New Light on Linguistic Diversity in Pre-Achaemenid Aramaic: Wandering Arameans or Language Spread?

L eipziger Altorientalistische Srudien Herausgegeben von Michael P. Streck Band 5 \W¿andering Arameans: Arameans Outside Syria Textual and Archaeological Perspectives Edited by Angelika Berlejung, Aren M. Maeir and Andreas Schüle 2017 2017 Harrassowitz Verlag . \ü/iesbaden Harrasso witz Verlag . \Wiesbaden 18 Jonathan Greer ThareaniSussely, Y. 2008: Desert Outsiders: Extra-Mural Neighborhoods in the Iron Age Negev, in: A. Fantalkin/4. Yasur-Landau (eds.): Bene-Israel: Strldies in the Archaeology of Israel and the Levant during the Bronze and Iron Ages in Honour of Israel Finkelstein, New Light on Linguistic Diversity in Pre-Achaemenid Aramaic: Arameans W'andering or Langtage Spread? Leiden/Boston, 197 -212. van der Toom, K. (ed.) 1997: The Image and the Book: Iconic Cults, Aniconism, and the Rise ofBook Religion in Israel and the Ancient Near East, Leuven. Uehlinger, C.1994: Eine anthropomorphe Kultstatue des Gottes von Dan?, BN 72, 89-91. 1997:. Anthropomorphic Cult Statuary in Iron Age Palestine and the Search for Yahweh's -. Cult Images, in: K. van der Toorn 1997,97-155. B. 1991: Faunal Remains from Tel Dan: Perspectives on A¡imal Production at a Village, Urban, and Ritual Center, Archaeozoologia 412, 9-86. Wilson, I. 2012: Judean Pillar Figurines and Ethnic Identity in the Shadow of Assyria, JSOT Holger Gzella- Leiden Wapnish, P./Hesse, 36,2s9¿78. Zevit,Z.1995: Philology, Archaeology, andaTerminus a Quo forP's haîlaotLegislation, in: D. P. Wright/D. N. Freedman/A. Hurvitz, Pomegranates and Golden Bells: Studies in Biblical, Jewish, and Near Eastem Ritual, Law, and Literature in Honor of Jacob Milgrom, Winona Lake,29-38. The Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches, London. -.2001: Zwickel. W. 2010: Priesthood and the Development of the Cult in the Books of Kings, in: B. Halpem/4. Lemaire/M. Adams (eds.), The Books of Kings: Sources, Composition, Historiography and Reception, Leiden/Boston, 401-426. Introduction New textual flrndings since the closing decades of the twentieth century make it increasingly clear that only complex linguistic and socio-historical models can convincingly account for the intriguing tension between unity and diversity in older Aramaic. As a result, there is now growing awareness that a simple chronological distinction between successive dfages ofthe language obscures many important causes that have contributed to its rise as the lingua franca (to employ a conventional though in fact imprecise term) of the Near East between Darius the Great and Muhammad, one of the most remarkable socio-cultural phenomena of the Ancient Mediterranean at large.l Linguistic history, however, never takes place in a vacuum but within a matrix of interacting demographic, economic, political, and ideological factors. A more comprehensive study ofdiversity (be it orthographic, phonetic, grammatical, syntactic, or lexical) in the textual sources can therefore shed new light also on the social conditions under which Aramaic evolved.2 At the same time, a vivid interest in the historical and cultural background of the A¡amaic-speaking population of Syria and Mesopotamia and the effects of their incorporation into the Assyrian and Babylonian world empires can help produce more adequate historical frameworks that will in due course hopefully permit a truly holistic approach to Aramaic and Arameans.3 Discoveries ofthe past few years in particular have contributed to a keener awareness of the gap between A¡amaic in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE., when it grew deep roots in the administration of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires, and Achaemenid Official Aramaic, that is, the international standard language of the Persian Empire during the fifth and fourth centuries. As a matter of fact, dozens of previously unknown epistolary, administrative, and legal documents from Bactria, 1 2 3 Hence the model proposed by Fitzmyer (1979) (its brief summary in Fitzmyer 32004,30-32, is virtually unchanged), popular though it is thanks to its extreme minimalism and easy access to non-specialists, must be considered inadequate. See Gzella 2015 ,45-52, for a more detailed discussion and further bibliography. A repositioning of the question has been attempted by Gzella 2015 . An important state-of-the-art synopsis is Niehr (ed.) 201a; a number of relevant issues are also discussed in the various contributions in Beriejung/Streck (eds.) 2013. 20 Holger Gzella New Light on Linguistic Diversity in Pre-Achaemenid A¡amaic Samaria, and Idumaea witness to the basically homogeneous character of the latter variety across the entire imperial territory.a By contrast, the many economic tablets and clerical notes from various Neo-Assyrian archives that have been published in the meantime, brief, dry, and formulaic though they are, add support to the impression of a certain degree of diversity also in written Aramaic between the disappearance of the independent Aramean principalities by the end of the eighth century, and the purposeful codification ofthe language in the context ofa bureaucratic reform early under Achaemenid ru1e.5 (unfortunately, the use of Aramaic in the Neo-Babylonian Empire is still poorly documented, but the few available witnesses confirm the general heterogeneity that emerges from the Neo-Assyrian evidence.6) This situation has a number of important consequences. First, it undermines the explanatory value of a convenient but imprecise classificatory scheme that subsumes the entire material from the seventh to the fourth centuries BCE. under the common label "Imperial" or "official Aramaic".T Second, it suggests that the much greater homogeneity of written Aramaic after about 500 BCE. was the result of conscious language planning and, given the lack of mass media, constitutes a major political and cultural achievement, which in turn enriches our knowledge of Achaemenid administrative practice and its proverbial efficiency.s Third, it points to the substantial difference between spoken and written Aramaic, which is generally underestimated in the study of earlier phases ofthe language: there is no reason to believe that Aramaic vernaculars current in Syria and in Mesopotamia were streamlined to a similar extent as the chancellery languages that surface in the written record.e Fourth, it raises the question why Aramaic, despite its early use in government institutions and other official contexts, was so diverse in the Neo-Assyrian and the Neo-Babylonian period: was it primarily a matter of language diffusion alone or also of population movements? 4 See now the complete edition ofthe Samaria papyri (containing private documents, mostly slave sales) by Duðek (2007), the Bactrian archive (consisting of letters and administrative lists) by Navel/Shaked (2012), aúPorIen/Yardeni (2014-2016) for the very recent edition of a rotal cor- pus ofabout 2,000 terse economic documents from ldumaea. In addition, some 300 ostraca with 5 6 7 8 9 brief letters and lists from Achaemenid Elephantine in the Clermont-Ganneau collection, only published in its enrirety by Lozachmeur (2006), enrich the Egyptian sub-corpus. For an evaluation of the linguistic profile of Achaemenid Aramaic, see Gzella 2015,168-lg2. References to the texts available thus far can be found in Lemaire (2008), to which Lipiúski (20i0) and Röilig (2014) now have ro be added. The authoritative grammar is Hug (1993); see Lipiúski 2010, 207--243, and,Gzella2\l5, rl2-119, for supplementary information based on the material published in the meantime. Oelsner 2006 provides a convenient survey. Cf . the discussion in Gzella 20 I 5, 1 04-1 06 and I 57 -162, with bibliography. See Henkelman2}l3, 534-535, for up-to-date information on the generai standardization ofbureaucratic procedures under Achaemenid rule. Indeed, the new written forms of Aramaic that emerged in the post-Achaemenid period are manifestly influenced by local dialects that \ryere distinct from the Achaemenid administrative idiom and thus presuppose an unbroken evolution ofvernaculars in the latter's shadow, see Gzella2015, 217¿25. Beyer ( 1986) (and the German original published in 1984) was the first to fully account for the interaction between literary languages and vemaculars in the history ofAramaic. 21 And what is the exact relationship between the native Syrian varieties of Aramaic and from other parts ofthe Fertile Crescent during the following centuries? The present remarks shall focus on this last aspect. In order to adequately assess the significance of linguistic diversity in seventh and sixth century Aramaic in diachronic terms, a first step will provide a brief survey of the earliest textual witnesses from ninth and eighth century Syria; subsequently, the linguistic profile of Aramaic in Mesopotamia and Egypt as well as the relation of this material with the earlier Syrian evidence will be addressed in the light of the evidence now available; f,rnally, the possible origin of Achaemenid Aramaic will succinctly be discussed against its background in a matrix of several different coexisting forms of earlier Aramaic. A short paper such as this one obviously cannot claim to provide a unified account of the rapid success of A¡amaic as a linguafranca and its underlying driving forces, but the subsequent remarks do attempt to contribute to a more nuanced use of the linguistic category "Aramaic" in its various manifestations on the one hand and the ethnic or social designation "Aramean" on the other.10 those The Formative Period: Aramaic in Ninth and Eighth Century Syria Aramaic first entered the stage of history in the ninth century BCE. in the form of royal and dedicatory inscriptions commissioned by the rulers of several once independent principalities in Syria. These texts all share a number of common, secondary, features of phonology (such as a reflex of the inherited Semitic phoneme */i/ written with q and thus presumably similar in pronunciation to /{), morphology (especially the absolute-state feminine plural ending in l-an/ instead of older */-ãt-l and the thirdperson masculine singular suffix /-awhl/ "his" with vocalic bases) as well as morphosyntax (e.g., the emerging postpositive definite article in *l-a'l) and basic Semitic vocabulary (for instance, /\ad/ "one", h(e)raynl "two", lbarl "son") not attested in any of the adjacent idioms. In addition, there äre some lexical items of varying frequency uncommon or at least used with a different meaning in other Semitic languages (a well-attested example is the verb siq "to go up", but many other distinctively Aramaic lexemes also exist).ll According to viable historical-linguistic method, such innovative features (especially in the domain of phonology and morphology, whereas the lexicon bears less diagnostic weight) establish "Aramaic" as a language subgroup in its own right and 0 Macdonald (1 998) addresses, from the point of view of ancient Arabian, a number of important methodological caveats in'the use of linguistic evidence for establishing ethnic demarcations. I 1 See the grammatical outline in Gzella 2014. All these features are universally accepted as Aramaic in current scholarship. 1 22 Holger Gzella New Light on Linguistic Diversity in Pre-Achaemenid Aramaic distinguish it from the neighbouring "canaanite" branch.r2 while the latter has direct ancestors in the second millennium BCE. and is a close relative of ugaritic, that is, the native written language of the city state of ugarit on the syrian coast that disappeared in the twelfth century BCE., Aramaic cannot be directly related to either and Both chancellery idioms thus seem to be based on distinct regional varieties of Namaic. These may be labelled "Eastern Syrian" (of which the Gozan inscription is (which covers the remaining evithe sole surviving specimen) and "Central Syrian" promoted to the status of written languages; they are were independently dence), and Aramaic" in scholarship. This suggests the term under "Old subsumed unanimously attestation and that the poputhe outset of its right from was diversified Aramaic that thereby constitutes a third branch of the linguistic subgroup commonly labelled "Northwest semitic". This suggests that A¡amaic in central and Eastern syria during the early first millennium BCE. was spoken by a different population group than Canaanite in Palestine to the south, but it cannot be said when exactly and under which circumstances it took on its distinctive shape.13 With the socio-economic and political changes in Syria-Palestine in the transition period between the Late Bronze and the Early Iron Age around 1000 BCE., written forms of Aramaic, whatever their origin may be, became the official languages of several emerging kingdoms in Syria: one in Arpad near Aleppo in the north, t{ama in the central region, and, in all likelihood (though textual evidence is currently lacking), Damascus in the south, another one in Gozan in the east. While the precise workings ofthis process are still shrouded in darkness, one may assume that it resulted, at least in part, from an amalgamation of an Aramaic-speaking population of low economic profile (hence their language remained invisible in the earlier textual record) and elites surviving the collapse ofthe Neo-Hittite Empire who may have continued to exercise power between the Amuq Plain and the Orontes Valley.la Aramaic was subsequently standardized as a local scribal language for representational and administrative purposes of these Syrian principalities. The various ninth and eighth cenh¡ry texts from Central and Western Syria are quite homogeneous among themselves, which points to an early regional koiné that soon must have become entrenched in scribal training (for such a uniform garb could not be explained otherwise). Its main distinctive feature as opposed to other early forms of Aramaic is the direct object marker 'yt.Yet another Akkadian-Aramaic bilingual from Gozan in Eastern Syria, dated around 850 BCE., while internally consistent, differs in a number ofcases pertaining to spelling, phonology, morphology, and lexicon, but not all idiosyncrasies can be explained by language contact with Akkadian.l5 I 2 For an accessible survey of the relevant methodological issues, cf. Huehnergard./Rubin 20 1 1. 13 Cf . Gzella 2015, 1 6-22. 14 Two up-to-date summaries (with somewhat different emphases) can now be found in Lipiúski (2013) and Sader (2014). \ileeden 2013 marshals possible evidence for a survival ofHittite imperial power in Karkami5. 15 Theuseoftheletters(insteadof$fortheinterdental/0/andthepreformative/l-l(derivedfrom the precative particle /lh/?) for the third-person non-negated "short imperfect" (instead of/y-l) could, at least in theory, indeed be related to Assyrian influence, but this is hardly the case for the loss of intervocalic /-lv/ in kln arrd, klm "all of them", basic-siem infinitives with /mJ prefix (as in later Aramaic), the by-form of the feminine near deictic z't "this one" (instead of z ), and the plurals níwn"women" and s'wø "ewes" (instead of nín andÍ'n in other texts ofthe same period). L3 lation throughout Syria spoke different dialects, even though the formal language that underlies the official register of the surviving material eclipses much of the actual variation.t6 It is nonetheless difficult if not impossible to establish a coherent ethnic category "A¡amean" on the basis of extra-linguistic identity markers such as material culture, lifestyle (including cuisine), or religion and other cultural core traditions (for 17 instance, mythical ancestors, customs, etc.). Outside Syria proper, the linguistic and ethnic situation becomes more blurred due to the ambiguity of the scarce evidence. Central Syrian Aramaic clearly surfaces again in a royal inscription from Bukan in West Azerbaijan, dated to ca.700 BCE., but nonSemitic substrate influence shows that it served as a mere official or representational idiom there, not as a spoken language.ls The classification of a few roughly contemporaneous inscriptioås from Sam'al in North-Western Syria and the plaster text from Deir Allã in Jordan, by contrast, is debated, but neither can be directly subsumed under A¡amaic. The local language of the Sam'alian inscriptions combines some Aramaiclike features with a few highly archaic elements of nominal morphology alien to both Iron-Age Aramaic and Canaanite (in particular remnants of a productive distinction of nominative and non-nominative case in the plural). Conversely, the unique literary composition from Deir Allã with its neat distribution of unambiguously Aramaic phonology and morphology and Canaanite syntax, as well as its mixed vocabulary, in all likelihood does not reflect a natural language at all. Rather, the only linguistically and historically satisfactory explanation suggests that the text goes back to a local, and perhaps oral, tradition in a Transjordanian language that was then recorded in a basically Aramaic grammatical code or literally translated into Aramaic after the shift from a Canaanite to an Aramaic literary culture as a result of political developments.le 16 Occasional phonetic spellings and perhaps a few other instances ofvariation may nonetheless reflect spoken forms ofAramaic, see del Río Sánchez 2006 (but cf. Gze1la20t5,69 and 93). l7 AshasbeenpointedoutwithrespecttoartandarchitecturebyBonatz(2014)andNovák(2014). The survey by Niehr 2014, too, indicates that Aramean religious practice is difficult to isolate from its broader matrix of West Semitic religion. l8 See the discussion inGzella2015,9l-93. 19 A more comprehensive assessment with further bibliography can be found in Gzella (2015,7277 and 87-91). Here the known facts in a nutshell: the Deir Allã text contains a number of productive grammatical fþatures that are evidently peculiar to Aramaic, and to Aramaic alone (such as 4 for */$/ passim and /-awhÏ/ "his" in I:1; see above), whereas the very few palaeographically and semantically clear forms that seem un-Aramaic are all lexical and not grammatical 24 Holger Gzella New Light on Linguistic Diversity in Pre-Achaemenid Aramaic Since both Sam'alian and the Deir Allã variety vanish from the textual record after the eighth century BCE., they do not bear immediately on the diffr¡sion of Aramaic in the seventh and sixth centuries and need not be discussed at greater length here. Neither, in any case, points to the presence of identifiable Aramaic-speaking population be related either to the use of perishable writing materials or to the predominant use oî Aramaic as a sPoken idiom onlY. The same social and political developments also appear to have triggered a further spread of Aramaic in the Weste¡n provinces beyond its homeland Central Syria: loyalty with the Assyrian king prompted the local ruler of Sam'al in Northern Syria to replace the indigenous written idiom by Central Syrian Aramaic in the latter half of the eighth century.24 Moreover, despite the absence of any evidence, positive or negative, one may at least entertain the possibility that Aramaic could also have been implemented in the Northern Kingdom of Israel after the latter had been incorporated as a province into the Assyrian Empire. Since the West Semitic languages of Syriapalestine were structurally similar and all rooted in an alphabetic scribal culture with common material underpinnings (that is, the use of a stylus and ink for writing on flexible surfaces), a shift to Aramaic for administrative purposes would have been easy to effectuate in territories now under Assyrian control, and this may in tum have facilitated granting formal recognition to a language that was on the upswing in the groups in the respective areas, although the Deir Allã text could attest to the use of A¡amaic as a medium of creative expression among scribal elites in fringe areas, perhaps owing to the political and cultural radiance of the kingdom of Damascus. The situation in ninth and eighth century BCE Mesopotamia, finally, is even more difficult to evaluate, since Akkadian dominates the textual record and continues to do so for several centuries. Nonetheless, mass deportations during the expansion period of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE. seem to have caused a certain influx of, among others, Aramaic-speaking groups from Syria and, presumably, Babylonia (if one assumes, as evidence from personal names suggests, that the "chaldeans" used Aramaic as their vernacular)2o into various parts of the imperial tenitory.2r In addition, merchants and specialized craftsmen using alphabetic signs as carvers' and fitters' marks, and therefore supposedly Aramaic-speaking, were employed in royal building projects at Nimrud already in the ninth century.22 Hence it seems to have been a combination of the conquest of A¡amaic-speaking territories in syria, demographic developments, and the presence of highly mobile professionals thanks to relatively open borders between the Assyrian vassal states that first facilitated a rapidly growing presence of the Aramaic language in Mesopotamia during the ninth and eighth centuries. Eventually, it resulted in an official recognition of Aramaic even in domestic administration from the seventh century on.23 As direct linguistic evidence for the preceding period is by and large restricted to "west semitic", i.e., non-Akkadian, personal names (not all of which can be positively classified as Aramaic in contradistinction to canaanite, even if their Aramaic provenance is plausible on historical grounds), it says little about the actual speech situation and the relationship between Akkadian and Aramaic or their social and functional distribution among the inhabitants of Mesopotamia. The scarcity ofthe documentation may items (the N-stem n'nh "sigh" in II:12, too, can be sufficiently explained as a lexicalized particias the causative stems in /É- / or /s-/ later in Aramaic; by contrast, i in i:5 presumably renders the noun "man", followed by the participle hzh, and, is not a relative pronoun; ld't inII:17, if it is not a noun o'to knowledge", may perhaps be read lyd,t,.do you not know?"). Hence a classification ofthe text as Canaanite would only result from both an enoneous interpretation ofthe data and an inadequate use oflinguistic methodology. For an extensive and rigorous analysis ofthe linguistic position ofSam'alian, which may indeed go back to a natural local language, see Noorlander 2012. 25 heartland, too. Aramaic in Seventh and Sixth Century Mesopotamiaand Egyp! After the disappearance of the independent A¡amean polities of Syria by the end of the eighth century BCE, the majorþ of the surviving Aramaic evidence for the subsequent two centuries comes from Mesopotamia.2s This new distributional pattern may simply result from the fact that representational inscriptions issued by kings on durable stone, of which the ninth and eighth century corpus from Syria almost exclusively consists, were no longer thought appropriate under Assyrian and Babylonian rule (after all, they belonged to the prerogative of the Great King), whereas documentary texts for more mundane bureaucratic purposes may have been written on perishable materials in the West. Clay tablets, by contrast, the default writing material in Mesopotamia that was then also employèd for Aramaic, proved much more resilient. However, a linguistic analysis of the several hundred Aramaic triangular clay tablets with debt notes ("dockets") or brief A¡amaic epigraphs on cuneiform documents summarizingtheir contents ("endorsements")26 indicates that the underlying Aramaic va- ple or root, just 20 21 22 23 Zadok2013,esp.322. Nissinen 2014. Millard2009. This date is based on the chronological dishibution of the Neo-Assyrian tablets and epigraphs. 24 Gzella2015,72-:77. 25 The Syrian material dating Íiom the seventh and sixth centuries is basically restricted to two funerary inscriptions from Nerab, an unprovenanced edict against tax evasion or unlawful immigration (usually thought to come from Syria-Palestine), a papynrs letter sent by the king ofEkron in Philistia to the Pharaoh, and a sixth century debt note from Sfire (cf. Gzella2}l5,109). The Ahiqar proverbs (ibid. 15ø-153), too, may originaily have been composed in Syria or Mesopotamia around 700 BCE. but only survive on an Achaemenid papl'rus from Elephantine. 26 See Gzella 2015 , 125-139 , for a discussion of these text types and their possible functions . Hoiger Gzella New Light on Linguistic Diversity in Pre-Achaemenid Aramaic a mere export product from Western Slria nor a proper regional "Mesopotamian" form with its own consistent set of dialect features. Instead, it seems to be a hybrid entity that has emerged from the interplay of the several different factors which, as has been suggested above, contributed to the spread ofthe language. Possible Syrian influence appears most clearly in spelling traditions. The interden/t/ andldl inpro¡als*/01 and*löl,whichhadmergedwiththecorrespondingdentals nunciation by the seventh century (evidence for the shift from */B/ to fl is only available for a later period), were written with J (as in Snh "there" or íql "to weigh") and z (as in the ubiquitous relative marker zy),27 exactly as in Central Syrian.28 Interestingly, the use of s for *l0l , as in the Gozan inscription, is not attested, even though it would correspond more closely to Assyrian orthography and pronunciation. Ifthe debated reading and interpretation of/- as a prefìxed negation "not" in a text from Tell Shiukh el-Fawkani is correct, that would provide another parallel with typical Central Syrian conventions against later Aramaic l'.2e Two tablets from Dür-Katlimmu may now contain a parallel.30 Such orihographic practice may indeed be patterned after Central Syrian standards, which were already widespread inthe preceding period, and could even point to the influence of Syrian scribes or scribal instructors.3l This is all the more likely since the use of the letters .í and z for representing the sounds */01 and *lö/ seems counter-intuitive and can best be explained by the correspondence ofthese etymological phonemes to their reflexes /É/ and /z/ in Phoenician, whence alphabetic writing had spread early in the first-millennium;32 it thus reflects a typically Western convention. If Aramaic, as it appears to be the case, had no established written tradition in Mesopotamia before about the seventh century BCE or a slightly earlier date, it would have been an obvious step to import experts from regions where Aramaic was already widely used as an official idiom in order to create an adequate infrastructure (i.e., scribal schools) and linguistic norms for meeting the demand for alphabetic writing in domestic administration. The wide gap between spoken and written language in the Ancient Near East at large would preclude an attempt at simply resorting to phonetic transcription. For such a new writing tradition, then, Central Syrian in particular, which had already spread as a regional koin,! during the eighth century, would have provided the model par excellence.33 It is thus only natural to find established Syrian odhographic conventions in Mesopotamian Aramaic documents, similar to the Phoenician writing practice that originally came with the diffusion of the alphabet across Syria-Palestine shortly after 1000 BCE. They are an instance ofknowledge transfer, not of migration. Spelling, however, merely pertains to the more or less arbitrary graphic representation of language and is indifferent as to linguistic affiliation. Syrian orthography, even if it influenced the use of written Aramaic in Neo-Assyrian bureaucracy, thus cannot establish a link between the specif,rc Aramaic variety underlying the Neo-Assfian tablets and Central Syrian Aramaic. Yet among the relevant diagnostic features of phonology and morphology, parallels that may point to possible Syrian roots of this form of Aramaic arc hard to find. As far as phonology is concerned, one important reason is that no straightforward phonetic peculiarities of Central Syrian vis-à-vis other Aramaic varieties have yet been identified; if they existed, they do not appear in the largely consonantal script. Neither do the tablets and epigraphs contain any phonetic hallmark that might align them with the post-Christian Eastern Aramaic literary languages Syriac, $andaic, and Babylonian Talmudic, or with the vernaculars that are reflected in magical bowls and amulets from Late Antiquity.34 All one can say is that occasional reflexes of more general phonetic developments that affect the language at large, especially the shift ofthe original A¡amaic realization of * /5/ to /' I (as in two instances of 7 ' "land" instead of usual 'rq) arrd, the merger of the interdentals with the dentals,3s presuppose a widespread oral use of Aramaic and contact among speakers. Hence Aramaic in seventh and sixth century Mesopotamia was part of a close-knit continuum of Aramaic dialects across the Fertile Crescent. Such phonetic changes are often advanced in the context oflanguage learning by successive generations of children that gradually move away from the speech of their caretakers.36 That, in turn, supports the hypothesis that Aramaic, despite the meagre written record for this period, already served as a popular means of oral communication in Syria and Mesopotamia. However, some of the phonetic peculiarities of later, especially Babylonian, Eastern Aramaic, such as the reduction of pharyngeals and laryngeals as well as the dissimilation of emphatics in the same root (see above), could result from Akkadian influence. They may have originated already in a period of genuine Akkadian-Aramaic 26 riefy is neither 27 SeetheexamplesinHug 1993,60 and 151. 28 Gzella 20 14, 7 9-8 1 ; 201 5, 38-39. 29 SeeGzella20l5, l3l,foradiscussionandreferencestoalternativereadings. 30 D61,3'inRöllig2014,see thenoteonp. 141; cf.D62,4. Othertextsfromthisa¡chivehave/' or /ft instead (D 10; 92). 31 Nissinen2014,276;Gzella2015, l25.Thecoexistenceoftheprefixednegation/-inoneofthe funerary inscriptions from Nerab with /'in the Syro-Palestinian edict against tax evasion or unlawful immigration nonetheless shows that these local scribal conventions were gradually disappearing already in the seventh century BCE. (cf. Gze11a 20 I 5, 1 1 7, for the exact references). 32 Kaufman 1982,147. 21 33 As Röllig (2014,15), rightly remarks, the by and large uniform spelling of the Aramaic administrative texts from Mesopotamia presupposes some degree of formal training. 34 Some salient features can be found in Gzella 2015,339 342. See below on the relevance of a weak articulation ofpharyngeals and laryngeals and dissimilation ofemphatics, as in Akkadian. 35 Attested already for the mid-seventh century BCE., see Gzella 201 5, 130-13 1. 36 It corresponds to what Labov (2007) calls "transmission" and "change from below". Phonetic mergers like these usually'spread at the expense ofphonetic distinction, hence during the transition period, some people will still have pronounced the original Aramaic reflex of */$/, while it had already become identical with the realization oforiginal /'/ in the speech ofothers. 28 Holger Gzella New Light on Linguistic Diversity in P¡e-Achaemenid Aramaic bilingualism but were not yet represented in the more conservative written code that direct linguistic link between seventh and sixth century manifestations of Aramaic and the old Central Syríankoíné. Rather, dialects that were previously eclipsed by the eaîly Aramaic standard language of Western Syria or by Akkadian in Mesopotamia and had no written tradition of their own came to the tbre with the consolidation of the Neo-AssYrian EmPire. Variation in the seventh and sixth century BCE Aramaic material itself also reflects faint traces ofwhat must have been a considerable amount ofdialectal diversity. An ostracon with an official letter from ca. 650 BCE that was discovered at Assur but presumably dispatched from Babylonia, already anticipates a distinctive feature of Achaemenid Official Aramaic as opposed to older varieties of the language, that is, the use ofthe independent third-person plural pro¡ounhmw instead ofthe correspondo'them".42 The roughly contemporaneous or slightly older proving object suffix -hm erbs ascribed to the legendary figure ofAhiqar (a counsellor to the Assyrian king), transmitted on a fifth century papyrus from Elephantine together with a later narrative frame, also seem to have been composed in the Assyrian period, though their exact date and place of origin are debated;43 they feature derived-stem infinitives with an lmJ prefrxthat coexisted with the unprefixed forms in the remaining corpus.44 A few private letters sent from Memphis to Syene and discovered at Hermopolis presumably written in the late sixth century BCE, contain further instances Egypt, in of variation, most notably remnants of the old feminine singular ending l-at/ instead. of l-â/, ittnovative second- and third-person masculine plural suffixes in /-nl instead of l-rnl,as and causative-stem infinitives with an lm-l prefix similar to the situation in the Ahiqar-proverbs. The spelling shows already some influence of Achaemenid orthographic conventions, albeit only sporadically so, but the language ofthese papyrus letters is clearly different from Achaemenid Official A¡amaic.aó It has been suggested was taught at scribal schools; consequently, they only surface at a moment when Akkadian was long dead and older scribal conventions had been replaced by a more phonetic spelling.rT In that case, the diffusion of Aramaic in Mesopotamia, at least in the southeastern part, would not result from large-scale immigration of native speakers from Syria-Palestine. Rather, the language would have been adopted by speakers of Akkadian, whose Akkadian accent in Aramaic was then transmitted to subsequent generations and, due to insufficient exposure to native pronunciation ofSyrian Aramaic, preserved even after the shift from Akkadian to Aramaic had been completed.3s While this hypothesis obviously results from a reconstruction based on later linguistic da1ø, ir. is entirely plausible and agrees with other evidence for the view that the spread of Aramaic in the Fertile Crescent was not conditioned by migration alone. The best, though still tenuous, evidence for evaluating the dialectal affiliation of this material comes from morphology. It is no doubt significant that the typical Central Syrian variant of the direct object marker, 'yt, does not occur in the Mesopotamian documents. This specif,rc form has parallels in similar elements in other Syro-Palestinian languages, such as Sam'alian, Phoenician, Hebrew, and Moabite, and thus seems to be related to a process of linguistic convergence in Syria-Palestine alone, whereas Achaemenid Official Aramaic and later Eastem Aramaic languages consistently use the preposition l- as a direct object marker.3e The Gozan inscription, by contrast, has no evidence for an object marker at all. As the cognate formyt later surfaces in Westem Aramaic, the plausible use of /- for direct object marking (and not for the indirect object) in a debt note from Nineveh,ao the only relevant instance, suggests that the underlying language variety is more closely related to an Eastern Syrian or a native Mesopotamian form of A¡amaic than to the dialect on which Central Syrian is based. Another significant criterion, the shape of the basic-stem infinitive, further corroborates this preliminary conclusion: Central Syrian consistently has forms without an /m-/ prefix, whereas the language variety underlying the Gozan inscription only contains prefixed forms; the latter then became completely regular in the whole of Aramaic from the seventh century BCE onwards (excepting the fossilized quotative marker I'mr "saying" that survived into Achaemenid Aramaic) and are thus also pervasive in later Westem A¡amaic.al Given the peripheral nature of the Gozan inscription, it seems only fair to assume that prefixed basic-stem infinitives enjoyed a wider distribution and were not generalized from this particular variety. Again, there is no 37 Cf.Gzella2015,350-357 and361-365forthelesst¡aditionalspellingofJewishBabylonian A¡amaic and Mandaic. 8 For a similar scenario in the evolution of Germanic and Romance, see Schrijver 2004. 39 Gzella 2013. The use of yl would be diagnostically significant, since, from a typological point 3 of view, the extension of a dative marker like /- to direct objects is quite common and could thus have arisen independently. 40 Hug 1993,18; Gzella20l5,l32. 4l Gzella20l5, 116 (with further bibliography). 29 42 GzeIla20I5,1l8. 43 For a briefsummary ofthe discussion, see Gzella 2015, 150-153. The linguistic classification remains inconclusive, bttl. the realia reflected in the proverbs suggest a Syrian provenance. 44 Gzella 2015, 116-1 17. 45 In two Neo-Assyrian tablets from Dür-Katlimmu, Rollig (2014) kanscribes 'lyhn"ro their debt" where 'lyhm would be expected, as the pronoun refers to two male persons previously mentioned (D 28,3 and 45,3). Ifthis transcription were correct, it would yield an intriguing grammatical feature that requires further analysis, since plural suffixes are largely absent in the other admínistrative tablets and epigraphs. Unforrunately, neither reading can be verified on the basis of the photographs, because the letter in question appears on the edge of the tablet in both cases. In addition, a shiÍï ÍÌom /m/ to /n/ is phonetically so easy to explain that it would only constitute a weak isogloss. 46 Gzella2015, i18-119and 148-150. Mostoftheinstancesof linguisticvariationinAchaemenid Official Aramaic commonly adduced result from a methodologically questionable inclusion of the few Hermopolis papyri in the latter corpus, but even ifone treats them on par with the rest of Achaemenid Aramaic, the basic homogeneity of the vast amount of the material from the Persian period (now corroborated by substantial discoveries from Bactria in addition to the Samaria papyri) easily outweighs the idiosyncrasies ofthis handful of short texts. 30 Holger Gzella New Light on Linguistic Diversity in Pre-Achaemenid Aramaic that the Aramaic-speaking community of Syene consists of people of syrian descent, which is not altogether implausible in the light of the onomasticon,aT but again, the language itselfcannot be connected to any attested Syrian variety ofthis period.as It appears to reflect a sub-standard register that only appeared in writing when A¡amaic began to be used more frequently outside the domain ofprofessional scribes. As far as s¡mtax is concerned, the fairly fixed word-order patterns known from ninth and eighth century A¡amaic increasingly seem to dissolve due to frequent fronting of direct objects and appositions.ae contact with Akkadian early in the Neo-Assyrian period may have acted as an important trigger, but Aramaic did not exactly copy Akkadian clause patterns.so Micro-variation in the document forms employed for Aramaic administrative tablets and epigraphs in Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylo- result from the latter's conservative character), and their existence cannot be posi- nian bureaucracy (as appears from subtle differences in terminology or idiom, such as either zy or /- for the creditor's name or the variation between 'grt and, dnh, both meaning "document", at the beginning, and the order ofthe different constituent parts such as the list ofwitnesses) also points to a lack ofcomplete standardization before the Achaemenid period.sr since these brief notes only represent a very small part of the grammatical system, there is little room for a similar amount of morphological heterogeneity as in the very few but more extensive remaining text types. As a consequence, the crucial diagnostic traits of Aramaic in this period, that is, pronominal suffixes, infinitives, and object markers, appear but rarely ifat all. By contrast, those morphological hallmarks that later constitute the distinctive features of Eastern Aramaic are still lacking in the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian material: the third-person "imperfect" preformative is consistently /y-1, as opposed to /l-/ or lnJ in Eastern Aramaic; the masculine emphatic-state plural ending is still l-ayy-ù instead of later Eastern Aramaic l-el; artd the third-person masculine singular suffix after vocalic bases appears as /-awhl/ rather than its secondary by-form /-ayn*r/ in Eastern Aramaic.52 If these traits were already present in spoken forms of Aramaic during this period, they have not left any traces in the written material (which may 47 Cf . Botta 20 14, 3"12-37 5 : Gzella 20t 5, 1 50. 48 Perhapstellingly,theoneinstanceofdirectobjectmarkinginthesetextsdoesnothavetheWestem form 'ytbúl-, see Hug 1993,71. 49 Hug 1993, 9 5-97, 103-1 05, 50 Cf. Gzella 2015,l2l-122. 5 I and, 127, with a brief evaluation on p. 127. Gzella 2015, 128-129 and 135-137. 52 Gzella 2015,265¿69. The peculiar form 'mm"'the peoples" in one of the proverbs does not necessarily reflect an Eastem Aramaic plural in /-el but could point to a différent noun pattern (ibid. 152-153). Ifit is indeed to be aligned with Eastem Aramaic, it constitutes an exceptional case, for even later Aramaic epigraphs from Babylonia still have the older common plural ènding l-ayy-al. The suffix /-awh7 is now amply attested in the formulaic expression 'twh "to his debt, in texts from Dur-Katlimmu (see the references in Röllig 201 4,269, s.v.). The reading ,lyh in D 44,3 according to Röllig (2014, 108), by contrast, is highly unusual and cannot easily be verified onthebasisoftheaccompanyingphotographonp.109;perhapsoneshouldassumã'lyh[m],,to their debt", especially since the document appears to refe¡ to two individuals (cf. D 7;26;3g;54). 31 tivelY verified' Seventh and sixth century Aramaic thus contains a significant degree ofinternal variation and thereby points to a dynamic evolution of the language in widespread oral use without any far-reaching standardization of the written code yet. While spelling and terminology of the administrative tablets and epigraphs betray a reasonable degree of homogeneity, several instances of morphological diversity can be found in the Assur ostracon, the Ahiqar proverbs, and the Hermopolis letters. The evidence therefore supports the hypothesis that Aramaic spread largely uncontrolled in the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires and that its formal recognition in imperial administration can best be seen as an attempt at catching up with a development that was akeady undet'way rather than as an instance of deliberate language planning. Written Aramaic of this period may have been influenced by established Syrian spelling conventions, but there is no clear linguistic affiliation of the material from Mesopotamia with any known geographical variety: it contains neither diagnostic traits of ninth and eighth century Central Syrian Aramaic nor of later Eastem Aramaic. So the generic notio¡l of "Mesopotamian Aramaic", employed in some earlier studies, does not coffespond to any specific dialect cluster, and there are many unknown factors that render a precise linguistic classification impossible for the time being.53 Aramaic in the Assyrian and Babylonian periods is far from uniform. Deportees or other types of expatriates specifically from Syria are thus unlikely to have played a key role in the spread of Aramaic in Mesopotamia. It seems more plausible to assume that part of the population consisted of speakers of diverse Aramaic dialects, some of whom may have settled in the region at a much earlier stage, and others switched from Akkadian to Aramaic for reasons not yet well known, but the actual impact of migration on the diffusion of Aramaic cannot be assessed with the linguistic material currently available. The end point is nonetheless uncontested: after a period of extensive bilingualism, which resulted in mutual borrowings of words, forms, and use patterns, Aramaic complelely replaced Akkadian as the dominant spoken idiom in Mesopotamia, perhaps some time around the f,rfth century BCE.54 Conscious maintenance of Akkadian thanks to its long-lasting prestige in conservative scribal and administrative circles that produced the lion's share ofthe evidence obscures the exact workings of the shift to Aramaic in Mesopotamian society. Yet the borrowing of Aramaic everyday vocabulary and function words into Akkadian (as opposed to the more specialized domains of Akkadian legal, administrative, and religious terminology borrowed into Aramaic) in the course of the Neo-Assyrian and the Neo-Babylonian periods no doubt underscores the prominence of A¡amaic in daily 53 Gzella20l5, l33,withacritiqueofearlierproposals.AlsonotedindependentlybyRöllig(2014, 1 5) ("In dieser Sprachstuf,e erscheinen noch nicht die Phänomene, die später die Trennung in den westlichen und den östlichenZweig der Sprache bestimmen"). 54 Beaulieu20131'Gzella2015,l19-l24.Theexactdateisimpossibletoascertain,however. 32 Holger Gzella New Light on Linguistic Diversity in Pre-Achaemenid Aramaic J-t usage, for basic vocabulary is normally borrowed from the pragmatically dominant language.s5 Interestingly, however, the process surveyed here seems to be confined to The Origin of Achaemenid Official Aramaic language diffusion; it does not coincide with any observable "A¡amean" ethnic or cultural sentiment: there is no evidence for a distinction between an "Assyrian" or "Babylonian" and an "Aramean" identity after the eighth century BCE.56 However, the actual reasons that promoted the rapid and pervasive spread ofAramaic in the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods still remain elusive; they would merit a large-scale investigation based on a more comprehensive comparative rypology of"world languages" in different socio-political settings. Several hypotheses have been formulated in earlier scholarship, but neither the relative simplicity of the alphabetic script as opposed to cuneiform writing nor the slender morphological of Aramaic vis-à-vis Akkadian nor the suitability of Aramaic as an ideologically "neutral" vehicle for communicating imperial values in a multiethnic state instead of imposing the use ofAkkadian provides a convincing argument, at least not in isolation.sT It is thus more likely to assume, by way of a preliminary working hypothesis, a combination of different factors contributed to the success of Aramaic: its established use and prestige in Syria prior to the Assyrian conquest; its employ in a flexible, lowoverhead form of bureaucracy That could easily replace the use of other West Semitic languages geared towards the alphabetic script in local administration in Phoenicia, Philistia, or the Northern Kingdom of Israel (more easily so than Akkadian, at any rate, because the latter was taught in a different and high-profile educational framework);58 and its popularity among highly mobile groups, which may have facilitated its function as a contact idiom in a multilingual context. (It is still unclear whether the vocabulary of about three hundred lexemes with reduced synonymy and the limited amount of nominal patterns attested in the seventh and sixth century material, excluding the Ahiqar proverbs, has any bearing on a possibly extensive use of Aramaic in contact situations among speakers ofdifferent native languages; nothing points to the existence of an Aramaic pidgin with a low degree of morphological complexity.) Migration or deportation was thus not necessarily the principal driving force in this process, but only much more sociolinguistic research along such lines can provide fuither too, has its roots in the varied Aramaic The ancestor of Achaemenid Official Aramaic, BCE. It is not directly attested, and sixth centuries ofthe seventh dialect landscape plural pfonoun instead ofthe object suffix third-person independent ofthe but rhe use clues. ,,thent" aligns it with the Assur ostracon, which seems to originate from Babylonia (see above). In addition, historical considerations may corroborate the hypothesis that the linguistic basis of Achaemenid Aramaic goes back to the Aramaic idiom of Babvlonian scribes who then entered the service of the Achaemenid rulers.se There is nothing unusual about such a development, for language codification normally proceeds from selecting a regional variety that subsequently undergoes a process ofstandardization and elaboration. Indeed, the rigour with which the Persian chancellery unified spelling and language use clearly presupposes a deliberate choice to continue the successful earlier use ofAramaic as a written idiom in Syria and Mesopotamia, streamlining it by means of a considerable reduction of linguistic variation. The most important orthographic feature is "degemination", i.e., the (presumably only graphic) rendering of an etymologically long consonanf lCCl as z¿C. Moreover, Achaemenid Aramaic has hw "he" and hy "she" for the third-person singular independent pronouns instead of older å', which previously obscured the morphological difference between both forms. Grammatical peculiarities include the use oî hmw instead of -hm "them", which seems to have been inherited from the local dialect on which this variety is based (see above), and the extension ofthe third-person masculine plural ofthe "perfect" also to the feminine (although it is not quite clear how this relates to the situation in older Aramaic, where no third-person feminine plural "perfects" are yet attested).60 All these features evidently distinguish the Achaemenid chancellery language from the preceding varieties of Aramaic, here subsumed under older/earlier (ninth and eighth centuries) and younger/later (seventh and sixth centuries) Old Aramaic.6r As a corollary, the timehonoured term "Imperial A¡amaic" should not be applied indiscriminately to the textual evidence of the Assyrian, the Babylònian, and the Persian Empire, because it obscures a linguistic development that has a wider socio-historical and culh¡ral significance; it is avoided here in favour of the more precise designation "Achaemenid Official Aramaic". With the creation of a homogeneous Aramaic linguafrancafbroughout the Achaemenid territory, the language has finally been dissolved from its original speech community: scribes and administrators in the local chancelleries between Egypt and Bactria, though, as personal names suggest, in part rocruited from the local population, 55 See Van Coetsem 1988,37-40. 56 Cf. the ambiguous evidence from personal names inNissinen20I4,282 283. 57 Czel1a2015, 108 andL25. 58 At least the use of a form of Aramaic (of unclear provenance) as a language of diplomacy in Syria-Palestine is attested by a letter of the Philistine ruler Adon to the Egyptian Pharaoh with a request for military support from ca. 600 BCE. (Gzella2015,140-141). 59 Gzella 2015, 162-165, with further bibliography. 60 Gzella 2015, 168-177. 61 See the discussion of terminology inGzella20l5,157-162; similarly Lipiúski2010'207 34 Holger Gzella were trained according to the same empire-wide linguistic standards and thereby con_ tributed their share to the rise ofa highly efficient bureaucratic system across a vast multilingual territory. Depending on the region, Achaemenid official Aramaic thus interacted either with other languages current in the persian Empire or with local vernaculars of Aramaic. As the intersection of Achaemenid and local features in the new written idioms that subsequently emerged in the Hellenistic and Roman Near East demonstrates, these vernaculars continued to be transmitted across generations of speakers and evolved naturally; hence distinct spoken varieties and a unified written language coexisted. By and large, then, the diffusion of the Aramaic administrative language under Achaemenid rule does not coincide with any substantial displacement of Aramaic speakers. Palestine, however, is a special case, since here western A¡amaic dialects seem to have spread chiefly due to the demographic shifts befween the Neo-Babylonian and the Achaemenid periods. (Judging from the use of the object markeryi, in all likelihood a form related to central syrian 'yt, these dialects p.ãuubty have roots in syria.62) This apparently exceptional socio-historical development is particularly important because it accelerated the much-debated language shift from Hefrew to Aramaic among the local population.63 Conclusion The picture that emerges from a fine-grained historical-comparative sfudy of preAchaemenid A¡amaic is thus one of bewildering diversity. Of the several local dialects that evolved into recognizable forms of Aramaic in Syria and perhaps also in parts of Mesopotamia some time before the ninth century BCE, two becamáthe basis of relatively standardized scribal idioms for the representational and, in all likelihood, bureaucratic purposes of newly-emerging polities: an Eastern Syrian variefy at Gozan (ca. 850 BCE) and a central syrian one that quickly advanced to a regional standard idiom covering the area between Arpad, Hama, and Damascus in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE. Neither, however, survived far into the Neo-Assyrian period. when Aramaic was eventually given formal recognition as a language of administration in the Assyrian Empire, only its writing tradition appears to have been pattemed after central syrian spelling conventions, which in turn could point to the piesence ofsyrian scribes or scribal instructors in Mesopotamia. Linguisticall¡ by òontrast, the Aramaic material mostly known from seventh and sixth century Assyria and Babylonia cannot be derived from the attested Syrian varieties. Instead, it seems to be rooted in a broader and more complex Aramaic dialect landscape that was consolidated not only New Light on Linguistic Diversity in Pre-Achaemenid A¡amaic bv demographic developments but also due to other reasons for linguistic diffusion .uch at trade or simPlY fashion. A reasonable amount of variation in administrative documents, official letters, literaly compositions, and, since the late sixth century BCE private communications nonetheless points to a lack of more rigorous linguistic standardization: by-forms of pronominal suffixes, basic and derived stems infinitives, and direct object markers reflect coexisting language varieties, which, however, cannot be associated with recognizable dialect groups as is later the case with Aramaic from Hellenistic times onwards. It is thus impossible to isolate chronological, geographical, and social factors thaf may underlie this diversity. In addition to such hard grammatical facts, the many administrative notes on clay tablets or in the form ofepigraphs on cuneiform documents seem to follow somewhat different patterns into which the constituent parts are organized' hence local administrative þrocedures were not fully unified either. Besides its use in writing, Aramaic also acted as a widespread means of oral communicaÍionthat, as changes in pronunciation indicate, was transmitted naturally across generations ofspeakers and, after a period ofbilingualism, eventually replaced Akkadian as a vernacular in Mesopotamia by about the fifth century BCE at the latest. Finally, the dialect that underlies Achaemenid Official Aramaic also appears to have evolved against this diverse background and may have roots in Babylonia. By selecting and codifuing this particular variety some time before 500 BCE, the persian administration continued an ongoing linguistic development but reduced diversity in written Aramaic and successfully implemented a comparatively unified and de-regionalized standard language throughout the imperial territory. spoken Aramaic nonetheless continued to evolve in its shadow and new scribal forms appeared once again in Syria and Mesopotamia after the fall of the Achaemenid Empire. Yet the linguistic evidence often cannot easily be related to known demographic shifts or instances of migration. while the diffusion of people of "Aramean" descent presumably played a role in the early stages of the bottom-up spread of Aramaic in Mesopotamia, numerous other factors also have to be taken into account. A more ambitious study of the diffusion of Aramaic in the context of a comparative typology of linguaefrancae in different historical situations - such as Latin, Arabic, Spanish, and English6a - could provide further insights into the conditions that made possible the success ofan erstwhile regional dialect spoken in a peripheral region ofthe Near East. 62 Beyer 1986,34. 63 See the archaeological data in Lipschits 2003 and the evaluation of the linguistic evidence in Gzella 20 1 5, I 90-l 93 and, 225J38. 35 64 Many valuable observations can now be found in Leonhardt 20 I 3. 36 Holger Gzella Bibliography Beaulieu, P.-4. 20i3: Aspects of Aramaic and Babylonian Linguistic Interaction in First Millennium BC Iraq, Joumal ofLanguage Contact 6,35g-37g. Berlejung, A./streck, M. P. (eds.) 2013: Arameans, chaldeans, and Arabs in Babylonia and Palestine in the Firsr Millennium B.C (LAOS 3), Wiesbaden. Beyer, K. 1986: The Aramaic Language: Its Distribution and Subdivisions, translated by J. F. 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