Aramaic is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, Sinai, southeastern Anatolia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Arabia, where it has been continually written and spoken in different varieties for over 3,000 years.
Aramaic served as a language of public life and administration of ancient kingdoms and empires—particularly the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Neo-Babylonian Empire, and Achaemenid Empire—and as a language of divine worship and religious study within Christianity and Gnosticism; it also has appeared to a limited degree in Judaism, where Hebrew remains primary. Several modern varieties of Aramaic are still spoken. The modern eastern branch is spoken by Assyrians, Mandeans, and a small contingent of Mizrahi Jews.: "The overarching concept of Aramaic, strictly a historical-linguistic abstraction, is made more concrete by various terms for the various Aramaic languages (or dialects, where we are mainly dealing with regional vernaculars without a written tradition; the neutral term variety includes both categories). ... Or scholars use the same terms to refer to different historical periods, as with "Old Aramaic" or "Imperial Aramaic." Others still are just misleading, such as "Modern Syriac" for the modern spoken languages, which do not directly descend from Syriac. When discussing what a certain word or phrase is "in Aramaic" then, we always have to specify which period, region, or culture is meant unlike Classical Latin, for instance. ... For the most part, Aramaic is thus studied as a crucial but subservient element in several well-established, mainly philological and historical disciplines and social sciences. Even in the academic world, only few people see any inherent value that transcends the disciplinary boundaries in this language family." Western Aramaic is still spoken by the Muslim and Christian Aramean inhabitants of the towns of Maaloula, Bakh'a and Jubb'adin in Syria. Classical varieties are used as liturgical and literary languages in several West Asian churches,: "Despite their divergent creeds and confessional affiliations, they retained their own West or East Syriac ritual prayers and liturgical formulae; on the one hand, there are the West Syriac Orthodox and Syriac Catholics...and also to a lesser degree the similarly Catholic Maronites (where Arabic is increasingly taking over the function of Syriac); on the other hand, there is the Assyrian "Church of the East," which stems from the East Syriac tradition, and...the Chaldean Catholic Church. Additionally, some of the many Christian churches of India belong to the Syriac tradition." and appear in a few places in Judaism (where Hebrew remains predominant), Samaritanism (where Samaritan Hebrew remains predominant), and Mandaeism.
The Aramaic language is considered endangered, with several varieties used mainly by certain older generations. Researchers are working to record and analyze all of the remaining varieties of Neo-Aramaic languages in case they become extinct.
Aramaic belongs to the Northwest group of the Semitic language family, which includes the mutually intelligible Canaanite languages such as Hebrew, Edomite, Moabite, Ekronite, Sutean, and Phoenician, as well as Amorite and Ugaritic. Aramaic varieties are written in the Aramaic alphabet, a descendant of the Phoenician alphabet. The most prominent variant of this alphabet is the Syriac alphabet, used in the ancient city of Edessa. The Aramaic alphabet became a base for the creation and adaptation of specific writing systems in some other Semitic languages of West Asia, such as the Hebrew alphabet and the Arabic alphabet.
Early Aramaic inscriptions date from the 11th century BC, placing it among the earliest languages to be written down. Aramaicist notes, "The linguistic history of Aramaic prior to the appearance of the first textual sources in the 9th century BC remains unknown." Aramaic is believed by most historians and scholars to have been the primary language spoken by Jesus of Nazareth both for preaching and in everyday life.
Name
The connection between Chaldean, Syriac, and Samaritan as "Aramaic" was first identified in 1679 by German theologian Johann Wilhelm Hilliger. Other scholars followed, such as Anton Theodor Hartmann, who explained in 1807:
I deliberately refrain, with good consideration, from using the expression “Chaldean language,” because the Aramaic language had already existed long before the Chaldeans flooded into Aram, and in the Bible the language that is usually called Chaldean is never designated by that name, but is always referred to as the Aramaic language. Likewise, I find the designation “Syriac language” as a means of distinguishing it from Aramaic to be equally inappropriate; both are entirely one and the same language. The insignificant differences by which people have believed themselves justified in recognizing a separate language are merely changes that tend to arise over time in any living language.
In 1819–1821 Ulrich Friedrich Kopp published his ("Images and Inscriptions of the Past"), in which he established the basis of the paleographical development of the Northwest Semitic scripts. Kopp criticised Jean-Jacques Barthélemy and other scholars who had characterized all the then-known inscriptions and coins as Phoenician, with "everything left to the Phoenicians and nothing to the Arameans, as if they could not have written at all". Kopp notes that some of the words on the Carpentras Stele corresponded to the Aramaic in the Book of Daniel and the Book of Ruth.
Josephus and Strabo (the latter citing Posidonius) both state that the "Syrians" called themselves "Arameans".Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 1.144: "Aram had the Aramites, which the Greeks called Syrians" (Strabo, Geographica, 1.2.34: "But it would seem that the view of Poseidonius is best, for here he derives an etymology of the words from the kinship of the peoples and their common characteristics. For the nation of the Armenians and that of the Syrians and Arabians betray a close affinity, not only in their language, but in their mode of life and in their bodily build, and particularly wherever they live as close neighbours. Mesopotamia, which is inhabited by these three nations, gives proof of this, for in the case of these nations the similarity is particularly noticeable. And if, comparing the differences of latitude, there does exist a greater difference between the northern and the southern people of Mesopotamia than between these two peoples and the Syrians in the centre, still the common characteristics prevail. And, too, the Assyrians, the Arians, and the Aramaeans display a certain likeness both to those just mentioned and to each other. Indeed, Poseidonius conjectures that the names of these nations also are akin; for, says he, the people whom we call Syrians are by the Syrians themselves called Arimaeans and Arammaeans; and there is a resemblance between this name and those of the Armenians, the Arabians and the Erembians, since perhaps the ancient Greeks gave the name of Erembians to the Arabians, and since the very etymology of the word "Erembian" contributes to this result".Strabo, Geographica, 16.4.27: "Poseidonius says that the Arabians consist of three tribes, that they are situated in succession, one after another, and that this indicates that they are homogeneous with one another, and that for this reason they were called by similar names – one tribe "Armenians," another "Arameans," and another "Arambians." And just as one may suppose that the Arabians were divided into three tribes, according to the differences in the latitudes, which ever vary more and more, so also one may suppose that they used several names instead of one. Neither are those who write "Eremni" plausible; for that name is more peculiarly applicable to the Aethiopians. The poet also mentions "Arimi,"by which, according to Poseidonius, we should interpret the poet as meaning, not some place in Syria or in Cilicia or in some other land, but Syria itself; for the people in Syria are Arameans, though perhaps the Greeks called them Arimaeans or Arimi". The Septuagint, the earliest extant full copy of the Hebrew Bible, a Greek translation, used the terms Syria and Syrian where the Masoretic Text, the earliest extant Hebrew copy of the Bible, uses the terms Aramean and Aramaic; numerous later bibles followed the Septuagint's usage, including the King James Version. This connection between the names Syrian and Aramaic was discussed in 1835 by Étienne Marc Quatremère.
In historical sources, Aramaic language is designated by two distinctive groups of terms, first of them represented by endonymic (native) names, and the other one represented by various exonymic (foreign in origin) names. Endonymic terms for Aramaic language were derived from the same word root as the name of its original speakers, the ancient Arameans. Endonymic forms were also adopted in some other languages, like ancient Hebrew. In the Torah (Hebrew Bible), "Aram" is used as a proper name of several people including descendants of Shem, Nahor, and Jacob. Ancient Aram, bordering northern Israel and what is now called Syria, is considered the linguistic center of Aramaic, the language of the Arameans who settled the area during the Bronze Age .
Unlike in Hebrew, designations for Aramaic language in some other ancient languages were mostly exonymic. In ancient Greek, Aramaic language was most commonly known as the "Syrian language",Nöldeke, 1871, p. 115: "Die Griechen haben den Namen "Aramäer" nie eigentlich gekannt; ausser Posidonius (dem Strabo folgt) nennt ihn uns nur noch ein andrer Orientale, Josephus (Ant. 1, 6, 4). Dass Homer bei den 'Ερεμβοι oder in den Worten eiv 'Αρίμοις an sie dächte, ist sehr unwahrscheinlich. Die Griechen nannten das Volk "Syrer"". in relation to the native (non-Greek) inhabitants of the historical region of Syria. Since the name of Syria emerged as a variant of Assyria, the biblical Ashur, and Akkadian Ashuru, a complex set of semantic phenomena was created, becoming a subject of interest both among ancient writers and modern scholars.
The Koine Greek word (Hebraïstí) has been translated as "Aramaic" in some versions of the Christian New Testament, as Aramaic was at that time the language commonly spoken by the Jews. However, is consistently used in Koine Greek at this time to mean Hebrew, and (Syristi) is used to mean Aramaic. In Biblical scholarship, the term "Chaldean" was for many years used as a synonym of Aramaic, from its use in the Book of Daniel and subsequent interpretation by Jerome.
History
Old Aramaic was the language of the ancient Aramean tribes. By around 1000 BC, the Arameans had a string of kingdoms in what is now part of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and the fringes of southern Mesopotamia (Iraq). Aramaic rose to prominence under the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–605 BC), under whose influence Aramaic became a prestige language after being adopted as a lingua franca of the empire by Assyrian kings, and its use was spread throughout Mesopotamia, the Levant and parts of Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula, and Ancient Iran under Assyrian rule. At its height, Aramaic was spoken in what is now Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Kuwait, parts of southeast and south central Turkey, northern parts of the Arabian Peninsula and parts of northwest Iran, as well as the southern Caucasus, having gradually replaced several other related Semitic languages.