Aramaic


Aramaic is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, Sinai, southeastern Anatolia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Arabia, where it has been continually written and spoken in different varieties for over 3,000 years.
Aramaic served as a language of public life and administration of ancient kingdoms and empires—particularly the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Neo-Babylonian Empire, and Achaemenid Empire—and as a language of divine worship and religious study within Judaism, Christianity, and Gnosticism. Several modern varieties of Aramaic are still spoken. The modern eastern branch is spoken by Assyrians, Mandeans, and Mizrahi Jews. Western Aramaic is still spoken by the Muslim and Christian Arameans in the towns of Maaloula, Bakh'a and Jubb'adin in Syria. Classical varieties are used as liturgical and literary languages in several West Asian churches, as well as in Judaism, Samaritanism, and Mandaeism. The Aramaic language is considered endangered, with several varieties used mainly by the older generations. Researchers are working to record and analyze all of the remaining varieties of Neo-Aramaic languages in case they become extinct.
Aramaic belongs to the Northwest group of the Semitic language family, which includes the mutually intelligible Canaanite languages such as Hebrew, Edomite, Moabite, Ekronite, Sutean, and Phoenician, as well as Amorite and Ugaritic. Aramaic varieties are written in the Aramaic alphabet, a descendant of the Phoenician alphabet. The most prominent variant of this alphabet is the Syriac alphabet, used in the ancient city of Edessa. The Aramaic alphabet became a base for the creation and adaptation of specific writing systems in some other Semitic languages of West Asia, such as the Hebrew alphabet and the Arabic alphabet.
Early Aramaic inscriptions date from the 11th century BC, placing it among the earliest languages to be written down. Aramaicist Holger Gzella notes, "The linguistic history of Aramaic prior to the appearance of the first textual sources in the 9th century BC remains unknown." Aramaic is believed by most historians and scholars to have been the primary language spoken by Jesus of Nazareth both for preaching and in everyday life.

Name

The connection between Chaldean, Syriac, and Samaritan as "Aramaic" was first identified in 1679 by German theologian Johann Wilhelm Hilliger. In 1819–1821 Ulrich Friedrich Kopp published his Bilder und Schriften der Vorzeit, in which he established the basis of the paleographical development of the Northwest Semitic scripts. Kopp criticised Jean-Jacques Barthélemy and other scholars who had characterized all the then-known inscriptions and coins as Phoenician, with "everything left to the Phoenicians and nothing to the Arameans, as if they could not have written at all". Kopp notes that some of the words on the Carpentras Stele corresponded to the Aramaic in the Book of Daniel and the Book of Ruth.
Josephus and Strabo both state that the "Syrians" called themselves "Arameans". The Septuagint, the earliest extant full copy of the Hebrew Bible, a Greek translation, used the terms Syria and Syrian where the Masoretic Text, the earliest extant Hebrew copy of the Bible, uses the terms Aramean and Aramaic; numerous later bibles followed the Septuagint's usage, including the King James Version. This connection between the names Syrian and Aramaic was discussed in 1835 by Étienne Marc Quatremère.
In historical sources, Aramaic language is designated by two distinctive groups of terms, first of them represented by endonymic names, and the other one represented by various exonymic names. Endonymic terms for Aramaic language were derived from the same word root as the name of its original speakers, the ancient Arameans. Endonymic forms were also adopted in some other languages, like ancient Hebrew. In the Torah, "Aram" is used as a proper name of several people including descendants of Shem, Nahor, and Jacob. Ancient Aram, bordering northern Israel and what is now called Syria, is considered the linguistic center of Aramaic, the language of the Arameans who settled the area during the Bronze Age.
Unlike in Hebrew, designations for Aramaic language in some other ancient languages were mostly exonymic. In ancient Greek, Aramaic language was most commonly known as the "Syrian language", in relation to the native inhabitants of the historical region of Syria. Since the name of Syria emerged as a variant of Assyria, the biblical Ashur, and Akkadian Ashuru, a complex set of semantic phenomena was created, becoming a subject of interest both among ancient writers and modern scholars.
The Koine Greek word Ἑβραϊστί has been translated as "Aramaic" in some versions of the Christian New Testament, as Aramaic was at that time the language commonly spoken by the Jews. However, Ἑβραϊστί is consistently used in Koine Greek at this time to mean Hebrew, and Συριστί is used to mean Aramaic. In Biblical scholarship, the term "Chaldean" was for many years used as a synonym of Aramaic, from its use in the Book of Daniel and subsequent interpretation by Jerome.

History

was the language of the ancient Aramean tribes. By around 1000 BC, the Arameans had a string of kingdoms in what is now part of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and the fringes of southern Mesopotamia. Aramaic rose to prominence under the Neo-Assyrian Empire, under whose influence Aramaic became a prestige language after being adopted as a lingua franca of the empire by Assyrian kings, and its use was spread throughout Mesopotamia, the Levant and parts of Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula, and Ancient Iran under Assyrian rule. At its height, Aramaic was spoken in what is now Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Kuwait, parts of southeast and south central Turkey, northern parts of the Arabian Peninsula and parts of northwest Iran, as well as the southern Caucasus, having gradually replaced several other related Semitic languages.
The scribes of the Neo-Assyrian bureaucracy used Aramaic, and this practice was subsequently inherited by the succeeding Neo-Babylonian Empire and later by the Achaemenid Empire. Mediated by scribes that had been trained in the language, highly standardized written Aramaic—named by scholars Imperial Aramaic—progressively became the lingua franca of public life, trade and commerce throughout Achaemenid territories. Wide use of written Aramaic subsequently led to the adoption of the Aramaic alphabet and, as logograms, some Aramaic vocabulary in the Pahlavi scripts, which were used by several Middle Iranian languages, including Parthian, Middle Persian, Sogdian, and Khwarezmian.
Biblical Aramaic was used in several sections of the Hebrew Bible, including parts of the books of Daniel and Ezra. Aramaic translation of the Bible is known as the Targum. It was the language of Jesus, who spoke the Galilean dialect during his public ministry, and of the Jerusalem Talmud, Babylonian Talmud, and Zohar. According to the Babylonian Talmud, the language spoken by Adamthe first human in the Biblewas Aramaic.
Some variants of Aramaic are retained as sacred languages by certain religious communities. Most notable among them is Classical Syriac, the liturgical language of Syriac Christianity. It is used by several communities, including the Assyrian Church of the East, the Ancient Church of the East, the Chaldean Catholic Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Syriac Catholic Church, the Maronite Church, and also the Saint Thomas Christians, Syriac Christians of Kerala, India. One of the liturgical dialects was Mandaic, which besides becoming a vernacular, Neo-Mandaic, also remained the liturgical language of Mandaeism. Syriac was also the liturgical language of several now-extinct gnostic faiths, such as Manichaeism.
Neo-Aramaic languages are still spoken in the 21st century as a first language by many communities of Assyrians, Mizrahi Jews, and Mandaeans of the Near East, with the main Neo-Aramaic languages being Suret and Turoyo. Western Neo-Aramaic persists in only two villages in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains in western Syria. They have retained use of the once-dominant lingua franca despite subsequent language shifts experienced throughout the Middle East.

Periodization

of historical development of Aramaic language has been the subject of particular interest for scholars, who proposed several types of periodization, based on linguistic, chronological and territorial criteria. Overlapping terminology, used in different periodizations, led to the creation of several polysemic terms, that are used differently among scholars. Terms like: Old Aramaic, Ancient Aramaic, Early Aramaic, Middle Aramaic, Late Aramaic, were used in various meanings, thus referring to different stages in historical development of Aramaic language.
Most commonly used types of periodization are those of Klaus Beyer and Joseph Fitzmyer.
Periodization of Klaus Beyer:
  • Old Aramaic, from the earliest records, to
  • Middle Aramaic, from c. 200 AD, to c. 1200 AD
  • Modern Aramaic, from c. 1200 AD, up to the modern times
Periodization of Joseph Fitzmyer:
  • Old Aramaic, from the earliest records, to regional prominence c. 700 BC
  • Official Aramaic, from c. 700 BC, to c. 200 BC
  • Middle Aramaic, from c. 200 BC, to c. 200 AD
  • Late Aramaic, from c. 200 AD, to c. 700 AD
  • Modern Aramaic, from c. 700 AD, up to the modern times
Recent periodization of Aaron Butts:
  • Old Aramaic, from the earliest records, to c. 538 BC
  • Achaemenid Aramaic, from c. 538 BC, to c. 333 BC
  • Middle Aramaic, from c. 333 BC, to c. 200 AD
  • Late Aramaic, from c. 200 AD, to c. 1200 AD
  • Neo-Aramaic, from c. 1200 AD, up to the modern times

    Old Aramaic

Aramaic's long history and diverse and widespread use has led to the development of many divergent varieties, which are sometimes considered dialects, though they have become distinct enough over time that they are now sometimes considered separate languages. Therefore, there is not one singular, static Aramaic language; each time and place rather has had its own variation. The more widely spoken Eastern Aramaic languages are largely restricted to Assyrian, Mandean and Mizrahi Jewish communities in Iraq, northeastern Syria, northwestern Iran, and southeastern Turkey, whilst the severely endangered Western Neo-Aramaic language is spoken by small Christian and Muslim communities in the Anti-Lebanon mountains, and closely related western varieties of Aramaic persisted in Mount Lebanon until as late as the 17th century.
The term "Old Aramaic" is used to describe the varieties of the language from its first known use, until the point roughly marked by the rise of the Sasanian Empire, dominating the influential, eastern dialect region. As such, the term covers over thirteen centuries of the development of Aramaic. This vast time span includes all Aramaic that is now effectively extinct. Regarding the earliest forms, Beyer suggests that written Aramaic probably dates from the 11th century BC, as it is established by the 10th century, to which he dates the oldest inscriptions of northern Syria. Heinrichs uses the less controversial date of the 9th century, for which there is clear and widespread attestation.
The central phase in the development of Old Aramaic was its official use by the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Neo-Babylonian Empire, and Achaemenid Empire. The period before this, dubbed "Ancient Aramaic", saw the development of the language from being spoken in Aramaean city-states to become a major means of communication in diplomacy and trade throughout Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Egypt. After the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, local vernaculars became increasingly prominent, fanning the divergence of an Aramaic dialect continuum and the development of differing written standards.