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While documentary material constitutes the lion's share of the surviving sources, traces of a literary tradition in Aramaic during Achaemenid times can also be identified. Yet it is practically impossible to assess the true extent of this tradition and the role of non‐documentary compositions in society: were they, or at least their general contents, known to significant parts of the population? Or was their use confined to scribal education, where they served as a medium of instruction (copying texts was a core activity in the training of Near Eastern scribes at various periods) and, perhaps, also as a model for stylistic imitation? Or did they form some common ground that defined the cultural self‐awareness of the small elite of the Achaemenid mandarins, as did the Greek and Latin classics for generations of British civil servants? For the time being, such questions must remain unanswered.

Three texts on papyrus that can safely be subsumed under the category “literary,” in the broadest sense of the word, have been found at Elephantine in Egypt. There is the story about Aḥiqar, an advisor to the Neo‐Assyrian court who, thanks to his insight and personal integrity, survived a plot against him; a number of older traditional wisdom sayings ascribed to this sage were then attached to the narration (TAD C1.1). Another tale, about Bar Puneš (TAD C1.2), is so fragmentary that but little can be said about its contents except that it seems to take place at a royal court. And a fragmentary Aramaic version of the Bisotun inscription with the res gestae of Darius I (TAD C2.1; Greenfield and Porten 1982) has been translated from the Babylonian and supplements the Elamite, Old Persian, and Babylonian trilingual inscription gracing the famous rock monument in Media, as well as the Neo‐Babylonian copy from Babylon. It is unclear whether Darius II had distributed a text celebrating the deeds of his predecessor throughout the empire in order to honor him (in accordance with §70 of the Persian original), or whether the copy discovered at Elephantine served as an exercise in scribal training. Since it closely corresponds to the orthographical and linguistic standards of Achaemenid Official Aramaic, it would, at any rate, have been a suitable model.

The origin of the Aḥiqar wisdom text is more difficult to trace, in particular because Aḥiqar was and is a well‐known figure in Near Eastern literature up to the present day (Contini and Grottanelli 2005). Thanks to the underlying customs account (TAD C3.7), which is arranged chronologically, the original sequence of the surviving parts of the palimpsest can be determined (Gianto 1995: pp. 87–89). Apparently, the preceding narrative frame in Achaemenid Official Aramaic served as an introduction to the ensuing sayings; the latter are entrenched in older lore and composed in a pre‐Achaemenid variety of Aramaic the provenance of which remains elusive (see Weigl 2010, with copious bibliographical references). Scholars are divided as to whether they were written in eighth‐ or seventh‐century southern Syria or in seventh‐ or sixth‐century (north‐)western Mesopotamia (Weigl 2010: pp. 677–678; Gzella 2015: pp. 150–153), a question not easy to answer given the very limited attestation of Aramaic during that period. One could imagine that the Aḥiqar composition was used not only for teaching a formal style of Aramaic for administrators in the make (hence perhaps some archaic rings in the narrative) but also for depicting the moral and intellectual ideal of a loyal court official. The rich vocabulary and high amount of syntactic subordination show that the language of the proverbs is a literary idiom (see also Gzella 2017). Interestingly, Aḥiqar occurs on a fragmentary Demotic papyrus (Betrò 2005), and Bar Puneš may be identical to the well‐known magician Hor‐son‐of‐Puneš in Demotic literature, although the reading Ḥwr in TAD C1.2 remains controversial (Gianto 1995: pp. 90–91). An ink inscription on the walls of a burial cave near Sheikh Fadl (TAD D23.1) may contain another literary composition from the Achaemenid period, but it is so fragmentary and palaeographically so difficult that its contents cannot be clearly determined.

Despite these few surviving non‐documentary sources in Aramaic dating from the former half of the first millennium, some vestiges of a broader literary tradition can be reconstructed in light of later evidence. However, such a supra‐regional “Standard Literary Aramaic” did not exist alongside Achaemenid Official Aramaic (as Greenfield 1974, who coined the term, and others maintained) but formed a subset of it (Gzella 2008: pp. 108–109, 2015: p. 165). The roots of the Aramaic parts of the Books of Ezra and Daniel in the Achaemenid chancery idiom can still be determined, even if contact with the local Aramaic variety in Judaea and successive phases of redaction have left their traces in what might have been a fourth‐century BCE core (Gzella 2004: pp. 41–45, 2015: pp. 205–208; on the linguistic peculiarities of Biblical Aramaic, see also Gzella 2011a: pp. 583–584). This idiom over time evolved into a local official language (“Hasmonaean”) that is attested in Aramaic religious compositions and legal documents from the Dead Sea (Gzella 2015: pp. 230–234). Scholars have also tried to identify poetic elements in non‐literary genres like an Aramaic funerary inscription from Achaemenid Egypt (KAI 269 = TAD D20.5), now in Carpentras (cf. Nebe 2007: p. 74), but this remains somewhat speculative.

It is not unreasonable to assume that the spread of Achaemenid Official Aramaic and the consolidation of a longer‐lasting institutional environment that upheld it created the backdrop for an Aramaic “world literature” to evolve. Although its true extent cannot be outlined, remains of an erstwhile common literary language still surface in various local traditions during the post‐Achaemenid period and point to such a shared matrix. Court novels in particular, as in Aḥiqar, Daniel, and some Qumran texts, constitute a genre closely associated with Aramaic (Gzella 2017). As a universal medium of expression, Aramaic could promote exchange of literary motives and figures between Egypt and Mesopotamia during the Achaemenid period. One can also suppose that knowledge of Mesopotamian science, glimpses of which appear in later writings, spread via lost Aramaic translations of technical writings (Ben‐Dov 2010).