ARAMAIC, LANGUAGE. - Aramaic belongs to the Semitic stock. It is not possible to determine what territory was the original home of spoken Aramaic. Its history can, however, be traced for about a millennium, down to its almost total disappearance.
With the collapse of the political power of the Arameans, their language did not disappear; on the contrary, it spread and won a place that stands in contrast with the political decline and the scarcity of original cultural creations of this people. This is due to the great expansion of the Aramean tribes and to their penetration both into Babylonia and into Assyria. The Arameans had an innate nomadic instinct and went about everywhere to trade. At Nineveh money was weighed not only with Assyrian weights but also with Aramean ones; the former were sometimes provided with an Aramaic inscription, certainly as early as 725 B.C., and perhaps also in earlier periods. From the 7th to the 5th century B.C. there are also Babylonian contracts with Aramaic annotations.
The alphabetic Aramaic script, moreover, so simple in comparison with the complications of cuneiform, lent itself to a vast diffusion of the language and made it suitable to serve as an easy vehicle of communication between Assyrians and Babylonians and the Mediterranean territories in which it was widespread. From a list of officials from the time of Ashurbanipal it appears that in the imperial chancery, besides an Assyrian secretary, there was an Aramean one; another document also speaks of six Aramean secretaries. Aramaic thus became a kind of diplomatic language, which the high officials of the states had to know.
When the Persian kingdom replaced the Babylonian one, conditions did not change; on the contrary, the Aramaic language acquired greater importance, even though it was of a different stock from the language of the rulers. Communications between the central chancery and those of the various western satrapies, including Egypt, were conducted in Aramaic, which greatly simplified the work, given the great diversity of languages among the subject peoples, and favored the position of the Arameans, who became indispensable in the high posts of the administration.
The introduction of numerous Aramaic terms into the Pahlavi script, as simple graphic signs, ideograms, is due to the great diffusion of Aramaic in the Persian empire and to the influence of Aramean scribes. Some think that even communications between the center of the empire and the Iranian regions of the east and north took place through the medium of Aramaic; but the documents do not support this assertion, although there is no lack of indications of the penetration of the Aramaic language as far as India (the Taxila inscription).
Aramaic also spread as a spoken language. Before the Christian era, it was spoken throughout the territory between the Mediterranean and the southern and northern parts of the Armenian mountains and of Kurdistan. In Palestine it replaced Hebrew; it was the language spoken by Jesus and his disciples. The penetration of Aramaic into Palestine as a diplomatic language had already occurred before the exile (2 Kings 18:26); but its diffusion among the people came about as a result of the deportations, which, largely depopulating the territory of the Israelites, opened it to the penetration of the Arameans of the north.
For a long time the division of Aramaic into eastern and western prevailed, even for the ancient period. A geographical criterion was followed, to which a morphological difference was also thought to correspond; the western branch was supposed to have the preformative j in the third person singular masculine and in the third person plural masculine and feminine of the imperfect; moreover, the ending ā in the emphatic state was supposed to have the meaning of the definite article; whereas in the eastern branch there would have been the preformative n, and the ending ā would have lost its definite sense. But such a distinction cannot be maintained for ancient Aramaic.
Ancient Aramaic is known to us from the following sources: a) Inscriptions (from the 9th to the 6th century B.C.); the first known was the inscription of Panammu, found in the vicinity of Zengirli, set up in memory of Panammu, who died in the following of Tiglath-Pileser III when the latter was marching against Damascus, by his son Barrakab; then the inscription on the stele of Hadad, older than the preceding one; afterwards a third inscription from Zengirli, commemorating a construction that Barrakab had erected; then (1904) came the inscription of King Zkr of Hamath (first half of the 8th century B.C.); more recently fragments of an inscription have come to light from the excavations of Arslan Tash, which seem to represent the oldest document in Aramaic so far possessed and which is dated back to the 9th century B.C. - b) Some biblical texts: Gen. 31:47 (two words); Jer. 10:11; Ezra 4:8-6:18; 7:22-26; Dan. 2:4-7:28. - c) The papyri, inscriptions and ostraca of Egypt (5th and 4th centuries B.C.), especially from Elephantine (v.). - d) The Aramaic words of the Pahlavi script. - e) Nabataean and Palmyrene.
Of Nabataean, the first documents (25 inscriptions found in the Hauran in Syria) became known in 1860-61; then followed other inscriptions, found at Hegra and Tema, in the Sinai peninsula, at Petra, at Safa, in the Gebel Druze and even at Miletus (a Greek-Nabataean bilingual of the 1st century B.C.) and at Cos (an inscription dated from the 78th year of King Aretas: if he is the third of this name, it goes back to 70 B.C.; if instead he is the fourth, to the year 9 A.D.). The Nabataeans, as appears from the names that recur in the inscriptions, are Arabs; but for their epigraphs they used Aramaic, since their own idiom had not yet been raised to a literary language.
Before Nabataean, Palmyrene became known, through the epigraphs discovered in 1751 at Palmyra (v.). Following new scientific expeditions, others were obtained from Palmyra and its surroundings; the oldest, dated, is from 38 B.C.; the most recent is from 274 A.D. With the capture of the city by Aurelian (year 272), Palmyrene gives almost no further sign of life.
In all these documents the language has a unitary and uniform character; nor is there found in them any trace of the supposed morphological distinctions between eastern and western Aramaic.
From ancient Aramaic there developed, in the first centuries of the Christian era, Neo-Aramaic, which is divided into two great groups: the western and the eastern, according to a geographical criterion, but this time also a morphological one.
The second, in fact, differs from the first in two peculiarities: in the imperfect, in the persons listed above, the preformative is n, and in the emphatic state plural masculine there is the ending ē. These characteristics cannot be explained as a normal development from ancient Aramaic, but are probably due to Akkadian influence. The division into eastern and western is geographically inadequate, because the Targum Onkelos belongs to the western group, even though it arose and was used in Babylonia.
To the western group belong, besides Samaritan (v.), Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (the targumic, the talmudic and the midrashic) and Christian Palestinian Aramaic, called by others Syro-Palestinian. Of the latter, the first published document was the evangelary of the Vatican Library, to which were added two other evangelaries, coming from the monastery of St. Catherine on Sinai, identical to the first.
To the eastern group belong: a) Syriac (v.), which was of great importance for its rich, predominantly religious literature; b) Babylonian Talmudic; c) Mandaic.
Aramaic, which had such a vast diffusion in ancient times, did not resist the pressure of Arabic, which replaced it in almost all the regions where it had previously dominated. Today western Aramaic is still spoken in three villages northeast of Damascus: Ma'lula, Bah'a and Jubb'adin; while the eastern is used in Tur Abdin, near Mosul, and in the regions around Lake Urmia.
Bibliography
Giuseppe Messina
ARAMAIC VERSIONS OF THE BIBLE:
V. TARGUM.