ARAMAIC, LANGUAGE. - Aramaic belongs to the Semitic branch. It is not possible to determine the territory in which Aramaic was originally spoken. However, its history can be traced for about a millennium until its almost total disappearance.
With the collapse of the political power of the Arameans, their language did not disappear; indeed, it spread and secured a place that contrasts with the political decline and the limited original cultural achievements of this people. This is due to the great diffusion of the Aramean tribes and their penetration both into Babylonia and Assyria. The Arameans had an innate nomadic instinct and traveled everywhere to trade. At Nineveh, money was weighed not only with Assyrian weights but also with Aramaic ones; the former were sometimes provided with Aramaic inscriptions, certainly from 725 B.C. and perhaps even earlier. From the 7th to the 5th century B.C., Babylonian contracts with Aramaic marginal notes are also attested.
The alphabetic Aramaic script, moreover, being so simple compared to the complexities of cuneiform, lent itself to a wide diffusion of the language and made it a convenient vehicle for communication between Assyrians and Babylonians and the Mediterranean territories where it was prevalent. A list of officials from the time of Ashurbanipal reveals that in the imperial chancery, alongside an Assyrian secretary, there was an Aramaic one; another document also mentions six Aramaic scribes. Aramaic thus became a kind of diplomatic language that high-ranking officials of the states had to know.
When the Babylonian kingdom was replaced by the Persian, conditions did not change; indeed, Aramaic gained greater importance, even though it belonged to a different branch from the language of the rulers. Communications between the central chancery and those of the various special stations, 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 high administrative positions.
The introduction of numerous Aramaic terms into the pellucid script as simple graphic signs or ideograms is attributed to the great diffusion of Aramaic in the Persian Empire and the influence of Aramaic scribes. Some believe that even communications between the center of the empire and the Iranian regions of the east and north passed through Aramaic; but no documents support this claim, although there are indications of Aramaic penetration even into India (inscription of Taxila).
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 Aramean mountains and 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 occurred even before the exile (2 Kings 18:26); but its spread among the people followed the deportations, which, by largely depopulating the territory of the Israelites, opened it to the penetration of Arameans from the north.
For a long time, the division of Aramaic into Eastern and Western was maintained even for the ancient period. A geographical criterion was followed, which was thought to correspond to a morphological difference; the Western dialect in the third person singular masculine and third person plural masculine and feminine of the imperfect would have had the preformative *j*; moreover, the Aramaic emphatic state ending would have had the meaning of a definite article; whereas in the Eastern dialect there would have been the preformative *n*, and the ending would have lost its definite sense. However, this distinction cannot be sustained for Old Aramaic.
Old Aramaic is known from the following sources: a) Inscriptions (from the 9th to the 6th century B.C.): the first known was the inscription of Panammu, found near Zincirli, erected in memory of Panammu, who died following Tiglath-Pileser III as he marched against Damascus, by his son Barrakib; then the inscription on the stele of Hadad, older than the previous one; subsequently a third inscription from Zincirli, commemorating a construction erected by Barrakib; then (1904) the inscription of King Zakkur of Hamath was discovered (first half of the 8th century B.C.); more recently, fragments of inscriptions have come to light from the excavations at Arslan Tash, which appear to represent the oldest Aramaic document possessed to date and which is dated 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 (q.v.). - d) The Aramaic words in Pahlavi script. - e) Nabataean and Palmyrene.
The first Nabataean documents (25 inscriptions found in the Hauran in Syria) were discovered in 1860–61; later, other inscriptions were found at Hegra and Tema, in the Sinai Peninsula, at Petra, at Šafā, in the Jabal Druze, and even at Miletus (a Greek-Nabataean bilingual from the 1st century B.C.) and at Cos (an inscription dated to the 78th year of King Aretas: if it is the third of this name, it dates to 70 B.C.; if it is the fourth, to the year 9 A.D.). The Nabataeans, as appears from the names recurring in the inscriptions, are Arabs; but for their epigraphy, they used Aramaic, as their own language had not yet developed into a literary tongue.
Prior to Nabataean, Palmyrene was known from the inscriptions discovered in 1751 at Palmyra (q.v.). Subsequent scientific expeditions yielded others from Palmyra and its surroundings; the oldest dated one is from 38 B.C., and the most recent from A.D. 274. With the capture of the city by Aurelian (A.D. 272), Palmyrene almost ceased to be used.
In all these documents, the language has a uniform and consistent character; no trace is found in them of the supposed morphological distinctions between Eastern and Western Aramaic.
From Old Aramaic, Neo-Aramaic developed in the first centuries of the Christian era, divided into two major groups: Western and Eastern, according to a geographical criterion, but this time also morphological.
The latter, in fact, differs from the former by two peculiarities: in the imperfect, in the aforementioned persons, the preformative is *l* or *n*, and in the masculine plural emphatic state, the ending is *-e*. These characteristics cannot be explained by normal development from Old 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 originated and was used in Babylonia.
In addition to Samaritan (q.v.), the Western group includes Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (the Targumic, Talmudic, and Midrashic dialects) and Christian Palestinian Aramaic, also called Syro-Palestinian by others. The first published document of the latter was the Gospel from the Vatican Library, to which two other Gospels from the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai were added, identical to the first.
The Eastern group includes: a) Syriac (q.v.), which had great importance due to its rich, predominantly religious literature; b) Babylonian Talmudic Aramaic; c) Mandaic.
Aramaic, which had such a wide diffusion in ancient times, did not withstand 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: Maʿlūlā, Baḥʿah, and Ġubbaʿdīn; while Eastern Aramaic is used in Ṭūr ʿAbdīn, near Mosul, and in the regions around Lake Urmia.