one of the Semitic languages.
The most ancient Aramaean settlements were in Syria and Mesopotamia; from there the Aramaic language spread throughout the Near East. The oldest Aramaic literary remains (from Samal, Damascus, Hamath, and other places) date from the ninth and eighth centuries B.C. During the period of the Assyrian and Persian empires, from the seventh to the fourth centuries B.C., Aramaic became the official language of these states and was the international language of the Near and Middle East. An archive of Aramaic documents from Elephantine (in Egypt) dates from the fifth century B.C. Aramaic was gradually replacing Hebrew, and there are sections of the Bible written in Aramaic (part of Ezra, fifth to fourth centuries B.C.; part of Daniel, second century B.C.) and one of the books of the Talmud (the so-called Gemara, from the second to the fifth centuries A.D.); other biblical texts were translated into Aramaic. The Palmyrenes and the Nabataeans also used Aramaic, as seen by inscriptions of the first and second centuries A.D. The Aramaic dialect of Edessa was the basis of the Syriac language; a rich Christian literature was created from the third to 14th centuries in Syriac. The religious books of the Mandaeans were written in the third through eighth centuries A.D. in Mandaic, an Aramaic dialect. Modern Aramaic dialects are divided into three groups: West (Malula), Central (Turayo), and East Aramaic (Assyrian or Neo-Syriac).
Characteristic elements of Aramaic are a shift of the proto-Semitic interdental consonants to stops, the emphatic status of nouns (status emphaticus), the use of reflexive forms for the passive voice, and the development of analytical constructions (especially in the modern dialects).
K. G. TSERETELI