Читать книгу A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire, 2 Volume Set - Группа авторов - Страница 89

The Persian administration consolidated earlier networks between Aramaic‐speaking regions throughout the empire and thus created a lasting heritage that outlived its chancery. By that time, Aramaic was deeply entrenched as a language of administration, law, and religious literature, which consolidated its long‐term success. Once the central authority disappeared with Alexander's conquest, elements of the official scribal tradition could interact more freely with regional forms of Aramaic, and linguistic innovations could spread more easily across the speech area (see Gzella 2011b and, more extensively, 2015: pp. 212–280 for an overview). Although it quickly faded away in Anatolia and lasted only until the Ptolemaic period in Egypt, the use of Aramaic as a standardized written, though not necessarily spoken, language largely continued in the western and eastern peripheries of the dialect landscape, in the form of very conservative varieties in northern Arabia (especially Nabataean) and Parthia (scattered epigraphic material and Aramaic ideograms in Middle Persian). In Hellenistic‐Roman Syria and eastern Mesopotamia (Palmyra, Edessa, Hatra), by contrast, several regional dialects of Aramaic were promoted to chancery idioms of small local kingdoms, yet were highly influenced by received spelling conventions. Judaea, finally, saw the gradual transformation of an Aramaic literary heritage into a new form of Jewish literary Aramaic between the fourth and the second centuries BCE. As a result, the end point of Achaemenid Official Aramaic is hard to determine. Aramaic still acted as a prestigious vehicle for reasserting local cultural self‐awareness in Hellenistic and Roman times (Gzella 2006; Healey 2009: pp. 1–51) and subsequently produced a number of long‐lasting religious literatures in Late Antiquity (Gzella 2015: pp. 281–381).