but the Babylonian dialect of Akkadian continued to be used for certain official purposes in Babylonia, as is evidenced by economic documents. Borrowings from Persian (Muraoka and Porten 2003: pp. 342–345) first appear in Achaemenid times and often relate to the sphere of administration.
Individual words and expressions concerning everyday life have been taken over from local idioms; hence the Aramaic texts from Egypt contain a fair share of Egyptian lexemes, in particular naval terminology (Muraoka and Porten 2003: pp. 345–347). The situation in other parts of the empire is less well documented, but Aramaic and Elamite, which has a long and distinguished history of its own as an administrative language in the ancient kingdom of Elam, clearly coexisted in Persepolis. Moreover, multilingual inscriptions from Asia Minor with parallel versions in Lydian (from Sardis: KAI 260), Greek (from Limyra: KAI 262), or Lycian and Greek (from Xanthos: KAI 319) next to an Aramaic text prove that local idioms continued to be used even for public representation in some regions. It is likewise difficult to assess the impact of Achaemenid Official Aramaic on Syria‐Palestine, the old homeland of the Aramaic language. Changes in the distributional pattern of the regional idioms as reflected by the epigraphic record suggest that Hebrew and the related dialects of the Transjordan area were increasingly marginalized or became confined to specific speech situations, such as religion in the case of Hebrew, and that Aramaic dominated many areas of daily life (Gzella 2015: pp. 190–193; 225–230). Phoenician inscriptions from Persian and Hellenistic times indicate, however, that this language preserved its local prestige and continued to be employed at least in monuments for public display. Yet it should be borne in mind that the limited written evidence does not necessarily provide a representative view of the language situation as such and of the use of regional vernaculars. See Gzella (2011c) for a brief summary of the linguistic history of the region.
A recent grammatical outline of Achaemenid Aramaic proper against its linguistic background can be found in Gzella (2011a). Muraoka and Porten (2003) provide a full synchronic reference grammar of the material from Egypt, which forms but a part (albeit an important one) of the total evidence. A comprehensive modern reference grammar of Achaemenid Aramaic as such still has to be written. The entire lexicon is included, with full scholarly bibliography, in the standard dictionary by Hoftijzer and Jongeling (1995); the historical semantics and actual use of a large part of the vocabulary are discussed extensively in the various articles in Gzella (2016).
Documentary Texts
Most of the surviving material in Aramaic from Achaemenid times consists of letters, contracts, and economic documents; various smaller honorific, dedicatory, and funerary inscriptions; and short marks on seals, coins, and other items (see Gzella 2004: pp. 35–56 and 2015: pp. 182–208 for brief synopses). Longer texts were written on perishable material like papyrus or leather, so Egypt, thanks to its dry climate, is overrepresented in the available evidence. Obviously, not all Aramaic texts discovered in Egypt are of local provenance, but a large share of them, the so‐called “Elephantine papyri,” illustrates daily life and the socioeconomic situation of a fifth‐century BCE Judean diaspora community, established by mercenaries some time before (Grelot 1972: pp. 33–42), on the island Elephantine on the Nile. In addition, a collection of slave sales from the second half of the fourth century was found in Wadi Daliyeh near Samaria in Palestine. Inscriptions on durable material, by contrast, were discovered throughout the Achaemenid Empire: from Egypt, the Arabian Desert, Asia Minor, Palestine, Babylon, Persepolis, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. They all conform, to varying degrees, to the linguistic standard set by the Achaemenid administration, depending on their public or private character. In the absence of other criteria, a tentative date can often be established on grounds of paleography.
The Aramaic texts from Egypt until the Ptolemaic period have been collected and collated by Porten and Yardeni (1986–1999 = TAD, together with drawings, a translation into English and Modern Hebrew, and bibliographical references). Nonetheless, the respective first editions with their philological commentary and photographs must form part of any serious study. A selection of Aramaic papyri from Elephantine in an annotated translation is also available in Porten et al. (1996: pp. 74–276); the notes and introductory paragraphs accompanying the French translation by Grelot (1972) are still quite serviceable, too. The Wadi Daliyeh papyri have been published by Gropp (2001) and, more recently in their entirety, by Dušek (2007). No such comprehensive collection exists for the inscriptions, but Schwiderski (2004, with an eclectic reading of the relevant texts, though without translation and notes) can be used as a point of departure and for bibliographical indications. Donner and Röllig (1966–2002 = KAI) give a representative selection of the most important pieces with a German translation and a philological commentary; other selections of a similar kind are less reliable. Fitzmyer and Kaufman (1992) provide an overview of older scholarly literature.
It is the use of Aramaic in domestic and provincial administration that best illustrates its role as an official language of the Achaemenid Empire. The large corpus of the mostly Elamite Fortification tablets from Persepolis, which record the assignment of food rations to persons affiliated in various ways with the royal palace, contains both texts with an Aramaic version and several hundreds of small tablets written in Aramaic alone. They do not lend themselves to easy access and remain unpublished to date (Azzoni 2008 gives a preliminary account). Some also refer to documents written on leather, the language of which, in all likelihood, was Aramaic, because the cuneiform script of Elamite, geared toward being inscribed with a stylus in wet clay, was unsuitable for being used with ink and on flat surfaces. Moreover, 163 mortars, pestles, and other stone objects discovered at the royal treasury bear short Aramaic inscriptions (Bowman 1970, whose erroneous interpretation as ritual texts has been abandoned in the meantime, see Naveh and Shaked 1973). The exact distribution of Aramaic and Elamite as administrative languages in Achaemenid Iran remains a matter of controversy, though, and cannot be easily explained on grounds of a sudden switch from Elamite to Aramaic alone. Tavernier (2008) has a useful synopsis of the current state of the discussion.
Evidence from top‐level administration in other satrapies further contributes to understanding the role of Aramaic as an international language in the Achaemenid Empire, even if no complete satrapal archive has yet been discovered. Of particular importance are the 13 letters and fragments of Aršama (TAD A6.3–16; Driver 1965 and, for the photographs, 1954), who acted as the satrap of Egypt at the end of the fifth century BCE. They reflect the spelling conventions, epistolary phraseology, and procedural mores of the Persian chancery, although they are not predominantly concerned with the public sphere. Written on leather in a clear, authoritative, no‐nonsense style and dispatched from the Achaemenid heartland to Egypt (presumably to his headquarters in Memphis, but the place of discovery remains unknown), they illustrate the way in which a leading Persian official instructed his managers to carry out their responsibilities and to look after his estates abroad. A few letters sent by his subordinates show how his orders flowed downward along the chain of command. In addition, Aršama features in two letters found at Elephantine (TAD A6.1–2).
A likewise official usage of Aramaic is attested for other eastern and western provinces, even where Aramaic had no prior history as a spoken or written idiom. The correspondence of a local governor with the satrap of Bactria in the second half of the fourth century BCE, consisting of 30 letters on parchment, now makes the most substantial addition to the very meager textual evidence from outside Egypt and Iran (Naveh and Shaked 2012; discussed at greater length in Chapter 66 Bactria). From Daskyleion in Asia Minor, the residence of the satrap of Phrygia, 12 clay envelopes (bullae) with the (generally Iranian) names of their proprietors on Aramaic tags and seals have survived (Röllig 2002); they, too, bear witness to Aramaic letter‐writing in provincial administration. Coins from Cilicia with Aramaic inscriptions (Vattioni 1971: pp. 70–78) and a trilingual stele (Aramaic, Lycian, Greek) issued by Pixodaros, the satrap of Lycia and Caria, in order to confirm the foundation of a new local cult at Xanthos in 337 BCE according to official Achaemenid procedure (recent bibliographical information is available in Funke 2008), also reinforce the use of the language in matters pertaining to the government.
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