A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire, 2 Volume Set. Группа авторов

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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