Aramaic

Aramaic never had an empire of its own. That is the strange fact at the center of its history. The Arameans were a scatter of small kingdoms in inland Syria — Damascus, Hamath, Sam'al, Bit-Adini — and Assyria conquered every one of them by the eighth century BCE. Then Assyria started keeping its records in the language of the conquered. Aramaic had an alphabet of twenty-two letters that a scribe could learn in a season, while Akkadian cuneiform took years and hundreds of signs. Empires are practical. Within two centuries the language of a defeated people was the language of the tax rolls from the Nile to the Hindu Kush.

The Persians made it official. Darius I ran the Achaemenid Empire on what scholars now call Imperial Aramaic — a standardized chancery dialect so uniform that a letter written in Egypt reads like a letter written in Bactria. We have both. Jewish soldiers garrisoned at Elephantine, on an island in the Nile, wrote home in it about a temple dispute in 407 BCE. Ashoka, the Mauryan emperor, had an edict carved at Kandahar around 260 BCE in Greek and Aramaic, because those were the two languages an educated person that far east was still expected to read. The alphabet traveled further than the language did: the square script the Hebrew Bible is printed in today is Aramaic, and so, through Nabataean, is the script of the Qur'an.

Then it fragmented, the way a lingua franca does when the empire holding it together goes. By the first century CE, Aramaic was a family rather than a language — Nabataean at Petra, Palmyrene at Palmyra, Hatran in the Mesopotamian desert, Jewish Palestinian Aramaic in the Galilee, Old Syriac at Edessa. The Galilean dialect is the one the world half-remembers, because a carpenter's son from Nazareth spoke it and the Greek Gospels kept a few of his sentences untranslated: talitha koum, ephphatha, Eloi Eloi lema sabachthani. Each branch produced a literature. The Babylonian Talmud, redacted at Sura and Pumbedita around 500 CE, is written in one dialect; the Mandaean scriptures of southern Iraq in another; the whole Syriac patristic library in a third.

Arabic ended the run. After the conquests of the 630s Aramaic retreated from the cities to the villages and from the street to the liturgy, though it took six centuries to finish — Aramaic was still being spoken across rural Syria and Iraq when the Crusaders arrived. What survives is fragmentary and mostly displaced. About a million people speak a Neo-Aramaic dialect, most of them in Södertälje, Chicago, Sydney, or Berlin rather than Tur Abdin or the Nineveh Plain. The Western branch, the one closest to the Galilean dialect, hangs on in three Syrian villages north of Damascus; one of them, Bakh'a, was emptied in 2013. A language that outlasted Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Rome is now down to a handful of grandmothers and a Swedish suburb.