older lore and composed in a pre‐Achaemenid variety of Aramaic the provenance of which remains elusive (see Weigl 2010, with copious bibliographical references). Scholars are divided as to whether they were written in eighth‐ or seventh‐century southern Syria or in seventh‐ or sixth‐century (north‐)western Mesopotamia (Weigl 2010: pp. 677–678; Gzella 2015: pp. 150–153), a question not easy to answer given the very limited attestation of Aramaic during that period. One could imagine that the Aḥiqar composition was used not only for teaching a formal style of Aramaic for administrators in the make (hence perhaps some archaic rings in the narrative) but also for depicting the moral and intellectual ideal of a loyal court official. The rich vocabulary and high amount of syntactic subordination show that the language of the proverbs is a literary idiom (see also Gzella 2017). Interestingly, Aḥiqar occurs on a fragmentary Demotic papyrus (Betrò 2005), and Bar Puneš may be identical to the well‐known magician Hor‐son‐of‐Puneš in Demotic literature, although the reading Ḥwr in TAD C1.2 remains controversial (Gianto 1995: pp. 90–91). An ink inscription on the walls of a burial cave near Sheikh Fadl (TAD D23.1) may contain another literary composition from the Achaemenid period, but it is so fragmentary and palaeographically so difficult that its contents cannot be clearly determined.
Despite these few surviving non‐documentary sources in Aramaic dating from the former half of the first millennium, some vestiges of a broader literary tradition can be reconstructed in light of later evidence. However, such a supra‐regional “Standard Literary Aramaic” did not exist alongside Achaemenid Official Aramaic (as Greenfield 1974, who coined the term, and others maintained) but formed a subset of it (Gzella 2008: pp. 108–109, 2015: p. 165). The roots of the Aramaic parts of the Books of Ezra and Daniel in the Achaemenid chancery idiom can still be determined, even if contact with the local Aramaic variety in Judaea and successive phases of redaction have left their traces in what might have been a fourth‐century BCE core (Gzella 2004: pp. 41–45, 2015: pp. 205–208; on the linguistic peculiarities of Biblical Aramaic, see also Gzella 2011a: pp. 583–584). This idiom over time evolved into a local official language (“Hasmonaean”) that is attested in Aramaic religious compositions and legal documents from the Dead Sea (Gzella 2015: pp. 230–234). Scholars have also tried to identify poetic elements in non‐literary genres like an Aramaic funerary inscription from Achaemenid Egypt (KAI 269 = TAD D20.5), now in Carpentras (cf. Nebe 2007: p. 74), but this remains somewhat speculative.
It is not unreasonable to assume that the spread of Achaemenid Official Aramaic and the consolidation of a longer‐lasting institutional environment that upheld it created the backdrop for an Aramaic “world literature” to evolve. Although its true extent cannot be outlined, remains of an erstwhile common literary language still surface in various local traditions during the post‐Achaemenid period and point to such a shared matrix. Court novels in particular, as in Aḥiqar, Daniel, and some Qumran texts, constitute a genre closely associated with Aramaic (Gzella 2017). As a universal medium of expression, Aramaic could promote exchange of literary motives and figures between Egypt and Mesopotamia during the Achaemenid period. One can also suppose that knowledge of Mesopotamian science, glimpses of which appear in later writings, spread via lost Aramaic translations of technical writings (Ben‐Dov 2010).
Aftermath
The Persian administration consolidated earlier networks between Aramaic‐speaking regions throughout the empire and thus created a lasting heritage that outlived its chancery. By that time, Aramaic was deeply entrenched as a language of administration, law, and religious literature, which consolidated its long‐term success. Once the central authority disappeared with Alexander's conquest, elements of the official scribal tradition could interact more freely with regional forms of Aramaic, and linguistic innovations could spread more easily across the speech area (see Gzella 2011b and, more extensively, 2015: pp. 212–280 for an overview). Although it quickly faded away in Anatolia and lasted only until the Ptolemaic period in Egypt, the use of Aramaic as a standardized written, though not necessarily spoken, language largely continued in the western and eastern peripheries of the dialect landscape, in the form of very conservative varieties in northern Arabia (especially Nabataean) and Parthia (scattered epigraphic material and Aramaic ideograms in Middle Persian). In Hellenistic‐Roman Syria and eastern Mesopotamia (Palmyra, Edessa, Hatra), by contrast, several regional dialects of Aramaic were promoted to chancery idioms of small local kingdoms, yet were highly influenced by received spelling conventions. Judaea, finally, saw the gradual transformation of an Aramaic literary heritage into a new form of Jewish literary Aramaic between the fourth and the second centuries BCE. As a result, the end point of Achaemenid Official Aramaic is hard to determine. Aramaic still acted as a prestigious vehicle for reasserting local cultural self‐awareness in Hellenistic and Roman times (Gzella 2006; Healey 2009: pp. 1–51) and subsequently produced a number of long‐lasting religious literatures in Late Antiquity (Gzella 2015: pp. 281–381).
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17 Gropp,
