3. Holger Gzella on Aramaic

Okay.

So should I imagine then that we have kids who speak whatever local language their parents speak, and then they're kind of packed off to school and it's told to them, okay, you have to learn Aramaic because you're going to be one of the scribes in these courts.

And so here you go, kid.

And then they go off to school, they learn Aramaic, and then it becomes a kind of an artificial bureaucracy language.

Yes, we know very little about the schooling, contrary to Mesopotamia, where a lot of information, very detailed information, but that is certainly a feasible possibility.

Now we have to distinguish between regions where Aramaic was naturally spoken, because it had already been spreading for centuries.

So large parts of the Levant, but also of Mesopotamia, were Aramaic speaking by the time the Persians rose to power.

But in other regions like Egypt, Asia Minor, but also Iran, Aramaic was implemented as a scribal language and it may very well have worked the way you described that certain kids were elected, presumably they were scribal families, and then they were trained in that language, which furnished them not only with a common form of expression, and it created channels through which ideas and traditions could spread across a vast geographical area, but it also furnished them with a common code of conduct, you may say, common scribal ethics,

common ideals.

Since we're still going through the basics here, maybe you could also say something about how it was written down.

So this is an alphabetic language, like Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and not like, let's say, Chinese, which is a character language.

It's not like cuneiform, right, which is another language from the ancient Near East.

So where is its place? I mean, where does it sit within the history of alphabetical scripts?

It's part of the same tradition to which our script is, where the Latin script belongs.

It's the alphabetic script that was present for a long time, really, of the second millennium BCE in the Levant.

So it was largely confined to substandard purposes, like owner's marks on objects, jars, and so forth.

And it broke through after a series of social and demographic changes that produced new societies in what we call Syria and Palestine.

And these started as villages, extended families, clans and so forth, and once they needed writing a system of notation because they were going so complex that you had to record ownership rights, for instance, payment of taxes and so forth.

And then they resorted to the alphabetic writing system because it was presumably more resilient than triniform writing because it was passed on in domestic circles.

And then it spread in the early first millennium BCE through the Phoenician cities.

And these new polities that arose, including the Aramean city-states in Syria, they adopted that writing tradition.

So it's part of the same alphabetic family as Phoenician and hence Greek and Roman script.

Now it did develop a number of different varieties, especially after the fall of the Achaemenid Empire.

The Achaemenids did not only standardize the language itself, but also the writing.

So that belongs to the tradition of scribal education, the way you write the letters.