A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire, 2 Volume Set. Группа авторов. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Группа авторов
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: История
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isbn: 9781119071655
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of letter signs as opposed to syllabic cuneiform with which Akkadian was written; the adaptability of the language itself, thanks to its light and versatile grammatical core; and the relatively neutral ideological connotations of an idiom that was not the native tongue of the Assyrian conquerors. Aramaic would, at any rate, have facilitated access to the structurally similar languages of Syria‐Palestina, which employed the same alphabetic writing system (see the overview in Gzella 2015: pp. 104–156). Linguistic similarity is known to foster trade and migration.

      Achaemenid Aramaic (Gzella 2015: pp. 157–211), by contrast, bears the characteristic marks of an imperial chancery: script, spelling, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and idiom are much more unified than in the immediately preceding stage, presumably as a result of a large‐scale administrative reorganization and unification under Darius I and Xerxes (Briant 2002: pp. 507–511). Hence, it constitutes a proper variety of Aramaic, to be distinguished on linguistic grounds both from the “Old Aramaic” material of the tenth to eighth centuries and from several other forms of Aramaic used during the seventh and sixth centuries. Yet inconsistent scholarly terminology obscures the linguistic boundaries: “Imperial Aramaic,” calqued after German Reichsaramäisch, originally referred to Achaemenid Aramaic but is now also often applied to Aramaic from the eighth century BCE on, and the same is true for “Official Aramaic.” So for clarity's sake, the slightly cumbersome label “Achaemenid Official Aramaic” will be used here in order to avoid confusion with the Aramaic varieties current under Neo‐Assyrian and Neo‐Babylonian rule (cf. Gzella 2015: pp. 104–106, 157–159).

      Contact with other languages, too, left many traces in Achaemenid Aramaic, especially in the form of lexical loans. Some less obvious features, such as changes in word order including the frequent clause‐final position of the verb, grammatical constructions, and sentence structure in general, may also result from the replication of foreign use patterns, although these are not yet well known. Multilingual scribes and interpreters in the homeland and in the provinces (Tavernier 2008: pp. 60–63 gives an overview of ancient sources referring to them) disseminated the results of such contact throughout the empire. Numerous Akkadian influences (Kaufman 1974) had entered the language already in preceding stages, 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.

      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