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Old Aramaic refers to the earliest stage of the Aramaic language, taken to give way to Middle Aramaic by the 3rd century (a conventional date is the rise of the Sassanid Empire in 224 CE). Emerging as the language of the Aramaean city-states of the Levant in the Early Iron Age, Old Aramaic was adopted as a ''lingua franca'' (besides Assyrian) in the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and in this role was inherited for official use by the Achaemenid Empire during Classical Antiquity. After the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, local vernaculars became increasingly prominent, fanning the divergence of an Aramaic dialect continuum and the development of differing written standards. ==Ancient Aramaic== "Ancient Aramaic" refers to the earliest known period of the language, from its origin until it becomes the ''lingua franca'' of the Fertile Crescent and Bahrain. It was the language of the Aramaean city-states of Damascus, Hamath and Arpad. There are inscriptions that evidence the earliest use of the language, dating from the 10th century BCE. These inscriptions are mostly diplomatic documents between Aramaean city-states. The alphabet of Aramaic at this early period seems to be based on Phoenician, and there is a unity in the written language. It seems that, in time, a more refined alphabet, suited to the needs of the language, began to develop from this in the eastern regions of Aram. Oddly, the dominance of the Neo-Assyrian Empire under Tiglath-Pileser III over Aram in the middle of the 8th century led to the establishment of Aramaic as a lingua franca of the empire, rather than it being eclipsed by Akkadian. From 700 BCE, the language began to spread in all directions, but lost much of its homogeneity. Different dialects emerged in Assyria, Babylonia, the Levant and Egypt. However, the Akkadian-influenced Aramaic of Assyria, and then Babylon, started to come to the fore. As described in 2 Kings 18:26, Hezekiah, king of Judah, negotiates with Assyrian ambassadors in Aramaic so that the common people would not understand. Around 600 BCE, Adon, a Canaanite king, used Aramaic to write to the Egyptian Pharaoh. "Chaldee" or "Chaldean Aramaic" used to be common terms for the Aramaic of the Chaldean dynasty of Babylonia. It was used to describe Biblical Aramaic, which was, however, written in a later style. It is not to be confused with the modern language Chaldean Neo-Aramaic. The first old Aramaic inscription to be found in Europe was the Carpentras stele, published by Rigord in 1704.〔See () and (). The stele is known as KAI 269. Maurice Pope (linguist) writes: "The story begins just before the century opened. In 1692 a long band of material from a mummy burial was unwrapped in the presence of M. de Maillet, the French Consul in Cairo. It carried figures drawn in the ancient Egyptian style which were accompanied by an ink-written text in a hitherto unknown sort of writing. It was cut up, presumably at the time of unwrapping, into seven or eight pieces, and sent to France. One of the pieces came to the notice of Jean-Pierre Rigord, a collector of antiquities, who discussed the find in the Memoires de Trevoux of June 1704. Rigord's article was illustrated with plates of an ordinary hieroglyphic inscription, a specimen of the mummy text, and another stone inscription from Egypt from his collection. With the aid of the passage about Egyptian writing in Clement, he identified the first as 'symbolical hieroglyphic', the second as either 'hieratic' or as 'cyriological hieroglyphic', and the third as 'epistolographic'. He thought that this last one, written from right to left, was probably Phoenician. The script was said to have been in public use, and Phoenician might have come in as a mercantile language with the Shepherd Kings. The divergence of the language from Hebrew (the original tongue of mankind) had obviously reached the point of unintelligibility in Joseph's day for an interpreter to have been considered necessary between him and his brothers, and Jerome had said that Phoenician was half-way between Hebrew and Egyptian. Finally, Rigord suggested that the language might have been the same as Punic."〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Old Aramaic language」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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