# Persian or Imperial Aramaic



## mojobadshah

Is Persian or Imperial Aramaic an ancestor of the Aramaic of Jesus and Syriac Aramaic?


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## berndf

Imperial Aramaic was the lingua franca of the region the basis for Judeo-Aramaic and Syriac.


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## mojobadshah

Would Persian Royalty have spoken Imperial Aramaic?  What happened to all the Aramaic loanwords in Persian?


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## berndf

Aramiac was the administrative language only of the Western provinces of the Persian empire. I the Iranian speaking provinces of the East it was of course Persian.

When the Persians conquered the Babylonian empire they took over all its administrative structures, including the official language.


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## fdb

The recently published Imperial Aramaic documents from Bactria (Afghanistan) confirm that Aramaic was the administrative language in the whole of the Achaemenid Empire. Old Persian was used only for royal inscriptions and for marking objects belonging to the royal household.


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## berndf

OK, I leaned that differently. You said _recently;_ what I learned decades ago may now be out of date.


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## fdb

<...>

_Joseph Naveh, Shaul Shaked: Aramaic Documents from Ancient Bactria (Studies in the Khalili Collection)._


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## origumi

fdb said:


> The recently published Imperial Aramaic documents from Bactria (Afghanistan) confirm that Aramaic was the administrative language in the whole of the Achaemenid Empire. Old Persian was used only for royal inscriptions and for marking objects belonging to the royal household.


What would be the motivation for a Persian-speaking government in a Persian-speaking area to take the non-native Aramaic as the administrative language?


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## fdb

First a minor point: the spoken language in Achaemenid Bactria was not Persian but (Old) Bactrian. The satrap and his entourage were Persians (probably part of the Achaemenid royal clan) as was the army. The scribes were probably Babylonians; in any case they kept their records in Aramaic. The native population were Bactrians.

The correspondence between the Achaemenid governor in Egypt (Arshama) and the Achaemenid centre in Susa/Persepolis survives in Aramaic (the long-known Arshama letters). Aramaic was not a spoken language either in Egypt or in the Persis. The Persians in Egypt would have dictated their letters in Old Persian and the scribes would have written them down in Aramaic. The letters were then sent to Persia and another scribe translated them back (orally of course) into Old Persian. The Persian elite could not read or write in any language.

The letters of Cyrus quoted in the book of Ezra are also in Aramaic. If (as is possible) they are authentic they would also have been dictated in Old Persian and written down in Aramaic. The language and formulary of these letters is very similar to that in the Achaemenid documents from Egypt and from Bactria.


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## origumi

fdb said:


> First a minor point: the spoken language in Achaemenid Bactria was not Persian but (Old) Bactrian.


My curiosity is about Persia itself. I guess administrative documents were written inside the homeland as well - could they be Aramaic?


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## fdb

Under the first Achaemenids there were two administrative languages in Persepolis: Elamite (written in cuneiform script on clay tablets) and Aramaic (written in alphabetic script on dried clay, and presumably also on papyrus or parchment, though the latter have not survived in Persia itself). Later Elamite was abandoned, presumably because  papyrus/parchment is less bulky than clay tablets and thus less wasteful of storage space.

PS. There is a fairly detailed discussion of this whole complex in the article ‘Translation in the ancient Iranian world’, in _Übersetzung - Translation - Traduction_, Volume 2, ed. Harald Kittel et al., Berlin and New York [2008], pp. 1194-1198. It is available in google books.


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## origumi

Thanks a lot, good article. I couldn't tell for sure where strong facts end and conjectures begin, for example in regard to the bidirectional translation Persian-Aramaic-Persian, or later use of Aramaic words in Aramaic letters as Persian ideograms (like reading "mlk" as "shah"), or existence of leather/papyrus scrolls that were never found. Nevertheless, the main argument, that Persian was NOT the administrative language, looks convincing.


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## fdb

origumi said:


> existence of leather/papyrus scrolls that were never found.



Not in Persia, indeed, but in Egypt and now also in Bactria, from the Achaemenid satrapal household itself.


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## mojobadshah

berndf said:


> OK, I leaned that differently. You said _recently;_ what I learned decades ago may now be out of date.



You're both leaving out a huge, unless I'm wrong, potentially huge gap of an Aramaic speaking, and written period (not just for translation purposes): Irano-Afghan's Christian period, which thrived for 200 years before Christianity thrived in Rome, when it was the second most widespread religion in Irano-Afghanistan second to Zoroastrianism, and though there were periods of persecution in Irano-Afghanistan after Constantine, it still thrived up until, unless I'm mistaken Islam was introduced.  So, knowing all this, can someone tell me how we can be so sure that a lot of so-called Arabic loans into Persian are actually not Aramaic loanwords into Persian?  Second to Islam, Christianity is the most widespread religion in Irano-Afghanistan to this day.


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## berndf

The discussion between fdb and me was about the Achaemenid period, i.e. 6th - 4th centuries *B.C.*


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## mojobadshah

berndf said:


> The discussion between fdb and me was about the Achaemenid period, i.e. 6th - 4th centuries *B.C.*



Well should I start a new thread or can I inquire about whether there was an Aramaic influence on the Persian language during Irano-Afghanistan's Christian period here?  Was Aramaic not a spoken language in Irano-Afghanistan then?


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## berndf

Opening a new thread would be better. This thread is explicitly about imperial Aramaic.


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