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ARAMAIC BRANCH
255 people. It was the vernacular of Jesus Christ and the Apostles, and probably the original language of the Gospels. The majority of the religious works of the various oriental Churches are written in dialects descended from Aramaic and in scripts descended from the Aramaic alphabet. ARAMAIC ALPHABET
The Aramaic scripts are a main branch of the North Semitic alphabet (Second Part, Chapter I), the Canaanite branch (Chapter IIT) being the other main branch. According to Professor W. F. Albright, the acknowledged authority on the subject, "it seems probable that the use of the North-west Semitic alphabet to write Aramaic does not ascend beyond the tenth century B.C." The earliest Aramaic written document extant is a short inscription discovered in Gozan or Tell Halaf, which was published in 1940, but the first inscribed monument of importance is the inscription (Fig. 126, 4), bearing the name of a king of Damascus. Professor Albright attributes it to about 850 B.C. The next oldest inscription (Fig. 126, 2) of significance is the stele of Zakir, king of Hamath and Lu'ash, attributed by Albright to AD
at to about 775 B.C. It was discovered in 1904, by the French Consul H. Pognon, in Afis, to the south-west of Aleppo. An ivory tablet, discovered in 1928, by F. Thureau-Dangin and A. Barrois, in Arslan Tash in the Serug Valley, seems to be dedicated to the king Hazael, belonging to the ninth century B.C. Fragments of a most important stele were discovered in 1930 in Sujin, to the south-east of Aleppo. On the whole, the earliest Aramaic inscriptions (Fig. 126), very few in number, belong to the ninth, eighth and seventh centuries B.C. A royal CanaaniteAramaic inscription is shown in Fig. 126, 1.
Several bundred monuments mainly of smaller dimensions represent the succeeding centuries. Numerous Aramaic papyri and ostraca come from Egypt, amongst them the famous Elephantine papyri (Fig. 127, 1). which give us information of religious and economic nature concerning a Jewish military colony in Egypt. The earliest Aramaic papyrus found
gypt seems to belong to 515 B.C. Amongst the most important Aramaic inscriptions, the following may be mentioned: Greek-Aramaic and Lydian-Aramaic bilingual inscriptions; the stele from Nerab, attributed to the sixth century B.C.; the inscription from Taima, in North Arabia, belonging to the fifth century: the ostraca recently found at Tell el-Kheleifeh (see p. 234f., 243f.) by N. Glueck, and attributed to the sixth-fourth centuries B.C. (see the articles by N. Glueck.W.E. Albright and C. C. Torrey, in the "BULL OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOLS OF ORIENTAL RESEARCH," No. So onwards, 1940-41), and the inscription found at Taxila, in north-west India, formerly attributed to the fourth and now to the third century B.C.
In the second half of the first millennium B.C. Aramaic became by far the most important and widespread script of the whole Near East, and the official character of the western provinces of the Persian empire, its diplomatic script.
