Aramaic

• 1. Introduction

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  Aramaic has been spoken continuously for more than three thousand years, making it one of the longest-lived languages on earth. It was the tongue of ancient kingdoms and desert traders, the language scholars believe Jesus of Nazareth used in daily life and in his preaching, and the foundation on which both the Hebrew alphabet and the Arabic alphabet were eventually built. Today a few thousand people still speak its western form in villages in Syria, while eastern varieties survive among Assyrian, Mandean, and Mizrahi Jewish communities scattered across Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and the diaspora. How did a language born in the ancient region of Syria come to govern the correspondence of empires stretching from Egypt to Central Asia? How did it outlast the empires that carried it, and why is it still fighting for survival in the twenty-first century?

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• 2. Language of Empires

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  Tiglath-Pileser III, king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, made Aramaic the empire's second official language as his armies swept west of the Euphrates and absorbed Aramean lands. That decision, taken sometime after 700 BC, set off a chain of adoption that would outlast Assyria itself. The scribes who handled the Neo-Assyrian bureaucracy wrote in Aramaic, and when the Neo-Babylonian Empire (605-539 BC) succeeded Assyria, it simply inherited those scribes and their language. The Achaemenid Persians, who took over in 539 BC under Darius I, went further still. Scholar Richard Frye, writing in 1955, questioned whether Aramaic ever received a formal decree naming it an official language; he argued instead that it functioned as a thoroughgoing lingua franca, more pervasive than generally assumed. The standardized form that emerged, called Imperial Aramaic by modern scholars, was written with spelling based on historical roots rather than any spoken dialect, giving it a clarity that crossed regional lines. One of the largest single collections of Imperial Aramaic texts was found at Persepolis, numbering about five hundred documents. Many others come from Egypt, especially Elephantine, where the best-known surviving text is the Story of Ahikar, a book of instructive aphorisms comparable in style to the biblical Book of Proverbs. A group of thirty Aramaic documents on leather discovered in Bactria, with analysis published in 2006, showed the language reaching the 4th century BC Achaemenid administration as far east as Bactria and Sogdia.

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• 3. Scripture, Prayer, and Sacred Texts

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  Biblical Aramaic appears in four distinct sections of the Old Testament: documents in Ezra from the Achaemenid period concerning the restoration of the temple in Jerusalem, five tales and an apocalyptic vision in Daniel, a single sentence in Jeremiah denouncing idolatry, and a place-name translation in Genesis. Since the time of Jerome of Stridon, scholars called this biblical Aramaic "Chaldean," a label that persisted into the 19th century before modern analysis showed it had no real connection to the ancient Chaldeans. The Babylonian Talmud, completed in the 7th century, was composed largely in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, and the Talmud itself records a remarkable claim: that Aramaic was the language spoken by Adam, the first human in the Bible (Sanhedrin 38b). Aramaic translation of the Bible, known as the Targum, was originally composed in Hasmonaean Aramaic; when the targums reached Babylon in the 2nd or 3rd century AD, they were reworked into the contemporary Babylonian dialect, forming the basis of Babylonian Jewish literature for centuries afterward. The 4th to 8th centuries were the golden age of Classical Syriac, when the Bible was translated into Syriac as the Peshitta and the poet-theologian Ephrem the Syrian produced masterful prose and verse. Missionary activity then carried Syriac from Mesopotamia into Central Asia, India, and China, where it became the liturgical language of several Eastern churches including the Maronite Church and the Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala.

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• 4. The Language Jesus Spoke

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  Aramaicist Holger Gzella notes that the linguistic history of Aramaic before the first textual sources in the 9th century BC remains unknown, but what scholars can reconstruct about the 1st century AD is detailed and striking. Most historians and scholars believe Jesus of Nazareth spoke Aramaic both in everyday life and for preaching, using the Galilean dialect of his home region. Seven varieties of Western Aramaic were in use in and around Judea during his lifetime, probably mutually intelligible but distinct enough that Galilean speech was recognizable. Galilean Aramaic is known mainly from a few place names, some rabbinic literature, and influences on the Galilean Targum; its features appear to have included collapsed gutturals and preserved diphthongs. The New Testament in Koine Greek preserves direct Aramaic phrases spoken in that world: "Talitha kumi" ("Little girl, arise"), "Ephphatha" ("Be opened"), and the anguished cry from the cross, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" The 2004 film The Passion of the Christ reconstructed Aramaic dialogue with the help of scholar William Fulco, S.J., who used Daniel's Aramaic and 4th-century Syriac and Hebrew to fill gaps where first-century Aramaic vocabulary was no longer known.

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• 5. Alphabet as Legacy

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  Around 600 BC, Adon, a Canaanite king, wrote to an Egyptian Pharaoh in Aramaic, a sign of how thoroughly the language had become the medium of international correspondence. The earliest Aramaic alphabet derived from the Phoenician alphabet, and over time Aramaic developed its own distinctive square style. Two main writing traditions branched from it: the system used for Biblical Aramaic and Jewish writing, and the cursive Syriac alphabet developed by Christian communities centered on the ancient city of Edessa. A highly modified form, the Mandaic alphabet, is used by the Mandaeans. The impact on neighboring scripts reached far beyond the region. Under the Parthian Arsacids in the 3rd century BC, the Aramaic-derived writing system gained prestige alongside the Parthian language; the Sassanids inherited it for Middle Persian; and Aramaic vocabulary items called ideograms continued to be written as Aramaic words even inside texts composed in Middle Iranian languages, eventually losing their Aramaic identity and becoming understood as pure signs, much as the symbol "&" is read as "and" in English with no awareness of the Latin "et" beneath it. After the Arab conquest of the Sassanids in the 7th century, the Arabic alphabet replaced the Aramaic-derived system except in Zoroastrian usage, where the name "pahlavi" for that writing system persisted.

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• 6. Surviving on the Margins

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  Western Neo-Aramaic, the last living descendant of the western branch, is today spoken in the Syrian villages of Maaloula and Jubb'adin on Syria's side of the Anti-Lebanon Mountains, and by some who migrated to Damascus. Bakh'a, once a third village in that community, was completely destroyed during the Syrian civil war; all survivors fled to other parts of Syria or to Lebanon. The eastern Neo-Aramaic varieties are more numerous but still fragile: Suret speakers number around 240,000, Turoyo speakers around 250,000, while Neo-Mandaic may now be spoken fluently by as few as 5,000 people out of a total Mandaean community estimated at between 50,000 and 75,000. Speakers of Assyrian and Chaldean varieties of Suret and of Turoyo survived as insulated communities for over a millennium in remote areas, which is why they escaped the Arabization of the Middle East that followed the early Muslim conquests of the 7th century. The turbulence of the last two centuries, particularly the Assyrian genocide, also known in Syriac as Seyfo, "Sword," scattered first-language Aramaic speakers across the world. Researchers are now actively recording all remaining Neo-Aramaic varieties in case they become extinct. In modern Israel, Aramaic is experiencing a small revival among Maronites in Jish, while the Aramean villages of the Qalamoun Mountains preserve the only vernacular thread still tying living speech to the tongue that once governed the Achaemenid Empire.

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