old Aramaic and the remaining (though scarce) evidence in late Old Aramaic in regularly replacing the third-person plural object suffix -hm by the corresponding independent personal pronoun hmw (kai 233:5.6.7.11.12.14.16.17) and perhaps also in using the marker lʾmr after a verb of saying (kai 233:8.10 and perhaps 17). It may therefore reflect traces of a regional variety of Babylonia that belonged to the same dialect cluster from which Achaemenid Official Aramaic emerged. Other features of later Eastern Aramaic, yet unattested in the written material of this period, supposedly have their origins in the early dialect landscape of Aramaic in Babylonia, too (see Section  5.5.1), but they remain invisible for centuries. A wider-ranging category “Mesopotamian Aramaic,” at any rate, cannot be substantiated on linguistic grounds for the available evidence (Section 3.2.1 below). Another regional variety of Aramaic seems to be reflected in the Hermopolis letters from Egypt (see Section 3.3.2 below). Besides a relatively high proportion of non-standard spellings, at times in free variation with traditional ones (lh instead of lʾ ‘not’; hw ‘he’ and hy ‘she’ instead of hʾ; emphatic state ending -h instead of -ʾ; dh instead of zʾ ‘this one’; kdy instead of kzy ‘as long as’; wordinitial ʾ- instead of h-), they also contain several morphological by-forms. A few remnants of the old feminine-singular ending /-at/ in the absolute state seem to be archaic vestiges, but possessive suffixes of the second and third-person masculine plural in /-n/ instead of /-m/ and a causative-stem infinitive with a prefix /m-/ align the language underlying these texts with varieties of Aramaic that are only attested in later periods. This idiom can be classified as a preAchaemenid local form that may have originated from Syria but was not subject to the influence of the Central Syrian koiné and may thus represent a language only employed for lower registers. However, it cannot be said with 343 See also Hug 1993: 74; Kottsieper 2000: 377–378 with n. 45.

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certainty whether the Hermopolis letters represent pre-Achaemenid Aramaic in Egypt more generally. Since new discoveries from both the ninth to eighth and the seventh to sixth centuries b.c.e. now enable one to define Central Syrian Aramaic with greater precision, it turns out that this variety had not simply become the lingua franca of the Neo-Assyrian empire.344 The syntactic changes in seventh-century Aramaic, the comparatively much lower frequency of the object marker ʾyt as one of the distinctive hallmarks of Western Aramaic, and the different forms of the infinitive as well as the loss of the Central Syrian basic-stem infinitive without /m-/ prefix cannot be explained in terms of linear chronological developments and thus all point to a language situation that was much more complicated. With all due caution, then, one should perhaps rather assume that Central Syrian fed into the dialect diversity even of written Aramaic in Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian times before Achaemenid administration established a more unified chancellery style that eventually came to be used in the various provinces. 3.1.3 Aramaic and Akkadian in Contact When Aramaic began to transform the domestic bureaucratic customs of Mesopotamia with their time-honoured basis in Akkadian and the cuneiform script into an increasingly bilingual administration during the second half of the eighth century b.c.e., speakers of various Aramaic dialects formed already part of Assyrian and Babylonian society. This must have resulted in a period of multilingualism, until Akkadian, perhaps in the fifth or fourth century b.c.e., finally ceased to act as a vernacular. The amount of mutual language contact that is only to be expected in such a social situation will mostly have affected the spoken idioms, whereas conservative (albeit heterogeneous) scribal traditions underlying the written material in both Akkadian and Aramaic have resulted in a much higher degree of maintenance of either language in the written registers.345 At least in the earlier stages of contact in the eighth and seventh centuries, the distribution of languages across functional usages in Mesopotamia will have been more complex than a simple “diglossic” opposition between Akkadian as the written and Aramaic as the spoken idiom. It should also be borne in mind that many other languages such as Egyptian, 344 As has been suggested, though admittedly in a time when less evidence was available, by Greenfield 1978: 95 and often repeated afterwards (e.g., by Young 1993: 58). 345 Nonetheless, it has been suggested that alphabetic writing also affected cuneiform spelling practice in Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Late Babylonian times (Streck 2001), which would underscore the important role of Aramaic even in scribal circles.

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Phoenician, presumably Greek, and others, were spoken by parts of the population in urban centres in Mesopotamia.346 Migration, deportations, imperial administration, and communication in border areas thus all contributed to a multilingual situation.347 Akkadian influences on Aramaic chiefly affect the vocabulary, but to some extent also the grammar. Many of the about two-hundred certain lexical loans are only attested in the later large-corpus varieties of Aramaic that once originated in Eastern Syria and Mesopotamia, in particular Syriac, Jewish Babylonian, and Mandaic.348 The predecessors of these Eastern Aramaic languages presumably still acted as unwritten vernaculars during the first millennium b.c.e. Nonetheless, Aramaic in Mesopotamia will have absorbed numerous Akkadian lexemes during this period of bilingualism, integrated them into the lexicon, and passed them on to the later varieties that evolved in the same region. Akkadian borrowings are mostly nouns and relate chiefly to the semantic fields of administration, economy, and law; professions and craftsmanship, including the names of tools, vessels, and vehicles; architecture; and to a lesser degree religion and science, especially astronomy.349 Some terms and calques (loan translations) in the area of bureaucracy appear already in the limited Neo-Assyrian material (see Section 3.2.1 below), whereas Akkadian religious vocabulary surfaces in the even earlier Tell Fekheriye inscription from Eastern Syria (Section 2.2.1). While the direction of borrowing may sometimes be ambiguous, a reasonably clear case for an Akkadian loan can be made if a word corresponds to Akkadian phonetic laws against Aramaic ones or if it ultimately goes back to Sumerian. As a rule, much more Akkadian influence occurs in the Aramaic varieties used in Mesopotamia than in their western counterparts, but at least some lexical items spread across different Aramaic languages and were later passed on to other idioms like Hebrew via Achaemenid Official Aramaic. Grammatical interference is less easy to pinpoint, but at least the ending /-ē/ of the masculine plural in the “emphatic state,” which in Eastern Aramaic replaced the native Aramaic morpheme /-ayyā/ has, in all likelihood, been taken over from Assyrian Akkadian.350 It may have been extended from 346 Cf. Radner 2011: 399 with some indirect evidence. 347 Any of these factors can contribute to the emergence of a multilingual society, cf. Joseph 1987: 45. 348 See Kaufman 1974: 165–170. His book furnishes still the most comprehensive survey; a few additions have been proposed by Sokoloff 2005. 349 Kaufman 1974: 166; taken over by Streck 2011: 421. 350 Rosenthal 1939: 139–140; Kaufman 1974: 127–128; Beyer 2004: 50; Gzella 2008a: 100.

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semantically transparent Akkadian nouns adopted along with their native plurals.351 In addition, the phonology of Mandaic with its distinctive loss of the pharyngeal and laryngeal consonants (as in Akkadian), the dissimilation of emphatics in the same root (basically conforming to Geer’s Law in Akkadian, though not to exactly the same effect), and a highly productive nasalization of long consonants (which was common in Babylonian Akkadian) seems to have undergone influence of substrate pronunciation. Mandaic, after all, was used in the former region of Babylonia and seems to go back to an ancient local dialect, the phonology of which could have assumed distinctive traits from Babylonian when the latter was still spoken (see Section 7.3.1).352 Such traits of pronunciation could have spread in the area among speakers who preferred to employ one single inventory of sounds, hence they eventually outlived Babylonian as a vernacular, and the phonological systems converged.353 Occasionally, lexicalized forms borrowed from Akkadian could develop a limited degree of productivity in Aramaic. This seems to be the case with certain causative-stem verbs with the prefix /sa-/ as in Assyrian (like sprk ‘to defend’) or /ša-/ as in Babylonian (like š(y)zb ‘to liberate’), depending on the period in which they entered the language, as opposed to Aramaic /ha-/ or later /ʾa-/ respectively. The Akkadian causative prefix could subsequently also be extended to native Aramaic verbs like /šaʿbed/ ‘he enslaved’ (as opposed to genuine Aramaic /haʿbed/) from the root ʿbd ‘to make’ by way of analogy.354 Changes in late Old Aramaic word order and sentence patterns, too, are likely to replicate Akkadian models. This hypothesis can be further supported by the distribution of such shifts within Aramaic: while some Western varieties seem to display a greater prominence of the early Old Aramaic Verb – Subject – Object order, especially the late Old Aramaic material from Mesopotamia, Achaemenid Official Aramaic, and the post-Achaemenid forms of Aramaic of Eastern Syria and Mesopotamia have a fairly free word order. Aramaic does, however, not exactly copy Akkadian sentence patterns.355 As a corollary, the “proleptic” (or “anticipatory”) pronouns in genitive constructions like brh zy pn ‘his son, the one of pn’ for ‘pn’s son’ that later became so characteristic of Aramaic syntax (for instance in Syriac) began to appear between the end of the 351 352 353 354

Cf. Matras 2009: 212–213 for comparative material. Ginsberg 1936: 96–98; Kaufman 1974: 119–122; Gzella 2008a: 96–97. Cf. Matras 2009: 221–226 and 229–230. See Kutscher 1971: 354; Beyer 1984: 466. Kaufman 1974: 123–124, by contrast, doubts an Akkadian origin of this feature and rather thinks of an unknown Northwest Semitic language as a possible source. 355 Kaufman 1974: 132.

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sixth and the beginning of the fifth centuries b.c.e., in part possibly reinforced by a similar Neo-Babylonian construction.356 It proves considerably more difficult to assess the impact of Aramaic on Akkadian. Unlike later Aramaic languages such as Syriac and Mandaic, which constitute the main source of Akkadian loans but have developed from ancient vernaculars that could have absorbed foreign influences uninhibited by scribal purism, written Akkadian formed part and parcel of a firmly-established cultural tradition. As a consequence, a conscious attempt at language maintenance in Akkadian-speaking scribal circles could have eclipsed much of the Aramaic influence that may have affected vernacular and thus unwritten forms of Akkadian during the period of bilingualism preceding the shift to Aramaic. In addition, the Aramaic evidence from the seventh and sixth centuries b.c.e. only reflects a fraction of the total grammar and lexicon, and some alleged loans may simply belong to a common Semitic stock. Last but not least, cuneiform orthography cannot adequately reproduce West Semitic laryngeals and pharyngeals, hence the etymology of numerous words and the possible direction of borrowing remain unclear. Past attempts therefore differ greatly in their assessment of the amount of Aramaic borrowings into Akkadian.357 The distribution of the reasonably certain items of vocabulary across semantic fields seems less straightforward than with the mostly technical Akkadian loans in Aramaic and basically relates to alphabetic writing (such as forms of the root spr ‘to write’ and /magallā/ ‘parchment scroll’), trade (/maʿā/, a weight corresponding to a sixth of a zūz), cattle farming (so presumably /gady/ ‘little goat’), craftsmanship (/qaṭṭāʾ/ ‘woodcutter’), the military (/ḥayl/ ‘troop’), and various areas of daily life including verbal roots (such as bḥr ‘to choose’ and presumably also rdp ‘to pursue’358). These semantic fields do not only reflect traditional Aramaean occupations in pasture, military contingents, and scribal culture, but attest to a wider use of Aramaic in everyday communication. In this respect, the higher proportion of Aramaic verbal roots borrowed into Akkadian than of Akkadian verbs borrowed into Aramaic is particularly significant.359 Calques on Aramaic function words like the Akkadian preposition 356 Kaufman 1974: 131–132; Blasberg 1997: 37; Streck 2011: 421. 357 Contrast the estimate of 280 vocabulary items in von Soden 1966, 1968, and 1977 with the much lower number of 42 fairly certain and 43 possible lexemes by Abraham – Sokoloff 2011, but cf. also Streck 2011: 419–421 with a few additional but exceedingly brief notes questioning some of the reassessments proposed by Abraham – Sokoloff. There is still room for discussion. 358 Cf. Beaulieu 2013: 372–374. 359 See also the passing remark in Blasberg 1997: 38.

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ana as a direct object marker in analogy with Aramaic l-360 and borrowings like kimā for /ka-mā/ ‘how much?’361 add to this general impression, since function words are semantically void and are easily borrowed from a speaker’s pragmatically, or psycholinguistically, dominant language.362 Since Aramaic loans have been fully integrated into Akkadian nominal and verbal morphology,363 obvious grammatical Aramaisms are not easy to discover in the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian corpus. The prestige of Akkadian at the court and in certain conservative scribal circles could have promoted conscious efforts at keeping the morphological core of the language intact.364 Some specific cases of structural convergence in the grammar of both languages may nonetheless be identified in Neo- and Late Babylonian365: the first-person plural independent pronoun anīnu or anīni with initial /a-/ as in the corresponding Aramaic form; a reintroduction of the archaic /t-/ preformative in the third person singular feminine of the present in analogy with the Aramaic “imperfect”; and the use of the preterite with jussive meaning in non-negated main clauses, possibly reinforced by the normal employ of the morphologically similar Aramaic “short imperfect” for deontic modality. It is not unlikely that examples like these can be multiplied by a more thorough investigation of linguistic phenomena that were less subject to the speaker’s control than the choice of individual words.366 Such instances of inconspicuous contact-induced convergence are only to be expected in a language situation in which widespread bilingualism promotes an assimilation of use patterns between different idioms for higher communicative efficiency, while linguistic prestige at the same time buttresses the preservation of the morphological and lexical core of a language and thus maintains its outer appearance.367 Hence, the specific results of AkkadianAramaic contact and the distributional pattern of the interference supports the idea of Aramaic as a pragmatically dominant language for most communicative 360 Blasberg 1997: 37; Streck 2011: 419. 361 Abraham – Sokoloff 2011: 37; Streck 2011: 420. 362 Matras 2009: 193–209. Cf. Gzella 2007a: 103 on a similar phenomenon in the Hebrew Bar Kosiba letters, with further bibliography. 363 Streck 2011: 420. 364 Cf. also Blasberg 1997: 36–37. 365 See now Beaulieu 2013 with a very nuanced discussion. 366 Radner 2011: 398–399, for instance, suggests that lack of concord with the stative in NeoAssyrian texts from Dūr-Katlimmu results from imperfect learning of Akkadian by speakers of Aramaic, but it is unclear why exactly this phenomenon should reflect Aramaic influence. 367 Cf. Gzella 2013b on the workings of convergence and their underpinnings in general, with references to more general linguistic studies.

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purposes of everyday life in large parts of Mesopotamian society. The force of its impact, which eventually resulted in a complete shift from Akkadian to Aramaic as a vernacular, is disproportionate to the small amount of the textual remains. 3.2

Aramaic in Bilingual Imperial Administration

Aramaic outlived the end of the independent Aramaean city-states of Syria: when they were incorporated into the Neo-Assyrian empire at the beginning of its consolidating phase, with the creation of provinces after a period of quick military expansion in the hundred years between Tiglath-pileser III and Ashurbanipal (745–645 b.c.e.),368 their language and administrative traditions continued under the auspices of the Assyrian great kings. The Assyrian chancellery thereby became involved in and reinforced the dynamic spread of Aramaic across the Near East. Mass deportations into the Assyrian heartland resulted in an increasingly multiethnic and multilingual population, a significant part of which will also have spoken Aramaic. Akkadian and Mesopotamian cuneiform writing remained largely confined to Assyria proper for domestic administration and, occasionally, legal deeds such as land sales abroad. Judging from the very limited evidence available, Akkadian scribal traditions were apparently not systematically exported to the western provinces (at least not on a larger scale), where Aramaic and other alphabetic languages of SyriaPalestine such as Phoenician and Hebrew had already been in full use. Hence, only extremely few cuneiform tablets from this period have been discovered outside Assyria.369 The prerogative of Akkadian became in due course restricted to monumental inscribed stelae by means of which the Assyrian ­rulers, especially Sargon II (722–705 b.c.e.), celebrated their conquests and conveyed their political-ideological message even in Syria-Palestine.370 No Assyrian royal inscription in a language and script other than Akkadian and cuneiform is known. Local, Canaanite, languages outside Syria were enriched 368 See Bagg 2013 for a recent overview. 369 Horowitz – Oshima – Sanders 2006: 20 list only eight administrative documents from Palestine. Radner 2011: 394–395, by contrast, views the sheer existence of such documents from private archives even in Western Syria and Palestine as evidence for the spread of Assyrian as an administrative language throughout the empire. Yet the vast difference in quantity as opposed to the cuneiform material from Mesopotamia renders it difficult to assess how representative such stray discoveries are. 370 Millard 2009: 206–207.

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but not replaced by Aramaic and maintained their role both as vernaculars and as representational idioms until the Achaemenid period. Daily business and international diplomatic correspondence, by contrast, were increasingly conducted in Aramaic, certainly in the west, but apparently also in the mainland of the empire. This suggests that the rise of Aramaic in Assyrian administration chiefly has to be attributed to practical rather than ideological reasons.371 It may have been reinforced by clerks from the Syrian provinces who continued their career in the Assyrian bureaucracy, perhaps in the training of alphabetic scribes.372 There is no evidence that Aramaic served as a vehicle for transporting unifying Assyrian cultural and social values in a multiethnic state and thus was part of an alleged “Assyrianization” of the provinces.373 Bureaucratic modalities absorbed into and transformed by the NeoAssyrian government endured under the successive Neo-Babylonian rule and subsequently formed part of the Achaemenid administrative reform. Aramaic thus became a core component of three different multilingual world empires. Since its true spread is not adequately reflected in the primary source material, however, the focus has to rest on Mesopotamia, which is currently the bestdocumented region for the use of Aramaic in bookkeeping during the pre-­ Achaemenid period. 3.2.1 The Neo-Assyrian Tablets and Epigraphs Most of the material that illustrates the function of Aramaic in Assyrian administration comes from seventh-century b.c.e. archives in the Upper Euphrates region, that is, Tell Barsip374 and Tell Shiukh el-Fawkani,375 as well as from Tell Sheikh Hamad (Dūr-Katlimmu)376 by the Ḥabur river and Maʾallanāte (Aramaic Maʿlānā)377 in the Ḥauran. It consists of typically small triangular tablets (“dockets”) with legal deeds, especially debt notes about grain or ­silver,378 written in a peculiar, so-called “argillary” ductus of the Aramaic 371 Bagg 2013: 125. Cf. Knoppers 2013: 31–32. 372 See Nissinen 2014: 276; similar to the bearers of Babylonian names in Neo-Assyrian administrative documents from Palestine, cf. Horowitz – Oshima – Sanders 2006: 20–22. 373 This latter view is championed especially by Parpola 2004: 6–14; 2005: 101. Fales 2007b: 140 has a more nuanced account and emphasizes that the linguistic-cultural traditions of the conquered peoples remained intact. 374 Bordreuil – Briquel-Chatonnet 1996–1997. 375 Fales – Radner – Pappi – Attardo 2005. 376 Only two of these texts are currently available in a preliminary edition by Röllig 1997. 377 Lipiński 2010. 378 By contrast, the actual nature of the very few seemingly non-legal texts (e.g., Fales 1986 no. 45 = Hug 1993: and 29) is debated.

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alphabetic script.379 A handful of them carry parallel Akkadian versions on the reverse.380 A few others had already been discovered in Tell Ḥalaf and Assur during earlier campaigns (see Section  3.1.1 above for an overview). They amount to some hundred-fifty published texts, as opposed to 5000–6000 clay tablets in Akkadian, and show that Aramaic played a role even in the core area of the Neo-Assyrian empire during its period of consolidation in the seventh century b.c.e. It is still debated whether Aramaic clay tablets were representative of Assyrian administrative documents as such,381 or, more plausibly, whether they only served as replacements for a much more widespread use of perishable writing materials such as papyrus and leather (or perhaps even wax) when these were not available.382 No consensus has been reached whether they were legally binding.383 From a different point of view, it has been suggested that a functional distinction underlies the distribution of Aramaic and Assyrian across different genres of legal texts.384 The exact distribution of clay tablets and flexible surfaces, whatever it may have been, certainly has an impact on assessing the relation between Mesopotamian and Levantine scribal traditions. Yet even a comparatively small number of alphabetic witnesses as opposed to the large quantities of cuneiform texts does not undermine the hypothesis of a strong presence of Aramaic in Neo-Assyrian domestic and, it can be inferred, provincial bureaucracy. Unfortunately, no indigenous Aramaic archives from the Neo-Assyrian or the Neo-Babylonian period that could be compared have yet been discovered. It stands to reason, then, that the trend towards employing Aramaic was accompanied by the use of a soft writing material like papyrus. Flat surfaces were more suitable for drawing the round shapes of alphabetic letter signs with ink, while clay tablets lend themselves to engraving wedges with a stylus. 379 Röllig 1999. Illustrations of the various types have been conveniently reproduced in Fales 2007b: 147–159. 380 The Akkadian and Aramaic versions may have acted as duplicate copies; see the note regarding the expression “on Assyrian tablets and on Aramaic tablets they wrote” (ct 53:46, a Neo-Assyrian text from the time of Asarhaddon) in Hug 1993: 22. 381 So Fales 2000: 123–124. 382 Millard 2009: 209–210, who rightly stresses that pens and ink, as employed in Aramaic epigraphs on cuneiforms tablets from Tell Sheikh Hamad, must point to a more popular use of writing on flexible surfaces, since this is what pens and ink are originally made for. 383 Cf. Fales 2007a: 102. 384 So Radner 2011: 394–398, who suggests that Assyrian may have been the preferred option for private documents of public interest like real estate transactions, hence comparable Aramaic texts are lacking. This is an attractive idea, but argumenta e silentio are difficult to establish on the basis of the still small Aramaic corpus.

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As the former is obviously more susceptible to climatic conditions, much of the evidence will not have survived.385 At least the administrative system in seventh-century Mesopotamia itself, however, was clearly bilingual, and not all who made use of writing could read cuneiform. Dozens of Akkadian legal deeds from Niniveh, Tell Sheikh Hamad (Dūr-Katlimmu),386 Maʾallanāte, and other, unknown, places therefore have short notes (“endorsements” or “epigraphs”) in Aramaic. These consist of at most four lines, but often less, and were scratched or incised with an unknown instrument, or painted with ink,387 on the edge of a cuneiform tablet in order to identify it when shelved. The modalities that govern the storage of such documents are still largely unknown, and it is commonly believed that both types of content were written by distinct clerks, the tablet itself by a “cuneiform scribe” (LÚ.DUB.SAR) and the epigraph by an “alphabet scribe” (LÚ.A.BA).388 However, one may entertain the possibility that epigraphs in alphabetic script would also enable the proprietors of these documents, who would not normally have mastered cuneiform script, to distinguish them if one supposes they were kept in private archives.389 Such notes were introduced by the term dnt or ʾgrt ‘document of’ and usually consist of the name of the seller or debtor,390 occasionally also his place of origin or even his function, and the commodity involved.391 The largely formulaic pattern allows for easy identification and presupposes but a limited degree of literacy, so that individuals without a specialized training could read them, too. At any rate, differences in execution between the Akkadian and Aramaic versions (the presence or absence of dates, measures, place of origin and patronym of the debtor) even in the same archive indicate that both were written 385 Cf. also Röllig 2002a: 23. 386 Contrary to the tablets, the epigraphs from Tell Sheikh Hamad have been published in the meantime by Röllig in Radner 2002. 387 Sometimes, as in Tell Sheikh Hamad, in addition to incised notes with the same contents. The rationale underlying this custom remains unknown. Cf. Fales 2007b: 150–160 and especially 151 for the suggestion that incised notes could have served as a fall-back option when writing in ink did not work out well. 388 E.g., Hug 1993: 22. On the term ‘alphabet scribe’, see Röllig 1999: *164 with further bibliography in n. 14. Both are mentioned side by side in several Neo-Assyrian letters and are depicted with different writing instruments in Assyrian palace reliefs (Fales 2007b: 142– 143 with Fig. 2; Fales – Radner – Pappi – Attardo 2005: 602–603). 389 So Röllig 2002a: 23 and 2005: 122–124. 390 E.g., Fales 1986 nos. 1, 2, 4, 5 (=Hug 1993: 27–28). 391 Fales 1986 nos. 23 and 28 (=Hug 1993: 28). The epigraphs from Tell Sheikh Hamad, too, exhibit both longer and shorter clauses.

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by different people. There are no known criteria to determine which cuneiform tablets were furnished with epigraphs and which were not, but some archives, like the one from Tell Sheikh Hamad, show a significantly higher percentage than others.392 Since debt notes from various archives share the same basic pattern, the form of such documents must have been standardized to a certain extent. Records about grain from Assur, Niniveh, and Tell Ḥalaf all list the various constituent elements in the same order: first the commodity itself, that is, šʿrn ‘barley’, then the name of the creditor after a particle or preposition, subsequently the name of the debtor after the preposition ʿl ‘on, at the cost of’, and finally the quantity in ciphers. This basic pattern could be expanded by other elements, such as a list of witnesses introduced by šhd(n) ‘witness(es)’393 or the interest rates in different wordings.394 The presence or absence of witnesses would usually distinguish legally binding deeds from purely administrative records.395 Instances of micro-variation in the form, however, may reveal local traditions that were not completely unified: in the debt-notes from Assur and Niniveh, the creditor is introduced by the relative marker zy,396 perhaps patterned after its Akkadian counterpart ša, whereas at least some from Tell Ḥalaf use the preposition l- ‘to’.397 Both types are attested side by side at Maʾallanāte.398 392 Cf. Röllig 2o02a: 22. 393 So in the three examples from Assur, Fales 1986 nos. 46–48 (=Hug 1993: 22–23). Several of the tablets from Maʾallanāte (Lipiński 2010), by contrast, introduce the witnesses individually (O. 3654; 3650; presumably also 3658) or collectively after the singular šhd (O. 3645; 3655; 3646; 3670; 3673), others correspond to the form used at Assur (O. 3659; 3717; 3652; 3647; 3656; 3657; 3651; 3715). 394 As in Fales 1986: no. 3 (=Hug 1993: 27), with the preposition b; Fales 1986 nos. 50–51 (=Hug 1993: 24), im 96 737 (=Hug 1993: 24–25), and Röllig 1997: 370–371, with an “imperfect” of the root rbī ‘to increase’; O. 3713, 3650, 3652, 3647, 3716, and 3656, with the noun rbh ‘its interest’ (variant spelling rbyh in O. 3657, 3651, 3671, and 3715). 395 Hug 1993: 24; Zadok 2003: 480. 396 Fales 1986 nos. 46–48 (=Hug 1993: 22–23) from Assur, all referring to the same creditor, and Fales 1986 nos. 9 (=Hug 1993: 17–18) and 3 (=Hug 1993: 27; cf. Fales 1986: 137 on the correction snh ‘deputy’ instead of the seemingly ungrammatical material reading znh ‘this one’) from Niniveh. Fales 1986 nos. 6 (=Hug 1993: 28) and 11 (=Hug 1993: 18) from the same place are too fragmentary. 397 Fales 1986 nos. 53, 54, and 56 (=Hug 1993: 26), again referring to the same creditor; so, too, the triangular tablets that belong to the archive of Zakarel (Lemaire 2001 nos. 7–11; cf. p. 82). Interestingly, Fales 1986 no. 55 (=Hug 1993: 26) has the relative marker zy instead of l(cf. Fales 1986: 247–248). Fales 1986 no. 57 (=Hug 1993: 27) is too fragmentary for an analysis. 398 With zy: O. 3654; 3650; 3658; 3673; 3649; 3671; 3715; with l-: O. 3717; 3659; 3652; 3647; 3716; 3656; 3657; 3651.

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Apparently, then, inconsistencies could also result from the individual preferences of certain scribes working in the same administrative centre, as the debt notes about silver from Assur begin with the quantity before the commodity, contrary to the barley debt notes, but, like them, employ the relative marker zy before the creditor’s name as well.399 Sealed documents begin with ḥtm ‘seal’ and the name of its bearer.400 It seems difficult to decide whether this Aramaic pattern with its limited but observable amount of variation was created by the Neo-Assyrian administration,401 or whether it had been adopted from an earlier model that was already in use in the Syrian provinces when the Mesopotamian conquerors came into contact with them and was only afterwards assimilated to the NeoAssyrian cuneiform deeds. Especially the texts from Mesopotamia proper exhibit various instances of Assyrian terminology, such as the frequent formulaic dnh /dannā/ ‘legal document’402 from Akkadian dannutu at the beginning of the so-called “conveyance clauses” in Aramaic epigraphs on tablets with deeds about property transactions.403 Other lexical borrowings in this material concern the titles of functionaries and offices, geographical terms (especially boundaries), the names of the months as well as other temporal designations, and weights.404 They were partly incorporated into Aramaic nominal morphology with its own feminine and plural endings. Akkadian influences on the Aramaic phonology and morphology of these texts, by contrast, are hard to find; a few Assyrian phonetic shifts, the workings of which can be observed in the corpus, relate to individual words, mostly names, of the donor language,405 but they do not seem to affect written Aramaic. More elaborate loan translations only occur in specific legal

399 Fales 1986 nos. 50 and 51 (=Hug 1993: 24). The former has a cipher, the latter a numeral. 400 Fales 1986 no. 49 (=Hug 1993: 23) and im 96 737 (Hug 1993: 24–25) from Assur and now many examples from Tell Sheikh Hamad (Röllig 1997) and elsewhere (Lemaire 2001 nos. 12, 13, 15, 16, 18). 401 As tentatively suggested by Röllig 1997: 367. 402 Kaufman 1974: 46; Hoftijzer – Jongeling 1995: 256–257; Cf. Röllig 2002a: 23 n. 233 for further bibliography. 403 E.g., Fales 1986 nos. 4, 5, and 23 (=Hug 1993: 28), and now many other examples from Tell Sheikh Hamad. The variant term ʾgrt (originally ‘letter’), which occurs less often, seems to be used in the same sense here. It is presumably related to Akkadian egirtu, but its etymology and the direction of borrowing are debated (cf. Kaufman 1974: 48). 404 See Fales 1986: 56 for an overview. Part of the legal terminology, however, may originally have been Aramaic and borrowed into Assyrian (Lemaire 2008: 87). 405 Fales 1986: 59–66.

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formulae.406 Besides in technical legalese, they appear but very infrequently,407 which may suggest that Aramaic and Akkadian did not merge into a genuine, mixed, contact idiom. These texts do, conversely, bear the mark of early Old Aramaic spelling traditions (see Section  2.2.2): word-internal vowel letters (as in zwz /zūz/ ‘half-shekel’) are still rare, z consistently serves as a grapheme for the old interdental /ð/ (as in the relative marker zy), */ś/ is written with š (as in šhd ‘witness’), and the reflex of */ṣ́/ predominantly with q (as in ʾrq ‘land’). Yet some irregularities witness to a more dynamic situation and correspond to a certain degree of v­ ariation in the form itself. The curious writing z instead of zy for the relative marker in one document from Tell Ḥalaf and very occasionally in the Tell Sheikh Hamad epigraphs is often viewed as a scribal mistake408; however, it may just as well be a non-standard abbreviation employed in highly formulaic expressions. Not all unexpected spellings, at any rate, can be explained away as erroneous. Two epigraphs from Tell Sheikh Hamad409 from the first and a mortgage document from Maʾallanāte410 from presumably the latter half of the seventh 406 Fales 2010: 192–193 now presents a convenient list with references to primary and secondary bibliography; Lemaire 2008: 80–83 has further notes on terminology, not all of which can be related to Assyrian, though. 407 An obvious calque is bʾdrn ‘at threshing-time’ for Akkadian ina adri in Fales 1986 no. 48:5 (=Hug 1993: 23) and now ʿl brky ʾšr nnwh ‘on the lap of Iššar of Niniveh’ (Lemaire 2001 no. 2, lines 6–7, cf. Fales – Radner – Pappi – Attardo 2005: 603). As has been stated above, the use of the Aramaic relative marker zy could have been influenced by its Akkadian counterpart ša, even if this is hard to verify. Müller-Kessler 2010: 153 even goes so far as to claim that the verb lqḥ ‘to take’ is not an Aramaic lexeme but has been borrowed from Akkadian. However, since this root already occurs in all forms of early Old Aramaic (including Central Syrian as reflected by the Sfire stelae; see Hoftijzer – Jongeling 1995: 580–584) and occasionally in post-Achaemenid varieties as well (Beyer 2004: 427), it is, according to established historical-linguistic method, best seen as part of the inherited Semitic basic lexicon of Aramaic. In addition, lqḥ does not necessarily have the specific sense ‘to buy’ in all occurrences, but its use in conveyance clauses could simply be an extension of the more general meaning ‘to take’ as attested elsewhere in Neo-Assyrian Aramaic epigraphs (e.g., Fales 1986 no. 49:4; im 59 050 in Hug 1993: 19, line 1; and im 96 737 in Hug 1993: 25, line 3; O. 3650:3 and 3717:3 in Lipiński 2010). 408 Hug 1993: 60; cf. Röllig 2002a: 23 (though hesitatingly). 409 Röllig in Radner 2002: 127 and 150 (nos. 88 and 109). The regular spelling occurs more frequently elsewhere in the same archive (p. 54, no. 29; p. 66, no. 39; p. 82, no. 48; p. 134, no. 93; and p. 164, no. 122; the alleged reading ʾrṣ in no. 113, p. 154, by contrast, is uncertain). 410 Lipiński 2010: 133–141, who suggests that the text may have been written by a younger scribe.

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century contain what seem to be the earliest instances of the innovative and presumably phonetic spelling ʾrʿ ‘land’, which gained ground in the Achaemenid period, instead of traditional ʾrq that still persists in Babylonian epigraphs. They attest to scribes who, in all likelihood, actually spoke Aramaic and, by accident or on purpose, deviated from established orthographic conventions in writing the word as it was pronounced. Moreover, the possible spelling of the negation /lā/ as a prefixed l- in a docket from Tell Shiukh el-Fawkani411 instead of lʾ as in later Aramaic, if the reading proves correct, also has an archaic ring. This writing occurs already in the early Old Aramaic Sfire inscriptions and otherwise only continues in  the late Old Aramaic Nerab stelae (see Sections  3.1.2 and 3.3.1).412 Palaeographic and grammatical considerations aside, however, its diagnostic value is obscured by the scarcity of negations in both early Old Aramaic and the Neo-Assyrian administrative documents; hence one cannot say with certainty whether it reflects a local Syrian (or perhaps even Central Syrian) spelling tradition,413 or whether such a writing was simply common to early Old Aramaic in general. The form lʾ that later became usual, however, already appears in a sealed debt note about silver from Tell Sheikh Hamad.414 A variant lh, as in later sub-standard spelling, may also occur in the formula hn lh in case that expression really means ‘if not’.415 These supposed instances of spelling variation even in the same administrative genre from the same time and region, if indeed they rest on correct readings, would suggest that different orthographic traditions for Aramaic coexisted in NeoAssyrian bureaucracy and were not standardized as happened later under Achaemenid rule. 411 Fales 1996: 90, line 6 = Fales – Radner – Pappi – Attardo 2005 no. 47, but the word in question has been read differently by Lemaire 2001: 123–124 in his re-edition of the same text (as no. 4*). 412 Another alleged example in the Assur ostracon, lṭḥnw (kai 233:8; so Kottsieper 2000: 378 n. 45 and the translation ‘they will not serve him’ in Fales 2010: 196), remains questionable, especially because of the mysterious verbal root ṭḥn. It seems much more plausible to interpret it as a preposition followed by a personal name ‘to ṭḥnw’ (Hug 1993: 21.71; none of Kottsieper’s counter-arguments is convincing, and the name ṭḥnw may be related to ṭḥnh in a fourth-century b.c.e. papyrus from Palestine, cf. Eshel – Misgav 1988). 413 So Kottsieper 2000: 377–378 with n. 45, who, however, does not address the palaeographic difficulty. 414 Röllig 1997: 370–371, line 7. 415 Fales 1986 no. 53 (=Hug 1993: 26), Lemaire 2001 no. 19 and 2008: 88. For the analysis of lh as ‘not’, see Lipiński 1975: 120; Hug 1993: 26; and Lemaire 2001: 108; 2008: 79 (ad 5); cf. Kottsieper 2000: 380; differently Fales 1986: 241–242.

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The formulaic nature of the texts and the limited amount of comparative data defy a precise definition of their underlying variety of Aramaic in historical or geographical terms. Leaving aside Akkadian loans for certain legal and  administrative terms, the surviving tablets and epigraphs have a deregionalized (albeit heterogeneous) veneer. Their language, like the spelling conventions and the formal patterns of the documents, may or may not have been imported from the Syrian provinces, but the documents were composed in an environment where Akkadian was also written and where presumably regional dialects of Aramaic were spoken as well. These dialects could have fed into the linguistic code employed for written Aramaic. An interesting example that may further illustrate these considerations is the possible occurrence of an object marker. It has already been shown that the Semitic languages of first-millennium Syria-Palestine developed similar strategies for optionally highlighting a definite and mostly animate direct object. The use of the particle ʾyt belongs to the characteristic hallmarks of Central Syrian and later Western Aramaic (see Section 2.2.2), but this particle does not appear in the Neo-Assyrian administrative documents, which prevents one from directly associating them with Central Syrian. Instead, the one instance of object marking in a document from Niniveh from around 670 b.c.e., recording the pledge of a person in exchange for silver, employs the preposition l- for the same purpose,416 which is otherwise unattested in Old Aramaic but corresponds to the normal way of object marking in Achaemenid and, later, Eastern Aramaic. Such a unique instance of course cannot establish a direct link between the language of the Neo-Assyrian tablets and epigraphs and Achaemenid Aramaic, since one does not know whether object marking with l- would otherwise have been usual in the former. However, it does corroborate the earlier existence of an otherwise still unknown feature that subsequently became one of the distinctive hallmarks first of Achaemenid, then of Eastern Aramaic (as opposed to the Western branch), almost two hundred years before the oldest dated Achaemenid Aramaic papyrus (495 b.c.e.). Once again, a seemingly trivial grammatical detail corroborates the view that the actual language situation was much more complicated than the written evidence suggests. 416 Fales 1986 no. 13 (=Hug 1993: 18), presumably line 2. Both the person given as pledge in l. 2 and the recipient in l. 3 are introduced by l-, which makes it difficult to decide who is who (cf. Fales 1986: 158–159), but a Neo-Babylonian debt note (kai 227) might furnish a parallel in which the (unmarked) direct object comes first and the indirect one second (as perceptively remarked by Hug 1993: 18, but the beginning of this text is fragmentary so that its value as a possible parallel cannot be confirmed).

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While the language clearly forms part of an administrative “AssyrianAramaic symbiosis”417 with a massive impact of Akkadian bureaucratic terminology, its core of Aramaic phonology, morphology, and basic lexicon thus remains intact. This “symbiosis” is therefore not a sharply defined linguistic category and, as a consequence, has very limited value for defining the place of the material in the historical evolution and subclassification of the Aramaic language. There are no regular linguistic features that could single out a “Mesopotamian Aramaic”418 variety from the other forms of the language in terms of historical or dialectal subdivisions. “Mesopotamian Aramaic” may be used as a convenient label for the Aramaic legalese underlying the administrative tablets and epigraphs from the Neo-Assyrian and the Neo-Babylonian periods, but it does not correspond to any attested natural Aramaic language with its peculiar dialectal traits.419 This caveat does of course not rule out that there were many spoken forms of Aramaic in Mesopotamia, some of whose dialectal hallmarks surface only in much later Aramaic varieties from the region,420 or may even crop up sporadically in the administrative material under discussion here. However, they do not seem to have left any consistent pattern of unambiguous regional traces in the texts.421 The Neo-Assyrian tablets and epigraphs in Aramaic are therefore 417 See Fales 1986: 44–47 and 104–105 for this term; cf. Lemaire 2008: 87 and Millard 2009: 211–212. 418 So Kaufman 1974: 8–9 and 156 and, more extensively, Fales 1986: 36–47. Greenfield 1978: 95 uses the same term in a broader sense that also includes the Central Syrian texts from Samʾal (Section 2.2.3) and the Nerab inscriptions (Section 3.3 below), but it is hard to see which proper linguistic features they should have in common, hence they should not be grouped together. None of these scholars refers to the one instance of l- as an object marker, although this is arguably the most relevant dialect trait in the material under discussion. 419 Cf. also the critical remark in Blasberg 1997: 34 n. 92. 420 Another example being the phonetic parallels between Akkadian and Mandaic as summarized above. This is in fact Greenfield’s only feature of his “Mesopotamian Aramaic” (1978: 95), but there is no evidence that it regularly affected the earlier written varieties of Aramaic which he also subsumes under this dialect cluster. 421 The four features suggested by Kaufman 1974: 156 all have a wider attestation in late Old Aramaic including material from Syria-Palestine and Egypt: relatively free word order (Hug 1993: 139); the “imperfect” preformative /y-/ (Hug 1993: 76–88; as opposed to later Eastern Aramaic /l-/ and /n-/); a proper distinction between the various noun states (Hug 1993: 65–70); and the use of zy as a genitive marker (cf. Hug 1993: 60). Since the construct state is also productive in texts from Mesopotamia (see Hug 1993: 66–67 for the evidence), the somewhat higher proportion of zy in the Mesopotamian administrative texts, notably before the name of the creditor, appears to be related to the formulaic pattern of these

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primarily associated with a particular genre and register, not necessarily with a specific historical variety of Aramaic. Such historical varieties, though invisible in the textual record, could nonetheless persist422 and continue to influence the subsequent development of the language in the Neo-Babylonian period. After the fall of the Assyrian empire, Northern Mesopotamia does not feature prominently in the textual record of Aramaic for several centuries, presumably because administration has completely shifted to the use of perishable writing materials with the disappearance of cuneiform scribal traditions. However, Aramaic reappears, with some distinctive local traits, in honorific and memorial inscriptions on stone from Assur and its surroundings in Hellenistic-Roman times (see Section 5.5). This suggests that it lived on in the region and continued to evolve despite the absence of significant written material. 3.2.2 Administrative Continuity in the Neo-Babylonian Period Aramaic and the alphabetic script continued to rival Akkadian and cuneiform writing as the main administrative tradition when the Babylonians became the principal power of the day. Its role is, however, much less well-documented in the relatively short Neo-Babylonian period. The decreasing number of cuneiform documents from the western provinces,423 which was already small in Neo-Assyrian times, until their disappearance with the rise of Achaemenid rule may suggest a further decline of time-honoured Mesopotamian administrative traditions outside the heartland. And even within Mesopotamia, cuneiform writing largely seems to have withdrawn from Assyria to Babylonia after the fall of the Assyrian capital Niniveh in 612 b.c.e. Consequently, Babylonia remained a bulwark of cuneiform learning within an increasingly Aramaicspeaking empire. Yet this process is not accompanied by a concomitant rise of monolingual Aramaic material, the sole datable piece of evidence from outside Mesopotamia being a tablet recording a financial transaction from the year 34 of Nebuchadnezzar (571/570 b.c.e.) that was presumably found at Sfire in Syria (kai 227). As in the seventh century, the most obvious explanation for documents. The opening formula of Aramaic epigraphs, too, uses zy and the construct state in free variation (Röllig 2002a: 23). As Fales 1986: 43, too, has to admit: “an analysis effected only in terms of “Mesopotamian Aramaic” grammatical features yields little in general, and precious little that is not to be found in other temporal or spatial phases of the language.” 422 Perhaps also due to the lack of unified leadership among Aramaean tribes around Babylon (Fales 2011b: 93–94). 423 See Horowitz – Oshima – Sanders 2006: 23–25.

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such a meagre documentation would be the widespread use of perishable writing materials. A Babylonian family archive that consists of twenty-seven cuneiform tablets with mostly debt notes about barley or silver and covers the period between ca. 560 and 520 b.c.e. has been discovered in Nerab in Syria. Five tablets, a relatively higher proportion than in other Babylonian archives, also bear Aramaic epigraphs. However, it is now generally assumed that the persons to whom this archive belonged had adopted local Babylonian bureaucratic customs: either because they originally came from Babylonia or because they were Syrians who had been deported as economically active aliens to Southern Mesopotamia around the beginning of the sixth century b.c.e. but returned to their homeland after the fall of the Neo-Babylonian empire, taking their business documents with them.424 The main argument adduced in support of such a view is the discrepancy between the Babylonian names of the scribes who wrote the documents and the West Semitic names of the individuals who feature in them. Consequently, this exceptional situation does not indicate that cuneiform administration played any significant role outside Mesopotamia, hence it cannot undermine the plausible hypothesis of a predominantly monolingual Aramaic bureaucracy employing perishable writing materials in the Babylonian provinces at least in the west. The Aramaic Sfire tablet (kai 227, dated to 571/570 b.c.e.) is thus a more adequate illustration of the usual administrative customs in Neo-Babylonian Syria and, supposedly, other western provinces as well. Written on clay, for whatever (extraordinary?) reason, it has survived by coincidence and contributes a few more insights that are unavailable from all the lost papyri, which may once have constituted the major part of the evidence. Again, close reading may produce some meaningful information on the wider historical background. The nature of the transaction recorded by this text remains unknown due to the broken beginning, but if it concerns a pledge of a slave for money, its pattern seems to correspond closely to the one employed in a similar document from Neo-Assyrian Niniveh.425 Contrary to the latter, however, the Babylonian text introduces each witness individually after šhd ‘witness’ instead of providing a mere list of names beginning with šhdn ‘witnesses’; the former usage now also occurs a number of times in the Neo-Assyrian material from Maʾallanāte, but it is yet unattested in the debt notes from Assur and Niniveh. Micro-variation in the underlying patterns thus points to an ongoing coexistence of slightly different bureaucratic templates. Presumably, then, there was 424 Oelsner 1989 and 2006: 28 n. 1; Röllig 2002a: 23 n. 232. 425 Fales 1986 no. 13 (=Hug 1993: 18). Cf. also Donner – Röllig 31973: 278.

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no fully standardized bureaucratic use of Aramaic that endured in the NeoBabylonian period. Cuneiform writing, including the study of traditional literature, nonetheless lived on in Babylonia proper and died a slow death until the Roman period. It is much more difficult to decide whether the contemporary form of Akkadian, generally termed “Late Babylonian,” still acted as a vernacular.426 Aramaean presence in Babylonia, at any rate, is well-established: it antedates the NeoBabylonian period,427 and the “Chaldaeans,” whom cuneiform sources distinguish from the Aramaeans but whose ethnic and linguistic affiliation remains mysterious, were presumably also speakers of Aramaic dialects. Yet monolingual Aramaic documents like the Neo-Assyrian dockets are still notably absent, hence evidence for a growing impact of Aramaic on administration is indirect.428 Especially dozens of Aramaic epigraphs also on Babylonian clay tablets written in cuneiform, which constitute the main body of data, document its use alongside Akkadian.429 This custom seems to have become more ­widespread in the sixth century, after the collapse of the Assyrian empire.430 A Babylonian school tablet with the letters of the West Semitic alphabet in cuneiform may relate to the training of scribes in such a bilingual administration.431 The ample evidence for cuneiform writing in administration, conversely, is heavily biased towards economic life of the Babylonian temple as well as the 426 Cf. Beaulieu 2013: 358–359. 427 Lipiński 2000: 409; Fales 2011b; Streck 2014. 428 The only known example is a Late Babylonian tablet of unknown function on which only three personal names can be read (Müller-Kessler 1998 = Lemaire 2001 no. 9*). Another text referred to by Zadok 2003: 558 is actually the Neo-Assyrian edict kai 317 from Syria (see Section 3.1.1 above; a Neo-Babylonian origin has been tentatively suggested in a passing remark by Fales 1978: 282, to whom Zadok’s classification is indebted, but this proposal has not found wide acceptance). 429 A convenient list of all 274 known Neo- and Late-Babylonian texts of this kind with bibliographical references has been assembled by Oelsner 2006 (including indications of a few more possible examples from unpublished tablets); Blasberg 1997 and Zadok 2003: 558– 578 provide a discussion of the evidence, the former also with a selection of texts. The old edition by Delaporte 1912 contains useful drawings, notes, and references to earlier literature for the material then known. 430 Röllig 2005: 124–125; Oelsner 2007a: 218–219. One document, brm 1,22, is occasionally dated to a year as early as 728/727 b.c.e. (Zadok 2003: 559) and would then confirm the existence of Aramaic epigraphs in Babylonia long before the Neo-Babylonian empire. Unfortunately, however, the said text is so short and doubtful that this cannot be ascertained (see Lipiński 2000: 421 n. 63; Röllig 2005: 124). 431 Cross – Huehnergard 2003. The date cannot be determined with certainty; proposals range between the seventh and the third or second centuries b.c.e. (ibid. 223–224 n. 3).

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patrician families in Babylonia (excepting the Murašū archive from Nippur and its immediate surroundings in Achaemenid times) and thus presumably not remotely representative of the empire at large or even for other social strata in the capital.432 Hence, the fact that only some 280 of in total approximately 20.000 Neo- and Late-Babylonian economic tablets have Aramaic epigraphs, that is, a bit more than one percent, seems to be related chiefly to the restricted economic circuit of the specific social group that used clay tablets and cuneiform writings. Perishable materials will no doubt have enjoyed a much wider circulation. While the custom of adding clerical notes in Aramaic to Babylonian tablets for easier identification thus appears to have been taken over from the Assyrians as part of a bilingual system of administration (see Section  3.2.1 above), the exact formulae employed in both corpora exhibit some differences. Instead of with dnt or ʾgrt, as was the usual way in the Neo-Assyrian period, the Babylonian epigraphs are commonly introduced by the variant term šṭr ‘written document of’,433 and a few examples with simply the name of the creditor at the beginning, or, very rarely, the preposition l- ‘to’ are also attested.434 Such a shift in terminology would in any case presuppose an active and not a fossilized use of Aramaic also in the Babylonian heartland. Nonetheless, the effect of this apparently modified system of indexation on the administrative modalities operative in the provinces cannot be assessed with any certainty. The true significance of these minute differences in both the monolingual administrative documents in Aramaic and in the Aramaic epigraphs on Akkadian tablets would of course have to be evaluated on the basis of a much more substantial textual corpus than the one currently available before widerranging conclusions can be formulated. Still, the evidence for micro-variation just surveyed suggests that either the coexistence of different patterns from Neo-Assyrian times (owing to a persisting lack of standardization of bureaucratic customs conducted in Aramaic) continued into Neo-Babylonian administration, or that elements of several patterns were rearranged into a new, characteristically Babylonian, format. No matter what the answer to this question may be, the one monolingual sixth-century administrative text in Aramaic from outside Babylonia is quite compatible with the hypothesis of an unbroken and dynamic use of alphabetic writing instead of cuneiform even after the end of the Neo-Assyrian empire. 432 Zadok 2003: 481. 433 Cf. Röllig 2002a: 23 with n. 232. 434 Some instances occur in the Nerab tablets, see Oelsner 1989: 75–76.

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Further, though no less indirect, evidence can add to this general picture. It has been perceptively remarked that Aramaic and the alphabetic script may have been much more deeply rooted in the bureaucratically more innovative royal administration even in Babylonia, whereas the temple archives, which have yielded most of the surviving evidence, employed Akkadian language and cuneiform writing as part of their procedural as well as cultural conservatism.435 Traditional scribal training thus produced a “classicizing” veneer of the texts.436 However, the noteworthy presence of “alphabet scribes” (sēpiru or sepīru)437 instead of “cuneiform scribes” (ṭupšarru) especially in royal administration, where their prominence seems to have increased over time, points to a considerably greater role of Aramaic than the overwhelming prevalence of Akkadian documents in the surviving record might suggest. As many of these alphabet scribes bore Aramaic names,438 they may well have been speakers of Aramaic. In addition, more than two-hundred sixth-century stamps with figural inscriptions and Aramaic letters on Babylonian bricks, most if not all of which contain personal names,439 could testify to the regular use of Aramaic among craftsmen. Even if the true function of these stamps remains elusive (did the names refer to the people responsible for the construction of certain walls, or parts thereof?),440 one may speculate that it was the builders who were supposed to read them. A prominent role of alphabetic writing, and hence presumably of Aramaic as well, in settings that do not presuppose a higher degree of literacy also emerges from indirect evidence for Aramaic characters as ownership marks on animals and slaves.441 All this, conversely, would imply a regular presence of Aramaic in Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon in contexts other than economy and administration. Babylonia itself may well have been largely 435 Jursa 2012 and 2014. It is a matter of some debate how “Babylonian traditions” lingered on in the core area; according to some (especially Oelsner 2007a), they remained dominant even until the early Arsacid period. 436 Cf. the summary in Blasberg 1997: 156–158. 437 The exact transcription and analysis of this word (se-pi/pir-ru/ri in cuneiform spelling) are controversial. It is generally accepted to be of Aramaic origin; sēpiru would presuppose an original active participle /sāpir/ with imala of /ā/ (so, e.g., Beyer 2004: 448, s.v.), sepīru another, less easily classified noun pattern with a long /ī/ in the second syllable (Blasberg 1997: 42). Pearce 2000 provides a study of the use of this term. 438 Streck 2011: 417, with further bibliography. 439 Sass – Marzahn 2010; see also Oelsner 2007b. 440 No convincing answer is provided by the editors, see Sass – Marzahn 2010: 193–194. 441 See most recently Jursa 2005 for a survey of the evidence and further bibliographical references.

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bilingual by the first half of the sixth century b.c.e., and Aramaic presumably acted as the normal language of administration in the provinces. The end point  of this development will have been a complete shift from Akkadian as a vernacular to Aramaic, perhaps at some stage in the fifth or fourth century b.c.e.442 3.2.3 Aramaic as a Diplomatic Language and its Use in Official Letters Evidence for letter writing in Aramaic during the Neo-Assyrian and the NeoBabylonian periods begins with a text from Syria-Palestine and one from Mesopotamia relating to official and diplomatic correspondence in the middle and the end of the seventh century b.c.e. The later Hermopolis letters from around 500 b.c.e. and thus the early years of Achaemenid rule in Egypt, though clearly not yet composed in Achaemenid Official Aramaic, illustrate the role of Aramaic in the private correspondence of individuals (see Section 3.3.2 below). It remains debatable whether this chronological distribution of the very restricted material–first official, then private documents–mirrors an increase in literacy in some regions, with a resulting diffusion of letter writing among private individuals, or is simply due to the coincidence of transmission. A not altogether implausible account of the relation between Aramaic as an international language of diplomacy and local idioms in the Neo-Assyrian period is captured in the well-known story about the encounter between the officials of king Hezekiah from Jerusalem with the Assyrian messengers (2 Kings 18:17–37, referring to events in the year 701 b.c.e.). Hezekiah’s delegation suggested to conduct the public negotiations in Aramaic, lest the people understand it and become confused (2 Kings 18:26). Despite its antiquarian flair with the exact titles of the various officials involved, this account obviously does not have to be historical. Nevertheless, it does illustrate a situation that can, by and large, be accepted as reasonably likely: knowledge of Aramaic spread among government functionaries and was employed for international matters; however, it still co-existed with regional vernaculars and was not yet universally understood by the common people throughout Palestine. As with the economic documents, the available evidence does not adequately reflect the true extent of Aramaic’s prominence in official epistolography: not more than two texts have survived, the short Adon letter on papyrus, originally from Syria-Palestine but discovered at Saqqāra in Egypt (kai 266 = tad A1.1; written around 600 b.c.e.), and the long Assur ostracon from Mesopotamia (kai 233; composed around 650 b.c.e. in Southern Babylonia). There is no indication that Aramaic in diplomatic correspondence was any 442 So Beaulieu 2013: 360.

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more standardized than in bookkeeping, hence the material adds to the general impression of inner-linguistic diversity that one gets from a closer study of the seventh- and sixth-century economic tablets. On the other hand, the occurrence of basic patterns such as opening formulae introduced by ʾl ‘to’ followed by the names of addressee and sender, or mn ‘from’ with the names in reverse order, more or less elaborate salutations with stereotypical expressions of greeting and blessing, and the transition marker wkʿt ‘and now’, to which also later Aramaic letters of the Achaemenid period with their much wider geographical distribution conform, points to the existence of an already reasonably fixed form (with some variation) for Aramaic letter writing and thus, indirectly, to the important role it must have played.443 In the absence of other suitable telecommunication strategies, official letters served a crucial function in enforcing imperial control on the provinces and thus contributed significantly to the cohesion of early empires.444 Once again, the use of papyrus as writing material for non-representational purposes can account for the scarcity of evidence from the western provinces. In the only available example from this period, an otherwise unknown king named Adon (kai 266:1) wrote to the Pharaoh, here addressed as mrʾ mlkn ‘lord of kings’ in the prescript, with a request for military help against the advancing Babylonian troops. Since the Adon letter was dispatched to Egypt, it had a much greater chance to be preserved in the dry desert climate. Hence, it may illustrate a type of Aramaic letter writing that was in fact more common in Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian SyriaPalestine. Its place of origin is not mentioned in the fragment, but a note on the back in Demotic seems to confirm receipt of ‘What the prince of Ekron gave’, so Adon was presumably the ruler of the city Ekron in Philistia or, alternatively, another Philistine kinglet. The Aramaic spelling and language of the surviving parts of the letter does not contain any unambiguous dialect features. This may suggest that it reflects a de-regionalized medium of international communication rather than a local vernacular, but the limited amount of material should caution against attaching too much significance to such an argument from silence. No object marking occurs, so it cannot be said with certainty whether the language of the Adon letter belonged to the Western group of Aramaic with its distinctive 443 Cf. Fitzmyer 1974 for the Aramaic evidence and Schwiderski 2000 for the more general Northwest Semitic background. 444 See Radner 2014, who argues that a fast and reliable long-distance communication network at the exclusive service of the state was first implemented in the Neo-Assyrian period.

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direct object particle ʾyt. The basic-stem infinitive with /m-/ lmšlḥ ‘in order to send’ (kai 266:7) conforms to the rest of late Old Aramaic and subsequent developmental stages of the language, whereas the causative-stem infinitive without /m-/ lhṣltn[y] ‘in order to save m[e]’ (ibid.) aligns the Adon letter with early Old Aramaic as well as the dialect on which later Achaemenid Official Aramaic is based, in contradistinction to the Aḥiqar proverbs, the Hermopolis letters, and later Western forms of Aramaic. Neither feature thus enables one to associate the language variety of the Adon letter with any specific regional dialect of Aramaic. This hypothesis gains support from the observation that in Ekron, as in the other Philistine cities, a Canaanite language was used for domestic purposes. A royal dedicatory inscription from the first half of the seventh century b.c.e. is composed in an idiom that cannot be easily distinguished from Hebrew (the writing bt ‘house’ for /bēt/ in line 1 instead of byt /bayt/ is especially close to Northern Hebrew in that it appears to reflect early monophthongization of diphthongs); nonetheless, it seems to employ Phoenician spelling conventions (such as bn ‘he built’ without a final vowel letter) and expressions that have parallels in Phoenician dedicatory epigraphs from Byblos.445 Although Ekron may well have been a Neo-Assyrian vassal state,446 the local language (be it Hebrew, Phoenician, or a separate Canaanite variety) was apparently still used also in representational inscriptions. Aramaic would then have played an increasingly important role in diplomacy and international communication, but it had not yet replaced the regional idiom. There is no evidence for the use of Aramaic for domestic purposes in the Philistine cities.447 This seems to correspond to the language situation in other parts of Palestine at that time, especially Judaea, where numerous documentary texts (such as the Lachiš letters from shortly after 600 b.c.e.) still illustrate the use of Hebrew in domestic administration and communication.

445 Gitin – Dothan – Naveh 1997: 8–16. The spelling of the third-person masculine singular suffix with h, by contrast, does not correspond to Standard Phoenician. Scholars are therefore divided as to whether one can identify a proper “Philistine” language as opposed to other Canaanite idioms or not (see Israel 1999). 446 Gitin – Dothan – Naveh 1997: 3 with further bibliography in n. 8. 447 The ostracon from Tell Jemmeh (Naveh 1985: 19–20) is ambiguous; besides a number of enigmatic ʿ signs, only the expression ʿl yd ‘on the hand of’, ‘under the responsibility of’ can be confidently read, but it could be either Canaanite or Aramaic. A jar inscription from Ekron itself (Gitin – Dothan – Naveh 1997: 15) seems to be written in Aramaic letters but only contains the personal name ḥmlk, a short form of Aḥīmilk that was quite widespread in Phoenicia.

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It is more difficult to determine the relation between Aramaic and Akkadian letter writing in Mesopotamia. Akkadian cuneiform texts as the traditional medium of Mesopotamian epistolography completely dominate the written record, but several references in the Akkadian corpus suggest that officials also corresponded in Aramaic among themselves.448 Court etiquette, however, seems to have prescribed that communications to the king, at any rate, should be composed in Akkadian, so a Southern Babylonian functionary under Sargon II had to be reminded to forward his reports in the former and not in Aramaic, which indicates that the latter did happen.449 As the vast majority of the about 3000 Neo-Assyrian letters450 come from palaces, the specific linguistic conventions of that particular environment govern the available evidence, but it is unlikely to represent the total situation. A possible instance of code-switching in a Neo-Babylonian letter reinforces the impression of a basically bilingual administrative milieu in first-millennium Mesopotamia, with Aramaic surfacing in spontaneous utterances like curses.451 One should expect that a systematic study of the many Assyrian and Babylonian letters might uncover other instances of (partly subconscious) language contact. Besides papyri, Aramaic ostraca painted with ink could have served as a normal medium for messages of a less lasting importance and in a less formal setting than the royal court; hence they might have been used abundantly both by government officials and private individuals.452 The one surviving specimen, the Assur ostracon, may thus only be the tip of an iceberg. It was sent by a cohort commander of Assurbanipal from Babylon to Assur, where it has been discovered during excavations (1903–1913),453 and reports about fugitive prisoners, but the exact sense remains elusive due to the fragmentary state of preservation. From a linguistic point of view, the most interesting aspect of this text concerns features that connect it with later Achaemenid Official Aramaic and may reinforce the hypothesis of the latter’s Babylonian background.454

448 See Fales 2007a: 108–110, 2007b: 142 with n. 9 and Fales – Radner – Pappi – Attardo 2005: 602 with n. 34 for a few well-known passages. 449 This often-quoted passage is now available in Dietrich 2003 no. 2, lines 13–21. Cf. Pearce 2000: 364–366; Fales 2007b: 142. 450 So the estimate by Fales 2010: 193–194. 451 See the insightful study by Jursa 2012. 452 Cf. Fales 2007b: 155. 453 See Fales 2010: 198 for a brief sketch of the historical background of the text and prosopographical information on the persons mentioned in it. 454 Gzella 2008a: 97–100; cf. Fales 2010: 194 n. 28. The alleged affiliation of the Assur ostracon with “Eastern Aramaic” in early twentieth-century literature (cf. Rosenthal 1939: 34)

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The clearest isogloss between the Assur ostracon and Achaemenid Official Aramaic consists in the regular replacement of the third-person plural object suffixes (masculine -hm ‘them’) with transitive verbs by the corresponding independent personal pronoun (masculine hmw ‘they’). While the former is well attested in early Old Aramaic and has evidently been preserved until the end of late Old Aramaic,455 the Assur ostracon has at least nine instances of the third-person plural independent pronoun instead of the pronominal suffix and thus conforms to the normal situation in Achaemenid Official Aramaic.456 Likewise, the preservation of the unprefixed basic-stem infinitive in the fossilized quotative marker lʾmr ‘saying’ after a verb of speaking occurs, with identical function, only in the Assur ostracon and in Achaemenid texts from Elephantine and Saqqāra (the normal infinitive ‘to say’ would already have been mʾmr with a prefixed /m-/, as in Aḥiqar, tad C1.1:163).457 It cannot be stated with certainty whether this second feature may count as a common innovation or simply as an archaic though previously unattested form inherited from early Old Aramaic and subsequently lexicalized in a fixed expression, but given the other parallel between the Assur ostracon and the Achaemenid chancellery language, it could well have originated or at least have been more regularly used in a Babylonian variety of Aramaic.458 Whereas the language of the Assur ostracon at the same time exhibits a number of differences as opposed to Achaemenid Official Aramaic, especially the lack of “degeminating” spellings (as in ʾt ‘you’ in lines 2 and 19 vis-à-vis

455

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should be discarded, since nothing aligns this text with what is now understood as the “Eastern” dialect group of Aramaic on linguistic grounds (see Section 5.5.1). See Degen 1969: 80 for the earlier and Hug 1993: 87–88 for the later evidence. The most pertinent late Old Aramaic example is the suffixed infinitive of a transitive root with verbal function lmwšrthm ‘in order to send them’ from the second Hermopolis letter (line 13). Another possible attestation from the Aḥiqar proverbs, mnḥtwthm ‘to put them down’ (tad C1.1:170), is debated (Kottsieper 1990: 13, for instance, considers the m a dittography and corrects the text according to the form with singular suffix mnḥtwth in the following line, cf. also Hoftijzer – Jongeling 1995: 727). In the light of other unambiguous pre-Achaemenid features in the Hermopolis letters (see Section 3.3.2 below), at any rate, they are very obviously to be connected with Old Aramaic rather than with Achaemenid Official Aramaic. Hug 1993: 55. The one allegedly suffixed form in line 17, ʾklthm wmrʾy ‘a fire has devoured them and my lord […]’, may therefore result from haplography (as has been correctly remarked by Degen 1979: 50 n. 86 and Hug 1993: 20). Another example occurs in one of the Hermopolis letters (tad A2.1:6), but it is not preceded by a verb of saying and thus does not act as a quotative marker in the strict sense. The true significance of this difference remains unclear, though. Cf. Gzella 2014c: 147–148.

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Achaemenid ʾnt), both may thus have roots in the complex Aramaic dialect landscape of Southern Babylonia.459 If that is true, the Assur ostracon, although it basically corresponds to established spelling conventions, would reflect some influence of a local vernacular that had not yet been elevated to the status of a written language. Only a century later did another dialectal variety from the same region advance to the chancellery idiom of the Achaemenid empire. The fact that two officials of the Assyrian empire exchanged a letter in a form of Aramaic that differed in at least one, perhaps in two important respects from earlier written registers but agrees with a later variety, indicates that communication in Aramaic, also as a vernacular, must have been sufficiently widespread outside the court setting and perhaps even dominant in private communication. 3.3

Aramaic in the Private Domain

Although the linguistic affiliation of a personal name does not necessarily say anything about the language commonly used by its bearer, it seems hard to resist the conclusion that the growing presence of West Semitic elements in the onomasticon of Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian documentary texts coincides with a spread of Aramaic-speaking individuals across the Near East during the seventh and the sixth centuries b.c.e.460 Some of them may have been traders and craftsmen from Syria, others deportees from the western provinces, and again others the children of parents who had themselves switched to the use of Aramaic later in their lives. Conversely, some traditional Akkadian names in the Mesopotamian sources could also belong to native speakers of Aramaic who had accepted the cultural hegemony of Assyria and Babylonia. The growing popularity of Aramaic throughout the imperial territory, however, is also reflected by textual material outside the professional circles of clerks and administrators, first in funerary inscriptions, 459 A possible counter-argument may be the alleged occurrence of what could be a form of the Western object marker ʾyt with a third-person masculine plural suffix at the beginning of line 6 (ʾythm ‘them’). However, no conclusive interpretation of this string of letters can be established, since both the preceding and the following text are missing (see Hoftijzer – Jongeling 1995: 48 for bibliographical references). If the reading is correct, an alternative interpretation (e.g., as a suffixed form of the existence marker ʾyty ‘there is’; cf. Beyer 1984: 509 for the by-form ʾyt due to reanalysis) would better correspond to the known distributional pattern of the object marker ʾyt and later yt, which otherwise occur in Western texts only. 460 Fales 1991; Zadok 2003.

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then in private letters. They allow a glimpse into the continuity of Aramaic in  Syria as well as into the daily life of Aramaic-speaking foreign colonies, especially in Egypt. 3.3.1 Funerary Inscriptions The practice of erecting funerary monuments with Aramaic texts for members of the local elite is already attested by the inscription for the royal steward Kuttamuwa from Samʾal in north-western Syria around the middle of the eighth century b.c.e. (see Section 2.2.3). The two basalt stelae of the priests Sinzeribni (kai 225) and Siʾgabbar (kai 226) from Nerab near Aleppo, which have been dated to ca. 700 b.c.e. on palaeographic grounds, belong to the same tradition. As Siʾgabbar is presumably identical to a priest and royal servant mentioned in a letter to the Assyrian king Sargon II,461 both individuals will have belonged to the nobility. The iconography, too, underscores their high status, and the stone belonging to Siʾgabbar depicts a funerary banquet similar to the one on the Kuttamuwa stele. Yet the corresponding inscriptions testify to a growing use of written forms of Aramaic in the private domain that characterizes much of the seventh- and especially the sixth-century material, when the employ of Aramaic also for representational purposes increasingly extended beyond the official sphere. Both texts contain apparently traditional formulae with curses upon those who would disturb the departed; these formulae and the first-person diction of  the deceased have approximate parallels in other first-millennium WestSemitic epitaphs (particularly Phoenician ones, such as kai 13 and 14).462 Siʾgabbar’s account of the day of his own death (kai 226:4–6) in particular reflects a formal prose style that reminds one of the rhetoric of the Old Aramaic monumental inscriptions, but now in a non-royal setting. Nor surprisingly, the language, too, illustrates the transition from the early to the late Old Aramaic period.463 The spelling basically conforms to Old Aramaic standards with a faithful representation of the etymological interdentals (like znh ‘this one’ in kai 225:7 and 226:2), intervocalic /-h-/ in causativestem forms (so in thns ‘you drag away’ from nws in kai 225:6 and 226:8, similarly in line 9), assimilation of /n/ in contact (as in ysḥw ‘may they eradicate’ from 461 Yun 2006: 40–41 n. 30; Niehr 2010: 42. 462 See Niehr 2010 for a synopsis of the religious background and pictures. 463 Their transitional character is also emphasized by Yun 2006, but his (at times questionable) analysis of several relevant grammatical facts and the underlying framework, which operates on the basis of a partition of Old and Imperial Aramaic around 700 b.c.e., differ from the views championed here.

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nsḥ in kai 225:9),464 and even the soon obsolete writing of the negation /lā/ as a prefixed l- (kai 226:4.6), which is typical for Central Syrian but differs from most of the remaining late Old Aramaic evidence (see Section  3.1.2). Wordmedial vowel letters (notably with suffixed third-person verbal forms like in ykṭlwk ‘may they let you die’, kai 225:11, and šmwny ‘they have placed me’, kai 226:3, but also in hwm ‘confusion’, kai 226:6) have rare predecessors in Central Syrian as well, although they occur here with greater frequency. Morphology, by contrast, exhibits at least one clear innovation: the causative-stem infinitive with a prefixed /m-/ (mmtth ‘his dying’, kai 226:10) is not yet attested in the early Old Aramaic material but has parallels in other late Old Aramaic texts such as the Aḥiqar proverbs and the Hermopolis letters.465 Consequently, the language reflected in the Nerab stelae cannot be subsumed under Central Syrian but represents either a variety of the former regional koiné that has developed further, or a dialect previously eclipsed by it and perhaps confined to lower registers than the king’s diction (comparable to a ­difference in use between Samʾalian and the dialect of the Kuttamuwa inscription). The presence of this typologically more recent infinitive reflects, albeit by way of a small detail, the linguistic evolution of Aramaic in Syria. Another funerary inscription for a priest has been discovered at Memphis in Egypt.466 Unfortunately, it contains only one very short sentence. Palaeography points to a date towards the end of the sixth century b.c.e., but there are no distinctive linguistic hallmarks, hence it cannot be said with certainty whether it belongs to the late Old Aramaic or the early Achaemenid Official Aramaic stage. The language, at any rate, is clearly Aramaic, as emerges from the typically Aramaic words and forms in the expression kmrʾ zy ‘the priest of’. By 464 The writings tnṣr ‘you protect’ and ynṣr ‘it will be protected’ in kai 225:12.13 are sometimes parsed as basic-stem forms with etymological spelling of the /n/ (e.g., Yun 2006: 31–32.38.40, who anachronistically compares them with Achaemenid Official Aramaic) but could also, and more plausibly, be understood as factitive-stem forms where the /n/ would not assimilate due to a following vowel (Hug 1993: 148, s.v. nṣr; Beyer 2004: 440, s.v. nṭr). The factitive stem of this root is also attested in other Aramaic languages (cf. Beyer 1984: 637, s.v. nṭr). 465 In addition, Yun 2006: 26–27 interprets mḥzh in kai 226:5 as a basic-stem infinitive with /m-/ prefix, as would indeed be normal in Aramaic after the eighth century, instead of the usual analysis as a participle of the factitive stem (e.g., Degen 1969: 78 n. 82; Hug 1993: 86; cf. Gzella 2004: 131 n. 43). This seems syntactically almost impossible, however, since the alleged use of the regular infinitive as a finite verb is completely unparalleled in Aramaic, where a factitive stem of the root ḥzī with the meaning ‘to see’ may also be attested in Sfire (kai 222 A: 13, cf. Fitzmyer 21995: 77–78). 466 Dupont-Sommer 1956; Hug 1993: 34–35.

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contrast, the name of the author, ʾnn, could possibly be Phoenician (its Aramaic counterpart would be ḥnn),467 and the two deities he served, Baʿl and presumably also ʿAnat, feature prominently in the Canaanite and in particular the Phoenician pantheon. While the exact historical background remains largely elusive, this may point to the use of Aramaic in a Phoenician or otherwise Canaanite colony in Egypt in the late sixth century b.c.e.468 3.3.2 Private Letters Different Aramaic-speaking groups from Syria-Palestine were present in Egypt already before it was conquered by the Persians, and apparently as early as the end of the eighth century b.c.e.469 Two administrative documents on papyrus from Egypt have been dated to the seventh century b.c.e. on grounds of palaeography,470 and the Adon letter from Saqqāra proves that diplomatic correspondence in Aramaic was dispatched to the Pharaoh’s court around 600 b.c.e. at the latest (see Section 3.2.3 above). Private letters on papyrus from this early period may also have existed once; yet the surviving evidence does not allow one to outline the use of Aramaic in daily communication between individuals with any detail until about 500 b.c.e., when it finally becomes evident that Aramaic in Egypt was not confined to official purposes such as diplomacy but also common among resident aliens. The famous Judaean community on the island Elephantine only becomes visible in the Achaemenid Official Aramaic papyri, but its inhabitants were the descendants of mercenaries who entered the service of Psammetichus I (664– 610) or II (595–589) and settled, together with their families, near the first cataract of the Nile.471 They were aware of their earlier history in Egypt, as a reference to their long tradition of religious worship in a later letter addressed to the Persian authorities regarding the destruction of their temple shows (tad A4.7:13 = A4.8:12–13). Since the terms “Judaean” (/yahūdāy/, tad B2.2:3)472 and “Aramaean” (/ʾaramāy/, B2.1:2) seem to have been used interchangeably for the same person, this could indicate that the part of Judaea from which they originally came was already in part Aramaic-speaking by then. 467 Cf. Dupont-Sommer 1956: 82. 468 So, too, Hug 1993: 34. 469 Cf. Porten 2003, who, on broader historical grounds, dates the establishment of a Judaean settlement in Egypt around 650 b.c.e. 470 Hug 1993: 29–30. Cf. also Degen 1974a: 66 and 69–70. 471 See Grelot 1972: 33–42. 472 The original meaning of this designation is purely geographic; the religious sense “Jew” is only attested in the third or second century b.c.e. (cf. Beyer 2004: 34).

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Another Aramaic-speaking community is directly attested in a collection of eight private letters on papyrus from around 500 b.c.e., discovered at the temple of Ibis in Hermopolis. Given the onomasticon and the Syrian deities mentioned in the salutation formulae, the origin of these people, perhaps, like the inhabitants of Elephantine, the descendants of soldiers in the service of the Pharaoh, may be traced back to Syria. The language of these letters, however, occupies a special place within the known varieties of Aramaic. They communicate matters of daily life between ordinary members of Aramaean groups in Memphis and Syene as well as Ophis; owing to their non-official character, they reflect the influence of both sub-standard phonetic spelling and vernacular language more immediately than documents composed in the formal registers.473 Spelling variation emerges from an inconsistent mix between traditional orthography and a much higher proportion of writings apparently not influenced by any chancellery standard than elsewhere in Old Aramaic: frequent lh for /lā/ ‘not’ (tad A2.1:5.6; 2.2:3; 2.3:4.11; 2.4:5; 2.5:3.4.7.8) occasionally oscillates with lʾ (tad 2.1:8); hw for /hū/ ‘he’ (tad A2.1:8) and hy /hī/ ‘she’ (tad A2.4:6; 2.5:7; 2.8:3; so, too, in the roughly contemporaneous Bauer-Meissner papyrus from 515 b.c.e., also from Egypt: tad B1.1:6) occurs instead of etymological hʾ as elsewhere in Old Aramaic; the emphatic-state ending was mostly written with -h for /-ā/ (e.g., tad 2.1:12; 2.2:4.17; 2.3:13; 2.4:12; 2.5:9; 2.6:3.6) instead of -ʾ (the latter being an etymological writing for older */-āʾ/); dh for /dā/ is used for the feminine-singular near-deictic ‘this one’ (tad A2.5:7) instead of zʾ (reflecting original */ðāʾ/) and for kdy /ka-dī/ (from older */ka-ðī/) ‘as long as’ (tad A2.1:4.7) instead of kzy, but the traditional spelling znh appears consistently for the masculine form of the near-deictic; a few instances of ʾ instead of h for the causative-stem prefix */ha-/, which had presumably shifted to /ʾa-/ in pronunciation, are also attested. Interestingly, hw and hy for the third-person singular independent pronouns were generalized in Achaemenid Official Aramaic, hence the corresponding instances in the Hermopolis letters and the BauerMeissner papyrus could also result from an incipient influence of the Persian chancellery orthography in Egypt. In addition to this inconsistent and largely sub-standard spelling, which is often influenced by pronunciation and not by etymology, morphological evidence points to a different dialect as the linguistic basis of the Hermopolis letters. The few absolute-state feminine-singular forms in /-at/ (tad A2.1:11; 2.2:11.12; 2.4:4) preserve an older form of this ending that has otherwise 473 See Gzella 2011b: 582–583 for a synopsis and Greenfield – Porten 1968: 219–223 for a more extensive treatment.

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generally been replaced by /-ā/ (with which they occur in free variation) already in early Old Aramaic.474 By contrast, the many examples of possessive suffixes of the second- and third-person masculine plural in /-n/ instead of /-m/475 may prelude similar forms in later Aramaic, even if it should be noted that an interchange between /m/ and /n/ is phonetically so natural that it can easily happen independently and may already have existed in an older dialect. Levelling could also have been triggered by the corresponding feminine forms in /-n/ by way of paradigm pressure and by the afformatives of the “imperfect.”476 Causative-stem infinitives prefixed by /m-/ (tad A2.2:13; 2.3:11bis; 2.5:6),477 too, are untypical in Achaemenid Aramaic and recur more regularly in later Western Aramaic as well as in Syriac. They are less easy to explain as a result of independent levelling and also have parallels in the Old Aramaic Aḥiqar proverbs, which may have been composed in Syria or North-Western Mesopotamia (see Sections  3.1.2 and 3.4). Moreover, the participle has already been integrated to some extent into the verbal system as a general present tense (tad 2.1:6; 2.5:2), thereby anticipating Achaemenid Official Aramaic usage.478 Last but not least, the strikingly frequent “periphrastic imperative,” which combines a finite form of the verb ‘to be’ and a participle, seems to be used for polite requests and appears much more often here than elsewhere in Aramaic,479 perhaps owing to an influence of the colloquial language. Several important differences as opposed to Achaemenid Official Aramaic nonetheless align this material with other Old Aramaic varieties: besides the vestiges of the feminine-singular ending /-at/ and the infinitives of the derived stems with /m-/ prefix, the scarcity of “degeminating” spellings of long consonants with a non-etymological n (as presumably in mndʿm ‘anything’ in tad A2.5:4 but mdʿm in 2.1:10; 2.4:10; 2.5:2; see, however, Section 3.1.2 above on the debated etymology) and the use of third-person plural suffixes instead of the 474 Allegedly similar forms in Achaemenid Official Aramaic act as adverbs, cf. Gzella 2011b: 578. No such syntactic distinction applies to their counterparts in the Hermopolis letters, since they occur as grammatical subjects and, especially (since feminine subjects are rare), as objects. There seems to be no functional difference between /-at/ and /-ā/ in Hermopolis. 475 Cf. Hug 1993: 56–59 for a complete survey of the evidence. 476 So Beyer 1984: 150. 477 See Hug 1993: 77. 478 Hug 1993: 119; more extensively Gzella 2004: 194–203. Evidence for the predicative participle acting on par with the finite verbal forms is otherwise rare in Old Aramaic, but cf. kai 226:5 with Gzella 2004: 131 n. 43 for an even earlier example from the Nerab-stelae. 479 Gzella 2004: 266–269; cf. 2011b: 583.

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corresponding independent pronouns (as has been discussed in Section 3.2.3 above on the Assur ostracon) have diagnostic value.480 Hence, these letters seem to reflect a pre-Achaemenid Aramaic dialect from Egypt, supposedly one with Western roots, and not Achaemenid Official Aramaic.481 Only the written garb may have been secondarily affected by the incipient influence of Achaemenid spelling conventions that were presumably gaining ground around 500 b.c.e., not the language itself. If the members of this community originally came from Syria, their form of Aramaic could thus continue a local spoken variety that does not feature in the earlier written record. When they started using it for private letters, they were not indebted to any existing chancellery norm but employed an inconsistent mix of standard and sub-standard spellings, on which in the course of time also Achaemenid orthographic conventions like mndʿm instead of more frequent mdʿm began to encroach. The Hermopolis letters and the Bauer-Meissner papyrus (which exhibits a similar inconsistency in the spelling of etymological /n/, as in ʾntn ‘I give’ in tad B1.1:10 as opposed to ʾtnnhy ‘I give it’ in tad B1.1:11) thus appear to illustrate, at least for Egypt, the growing impact of Achaemenid standards on pre-existing Aramaic varieties (see also Section 4.1.3).482 3.4

Aramaic Literature: The Aḥiqar Tradition

Notwithstanding its prominence in administration as well as communication and, presumably, a growing number of speakers, there is still hardly any evidence for Aramaic as an important idiom of religion and literature during this period. The early Old Aramaic monumental inscriptions like the Zakkur stele (kai 202) do, however, represent the elevated language of a formal prose register that occasionally surfaces in later material, too, such as the diction of certain funerary inscriptions (for instance, kai 226:4–6) or the rhetorical embellishment of official letters (particularly in the Achaemenid corpus). Little is known about the origins of this high-register usage, but it may perhaps even be traced back to a common Northwest Semitic poetic diction that had already manifested itself in Ugaritic epic towards the end of the second millennium b.c.e. and was later absorbed into the emerging rhetorical prose 480 Consequently, it would be methodologically unsound to subsume the Hermopolis letters under Achaemenid Aramaic and view these differences as the influence of an undefined local adstrate. 481 Cf. Greenfield – Porten 1968: 223. 482 Gzella 2008a: 92 and 107.

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register. In addition, the Deir ʿAllā plaster inscription illustrates the interaction of Aramaic with Canaanite literary traditions in the early Old Aramaic period as a result of the growing political power of Damascus (see Section 2.3.2). While it would be entirely feasible to assume the existence of traditional songs, sayings, stories, prayers and liturgies, and perhaps even mythological tales passed on from one generation to another, these have materialized into surviving texts only in very exceptional cases and under unknown circumstances. The sole clear example from the late Old Aramaic period are the socalled Aḥiqar proverbs. They contain a number of admonitions, curses upon fools or sinners, maxims, and animal as well as plant fables that illustrate popular sagacity, all closely resembling biblical wisdom literature but without any obvious influence from Akkadian language and literature.483 The surviving collection has been combined with an Achaemenid Official Aramaic tale about the sage Aḥiqar, an Aramaean advisor to the Assyrian kings who survived a plot against him thanks to his insight and personal integrity (see Section 4.4.1). The figure of Aḥiqar subsequently enjoyed a long reception history in Near Eastern literatures.484 In the reworked Aramaic version, the story, together with the proverbs, is preserved in substantial fragments of fourteen columns of a fifth-century papyrus palimpsest from Elephantine in Egypt and written according to Achaemenid spelling conventions (tad C1.1).485 Yet linguistic evidence consistently distinguishes the earlier proverbs, which in total cover nine columns, from the later story, despite the pervasive influence of Achaemenid orthography on the entire text (especially “degemination” in the writing of long consonants as in the frequent spelling ʾnt ‘you’).486 Even if the story, too, is based on earlier traditions, its language conforms to normal Achaemenid Official Aramaic usage of the fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e. The date and origin of the Aḥiqar proverbs are difficult or even impossible to ascertain given the limited comparative material in the corpus of seventhand sixth-century Aramaic. It has been suggested that they were composed 483 Weigl 2010. 484 See the various contributions in Contini – Grottanelli (eds.) 2005. 485 The original sequence of the columns of the papyrus and thus the exact relation between the proverbs and the narrative remain debated. The reconstruction in tad C.1.1, which has become the majority opinion, is based on the chronological sequence of the underlying customs account in the palimpsest (tad C3.7). Kottsieper, by contrast, suggests a different sequence on the assumption that the scroll had been separated into sheets before the original text was erased and subsequently put together in another order (he has argued the same point in a number of publications over the years, see Kottsieper 2008 for a recent discussion; it has not otherwise been accepted, however). 486 See Kottsieper 1990 for an analysis with text, translation, glossary, and drawings.

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some time between 750 and 650 b.c.e., either in Northern Syria,487 Southern Syria,488 or North-Western Mesopotamia.489 Each option, it should be noted, is based on just one rather weak and ambiguous linguistic isogloss. The basic-stem infinitive with /m-/ prefix has been generalized in the whole of late Old Aramaic and is thus no longer a regional trait. Conversely, the infinitives of the derived stems with a prefix /m-/ (see Section  3.1.2 above), which also occur in the Hermopolis letters and in later Western forms of Aramaic, but not in the Mesopotamian varieties, in Achaemenid Official Aramaic, or even in the Adon letter from Syria-Palestine, may indeed point to a Syrian local variety, but they do not follow any clear distributional pattern in the scanty evidence that has survived.490 It is therefore uncertain whether this form as such really distinguishes southern from northern Syrian dialects of Aramaic during the period in question. The only other possibly distinctive morphological feature with geographical relevance, the two instances of the spelling ʿmmʾ (tad C1.1:98.189), usually understood as ‘the peoples’, has been associated with the common masculine plural ending of the “emphatic state” in /-ē/ in the whole of later Eastern Aramaic.491 In that case, the Aḥiqar proverbs would contain at least one characteristically Eastern trait, which may point to an origin not in Syria but in North-Western Mesopotamia (since this feature seems to have diffused from  Mesopotamia according to its distribution in later evidence, see also Section 5.5.1).492 However, there are no unambiguous examples of this ending in ordinary Aramaic words before the second century b.c.e., and even texts from Mesopotamia consistently have -yʾ /-ayyā/ until then. Moreover, it remains unclear whether this word actually serves as a paradigmatic plural to the singular ʿm ‘people’, or whether the spelling represents the emphatic-state singular of a different lexeme (though otherwise unattested in Aramaic) 487 488 489 490

Lindenberger 1983: 279–304. Kottsieper 1990: 241–246. Weigl 2010: 677–678; similarly Beyer 2004: 50. Derived-stem infinitives with /m-/ prefix do therefore not necessarily militate against an origin in Eastern Syria or North-Western Mesopotamia either (pace Kottsieper 1990: 242), since the possible counter-examples of such unprefixed infinitives in the Tell Fekheriye inscription from ca. 850 b.c.e. (see Section 2.2.1) represent an earlier stage of the language that does not have to reflect the Aramaic variety of the region between 750 and 650 b.c.e. or later. 491 The bisyllabic plural base, as apparently evidenced by the double spelling of m, deviates from the situation in Sfire (kai 224:10) but occurs regularly in later forms of Aramaic as well (e.g., Daniel 3:4.7bis.31; 5:19; 6:26; 7:14; see Beyer 1984: 660, s.v., for other passages). 492 Beyer 1984: 98 and, more explicitly, 2004: 50 (with references to Aramaic toponyms in cuneiform texts), concluding that the idiom of the Aḥiqar proverbs reflects an Eastern Aramaic literary language. So, too, Gzella 2008a: 101.

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meaning ‘totality’.493 Possible lexical parallels with Canaanite, which have also been adduced in favour of a place of origin outside Mesopotamia and closer to the Canaanite speech area,494 have little diagnostic value due to the small comparative basis. They do not reflect characteristically Canaanite sound shifts or form an obvious semantic opposition to native Aramaic words; hence they may simply belong to the common Semitic stock. Since these are merely very general indications as far as time and place of composition are concerned, one cannot point to any specific historical circumstances that might have triggered the collection and perhaps also redaction of older wisdom material, which eventually resulted in the surviving text. With the rise of Aramaic-speaking clerks or even scholars in Neo-Assyrian imperial administration, there could well have arisen a more general tendency to produce at least a moderate amount of literary compositions in Aramaic based on older Syrian traditions.495 Such compositions might have served as a linguistic model for imitation in scribal education (not wholly dissimilar to reading and copying gnomic sayings as an integral part of Hellenistic and Roman literary education) and possibly also as a foil for the moral values of loyal court officials. The association with the advisor Aḥiqar, which only becomes tangible in the combination of the proverbs with their narrative frame in the Elephantine papyrus, could have roots in this period, too. Regardless of whether one can reasonably posit the existence of a class of Aramaic-speaking “mandarins” in imperial service, the production of non-­ documentary works in a literary style of Aramaic continues throughout Achaemenid times and thereafter. There is, nonetheless, little evidence that Aramaic also acted as a vehicle of Syrian culture besides its role in administration, in communication by means of letters, in representation, and as a ­vernacular in mono- or multilingual situations. Local literary traditions in Aramaic, starting with court novels, only begin to appear in the textual record during the Achaemenid period, although older works may have existed and disappeared with the perishable material they were written on. 3.5 Conclusion Aramaic under the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires in the seventh and sixth centuries b.c.e. reflects a considerable amount of internal heterogeneity. The rise of Central Syrian as an emerging regional koiné in the ninth and 493 As has been suggested by Kottsieper 1990: 118–121. 494 Kottsieper 1990: 244–245. 495 Cf. Weigl 2010: 757.

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eighth centuries was cut short and fed into an existing linguistic diversity that continued to evolve and spread further across the Near East between Egypt and Azerbaijan. Since neither the Assyrian nor the Babylonian government consistently standardized the use of Aramaic for official purposes (contrary to the Achaemenids in the subsequent period), its written forms, too, contain much variation in language and partly also in document format. Aramaic grew increasingly popular among distinct parts of society and for different reasons: as a prestige code patterned after Central Syrian of client kingdoms, attested by the Bukān inscription from the eastern periphery; as a means of communication among mobile craftsmen and workers, but presumably also in groups deported from Syria-Palestine to Mesopotamia and acculturated there; and as an idiom of imperial administration employed for debt notes, economic records, and official letter writing. In the course of time, it gradually came to be used more frequently as a written language also in the private domain. The decision of the Assyrian government to adopt Aramaic in imperial administration, continued by the Babylonians, thus only contributed to an uncontrolled spread of the language that was already in progress, but this official policy also gave it a further momentum. By the end of the Babylonian empire and the beginning of Achaemenid rule in 539 b.c.e., it may well have been the dominant lingua franca in the Near East as a whole and may have replaced Akkadian as a spoken language by the fifth or fourth century b.c.e. The coexistence of Aramaic with various local idioms in the provinces of the Neo-Assyrian and the Neo-Babylonian empires and with Akkadian in the Mesopotamian heartland resulted in a complicated distribution of languages across communicative situations. Aramaic no doubt persisted as a vernacular in its old homeland Syria, but clerks and administrators on the one hand and itinerant merchants and craftsmen on the other would have become increasingly bilingual. Local idioms, such as Phoenician, Hebrew, and the less wellknown Canaanite varieties of Philistia and Transjordan, remained in use also for representation in the vassal states (and, at least in some regions, for spoken discourse); yet provincial administration and international diplomacy relied on Aramaic. Akkadian with its distinguished history in Mesopotamia maintained its status as the idiom of the royal court, the king’s programmatic statements, traditional learning and culture, and much of the attested domestic administration in Assyria and Babylonia, but its use was not imposed on the provinces. At the same time, Aramaic also grew deep roots in imperial bureaucracy and epistolography: it served as a medium for legal deeds, economic records, and clerical notes on cuneiform tablets as well as in the correspondence of Mesopotamian officials. After the fall of the Neo-Assyrian empire, cuneiform

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writing retreated to Babylonia, where it nonetheless remained a marker of cultural self-awareness. This created a suitable backdrop for Aramaic literature to circulate more widely, at least among scribal classes. Since the writing materials generally employed for Aramaic and the alphabetic script were considerably more delicate than the sturdy cuneiform tablets, only a small fraction has survived. Nonetheless, the attested specimens and indirect references to Aramaic writing in Mesopotamia still point to its growing prominence in imperial administration and daily life. There is little evidence for a continuity of its earlier function as a vehicle of Syrian culture, however: Aramaic did not compete with Akkadian in Mesopotamia or the cultural languages in the west as a medium of official representation. It subsisted in successive world empires, but the Aramaeans did not found an empire themselves. Both the restricted amount of the material and the largely formulaic nature of the most extensive sub-corpora prevent one from identifying clear regional varieties, which must have existed among the vernaculars, in the written record. Some of them were eventually promoted to local chancellery languages in Syria and Mesopotamia, but only some time after the collapse of the Achaemenid empire. As a consequence, the umbrella term “Imperial Aramaic” for the evidence of this period merely reflects the general socio-cultural language situation and thus cannot serve as a linguistic category sharply defined in the light of unequivocal grammatical features. Despite these difficulties in depicting a dialectal map of seventh- and sixth-century Aramaic, certain diachronic ties can be established. The spelling conventions reflected by Central Syrian, as opposed to other ninth- and eighth-century forms of Aramaic, also underlie most of the textual evidence of the subsequent period, even if some of them will have been historical by then. The two Nerab inscriptions from Syria demonstrate, unsurprisingly, a reasonably close affinity with them without being fully identical to Central Syrian. Instances of more modern, phonetic, orthography crop up but very infrequently in official and representational documents, yet are common in the later private letters from Hermopolis. Some linguistic differences from older Central Syrian, especially phonetic changes that surface in occasional non-standard orthography, the regular basic-stem infinitive with an /m-/ prefix, and much less rigid word order patterns, witness to an ongoing evolution of Aramaic. These occur already in the non-mainstream dialect of the Tell Fekheriye inscription and thus seem to reflect a linguistic diversity of early Old Aramaic as a whole that was eclipsed by the prominence of Central Syrian in the written record but continued after the downfall of the kingdom of Damascus. Moreover, the very sporadic appearance of some traits of later Achaemenid Official Aramaic in a few Mesopotamian texts from the Neo-Assyrian period demonstrates that the dialect underlying

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the Persian chancellery language, also different from Central Syrian, was already taking on its shape. A few instances of presumably Achaemenid spelling conventions in the youngest Old Aramaic texts, the Hermopolis letter and the Bauer-Meissner papyrus, show how Achaemenid Official Aramaic also began to influence existing Aramaic varieties around 500 b.c.e. The continuous ­evolution of Aramaic can thus still be traced.

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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 ambiguous 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 ninthand eighth-century material, while others exhibit either linguistic innovations or by-forms that were not formerly attested in the written languages. In addition, 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 functionaries 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 significantly 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.

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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 NeoAssyrian 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 variety propagated by the Achaemenid chancellery from its functional predecessors 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.

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For this reason, and also because of its demonstrable impact on later forms of Aramaic, Achaemenid Official Aramaic is singled out in the present work. The life span of Achaemenid Official Aramaic does not coincide with the political and social structures of the government that upheld it. From a linguistic point of view, continuity extends beyond the rise and fall of the Achaemenid empire: one can thus make a reasonable case for the view that this idiom has grown out of a pre-Achaemenid local variety of Aramaic used in Babylonia, but it also lingered on in provincial areas some time after the downfall of the Achaemenid dynasty at the hands of Alexander the Great (similar to the survival of Central Syrian in Bukān, see Section 2.3.3). Its longlasting heritage then influenced, to varying degrees and interacting with regional vernaculars, the newly-emerging local languages that took on their shape as written idioms in Palestine, North Arabia, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Iran in the Hellenistic and Roman periods (see Chapter 5). This gradual transformation also affects Biblical Aramaic, whose time-honoured association with Achaemenid Official Aramaic501 has become a matter of debate when systematic research into the Aramaic texts from the Dead Sea produced what to some scholars seems a more appropriate point of comparison (see Section 4.4.2 below). The enduring presence of post-Achaemenid forms of the Achaemenid chancellery language502 makes it therefore difficult to define an endpoint of the Official Aramaic tradition and to narrow down the relevant corpus. For the same reason, these forms have all been subsumed under the same umbrella term “older Aramaic” in past approaches (such as Rosenthal 1939) as opposed to the “younger Aramaic” literary languages. A clear geographical diversification of Aramaic, at any rate, is only possible after the Achaemenid age (see Sections 5.5.1, 6.1.1, and 7.1.1). Achaemenid Aramaic material from Egypt, and specifically from Elephantine, has dominated the evidence ever since the opening years of the twentieth century; it has been described briefly by Leander 1928 and extensively by Muraoka – Porten 22003.503 The latter also includes pre-Achaemenid material such as the Hermopolis letters and texts discovered in Egypt but composed elsewhere, most notably the Aršama correspondence, hence the corpus that underlies 501 See also Gzella 2004: 41–45. 502 Nachachämenidisches Reichsaramäisch, or “Post-Achaemenid Imperial Aramaic,” in Beyer’s terminology, to be distinguished from the proper achämenidisches Reichsaramäisch, that is, “Achaemenid Imperial Aramaic” (Beyer 1984: 33–44 and 1986: 18–30). 503 But see Huehnergard 2002 and Morgenstern 2003 for a number of important corrections on various points.

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this work is heterogeneous both in chronological and in geographical terms. However, the hypothesis of an “Egyptian Aramaic” sub-variety was never correct (though basically feasible in Leander’s days due to the lack of suitable comparative material) and has finally been disproved by substantial textual discoveries from other parts of the empire. No single feature unites the various texts from Elephantine and Saqqāra, not to mention the Hermopolis letters, and sets them apart from those that have appeared in the meantime from Palestine or Bactria: they all essentially reflect the same language variety. Despite its relative popularity, then, the term “Egyptian Aramaic” is an evident misnomer and should be avoided, because it does not refer to any clearlydefined linguistic category.504 A full reference grammar of the entire Achaemenid Official Aramaic corpus now available remains a desideratum, and the significant new discoveries only add to its importance505; for the time being, Gzella 2011b furnishes a grammatical sketch that also includes the peculiarities of Biblical Aramaic. Most of the texts themselves, by contrast, are available and easily accessible in up-to-date and reliable presentations. As a corollary of the former preponderance of Achaemenid Aramaic sources discovered in Egypt, these have been assembled, together with the pre-Achaemenid material from the same region, in a comprehensive modern edition, Porten – Yardeni 1986–1999 (tad), which furnishes drawings, transliterations into square script based on fresh collations, translations into English and Modern Hebrew, and essential bibliography. To these, the new complete publication of the Clermont-Ganneau ostraca from Elephantine by Lozachmeur 2006 has to be added.506 Annotated English versions of some particularly important texts also feature in Porten et al. 22011, 504 Cf. Morgenstern 2003: 141. 505 It is currently in preparation by the present author. Segert 1975 includes Achaemenid material in his description of older Aramaic in general, but this work is neither comprehensive nor up-to-date and should only be consulted together with more recent studies (cf. Degen 1979). Folmer 1995 discusses a handful of unconnected phenomena of spelling, phonology, morphology, and the morpho-syntax of some (mostly nominal) constructions. Although the underlying framework heavily relies on the mid-twentieth century studies by Kutscher and Greenfield as well as the limitations imposed by the material then available, and the taxonomy indiscriminately mixes more and less significant evidence instead of assessing its weight, her extensive lists of examples and references to older (though now often outdated) secondary literature are still useful despite a number of methodological shortcomings. 506 Only a few of them had been published in advance and also appear in tad, namely nos. 16 = tad D7.7; 44 = D7.10; 70 = D7.21; 125 = D7.44; 152 = D7.16; 169 = D7.2; 186 = D7.35; 228 = D7.5; and 277 = D7.30.

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and the notes in Grelot 1972 are serviceable, too. Older editions of the texts on  papyrus and leather (Cowley 1923; Kraeling 1953; Driver 1954 and 1965; Segal  1983) preserve their value thanks to their often extensive philological commentary. Sub-corpora from other regions are available in recent specialized collections: Dušek 2007 for the private contracts from Samaria in Palestine (which replaces older, partial, editions of the better-preserved texts), Naveh – Shaked 2012 for the archive from Bactria, and Lemaire 1996 and 2002 for a selection of the numerous ostraca from Idumaea, many of which are still unpublished. An edition of the Aramaic administrative documents from Persepolis, by contrast, has yet to appear. A number of inscriptions on durable material from across the Achaemenid territory (North Arabia, Egypt, Asia Minor) can be conveniently accessed in Donner – Röllig 3–51971–2002 (kai 228–230; 258–263; 267– 272; 278; 318–319, the latter two without translation or commentary) and similar collections; for the rest, including small epigraphs on stones, coins, weights, statuettes, vessels, seals, bullae, and so forth, the respective editiones principes have to be consulted.507 All epigraphic texts from the Achaemenid period (thus excluding Biblical Aramaic) then known have also been included in Schwiderski 2004. Hoftijzer – Jongeling 1995 still acts as the standard dictionary, but the discoveries made in the meantime have yielded a substantial amount of new lexemes and grammatical forms not yet discussed there.508 For the time being, they can be found in the glossaries to the respective editions, but the accompanying translations may at times still be preliminary. Schwiderski’s concordance (2008) covers most of the corpus known until 2007 excepting the new ostraca from Elephantine, the Samaria papyri first published by Dušek 2007, and the Bactrian archive edited by Naveh – Shaked 2012. The older concordance by Porten – Lund 2002 is only based on the material in Porten – Yardeni 1986– 1999. As with the preceding stages, Beyer 1984: 503–728 and 2004: 341–506 situates a selection of the lexicon (but including the complete biblical material) in its wider Aramaic context. Several of the standard manuals of Biblical Aramaic, in particular Bauer – Leander 1927, Vogt 1971, and Rosenthal 72006, refer to comparative data from epigraphic sources from the Achaemenid period as well. Thanks to the considerable amount of surviving material representing many different genres, its vast geographical distribution across the entire Achaemenid sphere of influence, and its enduring impact on all successive stages of the 507 For older bibliography, cf. Beyer 1984: 29–32 and 15–18; 2004: 16–17; Gzella 2004: 36–41. 508 The future of a new edition, as it was envisaged a few years ago, is now uncertain.

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language, the Achaemenid chancellery idiom constitutes the best-known and most important variety of older Aramaic. The fact that substantial discoveries were unearthed already early in the twentieth century also gives it a special place in the history of research; for the past century, it has acted as an Archimedean point for the whole of Aramaic preceding the post-biblical Jewish and Christian literary traditions. Because Achaemenid Official Aramaic was controlled by a central authority and corresponds to a unified standard, the presentation of the material in this chapter follows a similar approach as in the preceding one and focuses primarily on the different contexts and communicative situations and not on regional variation; Aramaic vernaculars no doubt coexisted with the Achaemenid lingua franca but remained largely invisible during this period. Such a structure will be replaced by a primarily geographical arrangement in the following chapters, which discuss first the rise of local Aramaic chancellery languages in the post-Achaemenid period that eventually cluster into a bifurcation of a Western and an Eastern dialect group, then the subsequent emergence of a long-lasting local production of Aramaic literature. 4.1

Aramaic in the Achaemenid Empire

When the Achaemenid king Cyrus the Great founded a world empire around the middle of the sixth century b.c.e., Aramaic, as has been seen, had long become a global language in the Fertile Crescent. It continued to be spoken in its old heartland Syria, spread among the population in Mesopotamia, grew roots in Egypt with the arrival of immigrants from Syria-Palestine, and acted as a medium of representation in Central Asia. The decision to employ it in NeoAssyrian and later in Neo-Babylonian bureaucracy consolidated its role in domestic as well as provincial administration and paved the way to its use as an international diplomatic language. As a result, it was firmly supported by institutionalized (though apparently not yet uniform) scribal training and had developed, by the mid-sixth century b.c.e., numerous patterns readily available for all kinds of official and informal purposes, such as economic notes and legal documents, letters between functionaries and private individuals, representational inscriptions, and literary expression. It would have been an obvious decision for the chancellery of any newly-emerging imperial power to embrace such an already widely-used means of communication and incorporate its infrastructural underpinnings, such as scribal schools and administrative centres, rather than to replace them. Among the diverse varieties of Aramaic coexisting in the Fertile Crescent in the sixth century b.c.e., the Achaemenid administration seems to have

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selected an otherwise unattested Babylonian dialect as its standard language.509 This hypothesis chiefly rests on the very extensive use of “degeminating” spellings with n for long consonants even in words and forms that do not contain an etymological /n/ (for example ṣnpr for /ṣepper/ ‘bird’ in tad C1.1:82)510 and its supposed connection with the nasalized pronunciation of such long consonants in Babylonian.511 It derives further support from the otherwise characteristically Achaemenid Aramaic use of the third-person plural independent pronouns instead of the corresponding suffixes in the Assur letter from Babylonia.512 No such parallels can be established with other known forms of early or late Old Aramaic: regular “degeminating” spellings, basicstem infinitives with /m-/ prefix, and the lack of the direct object marker ʾyt militate against an affiliation with Central Syrian; the consistent absence of /l-/ as “short imperfect” preformative precludes a direct link with the language of the Tell Fekheriye stele; and several late Old Aramaic texts have derived-stem infinitives with /m-/ prefix unknown to Achaemenid Official Aramaic. It is not at all uncommon that official written languages ultimately derive from regional spoken dialects, such as Attic Greek or Tuscan Italian.513 Indeed, the processes of selection, codification, and elaboration constitute the fundamental stages in the emergence of standard languages.514 In the absence of any traces of a unified form of Aramaic in the seventh or sixth centuries b.c.e.,515 a Babylonian origin of Achaemenid Official Aramaic 509 Beyer 1984: 28–29 and 1986: 14–15; Gzella 2008a: 97–98; cf. Stadel 2011: 68. Greenfield 1978: 96 (cf. 1974: 282 and 1981a: 116), too, supposes a Babylonian origin but does not supply any linguistic arguments. 510 This instance occurs in a pre-Achaemenid text that has been copied according to Achaemenid spelling. 511 Cf. Kaufman 1974: 120–121; Beyer 1984: 89–95; Sanmartín 1995; Gzella 2008a: 96 and 2011b: 577. Unsurprisingly, degeminating spellings also occur in Aramaic epigraphs on cuneiform tablets from Achaemenid Babylonia, cf. ʾntt ‘wife of’ in cbm 5161 (text in Blasberg 1997: 177–178), dated to the thirty-seventh year of Artaxerxes I. Comparable instances also occur in other languages, however (cf. Schulze 1895). 512 See Gzella 2008a: 97 and Section 3.2.3. 513 Cf. Ginsberg 1933: 8. 514 So in the classic model developed by Haugen 1966. 515 Occasional passing remarks to the contrary in the secondary literature, such as Folmer 1995: 3, who incorrectly maintains, without providing any evidence, that “a particular variety of Aramaic became the administrative language and lingua franca of the Neo-Assyrian empire,” cannot be corroborated given the obvious coexistence of several distinct varieties of Aramaic in the seventh- and sixth-century written record (see also Section 3.1.2). Her discussion of past opinions on pages 746–749 finishes with a short list of allegedly mixed Western and Eastern features in Achaemenid Official Aramaic but fails to

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thus appears to be the best possible option.516 It also ties in with the increasing presence of Babylonian clerks instead of Assyrian ones in the Neo-Babylonian period, which immediately preceded the rise of the Achaemenid empire, and the continued tenure of various alphabetic scribes, appointed in the time of Nabonidus, under Cyrus.517 This does not entail that Achaemenid Official Aramaic as a standardized chancellery idiom was anybody’s first language (leaving aside perhaps one or two overenthusiastic clerks who may have embraced Persian imperial ideology to such a degree that they spoke to their children in the official lingua franca). Rather, it may simply have constituted a written norm to which no spoken variety of Aramaic corresponded exactly. Nonetheless, the language situation in the Achaemenid empire was complex, hence Aramaic competed with both regional sister-idioms of at times considerable prestige, like Phoenician and Hebrew in the Levant, and with other languages that were already in use in the Persian homeland of the Achaemenids, such as Elamite as well as Old Persian, and entered the stage of world history together with its inhabitants. This implies that much of the evidence has been produced by multilingual speakers and reflects the influence either of the numerous Aramaic vernaculars that continued to be used in oral communication or of other Semitic (besides Phoenician and Hebrew no doubt Arabian, in some areas of Babylonia perhaps still Akkadian) and non-Semitic languages (such as Iranian, Egyptian, and Anatolian) also spoken with a high degree of competence among the members of the imperial staff.518 Achaemenid Official Aramaic itself thus basically seems to have acted as a written variety; it is therefore unclear whether people who otherwise used non-Semitic languages in daily life, as would have been normal in the eastern parts of the empire, acquired it like a spoken idiom. The modalities of education in the imperial chancelleries remain elusive, but it seems quite feasible that word lists, glossaries, and sample formats of certain documents occupied a prominent place (see also Section 4.4.1 below on the Aḥiqar novel). Interaction with contemporaneous forms of Aramaic and other idioms as a result of enduring multilingualism has not led to geographical sub-varieties distinguish between both archaisms and innovations (only the latter are relevant for subgrouping according to established historical-linguistic method) and between incidental (spelling, lexicon) and diagnostic ones (phonology and morphology). 516 Yet it would be misleading to claim that “Official Aramaic can be classified as Eastern Aramaic” (Greenfield 1978: 99), since none of the distinctive linguistic features of the later Eastern branch of Aramaic is attested systematically, or attested at all, in the Achaemenid period or earlier (see Gzella 2008a: 105–106 and Section 5.5.1). 517 Greenfield 1974: 282 and 1981a: 116; Lipiński 2000: 409. 518 Cf. Gzella 2004: 53–56.

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within Achaemenid Official Aramaic. On the contrary, it has caused a notable one-way influence of this highly standardized supra-regional chancellery ­language on pre-Achaemenid written forms of Aramaic (for example, the Hermopolis letters and the Bauer-Meissner papyrus),519 the later written code of coexisting vernaculars (like the Aramaic dialects of Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia), and other languages, especially, though not exclusively, Hebrew (see also Section 4.1.3 below). Most regional differences within the Achaemenid Aramaic corpus itself affect the proportion of lexical loans only: Iranian lexemes occur to a significantly higher degree in official documents from Iran and Bactria than in contracts about slave sales issued by private individuals from Samaria. Since the lexicon of a language is, in principle, open-ended, it can be expanded easily even in idioms with a reasonably fixed core of grammar and does thus not undermine their degree of standardization.520 Differences in word order, by contrast, are more difficult to employ for diagnostic purposes,521 because such differences can have many pragmatic reasons. The absence of significant linguistic variation in the core domains of the grammar gives Achaemenid Official Aramaic the profile of an international prestige language.522 It is therefore unnecessary to postulate the existence of another literary idiom like the elusive “Standard Literary Aramaic” besides the Achaemenid administrative language in order to explain its long-lasting impact.523 4.1.1 The Corpus of Achaemenid Official Aramaic Texts composed in Achaemenid Official Aramaic can be arranged by region or function.524 They will be discussed at greater length in Sections 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4 519 520 521 522

See Section 3.3.2. Cf. Joseph 1987: 72. As has been done by Kutscher in various articles. Kahane 1986 has a concise discussion of the most salient general features of prestige idioms. 523 So Greenfield 1974: 284–289 and a few others. Since neither Greenfield nor his successors ever defined “Standard Literary Aramaic” or even identified one single linguistic feature that distinguishes it from Achaemenid Official Aramaic, one should conclude that this hypothetical variety never existed (cf. Cook 1994: 145–146; Gzella 2008a: 108–109). Traces of a common written language that permeate literary compositions in Aramaic between the Persian period on the one hand and the Targumim and the earliest Syriac Bible translations on the other are thus simply identical to the Achaemenid Official Aramaic heritage. It should also be noted that the terms “standard language” and “literary language” are largely identical in the sociolinguistic study of many modern idioms. 524 For an overview of texts and editions, see Beyer 1984: 29–32 and 1986: 15–16 with a supplement in 2004: 17. To these, Lozachmeur 2006, Röllig 2013, and Naveh – Shaked 2012 have to

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below, so a brief survey of the size and nature of the material can suffice here. Discoveries from mainly the Judaean military colony Elephantine in Egypt (see Section 3.3.2), which have been preserved in the dry desert climate, cover the entire range of genres and constitute the most extensive part of the total corpus. Consequently, they have formed the basis of any linguistic inquiry into Achaemenid Official Aramaic since the beginning of the twentieth century. The dates span the entire fifth century b.c.e. Some fifty papyri with extensive marriage contracts, a part of which belongs to family archives, deeds of obligation, conveyances, judicial oaths, and court records (tad B),525 as well as some twenty-five letters written by private individuals and the leaders of the community (tad A),526 extensively document legalese and epistolary prose. Thirteen letters and fragments on leather by the Persian governor Aršama in Egypt have later been acquired on the antiquities market; they were sent to Egypt from abroad and reflect the most official epistolary register (also republished in tad A).527 Numerous accounts and lists (tad C)528 furthermore illustrate aspects of the social and economic history of this community but have a less direct bearing on the investigation of the language. An Aramaic version of the royal inscription by Darius I and two literary works, among them the long Aḥiqar papyrus, reflect different styles of formal prose (likewise in tad C).529 (Papyrus Amherst 63 also seems to contain literary compositions in Demotic script, but the difficulties in dating and deciphering it preclude a straightforward association with Achaemenid Official Aramaic.) Less official texts like short private communications in telegram style, lists of names, delivery notes, and exercises have been preserved on hundreds of ostraca, in addition to several jar inscriptions (tad D; Lozachmeur 2006; Röllig 2013). While several of them contain occasional sub-standard spellings and traces of an informal style, they, too, clearly aspire to Achaemenid orthographic norms, as the regular occurrence of typically Achaemenid writings demonstrates.530 They are supplemented by a few dozens of short funerary

525 526 527 528 529 530

be added. Cf. also Gzella 2004: 37–41 and Forthc.(b) for brief descriptions of the nature of the evidence. Part of the material can be found in Cowley 1923 and Kraeling 1953, with detailed notes. Several have already been published by Cowley 1923. The first edition with plates is Driver 1954, an updated commentary has appeared in the minor edition Driver 1965. Some of them are also included in Cowley 1923. The earlier edition in Cowley 1923 is now outdated. See Lozachmeur 2006: 515–529.

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inscriptions on stone for private individuals from various places in Egypt (tad D).531 202 papyrus fragments relating to law, taxation, and economy, of which some thirty yield meaningful contextual information, have been discovered at Saqqāra near Memphis, some 700 kilometres to the north of Elephantine (Segal 1983).532 They are difficult to date exactly but correspond to the same Achaemenid Official Aramaic standard as the Elephantine material and thereby confirm its wide distribution in Egypt. Of the twenty-six short ostraca from Saqqāra, twenty-one are thought to be in Phoenician script. The same variety of Aramaic is documented, in similar genres, by numerous texts from other western provinces of the Achaemenid empire. Palestine has yielded thirty-seven private legal deeds from the Wadi Daliyeh in Samaria (Dušek 2007, the first complete edition), discovered in 1962 and dated to the second half of the fourth century b.c.e., and about 1700 ostraca from Idumaea, of which about 800 have already been published (notably by Lemaire 1996 and 2002).533 The onomasticon of the Samaria papyri contains a good deal of Yahwistic personal names and thus indicates that these contracts had been drafted for members of the local population; despite their somewhat younger date, the language is practically identical to the one reflected in the private contracts from Elephantine, but the legal framework seems to belong to a different tradition. Besides these substantial texts, several shorter Achaemenid Official Aramaic inscriptions from the fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e. have been discovered in the oasis of Teima and its surroundings in North Arabia (Degen 1974; Beyer – Livingstone 1987 and 1990; in total some twenty-five items)534 and in various parts of Asia Minor (Cilicia, Phrygia, Lydia, and Lycia, some with parallel versions in other languages: kai 258–263; 278; 318–319). Most of them are votive and funerary inscriptions commissioned by private individuals, but a trilingual stele from Xanthos has been erected at the behest of the satrap of Lycia and Caria in order to announce the foundation of a new local cult. Aramaic in the Iranian heartland and the eastern provinces during Achaemenid rule has been less well-documented in the past. Short epigraphs on 163 stone objects from the royal treasury in Persepolis (Bowman 1970) and 531 The inscriptions and a few ostraca from Egypt also feature in kai 267–272, an English translation of the former by B. Porten has appeared in Hallo (ed.) 2003: II, 185–191, of the libation bowls on pages 175–176, and of selected ostraca in III, 207–218 (the latter was edited by B.A. Levine and A. Robertson). 532 Some of them have been re-edited in tad B. 533 For a survey, see Lemaire 2006b. 534 Three of them have been included in kai as nos. 228–230.

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on a few dozens of cuneiform tablets from Persepolis and Babylonia were already known (the latter have been included in the survey by Oelsner 2006), whereas several hundreds of terse economic tablets still remain unpublished. The appearance of an archive from Afghanistan during the last decades of Achaemenid rule on the antiquities market (Naveh – Shaked 2012) now contributes to a more equal spread of the evidence. It comprises thirty letters, debt notes, and lists of allocations on parchment that contain the correspondence of a local governor with the satrap of Bactria and other communications as well as eighteen small wooden boards with acknowledgments of debts. The language and format of the letters almost exactly matches the texts from the Aršama archive acquired in Egypt. This new discovery highlights the role of Achaemenid Official Aramaic also in the eastern parts of the Fertile Crescent and underscores its truly international character. Finally, the corpus includes numerous small inscriptions on stones, statuettes, and vessels, as well as coin legends, weights, seals and seal impressions, and bullae. They do not only contain little information on the evolution of Aramaic, but even the date and linguistic affiliation are often difficult to ascertain. As a whole, this material documents a firmly-entrenched use of the same variety of Aramaic in the Fertile Crescent to a geographical and social extent formerly unknown; it covers the entire imperial territory, affects a wide variety of documentary and non-documentary genres, and unites functionaries from the top of Persian administration with members of the lower classes. The prominence of official letters and contracts in the total corpus underscores the role of Aramaic as an administrative and legal language that contributed significantly to maintaining imperial authority in the provinces. One can observe various types of contact with languages already spoken or even documented in textual material from the different regions, ranging from a continuation of earlier forms of Aramaic via a parallel use with local idioms to a language shift. A  smooth integration of Achaemenid Official Aramaic and an enduring ­linguistic prestige ensured its survival in substantial parts of these areas even after the collapse of the Achaemenid chancellery. Achaemenid Official Aramaic as a Standardized Chancellery Language Several characteristic features of mostly spelling and morphology recur in Aramaic texts discovered throughout the Persian empire between its western and its eastern periphery. New and significant discoveries especially from Bactria closely correspond to the Egyptian material, on which earlier studies had to focus, and confirm that Achaemenid Official Aramaic acted as an

4.1.2

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empire-wide and highly standardized chancellery language. Its use in institutional contexts constitutes and reproduces the authority of the Persian government. Such homogeneity is all the more noteworthy in the absence of mass media and against the background of linguistic diversity in earlier written Aramaic. One must therefore see the individual instances of variation in the corpus, which of course do exist (as standard languages, too, bear traces of historical evolution),535 in perspective and not overestimate them536; variation as such does not explain anything without an underlying historical, geographical, or sociolinguistic framework. It is the correlation between minimal variation in form and maximal variation in function that underpins the role of Achaemenid Official Aramaic as a standard language.537 Since Achaemenid Official Aramaic was thus no longer a natural dialect but a supra-regional koiné, it would be a category mistake to posit geographical sub-varieties: substrate influence from speakers of other languages who write in a particular standard idiom with fixed grammatical norms controlled by an institution does not necessarily lead to identifiable regional varieties of that standard idiom. Hence, a number of lexical borrowings and a few instances of, in all likelihood, mostly unconscious syntactic interference from Akkadian or Iranian vernaculars (above all certain word order patterns and a higher preference for analytical genitive constructions with zy /dī/ instead of the construct state) in official Aramaic texts produced in the East or by scribes who normally used Persian as their pragmatically prominent language in daily life cannot be adduced in support of the existence of an “Eastern” variety of Achaemenid Official Aramaic; they are socially and not geographically conditioned.538 535 Cf. Joseph 1987: 127–129 for some general remarks. 536 A less sharply defined corpus that also subsumes the Hermopolis letters or the Aḥiqar proverbs under Achaemenid Official Aramaic, as, e.g., in various articles by Kutscher (e.g,, 1971: 361–362), Greenfield (e.g., 1974: 283; somewhat differently 1978: 97–98; 1981a: 118–119), and subsequent studies influenced by them (in particular Folmer 1995) can be especially misleading, but a closer scrutiny leaves no doubt that these texts, the principal sources of “variation,” belong to a non-Achaemenid form of Aramaic (see Sections 3.3.2 and 3.4) and therefore must not be treated as witnesses for dialectal diversity within Achaemenid Aramaic itself. The remaining instances almost exclusively concern individual instances of spelling (see the survey in Folmer 1995: 691–714) and have little diagnostic significance. A few other phenomena relate to imperfect learning and will be discussed later in this chapter. 537 According to the typology elaborated by Haugen (1966). See also Milroy – Milroy 42012: 24–30 for a reduction of optional linguistic variation at all levels as the main characteristic of language standardization. 538 Kutscher’s hypothesis of an “Eastern type of Official Aramaic” (Kutscher 1971: 362) must therefore be rejected (cf. Beyer 1984: 29 and 1986: 15; Gzella 2008a: 90–91). It is telling that

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Word order in particular is prone to variation for many reasons and therefore unsuitable for distinguishing dialects. The basic linguistic unity of Achaemenid Official Aramaic that can be established on grounds of a distinctive orthographic norm as well as a few hard phonological and morphological criteria also matches the very considerable degree of standardization of bureaucratic procedures and document format (including bullae attached to folded Aramaic letters on leather or papyrus)539 that has been emphasized in recent research on Achaemenid administration. As a result of its prestige, the Achaemenid chancellery language also interacted with other varieties in regions that were already partly or even predominantly Aramaic-speaking; it thus contributed to further consolidating the continuum of Aramaic dialects and served as an important catalyst for linguistic innovations that afterwards spread more easily across the speech area. Among the various identifiable and pervasive, statistically significant features of Achaemenid Official Aramaic, only linguistic innovations are relevant for defining its historical position within Aramaic.540 The most salient trait is the ubiquitous use of “degeminating” spellings, that is, the strikingly frequent writing of a long (“geminate” in widespread but less exact terminology)541 consonant with a preceding n. This phenomenon targets most instances of etymological /n/ in direct contact with another consonant, where it would usually assimilate in pronunciation, such as yntn instead of /yatten/ ‘he gives’ and other verbs with root-initial /n/.542 While such writings are very occasionally attested in Old Aramaic,543 Achaemenid spelling extends them to cases where

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the lists of purported traits of such a sub-variety do not include a single feature relating to the grammatical core of phonology and morphology, and none of the diagnostic hallmarks of later Eastern Aramaic (Gzella 2008a: 105–107). His tentative “Western Official Aramaic,” allegedly consisting of the private letters and legal documents from Elephantine, is even less well-defined, being only supported by Verb – Subject – Object order in the opening and closing formulae of legal deeds (Kutscher 1971: 362–363). Again, this is an extremely weak isogloss. Henkelman 2013: 534–535. Gzella 2008a: 91–100. This corresponds to usual method in historical-genealogical linguistics. “Long” consonants, too, were articulated only once, but with a longer time between onset and release, just like geminates (spesso, fatto, etc.) in Italian. Hence they otherwise appear as simple consonants in Semitic alphabetic writing. Scores of examples can be found in Schwiderski 2008: 583–586 (for the root ntn ‘to give’); see also Beyer 1984: 89–95 for a broad selection of different words and forms. See Section 2.2.1 for mhnḥt in the ninth-century Tell Fekheriye inscription (kai 309:2) and Section 3.1.2 for (formulaic?) yntn in seventh-century legal texts from Tell Ḫalaf in the vicinity of Tell Fekheriye. The situation in the Aḥiqar proverbs, by contrast, is quite

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an assimilated etymological /n/ could not have been restored due to analogy with unassimilated forms like the corresponding “perfect,” for instance, ʾnt instead of Old Aramaic ʾt for /ʾattā/ ‘you’ (the original presence of an /n/ here as established by modern Comparative Semitics can only be deduced from some cognate languages such as Arabic ʾanta). Moreover, they occur even with other long consonants that have not resulted from assimilation of an original /n/, such as ṣnpr for /ṣepper/ ‘bird’ (tad C1.1:82). It is therefore quite plausible that these spellings have ultimately been influenced by the nasalized pronunciation of long consonants in Babylonian (see Section 4.1 above), but one may doubt whether they still reflect any phonetic reality in Achaemenid Official Aramaic itself. Especially their occurrence also with pharyngeal velars like /ʿ/ in tnʿl /taʿʿol/ ‘you enter’ (tad B3.12:22), where nasalization would be rather untypical, suggests that they merely acted as a (not always strictly obligatory?) graphic device for highlighting consonantal length.544 This view gains further support not only from a number of assimilated spellings without n in Achaemenid Official Aramaic545 but also from the fact that the few “degeminating” spellings (in particular of high-­ frequency words like ʾnt ‘you’) that linger on as Achaemenid heritage in postAchaemenid languages have a much more restricted distribution.546 The only exception is Classical Mandaic, which was spoken on the former territory of Babylonia and also shows at least two more characteristic instances of Babylonian substrate pronunciation, that is, dissimilation of emphatics (“Geer’s Law”) and the loss of pharyngeals and laryngeals (see Section 7.3.1); hence it should be treated as a special case that differs from the situation in the rest of Aramaic. Consequently, the originally nasalized pronunciation does not imply that Akkadian was still widely spoken in Babylonia during the sixth century b.c.e. but is best interpreted as an areal feature that also affected local forms of Aramaic, one of which has then been selected as the basis of the Persian chancellery language. The distribution of “degeminating” spellings in post-Achaemenid Aramaic thus confirms both their Babylonian origin and their purely graphic function in Achaemenid Official Aramaic. c­omplicated, because the few relevant examples admit several interpretations (cf. Kottsieper 1990: 51–62) and were presumably influenced by Achaemenid spelling. 544 Spitaler 1954; Beyer 1984: 101–102; Kottsieper 1990: 56 and 58; Gzella 2008a: 91–92 and 96–97 (unless one supposes that /ʿ/ was realized as a velar nasal as in later Western pronunciations of Hebrew, like, for instance, Yankef for Tiberian Yaʿaqoḇ ‘Jacob’). 545 Beyer 1984: 91; Kottsieper 1990: 58. 546 Cf. Garr 2007 for a serviceable synopsis of the material (though he views these spellings as evidence for a productive sound change).

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Other more innovative spellings that were generalized in Achaemenid Official Aramaic include a growing use of word-internal vowel letters. Noteworthy are also hw ‘he’ and hy ‘she’ for the third-person singular independent pronouns instead of hʾ for both forms in Old Aramaic (see Section 3.1.2), which made it possible to distinguish between the masculine and the feminine in writing, and mostly -why instead of older -wh for the third-person singular masculine suffix with vocalic bases. Several of these orthographic modifications reduce ambiguity in the consonantal writing: “degemination” by means of n allows to distinguish long from short consonants where it occurs, a phonemically relevant difference; word-internal matres lectionis highlight long vowels and thus underscore vowel quantity, which was likewise phonemic547; and the use of hw or hy disambiguates two high-frequency personal pronouns. It is therefore not implausible that the ever-increasing spread of Aramaic as a second or third language in the Achaemenid period contributed to reinforcing the employ of orthographic devices that at least in part compensated for the limitations and ambiguity of a largely consonantal writing system. This was especially useful for scribes who lacked native fluency in Aramaic. Two morphological features further determine the specific profile of Achaemenid Official Aramaic. First, the consistent use of third-person plural independent pronouns instead of pronominal suffixes with transitive verbs, as in lʾ ʾytyt hmw ‘I have not brought them’ (tad A3.3:10), constitutes a shared innovation with the Assur ostracon against the entire rest of Old Aramaic (see Section 3.2.3) and continues in later Aramaic.548 Second, the extension of the third-person masculine plural form of the “perfect” to the feminine (attested in the one relevant example, that is, mṭw ‘they [the letters] arrived’, tad A4.2:15) is generally also considered a hallmark of Achaemenid Official Aramaic and its offshoots.549 Although no third-person feminine plural “perfect” forms occur in the Old Aramaic corpus,550 both comparative evidence from other West Semitic languages and the presence of a proper feminine form in some 547 The correct representation of vowel length in Akkadian borrowings (Kaufman 1974: 146) and still in the later Aramaic incantation text in cuneiform from Uruk (ti-ḫu-ú-tú for /teḥōt/ ‘below’) strongly suggests that the phonemically relevant distinction between long and short vowels had not yet collapsed (Gzella 2011b: 576; pace Muraoka – Porten 22003: 35–36, the lack of explicit minimal pairs in the corpus with /ī/ or /ū/ on the one hand and /i/ or /u/ on the other may simply result from the restricted amount of evidence and cannot positively prove that vowel length was not phonemic in these cases). 548 Beyer 1984: 474. 549 So already Ben-Ḥayyim 1951; cf. Boyarin 1981: 626; Beyer 1984: 29 and 1986: 15; Gzella 2008a: 91–92. 550 Degen 1969: 64; Hug 1993: 76.

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post-Achaemenid Aramaic varieties551 indicate that it was originally present in older Aramaic as well. The Achaemenid Official Aramaic corpus also features a few instances of a passive participle together with the agent introduced by the preposition l-. This construction first seems to have been restricted to a few specific transitive verbs, especially ‘to hear’ and ‘to make’ (hence šmyʿ ly ‘it was heard by me’ in tad A6.10:3, similarly tad A3.3:13). Since there is no obvious pragmatic reason for demoting the agent while still explicitly mentioning it (for this is what a passive with agent phrase does), the surviving examples are best understood as an active reanalysis of an original passive expression (‘I have heard’). No comparable examples are attested from earlier Aramaic, and older Semitic languages do not normally mark the agent with passives.552 Old Persian, however, has an identical construction of the type manā krtam ‘by me it is done’ (meaning ‘I have done’) that compensates for the loss of the older Indo-European present perfect, hence its occurrence in Aramaic from Achaemenid times onwards is widely understood as an instance of syntactic pattern replication under Persian influence.553 Ongoing contact with other Iranian languages, such as Kurdish, in subsequent periods has greatly widened the distribution of similar passive participles with an active sense in Eastern Neo-Aramaic and triggered the emergence of entirely new conjugations ultimately based on this syntagm (see Section 7.1.2). Their rise is difficult to date, because they may have spread more quickly in unwritten vernaculars coexisting with literary languages like Syriac. The total absence of parallels for such a construction in other Semitic languages and in pre-Achaemenid Aramaic, its untypical combination of a passive form with an agent, its first appearance in a contact situation with Iranian, and its increasing productive exactly in those later Aramaic languages that were exposed to continuous interference from later stages of Iranian strongly suggest that it is an instance of contact-induced convergence.554 In addition to these innovations of either the Achaemenid standard language or its underlying historical dialect, some retentions inherited from a previous stage of Aramaic also help to outline its relation vis-à-vis other known 551 Including the vocalization of Biblical Aramaic, cf. Daniel 5:5 with Gzella 2004: 125 n. 31. This /-ā/, which corresponds to the reconstructed original form, was subsequently replaced by /-ē(n)/ in later Western Aramaic (see Section 6.1.1). 552 See Gzella 2009a: 308. 553 An extensive discussion can be found in Gzella 2004: 184–194, with older bibliography; for more recent references, see also 2008a: 92–93 with n. 23. 554 Indeed, no remotely convincing case for an internal development has ever been made.

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varieties: older derived-stem infinitives without an /m-/ prefix555 distinguish it from some forms of Aramaic first attested in the seventh and sixth centuries, especially the Aḥiqar proverbs and the Hermopolis letters (see Section 3.1.2). Moreover, the consistent use of the preposition l- for non-obligatory direct object marking constitutes the most important difference as opposed to Central Syrian, which employed the special particle ʾyt for the same purpose, and possibly other older Western Aramaic languages as well (see Section 2.2.2). The second feature may have an earlier parallel in a late Old Aramaic legal text from Niniveh556 (see Section  3.2.1) and occurs regularly in later Eastern Aramaic. However, this does not constitute sufficient evidence for aligning Achaemenid Official Aramaic directly with either the language underlying the said Neo-Assyrian pledge note or with the Eastern Aramaic literary languages like Syriac, Jewish Babylonian, and Mandaic: since linguistic typology shows that the reanalysis of a dative marker for the indirect object as a direct object marker occurs frequently (so, for example, a in Spanish, as in ¿A quién buscas? ‘Who are you looking for?’),557 such a parallel could easily have arisen independently. Several other grammatical phenomena that can be observed in the Achaemenid corpus rather affect the development of Aramaic at large.558 They reflect traces of the linguistic evolution of Aramaic that occasionally penetrate through the orthographic garb created by the strong Achaemenid scribal tradition. The merger of the etymological interdentals with their dental counterparts and of the reflex of */ṣ́/ with /ʿ/ had already been underway in the seventh century b.c.e. (see Section  3.1.2) but seems to have been completed in the Achaemenid period.559 Conservative spellings preserved the written reflex z of older */ð/, then pronounced like /d/, especially in a number of high-frequency forms like the demonstratives znh and zʾ ‘this one’ as well as in their distal counterparts zk, znk, zky, and zkm ‘that one’, and in the relative marker zy, but the slowly increasing appearance of (though in total still comparatively rare) phonetic spellings like dy and dnh, dk, and dky respectively in distinct parts of the empire proves that */ð/ had merged with /d/ in pronunciation in the whole 555 Beyer 1984: 28 and 150. 556 Fales 1986 no. 13 (=Hug 1993: 18), line 2. 557 See also Gzella 2013e. For bibliography on the Spanish construction, cf. Montrul 22013: 180 and 183. 558 The reconstructed vocalization of the substantial Elephantine letter tad A4.7 as well as the variants in the copy A4.8 in Beyer 2013a: 17–20 (together with a new translation) may exemplify what Aramaic in the Achaemenid period sounded like. 559 Beyer 1984: 100–101.

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of Aramaic.560 Similarly, the causative-stem prefix /ha-/ may have largely shifted to /ʾa-/ (first attested in the Hermopolis letters in the “perfect” and infinitive) under the influence of the earlier loss of intervocalic /-h-/ in causative-stem “imperfect” forms (see Sections  2.2.2 and 3.2.1) but was likewise often preserved in spelling.561 Unsurprisingly, such phonetic spellings, including assimilation of /n/ in contact, occur more often in non-official texts, in particular some private letters on ostraca, that were less subject to control by the imperial standard. Further sound changes in Aramaic during the Achaemenid period do not surface in the Achaemenid Official material but have reflexes in the spelling of Aramaic personal names in cuneiform documents, such as the occasional shift of /a/ to /e/ before syllable-final /ʿ/, /h/, or /ḥ/ until the fifth century b.c.e.562 More importantly, the working of the “Barth Ginsberg Law,” according to which the thematic vowel /a/ in basic-stem “imperfect” forms triggered a dissimilation of the original /a/ in the preformative to /i/ (which appears as /e/ in Aramaic) in several Northwest Semitic languages, that is, /yiktab/ from earlier /yaktab/, can first be observed in Aramaic in “imperfect”-names that occur in the cuneiform documents belonging to the Murašū archive.563 The subsequent extension of the dissimilated preformative vowel to all basic-stem “imperfects,” including those with the thematic vowels */u/ (Aramaic /o/) and */i/ (Aramaic /e/), as in the later vocalization of Classical Syriac, first appears in a fragmentary Jewish Babylonian contract from Dura Europos from 200 c.e.564 Personal names in sixth- and especially fifth-century b.c.e. cuneiform documents also begin to show anaptyxis of word-final consonant clusters; the resulting auxiliary vowel was then promoted to a full vowel in subsequent stages of Aramaic.565 (It has also been suggested that the loss of short unstressed 560 Correctly pointed out already by Leander 1928: 9; cf. Huehnergard 2002: 605–606. Cf. Schwiderski 2008: 291 for a few instances of dnh ‘this one’ in texts from Egypt, Palestine, and Iran; see also p. 282 for three attestations of dk ‘that one’ from Egypt (twice) and Asia Minor. 561 Beyer 1984: 148. 562 E.g., -ia-di-iʾ or -ia-di-ḫi for /yadeʿ/ ‘he knew’ besides -ia-a-da-ḫu- for /yadaʿ/, see Beyer 1984: 107–108. 563 Specifically in the element -li-in-ṭár for /lenṭar/ ‘may he protect!’ from the root nṭr as opposed to -la-an-ṭar for /lanṭar/ and -lam-ṭu-ru for /lanṭor/ in the seventh and ìl-an-ṭur for /ʾel lanṭor/ ‘may El protect!’ in the sixth century b.c.e., see Beyer 1984: 109–110. 564 Milik 1968, line 18: lypwq for /leppoq/ ‘may he go out’ from npq. The form is clear thanks to the plene spelling of the short preformative vowel with y. Cf. Beyer 1984: 110. 565 Hence -ša-am-iš or -ša-mi-iš for /šaməš/ from */šamš/ (or */śamš/, Beyer 1984: 102) ‘sun’, see Beyer 1984: 112–115. The evidence remains somewhat ambiguous, though, since it is

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vowels in open syllables had an onset already in the Achaemenid period, but the evidence is insufficient for supporting such an early date.566) Morphology, too, anticipates a number of common secondary changes in fifth- and fourth-century b.c.e. material that gradually increased in post-­ Achaemenid texts: unstressed long word-final vowels and diphthongs in various words and forms could be expanded by /-n/ (compare the frequent use of ʾdyn /ʾedayn/ ‘then’ in Achaemenid Official Aramaic with the older form ʾzy in the Assur ostracon, kai 233:6.14–15)567; geminate roots lengthen the first instead of the second radical in forms with preformatives or prefixes ending in a vowel, hence ʿlt /ʿallət/ ‘I entered’ (tad B7.2:8) but tnʿl /taʿʿol/ ‘you enter’ (tad B3.12:22).568 However, either feature may have been considerably older and only surfaces by chance first in the Achaemenid material. A similar variation between ʾl and ʾln /ʾellē(n)/ ‘these’, after all, occurs already in Old Aramaic,569 and the long first radical in geminate verbal roots can only be observed thanks to “degeminating” spellings in Achaemenid Official Aramaic and would have remained unwritten in earlier periods. Lengthening of the second radical in the basic-stem “imperfect” and infinitive of some frequent roots with initial /y/ in order to compensate for the unstable first radical may also belong here but is more difficult to demonstrate.570 Tense-aspect-modality marking, by contrast, exhibits clearer traces of a linguistic evolution vis-à-vis Old Aramaic. Its main innovation consists in the advanced integration of the predicative participle into the verbal system as a present-tense or durative form that encroached on the functional range of the

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often impossible to distinguish anaptyctic vowels from the purely graphic use of consonant-vowel signs not conditioned by a phonetic reality but by the very nature of the syllabic writing system. This hypothesis was proposed by Kaufman 1984, but cf. Huehnergard 2002: 606. The workings of this sound change can only be demonstrated for the first half of the third century c.e., see Beyer 1984: 128–136 (a date also accepted by Kaufman, but only as the endpoint of a long process). Even the best purported early example, the extraordinary spelling byš for what seems to be /bīš/ ‘bad’ (kai 258:3, fifth century b.c.e.) as opposed to regular bʾyš /baʾīš/, is ambiguous and could also be explained as a rare by-form (Beyer 1984: 131). Beyer 1984: 149; references for ʾdyn/ʾzy in Schwiderski 2008: 12–13. Beyer 1984: 150; Gzella 2011b: 581. The “degeminating” spelling of /ʿ/ in tnʿl can only be explained if the /ʿ/ was long, see above. Cf. Gzella 2014a: 85. Beyer 1984: 149; cf. Huehnergard 2002: 606 and Gzella 2011b: 581. However, the etymology of the only piece of direct evidence for this phenomenon, the indefinite pronoun mndʿm ‘anything’ (first attested in a Hermopolis letter, tad A2.5:4), is debated. See Section 3.1.2.

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“long imperfect.”571 The latter then became increasingly confined to modality, subordinate clauses, and future tense.572 As a result, the verbalization of the participle lightened the considerable functional load of the “long imperfect,” which previously combined the notions of present and future tense, imperfective aspect, and epistemic modality, and thus contributed to a stronger marking and a clearer distinction of tense-aspect categories from modal ones. This development continued in later Eastern Aramaic and eventually resulted in an entirely restructured verbal system based on old participial forms in NorthEastern Neo-Aramaic. A particularly complex use of verbal forms can be observed in the Aramaic of Daniel (see Section  4.4.2 below). Achaemenid Official Aramaic therefore contains the earliest consistent evidence for one of the most significant long-term changes in Aramaic. It is nonetheless unclear whether it reproduces a more general tendency in Aramaic during the Achaemenid period, or whether it represents the syntactic elaboration, as often in standard languages, of a formerly highly reduced system of inflectional categories.573 Word order patterns in Achaemenid Official Aramaic are more elusive. They show considerable variation, as they do in seventh- and sixth-century Aramaic, but Subject – Object – Verb seems to occur more frequently in texts produced by speakers of Iranian languages or translated from Persian, such as the Bisotun inscription (see also the following Section). Clauses with the verb in final position and the incipient use of redundant “proleptic” suffixes, by contrast, may continue an earlier Akkadian influence. The latter begins to appear regularly in the Achaemenid period (for instance, bṭlh zy ‘hwrmzd, literally ‘in his shadow, the one of Ahuramazda’, which simply means ‘in Ahuramazda’s shadow’, tad C2.1:10.12.16574) and eventually advanced to a characteristic syntactic hallmark of Aramaic at large. Together with the analytical genitive with zy instead of the construct state, they, too, appear to crop up with a higher frequency in material originating in the East of the empire due to substrate influence of non-­Aramaic languages in multilingual contexts. Yet the modalities of interference between Aramaic and other idioms used in the Persian empire are not yet well known and require a proper discussion. 571 Gzella 2004, with a summary of the main conclusions on pp. 326–330. 572 Cf. Gzella 2004: 197–203. 573 Cf. Haugen 1966. There is, however, no evidence that the integration of the active participle into the verbal system has been influenced in any way by Old Persian use patterns (such as the present indicative). 574 Parts of the expression are destroyed in the various passages but can confidently be reconstructed.

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4.1.3 Aramaic and Other Languages in the Achaemenid Empire The basic unity of Achaemenid Official Aramaic spelling, grammar, idiom, and script, as it has been established in the previous Section, indicates that the language has not spread naturally, as preceding varieties of Aramaic did, but that it was intentionally promoted by a central institution. Consequently, Aramaic was used in writing for official purposes by speakers of many diverse dialects and languages, including non-Aramaean peoples, and will not have featured prominently in day-to-day communication in many parts of the imperial territory (excepting of course Syria, Mesopotamia, and Syrian expatriate communities in Egypt, which were already Aramaic-speaking by then). New discoveries from the Eastern provinces of the Achaemenid empire support this general impression: the clerks who wrote the administrative documents from Bactria, towards the end of Achaemenid rule, consistently bore Iranian names, and some of these names even contain clear regional elements, such as Haš(y)a-vaxšu (hšwḥšw), with the divine river Oxus (wḥšw) as a theophoric element.575 Members of the administrative staff were thus recruited from the local population and learned Aramaic as part of their scribal training according to the standard determined by the Achaemenid chancery. The Persian state governed through its official language just as it did through legal authority and military power. Various cases of interaction between Achaemenid Official Aramaic and earlier written forms of Aramaic appear in the oldest Achaemenid documents from Egypt. The Bauer-Meissner papyrus from 515 b.c.e. and the roughly contemporaneous Hermopolis letters were composed around the beginning of Persian rule in Egypt, but they do not yet conform fully to Achaemenid spelling practice (see also Section 3.3.2). This emerges from the inconsistent writing of etymological /n/ directly before another consonant in the Bauer-Meissner contract (hence ʾntn ‘I give’ in tad B1.1:10, as would be the norm in Achaemenid Official Aramaic, but ʾtnnhy ‘I give it’ in line 11, both from the root ntn ‘to give’; or ʾṣl ‘I will take away’ in line 6, from nṣl)576 and of non-etymological n in the Hermopolis letters (as in mndʿm ‘anything’ in tad A2.5:4 as opposed mdʿm in 2.1:10; 2.4:10; 2.5:2).577 Especially the Hermopolis letters also contain a number of grammatical features that are otherwise untypical for Achaemenid Official Aramaic and thus indicative of a pre-Achaemenid regional variety. (Due to its small size and fragmentary state of preservation, the Bauer-Meissner papyrus, 575 Naveh – Shaked 2012: 51 and 58–59. 576 The usual spelling of the same form in Achaemenid Official Aramaic would be ʾhnṣl (tad B2.3:18–19; 3.7:14–15.15; 3.8:41–42; 3.11:10; 6.4:7–8) or ʾnṣl (tad B3.3:13). 577 But see Section 3.1.2 for the debated etymology of mndʿm.

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by contrast, does not exhibit such conclusive linguistic parallels with either Old or Achaemenid Official Aramaic.) The most plausible explanation of these facts is that the prestigious Achaemenid Official Aramaic variety, together with its particular spelling conventions, gradually encroached on regional forms of Aramaic and on local scribal practice,578 until it eclipsed, as long as the underlying imperial power could uphold it, much of the earlier diversity of written Aramaic that had emerged during the preceding centuries. Occasional sandhi writings in Achaemenid Official Aramaic texts proper (for instance, ʿznh in the uncorrected spelling of tad A4.7:20 for ʿd znh ‘until this [day]’ or ʿdbr in B7.1:3 for ʿl dbr ‘on account of’) could also result from the influence of a scribe’s spoken variety of Aramaic. Aramaic was moreover used alongside other official languages in the Achaemenid empire, and many borrowings resulted in considerable lexical elaboration. Elamite in particular had a long history in domestic bureaucracy as the only pre-Achaemenid language of Iran with a written tradition and continued to be employed in base-level financial administration in the heartland as well as presumably in some of the Eastern provinces.579 To a more restricted degree, Old Persian served as the representational idiom of the ruling dynasty and occupied an important place in the Great King’s monumental inscriptions. It only acquired a proper script, apparently established hastily and under the influence of Aramaic, in the early Achaemenid age,580 but presumably formed the main vernacular in Iran. Multilingual scribes in the homeland and abroad acted as mediators between the various languages functionally associated with the different echelons of administration and the regional idioms used in the provinces.581 Contact specifically with Iranian resulted in numerous lexical loans.582 Many of them relate to administration and cluster in texts issued by Achaemenid government functionaries, so a proportionately high number occurs in the correspondence of the provincial governors of Egypt and 578 Cf. Gzella 2011b: 582–583. 579 Account texts from Persepolis amply illustrate the use of Elamite in domestic bureaucracy, but remnants of a similar tablet from Kandahar suggest that a similar system was operative in Afghanistan, too; for an up-to-date survey, see Henkelman 2013 (with full bibliography). No comparable evidence exists for the Western provinces. 580 De Vaan – Lubotsky 2011: 195–196. 581 Cf. Tavernier 2008. 582 See Muraoka – Porten 22003: 342–345. This also includes loan translations like ‘pn šmh’ meaning ‘pn his name’ with a newly-introduced individual, i.e., ‘a certain pn’ (so especially in official documents like contracts and the Aramaic version of the Bisotun inscription), patterned after Persian ‘pn nāma’ (cf. Beyer 1984: 712, s.v. šm).

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in Bactria, while they are still completely absent from the pre-Achaemenid private letters from Hermopolis. Some Iranian loanwords only attested in later Aramaic material may also have entered the language in the Achaemenid period. Syntactic influences are less easy to pinpoint, but the Old Persian word order Object – Infinitive583 and the manā krtam construction (see the preceding Section) furnish plausible examples. Subject – Object – Verb order seems to occur especially frequently in Aramaic texts relating to the Persian imperial administration, such as the Aramaic version of the Bisotun inscription and letters by provincial governors. It could result from an Old Persian original or from scribes who mostly used an Iranian language in spoken discourse, since word order patterns and other syntactic phenomena are less subject to a speaker’s control than morphology and thus more prone to interference from another language that was dominant in daily-life communication. One should, however, not exclude conscious attempts at parallelizing the constituent order in some official representational documents like the Bisotun-inscription. Akkadian, by contrast, was increasingly replaced by Aramaic in Mesopotamia already during Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian rule, although a period of bilingualism had resulted in a certain degree of interference before the shift was completed (see Sections 3.1.3 and 3.2). Nonetheless, the use of Akkadian for administrative purposes and the study of Akkadian literature as part of scribal training apparently continued without interruption in Babylonia during Achaemenid times. This is evidenced not only by the major temple archives of Sippur and Uruk, but also by private collections, such as the fifth-century records of business transactions conducted by members of the prosperous Murašū family from Nippur (which, contrary to the temple archives, at the same time reflects the use of Aramaic in administration in the form of short epigraphs on some tablets). Curiously enough, Cyrus had a handful of Babylonian inscriptions made in which he embraced Babylonian royal ideology584; the Bisotun rock inscription of Darius includes a version composed in a rather odd, unidiomatic form of Akkadian, and another one was discovered in Babylon.585 The role of this ancient Mesopotamian idiom in Achaemenid administration and propaganda remains a matter of debate, but its employ may by and large result from an attempt to imitate the Mesopotamian tradition of cuneiform royal inscriptions. As a widespread means of international 583 Kaufman 1974: 133. 584 Schaudig 2001: 548–556. 585 A new multilingual edition under the general editorship of W.F.M. Henkelman is currently in preparation.

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communication, Aramaic transmitted Persian and Akkadian words into other West Semitic languages like Hebrew.586 In addition, Aramaic texts from Egypt contain various Egyptian lexemes, in particular naval terminology.587 Conversely, no convincing instance of Aramaic syntactic influence on Old Persian and Egyptian has yet been proposed, and Aramaic loanwords in later Coptic, which could have entered Egyptian during the Achaemenid period, are exceedingly few.588 This may suggest that the use of the respective indigenous languages was firmly entrenched in Iran and Egypt respectively. Achaemenid Official Aramaic was further brought to provinces where Aramaic had not previously been used; in part it thus also reinforced an earlier spread of the language. The result was a number of complex multilingual situations. Bi- or trilingual inscriptions from Asia Minor, where Aramaic does not seem to have a history as a written language before Achaemenid times,589 with parallel versions in Lydian (kai 260, from Sardis), Greek (kai 262, from Limyra), and Lycian as well as Greek (kai 319, from Xanthos) underscore the ongoing presence of local idioms in public representation. They also show how Greek and Aramaic competed for prestige. In Syria-Palestine, by contrast, Aramaic was already used at least for international correspondence before the Achaemenid period, as the Adon letter demonstrates (see Section  3.2.3). Changes in the distributional pattern of inscriptions pertaining to everyday matters, however, suggest that regional idioms with a long written tradition like Hebrew and the closely-related forms of Canaanite of the Transjordan area became increasingly confined to specific speech situations, such as religion in the case of Hebrew, and that Aramaic dominated many areas of daily life. Yet Phoenician inscriptions continued to be produced under Persian and Hellenistic rule, hence at least some indigenous languages of Syria-Palestine could still be employed in public representation. It is therefore very difficult to assess the actual role of the native idioms of many Achaemenid provinces in daily life and to trace the 586 Cf. Mankowski 2000: 167–170 for Akkadian (including words from other languages previously borrowed into Akkadian). 587 See Muraoka – Porten 22003: 345–347. No case of syntactic influence has yet been successfully identified (cf. Gzella 2014c: 147–148 for the assessment of an extremely speculative and unconvincing example). 588 For a summary of the few exceedingly speculative suggestions in older literature, see Rosenthal 1939: 40. A handful of few possible instances of older Aramaic borrowings into Coptic have been briefly discussed by Stadel 2009: 155–156 (with essential corrections of an earlier list in an Egyptological contribution). 589 Röllig 2004: 213–214.

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spread of Aramaic as a vernacular besides its function in administration. This calls for a more flexible approach to ancient multilingualism that allows for a complementary association of certain languages with certain communicative contexts.590 4.2

Domestic Administration

Persepolis was the heart of domestic administration in the Achaemenid empire. Recent research has described imperial bookkeeping as an intricate organism that interacted with partly autonomous bureaucratic structures in adjacent regions as well as with contracted herders and semi-independent pastoralists. It is characterized by a high degree of accountability and mutual control between different administrative sub-systems.591 Thousands of cuneiform tablets with details on the allocations of foodstuffs to functionaries and written in a variety of Elamite (the old scribal language of the region) that was reduced in linguistic complexity, and thus seems particularly geared towards use in bookkeeping, constitute the lion’s share of the evidence currently available for the reign of Darius I (according to current estimates, ca. 6000–7000 tablets and fragments are still legible). They provide a snapshot of the administrative apparatus from a base-level perspective. Yet the tradition of combining Aramaic with an indigenous administrative language written in cuneiform into a bilingual bureaucracy, as it has been initiated by the Neo-Assyrian government and then consolidated by the Babylonians (see Section 3.2), also continued under Achaemenid rule and beyond; Akkadian economic tablets with Aramaic epigraphs are still attested in Hellenistic Babylonia. The exact modalities of multilingualism as well as the patterns underlying the functional distribution of Elamite and Aramaic remain largely unknown; however, they cannot be explained by a complete switch from the former to the latter.592 Possibly, Elamite was generally confined to the established base level of financial administration that was concerned with recording the actual allocations of foodstuffs, whereas the letter-orders authorizing them and other communications of the upper echelons of bureaucracy, whose importance grew rapidly with the territorial expansion of the empire, would normally have been written in Aramaic. This general idea accounts for the new 590 See Grosjean 2010: 39–50 for some general remarks on language choice in multilingual situations. 591 Henkelman 2013: 535–538. 592 Tavernier 2008.

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needs of an older small-scale domestic administration, but it does not yet explain the use of Aramaic also in base-level documents. Administrative modalities in Persepolis survived after Alexander the Great had taken over from the Achaemenids.593 Aramaic in particular was so entrenched in bureaucracy that it reappears in the so-called “ideograms” in Middle Persian texts from Parthian and Sassanian times (see also Section 5.6). These are some six-hundred frozen Aramaic writings to be pronounced as if they were Iranian words (just as the abbreviation “etc.” for Latin et cetera can be read as “and so forth” in an English text) but inherited from Achaemenid Official Aramaic, whose orthography they preserve (for instance, zne from znh ‘this one’ with historical z instead of phonetic d). Since ideograms often seem to occur in time-honoured bureaucratic and economic contexts (such as the former symbol “f” or “fl.” on price tags in the Netherlands, originally derived from the old currency Florint but then used for Dutch Guilders), their presence in Middle Persian may corroborate the hypothesis of a certain degree of administrative continuity beneath the surface of the visible record after the fall of the Achaemenid empire. However, the shift from genuine Aramaic to logographic writing in Iran is very difficult to pinpoint. 4.2.1 Economic Documents Aramaic in domestic administration is chiefly attested in about 800 monolingual documents on triangular clay tablets from the Persepolis Fortification archive.594 They are often extremely difficult to read and have not yet been published.595 Like their much more numerous (and seemingly contemporaneous) Elamite counterparts, they relate to the distribution of food rations to people associated with the royal palace in various ways; both bodies of evidence also exhibit parallels in technical terminology. The contents of the Aramaic texts are more restricted, though, so they could simply have made the  respective information accessible to clerks who could not read Elamite. The same may also be true for the roughly 250 short Aramaic epigraphs on Elamite tablets (comparable to those on Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian cuneiform tablets in Akkadian which seem to have inspired them), but there is quite some evidence for scribes who could read or even write both languages. Unfortunately, the distribution of Elamite and Aramaic material in the corpus of tablets as well as its procedural rationale are still elusive. 593 Briant 2002: 733–737. 594 Henkelman 2013: 532–533 has an up-to-date summary. 595 See Azzoni 2008 for a preliminary account.

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Moreover, 163 mortars, pestles, and other stone objects discovered at the royal treasury bear short Aramaic inscriptions.596 They attest to a highly formalized use of the language (as in the stereotypical plural form ʿbdw ‘they made’ with singular subjects).597 Some Elamite documents, finally, refer to texts written on leather that have not survived; these were presumably composed in Aramaic, because the cuneiform script employed for Elamite was not suitable for writing with ink on a flat surface, and may have existing parallels in  the Aramaic letter-orders and lists of supplies now known from Bactria (see  Section  4.3.5 below). All this information underscores the importance of Aramaic in domestic bureaucracy, even if it does not yet add up to a coherent picture. 4.2.2 The Bisotun Inscription and Achaemenid Royal Ideology Contrary to the Mesopotamian kings (at least according to the surviving textual record), the Achaemenids also employed Aramaic for propagating their royal ideology abroad. Evidence is still limited yet undeniable: a late fifth-­ century b.c.e. papyrus fragment with a comparatively small part of a by and large fairly idiomatic Aramaic translation of the Bisotun relief inscription of Darius I has been discovered at Elephantine (tad C2.1),598 but this was presumably not the only example. However, Aramaic did not feature among the Elamite, Old Persian, and Babylonian Akkadian versions of the rock monument in Media, perhaps because it was considered a mundane administrative language that lacked, in contradistinction to Elamite, a written history in Iran and thus seemed unfit for the prestigious genre of royal inscriptions. The fact that Aramaic was employed for public representation by the local kings of Syria centuries ago (see Section 2.2) could easily have been forgotten or at least deemed insignificant: the Achaemenids would, in all probability, have preferred to compare themselves to Tiglath-pileser III and Ashurbanipal rather than to Hazaʾel of Damascus, if indeed they were aware of his existence. Certain parallels with the Babylonian text against the Elamite and Old Persian, notably the use of exact figures of the enemies killed or captured, may suggest that the Aramaic was subsequently translated from the Akkadian, but 596 Bowman 1970, whose erroneous interpretation as ritual texts has been abandoned in the meantime (cf. already Naveh – Shaked 1973). 597 Perhaps used impersonally for ‘one made’, cf. Gzella 2004: 248 n. 11 and see Section 4.3.5 below for number disagreement in a supply list from Bactria. 598 A more extensive edition has previously been published (Greenfield – Porten 1982); the Aramaic text will also be included in a forthcoming synopsis of the different versions of the Bisotun inscription under the general editorship of W.F.M. Henkelman.

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the latter also seems to betray some influence of the former.599 A few curious linguistic phenomena such as the otherwise unattested compound preposition lʿrq ‘against’ (tad C2.1:15.22.45; presumably related to the root ʿrq ‘to flee’, qrq in Old Aramaic) and what seems to be an adverbial infinitive lmmṭh ‘upon arrival’ (lines 20 and 25)600 await further clarification. The purpose and the envisaged readership of the Aramaic version remain somewhat mysterious, too. By distributing copies of the text in the international language of the day across the imperial territory, Darius II could simply have paid homage to his predecessor. However, it is equally possible that the Aramaic Bisotun inscription served as a model for imitation in scribal training and communicated not only the linguistic standards of Achaemenid Official Aramaic, to which it conforms closely, but also the monarchic values of the ruling dynasty and the glorious deeds of its members. Either would constitute a noteworthy innovation as opposed to known Assyrian and Babylonian practice, and underscore the  growing importance of Aramaic as an imperial language since the fifth century b.c.e. 4.3

Aramaic in the Provinces

While Elamite was thus propagated as the main language of base-level financial administration in Persepolis and presumably in other Iranian parts of the empire as well, the use of Aramaic enjoyed a wider distribution in the provinces (“satrapies”), both geographically and functionally. It connected local administrations with the centre and thus promoted unification in the style of governance. Achaemenid bureaucracy could further develop and standardize a system of accountancy, official letter writing, and legal procedures increasingly conducted in Aramaic since the Neo-Assyrian period. Most of the linguistically significant evidence comes from Egypt at the western and Bactria at the eastern end, but documentary texts from other regions, such as private contracts from Samaria and ostraca from Idumaea, also reflect the same language and bureaucratic procedures. This allows for a more representative discussion of the material per region than would have been possible for the Neo-Assyrian and the Neo-Babylonian periods. Clearly, then, the Achaemenids continued the already widespread use of Aramaic as a medium of expression in provincial government, private law, and economy. Moreover, they also brought Aramaic to places where it had no 599 Cf. for the time being Greenfield 1982: 475–476. A more detailed study is still lacking. 600 On the rare adverbial use of the infinitive in Aramaic, see Gzella 2004: 294.

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tradition dating back to Neo-Babylonian or even Neo-Assyrian times, such as Asia Minor. Scribal schools throughout the empire apparently promulgated uniform orthographic and linguistic standards, a coherent terminology, and identical administrative practices. All of these bear a recognizable “imperial signature” that in part persisted in a number of written traditions which subsequently developed in the former Achaemenid territory. Some regions, it is true, seem to have maintained inherited bureaucratic modalities within the wider Achaemenid matrix more effectively than others. The exact interaction of local administration and centralized supervision is often hard to grasp, as is the general structure of the provincial government. However, the satrapal system, despite its high degree of standardization, could easily have integrated institutions preceding Achaemenid rule and their apparatus. Akkadian language and script are a case in point: they continued in the conservative administration of the Babylonian temples and among the leading Babylonian families, although indirect evidence points to a growing use of Aramaic and perishable writing materials even there (see Sections 3.2.2 and 4.1.3 above). Other parts, like Syria and Northern Mesopotamia, have not yielded sufficient textual findings so far for assessing the role of Aramaic during and immediately after Achaemenid rule, and only a few extremely brief and fragmentary inscriptions have survived from the Persian Gulf.601 The Aramaic material that  appeared in various cities of the Syrian Desert and at Assur in the Roman  period nonetheless reflects the influence of some characteristically Achaemenid spelling conventions and legal terminology. Hence it is fairly certain that they, too, were affected by the promulgation of Achaemenid Official Aramaic as an administrative language. Discoveries like the Bactrian archive demonstrate that the textual documentation of Achaemenid presence in a particular area can change all of a sudden, and that arguments from silence should only be used with great caution. 4.3.1 Egypt Texts discovered in Egypt cover the entire bureaucratic range from top-level administration letters via private legal documents to ephemeral notes exchanged between individuals; there is also evidence for literary production, which will be discussed separately (see Section 4.4.1 below). The material thus reflects a wider distribution across distinct social contexts than any other Achaemenid Aramaic sub-corpus. In addition, the diachronic range makes it possible to trace the increasing standardization of Aramaic in the Persian 601 On the latter, see Gzella 2008b: 123–126.

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period and to observe the shift from pre-Achaemenid local written traditions, as represented by the Hermopolis letters and the Bauer-Meissner papyrus, to the Achaemenid chancellery idiom (see Section 4.1.3 above). Finally, discoveries from different areas in Egypt illustrate the dissemination of Aramaic in various non-Egyptian communities. The Egyptian material is thus the most important body of evidence for this language variety. Within this sub-corpus, thirteen letters and fragments on leather that presumably belonged to the archive of the Persian satrap Aršama (tad A6.3–16)602 from the end of the fifth century b.c.e. occupy a special place. They were acquired on the antiquities market and are now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford; their place of discovery remains unknown, but it is likely that those issued by the satrap himself, who often sojourned abroad, were dispatched from the Achaemenid heartland or from Mesopotamia, where he seems to have owned considerable landed property, to his headquarters in Memphis. Although these letters often relate to matters in the grey area between the public and the private domain, notably Aršama’s concern for his personal estate in Egypt, they are composed in the official style of the Persian chancellery and consistently conform to Achaemenid spelling conventions as well as idiom (including a number of administrative terms borrowed from Persian and an instance of the characteristically Iranian manā krtam construction, on which see Section 4.1.2 above). Their clear and authoritative diction illustrates procedural mores in the upper echelons of Achaemenid administration: the governor instructs his subordinate managers to look after his property in Egypt by means of brief and clear directions, keeps their correspondence on file, and holds them accountable. Some letters were sent by his staff and show how Aršama’s orders were subsequently processed by lower-ranking officials. Aršama also occurs in two letters discovered at Elephantine (tad A6.1–2). The extensive use of Aramaic in local administration in Achaemenid Egypt throughout the fifth century b.c.e., by contrast, emerges from dozens of papyri and ostraca that were discovered at Elephantine during German and French excavations at the beginning of the twentieth century. This settlement was situated on an island on the Nile, in the south of the area near the first cataract, and was inhabited mainly by Judaean mercenaries and their families who had come to Egypt prior to the Persian conquest in 525 b.c.e. (see Section 3.3.2). Their exact place of origin is a matter of debate, though. The textual discoveries illustrate the social and economic life of a Judaean expat community during a period in which Judaism was gradually emerging.603 Many of them are 602 See also the commentary in Driver 1965 and the photographs in Driver 1954. 603 Porten 1968 provides a useful though now partly outdated introduction.

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dated and show that the Achaemenid chancellery idiom remained basically stable throughout the entire fifth century, no doubt a result of firmly institutionalized scribal training. Naturally, the leaders of the Elephantine community wrote in Aramaic when dealing with the Achaemenid authorities; ten letters and fragments survive in the archive of Yedaniah the son of Gemariah (tad A4.1–10). They include two draft versions of a letter carefully crafted and rhetorically embellished in order to obtain permission from the governor of Yehud to rebuild the local temple (tad A4.7–8) as well as the subsequent memorandum of the governors of Yehud and Samaria granting this request (tad A4.9). Another fragmentary letter is often considered an early reference to the Passover feast (tad A4.1), but the reconstruction of the missing parts is, while basically plausible, not entirely certain. Others pertain to the relations and occasional difficulties of the community with the surrounding Egyptian population. Many of these letters reveal a considerable experience in using Aramaic as a written means of expression. Among the wider population of Elephantine, too, Achaemenid Official Aramaic dominates written communication. Besides a number of private letters (tad A3.1–11; the private or official character of a few additional epistolary fragments, grouped together as tad A5.1–5, cannot be determined with certainty), legal texts are especially well-documented. Already the BauerMeissner papyrus from 515 b.c.e. from Korobis in the Nile Delta confirms its function in private law at the end of the sixth century; the full spectrum of bequests, marriage contracts, and property transactions is reflected in the Elephantine family archives of Mibtaḥiah (471–410 b.c.e.; tad B2.1–11) and Ananiah (456–402 b.c.e.; tad B3.1–13). These collections are supplemented by twenty-one individual documents with deeds of obligation (tad B4.1–7), conveyances (tad B5.1–6), marriage contracts (tad B6.1–4), and judicial oaths (tad B7.1–4). In total, they constitute the beginning of a tradition of Aramaic legalese of which similar or even identical formulae (transfer of ownership, clearance statements, pronouncements of divorce) later recur in Dead Sea documents from the Roman period and in the Babylonian Talmud.604 Its background in Mesopotamian, Syrian, Egyptian, or Iranian law and the exact modalities of its coexistence with Demotic legal texts in Egypt are still debated,605 but its role as a catalyst in the evolution of Aramaic legal terminology cannot be doubted. 604 Gross 2008 illustrates the long-term workings of this tradition on the basis of three central functional clauses relating to the acknowledgment of receipts, investitures, and warranties. Cf. Healey 2009a: 22–23. 605 See the introduction by Levine in Muffs 2003: xi–xliv for a survey.

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Papyrus also served as the normal writing material for accounts (tad C3.1– 29) and lists (tad C4.1–9; these contain personal names of various provenances but of unknown purpose) that were presumably meant to be stored in archives for later reference. A long customs account with import and export duties dating from 475 b.c.e. and arranged by month (tad C3.7), which was subsequently re-used for the Aḥiqar text (see Section 4.4.1 below), furnishes some insights into the economic history of Achaemenid Egypt: duties were collected from incoming ships and deposited in the royal treasury.606 Similar information appears in the badly-damaged Memphis Shipyard Journal (tad C3.8) for the years 473–1 b.c.e. Numerous ostraca from Elephantine (tad D and now especially Lozachmeur 2006) contain telegram-style instructions with the request to deliver certain goods (such as grain and bread, cucumbers, fish, occasionally milk and cheese), lists of names, receipts, and other forms of base-level bookkeeping. They do not bear dates but can be assigned to the Achaemenid period on palaeographic and linguistic grounds. Besides a handful of writing exercise tablets with the letters of the alphabet in a specific order (tad D10.1–2; 22.28), little information on the various degrees of literacy among the population and on the institutional context of education is available. Some people seem to have been able to write their own names in clumsy signs, as ownership marks on jars indicate (Röllig 2013), but even they may have resorted to professional scribes for continuous texts such as letters.607 Occasional phonetic spellings instead of the standard etymological ones even in formal texts such as contracts (see Section 4.1.2 above) point to the use of (another variety of) Aramaic as a vernacular. Such spellings seem to occur with a higher frequency in sub-standard documents, in particular private communications on ostraca, but, by and large, even the latter evidently aspire to Achaemenid conventions. The discovery of some additional two-hundred fifth- and fourth-century b.c.e. papyrus fragments of documents pertaining to law, taxation, and commerce as well as a few ostraca at Saqqāra near Memphis (Segal 1983)608 confirms the important role of Aramaic as a language of private law. Although they are so heavily damaged that little contextual information can be gleaned from them, they illustrate the use of Aramaic in a non-Judean community of other Syro-Palestinian expatriates situated some 700 kilometres to the north of 606 Yardeni 1994 provides a detailed study. 607 Grelot 1972: 48–56. 608 Numbers 8 and 35 also appear in tad B as 5.6 and 4.7 respectively. See Williamson 1987 for several pertinent corrections and an overview of the more general significance of these texts.

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Elephantine. Their script and language basically correspond to Achaemenid Official Aramaic, while the diagnostic significance of a few smaller grammatical peculiarities as opposed to other sub-corpora remains hard to assess.609 Further, a number of court records (re-edited in tad B8.1–4; 6–12) illuminate Achaemenid legal procedures in Egypt. Their official character emerges from several Iranian lexical loans; the few remnants preserved include complaints against a former verdict, cross-examination, oaths, and the decisions taken. About half of these concern slaves. After the Achaemenid age, Greek became the dominant foreign language in Egypt, especially in urban centres, and grew deep roots in school education. The increasing prestige of Hellenistic culture as well as religion also reinforced the steady decline of Demotic as the indigenous written idiom for everyday situations.610 The youngest Aramaic texts from Egypt date from the second century b.c.e. at the latest, but one cannot say which parts of the population still used Aramaic in the Ptolemaic period, and for what purposes. It may have retained a small place for quite some time within a largely multilingual society, where different languages were spoken at varying degrees of proficiency in distinct communicative situations. Its influence on certain renderings in those parts of the Septuagint that may have been translated in Egypt could point to its use at least in Jewish circles during the early Hellenistic period.611 Some more information about its employ in literary production may in the future be derived from Papyrus Amherst 63 (see Section 4.4.1 below), but as long as reading, interpretation, and date of composition of this text rest on such a shaky foundation, one should suspend any judgment concerning its contribution to the historical language situation in Achaemenid and Ptolemaic Egypt. 4.3.2 Palestine Besides its growing role in literary production and its impact on Hebrew (see Section 4.4.2 below), Aramaic in Achaemenid Palestine is chiefly attested in legal and economic texts. The Achaemenid chancellery language employed in 609 The noteworthy feminine-singular ending of the absolute state in /-at/ instead of usual /-ā/, for instance, has been explained as an instance of Phoenician influence (Segal 1983: 12), but could also represent the substrate of an older Aramaic dialect like the one in the Hermopolis letters that was but secondarily assimilated to the Achaemenid chancellery standard (cf. Gzella 2004: 55 n. 225). 610 See Fewster 2002. 611 This is an old discussion; recent bibliography has been collected by Stadel 2009: 156–157, but a number of cases identified by previous contributions are somewhat speculative and do not conform to the most recent state-of-the-art in Aramaic scholarship. A thorough examination of the entire material would be worthwhile.

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the administrative domain will therefore have supplemented an earlier, restricted, use of Aramaic dialects as vernaculars; they surface again later but have left only a few indirect traces in the preceding periods (see Section 2.4.2). Canaanite-Aramaic bilingualism may have been more widespread in the north-eastern parts of Palestine; some groups of bilingual speakers could have moved southward already after the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and spread knowledge of Aramaic in Judaea. Written evidence, however, is only available from the Persian period onwards. Thirty-seven contracts from Wadi Daliyeh north of Jericho in Samaria (now for the first time published in their entirety by Dušek 2007)612 are dated to the second half of the fourth century and mainly relate to slave sales. All of them bear clear traces of Achaemenid Official Aramaic,613 even if they contain fewer Iranian loans than the Elephantine contracts, correspond to another legal pattern, and exhibit some terminological differences. Yahwistic personal names indicate that the people mentioned as buyers, and some of the slaves sold, worshipped the God of Israel and were presumably inhabitants of Samaria (who then took their archives with them when they fled from Alexander’s troops to the mountains), whereas the sellers and most of the slaves include people with Idumaean and Iranian names and thus may point to a wider geographical provenance. This underscores the function of Achaemenid Official Aramaic as the dominant language of private law in Palestine during the Persian period. The shift to Aramaic as the official language can also be observed in the chronological distribution of the epigraphic material in Arad and Idumaea: while the more than hundred ostraca known from this region from the sixth century b.c.e. are consistently composed in Hebrew, the many fifth- and fourth-century ostraca are all in Aramaic.614 Arad has yielded about one-hundred short and badly legible pieces (edited by Naveh 1981); from Idumaea, some 1700 legible pieces are known, of which many remain unpublished.615 Specific terminology clearly associates them with Achaemenid Official Aramaic.616 On the other hand, the clumsy script and numerous scribal mistakes suggest that these texts were not the 612 See Gzella 2012b for some corrections and alternative proposals. 613 This has already been suggested on the basis of selected texts by Gropp 1990 and can now be confirmed in the light of the entire material, see Gzella 2012b: 610–611. 614 Cf. Ephʿal 1998 and Beyer 2004: 35. 615 For an overview, see Lemaire 2006b and Briant 2009: 155 n. 44. 616 Rightly pointed out by Briant 2009: 152–155 for the ostraca from Idumaea; the same applies to the Arad-ostraca from the Achaemenid period, see Naveh 1981: 156 on no. 8 and the possibly occurrence of the Iranian term gnzbr ‘treasurer’ in no. 37 (Naveh 1981: 166).

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products of highly-trained chancellery scribes and that Aramaic was thus widely in use even in rural areas.617 As characteristic spellings in an ostracon containing a marriage contract as well as in two bowls with scribal exercises from Maresha in Idumaea and in the Aramaic inscriptions from Mount Garizim in Samaria (n for assimilated /n/ in contact; rendering of the etymological interdental */ð/ with z despite its merger with /d/; historical spelling of the causative-stem prefix with /h-/) demonstrate, this variety of Aramaic remained in use in Palestine for official purposes until the first half of the second century b.c.e.618 The impact of Achaemenid Official Aramaic on the language situation and the nature of its coexistence with Hebrew will be discussed at greater length in Sections  5.2.1 and 6.1.2. Suffice it to say here that the complete shift from Hebrew to Aramaic in the surviving everyday written documents since the beginning of the Achaemenid period highlights the role of Aramaic as the pragmatically dominant language also for the use of writing in daily life. Consequently, Hebrew became increasingly confined to the production of ­religious literature and, presumably, to oral discussions of the Law. Despite the significance of Hebrew as a marker of religious as well as national self-­ awareness and the resulting attempts at imitating the classical prose style of the biblical compositions in learned circles, Aramaic influenced it at all levels of phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon.619 Some Aramaisms in orthography, syntax, and terminology in post-exilic Hebrew can be specifically associated with Achaemenid Official Aramaic as opposed to other varieties (which began to spread in Palestine, particularly in border areas, already in earlier periods, see Sections  2.3.2 and 2.4.2).620 Especially syntactic interference, which is less subject to a speaker’s control and conscious language maintenance than morphology, reflects this change in the speech situation. The main reason for the flourishing of Aramaic in large parts of Palestine seems to be the demographic development: recent archaeological evidence points to a massive decline in the population following the Babylonian invasion of Judaea (the consequences of which have sometimes been underestimated in earlier historical studies) and a subsequent large-scale resettlement 617 As has been rightly noted by Ephʿal 1998: 116. 618 Beyer 2004: 32 and 35; cf. now Koller 2011: 204–207. The Maresha bowls have been published by Eshel – Kloner – Puech 2007. 619 Cf. Sáenz-Badillos 1993: 112–129; Hornkohl 2013; Hurvitz 2003 and 2013; and Stadel 2013a. 620 So in any case “degeminating” spellings of etymological /n/ in a few instances (Proverbs 2:11 and 5:2, cf. Gzella 2007b) and technical terms like śāhēḏ ‘witness’ (Job 16:9) or ʾiggεrεṯ ‘letter’ (Esther 9:29). The use of the preposition l- with direct objects (1 Chronicles 25:1) may also belong here, but the extension of a dative marker to animate direct objects is typologically so frequent that it could have evolved independently in Hebrew.

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during the Achaemenid period.621 Since the inhabitants of these many new foundations presumably spoke Aramaic, by then the official idiom of the area, the language shift was accelerated. Hebrew as a vernacular may have survived for a while in isolated village communities, but this is impossible to demonstrate. Aramaic would certainly have acted as the main language among most Judaeans for administration, economy and commerce, and presumably also for day-to-day communication. Other parts of Palestine have not yielded sufficient evidence yet: Phoenician was an old prestige language and continued at least as a means of representation in the ancient Phoenician cities along the Mediterranean coast until the first century c.e., as kai 60 demonstrates.622 However, its function as a vernacular cannot be easily determined, and a few Phoenician inscriptions from the third and second centuries b.c.e. contain some otherwise rare Aramaisms in function words and syntactic constructions relating to everyday use.623 This may suggest that Aramaic was then already the dominant spoken language of at least parts of the population. A period of restricted Phoenician-Aramaic bilingualism could have begun when the coastal cities of the region became part of the Achaemenid satrapy of Transeuphratene; the multilingual fabric was later enriched by Greek in Hellenistic and Roman times. The small-corpus idioms of Transjordan, such as Moabite, Ammonite, and Edomite, disappear entirely from the epigraphic record after the Achaemenid period, which seems to indicate that they were quickly replaced by Aramaic.624 4.3.3 North Arabia In contradistinction to Syria-Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, it proves challenging to delineate the social and linguistic history of North Arabia during the first half of the first millennium b.c.e. The absence of traces of 621 See Lipschits 2003, who gives a comprehensive survey of the available data and estimates a decline of about seventy percent in size of the settled area between the seventh and fifth centuries b.c.e. 622 Cf. Briquel-Chatonnet 1991. 623 E.g., the typically Aramaic lexemes bgw ‘admist’ (kai 17:1) and šgyt ‘many’ (kai 43:9) as well as a use of the relative marker followed by the preposition l- for indicating possession (kai 17:1.2; 43:9), which may have been calqued from Aramaic. 624 It may be of some significance that a Moabite papyrus clarifying property rights between individuals (Bordreuil – Pardee 1990), dated to ca. 500 b.c.e. on palaeographic grounds, contains the well-known Aramaic legal term rḥq ‘to renounce a claim’ in line 2. This could point to an influence of Achaemenid Official Aramaic as a legal language on a private note composed in the local idiom. However, the authenticity of this unprovenanced text remains debated, so it can only be used with great caution in the discussion.

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urbanism in the early archaeological record only adds to the difficulty. Several local languages that, despite considerable differences among themselves, belong to the wider Arabian family have presumably served as vernaculars among the population from time immemorial; they surface in numerous graffiti, written in forms of a distinct, “South Semitic,” tradition of the alphabetic script, which are notoriously hard if not impossible to date.625 There is no reason to doubt that these languages were normally spoken in the region when the Babylonian king Nabonidus went into a ten-year exile in the oasis of Teima (or Tayma) in the northern Hijaz in 553 b.c.e.626 By that date, Aramaic will have been the dominant vernacular of Babylonia (see Section 3.2.2), so the king’s entourage must have introduced or at least consolidated the use of Aramaic in Teima. One cannot exclude that contacts between speakers of Aramaic and Arabian languages goes back to an even earlier period, since a few occurrences of the name of this place in eighth-century b.c.e. sources suggest that it had sufficient economic power to be involved in long-distance trade.627 This ancient oasis, situated at the crossroads of important caravan routes, and its surroundings are the region where some thirty short and badly-preserved Achaemenid Official Aramaic inscriptions on stelae from the fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e. have been discovered (Degen 1974; Beyer – Livingstone 1987 and 1990; al-Theeb 1993: 40–47).628 They mark the beginning of the available Aramaic evidence from North Arabia. Most of them relate to a funerary or, less frequently, dedicatory context and mention individuals with North Arabian names, supposedly members of the local population. A larger stele accompanied by a relief depicting a sacrificial scene (kai 228) that was found already in 1879 and is now in the Louvre appears to refer to the installation of a priest and his descendants in a local temple of the regional main deity ṢLM, but some gaps in the text leave room for doubt. Curse formulae and specifications concerning a piece of ground as well as palms for offerings give the text a legal and thus official character. Coexisting inscriptions in the local Ancient North Arabian idiom (“Taymanitic”),629 many of which refer to the same deity as kai 228 but are 625 For a comprehensive synopsis with copious bibliography, see Macdonald 2004. 626 His sojourn, which became a literary topos that surfaces also in later Aramaic texts such as the Prayer of Nabonidus from Qumran (cf. Lemaire 2010), is now attested in several of these Ancient North Arabian inscriptions, see Müller – Al-Said 2001 and 2002. 627 See Livingstone 1995. 628 A selection has been included in kai 228–230. See also Niehr 2014 for the cultural-historical background. 629 Cf. Macdonald 2004: 490. They may come from the sixth and fifth centuries b.c.e.

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difficult to date, suggest that Aramaic was employed in a multilingual context here and may have played a comparable role as a formal idiom for legal and representational matters as elsewhere in the Achaemenid empire. The Arabian vernacular, by contrast, was used for everyday communication and only written for more ephemeral purposes, such as graffiti with short notes, spontaneous prayers, and related forms of individual expression. In the meantime, a handful of extremely short, graffiti-like, and in part not yet fully-understood Achaemenid Official Aramaic inscriptions have also been discovered at Dedan, some 120 kilometres to the south of Teima (Sima 1999). They illustrate the further spread of this form of Aramaic in the Arabian Peninsula. An immediate offshoot of the Achaemenid chancellery idiom still acted as the official written language in the later Nabataean kingdom (see Section 5.3). Since Nabataean Aramaic, documented by numerous inscriptions from all over the northern part of the Arabian Peninsula, is by and large difficult to distinguish from Achaemenid Official Aramaic on linguistic grounds (excepting a number of Arabic lexical loans and syntactic features that result from substrate influence), and the Nabataean script directly evolved from the Achaemenid chancellery style, the Aramaic variety introduced by the Persians must therefore have enjoyed a much wider distribution in North Arabia. Interestingly, it also served similarly official purposes in the Nabataean kingdom (such as the public display of property rights in the tomb inscriptions of Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ) as it did in the Achaemenid period. The workings of AramaicArabian contact in pre-Islamic North Arabia could become the topic of a promising new line of research, but it would be premature to provide even a tentative summary here. 4.3.4 Asia Minor According to the available evidence, Aramaic was a relatively late newcomer in Asia Minor and coexisted with a number of indigenous Indo-European smallcorpus languages as well as with Greek, the language of the Greek settlements along the coast in the western part of the region. Although Aramaic receives virtually no mention in most recent surveys of the historical language situation,630 a few inscriptions prove that it was used by some parts of the population as a medium of representation since the Achaemenid period. Its role in provincial administration can be deduced from twelve bullae with the Iranian names of their proprietors on Aramaic tags and seals that have been discovered at Daskyleion, the residence of the satrap of Phrygia (Röllig 2002c). Unfortunately, the documents with which these clay envelopes and seals have 630 E.g., Hawkins 2010. Contrast Lemaire – Lozachmeur 1996.

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been used are now lost, but it is quite likely that they were composed in Achaemenid Official Aramaic as the empire-wide chancellery idiom for official correspondence. Aramaic legends on coins from Cilicia (Vattioni 1971: 70–78) support this conclusion, because the minting of coins would have been the prerogative of the Persian governor. A lion weight from Abydos (kai 263) also relates to official standardization. The integration of Achaemenid rule and local practices manifests itself in a longer Aramaic-Greek-Lycian trilingual that confirms the installation of a new provincial cult at Xanthos; it was erected by Pixodaros, the satrap of Lycia and Caria, according to Achaemenid custom in 337 b.c.e. (kai 319).631 Some ten mostly brief inscriptions from several parts of Asia Minor, which date to the fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e., further illustrate the spread of the Achaemenid chancellery idiom, at least as a token of loyalty to Achaemenid government, among the elite of this formerly non-Aramaic speaking region. Most of them have been issued by private individuals for dedicating a statue as an act of personal religious devotion (kai 258 from Keseçek Köyü near Tarsos in Cilicia; kai 318 from Daskyleion in Phrygia), marking boundaries (kai 259 from Gözne and kai 278 from Bahadırlı, also in Cilicia, the former invoking Aramaean deities and the latter a local one) or commemorating a hunt (kai 261 from Saraïdin in Cilicia), and remembering the dead on tombstones (kai 260 from Sardis in Lydia; kai 262 from Limyra in Lycia, fragmentary). A few others are also known, but they have only been preserved in an incomplete state, so little can be said with certainty about the contents, or they may come from a slightly later period.632 The distribution of the few inscriptions suggests that Aramaic was relatively more prominent in Cilicia than elsewhere in Asia Minor. These texts are all by and large written in conservative Achaemenid orthography (as appears from the relative marker zy and near deictic znh ‘this’).633 However, several traces of imperfect learning occur with a relatively higher proportion in the material from Asia Minor, limited though it is, than in other Aramaic sub-corpora from the Achaemenid period. They indicate that Aramaic had not grown deep roots in this area and suggest that active bilingualism involving Aramaic was not particularly extensive. Absolute-state forms where 631 Much recent bibliographical information has been assembled by Funke 2008. 632 See now Schwiderski 2004: 34 (Ağaça Kale), 191 (Daskyleion), 202 (Hemite), 295 (Meydancıkkale, twice), and 408 (Sultaniye Köy), all with further bibliography. 633 Also mndʿm ‘anything’ (kai 260 B: 6), but see Section 3.1.2 on the debated etymology. kai 259:2, by contrast, has phonetic ʾt ‘you’ instead of ʾnt, as it would have been in Achaemenid standard orthography.

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the emphatic state would be expected are especially significant because they show a certain unfamiliarity with the characteristically Aramaic type of nominal determination and may result from the interference of a language that has no such means (comparable to the comparatively high number of errors in case marking by second-language speakers).634 The same could apply to the occasional lack of gender agreement635; productive gender marking beyond indicating sex in humans and higher animals has no evident semantic underpinnings but simply establishes connections between different clause constituents, hence it does not make intuitive sense to speakers of a first language without such marking and is, as a consequence, hard to learn (for instance, even speakers of Turkish with a reasonable proficiency in German still make regular gender mistakes).636 Other indications of substrate influence may also exist but are more difficult to isolate.637 Parallel versions in Lydian (kai 260) and Greek (kai 262) demonstrate that the pre-Aramaic languages continued to be used for representation in the private domain, and they presumably still served as vernaculars as well. Although a newcomer in an already diversified linguistic landscape, Aramaic lived on at least in parts of Asia Minor after the Persian period. Two supposedly Hellenistic inscriptions from Cappadocia can be cited as proof. One from Arebsun (kai 264) accompanies a fragmentary relief on basalt and features several typically Achaemenid spellings (zy, znh, ʾnt), but its oftenassumed date in the second century b.c.e. is not entirely certain. Another one from Faraşa (kai 265) also has a Greek parallel version and is mostly, though tentatively, dated to the first century c.e.; it has been inscribed in a rock and refers to ritual practices for the god Mithras, yet it is too short to allow for a more fine-grained linguistic classification within the wider spectrum of Aramaic. 634 So with the Iranian noun ptkr znh ‘this image’ (kai 258:1, but cf. normal ptkrʾ znh in l. 4) and presumably also the likewise Iranian prbr ‘the antechamber’(?) (kai 260 B: 3.5) as well as the native word sprb ‘the tomb chamber’ (kai 260 B: 3), both referring to identifiable architectural constructions. See Montrul 22013: 174 for more bibliography on this general phenomenon in language acquisition. 635 See especially ʾrḥʾ znh ‘this way’ (kai 318:3) with the masculine demonstrative following a feminine noun. 636 A similar feature may underlie the lack of gender concord in the Bukān inscription (briefly discussed in Section 2.3.3); in either case, however, it remains unclear whether this actually reflects a property of the unknown local vernacular. 637 Beyer 1984: 103, for instance, suggests that the spelling yḥgh for purported yhgʿ (kai 278:5) results from weak articulation of the gutturals by non-Semitic speakers, but the root of this form is actually debated (see the extensive note in Donner – Röllig 31973: 333–334).

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While these two texts constitute rather scanty evidence, they show how Aramaic formed part of the total fabric of the Greek-Near Eastern symbiosis that emerged in the local kingdoms of Hellenistic Asia Minor and continued under Roman administration. Its exact role, the extent of its use, and possible contacts with the Aramaic-speaking Osrhoene further to the east (see Section 5.4.2) cannot be determined. Indigenous languages, too, presumably continued to be spoken by parts of the population despite a predominantly Greek epigraphic record.638 Shifting identities between Greek and Near Eastern cultural affiliation during the first two centuries c.e. are sufficiently documented in the literature (first and foremost in the extensive work of Lucian of Samosata)639 and iconography from the neighbouring Commagene, even if no clear traces of Aramaic have yet been discovered there.640 4.3.5 Bactria Fertile Bactria, present-day Afghanistan, was an economically important province of the Persian empire, but until very recently, the modalities of Achaemenid administration remained largely obscure except for a few references in classical sources. The situation changed a few years ago after a substantial archive of documents on parchment from Bactria (judging from numerous place names in the texts) from the second half of the fourth century b.c.e., that is, the last decades of Achaemenid rule up to the early years of Alexander the Great, has been discovered on the antiquities market (Naveh – Shaked 2012, whose sigla will be used here). This so-called “Khalili collection” (named after its proprietor) comprises the correspondence of a local governor with his superior, presumably the satrap of Bactria, as well as several other ­letters, eighteen in total, two debt and receipt notes, eight lists of supplies (allocations for travelling functionaries, disbursement of small cattle, rations distributed to servants and functionaries) and two fragments of lists with Iranian personal names, as well as eighteen small wooden boards with what seem to be extremely brief and formulaic acknowledgments of debts. Close parallels in the letters with the earlier correspondence of the Persian satrap Aršama in Egypt (see Section 4.3.1 above), at the opposite periphery of the empire, and terminological congruence with economic texts from 638 Cf. Brixhe 2002. 639 See Ebner – Gzella – Nesselrath – Ribbat 2001: 11–31; Andrade 2013: 261–313. 640 The provenance of the Syriac letter of Mara bar Serapion, which is sometimes assigned to Commagene in the first-century c.e., remains debated, but a date in the third century c.e. or later seems much more likely on linguistic grounds such as the extensive use of dēn and gēr, see Gzella Forthc.(a).

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Persepolis prove beyond doubt that Bactria was subject to the same imperial administration as other provinces.641 Since the dated documents were composed during the period between 353 and 324 b.c.e. and thus at a later stage than the material from Egypt and Persepolis, they also illustrate the essential stability of Persian bureaucracy. According to the latest document (C4), this bureaucracy continued even into the seventh year of Alexander without any noticeable changes in language or document form. In addition, the lists seem to reflect the previously badly-documented use of Aramaic for a form of longterm bookkeeping on a higher bureaucratic level than the one represented by the Persepolis tablets, or for a more permanent use. Spelling, grammar, and style exactly match the form of Achaemenid Official Aramaic attested in Egypt and Samaria, hence it is now certain that an identical language variety was also employed among Iranian functionaries in the Eastern provinces of the Achaemenid empire.642 In particular the letters addressed to the local governor and issued by the satrap conform to the same top-level official standard as the Aršama correspondence from Egypt. Both exhibit the same form of address, structure, terminology, layout, way of binding and sealing (with the name of the addressee and the subject on the outside) as well as a similarly directive tone of voice. However, the others texts of the archive, too, breathe a distinctively official air, as emerges from the consistent spelling of long consonants with n (so consistently in ʾnt ‘you’); the historical rendering of */ð/ with z (zy, znh); and the etymological writing of the older causative-stem prefix /h-/ (though very occasional phonetic spellings like ʾytt ‘you have brought’ in B1:3 and perhaps in the “imperfect” tšgny ‘you lead me astray’(?) in B5:9 also crop up).643 Since these texts originated in the same milieu, Persian lexical loans (including some formerly unattested ones whose meaning is still debated) abound to a similar extent as in the Aršama letters. 641 See Briant 2009: 148–151 and Gzella Forthc.(c) with a number of relevant examples. 642 They also contain new evidence for phenomena previously badly attested, in particular adverbs expanded by an m in the consonantal spelling (Naveh – Shaked 2012: 115). This may be related to the by-form knm(ʾ) /kenāmā/ ‘thus’ with the affix /-ām/ and the adverbial ending /-ā/ (cf. Beyer 1984: 607). The occurrence of new but entirely plausible linguistic phenomena, such as formerly unattested words with a good etymology, in texts of unknown provenance can generally argue in favour of their authenticity, since the language of falsifications is often patterned after existing material. The amount of convincing new linguistic material may thus be employed as another criterion in distinguishing between genuine texts and fakes. 643 It could be significant that these rare sub-standard spellings all appear in the correspondence between functionaries of apparently equal rank that relates to a lower stratum of administration and not in letters issued by the satrapal chancellery.

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Relatively frequent instances of a certain passive construction644 may likewise result from Iranian influence and could be related to the manā krtam construction (see Section 4.1.2 above), but this has yet to be investigated. Scribes recruited from the local population were thus trained according to the same empire-wide standards as in other provinces. The exact modalities of Iranian-Aramaic multilingualism, however, remain unknown. Nothing suggests that the texts were originally dictated in Persian and recorded on the fly in Aramaic by a scribe,645 and the mixture of Aramaic grammar with Iranian terminology may constitute an institutionalized code like Latin elements in legal or medical technical language. A number of linguistic peculiarities would also merit further study, such as the curious violation of number agreement between a singular subject and apparently a plural verb in a supply list (C4:37.41). One cannot say whether this results from a growing disintegration of Aramaic,646 from a provincial scribe’s imperfect knowledge of Aramaic, or from a highly formalized employ of stereotypical phrases.647 Both the Aršama correspondence from Egypt and the letters issued by the Bactrian satrap furnish interesting insights into what seems to have been a common Achaemenid style of governance. Exploiting the provinces for amassing personal property and employing lower-ranking administrators for duties on the other side of the public-private divide (if indeed the existence of such a divide was ever felt) were no doubt widespread but should rather be discussed in a social history of the Achaemenid empire than in the present survey. More relevant for a history of the Aramaic language are the extensive citations from an earlier correspondence in several letters (see, for example, A1 and A4); these point to the preservation of substantial amounts of written material in archives for the purpose of control and procedural accuracy. The use of Aramaic in writing must have been ample, and documents seem to have been kept on file. In the light of the Khalili documents, it is now clear that Achaemenid Official Aramaic had spread throughout the Iranian Plateau during the Persian period. One may reasonably ask whether some knowledge of it persisted into Hellenistic Bactria and added to perhaps a more varied though now largely invisible cultural matrix than the ostentatious Greek identity-forming in the period after Alexander’s conquest suggests. The six later bilingual Aśoka 644 645 646 647

As in, e.g., A1:4; cf. Naveh – Shaked 2012: 72. So Naveh – Shaked 2012: 50–51. Suggested by Naveh – Shaked 2012: 51–52. See also Section 4.2.1 above for a similar phenomenon in Aramaic economic texts from Persepolis.

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inscriptions (274/272–236/230 b.c.e.) from Afghanistan and Pakistan with their curiously ungrammatical Aramaic versions show, at any rate, that the language eventually reached the Indus region, supplemented local idioms, and was considered prestigious enough to be employed as a veneer in official representation even after the fall of the Achaemenid empire (see also Section 5.6 for similar evidence from the Persian Gulf). 4.4

National Literatures in Aramaic

The evolution of Aramaic literature in the pre-Hellenistic period is a soft counterpoint to the representational and documentary material. Elements of a formal prose style surface already in the earliest royal inscriptions in Aramaic from ninth- and eighth-century b.c.e. Syria. Songs, stories, and myths no doubt existed in popular lore as well and were passed on orally from one generation to the next. Traditional proverbial wisdom first crystallized into a surviving text some time before the rise of the Persian empire and was eventually associated with the wise counsellor Aḥiqar (see Section 3.4). The Achaemenid period then saw the emergence of literary works in some provinces, which later continued into the production of vast bodies of religious compositions that corroborated the ideas and cultural self-awareness of Jews, Christians, and Mandaeans. One may therefore suppose that national literary traditions slowly began to take on their shapes with the increasingly institutionalized use of Aramaic. It is by no means easy to define the concept “literature” as such, and little can be said with certainty about its place in Western Asian society during the first millennium b.c.e.: one simply does not know whether some of the surviving texts were recommended for imitation (which would make them “classics”), whether they were known at all outside scribal circles (due to the lack of allusions to them in, for instance, private letters), or whether they had an influence on identity-forming within the communities in which they circulated. As in the study of other Ancient Near Eastern civilizations, “literature” here basically comprises non-documentary sources, that is, texts not specifically produced for a specific pragmatic purpose of daily life like legal deeds, economic receipts and lists, letters, and so forth.648 Theoretically more advanced criteria like intentional fictionality, layers of meaning, and “intertextual” references to other literary works649 could prove useful for the study of the subset of Biblical 648 Compare Röllig 1978: 20–21 for a similarly non-committing definition. 649 See Loprieno 1996 for an account of Egyptian literature that engages with more recent literary theory.

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Aramaic and its interaction with other Jewish literary compositions, but less so for the remaining evidence from the Achaemenid period. This negative definition, however, does not exclude that the powerful rhetoric of, for instance, the letters sent by the Judaean authorities of Elephantine to the Persian provincial administration in order to request permission to rebuild their temple (tad A4.7 and 4.8) can also exhibit considerable stylistic refinement, just as certain scientific writers like Sigmund Freud authored excellent and aesthetically most pleasing prose. In the same vein, some inscriptions, like the Aramaic funerary stele from Egypt in the library of Carpentras (kai 269 = tad D20.5), the place where Petrarch spent much of his youth, have often been considered “poetic” (in view of fixed expressions, parallelism with extensive use of synonyms, and the repetition of certain words) or even metrical in past scholarship.650 Whatever view one may espouse on this last point (terseness and rhythm are indeed hallmarks of poetry), a literary style of Aramaic can thus appear also in non-literary compositions, hence the boundaries between the social functions of texts and their stylistic levels are fluid. Neither rhetorical figures nor any kind of regular rhythm, however, can on their own ascertain the literary character of a text, and the lexical dimension with a possible distinction between “common” and “elevated” words is difficult to evaluate.651 As a result of its prestige and its empire-wide prominence in scribal training, Achaemenid Official Aramaic could have created a suitable backdrop for such a formal use of language to evolve into an Aramaic “world literature” of at  least a modest size. Orthographic, linguistic, and stylistic features of Achaemenid Official Aramaic that live on in post-Achaemenid literary productions certainly argue in favour of the presence of such a shared matrix.652 Wisdom instructions and court tales are the established genres documented so far. The former relate to a pristine Ancient Near Eastern tradition and could well be based on proverbs that have been transmitted from time immemorial. Court novels like the Aḥiqar framework, the biblical Books of Daniel, Tobit, and Esther, and some Aramaic Qumran texts like the Prayer of Nabonidus (4Q242) or “Proto-Esther” (4Q550), which occupy a prominent place in nondocumentary post-Achaemenid material written in Aramaic, by contrast, may ultimately spring from traditions rooted in earlier Aramaic literature and thereby form the nucleus of the surviving literary works. 650 Greenfield 1979; Nebe 2007: 72–83. 651 Cf. Loprieno 1996: 214–215. For the role of the lexicon in distinguishing Biblical Hebrew poetry from prose, see Driver 1953. 652 The hypothesis of a proper “Standard Literary Aramaic” existing besides Official Aramaic for documentary purposes is nonetheless unwarranted, see Section 4.1 above.

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Both genre and subject matter thus suggest that the earliest clear manifestations of Aramaic literature originated in the milieu of clerks and administrators. This matches the general situation in the Ancient Near East, where literature was predominantly produced and studied in schools, chancelleries, and temples. The exchange of literary motives and figures between Egypt and Mesopotamia during the Achaemenid period would have been facilitated by the use of Aramaic as a standardized chancellery language in the imperial provinces. In addition, the dim reflexes of Babylonian science (in a broad sense) in later Hebrew as well as in Hasmonaean, Syriac, and Mandaic writings on astronomy, divination, and exorcism may also have spread via lost Aramaic translations of technical writings.653 Here, too, the employ of flexible but perishable writing materials no doubt has taken its toll. 4.4.1 Egypt: Aḥiqar, Bar Puneš, and Papyrus Amherst 63 Several discoveries from Egypt still witness to an emerging local literature in Aramaic, its wider imperial backdrop, and perhaps also its interaction with native Egyptian traditions. The most important of these is the Aḥiqar papyrus from Elephantine (tad C1.1). It contains a combination of an older collection of wisdom sayings from Mesopotamia or Syria (see Section 3.4), which comprises nine of the fourteen columns, with a court story centred on the figure of Aḥiqar as a narrative framework in the remaining parts. The former has been composed in a pre-Achaemenid variety of Aramaic, the latter in Achaemenid Official Aramaic.654 Either could have been employed in the training of imperial clerks as a model for writing formal prose, but also for propagating the moral and intellectual ideal of a loyal court official. Aḥiqar, the wise counsellor to Sennacherib and Asarhaddon, was a proverbial sage in the Near East655; the story of how his integrity saved him from a 653 On this latter point, see Ben-Dov 2010, especially pages 391–398. Reflexes of Babylonian literary motives in Aramaic texts from Qumran have also been explained as results of a “Jewish-Akkadian symbiosis” (Lemaire 2010 and earlier studies cited there) transmitted by exiles who have come into contact with cuneiform culture, but this remains speculative: legendary figures and motives often spread independently in popular lore without direct cultural contact; hence King Darius and Avicenna are mentioned in Johannes von Tepl’s Der Ackermann aus Böhmen from around 1400 without there being evidence for any Iranian connection. 654 The framework story, too, may contain some linguistic archaisms in verbal syntax (cf. Gzella 2004: 135 and 198 on possible examples for a still more restricted scope of the predicative participle), even if these are, admittedly, quite hypothetical. 655 Now extensively discussed by the various contributions in Contini – Grottanelli (eds.) 2005. Several attempts to identify him with historical persons have been made in the past

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plot initiated by his adopted son enjoyed such a great popularity that it became not only the subject of later rewritings in several different languages including Syriac and continues to be retold in the Middle East,656 but was also referred to, by way of allusions, in other literary works such as the Book of Tobit (1:21– 22; 2:10; 11:18; 14:10).657 The name Aḥiqar (ᴈḫkl) even occurs in an extremely short and fragmentary Demotic papyrus from perhaps the first century c.e.658 Not much can be said about the contents of this papyrus, but the presence of Aḥiqar would entail that the tale became part of Egyptian literature after it had arrived in Egypt during the Achaemenid period or earlier. Its rich reception history highlights the literary potential of the Aḥiqar Stoff. Another tale on an Elephantine papyrus, about a certain Bar Puneš (tad C1.2, and now the extensive edition by Porten 2004), also appears to take place at a royal court, but the text is so fragmentary that the plot remains completely enigmatic. The surviving part seems to contain the report of a dialogue between Bar Puneš and Pharaoh with a blessing or cursing, culminating in a spell on the king’s boats. With all due caution, one cannot exclude the possibility that Bar Puneš was in fact identical to the well-known magician Hor-son-ofPuneš in Demotic literature; in that case, the Bar Puneš tale would furnish another instance of Aramaic-Demotic intersections. Yet the reading ḥwr ‘Hor, Horus’ in line 8, on which this hypothesis depends, is debated. The verso probably contains an ominous prophecy relating to the disappearance of justice. Finally, Papyrus Amherst 63 from perhaps the fourth (at the earliest), the beginning of the third, or even the second century b.c.e., contains what appears to be a long liturgical-poetic text in Aramaic written in Demotic script.659 No complete edition exists; much of the discussion has revolved around a passage (column XII, lines 11 to 19) that seems to parallel Psalm 20 but possibly with the name of Horus(?) instead of the tetragram referring to the God of Israel (if indeed this does not simply have to count as an attempt to render the tetragram with Demotic graphemes).660 This material is possibly of great interest for the history of the biblical text and its early reception, since it

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(e.g., Parpola 2005: 109–110), yet none of them appears particularly convincing. Cf. also Greenfield 1995a on the more general Babylonian background. See Talay 2002. Cf. Greenfield 1981b. Betrò 2005, with the original text and an annotated Italian translation. A translation reflecting the readings and interpretation of R.C. Steiner can be found in Hallo (ed.) 2003: I, 309–327, with a selective Aramaic glossary by Steiner and A.M. Moshavi in Hoftijzer – Jongeling 1995: 1249–1266. For older bibliography, see Fitzmyer – Kaufman 1992: 143–144 and Kottsieper 1997. See Kottsieper 1988.

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could perhaps illustrate the use of Aramaic in a scribal milieu not too dissimilar from the people who also produced the Septuagint version of those books of the Bible that have been translated in Egypt. However, the decipherment of Papyrus Amherst 63 is still extremely controversial, the exact date remains unclear, no official treatment can be consulted in order to verify the readings, and the few students of this papyrus differ fundamentally in their readings as well as analyses.661 Hence it would be premature to give even a general summary of its linguistic peculiarities662 or its contents here. The historical affiliation of the type of Aramaic represented in this text and its relation with the Achaemenid chancellery language or other varieties of Aramaic that ante- or even postdate the arrival of the Persians in Egypt have to remain open for the time being. 4.4.2 Palestine: Biblical and Jewish Literary Aramaic When Achaemenid Official Aramaic began to spread in Palestine after the annexation of Judaea and Samaria to the Persian empire (see Section  4.3.2 above), it interacted with a much-debated process of textualization of religious literature among priests and learned functionaries that eventually produced the Hebrew Bible. Hebrew retained its prestige as a literary and religious language during the subsequent centuries, while the growing use of Aramaic in administration and matters of daily life contributed to the rise of an extensive Hebrew-Aramaic bilingualism in Jewish tradition (see Sections 5.2.1 and 6.1.2). Aramaic influenced not only Hebrew since the Persian period at all levels, but parts of Aramaic have been absorbed into the composition of the Books of Ezra (4:8–6:18) and Daniel (2:4b–7:28) in addition to one verse in Jeremiah (10:11) and a word in Genesis (31:47). Although the “Biblical Aramaic” sub-corpus only comprises about one percent of the later canon, it includes some of the most popular passages with an 661 Steiner’s transcription and interpretation of Papyrus Amherst 63 results from cooperation with the same Egyptologist who also contributed to the author’s subsequent, but no less personal and controversial, work on the alleged Northwest Semitic “serpent spells” in the Pyramid texts. Since other Egyptologists have pointed to a number of factual errors and methodological flaws in the latter (see, e.g., Breyer 2012 for a fundamental critique), judgment on the former may perhaps be better suspended until verified by independent studies, simply in order to prevent working hypotheses from becoming accepted as truth. 662 Possible evidence for the pronunciation of /ṣ/ as [ts] (Beyer 2004: 46), short fleeting vowels after /h/, /ḥ/, and /ʿ/ (ibid. 52), and a preservation of the difference between */ʿ/ and /ġ/ as well as between /ḥ/ and /ḫ/ (Steiner 2005: 234–237) has a bearing on the historical phonology of Aramaic. It should be readdressed once an authoritative complete edition of the text with photographs is available.

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extensive reception history in subsequent art and literature, such as the vision of the Statue with the Feet of Clay, the Young Men in the Fiery Furnace, the Writing on the Wall at Belshazzar’s Feast, and the Vision of the Son of Man. As with the Aḥiqar narrative (see Section 4.4.1 above), much of this material is associated with Achaemenid administration and tales revolving around the imperial court. The best grammar and dictionary are still Bauer – Leander 1927 and Vogt 1971, but Rosenthal 72006 and the Biblical Aramaic section of the modern dictionaries of Biblical Hebrew are also serviceable. A reasonably upto-date grammatical survey can be found in Gzella 2011b: 583–584. The Aramaic material in the Hebrew Bible has been subjected to the same process of redaction and much later vocalization as the rest. The final reworking of the Book of Daniel can confidently be dated to about 165 b.c.e. in the light of historical allusions in the vision reports, and the vowel signs eventually applied to the earlier consonantal text reflect not only a post-Achaemenid stage of pronunciation of Aramaic (in which stops in weak articulation after vowels and /ay/ are spirantized and short unstressed vowels in open syllables lost or, rarely, lengthened),663 but also a different dialect. This dialect mixture emerges from hybrid spellings in which the consonantal writing and the vocalization presuppose distinct grammatical forms.664 Nonetheless, the Achaemenid signature of the language underlying the Aramaic parts of both Ezra and Daniel can be verified in, for instance, characteristically “degeminating” spellings, the use of the preposition l for direct object marking, and derived-stem infinitives without an /m-/ prefix; it is thus widely accepted in scholarly tradition.665 At least typologically, the idiom in which they have been composed is evidently steeped in the Achaemenid tradition, yet not fully identical with Achaemenid Official Aramaic. Redactional criticism further suggests that the core of Daniel 4–6 originates in the fourth century b.c.e.,666 and some authorities even maintain that the letters of Ezra are copies of authentic Achaemenid archival documents that contain a 663 A reconstruction of the pre-Masoretic pronunciation of Daniel 7:9–10 and 13–14 according to Aramaic historical phonology around the final redaction of Daniel can be found in Beyer 2013a: 20–21. 664 E.g., the Achaemenid Official Aramaic use of the masculine form for the third-person feminine plural “perfect” */napaqū/ ‘they came out’ in the consonantal text and the underlying proper feminine form */napaqā/ of Galilean Aramaic in Daniel 5:5 (cf. Gzella 2004: 125 n. 31). 665 Cf. Rosenthal 1939: 60–71 and 72006: 10; Segert 1975; Beyer 1984: 33 and 1986: 19 (who, nonetheless, rightly points out that Biblical Aramaic has to be dealt with separately); Gzella 2004: 41–45 and 2011b: 583–584. For more older bibliography, see especially Baumgartner 1927 and the references in Fitzmyer 32004: 29 n. 89. 666 See Gzella 2003: 6 with n. 14 for the most relevant bibliographical indications.

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correspondence with the Persian kings Artaxerxes and Darius.667 Although this may seem an extreme claim, the material certainly reflects a close connection with terminology and document forms known from other Achaemenid evidence. A number of grammatical peculiarities, however, distinguish Biblical Aramaic from its Achaemenid matrix and are at times adduced in support of a closer association with the subsequent developmental stage of the language rather than with Achaemenid Official Aramaic: the inconsistent spelling of */s/ and */ś/ anticipates their later merger668; the occasional shift of /-āy-/ to /-āʾ-/ before another vowel as in /kaśdāʾīn/ ‘Chaldaeans’ (Daniel 3:8) or the participle of “hollow roots” like /qāyem/ to /qāʾem/ ‘standing’ has parallels in Judaean Aramaic669; some feminine nouns ending in */-ī/ have plural forms with /-aw-/ (on analogy with feminines in */-āt/) instead of /-iy-/, as in Talmudic Aramaic670; the thirdperson “imperfect” of the root hwī is formed with the preformative /l-/ instead of regular /y-/, presumably in order to distinguish such verbal forms from the tetragram denoting the name of God, as is the case in Aramaic texts from Qumran and, occasionally, from other places in the Dead Sea region671; the Achaemenid spelling ʿq ‘wood’ has been replaced by later ʾʿ; in contradistinction to Ezra and Achaemenid Official Aramaic, but in accordance with post-Achaemenid varieties of Aramaic and the Hermopolis letters, Daniel has /-n/ instead of /-m/ in the second- and third-person masculine plural “perfect” endings as well as in the independent pronouns and one instance of the Western Aramaic object marker yt /yāt/ (3:12) that is alien to Achaemenid Official Aramaic. Some of these phenomena may result from mere orthographical modifications or other smaller changes during the transmission history, but a more innovative use of the verbal system in the Book of Daniel (with its reasonably frequent occurrence of participles as historical presents and performatives and the auxiliary verb bʿī ‘to wish’ as an incipient marker of the imminent future or proximative aspect)672 and the concomitant gradual loss of the “short imperfect”673 are important structural features that foreshadow fundamental 667 The authenticity of the letters has recently been defended again by Williamson 2008, but others view them as Hellenistic fabrications, so already in the nineteenth century and now again by Schwiderski 2000 (cf. 381–382 for a summary) and Grabbe 2006. See Rosenthal 1939: 63–65 for older bibliography. 668 Beyer 1984: 421, but cf. Lipiński 2014: 109. 669 Beyer 1984: 53 (1986: 38) and 418. This also occurs in Syriac, see Nöldeke 21898: 27–28. 670 Rosenthal 72006: §54. 671 Kaufman 1974: 124–126. 672 Gzella 2004: 120–136, 209–215, and 229–231. 673 Rosenthal 72006: §108. Presumably, it was triggered by the expansion of the participle for present- and future-tense, which then reinforced the modal uses of the “long imperfect”;

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changes in the grammatical core of Aramaic during the subsequent periods. Finally, the influence of literary Hebrew has resulted in a few lexical loans and some instances of the plural ending /-īm/ instead of genuine Aramaic /-īn/ (Daniel 4:14; 7:10; Ezra 4:13).674 The recurrence of at least a number of these peculiarities in other Jewish Aramaic religious compositions, especially in Hasmonaean works from Qumran, in Targum Onqelos and Targum Jonathan, and partly in younger Jewish Palestinian Aramaic texts, points to the existence of a local literary style.675 This common heritage allows a glimpse into the gradual evolution of a national literary tradition in which the waning Achaemenid Official Aramaic legacy interacted not only with regional dialect features, as it did in other postAchaemenid varieties of Aramaic, but also contributed to the rise of a particular sociolect. In terms of contents, too, the court tales in Daniel 2–7 connect with thematically comparable compositions later discovered at Qumran (see also Section 4.4 above).676 It is thus quite plausible that some of them were produced at the same time or in a similar milieu as the Aramaic parts of Daniel and came to serve as models for a “Diaspora lifestyle” that engaged with the wider-ranging problems of acculturation and religious self-awareness.677 The emergence of Aramaic literature in Palestine during the Achaemenid period would then belong to a continuous tradition with a network of intertextual references. 4.5 Conclusion The emergence of Achaemenid Official Aramaic confirms Antonio de Nebrija’s (1441–1522) often-cited dictum that “language has always been the companion

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since the “long” form would have been more frequent, it could easily have absorbed the function of the “short” one. See also Rosenthal 1939: 50–52. Similar cases recur in Qumran Aramaic, in the Qumran fragments of Daniel also in 2:27; 2:41; 2:42. The spelling of the reflexive-stem prefix with /h-/ in the received text instead of usual Aramaic /ʾ/, by contrast, could have occurred later in the manuscript transmission, since the parts of Daniel attested at Qumran mostly have /ʾ/ and are thus closer to Achaemenid orthography. See Fassberg 2010 (with a somewhat different trait list, but his important conclusions remain valid even if some scholars might prefer to include one or two features at the exclusion of others). Select bibliography on the setting of the court tales in Daniel can be found in Lemaire 2010: 128 with n. 7; cf. Gzella 2003: 127–130. Cf. briefly Gzella 2003: 75.

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of empire.”678 A bureaucratic reform carried out by Darius I and Xerxes at the beginning of the consolidation phase of Achaemenid rule in the latter half of the sixth century b.c.e. apparently resulted in the standardization of an earlier Babylonian dialect (owing to the influence of Babylonian scribes) of Aramaic. A particular variety was thus selected from the plethora of existing forms of the language, codified into a set of clear orthographic and grammatical rules, and applied to an extensive range of uses. The lingua franca thus institutionalized was employed widely in imperial administration and in local provincial government. Direct evidence of different sorts, mostly legal deeds, economic notes, official as well as private letters, and memorial and funerary inscriptions, comes from Iran, Egypt, Palestine, North Arabia, Asia Minor, and Bactria. The language variety common to all of them can be distinguished from the various seventh- and sixth-century b.c.e. forms of Aramaic on grounds of distinctive spellings (most notably a formerly unknown proportion of “degeminating” writing of long consonants with n) and some morphological and syntactic phenomena. Texts produced in the upper echelons of bureaucracy also contain a high amount of Iranian loans. The linguistic facts thus support a caesura between the late Old Aramaic period and Achaemenid Official Aramaic, although certain procedures and protocols that had already been in use under Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian rule were absorbed into Achaemenid administration. The first clear attestation of Achaemenid Official Aramaic is a papyrus from Elephantine dated to the year 495 b.c.e. (tad B5.1), but the language outlived the fall of the Achaemenid chancellery around 330 b.c.e. and interacted with local vernaculars in the formation of new written varieties of Aramaic in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. New discoveries from Palestine and Bactria support the essential homogeneity of Achaemenid Official Aramaic during the fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e. The texts reflect spelling conventions, grammatical forms, and stylistic features practically identical to the material from Elephantine that has previously determined the picture and thereby further undermine the validity of the notion “Egyptian Aramaic” in some older scholarship. As a corollary, they confirm the highly standardized nature of Persian bureaucracy that has been identified by in-depth studies on the social and economic history of the Achaemenid empire during in the past few years. Traces of an increasing influence of the new Achaemenid chancellery standard on earlier, linguistically distinct written varieties of Aramaic can still be observed in some texts from Egypt that date to the beginning of Achaemenid rule, that is, the private letters 678 See, e.g., Joseph 1987: 46.

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from Hermopolis and presumably also the Bauer-Meissner papyrus (although the latter proves more difficult to place in terms of grammatical features). A  new, comprehensive grammar sharply focused on Achaemenid Official Aramaic, but based on the entire material now available, remains an important desideratum. The use of Aramaic in a multilingual environment, above all in Persian administration, has resulted in varying degrees of linguistic interference. Nonetheless, the application of a more rigorous historical-linguistic framework shows that a geographical distinction of Achaemenid Official Aramaic proper into “Western” and “Eastern” forms cannot be upheld. Variation is thus chiefly conditioned by register (that is, language according to situation or use) and speaker competence. Phonology and morphology, which determine the Gestalt of a language, are strikingly uniform after 495 b.c.e.; practically all variant forms with potentially diagnostic significance occur in texts that show an obvious affiliation with older Aramaic, such as the Aḥiqar proverbs and the Hermopolis letters. Sporadic sub-standard spellings thus constitute the vast majority of variant phenomena, but it would be incorrect to adduce them as evidence for linguistic diversity: they merely reflect the imperfect application of a particular orthographic norm, but they do not undermine the existence of that norm. By the same token, word order variation in some texts may result from pragmatic factors or from substrate influence due to imperfect learning, besides the fact that word order was already much less rigid in the late Old Aramaic period in which the immediate predecessor of Achaemenid Official Aramaic has its roots. Occasional changes in sentence patterns therefore do not have the same classificatory value as phonology and morphology. Beneath the surface of Achaemenid Official Aramaic as a normative chancellery idiom throughout the Persian empire, however, older Aramaic vernaculars continued to develop in the regions where they were already spoken, such as Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia. They appeared again in the written record with the waning of the political power that had supported the Achaemenid chancellery and following the rise of local centres of administration. Since evidence for the inherited cultural languages of Phoenicia, Israel, and Transjordan rapidly decreases, it stands to reason that these were marginalized or even replaced by Aramaic. The Persian system of communication, messenger networks, and a largely standardized scribal training must have contributed to further consolidating the contacts between the distinct varieties of Aramaic that had spread (and continued to do so) in the Fertile Crescent. Linguistic changes could therefore affect a broader network of dialects more easily. Indeed, evidence for common developments in the whole of Aramaic increases after the fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e. (see the chronology in

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Section 1.2.3), so the Achaemenid chancellery idiom played a crucial role in the formation of a socio-historical background for the diffusion of linguistic innovations in Aramaic. At the same time, the earlier production of non-documentary texts, starting with instructions and court tales, evolved into emerging local literary traditions of Aramaic. Their beginnings under Achaemenid rule can be observed in Egypt, where a few papyri with literary compositions have been discovered, and, indirectly, by uncovering the earliest layers of the Books of Ezra and Daniel with the help of “higher” (redactional) criticism, in Palestine. The latter material would eventually grow into an essential component of Jewish literary heritage. Hence, the Achaemenid period documents the coming-of-age of Aramaic as a vehicle of cultural self-awareness. This only underscores its crucial role for the history of the language in general.

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Aramaic in the Hellenistic and Early Roman Near East Aramaic between the consolidation of Hellenistic rule after Alexander’s conquest in the third century b.c.e. and the rise of a Christian infrastructure following Constantine’s conversion in the early fourth century c.e. can only be understood in the light of its immediate prehistory. Owing to a conscious decision of the Achaemenid royal chancellery to select and promote one of the many coexisting local varieties of Aramaic as a standard language for domestic and provincial administration throughout the imperial territory, as outlined in the previous Chapter, the textual record during the fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e. gives a largely homogeneous impression. New discoveries from both the western and the eastern periphery confirm this essentially uniform garb: the bureaucratic centres between Egypt and Bactria that produced the majority of the evidence and the curricula underlying scribal education conformed to the same linguistic standard, hence the people who produced the texts must have been trained accordingly. Achaemenid Official Aramaic, however, was part of a complex multilingual fabric. It entered territories where Aramaic apparently had not yet grown roots, such as the Iranian heartland, Asia Minor, and North Arabia, and engaged with older, local, dialects in formerly Aramaic-speaking areas such as parts of Egypt and, presumably, Syria-Palestine as well as Mesopotamia. Although substantial direct evidence from the Achaemenid period is still lacking for the latter two regions, a considerable Official Aramaic superstrate in texts from Hellenistic and early Roman times corroborates the hypothesis of a strong and lasting presence of the Persian chancellery idiom there. This superstrate permeates the Hellenistic and early Roman material discussed in the present Chapter. Nonetheless, Aramaic vernaculars spoken by a considerable part of the population in the Fertile Crescent continued to develop, even if they remained invisible in the textual record until the collapse of the Persian chancellery. It is possible that these vernaculars were influenced, to varying degrees, by the Achaemenid prestige language, although there is no evidence for a distinct “spoken standard” patterned after the written one and employed for cultivated speech. Imperial bureaucracy may have increased the awareness of Achaemenid Official Aramaic without necessarily reinforcing its adoption by speakers of other Aramaic varieties, just as modern mass media promote the knowledge of the Received Pronunciation of Standard English while only a low percentage © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004285101_006

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of the population actually speaks it. In addition, the relatively stable social and economic circumstances as well as the common administrative framework will have buttressed contacts between different groups of Aramaic speakers and thereby paved the way for subsequent innovations to spread in waves. Some regional Aramaic dialects were thus eclipsed, though possibly affected, by Achaemenid Official Aramaic; yet they began to appear in writing only some time after the central power that upheld the universal scribal standards of the Persian period waned. Several of these regional varieties survive in the literary traditions that emerged subsequently in Late Antique Palestine (Chapter 6) and Syria-Mesopotamia (Chapter 7); others, by contrast, were replaced by Greek, as in the former Aramaic-speaking communities of Ptolemaic Egypt, or disappeared after the destruction of the cities in which they were spoken, but may linger on as pristine though elusive substrate in some modern vernaculars. There is thus no sharp linguistic distinction between the Achaemenid standard idiom on the one hand and its evolving heritage in the local varieties of Aramaic of the Greco-Roman period on the other.679 The social and economic causes that triggered the rise of these new written languages after the downfall of the Persian empire are not yet well understood, but a wave of cultural self-awareness seems to have played a major role in their promotion to regional chancellery idioms. Since a considerable gap separates spoken from written language in Near Eastern civilizations, such a development is by no means self-evident. It can probably best be explained against the wider background of cultural contact in the Hellenistic period.680 When Alexander the Great had conquered the territories of the former empire and his successors established local dynasties, Greek language and civilization, the influence of which had previously been only sporadic in the Near East, began to spread more widely among the population. The exact degree of this “Hellenization” is still a matter of debate and differed per region681; historians therefore disagree whether the new cultural paradigm mainly affected the elites alone or was adopted by larger parts of society. For the same reason, no consensus has been reached about the extent of multilingualism and the functional distribution of Aramaic, Greek, and other, indigenous, idioms such as Hebrew and the various Arabian languages. Many of the workings of Hellenism, 679 Hence Rosenthal’s “Altaramäisch” (1939: 1) and Beyer’s “altes Aramäisch” (1984: 24–25; 1986: 10–11) include the post-Achaemenid varieties of Aramaic still largely influenced by Achaemenid Official Aramaic. 680 Healey 2009a: 1–25 provides a very useful general introduction. 681 See Bowersock 1990; cf. now Andrade 2013 on the formation of Greek and Syrian social identifications.

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at any rate, only become visible during the subsequent Roman conquest of the Near East around the middle of the first century b.c.e. The Roman period is also the time when the first datable or even dated postAchaemenid inscriptions in Aramaic appear in Palestine, North Arabia, Syria, Mesopotamia, and the Persian Gulf. Many of the thousands of texts relate to the representational purposes of self-conscious elites, some of them to private law, others to personal devotion. Their scripts have all developed from the Achaemenid chancellery ductus,682 and spelling, grammar, lexicon, and style exhibit varying degrees of interaction between the Achaemenid Official Aramaic heritage and local peculiarities. Although the educational underpinnings of this linguistic situation and hence the degrees of literacy among the population remain unknown,683 letter forms, spelling, and diction are highly formalized already in the first dated witnesses. If one supposes that it took some time for these scripts and languages to become entrenched in scribal training at the local level, they must have taken on their shape as standardized written idioms during the late Hellenistic period before they eventually appeared, with some delay, from the first century b.c.e. onwards. The reasons for the gap in the textual evidence during the third and second centuries b.c.e. are unclear; one could suppose that the necessary economic conditions for a public epigraphic record with durable representational inscriptions on stone were only fulfilled in due course, whereas administrative documents on perishable materials, which presumably remained in use throughout, did not survive. Differences in script and language among the regional forms of Aramaic during this period reaffirm distinctiveness; they were codified in the standardization of new local chancellery languages. Scripts and orthographic systems in particular, after all, are not neutral representations of speech in writing but are laden with socio-cultural meaning (as modern debates about orthographic reforms or the differences between British and American spelling demonstrate). In all likelihood, then, the emancipation of local dialects of Aramaic and their promotion to written idioms partly reflects a wave of national, or “ethnic,”684 and cultural self-assertion that consciously aimed to downgrade 682 Healey 2009a: 27–32 provides an overview with a comparative script chart. For a more extensive palaeographic discussion and numerous drawings, see Klugkist 1982. 683 No direct evidence pertaining to school education is available from the entire Roman Near East (cf. Millar 1987: 149). At least public inscriptions would usually have been composed by professional scribes and subsequently executed by trained, but not necessarily literate, masons. 684 Both “ethnicity” and “nationhood” are somewhat problematic terms; they are employed here, in a very general sense, for lack of a better alternative (cf. the perceptive remarks in Healey 2009a: 20–21).

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Greek influence at a moment when the control exercised by the Hellenistic ruling dynasties of Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia became weaker.685 While the encroachment of a supra-regional standard idiom such as the Greek koiné can thus have buttressed regional cultural identity among speakers of dialects like the Aramaic vernaculars,686 their evolution into written languages cannot be isolated from the more general social and political situation. The Greek and Roman conquest of Syria-Palestine and Arabia was followed by a fairly long period of stability and relative peace; this so-called pax Romana made transport and extensive inter-regional trade very easy until the overthrow of the Parthian empire in the 220 s c.e.687 As a consequence, several new wealthy city-states emerged in the Syrian Desert and in North Arabia and flourished in the first two centuries c.e. Their leading inhabitants adopted the Hellenistic “epigraphic habit,” that is, the custom of erecting statues and inscriptions in public in honour of themselves and their peers. However, they often used their recently-formalized Aramaic dialects instead of or besides Greek in order to demonstrate their economic power and cultural prestige. Aramaic thus surfaces not only in casual graffiti that presuppose but a limited degree of literacy, but also in carefully composed and elegantly executed monumental inscriptions for public display. At the same time, the general patterns of the Aramaic epigraphs discovered in various regions do not simply reproduce the respective Greek counterparts but continue an ancient tradition of West Semitic honorific and dedicatory inscriptions in employing expressions that were already in use during the first half of the first millennium b.c.e. Civic elites thereby seem to have increasingly adopted the time-honoured style of royal epigraphy that first surfaces in the textual witnesses of early Iron-Age Syria-Palestine and contributed to the wider diffusion of codes formerly confined to the nobility. As memorial inscriptions in particular were meant to reinforce the identity of the individuals associated with them,688 the choice of Aramaic for this specific purpose is especially telling. It would thus be grossly misleading to envision the underlying language situation as an instance of “diglossia” with Greek as the high-register variant employed by the upper classes and Aramaic as the vernacular of the uneducated masses. Rather, the new written forms of Aramaic, too, acted as prestige languages and as vehicles of indigenous 685 686 687 688

See Andrade 2013: 63–64. Cf. Joseph 1987: 169 for this phenomenon as such. Hopkins 1980 outlines the wider economic background. Cf. Eck 2009: 18.

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cultural affinity.689 Despite its prominence among some traditionally-minded Ancient Historians who focus on Greek and Roman sources, the claim that national identities were absent in the cities of the Hellenistic and Roman Near East690 cannot be substantiated in the light of a meticulous philological and historically-sensitive reading of the Aramaic material in its sociolinguistic context and must be rejected. Since the Aramaic languages reflected in these epigraphic corpora differ considerably due to dialectal variation and divergent degrees of Achaemenid influence, they cannot be subsumed under a common developmental phase according to the currently widespread but problematic notion of “Middle Aramaic”: Nabataean, for instance, seems almost identical to Achaemenid Official Aramaic, whereas Edessan or Hatran Aramaic exhibit several regional features with much less Achaemenid superstrate influence. They are thus best treated apart, as distinct idioms, with their own grammars and text editions (Healey 2009a has a representative selection with an up-to-date commentary and further bibliography), hence the relevant bibliographical information will be supplied in each section. Most of the lexicon, divided into Nabataean, Palmyrene, Hatran, and Jewish Aramaic, is part of Hoftijzer – Jongeling 1995 (excepting the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls, for which Beyer 1984–2004 must be used, and Old Syriac, which is covered by the glossary in Drijvers – Healey 1999). It is also significant that these idioms already anticipate the bifurcation into a Western and an Eastern branch of Aramaic that underlies the literary languages of Late Antique Palestine and Syria-Mesopotamia. Some of their immediate ancestors first appear in the Hellenistic and early Roman period, but, due to the strong presence of the Achaemenid linguistic heritage in other varieties, a consistent distinction of these dialect groups only appears over time. In order to account for this particular situation, the present Chapter adopts, after a brief synopsis, a geographical organization, yet without a clear-cut dialectal division into West and East. The following speech areas can be distinguished on grounds of linguistic differences: Palestine, North Arabia, Syria, Eastern 689 As has been argued in detail by Gzella 2005c and 2006a. See already the brief remark by Schmitt 1983: 574 on the use of Palmyrene Aramaic as a manifestation of Aramaic national sentiment. 690 So, e.g., the alleged ‘amnesia’ that ‘marked the historical consciousness of the inhabitants of the Near East of this period’ according to Millar 1993: 6 and other publications by the same author. This idea is difficult to square even with the physical presence of past civilizations throughout the landscape (Kennedy 1999: 102; cf. Gzella 2006a: 17–18; Healey 2009a: 18–19; and now the fundamental critique in Andrade 2013: 10–11, 94–121).

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Mesopotamia, and Iran. In Egypt, by contrast, where the majority of Achaemenid Official Aramaic material has been discovered in the archives of Aramaean communities, the textual record of the former Persian lingua franca stops after the second century b.c.e. (see Section 4.3.1). The role of Aramaic in post-Achaemenid Asia Minor, finally, remains elusive: although Aramaic was a newcomer there, short inscriptions were still composed in the Hellenistic and Roman periods (see Section  4.3.4). Moreover, it seems not impossible that Aramaic influence from the Osrhoene extended westwards, at least in the border zone, but this cannot be confirmed in the absence of any evidence at the moment. Aramaic dialects, in any case, still formed an extensive and tightlyknit network in the Fertile Crescent. 5.1

Achaemenid Heritage and Local Dialects

The interaction of Achaemenid Official Aramaic heritage with regional dialectal traits in the Aramaic languages of the Greco-Roman period has fuelled a long-standing controversy as to the place of the material within the broader context of the language. This debate chiefly concerns the following local varieties: literary and more colloquial forms of Aramaic in Palestine (Section 5.2 below; according to some scholars, the same goes for the Aramaic of the biblical Book of Daniel, but see Section  4.4.2); Nabataean in North Arabia and partly also in the Dead Sea region (and wherever Nabataean traders dwelt; see Section 5.3 below); Palmyrene Aramaic in the Syrian Desert (spread by expatriate communities throughout the Roman territory; see Section 5.4.1); Old Syriac, or Edessan, in the Osrhoene region (Section  5.4.2); Hatran Aramaic and assorted varieties in Eastern Mesopotamia (Sections 5.5.2 and 5.5.3); and the few specimens of Arsacid Aramaic from Iran (Section 5.6). All these are reasonably standardized written idioms governed by scribal traditions, so the actual amount of linguistic diversity of Aramaic will have been much greater and comparable to the situation in the modern period. As expected, heterogeneity increases in languages used across a more extensive territory and in multilingual contexts. By and large, then, Aramaic in the Greco-Roman period is characterized by the highly dynamic intersection of a common literary tradition, which continued to be used in legal documents and religious compositions, with local idioms that gradually turned into written languages. 5.1.1 The Internal Classification of Post-Achaemenid Aramaic Some classificatory frameworks, especially those governing the works of Rosenthal (1939) and Beyer (1984–2004), stress the continuity of older Aramaic

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until the third century c.e. and therefore do not postulate a strong linguistic caesura after the fall of the Persian empire (compare Section 1.3.3 for the methodological underpinnings of Beyer’s model). Other approaches, by contrast, such as the ones proposed by Boyarin (1981) and Cook (1992), take a basically synchronic perspective and operate on the assumption of a reasonably fluid continuum of Aramaic dialects between Palestine and Iran in the Hellenistic and Roman Near East that but gradually crystallized into a “Western” and an “Eastern” branch (see also Section 1.3.2). Finally, in Fitzmyer’s widespread periodization of Aramaic (1979), these dialects are all subsumed under the common denominator “Middle Aramaic,” but the chronological boundaries (200 b.c.e. and 200 or 300 c.e. respectively)691 are based on somewhat impressionistic estimates and never supported by any reference to the linguistic evolution of Aramaic itself (see Section 1.3.1). A considerable amount of internal diversity, however,692 reduces the notion of “Middle Aramaic” to a convenient but very generic umbrella term with little to no linguistic basis. At the same time, extensive contact among the Aramaic dialects of the Greco-Roman period and the impact of the Achaemenid standard language undermine the validity of a linear genealogical framework that traces all attested varieties back to a common ancestor in the Achaemenid period. The hypothesis that they all derive from Achaemenid Official Aramaic enjoyed a certain popularity until about the middle of the twentieth century,693 but it has now largely been abandoned in the light of an improved assessment of linguistic variation in pre-Achaemenid Aramaic. It would thus be methodologically questionable to propose a common “Proto Middle Aramaic” ancestor. Rather, different vernaculars underlying the “Middle Aramaic” languages share several developments in phonology and morphology. Even if the limited evidence renders it difficult to assess the distribution of these innovations 691 See now Fitzmyer 32004: 31 with n. 98 on the author’s most recent position. This term has been employed only rarely and in various senses before Fitzmyer; the first occurrence of which I am aware is Sachau 1911: 262, who used “mittleres Aramäisch” (perhaps patterned after the notion of “Mitteliranisch,” which was already common in his time) for the Aramaic of Ezra and Daniel. The immediate ancestor to Fitzmyer’s definition seems to be Baumgartner 1927: 117, who applied “mittleres Aramäisch” to the Aramaic of Daniel, the Palmyrene inscriptions, and Nabataean. The attempt to single out Aramaic from the Hellenistic and early Roman periods as a proper evolutionary stage of the language is the main innovation of Fitzmyer’s model as opposed to earlier scholarship (cf. Fitzmyer 1979: 63). 692 For a brief synopsis, cf. Healey 2009a: 38–53 and Gzella 2011c. 693 So Rosenthal 1939: 55–71; 104–105; still repeated in Rosenthal 1978: 85.

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(see Section 1.2.3 for examples and further bibliography), increasing contact under Achaemenid rule will surely have facilitated their spread. A speaker’s everyday social contacts, after all, exercise a major influence on the diffusion and adoption of linguistic and other social changes.694 The following linguistic developments can be discerned in the material under discussion in the present Chapter: levelling of the vowel /e/ in the preformative of the basic-stem “imperfect”; consolidation of anaptyctic vowels that resolve word-final consonant clusters;/a/before root-final /h/, /ḥ/, /ʿ/, and /r/; a tendency towards /e/ instead of /a/ before sibilants; increasing monophthongization of diphthongs; shortening of word-final long consonants; shortening of word-final long laryngeals, pharyngeals, and /r/; gradual loss of unstressed word-final long vowels; aspiration of the plosive stops and the emergence of fricative allophones in postvocalic position (though the true extent of this phenomenon is still difficult to assess); and final loss of unstressed short vowels in open syllables towards the end of this period.695 Morphology exhibits a strong tendency towards replacing older masculine plural pronominal forms in /-m/, which were still preserved in Nabataean, by younger by-forms in /-n/ (as already in the Hermopolis papyri, see Section  3.3.2). In addition, the demonstratives were gradually expanded by /hā-/, a development that was first completed in Eastern Aramaic but did not yet affect the entire dialect continuum.696 Except for the generally more conservative language of the literary compositions from Qumran, all these Aramaic varieties have also lost the “short imperfect” (that is, the deontic-modal “jussive”), probably due to its restricted use, and replaced it by the “long imperfect”; the latter thereby extended its functional range to include deontic modality besides its inherited epistemic nuances. Besides such innovations that spread along the axes of social contact, the forms of Aramaic known from the Greco-Roman period seem to continue an older local diversification. Consequently, earlier dialectal forms now appear on the surface more widely and with clearer distributional patterns, such as the different direct object markers yt /yāt/ in the West and l /la-/ in the East. The shift of the “imperfect” preformative to /l-/ or /n-/ as well as the masculine plural ending of the emphatic state in /-ē/ in the Eastern dialects as opposed to the preservation of older /y-/ and /-ayyā/ respectively in the West may also have 694 Cf. Milroy – Milroy 42012: 25. 695 They were still preserved before the third century c.e., as appears from both occasional spellings with matres lectionis for short vowels (such as qwdm, see Section 5.5.3 below) and transcriptions (for instance, a Palestinian Aramaic inscription in Greek letters from near Beersheba, Beyer 1984: 353). 696 Beyer 1984: 150–151; on the demonstratives, see also Nebe 2006.

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been underway, though largely invisible in earlier periods, for quite some time. Since Eastern Aramaic is generally more innovative than its Western counterpart and includes dialects spoken across a larger area, its diagnostic traits can be observed more easily in the surviving textual evidence (see Section  5.5.1 below). Several characteristic features first occur cumulatively in a Hellenistic incantation text from Babylonia. The situation thus foreshadows the clearer bifurcation into Western and Eastern Aramaic in the literary languages of Late Antiquity (Chapters 6 and 7). In their written forms, however, all these varieties have been influenced, to different degrees, by the Achaemenid standard idiom, and some, like Nabataean in North Arabia or Arsacid Aramaic in Iran, may only have been spoken to a very limited extent. It is therefore a combination of historical, geographical, and social factors that accounts best for the exact linguistic shape of the various manifestations of Aramaic as they appear in local epigraphic corpora throughout the Near East during the Greco-Roman period. The same influences also explain the difficulties in formulating an unambiguous classification. Nonetheless, many more specific aspects of the underlying sociolinguistic situation await further clarification. A particularly intriguing point are the ways of transmission by which the Achaemenid Official Aramaic heritage survived after the collapse of the Persian chancellery during the two “dark centuries” of early Hellenistic rule until the reappearance of written Aramaic since the first century b.c.e. The respective multilingual situations, in which Aramaic was used, also differed. The most conservative varieties, Nabataean and Arsacid Aramaic at the western and eastern peripheries of the linguistic area, seem to reflect an unbroken local employ of the Achaemenid lingua franca as a written means of expression by speakers of other languages, such as Arabian and Iranian. Edessan and Hatran Aramaic at the centre, by contrast, appear to rest on linguistically more innovative vernaculars of the region and underwent a more limited degree of Achaemenid influence. Besides some elements of vocabulary, this influence by and large affects spelling (in particular a few remnants of “degemination” of /n/), which suggests that orthographic norms were to some extent patterned after the Achaemenid standard, but that the languages themselves did not directly derive from Achaemenid Official Aramaic. Eastern Syria and Mesopotamia are thus important centres of linguistic innovations in Aramaic that subsequently spread like waves. An umbrella term like “Middle Aramaic” obscures such crucial differences.697 697 As Nebe 1993: 311–312 perceptively remarks; cf. also Gzella 2008b: 127 and 2011c: 599; Healey 2009a: 37–38; Moriggi 2012b. Beyer (1984: 33.46), too, notes that some of the Aramaic languages of the Greco-Roman Near East directly continue Achaemenid Official

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The immediate linguistic prehistory of Edessan and Hatran Aramaic cannot be traced given the present state of knowledge. However, it is not altogether implausible that Achaemenid Official Aramaic lingered on for some time as an administrative language in the already Aramaic-speaking regions of Syria and Mesopotamia. Owing to its nature as an established idiom for bookkeeping, law, and other forms of bureaucracy, it would have been regularly used for records and communications on perishable material, presumably similar to the Old Syriac legal documents on parchment from Dura Europos that have survived by chance. When Aramaic began to be employed by individuals for their public representation under the influence of the Greek honorific and dedicatory inscriptions that proliferated in the Hellenistic period, these existing scribal conventions could provide a model for the promotion of local vernaculars to the status of written idioms, similar to the influence of Syriac on later written Neo-Aramaic. The consistently cursive nature of the various new scripts, too, points to an origin in commerce and administration,698 since cursive writing would be more naturally employed for writing letters with ink on a flexible surface than for chiselling them in stone. A few documentary texts from Palestine with characteristically Achaemenid Official Aramaic forms (see Section 4.3.2) prove that the Achaemenid chancellery idiom survived in this former imperial province for local administrative matters until the first half of the second century b.c.e., and the same may be true for Syria, even if suitable evidence is still lacking. Local bureaucracy thus seems to have preserved a basic knowledge of Achaemenid orthography and diction, which subsequently fed into the emergence of new regional standard languages on the basis of Aramaic vernaculars in various parts of the Hellenistic and Roman Near East. 5.1.2 Multilingualism in the Hellenistic and Roman Near East A comprehensive assessment of the historical-linguistic situation at large makes it plain that different forms of Aramaic were widely used as vernaculars in the Hellenistic and Roman Near East. According to established linguistic methodology, the many phonetic and morphological developments that affected the entire speech area between Palestine and Mesopotamia presuppose an extensive continuum of adjacent dialects. Otherwise, the wave-like spread of these innovations would be difficult to explain, because linguistic

Aramaic as a common written idiom, while others replace Greek as an administrative language. Cook (1992: 18) misrepresents this important distinction in his sketch of Beyer’s ideas. 698 Knauf 2010: 231, for instance, suggests that the Nabataean script was first used in recordkeeping and only secondarily for inscriptions in stone.

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changes, especially in phonology, are much more likely to originate in speech than in writing.699 Likewise, certain non-traditional phonetic spellings that are at variance with the older Achaemenid conventions must result from an oral use of Aramaic. Substrate influence in local Arabic vernaculars and the survival of modern spoken forms of Aramaic in remote pockets, which still reflect core features of the Western and Eastern dialects known from the Hellenistic and Roman period, confirm this general impression.700 Besides the interaction of regional dialects with the remnants of the Achaemenid standard idiom, Aramaic existed in a multilingual environment throughout the Greco-Roman period. Major Greek cities were established in Syria, so the Greek koiné permeated large parts of the Fertile Crescent; it thereby became an official idiom in administration but may also have been used as a vernacular in Seleucid foundations such as Edessa and Dura Europos.701 This has resulted in numerous Greek monolingual honorific and funerary inscriptions throughout Syria and parts of Palestine, with a notable share of bilingual texts accompanied by the local form of Aramaic in Palmyra (to be discussed at greater length in Section 5.4.1 below) and, to a lesser degree, in North Arabia (Section 5.3), but hardly in Mesopotamia. Mythological scenes on mosaics from Edessa, too, mirror the presence of Greek culture (whatever the status of the Greek language may have been there). The evidence covers the entire range of literacy in Greek, from clumsy tags to sophisticated metrical epitaphs in Hellenistic poetic diction. Urban settlements with their monumental structures were the exception rather than the rule, however: the majority of the population apparently lived 699 Milroy – Milroy 42012: 47–59. 700 Strangely, some Ancient Historians without first-hand command of the relevant languages continue to claim that the obvious conclusion from the total and indeed overwhelming linguistic evidence, namely a widespread use of Aramaic as a vernacular throughout the Roman Near East, is “seriously misleading” (so Millar 2013: 21 n. 13), but such statements only result from a lack of familiarity with the Semitic material and an inadequate grasp of its wider linguistic implications. Absence of written documentation for the use of Aramaic in local cults in large parts of the area, for instance, does of course not undermine its role as a means of daily communication (against Millar 2013: 21–22). Similar problems in the evaluation of linguistic matters occur time and again in Millar 1993, an otherwise valuable work that displays considerable historical learning but should not be consulted for information on Semitic languages. It will be seen in the course of this Chapter that the informed use of sociolinguistic insights and the study of language contact contributes vastly to a more responsible historical assessment of the difficult and technical Aramaic evidence. 701 A very concise summary can be found in Schmitt 1983: 558–561.

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in villages,702 so the high degree of Greek literacy in some places seems hardly representative of the entire region. While the assumption of a predominantly monolingual countryside, where only Aramaic was spoken, may be too simple, it is currently impossible to assess the proportion of Greek speakers or GreekAramaic bilinguals among the various layers of society and to determine where and for which communicative contexts exactly people resorted to Greek. All one can say with confidence is that Greek seems to have been the preferred or even the mandatory language for dealings with foreign authorities such as provincial courts. Latin, by contrast, remained the normal idiom among Roman government officials and at least the usual means of communication in the army (including veterans who reinforced the Latin-speaking element of the regions in which they settled). It was not imposed and thus never grew deep roots in the Near East outside the inner circle of Roman functionaries and soldiers, hence it is scarcely present in the material, and Roman titles as well as names of offices appear in their Greek form in the local languages.703 The impact of Greek on Aramaic in these multilingual settings, at any rate, seems largely confined to lexical loans pertaining to administrative and architectural terms, whereas it has not produced any clear phonological, morphological, or syntactical interference in the Aramaic material at large. Such a remarkable degree of language maintenance despite constant and extensive contact underscores the role of the local forms of Aramaic not only as the pragmatically dominant idioms in many situations of daily life but also as tokens of cultural self-awareness among the elite; otherwise much more syntactic convergence and borrowing of every-day vocabulary items would be expected in the written evidence. It should nonetheless be borne in mind that the corpus, consisting of mostly representational or memorial and partly of legal texts, by and large represents traditional and highly formalized modes of expression only; these may not fully correspond to the way people actually spoke. Given the general absence of more ephemeral communications, even faint traces of systemic language contact, or indeed the absence thereof, in the available material make a valuable contribution to understanding the wider linguistic distribution. The resulting picture certainly corresponds to a situation in which vast parts of the population, not only in the extensive countryside, but also in the cities, normally spoke Aramaic and not Greek in many if not most circumstances.704 702 Kennedy 1999: 97–99. 703 See Eck 2009 for a recent and very nuanced summary, with further bibliography. Isaac 2009 contains more detailed information on various contexts in which Latin in inscriptions from Roman Syria-Palestine and Arabia could act as a gesture. 704 Cf. Brock 1994b: 150–152.

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Interference beyond individual lexical borrowings can, however, be observed in cases where Aramaic did not normally serve as a vernacular. Nabataean inscriptions in particular contain not only many Arabic terms relating to agriculture and other matters of daily life, but also syntactic use patterns that seem to replicate phenomena alien to Aramaic but common in Arabic (notably deontic-modal uses of the “perfect” and a few other constructions, see Section 5.3 below). This suggests that most Nabataeans usually spoke Old (that is, pre-Islamic) Arabic or an Ancient North Arabian variety in day-to-day communication and resorted to writing in a very conservative form of Aramaic (and later Greek) for official and other formal matters only. Yet the Arabian substrate surfaces regularly, either due to subconscious slips and imperfect learning, particularly in the mixed code of a few inscriptions erected by private individuals, or in expressions pertaining to situations dominated by the vernacular, such as religious discourse. A number of characteristically Arabian personal names in Syrian and Mesopotamian cities like Palmyra, Dura Europos, Edessa, and Hatra may also reflect a certain percentage of speakers of Arabian languages among the local population.705 This is, however, much more difficult to determine, since names say little about the language of their bearers. The divergent modalities of contact between Aramaic and Greek in Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia on the one hand and between Arabic and Aramaic in North Arabia on the other thus point to different dominance profiles. In the former case, Aramaic is linguistically dominant and thus borrows only vocabulary (the least stable domain in language) from Greek. In the latter, Arabic as the dominant idiom also imposes a number of syntactic features on Aramaic.706 Such subconscious interference offers precious clues about the distribution of written languages and vernaculars. Further to the East, Iranian idioms continued to be spoken by significant parts of the population, hence the Aramaic ideograms in later Persian and the 705 Arabic names can be distinguished from Aramaic ones on grounds of different sound correspondences in cognate words (e.g., whb ‘to give’ instead of yhb), distinct basic lexemes (e.g., Aramaic zbn ‘to buy’, Arabic sʿd ‘to be happy’), noun patterns that are only productive in the one or the other (such as qutayl diminutives in Arabic or the nomen agentis form qātōl in Aramaic), different morphemes (for instance, nisbe forms in /-īy/ and derived-stem participles in /mu-/ in Arabic but /-āy/ and /ma-/ respectively in Aramaic), and divergent phonetic developments (for example, original */ʿabd/ ‘servant’ preserved in Arabic names transcribed as Αβδ- but /ʿḇeḏ/ with anaptyxis of the word-final consonant cluster in Aramaic appearing as Αβεδ- or Αβιδ-; such features are often difficult to evaluate in transcriptions because of unsystematic spelling). 706 Van Coetsem 1988: 13 and 36–37 has a brief but helpful general discussion of these different types of transfer as results of distinct contact situations.

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Arsacid inscriptions from the Persian Gulf betray a highly fossilized form of Aramaic (see Section  5.6 below). The unknown ancestors of North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects, which have been exposed to contact with Kurdish for centuries, could also have evolved earlier in an Aramaic-Iranian bilingual milieu (Section 7.1.2). Several other idioms of the pre-Achaemenid Near East would have largely or even entirely ceased to be used as vernaculars by the Roman period but continued to be studied as literary languages: although exact dates are hard to establish, it is widely agreed that Akkadian became increasingly confined to scribal circles during the Neo-Babylonian period and may no longer have acted as anybody’s first language towards the end of the fifth century b.c.e. at the latest (see Section 3.1.3). The role of Hebrew in postAchaemenid Palestine, by contrast, is still debated, but one cannot doubt the growing impact of the local Aramaic dialect as a means of daily-life communication, and there seems to be an increasing tendency in recent scholarship to doubt that Hebrew still served as a colloquial to any significant extent excepting its revival in religiously-based nationalist movements (see the following Section). 5.2 Palestine A major demographic change between the Neo-Babylonian and the Achaemenid period resulted in a complete shift from Hebrew to Aramaic as the dominant language in Palestine by the fourth century b.c.e. (see Section 4.3.2). This new situation is clearly reflected in the written evidence, for the substantial epigraphic record demonstrates that all economic and legal documents, including those from rural areas, were composed in Aramaic and not in Hebrew after the fifth century b.c.e.: first in the Achaemenid Official idiom and subsequently, from the second century b.c.e., in the regional forms of Aramaic. As a corollary of the linguistic shift, square script, being the local offshoot of the Achaemenid ductus, replaced the indigenous “Palaeo-Hebrew” letter forms and became the Jewish script par excellence until today.707 It is obviously more difficult to trace the spread of Aramaic as a vernacular in Palestine. Indirect reflexes in pre-Achaemenid Hebrew texts are still extremely limited and ambiguous (as has been discussed in Section  2.4.2). Regional varieties of Aramaic begin to appear unmistakably in the written evidence of the Hellenistic and Roman periods; since they anticipate already 707 See Yardeni 2002 and, more concisely, 2000: [147]–[218].

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some distinctive traits of the Western Aramaic branch that manifests itself more clearly in the different Palestinian literary traditions of the subsequent Byzantine era, they form part of a common regional dialect matrix. The extent and nature of Aramaic influence on Hebrew, especially general vocabulary and subconscious syntactic interference, also suggests that Aramaic was now the normal means of everyday communication. Hebrew, by contrast, became confined to the production of classicizing religious literature patterned after older, pre-exilic, models, such as the biblical Books of Daniel (the final redaction of which took place around 165 b.c.e.), Nehemiah, and Chronicles. Presumably, it also served as the language of the cult and as a medium for highly technical oral discussions relating to matters of religious law, custom, and exegesis, which eventually crystallized into the Mishna some time in the third century c.e., and other Rabbinic compositions. There is, however, no evidence that it still acted as anybody’s first language, or that it enjoyed any significant popularity as a colloquial. Like the other indigenous languages of Palestine and Transjordan, none of which is known to have survived into the Hellenistic and Roman periods, it was replaced by Aramaic and Greek, at least according to a weighted and unbiased assessment of the total direct and indirect evidence currently available. Greek language and culture, finally, spread during the Seleucid period and became further established with the consolidation of Roman imperial rule.708 5.2.1 The Languages of Hellenistic and Roman Palestine The language shift to Aramaic in Palestine, following a new demographic situation in the Achaemenid empire with the foundation of a significant number of new cities and the ensuing spread of Greek under the Hellenistic rulers, created a complex linguistic situation that is still but insufficiently understood. It may become clearer by means of a brief diachronic reassessment of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek as the historical idioms of pre-Islamic Palestine and their respective functional roles.709 Again, a rigorous distinction between spoken and written language on the one hand and a more precise evaluation of the nature and directionality of contact on the other can contribute meaningfully to a better understanding of the total picture. A particularly conspicuous effect of the social changes of the Achaemenid period is the growing marginalization of Hebrew in speech and its rising status as a ‘holy tongue’. Not long after the end of the Babylonian Exile, Hebrew had 708 The political history has been succinctly reviewed by Healey 2009a: 8–11. 709 For an exhaustive and balanced survey, see Poirier 2007, who concludes that Aramaic was dominant.

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turned from the usual means of writing and ordinary communication in the area during pre-Achaemenid times into a marker of cultural affiliation among Jews. It was therefore employed as a national symbol on coin legends in PalaeoHebrew script issued by local rulers during the Hasmonaean (second and first centuries b.c.e.) and Herodian (37 b.c.e. to 70 c.e.) ages.710 Subsequently, it appears in a few letters and contracts written by adherents of the religiously motivated nationalist movements of 66 to 70 and 132 to 135 c.e.711 According to much of the scholarly literature of the past fifty years, the existence of such documentary texts as well as the occurrence of non-classical lexical and grammatical features in post-biblical compositions were signs of a continuous and significant use of Hebrew as a vernacular in Jerusalem and Judaea until the second century c.e.712 Even a cursory glance at the discussion shows, however, that this view seems to be an a priori assumption rather than the result of an unprejudiced analysis.713 Indeed, there are a number of powerful arguments against the hypothesis of Hebrew as a widely-spoken language of Hellenistic and Roman Palestine, and a more sophisticated evaluation of the linguistic facts is gaining ground in more recent publications.714 First, the chronological, geographical, and social 710 Schwartz 1995: 25–27 and 2005: 76–77 has a convenient presentation of the evidence. 711 These have been included in Yardeni 2000. See also Beyer 1994: 195–196 (debt note; also in 2004: 258–259) and 216–222 (Hebrew Bar-Kosiba letters). 712 For representative summaries of this view and further bibliography, see, e.g., SáenzBadillos 1993: 134 with n. 71 and 163–171; Alexander 1999: 73–76. The extremely few snippets of (ambiguous or anecdotal) indirect evidence have been conveniently collected by Fassberg 2012, with a fully-documented summary of the main lines of the earlier discussion. Cf. also Schwartz 1995: 16 on the emotional side of the debate. 713 Even the only specific linguistic argument usually adduced in support is still inconclusive: it has been suggested that the accusative marker t- /ta-/ instead of ʾt h- /ʾat ha-/ in the Hebrew Bar-Kosiba letters (presumably via /ʾat-ta/; discussed at some length by Gzella 2007a: 97–102) must be a colloquialism, though an otherwise unattested one, and thus points to the use of Hebrew as a vernacular (e.g., Fassberg 2012: 272 n. 44). However, aphaeresis of unstressed /ʾa-/ here can have many different reasons; it may, among other possible explanations, simply result from a more common phonetic change, just as in the Western Aramaic object marker yt /yāt/ from ʾyt /ʾiyyāt/ or /ʾīyāt/ (see Section 6.1.1), later Aramaic /nāš/ ’man’ from /ʾenāš/ (Nöldeke 21898: 90–91), or the by-form lʿzr (Greek Λαζαρ or Λαζαρος) of the name ʾlʿzr ‘Elazar’ in many contemporaneous Aramaic texts (examples in Beyer 1984: 735 and 2004: 513; cf. Lipiński 22001: §27.26). One highly ambiguous detail cannot counter the strong and diverse historical and linguistic evidence in favour of Aramaic as the dominant spoken language throughout Hellenistic and Roman Palestine. 714 Much evidence has been collected by Beyer 1984: 55–58 (1986: 40–43) and 2004: 34–36; cf. Schwartz 1995 and 2005 (with a perceptive analysis of the socio-historical situation);

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distribution of the Aramaic material in Achaemenid, Hellenistic, and Roman Palestine is significantly wider than the few instances of a non-literary employ of Hebrew.715 Second, Hebrew of this period has a considerable amount of Aramaic lexical borrowings that cover a broad spectrum of semantic fields,716 whereas Hebrew borrowings into Aramaic are confined to religious terminology, thus pointing to the use of Hebrew in a highly restricted domain.717 Third, Hebrew after the Achaemenid period exhibits various structural features that can best be explained as subconscious influence from Aramaic as the pragmatically dominant idiom, especially the erosion of the consecutive verbal forms, the increasing verbalization of the participle, and the use of Aramaic function words.718 The renewed production of Hebrew documentary texts for a few years during the two Jewish revolts of the first and second centuries c.e. therefore seems to be the expression of a short-lived nationalist revival rather than an illustration of the general situation between the Exile and the refounding of Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina.719 By contrast, Hebrew’s ongoing employ in–perhaps initially oral–Rabbinic discourse, which later crystallized into the Mishna, could be compared to the role of Latin as the official language of the Catholic Church even today and its earlier active use in Roman seminaries despite the absence of native speakers.720 After all, Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and Classical Syriac are still occasionally used in oral discourse by a few people in highly specific contexts. Perhaps Hebrew continued to be spoken after the fourth century b.c.e. for some time in remote rural areas, but this is impossible to

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Goodblatt 2006: 49–70; Kottsieper 2007b; Gzella 2007a,c; and further references in Bernstein – Koller 2012: 194–195. Similarly the passing remarks by Schmitt 1983: 575–576; van der Horst 2001a: 181; Healey 2009a: 8; Berlejung 2014: 356 n. 84 and 362. As has been persuasively argued by Schwartz 1995: 12–19 and Goodblatt 2006: 51–55. See the examples in Stadel 2013a (post-Exilic Hebrew); Kutscher 1974: 187–215 (Qumran Hebrew); Beyer 2004: 261–262 and Gzella 2007a (documentary texts). Stadel 2008 provides a comprehensive examination. Van Coetsem 1988: 37–40 shows that specialized vocabulary is by and large borrowed more easily than basic vocabulary, hence the source language of the latter would normally be the dominant one. Gzella 2007a and 2007c. As is well known in contact linguistics, verbal syntax and function words in particular are less subject to conscious control and thus reflect the language that is most commonly used by a speaker in daily life. Occasional instances of predicative participles functioning as present-tense forms already in Classical Hebrew do not affect this general development, because syntactic convergence often targets existing but marginal use patterns in the borrowing language (see Gzella 2013b for references). So, too, Cotton 2005: 153–154. Cf. Corriente 2013: 357.

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verify.721 A total survey of the direct and indirect evidence therefore suggests that Hebrew in the Hellenistic and Roman periods was the language of religion and Judaean national consciousness, whereas Aramaic was the common idiom of speech, law, and administration. Aramaic, conversely, is well-attested in Hellenistic and Roman Palestine, both directly and indirectly. Several forms coexisted and could be employed in distinct registers or at different stylistic levels. Typical spellings even in later documents (such as zy for the relative marker) indicate that Achaemenid Official Aramaic acted without interruption as the administrative language of the area into the second century b.c.e.722 The almost four-hundred brief and fragmentary dedicatory and votive inscriptions in Aramaic letters from the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim, too, seem to correspond to Achaemenid spelling practice.723 Moreover, the Achaemenid chancellery idiom forms the basis of the local literary language, which nonetheless increasingly absorbed influences from regional dialects. This literary language underlies the Aramaic theological compositions from Qumran and the documentary texts from the Judaean Desert but also feeds into later Palestinian Aramaic literature (see Section 6.2). Palestinian regional varieties, by contrast, surface in a number of private funerary and ossuary inscriptions from Jerusalem and its immediate surroundings as well as in ostraca from Masada. They show but little influence from the literary standard and may therefore be linguistically closer to the Judaean colloquial language. Greek, finally, appears in hundreds of funerary inscriptions724 and in some twenty legal documents725; the former use was presumably influenced by the prestige of Greek for public representation,726 the latter by its official status as the idiom of provincial jurisdiction which usually required contracts to be 721 Fassberg 2012: 278–280 compares the situation with Neo-Aramaic vernaculars, which also remained invisible in the textual record until their rediscovery by modern scholars. Unlike Hebrew of the post-Achaemenid period, however, their spoken use can be deduced from certain instances of morphological and syntactic influence on the surrounding languages (see Sections 6.1.2 and 7.1.2). 722 The evidence (in particular the Maresha bowls) has been surveyed in Section 4.3.2. 723 Edited by Magen – Misgav – Tsfania 2004. For an extensive palaeographic analysis of the two Aramaic scripts (“monumental” and “cursive”), which points to a date in the first half of the second century b.c.e., see Dušek 2012: 3–63. A few likewise fragmentary inscriptions are written in Palaeo-Hebrew letters. 724 Van der Horst 2001b has a preliminary survey; the complete standard edition is now Cotton et al. 2010–. 725 Cotton 1999. 726 See Hoyland 2004: 187.

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translated if they were supposed to be acceptable to Roman courts.727 Since the majority of the Greek tomb inscriptions contain mere names, they could have served as graphic cultural codes (similar to Latin tags such as Requiescat in pace or Sit tibi terra levis in modern epitaphs) and do not necessarily reveal any advanced knowledge of the language. Conversely, unmistakable instances of systemic influence of Greek on Aramaic, which could point to a substantial number of high-level bilinguals, are lacking. Even Greek lexical loans in Aramaic, which do not presuppose intense language contact, are fairly rare before the third century c.e. However, since the degree of Hellenization in early Roman Palestine is still hotly debated,728 one cannot assess with precision the actual distribution of Aramaic, Greek, and Hebrew during this period across regions, social strata, and communicative situations, or the extent of Aramaic-Greek bilingualism. The relative paucity of Greek epigraphs from Upper Galilee, at any rate, points to regional differences in literacy. With the suppression of the Bar Kosiba revolt in 135 c.e. and the concomitant move of the Jewish centres of learning from Jerusalem to the by and large less urbanized zones (with some notable exceptions, such as Tiberias) in Galilee, the visibility of Jews in textual and archaeological sources decreased significantly for about two centuries. Subsequently, it underwent a revitalization in the fourth century c.e. This renewal of Jewish life triggered a renaissance of literary production in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (see Section 6.2). As a result, Palestinian Aramaic material became enshrined in a wider tradition of Jewish religious writing that has been transmitted and studied ever since. 5.2.2 The Hasmonaean Literary Language As elsewhere in the Hellenistic Near East, the change in leadership and the resulting independence of Judaea with the rise of the Hasmonaean dynasty (142 until 37 b.c.e.) had an immediate impact on the linguistic situation. It coincides with the appearance of a local literary variety of Aramaic in Jerusalem and Judaea that is best attested in some hundred-twenty to hundred-thirty religious compositions discovered among the Qumran scrolls. They often respond to issues of Jewish identity in this period: rewritten versions of biblical narratives focusing on the Patriarchs (such as the Genesis Apocryphon) and 727 So Cotton 2005: 153–160. The many syntactic influences from Aramaic as well as Aramaic signatures and subscriptions in the Greek documentary texts from Jewish collections (Lewis 1989: 13–16) indicate that the language of the inherited legal tradition and the idiom preferred by witnesses was Aramaic. 728 See, for instance, Hengel – Markschies 1989; Kokkinos 1998: 79–84 has a concise summary.

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translations into plain Aramaic (Targum of Job)729; apocalyptic visions of the end of days, which view transient worldly dominion sub specie aeternitatis (so in the Books of Enoch, the Son of God, the New Jerusalem, or the Vision of the Four Trees); farewell-speeches (Testaments) ascribed to the mythical ancestors of Israel’s past, encouraging the readers to stick to received religious traditions; and novels about Jewish life with its opportunities and perils in a foreign setting (Tobit and The Edict of Dareios). They were copied at Qumran because of the community’s specific interests but, in all likelihood, represent a broader selection of theological works produced in Palestine (the Aramaic Levi Document, for examples, is also known from a medieval Geniza copy730); the Qumran texts which are usually assumed to have been authored by members of the community themselves, by contrast, are all in Hebrew.731 Hence, the Aramaic material from Qumran illustrates terms and ideas that circulated more widely in Palestine around the time of the New Testament.732 Palaeographic criteria suggest that the Aramaic Qumran manuscripts were written between the second century b.c.e. and 70 c.e., but since they are copies of traditional literature, some texts may have been composed at an even earlier stage. However, in the absence of unambiguous historical references, the original date of composition generally cannot be determined with any precision: Aramaic evolved in a non-linear fashion and with a considerable interaction of literary and colloquial varieties, which resulted in different coexisting styles and registers; orthography in particular is easily modified in the course of manuscript transmission and thus must be used with caution for the purpose of dating. Some possible linguistic archaisms may simply have been employed as classicizing veneer, so one cannot place an Aramaic literary text from Qumran closer to the Achaemenid period on grounds of a higher number of conservative features alone.733 729 It is a hallmark of this translation that it often simplifies the poetic Hebrew text. 730 The latter contains a number of later linguistic features, see Stadel 2013d: 173 for a survey. 731 See Weitzman 1999 for possible reasons. One may thus suppose that the Hebrew and Aramaic texts together formed a library of works that were partly imported from outside and partly composed on the spot, but, because of their different origins, they obviously have to be kept apart in any linguistic study. Some Hebrew compositions, especially on science and astronomy, were presumably influenced by lost Aramaic originals (cf. BenDov 2010). 732 See Fitzmyer 1973–1974 for selected case-studies. 733 For an extensive discussion of the problem, see Gzella 2009b. The absolute dating of individual texts thus differs considerably; the Targum of Job, for instance, has been assigned to the third, the second, and the first centuries b.c.e. A widely-accepted relative sequence of composition presupposes that the biblical Book of Daniel was written before the

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The same language variety is also reflected in the very few known Hasmonaean inscriptions and coin legends, a number of private legal documents in the Achaemenid tradition from various places in the Judaean Desert (dating until 135 c.e. and written in a cursive script as opposed to the book hand of the literary works), citations of legal formulae in second- and thirdcentury c.e. Rabbinic literature, and the literary layer of the later Targumim (see Section 6.2.2). Due to the prevalence of the Qumran material, many scholars use the term “Qumran Aramaic,” but, like “Biblical Hebrew” (which excludes the early Hebrew inscriptions), this category covers only part of the evidence and is defined by canonical rather than by linguistic criteria. More adequate alternatives are “Hasmonaean,” designating its historical context,734 or “Standard Jewish Literary Aramaic,” which emphasizes its wider use.735 On the other hand, the important linguistic differences as opposed to the private inscriptions from post-Hasmonaean Judaea clearly show that the material from Hellenistic and early Roman Palestine cannot all be subsumed under one common notion “Palestinian Aramaic.”736 Conservative Achaemenid features of spelling and grammar occur side by side with local ones in Hasmonaean Aramaic, even in the same manuscript, and thus make the written material from Hasmonaean Palestine a transitional form between the Achaemenid standard language and the evolving Palestinian regional dialect.737 A few instances of z for original */ð/ are preserved in highfrequency deictics (such as znh ‘this one’) besides prevailing d, just as causative-stem forms with historical h- instead of phonetic ʾ- (likewise in the conditional particle hn or ʾn ‘if’) and š in addition to s for the reflex of */ś/ (for instance, forms of the root śgī ‘to be many’ are often spelled historically with š in most manuscripts but phonetically with s in the Targum of Job). Yet typically Achaemenid “degeminating” spellings (such as ʾntt ‘wife of’) decrease steadily, while vowel letters are increasingly being employed also for unstressed

734 735 736 737

Targum of Job, which precedes the redaction of the Enoch traditions, which in turn is thought to be earlier than the Genesis Apocryphon. However, since the governing method is questionable, this cannot be accepted as conclusive. Beyer 1984: 34–35 and 1986: 20–21, with a few additions in 2004: 18. Fassberg 2010: 76–77. Contrary to Fitzmyer 1979: 72–74, whose position can no longer be upheld. Cf. Gzella 2009b; Koller 2011. Gzella 2009b: 66–68; 2011c: 599–600; Lipiński 2014: 132–139. Occasionally, earlier scholarship has adduced common Achaemenid features such as orthographic degemination in support of an alleged “Eastern” origin of some Aramaic compositions from Qumran (see Gzella 2009b: 75), but since they are now well-attested in second-century b.c.e. Palestinian inscriptions (see Sections 4.3.2 and 5.1.1), this hypothesis must be rejected.

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word-final /-ā/ in the second-person masculine singular suffix -kh ‘your’ and word-medial short /o/. (At Qumran, local scribal practice also added a purely graphic -ʾ to word-final matres lectionis.) The spelling of the third-person pronouns hwʾ ‘he’ and hyʾ ‘she’ in Jewish texts instead of hw and hy is usually attributed to Hebrew influence. As far as morphology is concerned, by-forms in the pronouns are particularly common: the peculiar variant dn ‘this’ (masculine singular) besides older dnh; younger ʾl(y)n ‘these’ besides ʾlh; ʾnwn ‘they’ and -h(w)n ‘them’ (masculine) besides of hmwn and -h(w)m; the relative marker d besides dy. Characteristically Western Aramaic influence manifests itself in the rare third-person masculine singular suffix -wy instead of -why when attached to vocalic bases and in the few instances of the direct object marker yt (besides l-, which has been inherited from Achaemenid Official Aramaic), as in the later Palestinian texts (see Section 5.2.3 below), and presumably in sporadic weak articulation of pharyngeals that has caused some spelling mistakes. In addition, a few D- and C-stem infinitives with a prefix /ma-/ also seem to constitute Western features. Contrary to the other known Aramaic varieties of this period, however, the inherited “short imperfect” for deontic modality, negated by ʾl /ʾal/, is still productive in Hasmonaean, presumably as an archaism in the literary language. The use of the third-person “imperfect” preformative /l-/ with the root hwī ‘to be’ in order to avoid confusion with the tetragram, finally, seems to be an earlier Jewish convention attested in the literary style (see Section 4.4.2) but disappeared soon afterwards. The official publication of the Qumran scrolls, including the Aramaic ones, is the series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (djd, since 1955), but several of them are also available in specialized editions. Yardeni 2000 and Yadin et al. 2000 provide easy access to the documentary texts. Both bodies of material have also been included in Beyer 1984–2004 (with further bibliography, including references to the respective djd volumes and individual editions), together with later citations of legal formulae (1984: 324–327) as well as Hasmonaean inscriptions and coins (1984: 328–333). Since the palaeography of the documents is often difficult, the readings of the various editions always have to be compared in each individual case. Beyer 1984– 2004 also has the only full description of phonology and morphology of all Hasmonaean texts as well as a complete and reliable glossary, in fact the only lexicon of Qumran Aramaic hitherto available.738 Muraoka 2011 provides a synchronic grammar, including syntax, of the Aramaic texts from 738 An English-language glossary by E.M. Cook has been announced for some time but has not yet appeared.

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Qumran and adjacent locations.739 A brief grammatical summary can be found in Gzella 2011c: 599–600, but a comprehensive reference grammar of the entire corpus of literary and documentary texts is still lacking. Several particularly significant Aramaic lexemes are discussed at greater length in the respective lemmata in Fabry – Dahmen (eds.) 2011–2014.740 With the downfall of Hasmonaean rule in 37 b.c.e., scribal culture apparently underwent a change that lead to a quick decrease of the Achaemenid Official Aramaic superstrate in Palestinian written Aramaic. Excepting the conservative idiom of legal documents, where it was preserved to some extent (for instance, in the archaizing spelling znh of the demonstrative ‘this’ and occasional degemination) thanks to its traditional register (since legal texts are meant to last), more and more local Palestinian features appear in private inscriptions that were subsequently produced in Jerusalem and its surroundings. 5.2.3 Early Forms of Jewish Palestinian After the collapse of the Hasmonaean dynasty in 37 b.c.e., local scribal traditions and Palestinian Aramaic dialect traits increasingly appear in non-literary everyday writings from Judaea. Most of them relate to the private domain and can be dated to the period between 37 b.c.e. and about 200 c.e.; Beyer termed their language “Old Judaean” in order to distinguish it from Hasmonaean and other Palestinian varieties.741 The corpus consists of a few dozens of short inscriptions on tombs and informal, graffiti-like name tags on ossuaries from Jerusalem and Jericho (some of which add the name of the person in question in Greek letters; a cave inscription from near Beersheba is written in Aramaic in Greek script)742; boundary stones from Gezer; ostraca and jar epigraphs from Masada; fragments of papyrus receipts from Qumran and Murabbaʿat; 739 Important corrections and additions can be found in Stadel 2013d (especially on points of grammar and a number of questionable diachronic interpretations) and Puech 2014 (alternative readings). 740 E.g., ʾyln ‘tree’; ʾlp ‘to learn’; ʾrḥ ‘way’; bʾš ‘evil’; dbr ‘to lead’; dḥl ‘to fear’; dyn ‘to judge’; ḥdī ‘to rejoice’; ḥwī ‘to show’; yhb ‘to give’; mḥī ‘to strike’; mll ‘to speak’; nwr ‘light’; ʿll ‘to enter’; plg ‘to divide’; ptgm ‘message’; qbl ‘to accuse’; qṭl ‘to kill’; śgī ‘to be many’; šbq ‘to leave’; šlṭ ‘to rule’; šrī ‘to release’; tqp ‘to be strong’. 741 Beyer 1984: 50–53 (1986: 35–38) and 2004: 32–34. Secondary burial in ossuaries soon fell out of use after 135 c.e., so there are no significant quantities of later ossuary inscriptions. 742 Exceptionally, the Abba tomb inscription from Jerusalem (Beyer 1984: 346–347; Healey 2009a: 140–142) is written in Palaeo-Hebrew letters, perhaps as an expression of religious or cultural conservatism.

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and a handful of Aramaic letters written on papyrus as well as one on wood by the revolutionary leader Simon Bar Kosiba and his associates, containing terse, no-nonsense instructions on a number of practical matters. Genuine Palestinian material presumably also survives in citations in later Rabbinic literature, especially in the “Scroll of Fasting.” The same Palestinian spelling also surfaces in the synagogue inscriptions from Dura Europos (see Section 5.4.3 below) and, curiously, in a Jewish tombstone from second-century c.e. Mtskheta in Georgia.743 These witnesses all exhibit an unmistakable couleur locale in their strong preference for phonetic -h instead of -ʾ as vowel letter for /-ā/ in the masculinesingular emphatic state as well as s instead of š for etymological */ś/ (reflecting its pronunciation as /s/ by that time) and no degemination (hence regular ʾtt ‘wife of’); the increasing use of the Western object marker yt; the Palestinian third-person masculine singular suffix -wy /-ōy/ with vocalic bases (as in ʿlwy ‘with him’ in Yadin 54:16; see Section 6.1.1)744; and the loss of the “short imperfect” in favour of the long form. The much higher distribution of such nonAchaemenid features in this material as opposed to Hasmonaean Aramaic (see the preceding Section) and hence a lesser degree of dependence on the scribal standards of the literary texts is obvious and justifies a clear differentiation.745 Moreover, indirect evidence for the Palestinian regional dialect exists in the Western Aramaic adstrate in Hasmonaean and presumably also in cases of Aramaic influence–ranging from transcriptions of individual words and phrases, via calques of certain expressions to syntactic use patterns–in the Greek of the Septuagint, the New Testament, and the works of Flavius Josephus. The latter three rarely reveal any specific dialect traits, yet at least the transcription κουμ for the feminine-singular imperative /qūm/ ‘arise!’ (Mark 5:41) from older common Aramaic */qūmī/746 shows that the loss of unstressed word-final long vowels (with secondary lengthening of the possessive suffix /-ī/ ‘mine’) was operative here and thereby connects first-century c.e. Jewish Palestinian with the wider context of spoken Aramaic. 743 Shaked 2006: 503–504. 744 Also in Beyer 2004: 284. 745 Fitzmyer 32004: 32–34 (and in other publications), by contrast, explicitly refuses to accept this basic distinction but makes no mention of the hard linguistic evidence and never argues his point. 746 The variant reading κουμι has been corrected after the corresponding Hebrew form qūmī, see Beyer 1984: 123–124. One should also note that /qūm/ seems to be a Judaean form, since Galilean, the dialect supposedly spoken by Jesus, later has /qūmīn/ (if indeed this difference applies already to the first century c.e.; see Section 6.2.1).

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The lion’s share of the material was written by Jews; in addition, a short building inscription in a Palestinian Aramaic dialect, written in a script graphically similar to Palmyrene and Syriac and dated to the year 7/6 b.c.e., has been discovered at el-Mal, about halfway between the Sea of Galilee and Damascus.747 It was issued by the bearer of an Arabian name and an Arabian patronym, presumably a member of a mixed Jewish-pagan population.748 The text is too brief and too formulaic to exhibit any linguistic peculiarities, so it remains open whether it attests to another, non-Jewish, written tradition of Aramaic during this period (Beyer’s “Old East Jordanian,” which, together with its sister-branch Old Judaean, is subsumed to “Old Palestinian”) or should be considered an exceptional case. Beyer 1984: 335–362 and 2004: 267–290, 300 has collected and edited afresh the material; the grammar section and lexicon of his work are the most comprehensive and reliable tools currently available. The epigraphic texts as well as exact drawings are also accessible, occasionally with different readings, in Yardeni 2000 and partly in Yardeni et al. 2002.749 Both editions should always be consulted for in-depth study. A selection of a few texts can be found in Healey 2009a: 122–143 (together with a Hasmonaean sale document and a few later “Galilean” inscriptions). Since virtually all of the surviving evidence produced during this time comes from southern Judaea, excepting two very brief jar handle inscriptions from Galilee,750 it is impossible to reconstruct the wider Aramaic dialect landscape of Palestine during early Roman rule. The appearance of regional micro-variation in the more extensive epigraphic and literary material from later periods (see Section  6.1.1), however, strongly suggests that Palestinian Aramaic was already diversified by then. Beyer’s almost “Cartesian” reconstruction of seven different dialects for firstcentury c.e. Palestine on grounds of later attestations751 may seem somewhat optimistic, but the underlying general idea is no doubt correct. The limitations of the evidence make it thus very difficult to historically contextualize the 747 Beyer 1984: 406. 748 Cf. Millar 1993: 396–397. 749 Sokoloff 2003 can be used as a glossary for these latter two editions and also includes material from Rabbinic manuscripts. Older bibliography has been collected by Fitzmyer – Harrington 1978, but their readings and translations of the texts are now completely outdated and should no longer be used without comparison with the new scholarly editions. 750 Beyer 2004: 300. 751 Beyer 1984: 53–55 and 1986: 38–40 (who distinguishes between Judaean, South-east Judaean, Samarian, Galilean, East Jordanian, Damascene Aramaic, and Orontes Aramaic).

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language of Jesus as it seems to be reflected at least occasionally in the Greek text of his original sayings in the New Testament Gospels: one would expect Jesus to have spoken a Galilean dialect of Aramaic, but there is practically no comparative material from first-century c.e. Galilee. Hence, indirect evidence for perceived differences between Judaean and Galilean Aramaic, such as Matthew 26:73, cannot be verified. As a result, the “Semitic background” (which would, by and large, be an Aramaic one) of the New Testament is often elusive, even if the theological compositions from Qumran illuminate many words, expressions, and ideas especially in the Gospels and Acts.752 It is nonetheless patent that a written form of Aramaic strongly influenced by the regional vernacular was a popular means of expression for diverse, and often low-profile, communicative purposes of daily life among Jews in Judaea besides the more conservative register of legal documents. This implies that at least some modest degree of functional literacy may have existed outside scholarly circles753; the names on ossuary inscriptions in particular do not appear to have been incised by professional scribes, but rather by members of the family of the deceased. Local orthographic standards attest to the rise of a native Palestinian spelling tradition more grounded in pronunciation than in received scribal tradition. This corresponds to the more private and less representative character of the material as such. Jewish Palestinian thus seems to be the first of the indigenous Aramaic dialects of the region to have developed into a written idiom; in this respect, it was later followed by Samaritan (Section 6.3) and Christian Palestinian Aramaic (Section 6.4). Yet the quick increase of phonetic spellings as well as local dialect traits and the workings of common Aramaic sound changes in the epigraphic record from this period indicate that Aramaic was widespread as a vernacular among Jews in Hellenistic and Roman Palestine. If this were not the case, one would expect Palestinian Aramaic to be similarly conservative as 752 The extent of “Semitisms” in the New Testament (that is, Aramaic and Hebrew words, expressions, and syntactic constructions alien to koiné Greek usage but not inherited from the Septuagint) is the topic of a long-standing discussion, see Wilcox 1984 for a substantial reassessment of previous research with extensive bibliography (summarized in Wilcox 1994). Beyer 1989 provides a list of Greek constructions and expressions that only make sense when seen as translations from Hebrew or Aramaic. Earlier contributions are often marred by an insufficiently fine-grained framework, but there is at present no complete new evaluation of the material in the light of the current state of knowledge in Aramaic and Greek linguistics. 753 Estimates in modern research vary considerably, however; compare the diametrically opposed conclusions in Millard 2000 and Hezser 2001 with their proposed high and low literacy rates respectively.

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Nabataean Aramaic, which was indeed used as a written language by nonAramaic speakers, as the following Section argues. 5.3

North Arabia: Nabataean

Aramaic is first attested on the Arabian Peninsula in the form of a number of Achaemenid Official Aramaic inscriptions discovered at the oasis of Teima (see Section 4.3.3). There it coexisted with various Arabian vernaculars spread across North and Central Arabia. An offshoot that is linguistically almost identical to the Persian chancellery idiom,754 but written in a local, cursive, type of the Aramaic script, subsequently became a written standard language of the Nabataean kingdom with its capital Petra, transformed into the Roman provincia Arabia in 106 c.e., and is attested throughout North Arabia. It is this script from which, via an even more cursive transitional variety with extensive use of ligatures, the Arabic script eventually arose and spread from North-Western Arabia to Syria some time in the fifth or sixth century c.e.755 The Nabataean kingdom appears to have evolved from a tribal federation of unknown origins which developed settled forms of life and state structures besides nomadism since the second century b.c.e. Its inhabitants accumulated great wealth thanks to their control of the Incense Road, which in turn created the possibilities for a Hellenistic building program in Petra, but they were finally absorbed into the emerging Umayyad empire.756 Little is known about the political and social factors that governed their rise and fall. The Nabataeans, as they called themselves (nbṭw), are frequently labelled “Arabs” since the time of the Greek and Roman historians757 and by and large bear Arabic names.758 Their religion, too, is centred around the deities of preIslamic Arabia, in particular Dušara, ʾAllat, Manat, and ʾal-ʿUzza, with but occasional evidence, especially in the northern parts of the Nabataean cultural area, for the worship of Syro-Palestinian gods.759 However, “Arab” is a rather 754 Cf. Healey 1993: 55–59. 755 Nehmé 2010. 756 See Hackl – Jenni – Schneider 2003: 36–106; for the Roman period, cf. also Bowersock 1983. A summary with further bibliography can be found in Healey 2009a: 4–8. 757 Nöldeke 1871a: 122–128 and Healey 1989; classical sources are conveniently accessible in Hackl – Jenni – Schneider 2003: 415–620. 758 Macdonald 1999. The Arabian pronunciation also appears in Greek transcriptions of these names. 759 Healey 2001.

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imprecise category with unclear ethnic or cultural underpinnings and has been variously defined in recent scholarship.760 An ever-increasing amount of material shows that the linguistic and cultural landscape of pre-Islamic North Arabia was quite diverse. Finally, the biblical Books of Maccabees and Josephus’ Antiquitates refer to continuous contacts, at times peaceful and at times hostile, between Nabataeans and Judaeans. 5.3.1 The Profile and Function of Aramaic in North Arabia Given the many different Ancient North Arabian languages used in this area besides Old (or pre-Islamic) Arabic, and the distinct tribal affiliations of their speakers, Nabataean could act both as an internal lingua franca that facilitated communication among the population of the Arabian Peninsula and as an idiom for international business transactions with other parts of the Near East, where Achaemenid Official Aramaic was known since the Persian conquest at the latest.761 According to the historian Diodorus Siculus (19,96,1), Arabian nomads corresponded by means of ‘Syriac (that is, Aramaic) letters’ (Συρίοις γράμμασι) with foreign authorities already in 312 b.c.e.762 Nabataean traders then took their language with them when settling abroad, in Jordan, Syria, Egypt, the Greek islands, and Southern Italy.763 In addition to such functional uses, the deployment of Nabataean in memorial and representational epigraphs suggests that it could express a sense of supra-tribal communal or cultural affiliation. No comprehensive corpus of the about six-thousand inscriptions dating from between the second century b.c.e. and the fourth century c.e. exists, but a broad selection from the entire region (including the most significant ones) can be found in Hackl – Jenni – Schneider 2003.764 Some twenty texts with an extensive commentary have also been included in Healey 2009a: 52–121. Funerary and dedicatory epigraphs, most of them very brief, and thousands of graffiti constitute the majority of the evidence; especially important are a number of longer tomb inscriptions from Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ, ancient Ḥegra, that publicly declare the property rights of the respective graves (Healey 1993) and 760 Cf. Retsö 2003 for a discussion of the problem, even if one hesitates to agree with the author on the “Arabs” as a cultic community. 761 Cf. Gzella 2006a: 18–21 for a survey of the general background and Al-Jallad Forthc. for an up-to-date discussion of the complex language situation. 762 See Bowersock 1983: 14–15. 763 Cf. Macdonald 2003. 764 Some can also be found in Yardeni 2000; see Beyer 2004: 23 for additions. Many texts remain unpublished.

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family archives consisting of several legal papyri from the Dead Sea (dated between 60 and 122 c.e.; Yardeni 2000: 265–299 and Beyer 2004: 204–255). The latter consist of both Nabataean and Jewish Palestinian documents765; they were supposedly brought by their owners, two Jewish women, Babatha, the proprietor of the larger archive, and her neighbour, Salome Komaise, who resided at the periphery of the Nabataean kingdom, to the caves in which they had been discovered and were thereby secured during the unrest caused by the Jewish Revolts against Roman rule.766 Representational and legal purposes are thus the most prominent contexts in which written Aramaic was used by the Nabataeans; this distribution corresponds to the nature of the Aramaic evidence from Teima in North Arabia during the preceding Achaemenid period (see Section  4.3.3), and characteristically Achaemenid legalese runs like a thread through the material.767 Not only the official language itself, but also its communicative functions, continue seamlessly in the region after the Achaemenid period. The only full description of Nabataean Aramaic, Cantineau 1930–1932, is now outdated, since especially the Nabataean papyri from the Dead Sea contain much new grammatical and lexical information; in addition, textual discoveries made during the past decennia, a better knowledge of the surrounding Ancient North Arabian idioms, and progress in the investigation of Aramaic in general provide a better historical-comparative framework within which one can now situate Nabataean. More recent sketches of the language have appeared in Healey 1993: 49–63, Morgenstern 1999, and Gzella 2011c: 600–602, but a new reference grammar on the basis of the entire available material and against the wider Aramaic background as well as the language situation on the Arabian Peninsula in particular would respond to a much-felt need. Since it remains debated whether Nabataean ever acted as a spoken language to any significant degree (see below), one cannot say with certainty in how far it was influenced by contemporaneous developments in colloquial Aramaic (see Section 5.1.1 above) that do not surface in the consonantal writing of the Nabataean inscriptions.768 For instance, the relative marker is 765 Beyer’s edition also includes a handful of “Pseudo-Nabataean” papyri otherwise written in square script with a few linguistic features that resemble Nabataean (2004: 217–223; 224; 226–228). These are generally subsumed under Jewish Palestinian by other scholars. 766 Beyer 2004: 204. 767 See Healey 2005. 768 One may even entertain the possibility that Aramaic could have been read by the Nabataeans with a largely extempore vocalization patterned after Arabic, in a fashion that resembles, e.g., the reading of Phoenician inscriptions by enthusiastic laymen from

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consistently spelled dy or, rarely, zy in Nabataean, in accordance with its older pronunciation /dī/ as opposed to d for /d-/ in other forms of Aramaic. Achaemenid spelling conventions also underlie the frequent graphic preservation of etymological */n/ before consonants and the use of the grapheme š for */ś/; the extension of the third-person masculine plural of the “perfect” to feminine subjects, too, belongs to the inherited hallmarks of Achaemenid Official Aramaic. A few modernizations in orthography, on the other hand, reflect scribal tendencies that were already underway in the Achaemenid period: an increasing use of d for etymological */ð/ conforms to its merger with /d/ already centuries ago, and the same applies to the predominant writing of the causative-stem prefix with ʾ- instead of h-. Plene spelling of the absolute-state masculine plural ending/-īn/as -yn vis-à-vis older defective -n merely relates to orthography, too. Occasional shifts like /l/ > /n/, as in mnkw for the name of king Malichus, or /ā/ > /ō/, as in ʾnwš /ʾenōš/ for /ʾenāš/ ‘man, anybody’ could point to dialectal substrate pronunciation under the influence of an Arabian vernacular.769 Hence they do not indicate systematic sound changes that single out Nabataean as a proper dialect from contemporaneous forms of Aramaic. Likewise, the frequent use of the grapheme -w at the end of masculine Arabic names (such as klbw) may reflect a borrowing and is often associated with the nominative case ending /-u/, but the matter is open to further debate.770 By contrast, the use of the direct object marker yt /yāt/, which occurs regularly in the legal language of the tomb inscriptions from Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ,771 is unlikely to have been borrowed from Arabic or inherited from Achaemenid Official Aramaic. In the latter, it remains unattested, and the preposition lwould have been employed in its place. Hence yt in Nabataean seems to have been taken over from a Western form of Aramaic with which inhabitants of the Nabataean kingdom may have been in contact (see the following Section). A more modern by-form of the third-person masculine and feminine plural

Lebanon who speak Arabic natively but have no formal training in historical-comparative Semitic Philology. 769 So, among others, Beyer 1984: 41; 1986: 27. 770 For the traditional opinion, see Diem 1981: 336–342. 771 References can be found in Hoftijzer – Jongeling 1995: 48. Curiously, it seems largely confined to the form yth ‘him’ with a third-person masculine singular pronominal suffix, just as Arabic has an etymologically related marker ʾiyyā for pronominal objects (cf. Gzella 2013e: 117); the historical-linguistic implications of this distribution (if any) remain elusive. One may note that similar constraints seem to apply to the few occurrences of yt in Babylonian Talmudic Aramaic legalese (references in Rybak 1980: 116).

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pronoun ʾnw /ʾennū/ ‘they’ also occurs a few times besides older hmw(n) /homū(n)/.772 Nabataean Aramaic is thus extremely close to, but not fully identical with, Achaemenid Official Aramaic and may have been connected with the wider Aramaic speech-area. 5.3.2 Nabataean Aramaic in Contact with Greek and Arabic The incorporation of the Nabataean kingdom into the Hellenistic world resulted in a notable presence of Greek language and culture, particularly in urban centres. Following the annexation to the Roman empire in 106 c.e., the use of Greek in the capital Petra and other northern parts even seems to have increased (it was, after all, the usual idiom for legal documents intended for Roman courts),773 and Greek eventually replaced Aramaic as an official idiom for bureaucracy after the fourth century c.e.774 A number of Nabataean-Greek bilingual or even Nabataean-North Arabian-Greek trilingual memorial inscriptions as well as Greek monolingual texts erected by Nabataeans show that Greek could be employed not only for honouring foreign officials but also as a token of Hellenistic cultural affinity. Nabataean and Greek would thus both serve as prestige languages for representational purposes among speakers of Old Arabic and Ancient North Arabian vernaculars.775 As the addition of a brief line in Nabataean language and script to a Roman epitaph otherwise composed in Latin shows, members of Nabataean expatriate communities, too, at times employed Aramaic as a cultural marker.776 Despite the use of both Nabataean and Greek as written idioms in the region, there seems to be little interaction between the two in terms of grammar and literary form. First of all, the different versions of the multilingual inscriptions evidently conform to distinct patterns according to the West Semitic (‘This is the statue of…’) and Greek (‘The people/council of…honoured…’) traditions respectively. Moreover, they often contain complementary pieces of information, such as characteristically Hellenistic expressions like ‘because of his piety’ in the Greek on the one hand and a more extensive genealogy in the Aramaic on the other777; in some cases, the Greek is nothing more 772 773 774 775

See Beyer 2004: 385. Cf. Cotton 2005: 155. Cotton 2005: 165. So in the dedicatory inscription from the temple of Ruwafa that was erected for Marcus Aurelius by members of the tribe of the Thamud (Hackl – Jenni – Schneider 2003: 295–300). 776 See Hackl – Jenni – Schneider 2003: 108–109. 777 See, e.g., the Nabataean-Greek statue inscription from the temple of Seeia (Hackl – Jenni – Schneider 2003: 174–176), the tomb inscription from Madaba (ibid. 212–213), or the

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than a short tag.778 Greek linguistic influence on Nabataean, too, is highly restricted and seems to be confined to a few lexical loans relating to architecture; even Hellenistic epithets such as φιλόπατρις could be calqued literally as rḥm ʿmh /rāḥem ʿammeh/ ‘loving his people’.779 Greek as an administrative language at least in the northern part of the Nabataean kingdom survived in the about hundred-forty Petra Papyri from the sixth century c.e., which nonetheless also preserve traditional Nabataean names and occasional Aramaic words.780 Aramaic-Arabic contact, by contrast, must have been much more extensive and long-lasting throughout the area. This emerges from a considerable number of lexemes denoting items of daily life (in particular agriculture, economy, and trade)781 and several revealing instances of subconscious syntactic influence. Significant examples of the latter include the construction ‘what…among’ for ‘everything which’ (as in Arabic mā…min)782 and the modal use of the “perfect of wish” lʿn /laʿan/ ‘may he curse’ in the tomb inscriptions from Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ, which is untypical in Aramaic but exactly corresponds to the “optative perfect” in Classical Arabic (especially in religious discourse).783 According to the traditional opinion, then, the dominant language for situations of daily life among most users of Nabataean was thus Old Arabic or another variety of Arabian, whereas Nabataean acted as a purely written code.784 While this remains by far the most convincing scenario, the presence of the direct object marker yt /yāt/ in the Nabataean corpus is puzzling. It is evidently

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memorial inscription from Iram (ibid. 289–291) for such characteristic differences in wellpreserved texts. In the late and apparently sub-standard inscription from Umm al-Ǧimal (ibid. 197–198), the Greek is evidently patterned after the Nabataean, as the otherwise untypical addition of ‘this one’ in the former shows. Cf. Hackl – Jenni – Schneider 2003: 124–126, 195–196, or 283–284 for examples. See Bowersock 1983: 45 with n. 1 for coin legends under Aretas IV. Cf. Al-Jallad – Daniel – Al-Ghul 2013: 38–39 and Cotton 2005: 155. Cotton 2009 also argues in favour of traces of Nabataean legal concepts in the Petra Papyri, but this needs more research. For the survival of old Aramaic legal formulae in Arabian legal traditions in general, cf. Khan 1994. Beyer 2004: 23 gives an up-to-date survey with further bibliography. Beyer 2004: 433. Note also a few instances of the Arabic passive participle maḏkūr ‘remembered’ instead of expected Aramaic /dakīr/ even in fixed formulae (Hoyland 2004: 185 n. 11). See Gzella 2004: 242 for a recent discussion. Very rarely, similar examples seem to occur in Classical Syriac (cf. the supplementary remark in Schall’s edition of Nöldeke 21898: 333), but this merits further investigation. Cf., for instance, Rosenthal 1939: 92; Healey 1989: 43; Nebe 1993: 312; and many others.

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a Western Aramaic feature with no pedigree in Achaemenid Official Aramaic and may have entered Nabataean via a Syrian or Palestinian dialect through Moab or the Hawran area, where Aramaic had a longer history and would supposedly have been spoken more widely.785 One should also note that Nabataean is attested in countless graffiti from the Sinai area featuring personal names, and in signatures as well as subscriptions to legal documents from the Dead Sea.786 Such evidence has been taken as an indication that some parts of the population, for instance in the northern border zone, actually spoke Nabataean.787 However, the same data could, perhaps more plausibly, also point to the use of another, unwritten, form of Aramaic as a vernacular among some inhabitants of the Nabataean kingdom. A dedicatory inscription from Palmyra in the local Aramaic language (pat 0319) and the coexistence of Nabataean and Jewish Palestinian in contracts from the Dead Sea show that Nabataeans were indeed exposed to other forms of Aramaic.788 All in all, then, the functional distribution of languages in Hellenistic and Roman North Arabia indicates that Nabataean Aramaic, together with the Achaemenid Official Aramaic diction and phraseology encapsulated in it, by and large served for international, representational, and public as well as private legal purposes. Since a basic form of literacy in the vernacular seems to have been reasonably widespread especially among the settled population but to a lower degree also among the nomads (as substantial quantities of short 785 The ongoing investigation of the Ancient North Arabian languages of the area may also throw further light on this phenomenon in due course. 786 The sheer amount of such material could imply that Nabataean was used as a vernacular, but not necessarily so: alternatively, the authors of the Sinai graffiti may have been speakers of Old Arabic whose primary language still lacked a proper writing system (cf. Hoyland 2004: 185 n. 10 and 186 n. 15 for the concentration of Old Arabic features in the names in texts from Sinai), or they may simply have scribbled their names in Nabataean because this is what they usually did when signing documents. See also below. 787 As has been suggested, albeit tentatively, by, e.g., Nöldeke 1871a: 123–124 and, more recently, Macdonald 1998: 185–188 as well as Cotton 2005: 164–165. Knauf 2010: 200–202 argues that Aramaic acted as a middle-tier language that could allow a Nabataean to communicate with Greek-speaking patricians in city centres and with speakers of another, mutually unintelligible, Arabian idiom in the desert fringes; he also assumes the existence of native speakers (220), but this is, like much of his paper, extremely speculative. Millar 1993: 402 even goes so far as to claim that ‘the idea that the language [=Nabataean Aramaic] was not simultaneously spoken seems perverse and is very difficult to prove’, but his claim is refuted by many linguistic arguments. 788 Interestingly, one Aramaic inscription from Palmyra also has an instance of yt, see Section 5.4.1 below. Cf. Healey 2009a: 34.

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North Arabian inscriptions suggest),789 writing in Aramaic often appears to be associated with a specific communicative context. The extensive use of Nabataean in graffiti from Sinai shows that it was not necessarily restricted to official situations but could also function as a default medium of written expression by speakers of a colloquial without a proper script (unless one supposes that writing one’s name in Nabataean on rocks in the desert merely replicates a personal signature on a legal document, where Nabataean would act as the normal language and script). Conversely, a pre-Islamic variety of Arabic or another Arabian idiom was used in ordinary daily communication, religion, oral traditions, and face-toface administrative as well as legal activities.790 The existence of Arabian administrative terminology is evidenced by a number of Arabic loans in the Nabataean Dead Sea contracts (for instance, ʾikrāy ‘lease’, nḥl ‘to bequeath’, ʾaṣdaq ‘heir’, and others).791 A curious mix of both languages, either due to imperfect learning792 or code-switching triggered by a shift of register (and thus not necessarily as a sign of low linguistic competence),793 appears in a grave inscription of a certain Raqoš, daughter of ʿAbd-Manotu: several fixed expressions in the filiation (lines 1–2) and the dating formulae (lines 5–6) are written in Aramaic, owing to their official nature,794 whereas the account of the building of the grave (line 1), the passing of the person for whom it was made (lines 3–4), and the final curse formula (lines 6–9; introduced by lʿn ‘may he curse’, on which see above) are composed in Arabic.795 This oscillation of languages in the same epigraph may thus illustrate the different functional contexts in which they would normally have been employed. Formal registers of Arabic began to encroach on writing after about the second century c.e. in the Nabataean realm and eventually replaced the other languages of the Arabian Peninsula in most official and informal situations with the spread of Islam.796 This full-fledged use of Arabic as a written idiom in 789 790 791 792 793 794

Macdonald 2010b: 9–15. See Macdonald 2010b: 19–20. On Arabic as a language of religion, cf. also Knauf 2010: 234. Beyer 2004: 23. So Hoyland 2004: 186. Cf. Grosjean 2010: 51–62 for a more general assessment of code-switching. Compare the use of Greek numerals in Syriac sources of the Christian period, with examples from inscriptions in Brock 2009: 295–296. 795 Hackl – Jenni – Schneider 2003: 336–338; Healey – Smith 1989 and now Healey 2002 provide a more extensive philological commentary and argue in favour of a similar distribution of a basically Arabic gist and some formal Aramaic expressions (so, too, Al-Jallad Forthc.). 796 See Wasserstein 2003, with the additional remarks by Hoyland 2004: 194–198.

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early Islamic administration is foreshadowed by the appearance of entire passages in Arabic in Nabataean epigraphic texts before the Arabic script had evolved. Already the ʿEn-ʿAvdat inscription from the Negev, commonly dated between 88 and 150 c.e., switches to Arabic when citing a proverbial or religious maxim in praise of the deified king Obodas in the fourth and fifth of in total six lines, but then returns to Aramaic.797 As is often the case, code-switching was presumably triggered by content. A few centuries later, a memorial inscription from Namara in the desert of southern Syria, dated to the year 328 c.e. and still written in Nabataean letters, recounts the deeds of an Arabian king in Arabic throughout, with only the word ‘son’ (/bar/) in the filiation being Aramaic.798 Increasing writing of Arabic in Nabataean characters eventually produced the Arabic script. Since innovations in script generally occur in cursive and not in lapidary styles, the evolution of proper Arabic letter forms presupposes a much more extensive use of Nabataean writing for commercial and legal purposes on parchment and papyrus.799 Arabic documentary and literary prose has thus emerged from a milieu in which Aramaic enjoyed a wide distribution. As both languages remained in contact for several centuries on the Arabian Peninsula, it is not surprising that a number of Aramaic words had already entered Arabic in the pre-Islamic period. With the advent of Syriac-speaking Christians in the region, Arabic became exposed to another wave of Aramaic influence. Its possible impact on the Qurʾan still awaits a rigorous, methodologically sound, and historicallysensitive assessment,800 but one should stress that not all Aramaic features in early Islamic literature have necessarily been mediated by Christians.801 Aramaic has a much longer history on the Arabian Peninsula. 5.4 Syria In Syria, the old homeland of Aramaic, the interaction of local vernaculars that have been spoken for centuries with the heritage of the Achaemenid standard 797 Hackl – Jenni – Schneider 2003: 396–402. The interpretation remains controversial, but the switch seems to stress the role of Arabic in religion and popular lore; cf. also Macdonald 2008: 468–469. 798 Again, this is a much-debated text, see Macdonald 2008: 469 for bibliographical information. 799 So rightly Hoyland 2010: 35. 800 Griffith 2013: 18–23 has a concise but balanced summary of the historical background. 801 Cf. Healey 2014: 401–402.

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language on the one hand and with the Greek koiné on the other has produced a number of different language situations at Palmyra, Edessa, and Dura Europos. The Aramaic varieties of the former two can still be distinguished on linguistic grounds. Due to some distinctive features, Edessan Aramaic resembles contemporaneous Eastern Aramaic languages from Mesopotamia but belongs to a different dialectal sub-group (see Section 5.5 below). The classification of Palmyrene Aramaic is less straightforward because of the prevailing impact of Achaemenid Official Aramaic in the written record, but this variety, too, reflects a few Eastern dialect traits. The textual evidence thus points to the existence of a wider Eastern Aramaic dialect group with distinctive sub-varieties in Syria on the one hand and Mesopotamia on the other. Both regions later witnessed the rise of Eastern Aramaic literary traditions rooted in the local varieties of the Greco-Roman period (see Chapter 7). The degree of visibility of Greek differs, too: it was apparently dominant, at least in public life, in Dura Europos, where no native dialect of Aramaic is attested, coexisted as a written language with Aramaic in Palmyra, and is only indirectly attested in Edessa. The epigraphic record of Palmyra in the Syrian Desert, which lasts until the destruction of the city by the Romans in 273 c.e., reflects a balanced distribution of Achaemenid Official Aramaic and dialectal traits as well as a seemingly high degree of bilingualism among the elite; the noteworthy prominence of Greek could result from both a more general cultural affinity with the West and an early political association with the Roman province of Syria. Edessa and the Osrhoene to the north, by contrast, situated between eastern Asia Minor and western Mesopotamia, seems to have been an Aramaicspeaking region since the settlement of Aramaean tribes at the latest. When Edessa was founded as a Seleucid city, Greek no doubt acted as the official language. However, it was replaced by the local Aramaic dialect after the city became independent towards the end of the Seleucid period and a native ruling dynasty rose to power around 132 b.c.e. Aramaic lived on when Edessa submitted to Rome in 242 c.e. or shortly thereafter. This new written variety of Edessan Aramaic betrays but few Achaemenid traces as opposed to several hallmarks that anticipate later Eastern Aramaic; it thus appears to be closer to the vernacular. Its rise largely eclipsed former Greek influence in the region, but bilingualism became more clearly visible over time after Edessan Aramaic had evolved into “Classical Syriac,” itself a literary and theological standard language subsequently used throughout the Christian Near East until the present day. Dura Europos on the bank of the Euphrates east of Palmyra, finally, was a Seleucid colony in which Greek enjoyed an official status before the Sassanids sacked it in 256 c.e., but texts in different varieties of Aramaic have also been

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found there. Since these documents were not necessarily written by members of the indigenous population, little is known about the form of Aramaic possibly used in this area. The same applies to the entire region that extends eastwards from Antioch and Emesa, with the exception of Palmyra: Greek dominated public life and thus the epigraphic evidence during the Roman period, whereas written Aramaic, in the shape of Syriac, only appeared with the spread of Christianity to the west of the Euphrates.802 Beneath the surface of the available textual evidence, however, the cultural fabric of Hellenistic and Roman Syria was even more diverse. The regular presence of Arabian personal names that contain a number of distinctive linguistic peculiarities as opposed to Aramaic could possibly imply that Arabic or other ancient Arabian languages were also spoken by parts of the population; a similar conclusion may apply to Iranian elements in the onomasticon, even if names do not provide conclusive evidence for the language of their speakers. Religion, conversely, exhibits a strong presence of Mesopotamian deities, which is confirmed by a sizeable amount of Akkadian loans for religious items and concepts besides ancient West Semitic traditions, but evidence for the use of Akkadian texts and cuneiform writing is lacking. Finally, Iranian and Hellenistic-Roman features meet in art and architecture, leading to a new symbiosis that is identical neither to the one nor to the other. All this accentuates the role of Syria as a gateway area between Greco-Roman civilization in the West and Mesopotamia and Parthia in the East. 5.4.1 Palmyra and Palmyrene Aramaic Palmyrene Aramaic is a written form of the local Aramaic dialect originally spoken in the oasis Palmyra, or Tadmor (as it was called in indigenous sources), in the Syrian Desert. It is not altogether implausible to assume that the population consisted of an Aramaean and an Arabian part, but little can be said about the role of Arabic as a vernacular in pre-Islamic times. Urbanization was supposedly triggered or at least reinforced by the creation of a desert route that connected the Levantine coast with Mesopotamia and intersected with ancient caravan paths. Nonetheless, the history of the settlement in the preHellenistic period remains extremely difficult to trace. An extensive epigraphic record of in total some three-thousand inscriptions emerged when local and international trade networks in a border-zone between the Greco-Roman West and the Parthian East produced a mercantile elite by the first century c.e.803 802 Cf. Healey 2014: 399–400. 803 Cf. Hartmann 2001: 45–64; see now also Smith 2013 for a recent survey of the political and social history and earlier bibliography, Healey 2009a: 11–13 has a concise summary.

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Their wealth and panache prompted the rise of a monumental building programme strongly influenced by Hellenistic architecture. At that time, Palmyrene Aramaic had become an official idiom in the region with its own version of the Aramaic script, related to widespread cursive letter forms and close to the early Syriac characters,804 but its written use coexisted with Greek. Dated material extends over the period from 44 b.c.e. to 279/280 c.e. with a peak in the second and third centuries c.e. (the latter presumably due to Palmyra’s status as a Roman colony since 212 c.e.), but the native scribal tradition soon disappeared after Aurelian had destroyed the city in 272/273 c.e., following a revolt of the ambitious local queen Zenobia.805 Apart from a long tax tariff in Aramaic and Greek, most texts contain relatively brief honorific, funerary, and dedicatory inscriptions according to fixed patterns. In addition, hundreds of so-called tesserae, which presumably served as entry-tickets to ritual meals, have also been found. The decipherment of Palmyrene Aramaic in the mid-eighteenth century, being the first ancient language and script without a continuous tradition that could be recovered in modern times, inaugurated Semitic epigraphy.806 As in other parts of the Hellenistic and Roman Near East, the promotion of the local form of Aramaic to a written language appears to be the result of a conscious decision. The strong influence of Achaemenid Official Aramaic language and spelling conventions indicates that the Persian chancellery idiom served as a model when Palmyrene Aramaic underwent standardization. Even so, the presence of some characteristically Eastern Aramaic dialectal traits and the effects of wider-ranging phonetic changes demonstrate beyond doubt that a local form of Aramaic served as the usual vernacular in the region. Palmyrene Aramaic functioned as a means of expressing national pride and cultural distinctiveness as well, hence it also occurs in funerary and memorial inscriptions erected by Palmyrene expatriates, mostly Roman legionaries, throughout the Roman empire as far as Britain. Some two-hundred Aramaic texts, the majority of which come from Palmyra, are accompanied by a Greek and/or Latin parallel version, thereby suggesting that Greek was neither purposefully downgraded here, as it was in Edessa (see Section 5.4.2 below), nor that it replaced Aramaic as an official language, as it did in Dura Europos (see Section 5.4.3 below), but that it was integrated into a more complex multilingual environment. A few inscriptions from the western parts of the Roman empire have a Latin parallel version or feature at least a short Aramaic tag. 804 See Klugkist 1983. 805 Cf. Taylor 2001 for a survey of the dated material and its distribution over time. 806 See Daniels 1988.

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The epigraphic corpus is conveniently accessible in Latin transliteration in Hillers – Cussini 1996, whose system of referencing (pat) has been widely accepted.807 Unfortunately, this work contains many mistakes or outdated readings and lacks a translation, so the main editions must always be consulted for serious study. Healey 2009a: 144–222 has a reliable, representative, and fully annotated selection.808 The lexicon is covered by Hoftijzer – Jongeling 1995 (with bibliography and evaluation of alternative interpretations) and the glossary in Hillers – Cussini 1996 (with a minimum of discussion but fairly extensive citations in context). A modern reference grammar, by contrast, yet remains to be written. For the time being, Cantineau 1935 presents a basically synchronic description, while Rosenthal 1936 takes greater care in situating the language of Palmyra in its wider Aramaic context, but much more primary and comparative material is now available and makes a new comprehensive presentation necessary; Gzella 2011c: 602–604 has a brief but recent overview. Stark 1971 serves as the main guide to the onomasticon, which is also important because of the Greek transcriptions of Aramaic names. Since Achaemenid Official Aramaic features occur side by side with local traits in Palmyrene inscriptions,809 it is fairly certain that the use of the former as a written language continued without interruption at Palmyra after the fall of the Persian empire; yet the waning power of the Achaemenid chancellery enabled the regional spoken form of Aramaic to encroach on scribal practice. This resembles the position of Hasmonaean in Judaea (see Section 5.2.2 above), in contradistinction to both Nabataean and Edessan as well as Eastern Mesopotamian Aramaic: Nabataean is almost identical to Achaemenid Official Aramaic because it seems to have been used as a written idiom by speakers of Arabian languages, hence the impact of contemporary spoken forms of Aramaic was minimal there (see Section  5.3 above). Edessan and Eastern Mesopotamian Aramaic, by contrast, turned into written languages some time after the use of Achaemenid Official Aramaic had temporarily been replaced by Greek, so they have only been influenced to a much lesser degree by the Persian chancellery idiom (Sections 5.4.2 and 5.5 below). 807 A number of texts have not been included there; add the inscriptions published by Gawlikowski – al-Asʿad 1986–1987; Drijvers 1995a; Naveh 2002: 243–245; Gross 2005; Müller-Kessler 2005. 808 pat 0095; 0158; 0180; 0259; 0263; 0276; 0278; 0292; 0293; 0317; 0319; 0320; 0555; 1397; 1524; 1561; 1614; 2766. 809 See Beyer 1984: 42–43 and 1986: 27–28. Basically similar views, though with different nuances, have already been expressed in earlier scholarship, cf. Rosenthal 1939: 100–103 and Ginsberg 1942: 233–237.

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In terms of closeness to Achaemenid Official Aramaic, Palmyrene Aramaic thus occupies a middle position between Nabataean on the one hand and Edessan as well as Eastern Mesopotamian on the other. The distinctive extension of the third-person masculine plural “perfect” to the feminine in Achaemenid Official Aramaic is a morphological trait that survives at Palmyra (for instance, in pat 0259:I: 5: lʾ ʾsqw whww mtgbyn ‘they were not entered and they were taxed’, referring to the feminine plural subject ʿbydn ‘things’). Otherwise, the Achaemenid heritage mainly manifests itself in conservative spelling practice, especially in the use of “degeminating” n (as in ʾnt ‘you’ or ʾntth ‘his wife’)810 and the more restricted employ of vowel letters for long vowels (at least in native words). Similar to Nabataean, the few orthographic modernizations chiefly affect phonetic ʾ instead of historical h in the causative-stem prefix (*/ha-/>/ʾa/)811 and an increase of plene spelling in the masculine-plural absolute state /-īn/ as -yn, together with a few instances of phonetic spelling of word-medial /-t-/ that has undergone assimilation to the following consonant (mqrh ‘he is called’ in pat 0049:1 as opposed to the regular mtqrʾ or mtqrh, as in Old and Official Aramaic)812 and of /ʾ/ assimilated to a preceding /t/.813 The effects of several common Aramaic sound changes that were operative in this period, however, occasionally surface by way of orthographic variation (at times even in the same text) and thus firmly connect the dialect of Palmyra with the other Aramaic vernaculars. They demonstrate that the inhabitants of this desert oasis remained in constant contact with speakers of Aramaic elsewhere in the Near East, hence their language changed, together with other forms of Aramaic, as a result of continued active use.814 Unequivocal evidence exists for the loss of unstressed word-final /-ī/ and /-ū/, hence bnwh for /banawh/ from /banáwhī/ ‘his children’ (in, for example, pat 0046), but more frequently the traditional writing bnwhy elsewhere,815 and ʾqym for /ʾaqīm/ from /ʾaqīmū/ ‘they have erected’ (with a plural subject) instead of the more common 810 811 812 813 814 815

See Cantineau 1935: 45–46; Beyer 1984: 42 and 1986: 28. Beyer 1984: 148. Beyer 1984: 94 n. 1; 1998: 128. Beyer 1984: 469. Cf. already Rosenthal 1936: 105. Cf. Hillers – Cussini 1996: 349 for references. Beyer 1984: 96 and 144 suggests that the possessive suffix /-ī/ ‘my’ was preserved due to secondary lengthening in Palmyrene Aramaic, as in some Western Aramaic languages (see Section  6.1.1), but the name Μαρθειν for /mārtī/ ‘My Lady’ (the ν apparently being a marker of the Greek accusative), which he cites in support, could reflect an onomastic archaism and does not necessarily represent the spoken language.

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historical form ʾqymw.816 Many instances of the spelling d for the relative marker /dī/ instead of traditional dy or even archaic zy suggest that this form has turned into a proclitic /d(a)-/ (presumably via an unattested intermediate stage */di/), just as in other Aramaic varieties of this period.817 Likewise, the construct bt ‘daughter of’, as always in personal names (transcribed as βαθ in Greek), besides older brt indicates that the pronunciation was already /baṯ/.818 Greek transcriptions of personal names point to an aspirated pronunciation of the stops /k,p,t/ (written as χ, φ, and θ) in all positions, even if fricative allophones due to weak articulation after vowels are not directly attested.819 The effects of common morphological and syntactic changes can also be observed: the t-stems evidently act as normal passive forms820 and the participle has been extended to generalizing relative clauses.821 Such innovations that diffused across the entire dialect continuum prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Aramaic was widely used as a vernacular in Palmyra. A few individual traits align Palmyrene Aramaic with dialects spoken further to the East, most importantly the emphatic-state ending -ʾ /-ē/ for the masculine-plural besides still more frequent -yʾ for older /-ayyā/.822 It may be the case that the latter merely served as a graphic archaism in order to disambiguate the plural from the singular (since both would otherwise be indicated by -ʾ), while the actual form was consistently /-ē/.823 An unequivocal decision seems impossible, but it could be significant that the one emphatic-state of the masculine plural attested in a Greek transcription, the divine name ραβ ασειρη /raḇ ʾasīrē/ ‘Lord of the Captives’ (pat 0259:I: 10), renders the innovative Eastern form and not the inherited common Aramaic one. Further, like Eastern Aramaic, the third-person masculine singular suffix with vocalic bases in Palmyrene Aramaic has a secondary by-form /-ayh/ from */-ayhī/, in analogy with the rest of the paradigm in /-ay-/, besides older /-awh/ from */-awhī/ (contrast bnyh ‘his sons’ in pat 0334:3 with bnwh(y) elsewhere). Sporadic Easternisms 816 817 818 819 820

Examples in Cantineau 1935: 56–57, see also Rosenthal 1939: 102 and Beyer 1984: 122–125. See the examples in Hillers – Cussini 1996: 356. Cf. Beyer 1984: 43 and 1986: 28. Rosenthal 1937: 33; Beyer 1984: 43 and 1986: 28. Cantineau 1935: 38–39; Beyer 1984: 125–128. Cf. Cantineau 1935: 81–84. Contrary to Rosenthal 1936: 56 and 62, there is no unambiguous evidence for internal passives in Palmyrene Aramaic; the alleged yktb in pat 0259:I: 8 should therefore rather be analyzed as an active verb with unspecified agent (‘may one write’) or as a Gt-form with assimilated /-t-/ ‘may it be written’ (cf. Gzella 2011c: 604). 821 See Gzella 2011c: 604. Achaemenid Official Aramaic would usually employ the “imperfect” in such constructions, cf. Gzella 2004: 198–201. 822 Cantineau 1935: 123–124. 823 As perceptively suggested by Beyer 1984: 43 and 1986: 28.

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also crop up in individual words and forms, such as the root zdq ‘just’ (pat 0293:1) instead of ṣdq and the by-form of the suffixed numeral trwyhwn ‘the two of them’ (pat 0276:1), which has parallels in Jewish Babylonian, besides usual tryhwn.824 Other distinctively Eastern innovations, by contrast (such as third-person masculine singular “imperfects” in /l-/ or /n-/), are absent and thus distinguish the written form of Palmyrene Aramaic from Edessan and Eastern Mesopo­ tamian Aramaic.825 This does of course not exclude that an unwritten colloquial language of Palmyra might have been somewhat closer to Eastern Aramaic, and that conservatisms inherited from Achaemenid Official Aramaic affected the written idiom only. The latter, at any rate, attests to a smooth transition from the Achaemenid standard in decline to a local form of Eastern Aramaic encroaching on written language use, presumably some time before the appearance of the first dated witnesses around the middle of the first century b.c.e. As in Nabataean, an isolated instance of the Western Aramaic object marker yt /yāt/ (pat 0278:4, from Palmyra) instead of Achaemenid Official and Eastern Aramaic l- or an unmarked object, both of which are otherwise normal in Palmyrene Aramaic, remains puzzling but may result from contact with other forms of Aramaic. In any case, it does not have the same statistic significance as dialect traits that occur at a regular rate in the material. A Palmyrene inscription dedicated by a Nabataean (pat 0319) demonstrates that the local Aramaic variety was also used by people other than natives of Palmyra, and Palmyrene Jews were buried in Galilee (pat 0132– 0141), which reinforces the possibility of a more regular inner-Aramaic contact. The presence of regional features in the texts in addition to the effects of common phonetic, morphological, and syntactic developments in Aramaic thus provides further conclusive evidence that Aramaic served as the normal vernacular in Palmyra. A considerable percentage of Arabian personal names in the onomasticon and some twenty Arabic lexical loans in the Aramaic inscriptions826 could, moreover, indicate that a part of the population also spoke Arabic, but in the absence of subconscious syntactic borrowings in the surviving corpus (contrary to Nabataean, on which see Section 5.3.2 above), 824 Cf. Kutscher 1976: 26–28. 825 Hence Beyer 2013: 25 suggests a double affiliation with post-Achaemenid Official Aramaic on the one hand and Eastern Aramaic on the other. The hypothesis of a “Central Aramaic” dialect (so Cook 1994), by contrast, ignores the supra-regional character of the Achaemenid superstrate and is thus unconvincing. 826 See Maraqten 1995.

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which would reflect more directly an active use of Arabic in daily life, this is impossible to prove. As a written language, Palmyrene Aramaic was employed for a wide range of public and private purposes. The Aramaic version of the tax tariff and the frequent reference to legal stipulations concerning the transfer of burial property in funerary inscriptions (“cession texts,” such as pat 0095, 0555, or 1614) underscore its role as the main official idiom and continue the use of the same legal terminology as in Achaemenid Official Aramaic (notably the verb rḥq with the technical meaning ‘to withdraw’ in the cession texts).827 Since even leading citizens, depicted in reliefs with precious garments and jewellery, saw it fit to have their tombs inscribed with monolingual Aramaic texts, it is patent that the local idiom also acted as a prestige language and was deemed suitable for public representation. Its use in funerary contexts presumably intersects with the religious sphere, where, again, monolingual Aramaic inscriptions predominate. The bilingual texts with a Greek and/or a Latin parallel version from Palmyra itself are evenly spread across the different genres but mostly contain honorific inscriptions; they accompanied statues and busts of the local notables that were erected in public areas throughout the city centre. As with their Nabataean counterparts (see Section  5.3.2 above), a close comparison between the Aramaic and the Greek wording reveals subtle differences in structure, terminology, and content.828 Again, they help clarify the status of Aramaic. First, both versions follow the respective formal conventions with but rare examples of an Aramaic text patterned after the usual Greek structure or vice versa. It this respect, it is particularly telling that the Aramaic examples by and large adopt the time-honoured model of West Semitic royal or dedicatory inscriptions (‘This is the statue of…’ or ‘Statue of…’, as, for instance, in kai 309; 201; 202; 215; 311; 318).829 Under the influence of the Greek epigraphic habit, this model has been purposefully expanded to cater for the self-conscious representation of illustrious businessmen who protected the caravan trade and, presumably, profited from their connections with the desert dwellers. 827 Cf. Hoftijzer – Jongeling 1995: 1072–1074 for references to Achaemenid Official Aramaic legalese and further bibliography. 828 Many examples have been analysed by Gzella 2005c and 2006a: 21–31. Cf. also Taylor 2002: 317–324. 829 Only four Aramaic texts begin with the Greek expression bwlʾ wdms ‘council and people’, five have the name of the dedicatee at the beginning, but four of them (pat 0285–0287; 0289) refer to the same person. Yet even they are assimilated to the usual Semitic form by adding a finite verb ‘has/have erected, made’.

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Second, the Aramaic texts do not result from a mere translation of the Greek on the spot but are steeped in a native tradition with its own rhetorical conventions and idiomatic expressions (such as the omnipresent ʿl ḥyy /ʿal ḥayyay/ ‘for the life of’).830 The use of zdq /zāḏeq/ ‘just’ for εὐσεβής ‘pious’ (pat 0293:1) even recalls old West Semitic royal ideology.831 Consequently, an Aramaic text can display an even more self-conscious diction than a Greek one: the Romans would not have been amused to read that Queen Zenobia honoured her late husband Odainath as mlk mlkʾ /maləḵ malaḵē/ ‘king of kings’ (as in the monolingual pat 0292:1) according to Persian royal titulature!832 Third, bilingual Aramaic honorific and funerary inscriptions from Palmyra often contain extra information on the clan affiliation of an individual that is missing in the Greek,833 and include one or two more generations in the filiation (for instance, pat 0269; 1154; 1376); at times, they also exhibit some additional terminological precision.834 The full Roman name with praenomen, nomen gentile, and cognomen, following the universal grant of Roman citizenship in 212 c.e., tends to be confined to the Greek (so in pat 0247; 1417), while the Aramaic only mentions the local name; both can be phonetically or etymologically connected and occasionally appear in the same version.835 In some cases, the Greek is but a mere summary of the Aramaic (as in pat 0263; 1397). Such a distribution of information suggests that the Aramaic was more geared towards a local and the Greek towards an international target group, yet the former was apparently not inferior in status to the latter. Rather, the employ of Aramaic situated indigenous cultural codes within a civic and public context.836 A similar distributional pattern of languages and different communicative contexts emerges from the semantic fields covered by loanwords. The about 830 This phrase is already attested in the ninth-century Gozan inscription (kai 309: 7) and can also be found in Nabataean and Hatran texts. It seems to have been borrowed into Greek and Latin, where it survived for a long time in the emperor cult and in Christian votive phraseology, cf. Gzella 2005c: 448–449. 831 Cf. kai 215: 10–11.19; 216: 4; 219: 4; 226. 832 It also occurs in the Aramaic part of the bilingual pat 0317: 2, but the corresponding Greek text has unfortunately been lost. Cf. Andrade 2013: 331–333. 833 The concrete social underpinnings of such a tribal organization at Palmyra and their history remain unclear, though. 834 Note, e.g., that the Aramaic version of pat 0279 explicitly refers to tgrʾ bny šyrtʾ /taggārē ḇanē šīrtā/ ‘caravan merchants’ and not simply to ἔνποροι ‘merchants’ as the Greek. 835 The Greek rendering of the Aramaic phrase pn1 dy mtqrʾ pn2 ‘pn1 who is also called pn2’, that is, pn1 τὸν καί pn2, recalls Acts 13:9. 836 See also Andrade 2013: 187–204.

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seventy-five Greek lexemes relate to Roman offices, Hellenistic epithets (though some of them have been translated into Aramaic, such as nhyrʾ /nahīrā/ ‘shining’ for clarissimus or λαμπρότατος, indicating senatorial dignity), and architectural terms,837 whereas the vocabulary employed for trade, economy, and law is generally Aramaic (and often reflects inherited Achaemenid usage)838 and, at times, Arabic. Religious terminology features a couple of Mesopotamian elements, but these may have entered Aramaic in an earlier stage, just as the Iranian borrowings; the pantheon itself combines Mesopo­ tamian, Syrian, Canaanite, and Arabian influences.839 Otherwise, the Aramaic and Greek texts are grammatically correct and idiomatic (as it emerges, for example, from participle constructions in the Greek and subordinating clauses in the Aramaic) with but little mutual interference, in contradistinction to many other Greek inscriptions from Syria. This presupposes at least some formal education in both languages, but, unfortunately, the corresponding infrastructural framework remains totally unknown.840 Moreover, one wonders whether it is relevant that no female dedicators of Palmyrene bilingual epigraphs are known, whereas in twenty-seven cases, women commissioned monolingual Aramaic dedicatory or funerary inscriptions. Women, though legally independent (as some cession texts show), may thus have been more likely to use Aramaic only, which could indicate that it served as the normal language in the domestic sphere. Nonetheless, it should be clear by now that Aramaic was not simply a “low variety” used by the common people but also acted as a code of prestige among the local elite.841 Indeed, it was strong enough a symbol of cultural loyalty to be widely employed at least as a brief tag in epigraphs by natives of Palmyra living far abroad. 5.4.2 Edessa and the Osrhoene: Old Syriac Contrary to Nabataean and especially Palmyrene Aramaic inscriptions, which have been discovered across an extensive area, the emerging Aramaic chancellery language of Edessa (modern Urfa, called Orhay by its ancient inhabitants) remained a local phenomenon in pre-Christian times and is hitherto only 837 See Brock 2005 and Gzella 2005c: 450 and 454. Purely Aramaic titles, conversely, are often confined to local titles, such as rb ḥylʾ /raḇ ḥaylā/ for στρατηλάτης ‘commander’. 838 Examples include ʾgr ‘to hire’, gby ‘to levy taxes’, ḥwb ‘to be liable’, ṭʿn ‘to load’, mks ‘tax’, mnpq ‘export’, npqh ‘cost’, and especially šlyṭ ‘having legal authority’. Cf. Gzella 2005c: 451–452 and 2006a: 29–30. 839 Cf. Gzella 2006a: 31–32. 840 See also Taylor 2002: 318. 841 As has been argued by Gzella 2005c and 2006a; cf. now Andrade 2013: 177–187.

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attested, at least as far as texts found in situ are concerned, in the Osrhoene.842 This region in North Syria borders on the Commagene in Asia Minor in the west and on Mesopotamia in the east. Edessa’s foundation as a Seleucid colony no doubt introduced a noteworthy presence of Greek culture, which remains visible in mosaics depicting mythological scenes,843 and, in all likelihood, the Greek koiné as the official idiom of the place. Very little of certainty can be said about the area in prior times, except that, like the rest of Syria, it seems to have long been Aramaic-speaking.844 When the local dynasty of the Abgarids (after the recurrent Arabian name Abgar among the kings of Edessa) rose to power, the Osrhoene gained its independence. The king lists in later chronicles suggest that this occurred around the middle of the second century b.c.e.; the year 132 b.c.e. is now widely accepted as the beginning of Abgarid rule.845 As a corollary, the local dialect of Aramaic, commonly termed “Old Syriac,” was eventually promoted to a regional chancellery language with its own variety of the Aramaic script and a reasonable degree of standardization.846 The first dated inscription was produced in the year 6 c.e.,847 but the degree of homogeneity in letter forms and spelling in texts discovered throughout the region from that moment onwards indicates that orthographic standards must have been established some time before.848 While the early history of Edessa and hence the emergence of its chancellery language are shrouded in darkness, the relatively lower degree of correspondence with Achaemenid Official Aramaic vis-à-vis Palmyrene and 842 It has recently, though unconvincingly, been claimed again that the so-called “Letter of Mara bar Serapion,” which contains the exhortation of a father to his son to acquire Greek wisdom instead of fleeting worldly goods and has been preserved in a later manuscript, originates from first-century c.e. Commagene. If that were true, the Letter would be the earliest evidence for literary Syriac outside the vicinity of Edessa. Unfortunately, however, there is not a single valid argument in favour of this hypothesis, whereas both specific linguistic and wider cultural-historical considerations strongly support the Osrhoene in the third or fourth century c.e. as the original milieu of the text, see Gzella Forthc.(a). 843 Balty – Briquel-Chatonnet 2000; add now also Healey 2006; Desreumaux 2007. 844 For the Roman period, by contrast, see now Gnoli 2000, Ross 2001, and the survey in Healey 2009a: 13–16. Further bibliography can be retrieved from Millar 1993: 553–562. 845 See Luther 1999; Van Rompay 1999. 846 There is some evidence that a formal script, the ancestor of Estrangela (from which the Nestorian variant branched off after about 600 c.e.), coexisted with more cursive predecessors of the later Serṭa script already at the time of the earliest surviving inscriptions from Edessa, cf. Healey 2000. 847 Drijvers – Healey 1999: 140–144. 848 Beyer 1966: 245–246; 1984: 46; 1986: 31; Gzella 2006a: 32–33 with n. 60.

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particularly Nabataean Aramaic (as it appears from but occasional instances of degeminating spelling of long consonants with n) does not point to an unbroken gradual transformation of the Persian official idiom into a local variety under the influence of a vernacular. Rather, Greek seems to have followed Achaemenid Official Aramaic as an administrative language for a certain period, until the Edessan dialect was upgraded by the new rulers to a written language, which was then used consistently for local representation and administration.849 This Aramaic idiom is attested in about one-hundred brief inscriptions, mostly funerary in nature and dated between 6 and 252 c.e. (with a peak in the latter half of the second and the former half the third century), from different parts of the Osrhoene. Three legal texts on parchment in the same language and script were discovered at Dura Europos (dated to the years 240–243 c.e.); they are steeped in Achaemenid legalese and thereby demonstrate the survival of the Achaemenid Official Aramaic legal tradition, as in North Arabian and Palmyra.850 They have all been edited together with an extensive introduction and commentary as well as a glossary by Drijvers – Healey 1999851; Healey 2009a: 223–275 has a representative selection of almost twenty texts with useful notes. A grammatical précis in addition to Drijvers – Healey 1999: 21–34 can be found in Gzella 2011c: 604–606. A few shared lexical isoglosses between Syriac and the phonetic Greek transcription of two unwritten Gnostic sayings cited in Irenaeus’ Adversus haereses (I:21:3, ca. 180–192 c.e.)852 also points to the origin of Edessan Aramaic, or Old Syriac, in a vernacular. It is therefore quite plausible to suppose that its emergence as a written language at least partly results from an attempt to purposefully downgrade Greek influence.853 The former presence of Greek can safely be inferred from the Seleucid origin of Edessa and from a number of lexical loans already in the earliest witnesses, but otherwise remains invisible at the linguistic level: all inscriptions are monolingual, in striking contradistinction to the extensive bilingual epigraphic habit at Palmyra, and do not contain Greek expressions or reflect syntactic interference.854 A similar 849 Beyer 1984: 46; 1986: 31. 850 See Healey 2009b. 851 Add now Healey 2006 for a recent mosaic inscription and a few other short inscriptions (see Luther 2009: 11 n. 2 for references). Older bibliography can be found in Beyer 1984: 46 (1986: 31) n. 1. 852 Cf. Beyer 2004: 27, with a reconstruction of the underlying Aramaic. 853 Gzella 2006a: 32–33 and, more explicitly, 2008b: 126–127; Healey 2008: 225. 854 Even the mosaic epigraph Bm1 (Drijvers – Healey 1999: 200–201), although it contains a brief Greek text, is not a bilingual in the strict sense, because the isolated Aramaic words

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anti-Hellenistic sentiment may perhaps lie behind the distinctively prominent Parthian influences in Abgarid iconography.855 None of these texts contains any reference to Jewish or Christian beliefs or practices, so they all seem to relate to the pagan period of Edessa and represent the memorial epigraphy of private religion. With the consolidation of Christianity in the fourth century c.e., however, Syriac spread from Edessa throughout Syria and Mesopotamia and became the main literary language of Aramaic-speaking Christians from that moment onwards (see Section  7.4). Linguistically, this “Classical Syriac” is, by and large, very close to the “Old Syriac” variety of the pagan inscriptions, but it has undergone a considerable influence from the Syriac Bible translations and, in due course, from Greek theological works. There are also a few significant differences, however.856 Excepting later diacritic points for distinguishing between the letters d and r as well as increasing plene writings over time (notably with w as a vowel letter for short /o/), the main divergence in spelling is the use of the grapheme š for etymological */ś/ in Old Syriac (as in šm for what was presumably already pronounced /sām/ ‘he put’) instead of later s (as in sm).857 A clear morphological peculiarity has greater bearing on classification: the earliest Syriac inscriptions still preserve the older preformative /y-/ in thirdperson forms of the “imperfect,” whereas Classical Syriac consistently has /n-/. The shift of /y-/ to /n-/ or /l-/ in these forms counts as one of the most distinctive hallmarks of Eastern Aramaic.858 Yet /n-/ “imperfects” occur already in the Edessan inscriptions dated after about 200 c.e., which suggests that both variants were already in use in pre-Christian Edessa and perhaps distinguished by register or style.859 Together with the masculine plural ending of the emphatic state in /-ē/ as opposed to older /-ayyā/860 and the direct object marker /l-/, both of which are also characteristic features of the Eastern dialect group, as 855 856

857 858 859 860

constitute glosses written vertically besides the main figure, the deified river Euphrates, in the picture itself. See Winkelmann 2007 for an art-historical examination. These have been discussed comprehensively by Beyer 1966; cf. Drijvers – Healey 1999: 21–34. The brief summary in Gzella 2011c: 604–606 emphasizes the similarities between Old Syriac and Hatran Aramaic. See Drijvers – Healey 1999: 22–24. Cf. Gzella 2008a: 103 and Section 5.5.1 below. So Healey 2008. The evidence can be found in Drijvers – Healey 1999: 26. Masculine plural forms in the emphatic state are very rare in the about one-hundred brief inscriptions from the pre-Christian period, but cf., e.g., ʾlhʾ ‘the gods’ (Bs2: 5, Drijvers – Healey 1999: 193) or btʾ ‘the buildings’ (P3: 17.19, ibid. 244) as well as yrḥʾ ‘the months’ (P3: 17.18).

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well as the relative marker /d(a)-/ (from older /dī/),861 demonstrative pronouns expanded by /hā-/,862 and a few lexical by-forms like zdq ‘just’,863 this aligns Old Syriac with contemporaneous texts from Assur and Hatra (which have an “imperfect” preformative /l-/, whence /n-/ seems to originate; see Section 5.5.3 below) as early forms of Eastern Aramaic. They, as well as isolated Aramaic material from Hellenistic and Roman Babylonia (Section 5.5.2), can all be seen as distinct manifestations of an Old Eastern Aramaic branch, which then continued in the form of Classical Syriac on the one hand and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic as well as Mandaic on the other (see the more extensive discussion in Section 7.1.1).864 The advent of Christianity and the standardization of Classical Syriac also coincide with a noteworthy spread of this language and its emerging literary tradition to the west. While Old Syriac inscriptions up to the third century c.e. have only been discovered to the east of the river Euphrates,865 Classical Syriac ones (now often relating to building activities instead of funerary contexts) begin to appear in the western parts of the region from the late fourth century, and authors of Syriac theological works from the fifth.866 One can also assign the earliest known literary compositions in Syriac, such as the writings of Bardaiṣan and the Hymn of the Pearl, to the second and third centuries c.e., but they were at first a local phenomenon. The westward advance of Syriac in the early Christian period then resulted in an increase of demonstrable contact with Greek, the language that dominated administration, culture, and religion west of the Ḥauran. At least bishop Rabbula of Edessa (who died in 436 c.e.) is known to have written in both idioms. Two instances of linguistic convergence in particular suggest that exposure to koiné Greek and, consequently, Syriac-Greek bilingualism must have increased quickly in parts of Syria after or perhaps during the first three centuries c.e.: in addition to Greek lexemes, Classical Syriac shows a growing use of the particles dēn, which mainly acts as a connector (‘and’, ‘so’), and gēr, which 861 Originally an Eastern feature that subsequently spread further, see Cook 1992: 9 and Beyer 1984: 548–549. 862 Cf. Nebe 2006. 863 Attested in the noun zdqʾ ‘right’ in P3: iii.8, cf. Drijvers – Healey 1999: 243–244. 864 Similarly Beyer 1984: 45–48 and 1986: 30–34. 865 Three short graffiti from Krefeld in Germany (Luther 2009), though difficult to date, may form an exception and could belong to long-distance merchants from Edessa. 866 Brock 1994: 151–152 and 2009: 291; cf. Healey 2014: 400. See Littmann 1934 for a number of relevant Syriac inscriptions. There is no comprehensive corpus yet, but further bibliography on the material between the fourth and the seventh centuries can be found in Brock 2009: 291 n. 10.

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marks causal connections (‘for’). Neither is yet attested in Old Syriac, but both soon became omnipresent already in the earliest pieces of Classical Syriac prose literature (such as the Book of the Laws of Countries) and are also used in later Syriac inscriptions.867 As has long been known, these particles are native words, the former deriving from the clause-initial conjunction */ʾeday(n)/ ‘then, afterwards’ (already frequently attested in older Aramaic),868 the latter presumably from a less-well attested adverb */ġayr/ ‘indeed’ (with a possible cognate in Arabic).869 Their function and, with the aphaeresis of the first syllable of */ʾedayn/, even their form, however, has been assimilated to the similar but etymologically different Greek particles δέ and γάρ. In this respect, it is especially significant that the Syriac lexemes also replicate the word-order pattern of their Greek counterparts and do not, as */ʾedayn/ originally did, occur in the first position of the clause but in the second slot after the first nucleus (“Wackernagel’s Law”). Research into the workings of linguistic contact has revealed that replication of function words generally results from an extensive active use of the donor language by some speakers, so these innovations stand at the beginning of a more general “symbiosis of Greek and Syriac” in the fifth to seventh centuries c.e. and a reasonably widespread knowledge of both languages among the authors of theological works.870 The deliberate suppression of Greek in the public sphere in the post-Seleucid Osrhoene thus gave way to what seems to be an extensive Syriac-Greek biculturalism that soon grew with the spread of Christianity. Other phenomena of syntactic influence and convergence, which still have to be investigated thoroughly, will no doubt cast further light on the language situation of this region in the period under review here. 5.4.3 Dura Europos In Dura Europos, a Macedonian fortress on the Middle Euphrates, the Greek koiné acted as the official language during the earlier Parthian period and thus dominates the epigraphic record in bureaucracy and religion until the city was finally deserted in the 380s.871 Latin administrative documents and graffiti only relate to Roman legionaries, among them perhaps some members of the local population. Yet the surrounding Aramaic varieties of Syria and 867 On the latter, cf., for instance, Pognon 1907, nos. 52:2; 74,2. 868 E.g., tad B2.8:4; Daniel 2:17.48; 3:26; 6:4.5.6; Ezra 5:5. Cf. Gzella 2004: 116. 869 Brockelmann 21928: 151 and 114, also accepted by Sokoloff in his English edition, p. 230. 870 Cf. succinctly Brock 2009: 296–297 and see also Section 7.4.2. 871 General summaries with much further bibliography on the history can now be found in Kaizer 2009 and Andrade 2013: 211–241.

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Mesopotamia all occur in a handful of inscriptions discovered on the spot; they were presumably authored by travellers or resident aliens: in the first place Palmyrene Aramaic, due to the presence of a group of Palmyrene expatriates in Dura who stuck to their cultural and religious traditions,872 but also small quantities of Hatran Aramaic, Syriac, and one Jewish Babylonian contract.873 The twenty-five building inscriptions and graffiti from the local synagogue presumably reflect a Jewish Palestinian variety with several instances of phonetic sub-standard spelling.874 This evidence points to regular contacts between Dura Europos, Syria, and even Palestine. A few graffiti in Safaitic, an Ancient North Arabian language, and a Hebrew liturgical text on parchment were also found and add to the cosmopolitan character of the place, despite its inconspicuous architecture. Moreover, many of the names of the inhabitants that occur in the Greek and Latin parchments and papyri as well as in inscriptions with graffiti are of Aramaic or Arabic origin.875 They may further support the hypothesis of an Aramaean-Arabian symbiosis in several parts of the Syrian Desert. Upon a closer look, the reflexes of certain general phonetic developments in Aramaic (see Section 5.1.1 above and, more generally, 1.2.3) in the Greek transcriptions of several of these names suggest that Aramaic was spoken at least by parts of the population, whether they were natives, visitors from neighbouring villages, or, above all in the case of the Palmyreneans, resident aliens. The limitations of the onomastic material preclude any specific association with the known Aramaic languages of this period, since no distinctive Eastern or Western Aramaic features appear. However, if one focuses on unambiguously Aramaic names with transparent etymology and accounts for the influence of gutturals or syllabic consonants on the spelling, the workings of some systematic changes that apply to the whole of spoken Aramaic in this period can be observed. First, the inconsistent rendering of short unstressed vowels in etymological consonant clusters and in open syllables points to the anaptyxis of the former and reduction and subsequent loss of the latter: Αβεδ- or Αβιδ- for */ʿabd/ > 872 See Dirven 1999. 873 Beyer 1984: 48; 1986: 33–34. The majority of these Aramaic texts has been assembled by Bertolino 2004; for the Jewish Babylonian legal document from ca. 200 c.e. (pDura 151), see Milik 1968 and Yardeni 2000: 187. 874 Cf. Beyer 1984: 69; 1986: 53 (who classifies them as “Middle Eastern Jordanian” or “Middle Judaean”). However, it is not exactly easy to identify unambiguous linguistic features that point to a Palestinian origin, not least due to palaeographic difficulties. 875 See Grassi 2012 for an overview of the onomastic material, though with little to no further analysis. For a preliminary evaluation in terms of linguistic and cultural history as well as several additions and corrections, cf. Gzella Forthc.(d).

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/ʿḇeḏ/ ‘servant’ and similarly Ζαβαδ- and Ζεβεδ- for */zabd/ > /zḇeḏ/ ‘gift’; the by-forms Βαρναβους and Βαρνεβους of Βαρναβας; and presumably Σ(ε)ιλας for the original passive particle */šaʾīl/ ‘requested’.876 Spirantization of the plosive stops (which subsequently gave rise to fricative allophones in post-vocalic position), moreover, surfaces in Βαρχαλβ(ας) and Barchalbas for /Bar-kalbā/ ‘Son of Kalbā’ and Μαλχος for /malk/ ‘King’, since they are spelled with χ and not with κ. Finally, some sporadic changes like lowering of short /a/ to /o/, which occurs a few times before /m/, as in -σομας instead of -σαμας in Μαχωσομας as well as in the variation between Βαρβεσαμην and Βαρβεσουμην or Mambogaeus and Mombogaeus respectively, could result from regional dialectal speech or allophonic variation that has left no regular traces in the more standardized pronunciation that governs later vocalization traditions such as the liturgical recitation of Syriac.877 Despite these bits and pieces of evidence, one cannot say how widespread the use of Aramaic as a vernacular was at Dura Europos, which dialect (if any) the natives may have used, and to which extent Greek dominated everyday communication besides the official registers of administrative and cultic purposes. There is, in any case, no clear-cut association of Greek with the upper and Aramaic or Arabic with the lower classes: Greek and Semitic names interchange over generations within the same family, and parents with Greek names at times gave their children Aramaic or Arabic ones, as with Nabusams, son of Konon, grandson of Abissay878; double names also occur.879 This contradicts the hypothesis of a steadily increasing assimilation to Hellenistic culture over time.880 More significantly, people with Semitic names could be members of the local elite, such as the royal judge Adday.881 This evidence, restricted though it appears, does certainly not support the hypothesis of a diglossia situation with Greek as the upper class code, even if the actual language situation in Dura Europos remains elusive.

876 Differently Beyer 1984: 131, who views this as an older shortened by-form. 877 Cf. Brockelmann 1908: §75 for a few parallels mostly from Arabic vernaculars. Note also šwmyh /šomayyā/ ‘heaven’ with /o/ before /m/ in the sub-standard spelling of some later Jewish Palestinian inscriptions (Beyer 1984: 364, yyen 3, l. 7; 367, yyox 1, l. 5), Christian Palestinian, and Mandaic (cf. Beyer 1984: 135 n. 3). 878 Welles – Fink – Gilliam 1959, no. 31. 879 Welles – Fink – Gilliam 1959, no. 19. 880 So, too, Kennedy 1999: 103 on a comparable case from Gerasa. 881 Welles – Fink – Gilliam 1959, no. 18: 31.34; no. 19: 18.

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Eastern Mesopotamia

A combination of onomastic data and the specific modalities of linguistic contact with Akkadian indicates that Aramaic permeated large parts of Mesopotamian society already in the Neo-Assyrian period and increasingly grew in imperial administration from the eighth century b.c.e. onwards (see Section 3.2.1). Textual evidence from the northern part of Mesopotamia stops for several centuries with the beginning of Neo-Babylonian rule, when cuneiform culture, too, receded to its homeland Babylon in the south of the region. However, the appearance of native dialects of Aramaic in writing during the first century b.c.e. in Assur, the former religious centre of the Neo-Assyrian empire, and its surroundings implies that Aramaic continued to be spoken there despite the gap in the epigraphic record. The mark of common developments across the Aramaic speech area is also a strong indication of linguistic continuity. Eastern Aramaic in Mesopotamia (Beyer’s “Old Eastern Aramaic”)882 thus evolved as a vernacular for centuries, and its characteristic traits diffused over time between Hatra and Assur in the northwest of the region and Babylonia in the southeast. There it first appears as an identifiable variety that is distinct from other known forms of the language. The Aramaic dialect used in Edessa further to the northwest bears a close linguistic resemblance without being fully identical (see Section 5.4.2 above and Section 7.4); some Eastern features even reached Palmyra in the Syrian Desert (Section 5.4.1 above). Obviously, the true linguistic geography cannot be determined with precision, because the evidence is confined to reflexes of dialectal peculiarities in the written material. Hence, much of the dialectal micro-variation that must have existed, as it still does in the modern North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic languages, remains invisible (see also Section 7.1.2). Similar to Edessa and Palmyra, such local forms of Aramaic turned into official idioms with their own script in Hatra, Assur, and their vicinity during the late Hellenistic period, when Seleucid control waned. They were subsequently used for public and private representation and appear in epigraphic material since early Roman rule. Others may also have existed but are not directly attested; a case in point is the variety possibly connected to the peculiar script employed in the upper epigraph of what seems to be the Jerusalem tomb of Queen Helena of Adiabene (a region now situated in Iraqi Kurdistan) from about 50 c.e.883 In all likelihood, then, the highly complex Aramaic dialect 882 Beyer 1984: 45–48 and 1986: 30–34. 883 See Beyer 2004: 28. The letter forms resemble the Syriac and Palmyrenean script but are not identical to either, hence his suggestion that the Parthian client kingdom Adiabene

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landscape of Southern Mesopotamia in Late Antiquity has predecessors in the Greco-Roman period. 5.5.1 Early Forms of Eastern Aramaic The visibility of dialect traits that eventually became characteristic of Eastern Aramaic increases over time in the written material. Only in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods, however, did they crystallize into a dialect cluster that can be distinguished from both the Achaemenid Official Aramaic standard language, which had previously eclipsed a good deal of local variation, and other, Western, regional forms. Their full gamut can subsequently be observed in the literary corpora of Aramaic that originated in Eastern Syria and Mesopotamia during Late Antiquity (see Chapter 7), just as Western Aramaic as a coherent branch appears in the literary traditions of Byzantine Palestine (Chapter 6). Since one swallow does not make a summer, the sporadic occurrence of isolated features that later constitute hallmarks of Eastern Aramaic in earlier material does not by itself prove an Eastern affiliation of a particular text. Rather, it is their co-occurrence and pervasive distribution that makes it possible to classify a linguistic variety as Eastern Aramaic. One can basically identify a handful of such morphological, morpho-syntactic, and lexical traits in the material discussed here.884 At least some of them have an earlier prehistory, but, as has been observed, it is unclear when and where exactly they became regular, diagnostic, features that set apart Eastern from Western Aramaic. The origins of Eastern Aramaic are thus lost in the mist of history, and, given the amount and nature of the evidence, any attempt at reconstructing “Proto Eastern Aramaic” in a genealogical framework is obviously a dead end. The first cluster of several typical Eastern Aramaic traits appears in the Uruk incantation tablet from Hellenistic Babylonia. The most distinctive peculiarity of Eastern Aramaic in general, regularly attested already in its earliest certain manifestations, is the ending /-ē/ (presumably pronounced as an open [ɛ̄])885 instead of earlier common Aramaic /-ayyā/ of the emphatic, or determined, state of masculine plural nouns. It has

with its capital Erbil had its own written language. Since the inscription only contains the indigenous name (ṣdn or ṣrn) and the title mlktʾ ‘the queen’ (text and further bibliography in Beyer 1984: 342–343), no special linguistic features can be identified. Cf. Goodblatt 2012: 269–270 on the historical background. 884 See also Gzella 2008a: 100–105 and, more generally, Beyer 1984: 98. 885 This can be deduced indirectly from its preservation in the West Syrian pronunciation tradition (see Section 7.4.1), where an original closed [ē] shifted to [ī].

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been generalized in the Uruk incantation text (see Section 5.5.2 below) and, judging from the spelling -ʾ (as opposed to -yʾ), in the somewhat later Aramaic inscriptions from Hatra and Assur (Section 5.5.3 below) as well as in Edessan Aramaic (Section  5.4.2 above), and at least partly in Palmyrene Aramaic (Section 5.4.1). This ending thus constitutes a clear Eastern Aramaic innovation, but since /-ē/ cannot be deduced from /-ayyā/ on grounds of known sound changes (for long word-medial glides like /-yy-/ do not monophthongize in Aramaic), it is commonly assumed to be a loan from the Assyrian variety of Akkadian.886 If that proves true, it would presumably have been borrowed during a much earlier stage of active Aramaic-Akkadian bilingualism (see Section 3.1.3). It first occurs in Aramaic place names in cuneiform texts from the Neo-Assyrian period, such as Ti-le-e /tellē/ ‘the tells’,887 and may have been further extended via gentilics and other nisbe forms like /yahūdāyē/ ‘the Judaeans’ (for euphonic reasons instead of regular, but hitherto unattested, **/yahūdāyayyā/).888 Yet one cannot pinpoint the moment when this new form was generalized as a normal plural ending in some Aramaic varieties.889 The two instances of ʿmmʾ ‘the peoples’ in the Aḥiqar proverbs (tad C1.1:98.189) could provide early evidence for such dialectal by-forms on nouns other than toponyms and gentilics but, unfortunately, they can also be explained differently (see Section 3.4). By the Hellenistic period, at any rate, /-ē/ seems to have become the pervasive emphatic-state ending for masculine plural nouns in Aramaic in Mesopotamia. The second important instance of later morphological variation that eventually turned into a distinctively Eastern Aramaic trait is the replacement of the common Aramaic third-person “imperfect” preformative /y-/ by /l-/ (in Babylonia and in Eastern Mesopotamia) or /n-/ (in Syriac after about 200 c.e.). In all likelihood, this form has been generalized from the “asseverative” particle /la-/ used in conjunction with the “short imperfect” and subsequent loss of the original preformative /y-/ in non-initial position.890 Its supposed ancestor occurs in the ninth-century b.c.e. inscription from Gozan (see Section 2.2.1) but is strictly confined to non-negated volitives there. As “imperfect”-preformatives other than /y-/ remain practically invisible for many centuries

886 887 888 889 890

So, e.g., by Rosenthal 1939: 173–174, Kaufman 1974: 127–128; Beyer 2004: 50. Beyer 2004: 50 has many examples. Kaufman 1974: 127–128. Cf. Beyer 1984: 98. So, among others, Kaufman 1974: 124–126; Beyer 1984: 98. Cf. Gzella 2008a: 103 for further bibliography.

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afterwards,891 the extension of /l-/ to all “imperfect” forms cannot be dated and is likely to have first taken place in an unwritten vernacular. Due to the differences in function and distribution as opposed to all the later attestations, the /l-/ preformative in the Gozan inscription on its own does not necessarily align the language represented in this text with Eastern Aramaic as it appears in the later witnesses. Instead, the distinctive innovation reflected in genuinely Eastern Aramaic material, where this feature also co-occurs with the emphaticstate ending /-ē/, is, again, the generalization of an erstwhile marginal by-form. The relation between the /l-/ and /n-/ preformatives is not entirely clear, but one could assume that the latter results from a subsequent shift of /l-/ to /n-/ in the north-western part of the Eastern Aramaic speech area. (Dialect diversity within Eastern Aramaic later also surfaces in isoglosses between the southeastern varieties Jewish Babylonian and Mandaic on the one hand and north-western Syriac on the other, see Section  7.1.1.) Such a shift can be explained on phonetic grounds, since both are syllabic consonants, and may have been triggered by dissimilation before roots containing an /l/.892 As a result, the possibly dialectal by-form /n-/ eventually replaced older /y-/ in Edessan Aramaic also in the written language. The Uruk-text may contain the preformative /l-/, but neither of the two possible attestations is certain. A third innovation in the Eastern Aramaic dialects from Mesopotamia are third-person masculine singular possessive suffixes with vocalic bases in /-ayhī/ ‘his’ vis-à-vis common Aramaic /-awhī/ (itself being a secondary development from older Semitic /-ayhū/, see Section 1.2.1). They seems to occur first in the cuneiform incantation text from Uruk, then in Aramaic inscriptions from Hatra, Assur, and, occasionally, Palmyra. Since /-ayhī/ corresponds to the other suffixes in /-ay-/ with vocalic bases (such as the feminine /-ayhā/ ‘her’), it is possible that this change evolved independently in different Aramaic varieties due to paradigm pressure, but the distributional pattern seems to mark it as another specifically Eastern Aramaic feature. 891 Excepting the disambiguating use of /l-/ with the root hwī in Biblical and Hasmonaean Aramaic in order to avoid confusion with the Jewish tetragram (see Section 4.4.2), but these are quite special cases. 892 As has already been suggested by Bauer 1915: 563. Beyer 1984: 98, too, assumes that /n-/ derives from /l-/. For other examples illustrating the same shift, especially in initial position, cf. Lipiński 22001: §17.4. Deducing /l-/ from /n-/ (so Wajsberg 2011, assuming that the latter was extended from the first person plural), by contrast, would militate against the distribution of the evidence, because the distinctive Eastern Aramaic innovations seem to have spread westwards from Babylonia, and /l-/ is consistently attested in the earliest texts from this region.

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Moreover, the direct object marker l-, which is presumably identical to the preposition indicating the indirect object, also distinguishes later Eastern from Western Aramaic, since the latter uses (ʾ)yt instead. However, it has less diagnostic weight for positively defining the Eastern group than the two core features of morphology previously discussed: the extension of an indirect to a direct object marker is typologically common (differential direct object marking normally targets animate and/or definite objects, and the prototypical indirect object is animate as well), and l- also occurs in Aramaic varieties that exhibit no affinity with Eastern dialects, notably Achaemenid Official Aramaic (see Section 4.1.2). Hence, while (ʾ)yt is distinctively Western Aramaic, l- on its own cannot prove an Eastern provenance. The lexicon of the Aramaic languages of this period, too, contains Eastern by-forms of some common Aramaic words, in particular the root zdq ‘to be just’ as opposed to common Semitic ṣdq in Hatra, Assur, Edessa, and Palmyra893 as well as /ṭoll/ ‘shadow’ instead of /ṭell/ at least in Hatra and the Jewish Babylonian papyrus from Dura Europos.894 All these observations indicate that Babylonia was a centre of linguistic innovation, from which the distinctive hallmarks of Eastern Aramaic then spread westwards. 5.5.2 Babylonia Epigraphs on cuneiform tablets show that Aramaic functioned uninterruptedly as an administrative language in Babylonia throughout the Achaemenid into the Seleucid period, and presumably replaced Akkadian as a vernacular some time in the fifth or fourth century b.c.e. (see Section  3.2.2). Nonetheless, regional peculiarities emerge but gradually in the textual record, for the extremely brief and formulaic Aramaic notes that accompany cuneiform administrative documents in Akkadian defy a more precise linguistic classification. There is, for instance, no trace yet of the masculine plural emphatic state in /-ē/ (as opposed to older /-ayyā/), although the latter subsequently became the universal form in all Aramaic varieties from Babylonia.895 As the conservative spelling of the relative marker /dī/ as zy 893 See Beyer 1984: 674. 894 Beyer 1984: 590. In consonantal writing, the difference only surfaces in spellings that employ vowel letters also for short vocalic phonemes (ṭwl in H173:3 and pDura 151:17), whereas defective ṭl remains of course indistinct. 895 Cf. ngryʾ /naggārayyā/ ‘the carpenters’ in cbm 5503, a tablet from Achaemenid Babylonia dated to the fifth year of Darius II. (also edited by Delaporte 1912: 69–70 and Blasberg 1997: 246–247), even if this may simply be a conservatism of the written language.

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(instead of phonetic dy) as late as in Hellenistic times suggests,896 these epigraphs rather seem to continue time-honoured bureaucratic modalities and reflect, just like their Akkadian counterparts,897 a firm scribal training, but it is difficult to go beyond such general conclusions on the basis of the available material. A less formalized and linguistically more revealing use of Aramaic, however, comes to light with two incantation formulae on a cuneiform tablet from Uruk (ao 6489). The text, consisting of forty-three lines, has been transcribed into normalized Aramaic by Beyer 2004: 25–27, which can serve as a convenient and reliable point of departure898; a recent edition of the tablet itself is available in Müller-Kessler 2002a: 195–201.899 The employ of cuneiform writing for Aramaic is particularly noteworthy, because it does not correspond to the firmly established connection between Aramaic and the alphabetic script on the one hand and between Akkadian and syllabic cuneiform on the other; perhaps it was an experiment for didactic purposes in a bilingual scribal school.900 The absence of a tradition of writing Aramaic in cuneiform, in turn, implies that the spelling is presumably phonetic (despite its internal orthographic consistency) and thus by and large represents the local pronunciation at the time in which it was composed. Hence the text appears to have been written down as it was dictated, which makes it a very valuable source of linguistic information. Palaeographic criteria point to a date between 500 and 150 b.c.e.,901 but since the language exhibits already the shift of /e/ to /a/ before root-final /r/ (for instance, a-ma-ár in lines 18 and 43 for the basic-stem participle /ʾāmar/ ‘speaking’ instead of older /ʾāmer/), which is otherwise unattested 896 See, e.g., the tablet bm 78707, dated to the ninth year of Alexander (text in Blasberg 1997: 293–294). 897 So Blasberg 1997: 53. 898 Further bibliography, including editions of the cuneiform tablets, are given there and in Beyer 1984: 45 (1986: 31). 899 Her translation and interpretation of the Aramaic should be supplemented by Beyer’s, however. 900 This would make it a counterpart to a tablet from the Seleucid or Arsacid period that seems to contain the transcription of a Babylonian incantation in Greek letters, see Maul 1991. 901 The letter by J.J. van Dijk from 1969, to which Beyer 1984: 45 n. 4 (1986: 31 n. 33) refers, is now in the possession of the present writer. Van Dijk concludes, on the basis of a palaeographic comparison with dated tablets in the cursive type of cuneiform, that “die Sicherheit ist gross genug um zu sagen, dass eine frühe Ansetzung höchst unwahrscheinlich ist” and “dass wir 130 se [=180 b.c.e.] als Terminus post quem anzusetzen haben.” This matches the linguistic evidence.

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before the third century b.c.e., it seems to have been composed after about 200 b.c.e.902 Two distinctive traits of Eastern Aramaic can be securely identified in this text: the regular use of the emphatic masculine plural ending /-ē/ in lines 11–13 as well as 36–38903 and apparently the first attestations of the secondary byform of the third-person masculine singular possessive suffix /-ayhī/ (spelled -a-a-ʾi-i) ‘his’ instead of older /-awhī/ in lines 13, 30, 31, and 38904; perhaps also the third-person “imperfect” preformative /l-/ instead of /y-/ in lines 34 and 35,905 but the context of either passage is broken. Some controversial readings may yield other dialect features, but their existence cannot be taken for granted and therefore should not enter the discussion about the linguistic classification. Conversely, several common phonetic developments in later Aramaic are not yet attested here: unstressed short word-internal and long word-final vowels are preserved, and plosive stops in weak articulation were not spirantized (otherwise /ḵ/ would have been written with ḫ in the cuneiform script). The tablet contains guidelines for an exorcist, so if it is not simply a scribal exercise, it may document the employ of Aramaic in private ritual practice. The corresponding linguistic register differs from the more conservative variety used for epigraphs in administrative documents, in which no such obvious dialectal traits occur; this would agree with the non-official character of the text. A later Eastern Aramaic witness from the same region contains what turns out to be an early specimen of Jewish Babylonian: the fragmentary papyrus contract pDura 151 (Milik 1968; Yardeni 2000: 187), usually dated to about 200 c.e., was discovered at Dura Europos (see Section 5.4.3 above), but its combination of square script and the regular Eastern Aramaic “imperfect” preformative /l-/, which occurs in the verbs lypwq wlyʿwl for /leppoq w-leʿʿol/ ‘may he go out and enter’ (line 18), are indicative of a local Jewish variety of Aramaic and thus an early ancestor of the language that is subsequently attested in literary texts from Babylonia.906 Moreover, the form mṭwl /meṭṭol/ ‘because’ (line 17) is an Eastern lexical feature. Unfortunately, only individual phrases in a few lines are preserved well enough to be translated satisfactorily. The two diagnostic traits that can be identified with confidence, however, have parallels in numerous Jewish magic bowls and amulets as well as in the Babylonian Talmud in 902 903 904 905 906

Beyer 1984: 107–108 and 2004: 25. Examples have also been cited by Garr 2008: 175. Beyer 1984: 151. Beyer 1984: 110. As already stated by Milik 1968: 100; cf. Beyer 1984: 48 and 1986: 33.

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the Sassanian period and thus support a classification of the language of this contract as a form Jewish Babylonian. Not more than a few small bits and pieces of evidence have thus survived of Aramaic in Babylonia before the appearance of the later literary traditions of the Jews and Mandaeans (see Chapter 7). These scraps nonetheless show that Aramaic, though long eclipsed by a conservative writing tradition, continued to evolve in the region, and they allow occasional glimpses into the dialect background against which Jewish Babylonian and Mandaic eventually took on their shape. This also indicates that a written tradition of Aramaic outside official administration was gradually appearing. 5.5.3 Assur, Hatra, and the Rest of Eastern Mesopotamia The incantation tablet from Uruk that has been surveyed in the preceding Section shows that at least some traits of Eastern Aramaic had crystallized into a recognizable, albeit apparently largely unwritten, regional variety of Aramaic in Babylonia by the Hellenistic period. In a similar fashion as in Edessa, the local dialect was eventually selected as the basis of a written language in Assur, Hatra, and, to a more limited extent, a few other places in Eastern Mesopotamia on both sides of the Upper Tigris including Ṭur ʿAbdin to the northwest (where a modern form of Aramaic survived into the present day). The governing process of standardization was, again, accompanied by the creation of a proper type of the Aramaic script and particular spelling conventions.907 A large measure of internal homogeneity of the material from this area on the one hand and minute differences as opposed to Edessan Aramaic on the other justify its classification as a regional variety in its own right, best termed “Eastern Mesopotamian Aramaic.”908 Instances of variation in the corpus by and large relate to certain spelling conventions, in particular to the rendering of short vowels with matres lectionis.909 It is at present impossible to identify the place of origin of Eastern Mesopotamian scribal traditions, but the ancient city of Assur with its distinguished history in the Neo-Assyrian empire might be a possible candidate. At the time of the earliest textual witnesses, Aramaic will have been spoken throughout the entire region for centuries. Achaemenid Official Aramaic was presumably also known during the Persian empire, but it does not seem to have exercised any major influence on Eastern Mesopotamian besides 907 See Naveh 1972; Bertolino 2008. 908 Following Beyer 1984: 46–47 and 1986: 32–33, also adopted by Gzella 2008b and 2011c. 909 See Gzella 2006a: 32 n. 62 for examples.

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historical “degeminating” spellings in a few high-frequency words.910 Greek influence, on the other hand, is confined to but a handful of loanwords. Hence, this form of Aramaic, like its counterpart in Edessa, reflects specifically local scribal conventions that assert cultural distinctiveness. The decline of Seleucid power at the end of the second century b.c.e. would have created a suitable backdrop against which such a new written language could evolve, even if the specific political circumstances remain unclear.911 Eastern Mesopotamian is attested in some six-hundred mostly brief memorial (often on reliefs and life-size statues, but also in the form of graffiti scratched or written with black or red ink), building, dedicatory, and legal inscriptions dated to the period between 44 b.c.e. and 238 c.e. They have been edited and grammatically described by Beyer 1998 with numerous additions in Beyer 2013b912; unfortunately, this edition only contains very few notes and no detailed bibliographical references, but the full reconstruction of the vocalization for every text provides the essence of a grammatical analysis. A comprehensive philological commentary that caters for the needs of historians and other non-specialists remains an urgent desideratum; seventeen selected texts have received an annotated treatment in Healey 2009a: 276–310 and give a good impression of the corpus.913 Hoftijzer – Jongeling 1995 contain the lexicon of the inscriptions published by then, but since many more have become available with Beyer 1998 and 2013b, the glossaries there also have to be consulted. In addition to the dense but complete grammar section in Beyer 910 Notably ʾntt ‘wife of’ for /ʾattaṯ/ in H35: 3 and H 63: 1. The second-person feminine singular personal pronoun is as yet unattested, so one does not know whether it would also have been written as ʾnt according to Achaemenid practice. “Imperfect” forms of verbs In employ both degeminating (e.g., lnpq for /lappeq/ ‘he enables to go out’) and phonetic (lqr for /leqqar/ ‘he chisels’) spellings. Cf. Beyer 1998: 127 and 139 for the data. The (very limited) evidence for the use of bt ‘daughter of’ in names (so clearly in H36: 4) also suggests that brt merely served as a traditional spelling but was pronounced /baṯ/ (see Beyer 1998: 171). 911 Cf. Gzella 2006a: 32–39. Recent studies on the social and historical context of Hatra and its material culture can now be found in Dirven (ed.) 2013; see also Healey 2009a: 16–18. 912 This is the only complete and adequate presentation of the corpus. Older, preliminary, editions are often marred by so many mistakes in both reading and philological interpretation that they should only be consulted with great caution. Drawings, a selection of plates, and earlier bibliography to each text with photographs can be found in Aggoula 1991 (with many corrections in Sima 1995–1996), but the readings and translations must always be compared with Beyer and cannot be cited independently. 913 That is, H23; H29; H30; H34–35; H39; H74; H79; H107; H139; H232; H272; H281; H342–345; H408. Twenty inscriptions are also included in Donner – Röllig 3–51971–2002 (kai 237– 257), but the readings now have to be checked against Beyer 1998.

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1998, the most salient features have been summarized and placed against the wider background of contemporaneous Aramaic in Gzella 2011c: 604–606. The majority of the Eastern Mesopotamian Aramaic inscriptions come from Hatra, a city situated some 50 kilometres west of Assur. Hatra may have acted as a modest and thus inconspicuous resting place for caravans on their way through the desert or a place of worship for the surrounding nomads during the preceding period, hence no traces of human settlement can be identified before the first century b.c.e. However, it quickly rose to power after it became the capital of a Parthian kingdom in 165 c.e., flourished until its conquest by the Sassanians when a Roman garrison had been installed there, and was subsequently abandoned in 240/241 c.e. This event also put an end to the epigraphic record in the local form of Aramaic. Hatra’s new prosperity, be it due to distance trade or local pilgrimage, made possible a building programme of monumental architecture that was influenced by a combination of Hellenistic and Parthian styles. The second and early third centuries c.e. also form a climax in the production of inscriptions, yet no bilingual epigraphic habit comparable to the situation in Palmyra emerged. As in Edessa, the texts by and large seem to have a decisively private character and reflect personal devotion (many of the statues were set up in the temples) and memoria rather than a public celebration of local notables.914 Like their counterparts from North Arabia, Palmyra, and Edessa, their structure (ṣlmʾ dnh dy /ṣalmā ḏnā d(a)-/ ‘This is the statue of…’ or dkyr /dḵīr/ ‘Remembered be…’)915 and phraseology (including the pervasive expression ʿl ḥyy /ʿal ḥayyay/ ‘for the life of’) basically conform to common West Semitic conventions.916 Eastern Mesopotamian as a language of local law is also attested in a few decrees installed at the city gates and relating to capital punishment for theft (H336 = H343, H344, and the parallel H281 from the temple precinct) as well as the refusal of temple personnel to perform their duties (H342), so Aramaic clearly acted not only as a representational but also as the official idiom in the region. 914 The private character of this memorial culture also appears from the fact that the expression lyqrh ‘to his honour’, which occurs frequently in the inscriptions from Palmyra, is lacking in the Hatran material, as pointed out by Gzella 2006a: 34–35 (cf. also Dirven 2008: 235–237, with references to other opinions). 915 Since Hatran Aramaic seems to have been closer to the vernacular, the vocalization proposed here takes the loss of short unstressed vowels in open syllables into account. It is also reflected in spelling after the end of the second century c.e., see the next paragraph. 916 Gzella 2006a: 37.

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Distinctive innovations in spelling practice, in particular the considerably more advanced (though still inconsistent) use of y and w as matres lectionis for the short vowels /e/ and /o/917 and the greater frequency of phonetic writings with assimilated /-t-/ in t-stem forms,918 reinforce the break of Eastern Mesopotamian scribal practice with the Achaemenid standard and thereby assert its local character. Connections with the broader Aramaic speech area manifest themselves in several common sound changes, some of which can be better observed in Eastern Mesopotamian texts than in Palmyra thanks to their by and large more phonetic and local orthographic conventions. So the tendency to highlight short vowels reveals the disappearance of short unstressed vowels in open syllables after the end of the second century c.e., as a result of which, for instance, qwdm /qoḏām/ ‘before’ was then increasingly replaced by qdm /qḏām/.919 A few instances of -yh instead of -yhy for the third-person masculine singular suffix with vocalic bases (see below) in particular suggest that unstressed word-final /-ī/, and presumably also /-ū/, were lost or at least in the process of erosion; this is further supported by comparative evidence from Palmyra (see Section 5.4.1 above). However, these vowels are often preserved in orthography, presumably also because they graphically distinguished different grammatical forms, such as the third person masculine singular and plural in the “perfect.”920 Since the writing dy for the relative marker alternates with d even in the same texts, */dī/ must have turned into /da-/ (presumably via /dĭ/), as in contemporaneous forms of Aramaic,921 and demonstrative pronouns are likewise expanded by /hā-/.922 All significant common features of Eastern Aramaic from Mesopotamia of this period are also attested: the masculine plural emphatic state in /-ē/; the third-person masculine singular suffix -yhy for /-ēh/ (from older /-ayhī/, with purely historical and thus silent final -y, as elsewhere) when attached to vocalic bases; and the shift of the third-person “imperfect” preformative /y-/ to /l-/. The latter differs from /n-/ (which it nonetheless seems to underlie, see Section 5.4.2 above) in Syriac since 200 c.e., as does the apparently consistent monophthongization of /aw/ and /ay/ to /ō/ and /ē/ respectively and the suffix */-ayhī/ instead of */-awhī/. As later in Mandaic, and perhaps due to Akkadian substrate pronunciation (see Section  7.3.1), /q/ regularly shifts to 917 918 919 920 921 922

Examples in Beyer 1998: 122–125. Beyer 1998: 128. Beyer 1984: 128–136 and 1998: 125–126. The evidence has been surveyed by Beyer 1998: 122–123. See Beyer 1998: 132 and, for the wider context, 1984: 548–549. Beyer 1998: 131–132.

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/k/ before /ṣ/.923 Moreover, the Eastern Aramaic by-forms /ṭol(l)/ ‘shadow, protection’ and zdq ‘just’ also occur,924 as does the Achaemenid Official and Eastern Aramaic object marker l-.925 Since Eastern Mesopotamian is thus evidently affected by common phonetic developments in spoken Aramaic and also has a few characteristic isoglosses in contradistinction to Western Aramaic or Eastern Aramaic dialects from the North-West, one may safely conclude that it reflects a local, spoken variety of Aramaic that subsequently turned into an administrative and representational language. Its speakers, presumably craftsmen and travellers along the caravan routes, were nonetheless in contact with speakers of contemporaneous varieties of Aramaic, otherwise such phonetic innovations could not be explained. The same is true for close parallels in the Aramaic renderings of frequent Hellenistic epithets here and elsewhere in the Roman Near East: compare, for instance, rḥm mth /rāḥem māṯeh/ ‘loving his country’ for φιλόπατρις (H1039:3) with rḥm ʿmh /rāḥem ʿammeh/ ‘loving his people’ in Nabataean coin legends.926 Hatran graffiti on a relief from Palmyra (H411b–f) and Hatran inscriptions at Dura Europos support the presence of Hatran Aramaic elsewhere and thus its interaction with the wider Aramaic dialect landscape (see Section 5.4.3 above). These long-standing contacts corroborated a network of interconnected Aramaic-speaking groups throughout the Hellenistic and Roman Near East. On the other hand, local traditions seem to govern the noteworthy presence of some expressions at Hatra as opposed to other places, for instance the introduction of curse formulae by bgn.927 Such regional peculiarities presuppose a proper scribal tradition. It is much less easy to determine whether Aramaic at Assur, Hatra, and their surroundings was spoken alongside other languages as well. As has already been pointed out, Greek appears to be essentially absent and confined to a couple of lexemes relating to economy (in particular the Greek forms of Latin assus and denarius) and specifically Hellenistic architecture (στοά ‘portico’, προστάς ‘antechamber’) with no traces of syntactic interference.928 Iranian influence is visible in personal names and words denoting civil or military professions.929 One may suppose than at least some frequent commuters in 923 924 925 926 927 928 929

See Beyer 1998: 128 for the evidence and cf. Section 3.1.3. Beyer 1998: 123 and 128. So in H344: 4–5 (three times). Gzella 2006a: 37–38 and 19–20 with n. 14. Cf. Degen 1974c on the meaning. Other examples can be found in Gzella 2006a: 38. Gzella 2006a: 34. Gzella 2006a: 36.

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the border- zone between the Roman and the Parthian empires used several languages in day-to-day communication, even if this does not surface directly in the textual material. The same could also apply to Aramaic-Arabic bilingualism: as elsewhere in the Roman Near East, many personal names are clearly Arabian, but they do not allow any straightforward conclusions as to the language of their speakers.930 Several Mesopotamian terms for certain professions (for instance, ṭpšrʾ for ṭupšarru ‘scribe’, ʾrdklʾ for arad ekalli ‘architect’, and ʾpklʾ for apkalla ‘priest’), in all likelihood, entered the language during an earlier period of Akkadian-Aramaic bilingualism in the region and became normal Aramaic words (see Section  3.1.3). Local religion especially seems to continue pristine Mesopotamian traditions.931 These inscriptions thus show how Mesopotamian cultural heritage has been incorporated into an Aramaic–and perhaps Arabic–tradition of spoken and written language, which later came into contact with Parthian civilization but only had a superficial veneer of Greek. They did not serve as an expression of civic values as they did in Palmyra. To put it simply: the inhabitants of the Eastern Mesopotamian Aramaic speech area were much more eastward-looking than the citizens of Palmyra with their Janus-faced cultural orientation. 5.6

Aramaic Linguistic Heritage in Post-Achaemenid Iran

Although the Iranian plateau was not historically an Aramaic-speaking area, the international language of the Achaemenid empire also spread in domestic administration (see Section 4.2) and, as has become clear by now, in the eastern provinces (Section 4.3.5). The true extent of its use remains elusive due to the limitations of the evidence, but Aramaic as an idiom of bookkeeping and representation had a long-lasting afterlife in the region after the conquest of Alexander. Six bilingual rock edicts with Aramaic parallel versions set up by king Aśoka in the third century b.c.e. in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan reflect the somewhat clumsy attempt (or so it appears) of a provincial chancellery to conform to Achaemenid linguistic standards.932 The Seleucids 930 The exact meaning of ʿrbyʾ ‘Arabs’ in some Hatran inscriptions remains opaque. Its juxtaposition with city-dwellers (H336b: 4–5 = H343: 3–4) suggests that it was not necessarily an ethnic category but could also denote the Bedouins who mainly lived in the desert but paid frequent visits to Hatra. 931 Cf. Gzella 2006a: 36. 932 See Gzella 2004: 39–41 for a brief discussion and further bibliography. One of them has been included in kai as no. 273.

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subsequently still employed Aramaic for coin legends in the third and second centuries b.c.e., and the vast majority of the native Iranian languages adopted a script ultimately derived from the Achaemenid cursive.933 Even when the Arsacid dynasty (247 b.c.e. until 224 c.e.) established Parthian as their official administrative language,934 remnants of an erstwhile Aramaic-speaking bureaucracy survived in the form of about six-hundred “heterograms” securely attested since the first century b.c.e. These are frozen words represented in writing with their corresponding Aramaic forms according to Achaemenid spelling and virtually cocooned from later phonetic developments of the language but expanded with Iranian endings or employed in Iranian constructions.935 Hence they were meant to be read as Iranian: mlkyn mlka ‘king of kings’, for instance, militates against the usual Aramaic word order mlk mlkyn in construct chains but corresponds to its Persian counterpart šāhān šāh.936 The employ of heterograms was subsequently taken over by the Sassanians (224 until 642 c.e.) when they introduced Pahlavi, a Middle Persian language, as their standard idiom. Numerous short, mostly economic texts consist of accumulations of such writings, especially one of the Awroman land sale documents, more than 2500 highly formulaic ostraca with wine receipts from Nisa, and perhaps also a few short inscriptions.937 The disproportionately high amount of heterographic writing in economic notes may suggest that Aramaeograms were transmitted through bookkeeping. One could thus imagine that the restricted but highly technical use of language in this register, where nominal and verbal morphology would only play a subordinate role, and the availability of fixed document templates, prompted their reanalysis as graphic symbols and thus prevented them from being replaced by native Iranian words and forms. This would, in turn, presuppose an entrenched use of Aramaic in Persian administration that long outlived the fall of the Achaemenid empire. A comparative typology of language use in ancient economic and administrative records may perhaps add further support to the view that this is the register where heterographic writing would most naturally evolve.

933 Skjærvø 1995. 934 Cf. Schmitt 1998: 164–165. 935 They have been assembled in the Pahlavi glossary Frahang i Pahlavīk, see Nyberg (ed.) 1988 for a useful overview of the Aramaic words. 936 See Skjærvø 1995: 286–288. Older bibliography can be retrieved from Rosenthal 1939: 72–82. 937 Bibliographical references in Beyer 1984: 43–44 (1986: 28–30) and 2004: 24–25.

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As a representational language, Aramaic also occurs in a small number of short texts on rock-sculptures from, if palaeographic dating is to be trusted, second-century c.e. Elymais (a Parthian client kingdom north of the Persian Gulf), the Šimbar valley, and Xuzistan. These “Arsacid” inscriptions938 denote the persons depicted with their native titles; they are written in an otherwise unattested cursive script (perhaps under the influence of Parthian)939 and betray, besides a more extensive use of vowel letters in accordance with local custom (w and y for short /o/ and /e/, ʾ for word-medial /ā/, as in nʾsyb kwrsyʾ for /nāseb korsiyā/, ‘holder of the throne’), a lasting influence of Achaemenid spelling conventions: as in the heterograms, historical z instead of phonetic d is used in the masculine singular near-deictic znh and in the relative marker zy, and long unstressed word-final vowels are still written. Moreover, there is no clear trace of the common innovations of contemporaneous forms of Eastern Aramaic, since the emphatic state of the masculine plural appears as -yʾ for /-ayyā/ as opposed to -ʾ for /-ē/ in the one clear attestation,940 and the thirdperson “imperfect” preformative is still /y-/.941 These inscriptions can be compared to scattered material from elsewhere in the eastern fringe areas.942 A brief memorial epigraph from second-century b.c.e. Armenia (kai 274), for instance, relates to Artaxias, a former general of Antiochus III and since 189 b.c.e. king of Armenia. Moreover, an AramaicGreek bilingual from Armazi in Georgia has been erected presumably in the second-century c.e. in order to remember the daughter of a functionary of the local king Pharasmenes (kai 276). Apparently, they all belong to the same representational tradition of Aramaic and document its tenacity. The linguistic evidence thus seems to indicate that the form of Aramaic employed in these peripheral regions was a prestigious written code of the local elite but not a spoken idiom. The esteem of Aramaic in Iran derives from its status as an administrative language during the Achaemenid age, hence it survived as a substrate in scribal culture and not in speech.

938 Edited and described by Gzella 2008b, with references to earlier editions; see also the brief summary in Gzella 2011c: 606. 939 See Häberl 2006: 59–60. 940 Gzella 2008b: 120. 941 One possible attestation of a reflex of the suffix /-ayhī/ in an inscription from Elymais (Gzella 2008b: 114–115) and perhaps a trace of a more extensive use of the participle (Gzella 2008b: 118–119) are exceptional; they could suggest that the situation was in fact more complicated, but the matter needs more attention. 942 References can be found in Beyer 1984: 43–44 (1986: 28–30).

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5.7 Conclusion A wide variety of different forms of Aramaic were used as spoken and written languages throughout the Hellenistic and early Roman Near East. Common phonetic developments and the diffusion of representational phraseology suggest that they formed a wide-ranging network with continuous contact among speakers of distinct Aramaic vernaculars. Local cultural self-awareness as both a reaction to Hellenistic rule and a result of increasing economic prosperity eventually triggered the rise of new, regional, and largely standardized administrative idioms based on or at least significantly influenced by the respective local dialects of Aramaic, each written in a proper type of the Aramaic script derived from the Achaemenid chancellery ductus. These Aramaic languages were emancipated, to varying degrees, from the impact of Achaemenid Official Aramaic as the former common literary and administrative idiom of the Persian empire. The Greco-Roman era, the most complicated period in the attested history of earlier Aramaic, is also the time when Eastern Aramaic first becomes visible as a coherent dialect group marked by several linguistic innovations. As a written language, Aramaic is preserved in thousands of epigraphic witnesses and was employed in different social and functional contexts: law, public representation, private memoria as well as religious devotion, and literature. An interaction between the waning heritage of Achaemenid Official Aramaic on the one hand and local varieties that increasingly encroached on scribal traditions on the other thus produced a number of quite distinct written forms of the language, which all reflect different evolutionary stages. Hence, it is misleading to subsume them indiscriminately under a common denominator like “Middle Aramaic,” and this obsolete notion can no longer be maintained. Some varieties, at the western and eastern peripheries of the area, served as official or representational idioms by speakers of other languages who continued to employ Achaemenid Official Aramaic almost without change. This is the case with the North Arabian tribes united in the Nabataean kingdom, who mainly used Arabic and other Arabian languages in daily life (as frequent subconscious syntactic influence and even occasional code-switching demonstrates), whereas Iranian languages functioned as the normal means of communication among the various population groups in the Parthian empire. Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia, by contrast, had long been Aramaic-speaking regions by that time, where Aramaic evolved naturally and survived, in isolated pockets and as a minority language, until the present day. The diffusion of some Eastern Aramaic innovations that originated in Hellenistic Mesopotamia to northern and western regions, and hence the emergence of the Eastern Aramaic branch, can still be traced.

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Since the spread of linguistic innovations in general, and phonetic developments in particular, across a particular region can only be explained against the background of a widespread spoken usage, the evidence unambiguously indicates that Aramaic in its various dialects acted as the pragmatically dominant language of large parts of the population between the Mediterranean coast and the Parthian border. Nonetheless, it also interacted with Greek as the prestige idiom of Hellenistic culture and Roman administration; GreekAramaic bilingualism or even Greek monolingualism would have been particularly extensive in a number of urban centres in Palestine and Syria, but supposedly played a much less prominent role in the hinterland. Even so, Aramaic inscriptions reproduce a native tradition and exhibit only little structural or systemic influence from Greek beyond a number of loanwords and– especially in Palmyra–the fashion of erecting honorary epigraphs. Arabic-Aramaic contact, conversely, is well attested for the Arabian Peninsula but may have been more pervasive than it seems in the Fertile Crescent without leaving visible traces outside the onomasticon. In the long run, IranianAramaic interaction caused important structural changes in Aramaic vernaculars originally spoken near and beyond the eastern frontier of the Roman empire, as can be seen in their modern descendants, but these changes cannot be easily identified in the earlier epigraphic sources. New reference grammars of Nabataean and Palmyrene Aramaic as well as comprehensive editions of the Palmyrene and Hatran inscriptions with a translation and commentary, at any rate, could facilitate a more nuanced use of the material and its linguistic implications in the study of the Hellenistic and Roman Near East. The Aramaic varieties from Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia that surface in inscriptions and papyri from between the second century b.c.e. and the third century c.e. then continue without break into several distinct literary languages of Jews, Christians, and other groups with their patent bifurcation into a Western (Chapter 6) and an Eastern branch (Chapter 7). The emergence of these literary traditions in the fourth century c.e. coincided with a rapid consolidation of Christianity. At that moment, religious affiliation replaced local political self-consciousness as the main motivation for writing in a particular type of Aramaic. The religious groups that accepted Aramaic as a language of their respective canonical literatures–Jews, Christians, Samaritans, and Mandaeans–survive until today. This further underscores the historical importance of the Greco-Roman era as the common foundational period of these language varieties.

chapter 6

Western Aramaic in Late Antique Palestine Local forms of Aramaic in Palestine at large (thus including Judaea, Galilee, and Transjordan)943 first reached the surface of the textual evidence under Hellenistic and early Roman rule. At that point, Aramaic ceased to function as a global language of imperial administration following the collapse of the Achaemenid empire. Regional vernaculars then began to be used in writing in particular forms of the Aramaic script and according to orthographic principles established by the scribal schools of newly-established local chancelleries (Chapter 5). The highly multicultural setting of Roman and Byzantine Palestine subsequently saw the evolution of three literary traditions of Jews, Samaritans, and Christians, each with its own script and spelling as a marker of supraregional cultural affiliation in an age of emerging religious identities. These three Aramaic languages remain thus visibly distinct despite considerable linguistic similarities. Jews had switched to square script in the Persian period and employed it for their literary and documentary texts in Palestine as well as in Babylon (and continued to do so even when writing the medieval European idioms Yiddish and Ladino); the Samaritan letters are directly related to the pre-Achaemenid epigraphic Hebrew script with its strong nationalist connotations (one may impressionistically compare the overtones of Gothic letter forms like Fraktur in the modern age); and Palestinian Christians adopted the Estrangela writing of their brethren in Syria and Mesopotamia (where a Christian-Aramaic literature first took on its shape). Nonetheless, the underlying dialects themselves all belong to the same branch of Aramaic, as will be seen in the ensuing discussion, and their speakers coexisted on partly friendly, partly hostile terms.944 A much more extensive body of material than before enables one to describe the grammar and lexicon of Aramaic to a sufficient degree of completeness from about the fourth century c.e. onwards, that is, in the later Roman or Byzantine period. Since there is no longer a unifying lingua franca, an eventual 943 The exact geographical boundaries of the region (also called “Eretz Israel” in the Jewish and “the Holy Land” in the Christian traditions) are not always clear and have changed over time. Hence the term “Palestine” denotes a more general cultural area here, situated between Syria in the north and east on the one hand and Arabia in the south on the other, and not a precise administrative district. Belayche 2001: 13–25 has a useful discussion of the matter. 944 Cf. Millar 2013: 65–74 for a number of examples from Greek historians of this period.

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decrease of the Achaemenid Official Aramaic superstrate makes it possible, after the third and fourth centuries c.e., to define a broader spectrum of characteristic isoglosses of regional forms of Aramaic, verify their distributional patterns, and assess their diagnostic weight with reasonable confidence. As a result, Western Aramaic as a well-defined dialect group appears in the light of day and can henceforth be clearly distinguished from its Eastern Aramaic sister branch (which became visible at a somewhat earlier stage, see Section 5.5.1). A consistent geographical arrangement with a further subdivision into Jewish, Christian, and other varieties therefore constitutes the most viable classificatory principle for a history of Aramaic after the third century c.e. and is universally accepted in current research.945 There is thus good reason to postulate the beginning of a new stage in the evolution of the language at this point, no matter whether one prefers the widespread though somewhat infelicitous term “Late Aramaic,” following Fitzmyer, or Beyer’s “Middle Aramaic.”946 Both dialect groups obviously did not arise overnight, but the underlying vernaculars remained largely unwritten before they, influenced to varying degrees by the Achaemenid standard language, came to be used as written means of expression and a token of new regional cultural self-awareness in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods. Epigraphic production in the respective language varieties also continued in the public as well as in the private sphere 945 Rosenthal 1939: 104–105 (his chronological category “Jungaramäisch” basically corresponds to Western Aramaic and is opposed to the more straightforwardly geographical notion of its counterpart “Ostaramäisch,” but this terminological asymmetry is prompted by the inclusion of the language of Targum Onqelos and Jonathan, which cannot be assigned to either the one or the other branch on unambiguous linguistic grounds, and the synagogue inscriptions from Dura Europos, which, despite their Eastern place of discovery, may nevertheless reflect a Palestinian variety; cf. 105 and 115 n. 1); Beyer 1984: 59 and 1986: 43 (who correctly stresses the primacy of a dialectal bifurcation of Aramaic since the third century c.e. as opposed to the earlier interaction of regional varieties and common literary languages that obscures a similar distinction for previous periods); Fitzmyer 32004: 31 (who does not supply any linguistic arguments). 946 The latter would of course be more appropriate on grounds of terminological elegance thanks to its intuitively appealing division into an “old,” a “middle,” and a “modern” period (as, e.g., in Iranian). Such a division emphasizes the direct connection between older epigraphic forms of Jewish Palestinian and Syriac under Hellenistic and early Roman rule on the one hand and the corresponding literary traditions in the Byzantine period on the other. Unfortunately, “Middle Aramaic” is now mostly understood in Fitzmyer’s less adequate sense as an umbrella term for the very different Aramaic languages of the GrecoRoman period, where such a common notion seems much harder to justify linguistically (see Section 5.1.1).

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and helps contextualize the manuscripts of literary texts, which have been transmitted over generations of scribes and thereby also assumed secondary modifications (if only in the form of accidental mistakes), against their historical-linguistic background. The systematic use of inscriptions as Archimedean points for determining the original form of the language underlying these literary traditions belongs to the most significant advances of Aramaic philology in the second half of the twentieth century after a phase of uncovering and editing texts, writing descriptive grammars, and compiling dictionaries. Thanks to such an improved framework, the languages of the Jewish, Samaritan, and Christian Aramaic literatures of Palestine can now be assigned their place within the whole of Aramaic and the earlier history of Aramaic in Palestine with reasonable accuracy. The social and cultural history of the region between the second and the fourth century c.e. is currently much debated,947 but the expansion and consolidation of Christianity and the emergence of a largely Greek-speaking church infrastructure after the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great (who ruled between 306 and 337 c.e.) furnishes an important caesura that also made the rise of Christian Palestinian Aramaic writings possible.948 Another major change in the political, religious, and linguistic landscape occurred with the spread of Islam after the sack of Jerusalem in 637/638 c.e. and the increasing Arabization of Palestine during the eighth century. “From Constatine to Muhammad” is thus is viable and useful chronological delimitation of the complex phenomenon of “Late Antiquity” as such, itself being a period of transition and emerging religious identity.949 Literary production in the indigenous Aramaic languages, and at any rate the study and transmission of manuscripts, still continued for a few hundred years, but Arabic became over time the dominant means of communication as well as administration and the idiom of prestige even beyond the rapidly growing number of adherents to Islam among the local population. Although the takeover of Arabic thus did not put an end to the use of Aramaic as a literary and religious idiom among other groups, its impact on the speech situation is generally accepted as sufficient reason for concluding this period–and, indeed, the chronological scope of the present book–in the eighth century c.e.950 947 It is now often accepted that Palestine in this period was predominantly pagan (cf. Belayche 2001). 948 See Millar 2013: 59–60 on the transformation of the religious geography due to the appearance of numerous Christian bishoprics in Palestine. 949 Cf. the discussion in Inglebert 2012. 950 Beyer 1984: 24 and 1986: 10; Fitzmyer 32004: 31.

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Aramaic of the fourth to the eighth centuries c.e. is also the developmental stage of the language reflected in first the Eastern, then the Western pointing traditions that were established in order to ensure the correct reading of the biblical text by adding vowel signs and other diacritic marks to the consonantal skeleton. Especially the loss of short unstressed vowels in open syllables, which was demonstrably completed around the middle of the third century c.e. (see Sections 1.2.3 and 5.1.1), gives it its distinctive shape. Syriac, Biblical Aramaic, and Targumic Aramaic, as they appear in vocalized literary compositions, thereby notably differ even at face value from the other “canonical” Semitic languages Biblical Hebrew, Classical Arabic, Classical Ethiopic, and Akkadian that underlie the foundational work in the field during the nineteenth century and still constitute the main pillars of Semitic Philology. Aramaic from this period is thus often regarded as representative of the language as such. Despite its importance in terms of quantity of the surviving material, its accessibility thanks to native pointing traditions, and its cultural impact on the Jewish-Christian tradition, however, one must not forget that the phonetic peculiarities reflected in this stage of Aramaic result from secondary developments as opposed to earlier forms. Progress in the investigation of the historical phonology of Aramaic shows beyond any reasonable doubt that it is now unacceptable to vocalize Old Aramaic, Achaemenid Official Aramaic, or Qumran Aramaic texts according to the principles of Syriac or Biblical Aramaic in its Tiberian garb (just as it would be odd, from a strictly historical-linguistic point of view, to read an unpointed Arabic papyrus from the early Islamic period as if it were Moroccan spoken Arabic). The degree to which Aramaic survived as a vernacular in Palestine after the eighth century c.e. is difficult to assess. One may suppose that the modern Western Aramaic dialects still spoken in the Christian mountain villages of Maʿlūla, Baḫʿa, and Ǧubb ʿAdīn in the Antilebanon once have evolved from the same linguistic matrix as the older, now extinct Western Aramaic varieties that appear in the inscriptions and manuscript traditions of late Roman Palestine. Over the thousand years between the takeover of Arabic and their rediscovery and subsequent description by Western scholars in the latter half of the nineteenth century,951 they have of course undergone substantial influence from Arabic. A few surprising and non-trivial parallels with either Jewish, Samaritan, or Christian Palestinian Aramaic nonetheless point to historical ties between 951 See Rosenthal 1939: 160–169. Western Neo-Aramaic has been described afresh by Arnold 1990 on the basis of extensive new fieldwork; see also the more recent summary in Arnold 2011.

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the unknown predecessors of Western Neo-Aramaic and the Aramaic languages of Palestine in the period under discussion here.952 Aramaic substrate also lingers on in numerous (though Arabicized) place names of the region953 and in some individual lexical items in the local Arabic vernaculars.954 Since there is no comparative grammar of Western Aramaic and no diachronic study of Western Neo-Aramaic, it is not yet clear to what extent the latter’s predecessors can still be reconstructed and the gap between the ninth and the nineteenth century c.e. be bridged. 6.1

Western Aramaic and the Languages of Hellenistic and Roman Palestine

The documented linguistic continuity of Aramaic in Palestine since the Hellenistic period suggests that the three literary traditions of the Byzantine age, Jewish, Samaritan, and Christian, are all based on older regional dialects that had already a long history before they acquired the status of written languages. This essential continuity can be demonstrated at least for Jewish texts from Judaea, which are directly related to older epigraphic material from the same area in the preceding period (see Section 5.2 and Section 6.2 below). Yet it is no less plausible to connect Samaritan with the vernacular of the inhabitants of Samaria (Section 6.3 below), of which only a handful of linguistic features can be reconstructed, and Christian Palestinian with a form of Aramaic that was spoken in North Judaea or Transjordan (Section 6.4 below). Their new role as vehicles for local and denominational literatures since about the third or fourth century c.e. coincides with a further decrease of the Achaemenid linguistic heritage in Palestine, which makes it possible to identify more regional traits in the textual material, and with a process of religious communitybuilding. The latter aspect is further reflected in the complete absence of demonstrably pagan Aramaic epigraphs from later Roman Palestine, the youngest being the el-Mal building inscription dated to the year 7/6 b.c.e. (Section 5.2.3). Other spoken varieties will also have existed, such as the ancestors of Western Neo-Aramaic, which have been mentioned in passing, but they never became the basis of written traditions, hence they remain largely invisible in the textual record. For instance, a supposed Eastern Jordanian dialect, with which both a number of synagogue inscriptions discovered in Transjordan and 952 Cf. Stadel 2013c and Beyer 1995a: 245 for specific examples. 953 Beyer 1984: 71 n. 3 and 1986: 55–56 n. 70 (with further bibliography). 954 Rosenthal 1939: 169–172.

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the predecessor of Christian Palestinian have been associated,955 may indeed reflect a form of Aramaic slightly different from the speech of the surrounding areas, but it can hardly be distinguished from Jewish Palestinian as it was used in South Judaea on grounds of clear grammatical isoglosses. Only a rough outline of the total linguistic geography can thus be extracted from the written sources; depicting the Western Aramaic dialect landscape in Antiquity is like playing the piano with gloves on. In addition to forming a continuum of dialects with a high degree of mutual intelligibility, Western Aramaic languages in the late Roman period interacted in contact situations first with Greek, then increasingly with Arabic, and were eventually reduced to purely literary idioms with the breakthrough of Arabic in the eighth and ninth centuries c.e. However, the exact degree of bilingualism, the precise distribution of languages across different communicative situations or social settings, and the specific modalities of the shift from Aramaic to Arabic still have to be researched more thoroughly. Even basic tools, such as accurate text editions, grammars, and dictionaries of the individual Western Aramaic idioms have only appeared in the past twenty-five years after a long period of neglect in favour of the preceding phases of the language, so there is much room for further specialized studies, especially in the areas of syntax and historical-comparative linguistics. 6.1.1 The Appearance of Western Aramaic The continuity of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, the emergence of Samaritan as well as Christian Palestinian Aramaic as written languages, and the eventual development of vocalization traditions make it possible to define Western Aramaic as a coherent dialect group more clearly in the later Roman period than before. Scribal practice of that time shows a general weakening of Achaemenid standards in favour of a more phonetic spelling (with, for instance, widespread h instead of ʾ as a vowel letter for final /-ā/ in the emphatic state, absence of graphic degemination of /n/ in contact, and assimilation of /-t-/ in the reflexive-passive stems to a following consonant956). The earlier history of this dialect group as a whole still remains largely unobtainable. With the direct object marker ʾyt /ʾiyyāt/ or /ʾīyāt/, from which later yt /yāt/ has no doubt evolved due to aphaeresis,957 one distinctively “Western” 955 Beyer 1984: 65–66 and 1986: 50; 2004: 40. 956 On this last point, see Beyer 1984: 94 n. 1; 1998: 128. It may have been more widespread in pronunciation even in Old and Achaemenid Official Aramaic, where this /t/ was nonetheless normally written. 957 Cf. Gzella 2013e: 115.

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feature occurs already in eighth-century b.c.e. material from Central Syria (see Section 2.2.2) as opposed to the use of the preposition l- for the same purpose in Achaemenid Official Aramaic and a few witnesses from the NeoAssyrian period. Yet it is not clear when exactly a distinctively Western branch of Aramaic that can be positively defined by an entire cluster of traits came into existence. The sixth- or early fifth-century b.c.e. letters from Hermopolis in Egypt, too, are often connected with later Western Aramaic (see Section 3.3.2), but the relevant isoglosses in spelling (such as h for /-ā/) and morphology (for instance, derived-stem infinitives with an /m-/ prefix) are somewhat ambiguous as to their diagnostic value. Other traits, by contrast, do not yet surface in the earlier textual evidence, in part because local Western Aramaic dialects evolved in the shadow of administrative and literary varieties such as the Achaemenid lingua franca, but also because the consonantal writing system and the generally conservative spelling conventions inherited from preceding written idioms conceal phonetic innovations that could turn out to have diagnostic value in distinguishing Western Aramaic from the contemporaneous Eastern varieties. These innovations are thus very difficult or even impossible to date given the present state of knowledge. Since Western Aramaic was spoken in a fairly small geographical area and by groups which, as ancient sources indicate, remained in constant contact with each other, one generally cannot decide whether a certain trait was inherited from a common predecessor or spread by means of areal diffusion. In all likelihood, then, the roots of the Palestinian Aramaic dialects may predate the Achaemenid period, yet they cannot be traced back to one specific ancestor and may well have emerged over a longer period of time due to contact and convergence. An attempt to reconstruct a purported “ProtoWestern Aramaic” therefore has very little explanatory value. Despite a number of secondary changes, Western Aramaic preserves several important features of an older developmental stage of Aramaic which have been replaced by innovations in contemporaneous Eastern Aramaic (on the latter, see Section 5.5.1). The most salient conservatisms include the emphaticstate ending of the masculine plural /-ayyā/ (as opposed to Eastern /-ē/), a functional distinction between the absolute and the emphatic state (which became the default form in later Eastern Aramaic) for marking definiteness, and the etymological third-person “imperfect” preformative /y-/ (which consistently shifted to /l-/ or /n-/ in the whole of Eastern Aramaic after around 200 c.e.). These are sometimes viewed as specific hallmarks of the Western branch, but since they obviously represent shared retentions inherited from a previous linguistic stage, they cannot positively define a subgroup in a historicalcomparative framework (Section 1.2.1).

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A few other changes even cut across dialectal boundaries, most notably derived-stem infinitives with an /m-/ prefix: they occur already in the later Old Aramaic period (see Section 3.1.2) and have been largely generalized in Western Aramaic958 as well as in Syriac, yet not in the other Eastern Aramaic literary idioms Jewish Babylonian and Mandaic. Likewise, the tendency to add /-n/ to words ending in a long vowel occurs in various forms of Aramaic since the Achaemenid period at the latest but neither exclusively nor consistently in Western Aramaic.959 Monophthongization of the etymological diphthongs */aw/ and */ay/ to /ō/ and /ē/ respectively also varies within both the Western and the Eastern branch. Several distinctive innovations, conversely, have arisen over time in the Western group only. In addition to the object marker yt, an early form of which is already attested in Old Aramaic (see above), the following are especially significant: First, the preservation of the possessive suffix /-ī/ ‘my’ in Western Aramaic as opposed to its loss in Jewish Babylonian, Mandaic, and Syriac seems to be secondary and may result from a stress shift in such forms, patterned after the suffixed monoradical prepositions /bī/ ‘in me’ or /lī/ ‘to me’, in order to disambiguate them from unsuffixed ones.960 At least this is the obvious conclusion if one views the loss of unstressed word-final long vowels around 100 b.c.e. as a regular and unconditioned sound law in Aramaic (see Section 1.2.3). Second, by-forms of the second-person feminine singular independent pronoun spelled ʾty ‘you’ (older /ʾáttī/, which otherwise shifted to /ʾatt/ > /ʾat/) co-occurring with expected ʾt and the corresponding “perfect”afformative -ty (for older /-tī/) could be related to the same phenomenon.961 Third, another common innovation is the “perfect”-afformative /-ē(n)/ instead of older /-ā/ for the third-person feminine plural (unattested in Old Aramaic so far and replaced by the corresponding masculine form in Achaemenid Official Aramaic but present in the vocalization of Biblical Aramaic, see Section 4.1.2).962 958 Excepting some archaic remnants without /m-/ in lexicalized substantives, cf. Fassberg 1990: 169 and Müller-Kessler 1991: 177. 959 See Beyer 1984: 149 for examples. This feature has been considered a specifically Jewish Palestinian or Western Aramaic trait in older literature (e.g., Kutscher 1976: 32; similarly still Sokoloff 2011a: 612), but its wider Aramaic distribution is now an established fact. 960 Beyer 1984: 144; cf. Beyer 1995a: 245. 961 See Kutscher 1976: 31 and Sokoloff 2011a: 613–614 for the (rare) pronoun; Tal 2013: 36 and 53–54; Müller-Kessler 1991: 67 and 152. Beyer 1984: 67 and 1986: 51, however, views the y in such forms as originally purely graphic. 962 Sokoloff 2011a: 615 (cf. Beyer 1984: 54 and 1986: 39); Tal 2013: 53; Müller-Kessler 1991: 152 and Morgenstern 2011b: 633–634. It has been explained as an extension of the second-person feminine plural afformative and/or the third-person feminine plural independent

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Fourth, by-forms of the active basic-stem participle according to the verbal noun pattern qātōl besides etymological qātel also occur, to varying degrees, in the different Western Aramaic languages.963 Certain individual lexical items, finally, occur specifically in Western texts or at least have a wider distribution there (such as the root ḥmī ‘to see’ instead of common Aramaic ḥzī), but phonology, morphology, and syntax yield more reliable features for linguistic classification than vocabulary. Besides these common tendencies, a few instances of micro-variation within later Western Aramaic can be identified as well: First, evidence for a reduction of the etymological pharyngeals is conflicting and points to a quite complex process. This development seems to have originated in Samaria and Galilee and may have diffused southwards over time (hence it occasionally surfaces in the Dead Sea Scrolls and documentary texts, judging from spelling mistakes involving these sounds) but did not equally affect all Palestinian Aramaic dialects, excepting Samaritan, or even all Galilee.964 Second, Christian Palestinian and Western Neo-Aramaic both exhibit a shift of short and long o and e vowels to u and i respectively by way of assimilation to an erstwhile i.965 Third, a notable morphological isogloss of Jewish Palestinian and Western Neo-Aramaic is the first-person singular “imperfect” preformative in /n-/, which, under the influence of the plural, replaced etymological /ʾ-/ (the latter still occurs in the more conservative linguistic layer of Palestinian Targumic texts).966 Fourth,

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pronoun (Fassberg 1990: 165). The relationship to unpointed and thus unpronounced -y in the spelling of corresponding forms in Classical Syriac is debated; presumably, the latter merely served as a graphic device in order to distinguish the feminine form from the masculine one (Beyer 1984: 67 and 1986: 51) and has arisen independently from /-ē(n)/ in Western Aramaic, which is a genuine morpheme with a basis in pronunciation. Historical spellings of the second-person feminine singular independent pronoun and the corresponding “perfect” afformative with -y could easily underlie the reanalysis of -y as a more general but purely graphic feminine marker in Syriac. As a consequence, it cannot count as a “Western” trait there. See Tal 2013: 94 on Samaritan; Bar-Asher 1988: 53–55 and Morgenstern 2011b: 634 on Christian Palestinian; Kutscher 1976: 30–31 on Jewish Palestinian; cf. Beyer 2004: 35 (near bottom of the page) for one of the very rare instances of this usage in earlier Jewish Palestinian. The material has been surveyed and examined in detail by Kutscher 1965: 41–50 and 1976: 67–96; cf. also Beyer 1984: 122. Weak articulation of the pharyngeals is attested for the fringe areas of south-eastern Galilee (Beyer 1984: 103), but not for central Galilee (Beyer 2004: 52). Beyer 1995a: 245. Beyer 1984: 54 and 1986: 39 (cf. 1984: 39 and 1986: 25) and 1984: 152–153, who dates this shift to the first century c.e.; Sokoloff 2011a: 615. It seems to have been borrowed into

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the old third-person masculine singular possessive suffix attached to vocalic bases */-áwhī/ ‘his’ has yielded different by-forms due to the loss of intervocalic /-h-/ after monophthongization of */aw/ to /ō/, that is, mostly /-ōy/ and rarely /-ōh/, but /-ō/ in Samaritan.967 Fifth, the first-person singular object pronoun /-nī/ ‘me’ can be replaced by secondary /-ī/, patterned after the corresponding possessive suffix due to paradigm pressure.968 Sixth, doubling-stem infinitives without /m-/ prefix are attested in Christian Palestinian, but may have enjoyed a somewhat wider distribution.969 It remains unclear, by contrast, whether basic-stem infinitives without /m-/, resembling the Hebrew infinitive absolute, are also a common Western Aramaic feature.970 Differences within Jewish Palestinian itself seem to exist as well, but it is controversial whether they reflect a geographical distinction between a Galilean and a Judaean dialect or should better be explained historically or stylistically (see Section 6.2.1 below). Such cases of micro-variation, which even outnumber the attested common innovations, can only be indicative of a dialectal map that featured many more varieties of Aramaic than those that underlie the three literary traditions of late Roman Palestine. It is particularly significant that the known instances include a number of secondary changes in pronunciation, which cannot but result from an active and continuous use of Aramaic in speech. The obvious consequence is that Aramaic must have widely served as a vernacular in the region, especially in the hinterland, despite a strongly visible presence of Greek in urban centres. This conclusion has an important bearing on the assessment of the wider, and debated, language situation. 6.1.2 Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek: The Historical Language Situation The dominant languages of later Roman Palestine until the breakthrough of Islam were thus Aramaic in its various forms and, obviously, Greek. As in the earlier Roman period, Latin was spoken and written on a regular basis only by Roman administrators and members of the army among themselves, but even they would conduct dealings with the local population in Greek. Jerusalem’s status as a holy city also for Christians no doubt attracted a steady stream of

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Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew from Palestinian Aramaic. Conversely, the few instances in Christian Palestinian are presumably scribal errors and thus not relevant for classification (cf. Morgenstern 2011b: 634, against Ginsberg 1942: 232). Beyer 1984: 118 n. 1 and 117. For examples, cf. Fassberg 1990: 119 (with a useful table on p. 117); Tal 2013: 38–39; Müller-Kessler 1991: 70. The older form also occurs at times, perhaps due to historical spelling. Sokoloff 2011a: 614; Tal 2013: 41; Müller-Kessler 1991: 70–71 and Morgenstern 2011b: 633. Cf. Müller-Kessler 1991: 171 with Beyer 2004: 40. As suggested by Müller-Kessler 1991: 162.

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Latin-speaking pilgrims such as Egeria on a temporary and monks like St. Jerome on permanent basis to the Holy Land; however, they have not left a linguistic footprint, and the use of Latin was enforced neither by secular nor by ecclesiastical authorities. Hebrew, by contrast, which had been the local language in the region from time immemorial, survived only as a medium of literary expression after the demographic changes of the Achaemenid period. The only attested exception to this is its employ, on a small scale, for everyday purposes by nationalist movements in the first two centuries c.e. While it has often been maintained during the past decades, though unconvincingly and despite much good evidence to the contrary, that Hebrew still served as a spoken language in Palestine until the second century c.e. (see Section  5.2.1), it is, at any rate, almost universally agreed now that this was no longer the case by the fourth century c.e.971 At that point, Jerusalem, founded afresh by Hadrian as Aelia Capitolina after the Bar-Kosiba revolt from 132 to 135 c.e., had long ceased to act as a centre of Jewish culture and religion and was soon to become a largely Christian city. Knowledge of Hebrew certainly continued to be transmitted in Jewish as well as Samaritan scholarly and priestly circles without interruption; Hebrew even became a medium of literary production once again between the fourth and the seventh centuries c.e.972 However, one cannot easily assess how widespread at least a rudimentary familiarity actually was in the various Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean and the Near East. Diaspora Jews would normally speak the local language,973 and scattered references to Hebrew in Greek writers are difficult to evaluate because of the ambiguity of the term Ἑβραϊστί ‘Hebrew’. Ἑβραϊστί is used indiscriminately for Hebrew and Aramaic already in the New Testament, since both were associated with Jews 971 Cf., e.g., Sáenz-Badillos 1993: 171–172. The extremely few alleged signs of its use in speech beyond that date (cf. Fassberg 2012: 277–278) are all indirect and inconclusive: brief anecdotes are difficult to interpret historically, and possible reflexes of an earlier style of Rabbinic Hebrew in later Hebrew compositions could simply be instances of literary imitation rather than colloquialisms. Incidentally, all three purported features of Mishnaic Hebrew in a fifth- or sixth-century c.e. papyrus letter (Oxford ms Heb. D. 69(P); Fassberg 2012: 277) are actually Aramaic traits and presumably have been borrowed into Mishnaic Hebrew from there (see Kutscher 1976: 58–67 and Beyer 1984: 149 on /-m/ > /-n/ and /-n/ added to long word-final vowels, as well as Beyer 1984: 735 and 2004: 513 for the numerous attestations of the shortened form lʿzr of the name ʾlʿzr ‘Elazar’ in early Jewish Palestinian Aramaic inscriptions). 972 Schwartz 2005: 83. 973 See Schwartz 1995: 38–40.

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(‘Hebrews’), written in square script, and presumably also conceived as linguistically similar.974 This label can thus refer even to distinctively Aramaic words like Γολγοθα ‘Golgotha’ (Matthew 27:33; John 19:17; dissimilated from /golgoltā/)975 with the characteristic feminine-singular emphatic state ending that is alien to Hebrew. Nonetheless, Hebrew fed into Jewish Palestinian and Samaritan Aramaic language and lore; therefore it may be assumed that a passive knowledge would have been reasonably common at least among certain groups and Hebrew texts were easily accessible.976 Aramaic, on the other hand, remained almost certainly the pragmatically dominant means of communication in everyday-life for many inhabitants of Palestine throughout the Roman period until the advent of Islam. A number of important phonetic developments in particular, which either reflect common shifts in Aramaic or dialectal peculiarities, clearly presuppose an extensive use of Aramaic as a vernacular and firmly situate Palestine in a broader continuum of adjacent spoken varieties of this language. Aramaic thus persisted long after the downfall of the Achaemenid empire that once consolidated its use in the region. The testimony of ancient writers adds further support to such an interpretation of the linguistic facts themselves, since Palestine was included in lists of Aramaic-speaking areas by, for instance, Theodoret of Cyrrhus and later Barhebraeus. Moreover, various references to translators into Aramaic imply that significant parts of the population were monolingual.977 In societies with a limited degree of literacy, however, the decision to commit an oral language to writing is usually prompted by the rise of a specific group of speakers to political and economic power or by the appearance of a common cultural self-awareness as opposed to others. As in Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Mesopotamia or in large parts of pre-Islamic Arabia, the extent and distribution of the surviving textual material is therefore conditioned by a number of social factors and does not immediately reflect the actual language situation. To put it simply: there is no straightforward 974 See Nöldeke 1871a: 130–131; Dalman 1922: 14; Schmitt 1983: 575 n. 98. Cf. Cotton 2005: 162–163. 975 Cf. Beyer 1984: 544. In a similar fashion, Ἑβραϊστί introduces Aramaic words in John 5:2; 19:13; 20:16 and Mark 10:51 (cf. Beyer 1984: 137 and 144). 976 References to the teaching of Hebrew in Rabbinic literature have been collected by Fraade 1992: 269 n. 40, but their historical accuracy is of course difficult to verify. Alexander 1999 has a nuanced discussion of the possible educational context and the methods employed therein (such as drawing letters, learning portions of Scripture by heart, and translating into the vernacular); see also Goodblatt 2006: 32–48 on the absence of evidence for schools and the role of public reading of Scripture. 977 Hoyland 2010: 30–31.

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c­ orrelation in Ancient Near Eastern societies between the amount of written evidence in a particular language and the number of its speakers. Since Aramaic had ceased to act as an idiom of imperial administration after the conquest of Alexander, socio-cultural causes in particular must have triggered the emergence of Jewish, Samaritan, and Christian Palestinian Aramaic literary traditions from local Aramaic vernaculars. Regional forms of scribal practice and the evolution of distinct scripts further reflect an emancipation from the waning Achaemenid heritage and an increase of regional fragmentation. A sense of a proper cultural identity had long existed among Jews of the area and was fuelled by different reactions, welcoming or hostile, to Hellenism. The established practice of erecting private inscriptions and composing traditional literature therefore continued into the later Roman period, when it was vigorously renewed; all this production is graphically and ideologically united by the use of square script, which had become the Jewish writing system par excellence since the Achaemenid period. It is more difficult to pinpoint the origin of Samaritan literature, but a consolidation of communal identity in contradistinction to Judaism and emerging Christianity some time in the fourth century c.e. may at least provide a plausible explanation. As a local dialect, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, on the contrary, could not advance to the official idiom of a global and highly dynamic religion, because that place, as far as Palestine is concerned, was already taken by Greek, a language of great cultural prestige and international diffusion. Rather, it performed more modest functions in the pastoral of Christian communities in mainly agricultural zones and served as a means for asserting affiliation to a local, Palestinian, manifestation of the universal Church. The use of letter forms patterned after the Syriac script, however, visually conveys an awareness of belonging to the wider community of Aramaicspeaking Christians. Contrary to Hebrew and Aramaic with their long history in the region, Greek was a relative newcomer to Palestine. Its use, in the form of the koiné, spread during the Hellenistic period and was further consolidated by Roman administration as the official idiom of the area.978 Already in pre-Christian times, it certainly served as the prestige language among members of the elite with an affinity for Greek culture, but at least some knowledge must have been current in other social strata as well.979 Jewish and Samaritan immigrants from the 978 The nuanced survey presented by Mussies 1976 can still be used with much profit. 979 Cf. Millar 2013: 54–65, whose attempt to downgrade the role of Aramaic as a vernacular in Palestine is, however, hard to square with the linguistic facts that have been outlined above and in the previous section.

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Mediterranean Diaspora may also have promoted a considerable degree of functional bilingualism throughout Palestine and across different population groups, especially in urban centres.980 This has resulted in a noteworthy amount of Greek lexical borrowings, in particular relating to legalese, in Rabbinic Hebrew and the Palestinian Jewish varieties of Aramaic.981 The large share of Greek funerary inscriptions found in the area suggests that Greek was, at any rate, a preferred medium for public representation at all levels.982 Yet this does not necessarily entail that people who had epitaphs with their names and the appropriate formulae in Greek made for themselves also used the same language consistently in their daily lives; in doing so, they may simply have replicated particular cultural codes of the upper classes. When Christianity became an institutionalized religion in the fourth century c.e. and Christians, be it by birth or by conversion, subsequently formed a considerable part of society, Greek also served at least as the official idiom for the production of theological literature as well as for ecclesiastical administration in Palestine.983 One could imagine that it enjoyed an even greater popularity in larger cities, so that it could also be employed in pastoral contexts such as sermons in parishes frequented by a more cosmopolitan urban population. The extent of its use presumably differed in the various parts of the region, and the situation seems to have been different in rural areas. It was there in particular that a form of Palestinian Aramaic developed into a written language that came to be used for a range of liturgical and everyday-purposes among local Christians. Greek may therefore have acted as a common second language, mastered to greatly varying degrees of proficiency in later Roman Palestine and presumably with a higher proportion of bilinguals in cities. Nonetheless, it is still the most plausible hypothesis that Aramaic served as the general first language among the total population, excepting some bulwarks of Hellenistic culture such as Caesarea, and that it was employed in most communicative situations of daily life in the hinterland. The much higher amount of regional variation in Palestinian Aramaic (see Section 6.1.1 above) than in the Greek textual witnesses from the same region and little to no subconscious structural interference of Greek in the Aramaic 980 Cf. Alexander 1999: 76. 981 See Krauss 1898; Sperber 1984 with the additional remarks by Katzoff 1989. Only a fraction of these words, however, were fully incorporated into Rabbinic legal vocabulary, while most of them appear in stories and parables relating to gentile life. 982 Van der Horst 2001b. 983 Hoyland 2004: 187–188; Millar 2013: 32–40.

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material besides individual loanwords984 would naturally result from such a speech situation. This reconstruction of the sociolinguistic context could also explain why Greek was so swiftly displaced by Arabic when Islam rose in Palestine since the eighth century c.e.985 Aramaic, by contrast, did not only remain a vernacular in some parts of the larger region until today, but even left its mark as substrate in the Arabic dialects that evolved in Palestine and Lebanon. Besides a considerable number of evident lexical loans, which can be transferred even in situations of less intense language contact, morphological borrowing and the replication of syntactic patterns in particular point to a fair share of bilingual speakers during the transition period.986 Moreover, the common origin of Aramaic and Arabic results not only in a large number of shared lexemes but also in fundamental structural similarities in the root and pattern system, the verbal conjugations, and the derived verbal stems. This would have facilitated a quick but smooth transition from the one to the other instead of a radical break; hence a translation of Greek philosophical and scientific works via Syriac proved more convenient in the early Umayyad period than directly into Arabic (see Section 7.4.2). A few scattered bits and pieces of evidence could confirm the intuitively plausible view that Arabic was to some extent spoken in parts of Palestine even before the seventh and eighth centuries c.e., yet the amount of bilingualism is currently impossible to assess (see Section 6.4.2 below). With the spread of Arabic and the subsequent language shift, the linguistic bonds connecting the three literary traditions of Western Aramaic to their underlying vernaculars were severed. These literary idioms subsequently became the object of study among speakers without native competence in them, while local dialects over time continued to be spoken only in remote pockets such as the village communities near Damascus where they have survived until today. Yet the association of Aramaic with religious discourse 984 Some scholars attribute weakening of the pharyngeals in Palestinian Aramaic to Greek influence (notably Kutscher 1976: 90–92). This is possible but by no means certain; one should also note that Christian Palestinian of all varieties, which was continuously and intensely exposed to Greek yet largely unaffected by traditional historical spelling, apparently preserved the pharyngeals (see Section 6.4.1 below). 985 As has rightly been pointed out by Hoyland 2004: 192. 986 Diem 1979: 43–49; Contini 1999; Weninger 2011. Plausible instances of grammatical influence of Aramaic on Arabic include the derivational feminine singular morpheme /-ūt/ for abstract nouns and the use of proleptic pronominal suffixes in genitive constructions (cf. Section  3.1.3). Some similarities may result from parallel development instead of interference, however, especially if they occur in Arabic varieties that were not exposed to long-term contact with Aramaic.

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among Jews and Samaritans ensured its long afterlife as a language of cultural tradition that was not replaced by Arabic. 6.2

Jewish Palestinian Aramaic

Local Aramaic dialects had spread widely as vernaculars among Jews in Palestine since the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods at the expense of Hebrew. They remained in use until they became extinct some time after the Arabization of the region and the ensuing shift to Arabic as the dominant vernacular, perhaps around 950 c.e.987 As has been argued above, Jewish Palestinian directly continues an older written language that employs square script as a graphic marker of Jewish cultural affiliation and appears already during the early Roman period in various inscriptions as well as documentary texts (such as the Aramaic Bar-Kosiba letters), mainly from Judaea. Indirectly, it also surfaces as a non-Achaemenid adstrate in literary compositions in Aramaic discovered in the Dead Sea region (see Section 5.2). Parallels with this older epigraphic material from Judaea in spelling and grammar show that Jewish Palestinian Aramaic rests on a scribal tradition that goes back at least to the first century b.c.e., whereas Samaritan and Christian Palestinian Aramaic have apparently turned into literary idioms only after the expansion of Christianity in the fourth century c.e. As a result, the orthographic practice of Jewish Palestinian (notably a tendency towards phonetic spelling) could serve as an obvious model when the principles for writing in other forms of Aramaic throughout the area were established. Although their function as spoken idioms was eventually taken over by Arabic, Palestinian varieties of Aramaic fed into a long-lasting production of Jewish religious literature that circulated widely in the Near East and, later, in Europe. The emergence of such a literature from the fourth century c.e. onwards, however, seems to coincide with a powerful renaissance of Jewish religious and communal life as it also appears in the many architecturally prominent synagogues with their extensively decorated mosaic floors that began to be constructed. Recent scholarship has interpreted this significant boost to Judaism after a period of limited visibility following the Bar-Kosiba revolt in the second century c.e., perhaps due to assimilation, as a reaction to Christian imperial rule.988

987 Cf. Goitein 1966: 198 for this particular date. 988 Schwartz 2001 (the main conclusions have been summarized on pp. 14–16).

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The transmission history of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic exegetical, liturgical, and legal works is particularly complex. It has resulted in a considerable amount of interference from other, Babylonian, dialects in manuscripts produced after about 1000 c.e., when the Babylonian Talmud and the Babylonian Targum had become authoritative in Palestine. In addition, later copies that were made in medieval Europe, and the modern printed editions based on them, contain many mistakes. The most reliable witnesses for Jewish Palestinian Aramaic in this period are thus more than fifty synagogue and tomb inscriptions as well as amulets, all datable to the five-hundred years between about 200 and 700 c.e. They contain snapshots of the actual language without later modifications and thus provide a number of specific linguistic criteria for distinguishing between genuine forms and secondary corruptions; hence they serve as a benchmark for assessing the quality of a manuscript.989 Old and linguistically valuable fragments of Palestinian literary and legal texts have been preserved in the Cairo Geniza, a very large collection of discarded manuscript fragments of all sorts from the storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo. Moreover, ms Vat. Ebr. 30 of Bereshit Rabba, which is nearly complete, has been shown to provide a trustworthy text of one particular composition.990 6.2.1 The Dialectal Underpinnings of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic When Jews were banished from Jerusalem and Northern Judaea after the suppression of the Bar-Kosiba revolt in 135 c.e., Galilee became the centre of Jewish learning and religious authority. All Rabbinic texts of this period were produced in Galilee, hence older scholarship used the term “Galilean Aramaic” for the language they reflect.991 Traditionally, it refers to the Aramaic parts of the Palestinian Talmud (with legal debates according to thirty-nine tractates of the Mishna), usually assumed to have been completed in the fifth century c.e. in Tiberias and Caesarea but almost impossible to reconstruct in its original form,992 and to the Aramaic portions of the Palestinian Amoraic Midrashim to 989 See Kutscher 1976; Sokoloff 1978. 990 It can still be improved with the help of Geniza fragments, see Sokoloff 1982. 991 Cf. Beyer 1984: 62–65 and 1986: 47–48 for an overview, with additions in 2004: 38–39. A list of standard editions of these Rabbinic works can also be found in Sokoloff 22002: 19–28. 992 The only complete witness is the Leiden manuscript dating to 1289 c.e. and finished in 1334, which constitutes the basis of the printed editions. In addition to individual fragments of some parts that have been preserved among the Geniza discoveries (Ginzberg 1909) and are linguistically more reliable, citations in other texts witness to earlier recensions of the Palestinian Talmud. Cf. also Strack – Stemberger 1991: 187–189 on the date. Extensive bibliography can be found in Bokser 1979.

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the five books of the Pentateuch and Song of Songs to Esther with exegetical discussions (Rabbot). The latter also include popular stories and anecdotes that may reflect the colloquial language somewhat more accurately.993 They are preserved in a more original form in the earliest manuscripts, such as those from the Cairo Geniza. The exact hermeneutic principles that govern the intersection of Hebrew and Aramaic in these Rabbinic compositions still await a comprehensive study.994 Further local Palestinian Aramaic material crops up in Targum texts (Aramaic Bible translations with various actualizations and interpretative expansions) that were produced in Palestine before the Arab period, and in marriage contracts and literature relating to religious law (halakha) that were discovered in the Cairo Geniza but drafted in tenth- and eleventh-century Palestine (or at least according to the Palestinian legal tradition to which the Palestinian Jewish community in Cairo adhered). In all these texts, however, Palestinian Aramaic occurs side by side with pristine Achaemenid Official Aramaic forms and words that prevail in literary styles and legalese; both linguistic layers have amalgamated into a Palestinian Jewish literary language (see also Section  6.2.2 below). The local Aramaic variety of Palestine also governs the Palestinian and Tiberian pronunciation traditions, ranging from the recitation on which the Greek transcription of the Hebrew text in Origen’s Secunda is based (written around 240–245 c.e. in Caesarea) to the Tiberian and Palestinian pointing in medieval Bible codices as well as the corresponding “Masoretic” marginal notes. Several undated poems preserved among the Geniza finds and in medieval manuscripts from Europe seem to reflect Jewish Palestinian Aramaic as well,995 but their origin cannot be specified with precision, and they also bear the mark of other Jewish-Aramaic literary languages and of Greek.996 Jewish Palestinian Aramaic inscriptions from the late Roman period, by contrast, are mostly quite short but cover an extensive part of South Judaea, especially the region between Hebron and Beersheba, where Jews continued to live after 135 c.e. (all texts have been collected and edited afresh by Beyer 1984: 362–371; 1994: 234–248; 2004: 301–310), via North Judaea, the Carmel, and the Decapolis up to Galilee proper (Beyer 1984: 371–395; 1994: 248–259; 2004: 993 So Beyer 1984: 63 and 1986: 47; cf. also the bibliography cited by Fitzmyer 1979: 74 n. 120. 994 Cf. Fraade 1992: 273–276, who suggests that Hebrew by and large functioned as the language of teaching and Aramaic as the language of debate. See also Yahalom 1996 on Aramaic as an idiom of lament. 995 Sokoloff – Yahalom 1999. 996 Cf. Beyer 2004: 22.

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310–311) and to the east of the Upper Jordan (Beyer 1984: 396–399; 1994: 259– 268); a few others cannot easily be assigned to a specific sub-dialect (Beyer 1994: 268–269; 2004: 312).997 They relate to memorial, funerary, and, as far as a number of amulets are concerned, apotropaic and other magical purposes (such as an ostracon with a love charm from En Rimmon). Most of the inscriptions that were found in the many newly-built synagogues of this period are composed in Aramaic, and only a much smaller portion in Greek. They publicly remember the donors who contributed to the erection of the respective synagogue (these were by and large distinguished members of the local community), with their titles following the common opening formula dkyr lṭb /dḵīr lṭāḇ/ ‘Remembered be for good’.998 A tomb inscription for a Rabbi from Baalbek, dated to the year 837/838 c.e., shows that some Palestinian Jews, like Samaritans and Aramaic-speaking Christians around the same time, continued to employ their former Aramaic language at least for representational purposes into the Arab period despite what seems to be an imperfect mastery.999 The occasional use of a non-standard dating formula ‘after the destruction of the Temple’ (in 70 c.e.) in a few Jewish Palestinian texts spread across several centuries accentuates the role of Aramaic as a vehicle of traditional cultural self-awareness among Jews who may have wanted to distance themselves from the Christian population.1000 In addition, ten fourth- or fifth-century c.e. papyrus fragments with letters and contracts discovered in Egypt appear to be of Palestinian origin, too, or reflect Palestinian legal custom, but they contain much influence from Greek, the dominant language of many Egyptian Jews by that time.1001 The wide 997 The separate treatment of these inscriptions according to their regional provenance reflects Beyer’s hypothesis of the coexistence of a Galilean and a Judaean dialect of Palestinian Aramaic. 998 For a general survey, see now Hachlili 2013 (a chapter on the inscriptions on pages 517–538 provides an overview but is not always exact on linguistic matters). 999 The text is easily accessible in Beyer 1994: 252–253. It features two scriptural references (Proverbs 10:7 and Daniel 12:2) and a certain Hebrew-Aramaic interference, such as hbyt ‘the Temple’ with the prepositive Hebrew article and the Aramaic masculine-plural emphatic state ending /-ayyā/ in yšnyh ‘the sleepers’ (i.e., the deceased), an allusion to the Hebrew text of Daniel 12:2. 1000 Meyers 2010; Flesher 2010. The non-official character of this dating system appears from the fact that the said formula is also accompanied by a date according to the Sabbatical cycle and, perhaps, the apparent variation between 70 and 71 c.e. as the year in which the Temple was destroyed (cf. Beyer 1994: 252). 1001 Beyer 1984: 370–371 and 1994: 241–247 subsumes the Egyptian material under the Judaean dialect. Greek interference is particularly striking in one of the private letters (Beyer 1994: 243) and a marriage contract (Beyer 1994: 244–247); the borrowing of a function word like

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geographical distribution of these epigraphic sources throughout Palestine and their basic similarity with the language of the literary texts has resulted in a change of nomenclature in more recent studies from the time-honoured label “Galilean” to the generic notion of “Jewish Palestinian Aramaic” (which previously acted as a mere umbrella term that did not presuppose any linguistic unity) for the entire material.1002 Redefining Jewish Palestinian Aramaic as a linguistic entity in its own right (that is, the written idiom used by Palestinian Jews between the third and the eighth centuries c.e.) as opposed to synchronically describing a number of canonical texts that have also absorbed influences from other Jewish Aramaic varieties such as Targum Onqelos and Jonathan or from Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (see Section 6.2.2 below) and from Hebrew is a comparatively recent trend in scholarship. This approach governs Sokoloff 22002, the authoritative dictionary for the epigraphic and literary material on the basis of, by and large, the best available witnesses.1003 It only excludes Targum Pseudo-Jonathan because of the latter’s strong Babylonian influence, and the Targumim to the biblical books from Joshua to Chronicles, for which Levy 1867 has to be used. In much current research, Jewish Palestinian Aramaic is thus treated as an essentially homogeneous language variety despite the limited but probably significant dialectal differences (see below). For the epigraphic sources, such distinctions are regularly noted in Beyer’s glossary (1984–2004). Whereas Jewish Palestinian Aramaic lexicography can now rest on a much firmer footing than in previous periods, no complete grammar according to modern standards exists. Syntax in particular still remains to be investigated comprehensively. The phonology and morphology of the inscriptions have been included in Beyer’s full historical-comparative analysis of Palestinian epigraphic material (1984–2004). Fassberg 1990 provides a nuanced and very welldocumented description of the Palestinian Targumim according to the Geniza fragments from Cairo (eighth to fourteenth centuries c.e.),1004 which have a more reliable text than the later manuscripts (such as especially Codex Neophyti 1 from 1504 c.e.).1005 pnṭws for πάντως ‘absolutely’ in the former and numerous items relating to daily life (such as clothes) in the latter would generally presuppose a high degree of language contact with Greek as the pragmatically prominent spoken idiom. 1002 See Svedlund 1974: 6; Sokoloff 1978: 161. 1003 The reviews by Beyer 1992 and Kaufman 1994 provide a number of additions and corrections. 1004 Cf. also Beyer 1995b. 1005 Thanks to its size and state of preservation, the Codex Neophyti has given a major impulse to Targumic studies after its rediscovery had been announced by A. Díez Macho in 1956

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In the absence of more adequate works, Dalman 21905 remains the only complete description of phonology and morphology of the literary material, and the first to treat the idioms of these various compositions separately.1006 It still acts as an obvious point of departure, but it is based on the first printed editions of the texts at the exclusion of early manuscripts and inscriptions, hence it also cites a number of later corruptions. For this reason, one has to cross-check with the help of Sokoloff 22002 whether a certain form referred to by Dalman actually exists in authentic Palestinian sources. Two of the fifth- or sixth-century Midrashic compositions have been described by Odeberg 1939 on Bereshit Rabba, with a useful survey of the syntax, and Svedlund 1974 on Pesiqta de Rab Kahana, which also has a comparative analysis of the Aramaic variety represented by this text. Sokoloff 2011a provides a very concise and synchronic grammatical overview. Thanks to the existence of manuscripts with Palestinian or Tiberian vocalization, sporadic and secondary though it is, the phonology and morphology of Jewish Palestinian can be described with somewhat greater accuracy than is generally the case for older Aramaic.1007 Direct evidence confirms the existence of fricative allophones of the plosive stops in originally post-vocalic position and the subsequent loss of short unstressed vowels in open syllables (see Section  1.2.3). Although the pointing systems indicate vowel quality alone, there appears to be some indirect evidence for the preservation of contrasts between short and long vowels.1008 Characteristically Jewish Palestinian features of phonology and morphology, in contradistinction to Samaritan and Christian Palestinian, are the shift of the older first-person singular “imperfect” preformative /ʾ-/ (which also

and first published by the same scholar in 1968–1979. As a witness to Palestinian Aramaic, however, the Geniza fragments, incomplete though they are, deserve clear preference. Golomb 1985 provides a preliminary descriptive grammar of the Neophyti manuscript chiefly based on Genesis, but it has to be replaced in due course by a more complete and historically-sensitive study. 1006 Stevenson 1924 enjoys a wide popularity as an introductory manual with useful comparative paradigm tables, but it has no independent value as opposed to Dalman’s more extensive grammar. 1007 Fassberg 1990: 23–104; Beyer 1995b: 148–149. Khan 1997 largely depends on Fassberg but has some additional remarks. The vocalization does not always match the consonantal text, cf. Beyer 2004: 21 for examples. Note that the Tiberian pointing of Pseudo-Jonathan and the Fragment Targum in the printed editions is heavily patterned after Biblical Aramaic and Targum Onqelos and is thus unreliable. 1008 Cf. Beyer 1995b: 148–149.

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occurs in Palestinian Targumic texts) to /n-/ as in the plural,1009 frequent loss of /-n/ in the ending /-ayn/,1010 and a tendency of word-final /-m/ to change into /-n/.1011 Common Palestinian Aramaic traits that also occur in the Jewish material include the second-person feminine singular pronoun ʾty(n) ‘you’ besides ʾt (yet the corresponding “perfect”-afformative is apparently only attested as -t and not as *-ty),1012 the innovative third-person feminine plural “perfect” afformative /-ē(n)/, the third-person masculine singular possessive suffix /-ōy/ when attached to vocalic bases, and the first-person singular object suffix /-ī/ ‘me’.1013 By-forms in the “perfect” of roots IIIī (often patterned after sound roots) are also significant.1014 In the domain of syntax, Jewish Palestinian Aramaic reflects the integration of the participle into the verbal system as a present- and future-tense form at the expense of the “imperfect,” which generally becomes increasingly confined to modal usages in the post-Achaemenid period of Aramaic (see Section 4.1.2).1015 However, instances of linguistic variation in the corpus in its entirety are a fact. They have received different explanations along historical, geographical, and stylistic lines, but no consensus has been reached in present-day scholarship. At least in part, this is due to methodological problems inherent in the nature of the data. A diachronic approach that is based on the by and large linear evolution of a generally unified Jewish Palestinian Aramaic language1016 would ideally trace the development of one language variety in the same region over time. Yet the lion’s share of the securely datable epigraphic material comes from Judaea during the early Roman rule and, owing to changes in the socio-political situation, from Galilee in the Byzantine period. Possible chronological factors are thus difficult to isolate from other reasons for diversity in the corpus. As a result, it may be more plausible to assume a coexistence of at least a Galilean and a Judaean local dialect during the Byzantine period, either of 1009 See Section 6.1.1 above for references. 1010 Beyer 1984: 149; Khan 1997: 106; Sokoloff 2011a: 612. 1011 Kutscher 1976: 58–67 and 102; Beyer 1984: 149; Khan 1997: 106; Sokoloff 2011a: 612. 1012 See Beyer 1995b: 150. (According to Fassberg 1990: 164–165 and Sokoloff 2011a: 615, the second-person feminine singular of the “perfect” is unattested, but this seems to be an oversight.) 1013 Again, references are given in Section 6.1.1 above. 1014 Fassberg 1995. 1015 This also underlies the unique first-person singular “perfect” hwynh ‘I was’, which was formed from the active participle plus an enclitic first-person singular pronoun (Fassberg 1995: 47–50) and is thus similar to the new conjugations in Eastern Aramaic (see Section 7.1.1). 1016 Notably by Tal 1979.

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which has also produced a proper written language.1017 The spread of Galilean material to areas outside its place of origin would then have to be explained as a diffusion of the Galilean written idiom and could not be adduced as an argument against regional variation in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. While the social underpinnings of a competing use not only of local Aramaic vernaculars, but also of regionally distinct written traditions among Palestinian Jews, would require further investigation,1018 some apparent conservatisms in the inscriptions from South Judaea as opposed to the remaining epigraphic sources from the same period and in the same style or linguistic register could indeed be explained as geographical isoglosses. This applies in particular to Judaean third-person masculine plural “perfect” verbs which consistently have either -w for old /-ū/ or no ending vis-à-vis -wn for secondary /-ūn/ in Galilean1019 on the one hand and the singular numeral mʾ(h) /mā/ ‘one hundred’1020 instead of the plural (as regularly in Galiliean and Samaritan Aramaic) with hundreds from ‘200’ to ‘900’ on the other. Further peculiarities may include the feminine-singular imperative in -y for original /-ī/ instead of later -yn /-īn/ in Galilean and the corresponding “imperfect” form of verbs IIIī spelled with -yn instead of Galilean /-ay/,1021 but relevant attestations occur extremely rarely in the epigraphic sources. Likewise, monophthongization of the diphthongs */aw/ and */ay/ may have been more advanced in Judaea than in Galilee, where they were preserved in open syllables, but it is difficult to verify in unvocalized texts due to the possibility of 1017 So most rigorously Beyer 1984: 62–66 and 1986: 46–50, with additions in 2004: 39. He posits the rise of a proper Galilean literary language around the time of Herod, but this remains conjectural in the absence of written evidence antedating the third or fourth century c.e. Cf. also Lipiński 2014: 156–157. 1018 It may be significant that Galilean synagogues also exhibit many architectural peculiarities, see Hachlili 2013: 155–162. 1019 Compare “Judaean” ʿbdw ‘they made’ in texts from En-Gedi (Beyer 1984: 364, yyEN 4, l. 2) and Maon near Gaza (Beyer 1984: 366, yyMA 1, l. 2; note also yhbw ‘they gave’ in l. 4) as well as yhb ‘they gave’ in a synagogue inscription from Eshtemoa in South Judaea (Beyer 1984: 365, yyES 1, l. 2) and one from Susiya nearby (Beyer 1984: 367, yySU 2, l. 3) with “Galilean” yhbwn ‘they gave’ in synagogue inscriptions from Gadara near Galilee (Beyer 1984: 384– 385, ggHA 2, l. 2; cf. dhbwn ‘who gave’ in ggHA 1, l. 8, and ggHA 3, l. 4; dyhbw[n] in ggHA 2, l. 4, and dyhb in ggHA 4, l. 3, by contrast are dubious) as well as Rehov (Beyer 1994: 253, ggBS 7, l. 1) and presumably Tiberias (Beyer 1994: 257, ggTI 5, l. 2: dyh]bwn) and ʾtndbwn ‘they donated’ in one from Beth Alpha near Beth Shean (Beyer 1984: 376–377, ggBA 1, l. 4). All inscriptions come from the fourth or fifth centuries c.e. 1020 Numerous examples can be found in the dated tomb inscriptions from Zoar south of the Dead Sea, Beyer 2004: 301–309. 1021 So Beyer 1994: 266 and 2004: 38–39.

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occasional historical spellings.1022 A handful of inscriptions and amulets from Transjordan seem to agree with the Judaean epigraphic texts against the rest.1023 However, they do not obviously constitute a dialect in its own right with clearly identifiable peculiarities.1024 Since so little Judaean material has survived from the Byzantine period, it is thus intrinsically difficult to determine how representative and statistically significant these minute differences actually are for drawing dialectal boundaries. A geographical explanation of such instances of variation appears, at any rate, somewhat less subjective than a purely stylistic one that operates on the basis of different registers in which the texts were written.1025 Given the distribution of relevant by-forms in epigraphic material that can be assigned to certain regions and periods with a reasonable degree of confidence and represents the same genre conventions (in this case formulaic memorial or dedicatory inscriptions), it seems premature to deny any geographical distinctions in Jewish Palestinian whatsoever. Indeed, at least a minor cleavage between the otherwise very closely-related Galilean and Judaean dialects appears to be the best explanation of the instances of micro-variation just outlined. As a language of traditional religious literature, however, Aramaic as it was written in Galilee soon outgrew its role as an originally regional idiom and spread throughout Palestine. The similarities that unite Jewish Palestinian Aramaic in its various manifestations are thus far more numerous and significant than the few differences. 6.2.2 Jewish Palestinian Aramaic and the Language of the Targumim Contrary to Samaritans and Palestinian Christians, Jews produced religious literature in two entirely different areas, Palestine and Babylon, each with its own dialect. Both areas remained in contact over the centuries and were even formally united under the caliphate of the Umayyads (622–750 c.e.). Unbroken contact between Western and Eastern forms of Jewish Aramaic thus by necessity accompanied the earlier history of transmission of the literary sources, especially after Aramaic ceased to be spoken natively and was replaced by 1022 Beyer 1984: 53 and 117–120; 1986: 38. 1023 Cf. the third-person masculine plural “perfect” forms in -w for older /-ū/ (instead of -wn /-ūn/) ʿbdw ‘they made’ in two third- and fourth-century c.e. inscriptions from Dabbura in the Golan (Beyer 1984: 396, ooDA 4, l. 1) and Qaṣrin east of Capernaum (Beyer 1984: 399, ooUA 1, l. 3). Compare also rdpw ‘they pursued’ in a sixth- or seventh-century c.e. amulet (Beyer 1994: 262–264, ooXX 8, l. 15). 1024 Beyer’s “Eastern Jordanian” dialect group (1984: 50, 54, and 65–66; 2004: 40) is thus hypothetical. 1025 As has been proposed for certain suffixes by Yahalom 1993: 332–333.

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Arabic as the dominant vernacular among Jews. In addition, Aramaic’s sisteridiom Hebrew, the sacred language of most of the Bible and a substantial part of Rabbinic literature, and Biblical Aramaic, an offshoot of Achaemenid Official Aramaic in Palestine not directly related to either the Western or the Eastern dialect group, were also sources of interference. When the cultural centre of medieval Jewry first shifted to Babylon and later to Europe, the genuine Palestinian variety of Aramaic was eclipsed by Jewish Babylonian Aramaic and the language of the Targumim Onqelos and Jonathan. The scribes of those later periods had thus much more exposure to the latter corpora, which in turn caused numerous distortions in the course of the manuscript transmission of Jewish Palestinian.1026 As a result of such inner-Aramaic interference, the exact linguistic affiliation in particular of the various Targumim and their connection with Palestine, where, judging from early examples among the Aramaic Qumran writings (see Section  5.2.2), the tradition of Jewish Aramaic Bible translations once originated,1027 is debated. Scholars widely agree that the Geniza fragments of manuscripts containing Palestinian Targumic texts to the Pentateuch (edited by Klein 1986)1028 that predate the eleventh century c.e. are free of Babylonian influence and exhibit especially close parallels with other Palestinian witnesses. Owing to their prominence in the liturgy, Pentateuchal readings would have been the first to be rendered verse by verse into Aramaic when the congregation, and possibly individual readers in private or scholastic settings as well, could no longer understand Hebrew or at least needed an actualizing commentary interwoven with the translation. A number of minor linguistic inconsistencies and the unknown date have stirred some controversy as to the time of origin1029: proposals range from the first century c.e. to the Arab period, but there is now general consensus that the Palestinian Targum, as it appears in its different recensions, dates to the third century c.e. at the earliest.1030 1026 As already recognized by Rosenthal 1939: 115–116. See also Sokoloff 1978: 162–165. 1027 See Fraade 1992 for an investigation into the social context from which the practice of Jewish Aramaic translations of Scripture emerged, with additional remarks by Alexander 1999: 80–82 on the use of Targum texts in early education. The origin of the root trgm ‘to translate’ is somewhat debated; in the past, it has occasionally been viewed as an Anatolian loan, but this could never be demonstrated and seems quite unlikely given the other, and plausible, Semitic cognates (cf. Gzella 2011a: 446). 1028 Cf. Klein 1983 and Fassberg 1990: 322 for additional publications. The relevant manuscripts, modern editions, and tools for study have also briefly been discussed by Lipiński 2014: 156–165. 1029 Fassberg 1990: 3–5 has a clear and concise review of various positions. 1030 So Kaufman 1985.

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Essentially, linguistic variation in the Palestinian Targumim can be explained as an interaction between a more conservative layer that contains some historical spellings (especially etymological ʾ in cases where it had long disappeared in pronunciation, as in rʾš ‘head’ and rarely in the masculine-singular emphatic state; š for */ś/ > /s/; or “degeminating” writings like ʾnth ‘woman’) and older morphological forms (for instance, the very frequent masculine-plural afformative -w for etymological /-ū/ in the third-person “perfect” and the imperative except for roots IIIī; the original first-person singular “imperfect” preformative in /ʾ/; a few derived-stem infinitives without /m-/ prefix) on the one hand and specifically Palestinian innovations on the other (most notably, the afformative -wn for /-ōn/ instead of /-īw/ in the third-person masculine plural of the “perfect” and the masculine-plural imperative with verbs IIIī and the first-person singular “imperfect” preformative in /n-/). Hence, the language of the Palestinian Targum has been described as a literary idiom that combines elements of the waning Palestinian offshoot of Achaemenid Official Aramaic (sometimes also termed “Jewish Literary Aramaic”; see Section 4.4.2), which served as the old standard language and also underlies much of the Aramaic writings from Qumran (Section  5.2.2), with peculiarities of the Palestinian local dialect that outgrew its role as a vernacular and became increasingly employed in writing.1031 A lower degree of linguistic standardization than with Targum Onqelos would then result in some fluidity between these two layers and cause a certain measure of by-forms occurring side by side in the transmitted texts. This variation can be interpreted synchronically by positing an artificial mixed Palestinian Aramaic language for literary purposes (Beyer’s “Galilean Targumic Aramaic”)1032 or diachronically as the result of a linear linguistic evolution of Palestinian Aramaic.1033 If one believes in the diagnostic significance of the minute differences between Galilean and Judaean Aramaic as indicative of distinct, coexisting geographical varieties (as has been argued in Section 6.2.1 above), some specifically Palestinian features in the Targum, in particular the afformative /-ōn/ in masculine-plural forms of verbs IIIī and perhaps the preservation of /ay/ (indicated by the digraph yy in unvocalized 1031 So Beyer 1984: 37–40 (1986: 23–25) and 2004: 20–21, with a more extensive list of features (not all of which have equal diagnostic value, though). Especially the significance of syntactic phenomena, such as word order and the increasing use of the participle for present and future tense instead of the “imperfect,” merits further investigation, because they reproduce more general developments in Aramaic. 1032 See the previous note. 1033 Tal 1979.

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texts),1034 could then be associated with the Galilean dialect.1035 In that case, they would support a geographical rather than a diachronic explanation. It seems that only a thorough historical-comparative evaluation of the entire Palestinian material can put such individual instances of inner-Aramaic variation in perspective and thereby advance the discussion. Other languages play a minor role in the formation of the idiom of the Palestinian Targum: Greek influence appears to be mostly restricted to a number of lexical loans, while the shift to Arabic as the main vernacular of Palestinian Jews may very occasionally result in details of the later Tiberian pointing of some manuscripts.1036 However one wants to account for the specific linguistic code, the Palestinian provenance of the Targum fragments from the Geniza seems clear. The Palestinian character of Targum Pseudo-Jonathan (or “Yerushalmi I”) with its well-nigh complete text of the Pentateuch and substantial expansions (the most recent edition of the one surviving manuscript is Clarke 1984), by contrast, has been evaluated rather differently in twentieth-century scholarship: some relate it to Targum Onqelos with sporadic Palestinian influence, whereas others take the opposite approach.1037 A more recent review of the lexicon featuring in this text has once again reinforced the mixed character of the language, to the extent that no clear geographical association emerges. Instead, it can, so it appears, best be described as a unified literary idiom that employs a morphology similar to Targum Onqelos and draws its vocabulary from many different varieties of Aramaic, but that also surfaces in the Targum texts to Job and Psalms. Since the final redaction is usually supposed to have taken place after the mid-seventh century c.e. at the earliest on grounds of possible historical allusions in the text, the language has been termed “Late Jewish Literary Aramaic.”1038 The late date would then also explain the reasonable number of artificial forms. The obvious conclusion is, at any rate, that Targum Pseudo-Jonathan cannot act as a witness to genuine Palestinian Aramaic but constitutes a category in its own right, and perhaps was not even composed in Palestine. The language of the Fragment Targum to the Pentateuch (or “Yerushalmi II”), of which, for unknown reasons, only individual verses or at most selections that have purposefully been extracted survive (collected and edited by Klein 1980), appears to be different from Pseudo-Jonathan in that Babylonian 1034 1035 1036 1037 1038

On the other hand, */aw/ had already been monophthongized to /ō/, cf. Fassberg 1990: 58. As suggested by Beyer 1995b: 147. Cf. Beyer 2004: 21 for two examples. See Fassberg 1990: 1–2 for essential bibliography. Kaufman 2013a (originally 1993). Occasionally, a much earlier date is proposed.

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Aramaic seems to have had a less strong impact on it.1039 Spelling and morphology of the Fragment Targum contain some conservative forms, and it is generally associated with the Palestinian Targumic tradition,1040 but this would still have to be verified in the light of a more rigorous linguistic analysis. The date of composition remains entirely unclear. Such variation in the surviving textual forms confirms the well-established view that the Palestinian Targumic tradition has never been subjected to a unifying and definitive redaction. A particularly extensive debate, finally, revolves around the origin of the two authoritative Rabbinic Targumim, Onqelos to the Pentateuch and Jonathan to the Prophets (edited by Sperber 1959–1973).1041 Onqelos above all exercised a major influence on the production of later Jewish literature as well as legal discussions in Aramaic; it also affected the manuscript transmission of other traditional texts, including even the Samaritan Targum.1042 Both Onqelos and Jonathan have been accepted as official in the fifth century c.e. in Babylonia, where they also underwent their final redaction and much later received a fixed vocalization according to the local Eastern pronunciation. According to the traditional majority opinion, however, they were originally composed in Palestine. Adherents of this view differ as to the extent of the linguistic influences from Babylonian Aramaic that have resulted from subsequent reworking. Others, conversely, have argued that it is impossible to demonstrate whether a complete version of the text redacted in Babylonia had already been drafted in Palestine.1043 A brief review of the relevant evidence may further illustrate the problem. Discoveries of earlier Jewish Aramaic texts from Palestine now provide a better comparative framework in the light of which numerous non-Eastern 1039 See there references in Fassberg 1990: 2. 1040 Cf. Doubles 1968. 1041 See Beyer 1984: 35–37 and 1986: 21–23 with supplementary bibliography in 2004: 18–19. The only dictionary specifically dedicated to Onqelos, Cook 2008, is a simple word-list, although it does contain references to scholarly dictionaries of other Aramaic varieties for further study; Levy 1867 also covers the other Targumim known at that time and contains valuable information on meaning and usage. A modern reference grammar does not exist, but Dalman 21905 and, for less advanced purposes, Stevenson 1924 provide some guidance. A number of syntactical topics (nominal determination, the morpho-syntax of the numerals, genitive constructions, verbal syntax, and word order) have been discussed thoroughly by Kuty 2010. 1042 As has been demonstrated by Tal 2008. 1043 Fassberg 1990: 1 summarizes the main positions, Kuty 2010: 5–14 has a more extensive discussion. See also Rosenthal 1939: 127–131 and Goshen-Gottstein 1978 for an evaluation of older literature.

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linguistic features in Targum Onqelos and Jonathan can be identified. Some of them correspond to common Western Aramaic retentions inherited from an older stage of the language that have been replaced by innovations in Eastern Aramaic (see Section 6.1.1 above); the most salient and diagnostically significant among them are the third-person “imperfect” preformative /y-/ (instead of Eastern Aramaic /l-/ or /n-/) and the masculine-plural emphatic state ending /-ayyā/ (in contradistinction to Eastern Aramaic /-ē/). These traits on their own cannot substantiate a classification as Western Aramaic, because they could, at least in theory, also constitute archaic survivals in another, literary, variety. A few others with a likewise regular distribution, however, such as especially the direct object marker yt /yāt/, are known to have been productive only in the western part of the Aramaic speech area. The non-Eastern layer of Targum Onqelos and Jonathan thus largely reflects the Palestinian offshoot of Achaemenid Official Aramaic, originally a local literary language that also underlies the Qumran Aramaic compositions and occasionally surfaces in the Palestinian Targum. By contrast, a second, smaller, group of linguistic features can be associated specifically with Eastern Aramaic: less frequently, but of particular significance for the dialectal affiliation, the emphatic-state masculine plural in /-ē/, as in all Eastern Aramaic languages since the Hellenistic and early Roman periods at the latest1044; and perhaps also the D-stem passive participle according to the pattern */makottab/ instead of */makattab/ as well as derived-stem infinitives with the vowel sequence /ō-ē/.1045 The lexicon, too, combines words that occur predominantly in texts generally considered to be of Western provenance on the one hand and distinctively Eastern lexemes on the other, but the former seem to predominate.1046 This presumably two-stage interaction of a Jewish Palestinian literary idiom as the base layer and a Jewish Babylonian veneer in the course of later revision has produced a new, supra-regional (perhaps even intentionally so), and highly standardized written code (termed “Babylonian Targumic” by Beyer). It constitutes a linguistic entity in its own right, can no longer be subsumed under 1044 On this last trait, see Section 5.5.1. Interestingly, Garr 2008 suggests a different functional range of both emphatic-state endings, with /-ē/ being confined to collectives, lower degrees of referentiality and nonunique identifiability, but this does not preclude that they originate from two distinct dialect clusters. Quite on the contrary, it occurs fairly frequently in languages that a coexisting by-form receives a new function somewhat distinct from the usual form and is thereby preserved. 1045 Beyer 1984: 36–37 and 1986: 22, yet the specifically Eastern nature of these two seems not entirely certain; they deserve further investigation. 1046 See the examples and evaluation in Cook 2008: xi–xiv.

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Palestinian Aramaic, and was long considered a model for linguistic imitation in  Babylonian Jewry.1047 As a consequence, its vocabulary has rightly been excluded from strictly dialect-based handbooks such as Sokoloff 22002 and 2002. In the evolution of Jewish traditional writings, then, genuine Palestinian Aramaic has over time been overshadowed by mixed or deregionalized literary varieties of the language. In this amalgamated form, Aramaic literature outlived the use of Aramaic as an idiom commonly spoken by Jews: Arabic became the vernacular of most Near Eastern Jews, but it did not replace Aramaic as a classical written means of expression that established a linguistic continuity of religious and exegetical discourse over the centuries. Its close ties with Scripture bolstered the characteristic Hebrew-Aramaic bilingualism of Jewish literature and lore and eventually gave Aramaic a status close, but not entirely identical, to Hebrew.1048 6.3

Samaritan Aramaic

While the existence of Jewish Palestinian literature had at least been known in Semitic scholarship before the nineteenth century, even though its study was largely neglected, Samaritan exegetical traditions remained long inaccessible. The variant readings of the Hebrew Pentateuch in the Samaritan recension1049 and the Samaritan Targum, it is true, had been easily available since their inclusion in the seventeenth-century Paris Polyglot,1050 but only in the nineteenth century did Samaritan Aramaic writings become the object of scholarly discussion. Nöldeke managed to demonstrate their close affinity with other forms of Palestinian Aramaic,1051 and subsequent research, especially a more 1047 Beyer 1984: 37 and 1986: 22; cf. already Rosenthal 1939: 131. Müller-Kessler 2001, too, argues, with a somewhat different emphasis, in favour of an artificial character of the language of Targum Onqelos and Jonathan. Cook 1994, conversely, connects the ambiguous dialectal affiliation of these texts with a “central” dialect of Aramaic situated between the Western and the Eastern group. However, since there is no independent evidence either for such a “central” Aramaic variety or indeed for a Jewish scholarly milieu between Palestine and Babylon that could have produced these texts, other explanations for the coexistence of different dialectal traits in Targum Onqelos and Jonathan should be preferred. A detailed review of the linguistic affiliation of Targum Jonathan to Samuel (Kuty 2010: 243–251) shows its proximity to the Palestinian literary language. 1048 Cf. Fraade 1992: 270. 1049 See Knoppers 2013: 178–190 for a recent assessment of the textual relation. 1050 Gzella 2012a: 134 and 153–154. 1051 Rosenthal 1939: 133–143; cf. now also Lipiński 2014: 165–170.

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systematic investigation of Christian Palestinian (see Section 6.4 below), has confirmed this impression. Samaritan Aramaic as used by the religious group of the Samaritans, who broke with Judaism at some point in the mid-second century b.c.e. after a period of common development,1052 is apparently based on a regional and now forgotten Western Aramaic dialect from Samaria. The Samaritan religion still has a handful of adherents who still live in Shekhem and Holon near Tel-Aviv, but they have long abandoned the use of Aramaic in favour of Arabic and, in modern times, Israeli Hebrew.1053 Since the Samaritans never seem to have founded Aramaic-speaking centres of learning outside Palestine (although they lived in various places around the Mediterranean), the Western character of Samaritan Aramaic is preserved throughout the textual evidence. The early Samaritan scribes adopted Judaean spelling conventions, but Samaritans graphically represent their language until today with letters that continue the native epigraphic Hebrew alphabet (“Palaeo-Hebrew”) instead of the Achaemenid chancellery ductus from which the other Aramaic alphabets emerged. Between the third or fourth and the thirteenth centuries c.e., Samaritan Aramaic was employed as a written language in a few surviving inscriptions and a collection of liturgical and commentary compositions of Palestinian provenance, and presumably also served as a vernacular until about the eighth century, when it was replaced by Arabic. By contrast, no direct linguistic ties can be established with the extremely brief second-century b.c.e. Aramaic inscriptions from Mount Gerizim in Achaemenid orthography, which feature non-Palestinian historical spellings such as the relative marker /dī/ as zy (see Section 5.2). Samaritan Aramaic also remained free of later Eastern Aramaic influence that affected Jewish and Christian Palestinian literature in the course of its transmission. Owing to the general language situation, it was, however, in contact first with Greek, then with Arabic. 6.3.1 Samarian and Samaritan Aramaic One may thus suppose that Samaritan Aramaic as the literary language, and presumably also as the colloquial, of the religious community of the Samaritans is largely based on an older Western Aramaic vernacular used in the region of Samaria; it betrays little impact of Achaemenid Official Aramaic.1054 This 1052 See Knoppers 2013 for a recent survey. 1053 Copious information on the Samaritans, their history, and their religion can be found in Crown (ed.) 1989 and Crown – Pummer – Tal (eds.) 1993. For more bibliographical references, see Beyer 2004: 40. 1054 Beyer 1984: 53–54; 1986: 39.

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“Samarian” dialect (a purely geographical notion as opposed to the religious and cultural affinity expressed by the term “Samaritan”), however, cannot be reconstructed with any confidence, hence its origins remain completely elusive. The received pronunciation of the few Aramaic passages that have been incorporated into the Samaritan liturgy as it is celebrated today has undergone considerable influence from the orally transmitted pronunciation tradition of the Samaritan Pentateuch and can only be used for historical-comparative purposes with much caution. The earliest manuscripts with literary texts have been written in the thirteenth century c.e., that is, during a period when Samaritan Aramaic was presumably no longer spoken. Hence the inscriptions, few and short though they are, still offer the most reliable guidance for a correct, though of course largely incomplete, description of Samaritan Aramaic. Their orthographic standard sides with other ancient Palestinian traditions as opposed to Achaemenid Official Aramaic, most obviously in the use of phonetic h for word-final /-ā/ in the emphatic state instead of etymological ʾ. The graphic distinction of the etymological laryngeals and pharyngeals /ʾ/, /h/, /ḥ/, and /ʿ/, which had been lost in the pronunciation of the Samarian dialect of Aramaic, also points to external influence in the creation of Samaritan spelling practice, since one would otherwise expect a situation as in Mandaic, where these graphemes mainly came to function as vowel letters without any consistent connection with the consonantal phonemes they once denoted (see Section 7.3.1).1055 Systematic differences as opposed to the Achaemenid orthography underlying the brief fragments of Hellenistic inscriptions from Mount Gerizim on the one hand and a gap of several centuries before the appearance of the first proper Samaritan epigraphs in the fourth century c.e. on the other suggest that Samaritan Aramaic, like Christian Palestinian (see Section 6.4 below), had given rise to a literary tradition only at some point in the opening centuries of the first millennium c.e., presumably around 400 c.e. The driving forces that triggered its emergence and the immediate prehistory of the Samaritan version of the old Hebrew script remain unknown.1056 It has been proposed, not altogether implausibly, that the rise of Samaritan writing resulted from an attempt to preserve native cultural and religious identity as a reaction against the highly successful Christian mission.1057 More generally, this development may have coincided with a reorganization of the Samaritan community in the 1055 Cf. Beyer 1984: 66–67; 1986: 50–51. 1056 Beyer 2004: 40 suggests that the Samaritans had taken it over from the Sadducees, but this is hard to verify. 1057 So Barag 2009: 321.

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fourth century c.e. after a period of assimilation to paganism according to medieval Samaritan chronicles, but their historical value can only be determined after meticulous source criticism.1058 The surviving Samaritan Aramaic inscriptions amount to no more than a handful and date between the fourth and the fourteenth centuries c.e. They contain brief memorial notes of the type ‘Remembered be…’ and mostly record the benefactors of local synagogues and their good deeds, just like many of their Jewish Aramaic counterparts.1059 The material can be accessed in Beyer 1984: 399–402, who also includes it in his grammatical analyses and lexicon. Other inscriptions of the same type that were found in Samaritan synagogues are composed in Greek1060; one has a Greek text in Samaritan letters, which highlights the use of the script as a graphic marker of distinctiveness.1061 In addition, a few epigraphs on lamps and other smaller objects as well as a capital from Emmaus and a lintel from Beit el-Ma contain individual words or short phrases in Hebrew quoted from the Samaritan Pentateuch, the latter inscription even a short passage from the Ten Commandments according to the characteristically Samaritan reading of Deuteronomy 27:4 with a reference to Mount Gerizim instead of Ebal, as in the received Masoretic Text.1062 Manuscript evidence, conversely, only begins after the period in which Samaritan Aramaic was actively used. Nonetheless, parts of liturgical poetry (piyyutim) and the Midrashic collection Tibat Marqe (a set of meditations on certain Pentateuchal passages, occasionally also labelled Memar Marqah) are commonly assumed to date between the third or fourth and the eighth centuries c.e. The same may apply to the original layer of the Samaritan Targum to the Pentateuch before its later reworking that is reflected, to varying degrees, in the surviving manuscripts.1063 Absolute dates are difficult to ascertain, but an origin in the Byzantine period can be supported by the genuine Aramaic character of the first and parts of the second book of Tibat Marqe as well as the linguistically similar sections of the earliest prayers, suggesting that the oldest material belongs to a time when Samaritan still served as a vernacular among the Samaritans. Some Greek and Roman names as well as the absence of 1058 Cf. Tal 2011: 620–621; Belayche 2001: 70 with n. 151. On the chronicles in general, cf. Knoppers 2013: 191. 1059 See Stadel 2012 for a comprehensive analysis. 1060 See Di Segni 2009: 353–354 with bibliography in n. 4. 1061 Beyer 1984: 400, from Beth Shean/Scythopolis, where Greek presence was strong (Belayche 2001: 258–262). 1062 Barag 2009. 1063 Tal 2011: 622–623 and 2013: 17–19 provides the most relevant references to editions and translations.

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obvious Arabic or Islamic influences in the said parts further corroborate the hypothesis of their early date, yet without providing conclusive proof. Unfortunately, then, the diachronic study of Samaritan Aramaic does not rest on a similarly solid foundation as Jewish Palestinian. The only comprehensive dictionary so far is Tal 2000 (with extensive additions and corrections by Müller-Kessler 2003 and Sokoloff 2003b). Tal 2013 serves as a convenient descriptive grammar (based on the traditional Samaritan pronunciation where available) with an annotated chrestomathy section and a glossary; a brief survey of the most salient grammatical phenomena can also be found in Tal 2011. Macuch 1982 has a much fuller documentation of phonology and morphology but is more difficult to use, could not yet incorporate the new editions of the Samaritan Targum and Tibat Marqe, and does not always prove reliable in historical-comparative matters; older manuals have to be consulted with even more caution. Fortunately, Stadel 2013b now provides a full and up-to-date discussion of the syntax. Since the only source for the pronunciation of Samaritan Aramaic is the oral transmission of the liturgical recitation in the community over countless generations with considerable interference from Samaritan Hebrew and, evidently, a number of secondary changes,1064 the original phonology can but partially be reconstructed. If in doubt, only non-Hebrew features should be regarded as genuinely Aramaic. The gradual merger of the laryngeals and pharyngeals /ʾ/, /h/, /ḥ/, and /ʿ/ into /ʾ/ and their subsequent loss, at any rate, is commonly accepted.1065 It triggered the reanalysis of verbal roots containing one of these sounds in the slot of the second or third root letter as “hollow” (that is, vowel-medial) or vowel-final allomorphs, which regularly disguises their original forms.1066 Subsequently, the corresponding graphemes often came to serve as vowel letters in manuscripts,1067 but they are still spelled historically correctly in the few known inscriptions. As in other Aramaic languages of this period, short vowels are confined to closed syllables and the diphthongs /aw/ and /ay/ have monophthongized to /ō/ and /ē/ respectively.1068 The disappearance of unstressed long word-final vowels may have caused a merger of the second-person feminine singular 1064 Such as the merger of the fricative and plosive allophones of the stops into plosives, although medieval grammarians still distinguish between plosive and fricative reflexes of /b/, /p/, and /t/ (Tal 2011: 625; 2013: 25–26). 1065 Beyer 1984: 66 and 103; Tal 2011: 625. 1066 See Tal 2011: 626–627 for examples. 1067 Tal 2013: 28. 1068 Tal 2011: 625–626; cf. Beyer 1984: 54 and 1986: 39.

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“perfect” (originally distinguished by /-ī/) with the corresponding masculine form, but both were at least graphically distinguished.1069 It is not clear whether this difference was merely artificial or whether it had a basis in pronunciation; it also affects the second-person feminine singular independent personal pronoun ʾty. In the case of the third-person feminine plural of the “perfect,” the innovative Western Aramaic afformative /-ī/ or /-ē/ is pronounced in traditional recitation.1070 Loss of intervocalic /-h-/ resulted in a third-person masculine singular possessive suffix /-ō/ ‘his’ when attached to a vocalic base.1071 In addition, qātōl verbal nouns could act as by-forms of the basic-stem active participle.1072 The lexicon has numerous correspondences with other Palestinian dialects of Aramaic, but also a considerable share of idiosyncrasies that had long obscured the Western Aramaic background of Samaritan Aramaic before it was identified by Nöldeke.1073 6.3.2 The Languages of the Samaritans Close correspondences between Samaritan Aramaic as reflected in the epigraphic evidence as well as in the older layers of some works of religious literature on the one hand and the rest of contemporary Western Aramaic on the other strongly suggest that this variety, too, has roots in the wider dialect landscape of Palestinian Aramaic vernaculars (see Section 6.3.1 above). The workings of secondary phonetic changes, especially the reduction of the laryngeals and pharyngeals, and embryonic stages of some syntactic phenomena later fully developed in Western Neo-Aramaic dialects,1074 add support to the hypothesis that Samaritan Aramaic served as a spoken language of the Samaritans during the classical period between the emergence of a written tradition in the third or fourth century c.e. and the spread of Arabic in Palestine after the eighth century. Samaritans, at any rate, maintained contacts with other groups in Roman and Byzantine Palestine,1075 and Hebrew and Greek were also in use.1076 Since no other Hebrew texts, such as exegetical literature or documentary material, besides a proper version of the Pentateuch are known to have circulated among 1069 Beyer 1984: 54 and 67; 1986: 39 and 51. 1070 Tal 2013: 53. Evidence is lacking for second-person feminine singular “perfects,” since they do not feature in the Aramaic sections of the Samaritan liturgy. 1071 Beyer 1984: 54 and 1986: 39; Tal 2013: 32. 1072 Tal 2013: 94. 1073 See Tal 2011: 627 for examples. 1074 See Stadel 2013c. 1075 Cf. Knoppers 2013: 220–237 for the relevant evidence. 1076 Van der Horst 2001a provides a summary.

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the Samaritans in pre-Islamic times,1077 it is fair to assume that Hebrew acted as a purely literary idiom and was basically restricted to liturgical functions. This can be corroborated by the lack of any conclusive evidence for Hebrew being spoken natively outside the Samaritan community (see Section  6.1.2 above).1078 A few quotations from the Samaritan Pentateuch in inscriptions (including an Aramaic one)1079 draw attention to the role of brief tags in Hebrew as a marker of cultural and religious affiliation. By contrast, indications for the use of Greek by Samaritans, especially in Palestine, but also in the Diaspora (for which there is historical evidence from the third century b.c.e. onwards) on the Greek islands, in Egypt, and elsewhere across the Roman empire,1080 are relatively more numerous. One should also note that with some Greek inscriptions, it is impossible to tell whether they were erected by Jews or by Samaritans, so the actual Greek corpus may have been even larger. The scarcity of the epigraphic material precludes any reliable assessment of the extent of Aramaic-Greek bilingualism among Samaritans between the third and the eighth centuries c.e. All one can say with reasonable certainty is that at least some members of the community seem to have preferred Greek occasionally or regularly as a medium of written expression, regardless of the insoluble problem as to what degree they had actually mastered it and in which communicative situations exactly they used it. Since Greek was a major language in Roman Palestine and ancient sources contain several reports about contacts between Samaritans and other inhabitants of Palestine, this is hardly surprising. Greek-speaking Samaritans from the various Diaspora communities who, for whatever reason, temporarily or permanently lived in Palestine will no doubt have contributed to the prominence of Greek among speakers of the homeland.1081 As a result, the lexicon of Samaritan Aramaic contains a fair share of Greek lexical loans. In particular the incorporation of function words like ṭṭh ‘then’ from τότε1082 would normally presuppose a regular active use of the donor language instead of merely sporadic contact (since 1077 Samaritan Hebrew as an artificial literary language patterned after the Pentateuch saw a short-lived revival in the eleventh and twelfth centuries c.e., see Florentin 2005: 33–58. 1078 So rightly van der Horst 2001a: 180–182. 1079 Cf. the short quotation of Numbers 10:35 in the first line of the fourteenth-century Samaritan Aramaic inscription from ʿAwarta near Nablus (Beyer 1984: 399). The synagogue inscription from Yamnia (eighth to eleventh century c.e.) has an Aramaic memorial expression at the beginning, followed by a quotation from the Decalogue in lines 3–20 (Beyer 1984: 400). 1080 References in van der Horst 2001a: 185–190; see also Knoppers 2013: 171–172. 1081 Cf. van der Horst 2001a: 190–191. 1082 References in Tal 2000: 309, s.v.

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nouns and adjectives are generally borrowed with much greater frequency than conjunctions and particles) and thus points to a certain degree of longterm bilingualism in the speech community. The subsequent shift to Arabic as the main vernacular of Palestinian and Diaspora Samaritans after the eighth century c.e. is reflected in clear traces of Arabic influence in the third to the sixth books of Tibat Marqe and perhaps very occasionally also in the epigraphic material.1083 Similar effects of Arabic interference can be better observed in the later Christian Palestinian Aramaic inscriptions (see Section 6.4.2 below); they may resemble the situation among other former Aramaic-speaking groups. Between the eighth and the thirteenth centuries c.e., Samaritan Aramaic thus seems to have been reduced to a literary language that was mastered only by scribes and religious authorities.1084 This later, written, form of Samaritan Aramaic then constituted the basis of an artificial mixed code, enriched by Hebrew and Arabic elements, in which Samaritan scholars from the fourteenth century c.e. composed a number of religious and secular writings.1085 As was the case with Jews, the religious p ­ restige of Hebrew and Aramaic contributed to their survival as literary idioms among the Samaritan community even when its members spoke and wrote Arabic. 6.4

Christian Palestinian Aramaic

Unlike Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, which continues an unbroken use of Aramaic in writing in Palestine since the Achaemenid period at the latest, but similarly to Samaritan Aramaic, Christian Palestinian is not part of a known earlier literary tradition.1086 It derives from the vernacular spoken by Palestinian Christians (termed “Melkites,” that is, “Royalists,” after they sided with the 1083 Beyer 1984: 399 suggests the divine title tʿlh ‘the exalted one’ in the fourteenth-century tomb inscription from ʿAwarta (line 8) is Arabic. 1084 Florentin 2005: 18–32; Stadel 2013c: 334. 1085 Comprehensively described by Florentin 2005: 59–356. 1086 Beyer 1984: 67–69 and 1986: 51–53. He suggests an Eastern Jordanian dialect as the origin of Christian Palestinian (cf. also 1984: 65–66; 1986: 50). However, it is not entirely clear whether the surviving evidence makes it possible to distinguish between Aramaic dialects in Judaea and Eastern Jordan, since not more than a handful of isoglosses can be posited for the latter (see Beyer 1984: 55 and 1986: 39–40), and most of those also occur elsewhere (e.g., loss of unstressed word-final long vowels, monophthongization of diphthongs, and occasional shift of intervocalic /y/ to /ʾ/). An Eastern Jordanian origin of Christian Palestinian is of course nonetheless possible, but the same is true for other parts of Palestine (Rosenthal 1939: 153–156).

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Byzantine Emperor at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 c.e.), exhibits a number of similarities with Jewish Palestinian (specifically the Judaean variety, see Section 6.2.1 above), with which it may have been mutually intelligible,1087 and has given rise to a considerable local use during the Byzantine period. The language is attested in a few dozens of brief public and private inscriptions (the latter mostly testifying to personal piety and reflecting spoken discourse in spontaneous prayers like mry ysws ʾtrḥm ‘Lord Jesus, have mercy!’),1088 manuscripts with Bible translations as well as liturgical texts, and, judging from one surviving short letter on papyrus to the abbot of the monastery of Castellion at Khirbed Mird near Jerusalem with a request for prayer, also in written communication. These texts cover the total period from about the fifth to the thirteenth centuries c.e. The origin of the known manuscripts generally cannot be determined with confidence, but almost all inscriptions have been found in some twenty small towns and villages in the immediate vicinity of Jerusalem in North Judaea and Amman in Transjordan, both areas with a significant Christian population since the fourth century c.e., and only a handful further afield. Consequently, this appears to be the original heartland of the third literary tradition of Western Aramaic in Late Antiquity. 6.4.1 Christian Palestinian Aramaic: Language and Use When Christian Palestinian (a term coined by Nöldeke in order to distinguish it from Jewish Palestinian) began to function as a regional written language, the first scribes basically adopted Classical Syriac letter forms of the Estrangela type and some orthographic conventions connected with them. The latter include the use of ʾ as a vowel letter for word-final /-ā/ instead of phonetic -h as in Jewish Palestinian and of a diacritical point in a few cases.1089 In addition, Christian Palestinian scribes coined an inverted p for Greek π and later developed a simple pointing system that reduces the ambiguity of the script. This 1087 So, too, Beyer 1984: 53 and 1986: 38. See also the anecdote in John Moschus cited by Griffith 1997: 19 n. 46. 1088 Cf. the four brief church inscriptions in Beyer 1994: 270–271. On the use of Christian Palestinian Aramaic as a vernacular, see also Milik 1953: 537, Hoyland 2004: 192, and Morgenstern 2011b: 630. This is further supported by reflexes of common phonetic changes in contemporaneous Aramaic, on which see below. 1089 Hence Christian Palestinian is sometimes still referred to by its older name “Palestinian Syriac,” but since only the script and a few scribal conventions have been borrowed from Syriac, whereas the language itself clearly has a Palestinian origin, this misnomer should be avoided despite its popularity in older scholarship (just as one does not call Ottoman Turkish, written in Arabic letters, “Turkish Arabic”; cf. also Sokoloff 2003: 75 with n. 40). See further Rosenthal 1939: 144–145 on terminological matters.

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process must have been completed some time before the oldest textual witnesses, presumably around 400 c.e. or slightly earlier.1090 While Greek remained an important ecclesiastical language in Palestine before the advent of Islam, the nature of the evidence suggests that written Christian Palestinian Aramaic flourished especially in the monastic milieu of rural areas. Its appearance was perhaps a result of the pastoral needs of the village communities to whom the monks ministered.1091 Christian Palestinian Aramaic as a linguistic variety in its own right has been known to western scholars since the mid-eighteenth century,1092 but a systematic investigation on a larger scale and the establishment of a more reliable textual basis only began in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The few surviving epigraphic sources are difficult to date, excepting the ʿAbūd building inscription from 1058 c.e., but, like their Jewish Palestinian and Samaritan counterparts, they reflect the original language, uncontaminated by later scribal modifications. They are conveniently accessible in Beyer 1984: 402–406, with additions in 1994: 269–273, and have been edited after a fresh collation; all these witnesses have also been included in his glossary and his general discussion of Aramaic grammar.1093 Most of the literary material, by contrast, has only survived in fragments or as underwritten text in Greek, Syriac, Hebrew, Arabic, and Georgian palimpsest manuscripts, of which the earliest dated one is an Evangeliary written in 1030 c.e. All these contain exclusively translations of known texts in Greek, the main language of Christian liturgy and theology in Palestine of this period, from the Old Testament, the New Testament, apocrypha, liturgical works, saints’ lives, and the catechism of Cyril of Jerusalem.1094 Over one-hundred 1090 Beyer 1984: 68 and 1986: 52. This date is now supported by the ʿEvron inscription, which seems palaeographically very close to Christian Palestinian (Beyer 1994: 273), and its adjoining Greek inscription, dated to the year 415 c.e., cf. Di Segni 2009: 354. 1091 So Griffith 1997. Lipiński 2014: 201, by contrast, suggests that Jewish converts to Christianity were the main target group of translations of Greek religious writings into Palestinian Aramaic. 1092 See Rosenthal 1939: 144–159; Lipiński 2014: 185–208. 1093 Cf. also Müller-Kessler 1991: 10–15, with an extensive elenchus of earlier studies. Moreover, several dozens of sixth-century tombstones with personal names from the cemetery of the monastery at Khirbet es-Samra (Beyer 1984: 404; 1994: 271–272) are now fully available in Desreumaux 1998. Further recent bibliography on the corpus of Christian Palestinian Aramaic inscriptions has been collected by Di Segni 2009: 354 n. 7 and Hoyland 2010: 37–39 (both of whom are curiously unaware of Beyer’s edition). 1094 The biblical manuscripts do not seem to reflect one single tradition of the text (cf. Rosenthal 1939: 158–159).

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manuscripts are reported to have survived into modern times, even if some which were still accessible to nineteenth and early twentieth-century editors have been lost in the meantime.1095 The most important sources are available in a new and much more reliable edition by Müller-Kessler – Sokoloff 1996–1999, to which Desreumaux 1997 with a substantial part of the fragments of the Codex Sinaiticus Rescriptus (also included in Müller-Kessler – Sokoloff 1996–1999) and Goshen-Gottstein – Shirun 2009 with Psalms can now be added.1096 The glossaries in these modern editions for the time being supplement or replace Schultheß 1903, which, due to its easy access and comprehensive nature, is still cited; the even older lexicographical work by Schwally 1893 can also be useful thanks to its comparative notes and its brief discussions of specific semantic nuances. Yet a full dictionary that accounts for progress in editing and grammatical description over the past few decennia remains an important desideratum. The investigation of Christian Palestinian Aramaic grammar has profited much from a sharper focus on the newly-collated palimpsest manuscripts. As a consequence, erroneous readings could have been cleared away and the analysis could be based on the earliest literary texts and inscriptions as the most accurate witnesses. Similar results have been achieved for Jewish Palestinian earlier in the twentieth century and for Jewish Babylonian in the very recent past (see also Section 1.1.3). Orthography, phonology, and morphology (with a few remarks on morpho-syntax) have been fully described by Müller-Kessler 1991, which replaces the corresponding parts in Schultheß 1924. Her work takes great care in establishing a solid material foundation and distinguishes constantly between early and late texts. Unfortunately, it cocoons Christian Palestinian Aramaic from most of the other Palestinian dialects and associates it too closely with Samaritan,1097 so the reconstruction of the phonology must always be checked against the essential corrections in Beyer 1995a. A brief presentation of the syntax in the otherwise largely outdated grammar by Schultheß (1924) still constitutes the only complete overview and contains frequent references to the Greek Vorlage. Since syntax depends to a lesser extent than spelling and accidence on a meticulous examination and collation of epigraphic and manuscript evidence, this work can offer some basic 1095 Cf. Bar-Asher 1988: 33; Müller-Kessler 1991: 15–26. 1096 See also the surveys in Beyer 1984: 67 n. 1, 1986: 51–52 n. 60, and Morgenstern 2011b: 631– 632 for several older editions. 1097 Especially in her presumably erroneous assumption that the pharyngeals had been consistently lost, see Müller-Kessler 1991: 43–46 and 52 (similarly Bar-Asher 1993: 61–66), but contrast Beyer 1995a: 246 and cf. Kutscher 1976: 77 as well as Lipiński 2014: 203. These sounds are still spelled correctly in most cases, so their disappearance is unlikely to have been universal in Christian Palestinian Aramaic.

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guidance even now. One should nonetheless note that his manual does not systematically distinguish between the original language as it appears in the most trustworthy sources and later contaminations, hence it requires some caution on the part of the reader and will hopefully be replaced by a full syntax (with constant reference to the Greek original) in due course. A compact summary of the language and the essential primary and secondary literature is also available in Morgenstern 2011b. Similar to Jewish Palestinian and Samaritan, Christian Palestinian Aramaic material up to the Arabization of Palestine in the eighth century c.e. shows the workings of several secondary changes that affected the Aramaic dialect continuum at large and thus confirm the status of this variety as a spoken idiom1098: monophthongization of /ay/ and /aw/ to /ē/ and /ō/ in open syllables; shortening of word-final long consonants and word-internal long pharyngeals, the latter partly with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel; loss or, as with the possessive suffix /-ī/ ‘my’ in Western Aramaic in general, secondary stress of formerly unstressed word-final long vowels (though the vowel letters -w and -y for old /-ū/ and /-ī/ have often been preserved under the influence of Syriac spelling conventions for graphic disambiguation of paradigmatic forms with identical pronunciation); presumably also fricative allophones of the plosive stops in post-vocalic articulation (since at least plosive [p] is graphically distinguished from [p̄ ] by the use of the inverted p in later manuscripts); and loss of unstressed short vowels in open syllables. The extensive use of the active participle including future and modal nuances as well as periphrastic constructions,1099 too, reflects a common development in Aramaic since the Achaemenid period (see Section 4.1.2) and thereby connects Christian Palestinian Aramaic with its wider Aramaic background. Verbal usage shows that the translators tried to reproduce the Greek closely, but the texts generally represent native Aramaic syntax and not a hybrid translation idiom.1100 This, too, underscores its basis in an actual language. A few other features associate Christian Palestinian Aramaic more specifically with the remaining Palestinian dialects than with the rest of contemporaneous Aramaic, especially the third-person feminine plural “perfect” afformative in /-ī/ or /-ē/1101; the reanalysis of the qātōl verbal noun pattern as a by-form of the active basic-stem participle1102; certain forms of the infinitive 1098 1099 1100 1101 1102

Relevant examples have been collected by Beyer 1995a: 244–249. Schultheß 1924: 87–88; see now also Li 2013. As has been demonstrated by Li 2013. Müller-Kessler 1991: 152; Morgenstern 2011b: 633–634. Bar-Asher 1988: 53–55; Morgenstern 2011b: 634.

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without /m-/ prefix1103; possibly also the use of the first-person singular possessive suffix /-ī/ ‘my’ as pronominal object suffix ‘me’ with the “perfect” instead of /-nī/.1104 Later manuscript evidence indicates a shortening of long vowels in closed syllables after the stress, which has shifted to the penultimate syllable, hence this change seems to have been operative in the last phase of Christian Palestinian as a living language.1105 Another, local, isogloss appears to align Christian Palestinian with Western Neo-Aramaic from the Damascus region and thus points to the ancient but largely unknown roots of modern forms of Aramaic still spoken in the area: both exhibit assimilation of short and long o and e to u and i respectively under the influence of an old preceding i, but this principle is unattested in the known ancient vocalization traditions of other Aramaic languages.1106 Due to the limitations of the evidence and the unvocalized script of the few epigraphic witnesses, however, it is impossible to say whether this feature constitutes a clear isogloss that distinguishes an Aramaic dialect group spoken to the east of the Upper Jordan from Judaean Aramaic. The lexicon of Christian Palestinian, too, contains many items shared with the rest of Palestinian Aramaic but also includes a few Eastern Aramaic forms (such as zdq ‘just’ instead of original ṣdq1107 or derived-stem infinitives in /-ū/ instead of /-ā/1108) that may have entered the language in due course under the influence of Syriac.1109 Despite such interference, Christian Palestinian remains firmly connected with its Palestinian Aramaic linguistic environment. 6.4.2 Aramaic, Greek, and Arabic among Palestinian Christians During the eight centuries of its attestation, Christian Palestinian Aramaic reflects the more general language situation of the Melkite Church in Palestine. A distinction of this period into two phases on palaeographic, orthographic, 1103 Müller-Kessler 1991: 162 and 171; Morgenstern 2011b: 634. 1104 Müller-Kessler 1991: 70–71; Beyer 1984: 475; Morgenstern 2011b: 633. However, since the other pronominal object suffixes correspond to their possessive counterparts, independent analogical levelling could be a possible alternative explanation. 1105 Beyer 1995a: 249; cf. Bar-Asher 1988: 44–47 and 1993: 58–61. 1106 Beyer 1995a: 245. Cf. Arnold 2011: 687. 1107 Beyer 1995a: 253; cf. 2004: 34. 1108 Müller-Kessler 1991: 170–171 and 177. 1109 Cf. also Müller-Kessler 1991: 8 for additional examples from later manuscripts. An early twentieth-century hypothesis that the lexicon of Christian Palestinian had been directly influenced by a spoken form of Hebrew (though still reiterated by Bar-Asher 1988: 28 and, subsequently, Di Segni 2009: 354 n. 8) is ungrounded and has been convincingly disproved long ago (see Rosenthal 1939: 151). It should be laid to rest.

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and linguistic grounds is widely accepted.1110 As has been suggested above (see Section 6.4.1), Christian Palestinian enjoyed a blossoming in the fifth to eighth centuries c.e., when it served not only as a vernacular but also as a liturgical language and a regular written means of expression for low-profile representation, personal devotion (including magic and apotropaic purposes),1111 and epistolography. Early manuscripts preserved as palimpsests or in fragments often lack colophons and are therefore difficult to date. Based on palaeographic and, where possible, archaeological dating, however, the majority of public and private inscriptions also appear to come from this former phase and confirm the written use of Christian Palestinian for a variety of purposes. Although the script has been borrowed from Syriac Christians, even the language of the biblical and other religious compositions in the earliest witnesses shows but little influence of its Eastern Aramaic neighbour. This clearly emerges from a substantial amount of Greek loans and, especially, from the transcription of Hebrew and Aramaic names in biblical texts: they do not appear in their original Semitic form, as in the Syriac versions of the Bible, but even very frequent ones have been patterned after the Greek (for instance, ysws according to Ἰησοῦς instead of yšwʿ for Jesus).1112 In all likelihood, then, Greek was so entrenched as the official language of Christianity in Palestine including Transjordan, not least as a result of several centuries of Roman administration, that Syriac translation technique and idiom, which could develop more freely in Edessa (see Section 5.4.2), did not grow deep roots among Christians of Palestinian descent. This may apply in particular to the rural monastic milieu in which Christian Palestinian Aramaic is predominantly attested as a written language, even though Syrian monks and Syriac manuscripts were demonstrably present to some extent in Palestinian monasteries.1113 Hence, only the use of a script based on Syriac letters instead of square script, the normal medium for writing Jewish Aramaic, served as a consistent expression of a distinctively Christian identity and as a token of supra-regional religious loyalty. There is good evidence already in ancient sources for a substantial use of Aramaic as a vernacular and a certain 1110 Following Bar-Asher 1988, where the author summarizes the main results of his unpublished 1977 Jerusalem dissertation. See also Beyer 1984: 68; 1986: 52; Müller-Kessler 1991: 15; Morgenstern 2011b: 629–631. 1111 Cf. Hoyland 2010: 31–34 on the personal character of the Christian Palestinian inscriptions as opposed to more formal dedications in Greek. 1112 As perceptively remarked by Beyer 1984: 68; 1986: 52. Cf. Lipiński 2014: 207. 1113 Cf. Griffith 1997: 19–21.

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degree of Aramaic-Greek bilingualism among the Christian population (especially in the case of church officials, as the fourth-century pilgrim Egeria remarked in her travel report), but when Aramaic was committed to writing for private purposes and low-profile public representation, this happened mostly in rural areas, not in urban centres.1114 The bloom of the Christian Palestinian church and its local literary production soon came to an end after the eighth century. Since parchment was expensive, significant quantities of Christian Palestinian Aramaic biblical and liturgical manuscripts were recycled as writing material for the religious works of other Eastern Christian traditions, hence the early texts are by and large palimpsests. Knowledge of the language and its script as well as at least some writings must nonetheless have survived for a few centuries, ­presumably in the multilingual monasteries of Palestine and Sinai. A brief renaissance of Christian Palestinian traditions in the eleventh and twelfth centuries once again produced copies of exclusively liturgical manuscripts in Christian Palestinian Aramaic; yet they represent but a small selection of the material formerly in use. As most of them were discovered in St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Desert, one could suppose that the short-lived revitalization of Christian Palestinian originated in Egypt. This renewed phase of copying obviously presupposes some cultural continuity, but the manuscripts produced during the later period contain considerable interference from Syriac (for instance in the confusion of absolute and emphatic state, since the latter became the default form in Eastern Aramaic),1115 with which the copyists were apparently more familiar as a theological and liturgical idiom, and from Arabic, which presumably acted as the dominant language of daily life by then. Many other scribal mistakes result from a decreasing familiarity with Christian Palestinian Aramaic. Outside ecclesiastical contexts, there is not more than scanty evidence for the use of the old Melkite language. Developments in the linguistic situation often materialize in the written record only after some delay, so, as with Nabataean-Arabic or Hebrew-Aramaic interactions in the preceding period, identifying instances of spontaneous interference less easily controlled by a speaker, code switching, and imperfect learning can contribute to a more nuanced assessment of the distribution of languages across functional contexts. In the case of Christian Palestinian, an analysis along these lines can of course only rely on a restricted amount of 1114 See Griffith 1997: 16–21, briefly summarized in Hoyland 2004: 187–188. 1115 Morgenstern 2011b: 633.

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data. Yet above all occasional traces of subconscious influence of Arabic in later epigraphic material suggest that Christian Palestinian Aramaic no longer acted as a pragmatically prominent idiom. A particularly revealing example is the use of the “perfect” nʾḥt /nāḥaṯ/ ‘may it [sc. the soul of your servant] rest’ for expressing a wish in the ninth-to-eleventh century tomb inscription from Gerasa north of Amman.1116 Such a deontic-modal function of the “perfect” is otherwise alien to Aramaic, but it has a striking parallel, again under Arabic influence, in Nabataean curse formulae (see Section 5.3.2). The same epitaph contains an unexpected spelling ʾwb of the Aramaic adverb ʾ(w)p ‘even’, here apparently used as a focus particle, that presumably results from the normal pronunciation of /p/ as [b] by Arabic speakers (since inherited Semitic /p/ had already shifted to /f/ in Arabic).1117 A similar explanation may apply to the incorrect use of the absolute instead of the emphatic state (which does not exist in Arabic) in the roughly contemporaneous ʿAbūd building inscription.1118 Several Arabisms also crop up in later manuscripts.1119 This evidence fits in well with the general picture and illustrates important changes in the wider distribution of the languages used by Palestinian Christians. The gradual Arabization of Palestine, which saw its breakthrough after the siege of Jerusalem in 637/638 c.e., eventually triggered a shift from Aramaic to Arabic as the dominant vernacular of the Palestinian Christian communities and also caused a steady decline of Greek as the preferred idiom of theological discourse after the eighth century.1120 This shift occurred relatively early among the Melkites and seems to have been completed by the mid-ninth century c.e.1121; however, it must have been preceded by a period of Arabic-Aramaic bilingualism, since already the eighth-century letter (if the conventional date established on grounds of palaeography is to be 1116 So already Milik 1953: 528; Beyer 1984: 403. Cf. Müller-Kessler 1991: 14 on the date. 1117 Beyer 1984: 403; the same instance of substrate pronunciation occurs in Greek inscriptions on lamps (βᾶσιν instead of πᾶσιν), see Di Segni 2009: 367. 1118 Beyer 1984: 402, lines 5 and 7 (in the latter case in an adjective modifying a noun in the emphatic state, with which it should agree according to correct grammatical usage). Comparable instances of a confusion of states due to imperfect learning occur in Aramaic inscriptions from Achaemenid Asia Minor that have been erected by speakers of other languages, see Section 4.3.4. 1119 Cf. Müller-Kessler 1991: 7. 1120 See Hoyland 2004: 193. A concurrent but gradual decrease of Greek inscriptions reflects the same development, see Di Segni 2009. 1121 Cf. Leeming 2003.

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trusted) to the abbot of the Castellion monastery contains one or two Arabic lexical loans relating to everyday words (ʾhl ‘people’ and presumably rʿš ‘to tremble’).1122 As with Hebrew in the Second Temple period, however, it is impossible to ascertain when the last native speaker of Christian Palestinian Aramaic died. The language may have lingered on in peripheral areas, where it once enjoyed its greatest popularity, for quite a while. Plausible instances of Aramaic syntactic influence in first-millennium Christian Arabic texts from Palestine1123 suggest, in any event, that the decline was gradual. Moreover, one can make a good case for the view that Arabic was current among some parts of the population in Palestine even before the eighth century c.e.,1124 especially if the few bearers of typically Arabic names on the sixth-century tombstones of the Khirbet es-Samra cemetery were also speakers of Arabic,1125 but the extent of its distribution remains largely elusive. There is thus no direct evidence for the vernacular used by the “Arab Christians”1126 in Palestine between the fourth and the seventh centuries c.e. Unlike Jewish Palestinian, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, owing to its reduced scope as a written language, was not prestigious enough to be transmitted in later periods, so it had to yield to Arabic and Syriac.

1122 Beyer 1984: 404, lines 8 (as already suggested, albeit hesitatingly, by Milik 1953: 536) and 9. This reading in particular of the second word is plausible but not entirely certain, cf. Müller-Kessler 1991: 15 with n. 70 for other possibilities. 1123 See the examples discussed by Blau 1983. 1124 Cf. Griffith 1997: 21; Hoyland 2004: 190. Note, however, that the alleged Arabic formula bslʾm for bi-salām ‘in peace’ according to an old reading of an inscription on a grave in a church in Nebo (so Hoyland 2004: 190 and Knauf 2010: 200, but without any reference to the difficulties involved in this; Di Segni 2009: 353 n. 4 has been mislead by the same interpretation) is palaeographically extremely dubious, not least due to very odd shapes of what then has to be a medial l and a final m, and thus cannot be used as firm evidence. Alternatively, this sequence of letters may, among other possibilities, simply be a clumsy rendering of the name Saola in Christian Palestinian (cf. Müller-Kessler 1991: 11 n. 48; Beyer 1994: 271; and now also Hoyland 2010: 35–37 with an extensive discussion, revising his earlier judgment and subsuming this inscription under Christian Palestinian instead of Arabic). 1125 So at least qymw, ʿwbydw, and zwbydw, all with final /-ū/, as in many Nabataean names (cf. Beyer 1994: 272), and the latter two also conforming to the qutayl diminutive pattern that is notably frequent in the Arabic onomasticon. All three occur in Palmyrene and/or Nabataean texts as well. Yet of course one cannot be sure that these persons actually spoke Arabic. 1126 See Shahîd 2003.

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6.5 Conclusion Epigraphic and manuscript evidence from the Byzantine period demonstrates that several local varieties of Aramaic coexisted as vernaculars in Roman Palestine until the advent of Islam. Some may even have evolved from ancestors that were used in border areas since the first half of the first millennium b.c.e. but remained in the shadow first of Hebrew as the national language, then of Achaemenid Official Aramaic as the Persian lingua franca. Early forms of Jewish Palestinian, however, had increasingly been used in writing already since the Hellenistic period, emancipated over time from the Achaemenid heritage in scribal culture, and eventually fed into an emerging tradition of Jewish religious literature. Its rise coincided with a wider-ranging renewal of Jewish religious life around the fourth century c.e. This is also the time when the dialects spoken by Samaritans and Palestinian Christians became the basis of written languages that were employed as means of expression for memorial representation and for liturgical and cultural traditions. Inscriptions help anchor the language conserved in later manuscripts in time and place. The use of different scripts for Jewish, Samaritan, and Christian Palestinian Aramaic reflects diverging cultural loyalties in an age of ever-sharpening religious boundaries, yet the considerable linguistic similarities between them show that they belong to the same coherent, relatively conservative dialect group vis-à-vis the more innovative Eastern Aramaic languages that developed in Syria and Mesopotamia during the same time. Jewish, Samaritan, and Christian Palestinian Aramaic thus all share a common Western Aramaic basis that consists of a number of characteristic isoglosses; they continued to evolve during the four centuries between the institutionalization of Christianity after Constantine and the takeover of Arabic as part of Islamic cultural dominance around the eighth century c.e. They evidently form part of a wider matrix of spoken Aramaic in Palestine, of which many dialects remained unwritten and can no longer be reconstructed. A comprehensive comparative study of Western Aramaic could highlight both its basic coherence as opposed to Eastern Aramaic and evaluate the moderate amount of internal linguistic heterogeneity in chronological, geographical, and social or stylistic respects. Up to now, however, Western Aramaic has generally been less well researched than the preChristian epigraphic varieties. Since major desiderata include basic tools such as a complete grammar of Jewish Palestinian and in particular a description of its syntax, a full syntax of Christian Palestinian, and modern dictionaries of Christian Palestinian as well as Western Neo-Aramaic, more

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preparatory work still has to be done before such an ambitious analysis becomes feasible. The impact of common phonetic developments in Aramaic at large, most notably the characteristic disappearance of short unstressed vowels in open syllables, which was completed by the middle of the third century c.e. in both the western and the eastern periphery of the dialect spectrum, and the subsequent loss of unstressed word-final long vowels, can only result from an extensive and geographically continuous use of the language as a vernacular across the entire speech area. Instances of micro-variation and isoglosses that cut across chronological and cultural boundaries, such as individual parallels between Jewish or Christian Palestinian on the one hand and Western NeoAramaic on the other, corroborate the hypothesis that Aramaic was widely spoken, presumably even as the first language of the majority of the population, in later Roman Palestine. Besides the Palestinian Aramaic dialects that turned into written languages and thereby into carriers of distinct cultural-religious traditions that transmitted texts written in them over generations, others will thus no doubt have shaded into another; they still survive in their Western Neo-Aramaic offshoots or at least as substrate in regional forms of Arabic. There is thus no good reason to doubt that Aramaic served as the pragmatically dominant vernacular, until the eighth century c.e. at the earliest, of large parts of the various groups that inhabited Roman Palestine, especially in the hinterland. This does not exclude a close interaction with other languages: Hebrew acted as a literary and religious idiom among Jews and, as far as the Pentateuch is concerned, also among Samaritans, but cannot be demonstrated to have been spoken natively any longer. Greek, by contrast, was strongly present in various social strata and used at many levels of communication, in particular in cultural centres such as Jerusalem and in the Christian ecclesiastical milieu. Speakers with a higher level of competence or even full bilingual command would include Roman provincial administrators, pro-Roman elites, at least the upper echelons of the Christian clergy, and Jews as well as Samaritans who have been raised or temporarily lived in the Diaspora. Arabic, finally, had been present in border areas between Palestine and North Arabia for centuries. At least to some extent, it will thus have formed part of the multilingual fabric of the region, even if it remained largely invisible before the eighth century c.e. and only became a written prestige language under the influence of Islam. With the Arabization of Palestine, however, the three literary languages of Jews, Samaritans, and Christians turned into mere scholarly and religious idioms that were no longer actively used in normal situations of daily life. They continued for some time to serve for short representational inscriptions into

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the early Islamic period, but even the few surviving texts contain subconscious Arabic influence in pronunciation and syntactic patterns. Their presence indicates that Arabic soon became the dominant language, even though Aramaic was tenacious enough to remain a spoken idiom in small parts of the region until today.

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Eastern Aramaic in Late Antique Syria and Mesopotamia The long but not always well-documented history of Aramaic in Eastern Syria and Mesopotamia dates back to the consolidation of Aramaic-speaking tribes in the region.1127 It gained momentum with the subsequent rise of principalities throughout Syria, the continuous integration of Aramaeans into Mesopotamian society, and the increasing employ of Aramaic in the bureaucracy of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires. In all likelihood, linguistic variation in the representational inscriptions from ninth- and eighth-century b.c.e. Syria (Chapter 2) as well as in the documentary material from seventh- and sixth-century Syria and Mesopotamia (Chapter 3) reflects different, coexisting local forms; yet no coherent dialect branches of Aramaic can be reconstructed from the scanty written evidence, widely dispersed and obscured by scribal conservatism. Variation was then considerably reduced with the standardization of Achaemenid Official Aramaic under Persian rule between the fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e. (Chapter 4). Spoken forms of the language, however, evolved in the shadow of the different chancellery idioms of the Assyrian, the Babylonian, and the Achaemenid administration and appeared on the written surface when Achaemenid Official Aramaic gave way to emerging local varieties in public and private inscriptions during the Hellenistic and the Roman periods between the second century b.c.e. and the third century c.e. (Chapter 5). These betray the influence of regional developments in the underlying vernaculars, and clusters of identifiable features of an “Eastern Aramaic” dialect group first appear in an incantation on a cuneiform tablet from Uruk and then in representational and documentary texts from various places in Mesopotamia (see in particular Section 5.5). Both linguistic and cultural-historical criteria support the beginning of a new phase of the Aramaic language in the fourth century c.e. not only for the 1127 Definitions of this vast territory vary considerably already in the ancient geographers, see the comprehensive discussion in Nöldeke 1871b. For the practical purposes of this Chapter, Syria by and large refers to the Syrian Desert stretching eastwards to the river Euphrates, whereas Mesopotamia covers the area between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris as well as the western parts of the Zagros mountains. The boundaries between Eastern Syria and North-Western Mesopotamia, however, are blurred.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004285101_008

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Western but also for the Eastern group, termed “Late Aramaic” by Fitzmyer and “Middle Aramaic” by Beyer respectively (the relevant arguments have already been discussed in the opening paragraphs of Chapter 6 and need not to be repeated here). The loss of short unstressed word-medial vowels in open ­syllables and of long unstressed word-final vowels, which caused important changes in the grammatical structure, gives these languages their characteristically Aramaic shape as it also surfaces in their Western counterparts but ­differs from what can be confidently reconstructed for the earlier developmental stages that are reflected in epigraphic sources: Aramaic still formed a ­linguistic continuum. Similar to the situation in Palestine, the homeland of the “Western Aramaic” branch (see Section 6.1), some of the regional dialects of Syria and Mesopotamia, of which Syriac and Jewish Babylonian (though the latter is only attested in one text) had already developed a written tradition for memorial and administrative purposes, came to underlie the extensive religious literatures of Jews, Mandaeans, and Christians since the fourth century c.e. Many other Aramaic vernaculars of Syria and Mesopotamia continued to be spoken throughout the Islamic period until today without giving rise to a written tradition. However, numerous grammatical and lexical similarities with Jewish Babylonian, Mandaic, and Syriac show that their ancestors coexisted with the dialects on which these literary languages are based. One can thus depict, albeit with broad strokes, a highly varied linguistic landscape of Eastern Aramaic in Syria and Mesopotamia in Late Antiquity. The employ of these regional varieties in literary production coincides with the consolidation of interacting religious traditions. Christianity flourished in the region and quickly developed its own infrastructure from the fourth century c.e. onwards; centres of Rabbinic learning arose in Babylonia in the same period but absorbed Palestinian oral and literary traditions, hence the ongoing textualization of Jewish lore in the West may have influenced the process of collecting and editing that eventually produced the Babylonian Talmud; and Mandaism, too, took on an identifiable shape with its own mythology, ritual practice, and religious offices some time before the fifth century c.e. Unlike the Western Aramaic literatures in Palestine, a restricted geographical area firmly incorporated into Roman administration, their counterparts in the East arose in a wider region between two different political and cultural settings. Syria belonged to the later Roman (Byzantine) empire, whereas most of Iraq and Iran was under the control first of the Parthians (second century b.c.e. until the third century c.e.) and then of the Sassanians (from the third century c.e. up to the rise of Islam in the seventh). This may explain the relatively higher amount of notable linguistic diversity. As the idioms of

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authoritative canonical compositions, Jewish Babylonian, Mandaic, and Syriac spread beyond their place of origin: the Babylonian Talmud still has normative status in Judaism worldwide, just like the Mandaean liturgies and traditions for the now predominantly Arabic-speaking adherents of Mandaism even in the Diaspora, and Syriac serves not only as a literary and theological language across the Christian Middle East but also enjoys a considerable prestige among Aramaic-speaking Christians wherever they live. While the three major Eastern Aramaic literary idioms are all evidently rooted in the same dialect matrix and show the workings of common phonetic laws, different types of the Aramaic script and distinct scribal conventions set them visually apart. Square script had soon become the usual Jewish writing system in post-Achaemenid Palestine; it is also attested on a second-century c.e. Aramaic papyrus from Dura Europos that exhibits a few Eastern linguistic traits, which demonstrates the early employ of square script for writing different dialects of Aramaic. Likewise, the Syriac script, based on the local ductus of Edessa, became the visible shape not only of Classical Syriac literature (with its later parting into two denominational scripts following the Christological controversies of the fifth century) but also of the translations of Greek theological works by Palestinian Christians into their own, Western Aramaic, dialect. The Mandaic alphabet, finally, differs significantly from either and was used for putting the Aramaic variety of the Mandaeans into writing; they, however, whatever their origin may be, only emerged as a distinct group in Late Antique Babylonia. One thus encounters a similar link between specific Aramaic scripts and religious-cultural traditions in Syria-Mesopotamia as in Palestine. Little of certainty is known about social and cultural contacts (be they friendly or hostile) between Jews and Christians in Syria and Mesopotamia in the first centuries c.e. except for a few anecdotal–and presumably biased– remarks in Syriac narrative writings,1128 and even less about the relations between the Mandaeans and adherents of other faiths.1129 There have also been attempts at tracing the impact of Iranian culture and Zoroastrianism on  the Babylonian Talmud, but this research is still in its initial stages.1130 Yet  close  parallels in magic bowls and amulets produced for these different groups, currently the only reasonably extensive source of direct information 1128 See Drijvers 1985. 1129 For an elenchus of passages on Zoroastrians in Syriac literature, cf. Bidez – Cumont 1938: II: 93–135. 1130 Cf. now Secunda 2014 for a general introduction. Bibliographical information on references to Judaism in Zoroastrian texts may be retrieved from Gafni 2006: 793 n. 2.

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on popular religion, indicate a certain measure of coexistence and a lasting influence of shared Mesopotamian traditions on everyday belief and ritual practice of many ordinary Jews, Mandaeans, and others.1131 The same craftsmen who made these artefacts apparently worked for clients with distinct religious affiliations and thus adapted language, script, and certain particulars (such as different opening formulae) to the respective target group, but they also employed a common inventory of spells and incantations that was presumably transmitted orally or in manuals now lost. Such material can supplement the more orthodox perspectives represented in the Babylonian Talmud, Mandaean mythology and ritual, and Syriac theological writings; it thereby provides a context for the various linguistic intersections between different Eastern Aramaic languages. The reasons for the sudden emergence of this particular genre in the fourth or fifth century c.e. and its disappearance two centuries later1132 remain nonetheless mysterious. The different forms of Aramaic spoken and written in the area thus clearly interacted with each other and with other languages: Greek in Hellenistic and Roman Syria, Iranian idioms in the Parthian and Sassanian territories, and presumably Arabic in the western desert zone. Arabic advanced to the status of the dominant language with the spread of Islam since the seventh century c.e., but Aramaic continued to be employed not only for literary expression but also survived in active use in distinct vernaculars. Some of them later became the basis of new written languages, notably the dialect of Alqosh near Mosul for a Christian literature in the seventeenth century c.e. (by speakers– now often termed “Chaldaeans”–eventually united with the Roman Catholic Church),1133 a Jewish variety common in Northern Iraq around the same time (for Bible translations),1134 and the vernacular of Christians in Urmia in Azerbaijan in the nineteenth century (under the influence of American Presbyterian missionaries).1135 It is obviously impossible to assess how faithfully these new written languages reflect their dialectal underpinnings; Christian forms of written Neo-Aramaic, for instance, were to a significant 1131 A succinct outline can be found in Shaked – Ford – Bhayro 2013: 1–28. On the “Aramaic cultural mediation” of Babylonian lore, see now also Bhayro 2013. 1132 This chronological range is supported by archaeological considerations and the absence of any Arabic or Islamic influence, see already Rosenthal 1939: 222 and 233–234; some bowls are explicitly dated to the fifth century c.e. 1133 Murre-van den Berg 2008 has a nuanced survey of the sociolinguistic situation. 1134 The relevant sources are briefly mentioned by Sabar 2002: 8–9. 1135 Murre-van den Berg 1999 furnishes a comprehensive study; see also Kapeliuk 2006: 381– 383 and now Lipiński 2014: 280–284 for a concise history, the primary sources, and essential bibliography.

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extent affected by Syriac orthographic practice, just as the earlier Aramaic languages of Palmyra, Edessa, and Hatra reproduce, to varying degrees, Achaemenid Official Aramaic spelling conventions. The much better documented cases from the modern period may thus illustrate some basic effects of similar processes of interference between a standard language and local vernaculars that were already operative a millennium and a half before. Although the matter requires further investigation, the ancestors of these North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects known today occasionally left their marks as substrate in literary texts composed in fully or at least relatively standardized idioms such as Syriac and Jewish Babylonian. A comprehensive dialect history of Aramaic in the region, however, can only be written after the still predominantly descriptive approach to Neo-Aramaic has been enriched by more rigorously diachronic work. Such research will no doubt call attention to the fluid boundaries between the original vernaculars that have crystallized into Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, Mandaic, and Syriac. 7.1

Eastern Aramaic in the Roman-Sassanian Border-Zone

The appearance of several distinct Eastern Aramaic languages in Hellenistic and Roman Syria-Mesopotamia provides the wider linguistic background of the Jewish Babylonian, Mandaic and Syriac literary languages. Although instances of variation and shared features point to a much more complicated interaction of distinct dialects across political and cultural boundaries, the literary idioms of Jews, Mandaeans, and Christians that emerged in late Roman Syria and Sassanian Mesopotamia are certainly rooted in a highly varied matrix of Aramaic vernaculars. Continuity in the written record can best be observed in the case of Classical Syriac, which is based on the local dialect of Edessa as it surfaces, though with a few more archaic traits, in epigraphic witnesses of the preceding period. Contrary to Palestine, however, there is no unbroken tradition of written Jewish Aramaic in Babylonia, and the origin of the Mandaeans remains wholly controversial in the absence of any suitable evidence. Nonetheless, the occurrence of the same distinctive core features of phonology and morphology in Jewish Babylonian and Mandaic on the one hand and earlier Babylonian and Eastern Mesopotamian forms of Aramaic on the other strongly suggests that Jews and Mandaeans in the region spoke the local Aramaic vernaculars that had evolved over the past centuries. Due to a much lower impact of Achaemenid scribal conventions on written Aramaic in Babylonia than on the Jewish Palestinian literary language and on the earliest stages of Syriac, dialect forms can be identified more easily here. There are

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some indications that other local idioms, too, crystallized into literary traditions, but these have not survived. The most famous is the Eastern Aramaic dialect in which Mani, the founder of the Manichaean religion, originally composed his works in the third century c.e. and for which he designed his own script.1136 There can be no doubt, then, that the regional idioms that constitute the basis of Jewish Babylonian, Classical Mandaic, and Classical Syriac coexisted with several other language varieties. Informal registers may appear occasionally in the textual material, such as magical artefacts for popular use; these were less controlled by scribal standards, hence they do not always permit a straightforward linguistic classification. Other geographical dialects (or registers of the same dialect) remained unwritten but continued to be spoken throughout the Islamic period and eventually evolved into Neo-Aramaic vernaculars, some of which are still alive and may preserve typologically archaic material. Since the investigation of the linguistic map of Late Antique Babylonia is still ongoing, it would be premature to attempt a reconstruction of the complete picture, but it is essential to grasp the basic outline. Such a reconstruction obviously also has to take into account other languages used in this vast region, especially Greek in Byzantine Syria and Iranian idioms in Parthian and Sassanian Mesopotamia, and subsequently Arabic, which gradually came to dominate speech and writing with the rise of Islam in the Fertile Crescent since the eighth century c.e. Research on the exact modalities of contact between Aramaic and other languages during these periods is still in its infancy, but some general tendencies may be noted: the imprint of Greek on early Syriac by and large seems to affect the lexicon, later also the discursive prose style, whereas long-term exposure to Iranian over time triggered fundamental changes in the syntax of the contemporaneous Aramaic vernaculars, especially in the verbal system. These have dramatically altered the structure of the Eastern Neo-Aramaic languages, but individual, though mostly indirect, reflexes of such an evolution in the vernacular can apparently already be observed in the written material. Yet a more rigorously comparative-linguistic investigation of the three literary traditions of Eastern Aramaic has been hampered by a high degree 1136 See Contini 1995 for an extensive discussion. Manichaean letter forms, which resemble Palmyrene cursive writing, and perhaps some distinctive linguistic features of the underlying variety, survive in a few sixth-century c.e. Christian magic bowls from Babylonia. Their language is sometimes associated with an early form of Syriac (Rosenthal 1939: 207–211; cf. Moriggi 2012a: 95–96), but a proper Southern Eastern Aramaic dialect seems perhaps more likely (Beyer 2004: 29–30).

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of scholarly compartmentalization and disciplinary boundaries: Jewish Babylonian is mostly studied inductively and as a gateway to enter the world of the Babylonian Talmud as a religious compendium; interest in Classical Mandaic literature is governed by its value as a source for ancient Gnosticism; and knowledge of Classical Syriac primarily serves as a means to access the rich theology and history of the Christian Near East. Since the approaches to Eastern Aramaic of Late Antiquity are thus all predominantly functional, there is a general shortage of modern philological and linguistic studies devoted to the respective languages, and their mutual interconnections, in their own right. Eastern Aramaic therefore remains an important field for future linguistic research in the strict sense and still provides countless opportunities for descriptive and historical-comparative groundwork. 7.1.1 Points of Contact between Eastern Aramaic Dialects The vast majority of Eastern Aramaic composed in Late Antiquity has been transmitted in manuscripts by generations of scribes; considerable parts of Jewish literature from Babylonia were in due course even copied in Yemen and Europe, regions far away from the original speech area. Being taken out of the linguistic context in which they evolved, and handed down by people who no longer spoke the respective languages natively, the texts thus absorbed countless secondary modifications. These have to be identified in order to arrive at a reliable material basis for any descriptive or historical study of Eastern Aramaic as a sharply-defined dialect group; it is thus necessary to create a comparative framework based on texts that can be assigned with confidence to the period and region in question. As has become clear in the middle of the twentieth century, the most authentic forms of Palestinian varieties of Aramaic are attested in Jewish, Samaritan, and Christian inscriptions. They provide important Archimedean points for evaluating possible secondary changes in the manuscript transmission of the literary compositions. No such epigraphic sources exist for Babylonia; yet a sizeable corpus of Jewish, Mandaic, and Christian magic bowls and amulets for protection against demonic forces, found at Nippur in Iraq and Khuzistan in Iran and dating from the fifth to seventh centuries c.e., can serve a similar purpose, because they contain distinctive forms and words that remained unchanged from later corruptions. This corpus is constantly growing in size and reliability thanks to the ongoing publication of texts and the constant revision of preliminary readings as well as interpretations in earlier editions. As the historical-comparative investigation of Eastern Aramaic is still very much in progress, any assessment of the finer points of grammar can only count as a working hypothesis for the time being.

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Some general principles may be formulated with confidence, however. Aramaic material from Babylonia in particular exhibits a much lesser impact of conservative scribal traditions when compared to the West and thus a higher frequency of phonetic spellings. This is even more so the case with Mandaic and sub-standard compositions like the magic bowls than with Jewish Babylonian. Hence it is possible to reliably define certain characteristic traces of the Eastern Aramaic varieties of this period and conclude that they formed a continuum of closely-related dialects with presumably both a shared linguistic history and convergence due to mutual influence1137; several peculiarities even occur in the North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic languages that continued to be spoken in the region. The two main innovations that have apparently been generalized in Eastern Aramaic languages in Hellenistic and Roman Syria and Mesopotamia also exhibit a regular distribution in the later material from the same area: first, the masculine-plural ending of the “emphatic state” is consistently /-ē/ (instead of the older Aramaic form /-ayyā/ that was preserved in the West); and second, the productive third-person “imperfect” preformative is, by and large, /l-/ in Babylonia and /n-/ in Syria, while older /y-/ only recurs in what seem to be formulaic expressions. Furthermore, at least in Mesopotamia, the third-person masculine singular possessive suffixes with vocalic bases is /-ayhī/ and then /-ēh/ (via assimilation from the older, and specifically Aramaic, form /-awhī/, which resisted levelling in Western Aramaic and in Syriac). Typical lexical features, such as the direct object marker l- and certain by-forms of common Semitic words, also occur, even if they have only a minor importance for linguistic classification. Later common changes in Eastern Aramaic during its attested history, however, indicate an ongoing evolution of the language as a result of permanent contact among speakers. Most notably, the loss of the determinative value of the emphatic state as the new unmarked form and the much more restricted use of the absolute state (in particular for predicative adjectives, expressions of totality, and numerical constructions) characterizes the Eastern Aramaic idioms of Late Antiquity and sets them apart from both earlier and Western Aramaic, but the reasons governing this development remain mysterious1138; 1137 Boyarin 1981; see now also Moriggi 2012a: 96–97. 1138 Early instances of a weakening of the emphatic state can already be found in the Aramaic inscriptions from Hatra (references in Beyer 1998: 136) and perhaps Edessa (Healey 2009a: 45–47, briefly discussed in Section 7.4.1 below), but the latter are somewhat ambiguous and the former include cases where later Eastern Aramaic would use the absolute state and thus do not exactly foreshadow the distribution of emphatic and absolute states

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as a result, new definiteness markers arose over time out of personal pronouns in Neo-Aramaic.1139 The same languages also seem to exhibit a gradual increase of periphrastic genitives at the expense of the construct state and less fixed word-order patterns, but since similar tendencies have been identified in other Semitic idioms in the course of time, they have less diagnostic weight. In addition to such regional developments, Eastern Aramaic also underwent a number of changes shared with contemporaneous Western dialects, in particular the loss of unstressed short vowels in open syllables as well as of unstressed word-final long vowels, fricative allophones of the plosive stops in post-vocalic position (which were subsequently phonemicized again in NeoAramaic),1140 and an ever-growing expansion of the functional range of the participle at the expense of the “imperfect” (see Section  1.2.3).1141 Together with enclitic forms of the personal pronouns (for instance, /nāp̄ eq-nā/ ‘I am leaving’ from /nāp̄ eq ʾanā/), they gave rise to new conjugations that eventually became established as proper verbal paradigms. One may thus conclude that Eastern and Western Aramaic of Late Antiquity did no longer share a common literary language, as a result of which regional peculiarities appear more clearly in the texts, but that the Aramaic dialect continuum was not interrupted until the spread of Arabic from the seventh century c.e. Lasting contacts between speakers of Western and Eastern varieties thus still made it possible for certain linguistic innovations to spread across the entire speech area. Differences between the Eastern Aramaic languages of Late Antiquity nonetheless reveal the existence of dialectal sub-varieties. They have predecessors in the minute grammatical divergences that can already be observed in early Roman inscriptions from Edessa and the Osrhoene on the one hand and Hatra, Assur, and other places in Eastern Mesopotamia on the other, especially the use of the third-person “imperfect” preformative /n-/ in the former and /l-/ in the latter (see Sections 5.4.2 and 5.5.3); it is quite likely that many more would have existed in the spoken idioms. In a later stage of this dialect cleavage, specific isoglosses align Jewish Babylonian with Mandaic against Syriac and there. Kaufman 1974: 134–135, Lipiński 2014: 171, and others assume influence from Akkadian in the neutralization of the emphatic-absolute opposition, which would imply that this process was much more advanced in the Aramaic vernaculars of Mesopotamia and only appeared in the textual record centuries after Akkadian had ceased to function as a spoken language. 1139 Jastrow 2008: 7–8. 1140 The development in the various modern Aramaic vernaculars is quite complex; for a succinct outline, see Jastrow 2008: 3–5. 1141 Cf. Jastrow 2008: 8–9 for a basic overview of the restructuring of the verbal system triggered by the expansion of the participle in modern Aramaic languages.

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thus provide a rationale for grouping together the former two under “Southern Eastern Aramaic” (with predecessors in the Aramaic of the Uruk incantation text as well as the Eastern Mesopotamian inscriptions from Hatra, Assur, and their surroundings)1142 and the latter under “Northern Eastern Aramaic” (previously attested in the epigraphic material from Edessa and the Osrhoene).1143 Yet one should note that distinct scribal traditions must be taken into account for an exact evaluation of the similarities and differences in the various forms of Aramaic: the orthography of Classical Syriac is quite conservative, especially since the fifth century c.e., whereas Classical Mandaic texts show a particularly high degree of phonetic spelling. The frequent occurrence of helping vowels indicated by y in Mandaic and Jewish Babylonian, for instance, may thus result from a different orthographic practice; in all likelihood, similar auxiliary vowels would have occurred in the pronunciation of Syriac but were not written down there.1144 The orthographic garb of a language can suggest a typologically older developmental stage than its actual pronunciation, so a comparison of the distinct forms of Eastern Aramaic in this period should always proceed from genuine phonetic, morphological, and syntactic features. Present-day French with its preservation of distinct endings in the spelling of verbal forms pronounced the same way (je dis, il dit, etc.), contemporary English with its numerous historically-conditioned eccentricities, and written Urmi Neo-Aramaic, which looks very much like Classical Syriac at first glance, furnish illustrative examples. Despite these caveats and a basic uncertainty as to what vernacular Aramaic looked like in the period in question, however, some dialectal differences can be confidently posited for the written material. The most important common features of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic and Mandaic against Syriac and earlier Eastern Aramaic varieties1145 therefore seem to result from parallels in the underlying regional dialects and occur at all levels of grammar. First of all, the reduction of the pharyngeals /ʿ/ and /ḥ/ to /ʾ/ and /h/ respectively may derive from lasting substrate pronunciation of Akkadian, which could have influenced local Aramaic languages when it was still spoken, and has 1142 So Beyer 1984: 60; 1986: 45. 1143 Beyer 1984: 45–46; 1986: 30–31. The exact dialectal affiliation of the few Eastern Aramaic features in Palmyra, however, remains inconclusive. Beyer’s association with Northern Eastern Aramaic is plausible on geographical grounds but cannot be established on the basis of independent linguistic evidence. 1144 They may even have been stigmatized by normative grammar, cf. Weiss 1933: 25–26 for evidence from an East Syrian Masoretic manuscript. 1145 Copious evidence can be found in Morgenstern 2010a and 2010b (an expanded Hebrew version of 2010a).

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subsequently triggered major developments in morphology, such as the merger of roots with etymological pharyngeals and vocalic roots. Such changes also show that the reduction was operative in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic even where the original pharyngeals were preserved in spelling, perhaps partly under the influence of other varieties of Aramaic, but no comparable evidence exists for Syriac. A similar reduction of /ʿ/ occurs in most North-Eastern NeoAramaic languages but not in the more western dialects.1146 This points to an areal-linguistic development. In addition, loss of final /-n/ in absolute-state forms in the plural (as in participles like /qāṭlī/ from older */qāṭelīn/, with earlier reduction of the short vowel in an open syllable) is widespread in Classical Mandaic but not in Syriac; however, it relates to a much more frequent tendency towards assimilation, encliticisation (especially of the monoradical prepositions b- and l-), and disappearance of certain word-final consonants in Jewish Babylonian. This, too, has parallels in modern Aramaic vernac