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

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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.

      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.

      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