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When the Achaemenid authorities promoted an Aramaic dialect to the official administrative idiom of their vast and highly heterogeneous empire, this was a sensible if not an obvious choice. Aramaic had spread continuously throughout the Fertile Crescent soon after its appearance in writing in tenth‐ to ninth‐century BCE Syria (though it presumably acted as a vernacular even before that time) and subsequently gained much ground in the administration of the Neo‐Assyrian and the Neo‐Babylonian empires. As a consequence, it was widely understood, especially among scribes and officials, formed part of an entrenched institutional framework that provided a considerable degree of professional training, and had already developed a suitably broad technical terminology as well as a sufficient number of established literary forms for letters, contracts, and economic documents current in east and west. An eighth‐century inscription from Bukān (KAI 320; Sokoloff 1999) points to an early presence of Aramaic in Iran, and the Adon letter (TAD A1.1) demonstrates that this language was known at least in some places in Egypt toward the end of the seventh century BCE at the latest. So when the Achaemenid dynasty rose to power and felt the necessity for an efficient medium of international communication by which the king's wish could manifest itself between Egypt and present‐day Afghanistan, it did not have to reinvent the wheel.

The driving forces underlying the increasing popularity of Aramaic in the Near East early in the first millennium BCE, at the expense of Akkadian, still defy explanation. Nonetheless, the amount of linguistic diversity in the Aramaic witnesses of the seventh and sixth centuries BCE (Hug 1993; additions in Gzella 2015: pp. 112–119), after a period of coexistence of several reasonably standardized written forms of Aramaic in Syria (Gzella 2014, 2015: pp. 53–103), suggests a fairly low degree of conscious language policy and rather points to the role of highly mobile speakers, such as merchants and craftsmen, as a crucial factor for its success. Other reasons that have been suggested by scholars, but are hard to verify, include the practical advantages of the alphabetic script with its relatively small inventory of letter signs as opposed to syllabic cuneiform with which Akkadian was written; the adaptability of the language itself, thanks to its light and versatile grammatical core; and the relatively neutral ideological connotations of an idiom that was not the native tongue of the Assyrian conquerors. Aramaic would, at any rate, have facilitated access to the structurally similar languages of Syria‐Palestina, which employed the same alphabetic writing system (see the overview in Gzella 2015: pp. 104–156). Linguistic similarity is known to foster trade and migration.

Achaemenid Aramaic (Gzella 2015: pp. 157–211), by contrast, bears the characteristic marks of an imperial chancery: script, spelling, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and idiom are much more unified than in the immediately preceding stage, presumably as a result of a large‐scale administrative reorganization and unification under Darius I and Xerxes (Briant 2002: pp. 507–511). Hence, it constitutes a proper variety of Aramaic, to be distinguished on linguistic grounds both from the “Old Aramaic” material of the tenth to eighth centuries and from several other forms of Aramaic used during the seventh and sixth centuries. Yet inconsistent scholarly terminology obscures the linguistic boundaries: “Imperial Aramaic,” calqued after German Reichsaramäisch, originally referred to Achaemenid Aramaic but is now also often applied to Aramaic from the eighth century BCE on, and the same is true for “Official Aramaic.” So for clarity's sake, the slightly cumbersome label “Achaemenid Official Aramaic” will be used here in order to avoid confusion with the Aramaic varieties current under Neo‐Assyrian and Neo‐Babylonian rule (cf. Gzella 2015: pp. 104–106, 157–159).

The prehistory of Achaemenid Official Aramaic remains mysterious, largely owing to the scanty amount of textual material immediately preceding the Achaemenid period, but a case can be made for the view that it is based on a subsequently deregionalized, otherwise unknown, local Aramaic dialect of Babylonia (Gzella 2008: pp. 96–100). One may assume that the bewilderingly complex dialect landscape of south and central Babylonia in Late Antiquity (cf. Khan 2007) has roots in a much older period; a rigorous large‐scale reconstruction of the language situation in ancient Babylonia in light of medieval and modern Aramaic material could perhaps shed further light on the origins of Achaemenid Official Aramaic. For the time being, one can point to a number of linguistic hallmarks that distinguish the Achaemenid chancery language from older Aramaic varieties (Gzella 2008: pp. 91–97; 2015: pp. 168–182). The most important of these include the very frequent spelling of long (“geminate”) consonants /CC/ with nC (e.g. ’nt for /’attā/ ‘you’ instead of ’t, as in older Aramaic), which points to a nasalized pronunciation of such consonants in the vernacular originally underlying Achaemenid Official Aramaic (e.g. [’ãtā]) but seems to have been a purely orthographical device in the latter (because it targets sounds that are unlikely to be affected by nasalization, such as the voiced velar or uvular fricative written with the letter signs q or ‘); a construction based on the passive participle with the agent expressed by a preposition, presumably calqued on Old Persian though still rarely attested in first‐millennium BCE Aramaic (e.g. šmy‘ ly /šamī’ lī/ “it was heard by me” for “I have heard”); the replacement of third‐person plural suffixes marking a pronominal direct object with transitive verbs by independent pronouns (e.g. l’ ’ytyt hmw “I did not bring them”); and, perhaps, a merger of the third‐person plural masculine and feminine forms in the “perfect” conjugation (e.g. ktbw/katabū/ “they wrote” with a feminine subject; however, proper forms of the third‐person feminine plural, as in many other older Semitic languages, are only attested in post‐Achaemenid Aramaic, so the diagnostic value of this feature remains unclear).

Since Aramaic had already been in use in many regions that were subsequently incorporated as provinces into the Persian Empire, the standard determined by the Achaemenid chancery interacted with local dialects and scribal practice. A certain degree of variation (mostly related to spelling) in the corpus shows that Achaemenid Official Aramaic, while being essentially uniform, was to some extent affected by local dialects and competing earlier written traditions of Aramaic. Nonetheless, it soon came to dominate scribal culture and eclipsed much of the diversity that the uncontrolled spread of Aramaic in the preceding period had brought about. A comparison between the letters in the archive of Aršama (or Arsames), the Persian satrap of Egypt (TAD A6.3–16), and the private letters on papyrus discovered at Hermopolis (TAD A2.1–7) provide a case in point. Whereas the former reflect Achaemenid Official Aramaic in its purest form, the latter are clearly composed in a distinct regional variety of Aramaic and contain a number of non‐standard phonetic spellings as well as morphological and syntactic peculiarities but do exhibit a few traces of Achaemenid orthography (e.g. the writing of long consonants with n, as in one instance of mnd‘m “whatever” instead of the spelling md‘m, which is also employed) that was gradually encroaching on local scribal practice (Gzella 2011a: pp. 582–583, 2015: pp. 147–150). In addition, many Persian loanwords in the Aršama correspondence and their absence in the Hermopolis papyri reinforce the difference between highly official and sub‐standard Aramaic texts. The place of origin, the genre and register of a text, and the degree of formal education of a scribe thus constitute a complex interplay of factors that cause variation. However, attempts at identifying regional varieties within Achaemenid Aramaic proved unsuccessful, and the provenance of a text cannot be ascertained on linguistic grounds (see Gzella 2015: pp. 159–160).

Contact with other languages, too, left many traces in Achaemenid Aramaic, especially in the form of lexical loans. Some less obvious features, such as changes in word order including the frequent clause‐final position of the verb, grammatical constructions, and sentence structure in general, may also result from the replication of foreign use patterns, although these are not yet well known. Multilingual scribes and interpreters in the homeland and in the provinces (Tavernier 2008: pp. 60–63 gives an overview of ancient sources referring to them) disseminated the results of such contact throughout the empire. Numerous Akkadian influences (Kaufman 1974) had entered the language already in preceding stages, but the Babylonian dialect of Akkadian continued to be used for certain official purposes in Babylonia, as is evidenced by economic documents. Borrowings from Persian (Muraoka and Porten 2003: pp. 342–345) first appear in Achaemenid times and often relate to the sphere of administration.

Individual words and expressions concerning everyday life have been taken over from local idioms; hence the Aramaic texts from Egypt contain a fair share of Egyptian lexemes, in particular naval terminology (Muraoka and Porten 2003: pp. 345–347). The situation in other parts of the empire is less well documented, but Aramaic and Elamite, which has a long and distinguished history of its own as an administrative language in the ancient kingdom of Elam, clearly coexisted in Persepolis. Moreover, multilingual inscriptions from Asia Minor with parallel versions in Lydian (from Sardis: KAI 260), Greek (from Limyra: KAI 262), or Lycian and Greek (from Xanthos: KAI 319) next to an Aramaic text prove that local idioms continued to be used even for public representation in some regions. It is likewise difficult to assess the impact of Achaemenid Official Aramaic on Syria‐Palestine, the old homeland of the Aramaic language. Changes in the distributional pattern of the regional idioms as reflected by the epigraphic record suggest that Hebrew and the related dialects of the Transjordan area were increasingly marginalized or became confined to specific speech situations, such as religion in the case of Hebrew, and that Aramaic dominated many areas of daily life (Gzella 2015: pp. 190–193; 225–230). Phoenician inscriptions from Persian and Hellenistic times indicate, however, that this language preserved its local prestige and continued to be employed at least in monuments for public display. Yet it should be borne in mind that the limited written evidence does not necessarily provide a representative view of the language situation as such and of the use of regional vernaculars. See Gzella (2011c) for a brief summary of the linguistic history of the region.

A recent grammatical outline of Achaemenid Aramaic proper against its linguistic background can be found in Gzella (2011a). Muraoka and Porten (2003) provide a full synchronic reference grammar of the material from Egypt, which forms but a part (albeit an important one) of the total evidence. A comprehensive modern reference grammar of Achaemenid Aramaic as such still has to be written. The entire lexicon is included, with full scholarly bibliography, in the standard dictionary by Hoftijzer and Jongeling (1995); the historical semantics and actual use of a large part of the vocabulary are discussed extensively in the various articles in Gzella (2016).