ARAMAIC, LANGUAGE. – Aramaic belongs to the Semitic stock. It is impossible to determine the territory in which Aramaic was originally spoken. Its history, however, can be followed for approximately a millennium, until its almost total disappearance.
With the collapse of the political power of the Arameans, their language did not disappear; rather, it spread and secured a position that contrasts with the political decline and the scarcity of original cultural achievements of this people. This was due to the extensive diffusion of the Aramaic tribes and to their penetration both into Babylonia and into Assyria. The Arameans possessed an innate nomadic instinct and went everywhere to trade. At Nineveh, money was weighed not only with Assyrian weights but also with Aramaic ones; the former sometimes bore Aramaic inscriptions, certainly from as early as 725 B.C., and perhaps even in earlier periods. From the seventh to the fifth century B.C. there are also Babylonian contracts with Aramaic postscripts.
The Aramaic alphabetic script, moreover, so simple in comparison with the complications of the cuneiform scripts, lent itself to a broad diffusion of the language and made it suitable for serving as an easy vehicle of communication between the Assyrians and Babylonians and the Mediterranean territories, where it was widespread. From a list of officials dating from the time of Ashurbanipal, it appears that in the imperial chancery, besides an Assyrian secretary, there was an Aramaic one; another document also mentions six Aramaic 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 kingdom, conditions did not change; indeed, Aramaic acquired greater importance, even though it belonged to 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. This greatly simplified the work, given the wide diversity of languages among the subjugated peoples, and favored the position of the Arameans, who became indispensable in the higher offices of the administration.
The introduction of numerous Aramaic terms into the Pahlavi script, as simple graphic signs and ideograms, is attributable to the great diffusion of Aramaic in the Persian Empire and to the influence of Aramaic scribes. Some believe that communications between the center of the empire and the Iranian regions of the east and north also took place through Aramaic; but the documents do not support this assertion, although there are indications that Aramaic penetrated 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 and Kurdish mountains. 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 taken place before the Exile (II Kings 18:26); but its diffusion among the people followed the deportations, which, by 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 was applied also to the ancient period. A geographical criterion was followed, which was thought to correspond to a morphological difference as well: in the third-person masculine singular and in the third-person masculine and feminine plural of the imperfect, the western dialect was thought to have the j preformative; furthermore, the final ā in the emphatic state was thought to have the meaning of a definite article, whereas in the eastern dialect there was supposed to be the n preformative, and the final ā was thought to have lost its definite sense. This distinction, however, cannot be maintained for Ancient Aramaic.
Ancient Aramaic is known to us from the following sources: a) Inscriptions (from the ninth to the sixth century B.C.); the first known was the inscription of Panammu, found near Zengirli, placed in memory of Panammu, who died while accompanying Tiglath-pileser III, when the latter was advancing against Damascus, by his son Barracab; then the inscription on the stele of Hadad, older than the preceding one; afterward a third inscription from Zengirli, commemorating a building erected by Barracab; then (1904) the inscription of King Zkr of Hamath was discovered (first half of the eighth century B.C.); more recently, fragments of an inscription have come to light from the excavations at Arslan Tāš, which seem to represent the oldest document in Aramaic so far possessed and which is assigned to the ninth century B.C. – b) Certain biblical texts: Gen. 31:47 (two words); Jer. 10:11; Esth. 4:8–6:18; 7:22–26; Dan. 2:4–7:28. – c) The papyri, inscriptions, and ostraca of Egypt (fifth and fourth centuries B.C.), Elephantine (v.). – d) The Aramaic words in the Pahlavi script. – e) Nabatean and Palmyrene.
The first Nabatean documents (25 inscriptions found in the Hauran in Syria) became known in 1860–61; other inscriptions followed, discovered at Heğra and Tema, in the Sinai Peninsula, at Petra, Ṣafā, Gebel Deuso, and even at Miletus (a Greek-Nabatean bilingual inscription from the first century B.C.) and Cos (an inscription dated to the seventy-eighth year of King Aretas: if he was the third of that name, it goes back to 70 B.C.; if instead he was the fourth, to A.D. 9). The Nabateans, as appears from the names recurring in the inscriptions, were Arabs; but for their epigraphs they used Aramaic, since their own language had not yet risen to the status of a literary language.
Palmyrene became known earlier than Nabatean, through the epigraphs discovered in 1751 Palmyra (v.). Following new scientific expeditions, further inscriptions were obtained from Palmyra and its surroundings; the oldest dated one is from 38 B.C.; the most recent is from A.D. 274. With the capture of the city by Aurelian (in 272), Palmyrene scarcely showed any further sign of life.
In all these documents, the language has a unified and uniform character; nor is there in them any trace of the supposed morphological distinctions between eastern and western Aramaic.
From Ancient Aramaic, Neo-Aramaic developed in the first centuries of the Christian era. It is divided into two major groups: western and eastern, according to a geographical criterion, but this time also a morphological one.
The latter differs from the former in two peculiarities: in the imperfect, in the persons listed above, l, n is found as the preformative, and in the masculine plural emphatic state the ending is ē. These characteristics cannot be explained as normal developments from Ancient Aramaic, but are probably due to Akkadian influence. The division into eastern and western is geographically inadequate, because the Targum of Onkelos belongs to the western group, although it arose and was used in Babylonia.
Besides Samaritan (v.), the western group includes Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (the targumic, talmudic, and midrashic forms) and Christian Palestinian Aramaic, called by others Syro-Palestinian. The first document of the latter to be published was the Gospel book in the Vatican Library, to which were added two other Gospel books from the monastery of St. Catherine on Sinai, identical with the first.
The eastern group includes: a) Syriac (v.), which acquired great importance through its rich, predominantly religious literature; b) Babylonian Talmudic Aramaic; c) Mandaic.
Aramaic, which achieved such wide diffusion in ancient times, did not withstand the pressure of Arabic, which replaced it in almost all the regions where it had previously predominated. Today Western Aramaic is still spoken in three villages northeast of Damascus: Ma'lōlā, Baḥ'ah, and Ġubba'dīn; while Eastern Aramaic is used at Ṭūr 'Abdīn, near Mosul, and in the regions around Lake Urmia.
Giuseppe Messina
ARAMAIC VERSIONS OF THE BIBLE:
V. TARGUM.