The Aramaization of the Middle East: Revisiting the Fall and Rise of Written Traditions

Introduction

For more than two thousand years, the Sumerian and Akkadian languages and the cuneiform script dominated the written record of the Middle East (c. 3000-500 BCE). Yet the hegemonic cultural position of these languages began to erode under the Assyrian Empire (935-612 BCE), when the region was subject to an imperial order closely aligned with the Sumero-Akkadian tradition.

Research Question

How did Aramaic writing, lacking a comparable pedigree or status, manage to establish itself alongside Sumero-Akkadian before displacing it altogether?

Significance of the Study

Answering this question has significance far beyond the first millennium BCE. The Aramaization of the Middle East is the story of the fall of the world's oldest literate tradition and its replacement by an upstart language and script.

Implications

Making sense of this transition will be instructive for our understanding of processes of language change in the long term. It will also contribute to our understanding of later sociolinguistic transformations in the Middle East and elsewhere, including in our own time of global linguistic and cultural flux.

Challenges in Research

The Aramaization of the Middle East has evaded adequate treatment because of:

1. The difficulty and dispersal of the data
2. Enduring disciplinary divisions
3. Outdated interpretative paradigms

The publication in recent decades of much new evidence adds to the urgency of the problem.

Project Overview

The ARAMAIZATION project will investigate the Aramaization of the Middle East across disciplinary boundaries, bringing together expertise in Assyriology, Aramaic studies, and historical sociolinguistics.

Research Approach

We will approach Aramaization as a process rooted in the choices of the people and institutions who commissioned and produced writing.

Methodology

We will examine these choices by surveying all available evidence together as part of a single linguistic landscape. Our research will pioneer sociolinguistic research methods with broad applicability to the study of language choice and language change across the ancient world and beyond.