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Most of the surviving material in Aramaic from Achaemenid times consists of letters, contracts, and economic documents; various smaller honorific, dedicatory, and funerary inscriptions; and short marks on seals, coins, and other items (see Gzella 2004: pp. 35–56 and 2015: pp. 182–208 for brief synopses). Longer texts were written on perishable material like papyrus or leather, so Egypt, thanks to its dry climate, is overrepresented in the available evidence. Obviously, not all Aramaic texts discovered in Egypt are of local provenance, but a large share of them, the so‐called “Elephantine papyri,” illustrates daily life and the socioeconomic situation of a fifth‐century BCE Judean diaspora community, established by mercenaries some time before (Grelot 1972: pp. 33–42), on the island Elephantine on the Nile. In addition, a collection of slave sales from the second half of the fourth century was found in Wadi Daliyeh near Samaria in Palestine. Inscriptions on durable material, by contrast, were discovered throughout the Achaemenid Empire: from Egypt, the Arabian Desert, Asia Minor, Palestine, Babylon, Persepolis, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. They all conform, to varying degrees, to the linguistic standard set by the Achaemenid administration, depending on their public or private character. In the absence of other criteria, a tentative date can often be established on grounds of paleography.

The Aramaic texts from Egypt until the Ptolemaic period have been collected and collated by Porten and Yardeni (1986–1999 = TAD, together with drawings, a translation into English and Modern Hebrew, and bibliographical references). Nonetheless, the respective first editions with their philological commentary and photographs must form part of any serious study. A selection of Aramaic papyri from Elephantine in an annotated translation is also available in Porten et al. (1996: pp. 74–276); the notes and introductory paragraphs accompanying the French translation by Grelot (1972) are still quite serviceable, too. The Wadi Daliyeh papyri have been published by Gropp (2001) and, more recently in their entirety, by Dušek (2007). No such comprehensive collection exists for the inscriptions, but Schwiderski (2004, with an eclectic reading of the relevant texts, though without translation and notes) can be used as a point of departure and for bibliographical indications. Donner and Röllig (1966–2002 = KAI) give a representative selection of the most important pieces with a German translation and a philological commentary; other selections of a similar kind are less reliable. Fitzmyer and Kaufman (1992) provide an overview of older scholarly literature.

It is the use of Aramaic in domestic and provincial administration that best illustrates its role as an official language of the Achaemenid Empire. The large corpus of the mostly Elamite Fortification tablets from Persepolis, which record the assignment of food rations to persons affiliated in various ways with the royal palace, contains both texts with an Aramaic version and several hundreds of small tablets written in Aramaic alone. They do not lend themselves to easy access and remain unpublished to date (Azzoni 2008 gives a preliminary account). Some also refer to documents written on leather, the language of which, in all likelihood, was Aramaic, because the cuneiform script of Elamite, geared toward being inscribed with a stylus in wet clay, was unsuitable for being used with ink and on flat surfaces. Moreover, 163 mortars, pestles, and other stone objects discovered at the royal treasury bear short Aramaic inscriptions (Bowman 1970, whose erroneous interpretation as ritual texts has been abandoned in the meantime, see Naveh and Shaked 1973). The exact distribution of Aramaic and Elamite as administrative languages in Achaemenid Iran remains a matter of controversy, though, and cannot be easily explained on grounds of a sudden switch from Elamite to Aramaic alone. Tavernier (2008) has a useful synopsis of the current state of the discussion.

Evidence from top‐level administration in other satrapies further contributes to understanding the role of Aramaic as an international language in the Achaemenid Empire, even if no complete satrapal archive has yet been discovered. Of particular importance are the 13 letters and fragments of Aršama (TAD A6.3–16; Driver 1965 and, for the photographs, 1954), who acted as the satrap of Egypt at the end of the fifth century BCE. They reflect the spelling conventions, epistolary phraseology, and procedural mores of the Persian chancery, although they are not predominantly concerned with the public sphere. Written on leather in a clear, authoritative, no‐nonsense style and dispatched from the Achaemenid heartland to Egypt (presumably to his headquarters in Memphis, but the place of discovery remains unknown), they illustrate the way in which a leading Persian official instructed his managers to carry out their responsibilities and to look after his estates abroad. A few letters sent by his subordinates show how his orders flowed downward along the chain of command. In addition, Aršama features in two letters found at Elephantine (TAD A6.1–2).

A likewise official usage of Aramaic is attested for other eastern and western provinces, even where Aramaic had no prior history as a spoken or written idiom. The correspondence of a local governor with the satrap of Bactria in the second half of the fourth century BCE, consisting of 30 letters on parchment, now makes the most substantial addition to the very meager textual evidence from outside Egypt and Iran (Naveh and Shaked 2012; discussed at greater length in Chapter 66 Bactria). From Daskyleion in Asia Minor, the residence of the satrap of Phrygia, 12 clay envelopes (bullae) with the (generally Iranian) names of their proprietors on Aramaic tags and seals have survived (Röllig 2002); they, too, bear witness to Aramaic letter‐writing in provincial administration. Coins from Cilicia with Aramaic inscriptions (Vattioni 1971: pp. 70–78) and a trilingual stele (Aramaic, Lycian, Greek) issued by Pixodaros, the satrap of Lycia and Caria, in order to confirm the foundation of a new local cult at Xanthos in 337 BCE according to official Achaemenid procedure (recent bibliographical information is available in Funke 2008), also reinforce the use of the language in matters pertaining to the government.

The role of Aramaic in the communication of local authorities during the Achaemenid period is best attested for Egypt, chiefly thanks to the Elephantine papyri. These exhibit a higher degree of spelling variation, including some phonetic spellings, than, for example, the Aršama letters, which indicates that they were produced by Aramaic‐speaking inhabitants. Topics of interest to a Judean expat group, at a time when Judaism began to take on its distinctive shape, surface in the 10 letters and fragments of the archive of Yedaniah, the son of Gemariah, the leader of the community during the end of the fifth century. Two versions of a rhetorically forceful letter seeking permission from the governor of Yehud to rebuild the local temple (TAD A4.7–8) are particularly famous, as is the memorandum of the governors of Yehud and Samaria granting this request (TAD A4.9). Both versions appear to be drafts, with some modifications, that have been preserved in the communal archive. Another letter, though highly fragmentary, is usually interpreted as an early reference to Passover, based on a reasonable yet not entirely certain reconstruction of the missing parts (TAD A4.1), and the others address various matters illustrating the sometimes‐uneasy relations of the Judean community with the Egyptian population.

As a language of private law, too, Aramaic is particularly well attested in Achaemenid Egypt, where it coexisted with Demotic. The oldest datable legal text, a lease written in 515 BCE, originates from Korobis in the Nile Delta and reflects traces of a preceding Aramaic scribal tradition (TAB B1.1). The family archives of Mibtahiah (471–410 BCE; TAD B2.1–11) and of Ananiah (456–402 BCE; TAD B3.1–13) contain bequests, marriage contracts, and property transactions. Twenty‐one loose documents with deeds of obligation (TAD B4.1–7), conveyances (TAD B5.1–6), marriage documents (TAD B6.1–4), and judicial oaths (TAD B7.1–4) have also been discovered. They all mark the beginning of a long‐lasting Aramaic legal tradition, with similar or even identical formulae recurring not only in the Hellenistic and Roman Near East but also in the Babylonian Talmud (Healey 2005; Gross 2008). Its origin in older Mesopotamian and West Semitic, local Egyptian, or perhaps even international Iranian law remains a matter of debate (see the introduction by Levine in Muffs 2003: pp. xi–xliv). The Egyptian evidence can now be supplemented by 27 fourth‐century slave sales from Wadi Daliyeh in Palestine, which employ a slightly different phraseology (Gropp 2001; Dušek 2007).

In addition, 202 fifth‐ and fourth‐century papyrus fragments relating to law, taxation, and commerce have been discovered at Saqqāra near Memphis (Segal 1983; nos. 8 and 35 have been re‐edited in TAD B5.6 and 4.7 respectively). Unfortunately, they are so severely damaged that little reliable information can be derived from them, but they seem to emanate from non‐Judean circles. The language exhibits a number of smaller peculiarities as opposed to other sub‐corpora of Achaemenid Official Aramaic, yet their diagnostic value is, again, hard to assess. A number of court records (re‐edited in TAD B8.1–4; 6–12) shed further light on the workings of legal procedures under Achaemenid administration in Egypt, despite the mostly minimal amount of text preserved, including complaints against a former verdict, cross‐examination, oaths, and the decisions taken. About half of these cases concern slaves. Some Persian loans add to their official ring. The same site yields 26 ostraca, 21 of which are thought to be in Phoenician script.

Most economic texts from the provinces have been preserved on papyrus fragments and ostraca from Egypt, easily accessible in TAD C and D, as well as on Palestinian ostraca, especially some 2000 pieces from Idumaea, most of which record the transfer of goods (Porten and Yardeni 2014–2020). The latter in particular illustrate the well‐entrenched employ of Aramaic also for base‐level bookkeeping in a largely agrarian society. Papyrus was used for accounts (TAD C3.1–29) and lists (TAD C4.1–9; personal names of various provenances but of unknown function) that cover a longer period of time or were of more than ephemeral importance, whereas ostraca served for short‐term purposes. The extensive customs account of import and export duties dating from 475 BCE and arranged by month (TAD C3.7), which was later erased and replaced by the Aḥiqar wisdom text (see below), is particularly revealing for the economic history of Achaemenid Egypt and Egypto‐Aramaic naval terminology: duties were collected from incoming ships and deposited in the royal treasury (Lipiński 1994: pp. 62–67; Yardeni 1994). Information of a similar sort can be found in the poorly preserved Memphis Shipyard Journal (TAD C3.8) for the years 473–471 BCE.

Numerous texts from outside the administrative sphere show that Achaemenid Official Aramaic enjoyed a wide distribution in the Persian Empire: private letters on papyrus and ostraca; various types of stone inscriptions; property marks, seals, graffiti; and so forth. Short though they are, they bear witness to the growing distribution and impact of the orthographical and grammatical norm established by the royal chancery on the use of written language in daily life. The Hermopolis papyri (TAD A2.1–7) illustrate a tradition of Aramaic letter writing in Egypt that precedes the Achaemenid administration but gradually came under its influence; a similar situation may apply to other areas where such documentation is no longer available simply because the evidence has not been preserved. The majority of the short epistolary communications come from Elephantine and are written on ostraca; they generally concern matters of everyday economic life and often contain requests to dispatch certain goods (Lozachmeur 2006, a small part of which was previously published in TAD D; most of the 280 pieces in this collection are in Achaemenid Aramaic). Besides a few writing exercise tablets with the letters of the alphabet in a specific order (TAD D10.1–2; cf. 22.28), little information on the various degrees of literacy among the population in different regions and on the educational framework is available. The fact that people were presumably able to write their own names in clumsy letters does not exclude that many of them needed professional scribes for letters and other more advanced matters (Grelot 1972: pp. 48–56). The use of Aramaic for private representation surfaces in a number of dedicatory, funerary, and memorial inscriptions from Arabian Tayma, Asia Minor, and Palestine.