best attested for Egypt, chiefly thanks to the Elephantine papyri. These exhibit a higher degree of spelling variation, including some phonetic spellings, than, for example, the Aršama letters, which indicates that they were produced by Aramaic‐speaking inhabitants. Topics of interest to a Judean expat group, at a time when Judaism began to take on its distinctive shape, surface in the 10 letters and fragments of the archive of Yedaniah, the son of Gemariah, the leader of the community during the end of the fifth century. Two versions of a rhetorically forceful letter seeking permission from the governor of Yehud to rebuild the local temple (TAD A4.7–8) are particularly famous, as is the memorandum of the governors of Yehud and Samaria granting this request (TAD A4.9). Both versions appear to be drafts, with some modifications, that have been preserved in the communal archive. Another letter, though highly fragmentary, is usually interpreted as an early reference to Passover, based on a reasonable yet not entirely certain reconstruction of the missing parts (TAD A4.1), and the others address various matters illustrating the sometimes‐uneasy relations of the Judean community with the Egyptian population.
As a language of private law, too, Aramaic is particularly well attested in Achaemenid Egypt, where it coexisted with Demotic. The oldest datable legal text, a lease written in 515 BCE, originates from Korobis in the Nile Delta and reflects traces of a preceding Aramaic scribal tradition (TAB B1.1). The family archives of Mibtahiah (471–410 BCE; TAD B2.1–11) and of Ananiah (456–402 BCE; TAD B3.1–13) contain bequests, marriage contracts, and property transactions. Twenty‐one loose documents with deeds of obligation (TAD B4.1–7), conveyances (TAD B5.1–6), marriage documents (TAD B6.1–4), and judicial oaths (TAD B7.1–4) have also been discovered. They all mark the beginning of a long‐lasting Aramaic legal tradition, with similar or even identical formulae recurring not only in the Hellenistic and Roman Near East but also in the Babylonian Talmud (Healey 2005; Gross 2008). Its origin in older Mesopotamian and West Semitic, local Egyptian, or perhaps even international Iranian law remains a matter of debate (see the introduction by Levine in Muffs 2003: pp. xi–xliv). The Egyptian evidence can now be supplemented by 27 fourth‐century slave sales from Wadi Daliyeh in Palestine, which employ a slightly different phraseology (Gropp 2001; Dušek 2007).
In addition, 202 fifth‐ and fourth‐century papyrus fragments relating to law, taxation, and commerce have been discovered at Saqqāra near Memphis (Segal 1983; nos. 8 and 35 have been re‐edited in TAD B5.6 and 4.7 respectively). Unfortunately, they are so severely damaged that little reliable information can be derived from them, but they seem to emanate from non‐Judean circles. The language exhibits a number of smaller peculiarities as opposed to other sub‐corpora of Achaemenid Official Aramaic, yet their diagnostic value is, again, hard to assess. A number of court records (re‐edited in TAD B8.1–4; 6–12) shed further light on the workings of legal procedures under Achaemenid administration in Egypt, despite the mostly minimal amount of text preserved, including complaints against a former verdict, cross‐examination, oaths, and the decisions taken. About half of these cases concern slaves. Some Persian loans add to their official ring. The same site yields 26 ostraca, 21 of which are thought to be in Phoenician script.
Most economic texts from the provinces have been preserved on papyrus fragments and ostraca from Egypt, easily accessible in TAD C and D, as well as on Palestinian ostraca, especially some 2000 pieces from Idumaea, most of which record the transfer of goods (Porten and Yardeni 2014–2020). The latter in particular illustrate the well‐entrenched employ of Aramaic also for base‐level bookkeeping in a largely agrarian society. Papyrus was used for accounts (TAD C3.1–29) and lists (TAD C4.1–9; personal names of various provenances but of unknown function) that cover a longer period of time or were of more than ephemeral importance, whereas ostraca served for short‐term purposes. The extensive customs account of import and export duties dating from 475 BCE and arranged by month (TAD C3.7), which was later erased and replaced by the Aḥiqar wisdom text (see below), is particularly revealing for the economic history of Achaemenid Egypt and Egypto‐Aramaic naval terminology: duties were collected from incoming ships and deposited in the royal treasury (Lipiński 1994: pp. 62–67; Yardeni 1994). Information of a similar sort can be found in the poorly preserved Memphis Shipyard Journal (TAD C3.8) for the years 473–471 BCE.
Numerous texts from outside the administrative sphere show that Achaemenid Official Aramaic enjoyed a wide distribution in the Persian Empire: private letters on papyrus and ostraca; various types of stone inscriptions; property marks, seals, graffiti; and so forth. Short though they are, they bear witness to the growing distribution and impact of the orthographical and grammatical norm established by the royal chancery on the use of written language in daily life. The Hermopolis papyri (TAD A2.1–7) illustrate a tradition of Aramaic letter writing in Egypt that precedes the Achaemenid administration but gradually came under its influence; a similar situation may apply to other areas where such documentation is no longer available simply because the evidence has not been preserved. The majority of the short epistolary communications come from Elephantine and are written on ostraca; they generally concern matters of everyday economic life and often contain requests to dispatch certain goods (Lozachmeur 2006, a small part of which was previously published in TAD D; most of the 280 pieces in this collection are in Achaemenid Aramaic). Besides a few writing exercise tablets with the letters of the alphabet in a specific order (TAD D10.1–2; cf. 22.28), little information on the various degrees of literacy among the population in different regions and on the educational framework is available. The fact that people were presumably able to write their own names in clumsy letters does not exclude that many of them needed professional scribes for letters and other more advanced matters (Grelot 1972: pp. 48–56). The use of Aramaic for private representation surfaces in a number of dedicatory, funerary, and memorial inscriptions from Arabian Tayma, Asia Minor, and Palestine.
Literary Compositions
While documentary material constitutes the lion's share of the surviving sources, traces of a literary tradition in Aramaic during Achaemenid times can also be identified. Yet it is practically impossible to assess the true extent of this tradition and the role of non‐documentary compositions in society: were they, or at least their general contents, known to significant parts of the population? Or was their use confined to scribal education, where they served as a medium of instruction (copying texts was a core activity in the training of Near Eastern scribes at various periods) and, perhaps, also as a model for stylistic imitation? Or did they form some common ground that defined the cultural self‐awareness of the small elite of the Achaemenid mandarins, as did the Greek and Latin classics for generations of British civil servants? For the time being, such questions must remain unanswered.
Three texts on papyrus that can safely be subsumed under the category “literary,” in the broadest sense of the word, have been found at Elephantine in Egypt. There is the story about Aḥiqar, an advisor to the Neo‐Assyrian court who, thanks to his insight and personal integrity, survived a plot against him; a number of older traditional wisdom sayings ascribed to this sage were then attached to the narration (TAD C1.1). Another tale, about Bar Puneš (TAD C1.2), is so fragmentary that but little can be said about its contents except that it seems to take place at a royal court. And a fragmentary Aramaic version of the Bisotun inscription with the res gestae of Darius I (TAD C2.1; Greenfield and Porten 1982) has been translated from the Babylonian and supplements the Elamite, Old Persian, and Babylonian trilingual inscription gracing the famous rock monument in Media, as well as the Neo‐Babylonian copy from Babylon. It is unclear whether Darius II had distributed a text celebrating the deeds of his predecessor throughout the empire in order to honor him (in accordance with §70 of the Persian original), or whether the copy discovered at Elephantine served as an exercise in scribal training. Since it closely corresponds to the orthographical and linguistic standards of Achaemenid Official Aramaic, it would, at any rate, have been a suitable model.
The origin of the Aḥiqar wisdom text is more difficult to trace, in particular because Aḥiqar was and is a well‐known figure in Near Eastern literature up to the present day (Contini and Grottanelli 2005). Thanks to the underlying customs account (TAD C3.7), which is arranged chronologically, the original sequence of the surviving parts of the palimpsest can be determined (Gianto
