A Cultural History of Aramaic

Gzella, Holger

doi:10.1163/9789004285101

Cited by 44 publications

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“…159 The practice of Babylonians in Uruk using Greek names died out within ten years of the Parthian conquest. 160 A similar picture emerges in eastern Syria from the first century . 161 In an essay on the second-century  composition De Dea Syria, Lucinda Dirven highlights the consequences of exaggerating Hellenism's impact: 'the attention to the Hellenistic traits in the work has led to a neglect of the equally or more important "native" elements.'…”

Section: mentioning

confidence: 93%

Mesopotamian Civilization and the Origins of the New Testament

Baker

2022

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In this ground-breaking study, Robin Baker investigates the contribution ancient Mesopotamian theology made to the origins of Christianity. Drawing on a formidable range of primary sources, Baker's conclusions challenge the widely held opinion that the theological imprint of Babylonia and Assyria on the New Testament is minimal, and what Mesopotamian legacy it contains was mediated by the Hebrew Bible and ancient Jewish sources. After evaluating and substantially supplementing previous research on this mediation, Baker demonstrates significant direct Mesopotamian influence on the New Testament presentation of Jesus and particularly the character of his kingship. He also identifies likely channels of transmission. Baker documents substantial differences among New Testament authors in borrowing Mesopotamian conceptions to formulate their Christology. This monograph is an essential resource for specialists and students of the New Testament as well as for scholars interested in religious transmission in the ancient Near East and the afterlife of Mesopotamian culture.

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Section: mentioning

confidence: 93%

Mesopotamian Civilization and the Origins of the New Testament

Baker

2022

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“…While the dissimilation of intervocalic voiced geminates is attested throughout Aramaic and is therefore of limited value for identifying Western Aramaic loans, the dissimilation of q > k before another "emphatic" consonant 31 is characteristic of Western Aramaic, not regularly attested in the eastern languages, where we find for example Jba qûšṭā. 32 Within Mandaic, a similar rule operates, whereby q regularly dissimilates to g before an emphatic consonant, 33 e.g., gṭal 'he killed' (<*qṭal), lgaṭ 'he grasped' (< *lqaṭ), and gaiṭa 'summer' (<*qayṭā), but this rule would produce the unattested form **gušṭa. Consequently, this quintessentially Mandaic word is actually irregular within Mandaic, one of a handful of roots in which *q dissimilates to k, 34 all of which likely reflect borrowing from another dialect in which this sound change was regular.…”

Section: A Western Aramaic Substratementioning

confidence: 99%

“…5 Nonetheless, to the extent that we can lump Aramaic languages into conjectural categories based on shared morphological innovations, Mandaic undeniably agrees with the other members of the eastern category in all of its most widely accepted diagnostic features. 6 These include the replacement of the masculine plural emphatic morpheme -ayyā with -ē (Mandaic -ia, never **-aia, and pronounced -i), the replacement of the third masculine singular personal morpheme of the prefix conjugation y-with a n-or an l-, and the replacement of the third masculine singular possessive pronoun *-awhī with reflexes of *-ayhī (Mandaic -(i)ẖ, pronounced -i).…”

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confidence: 99%

Mandaic and the Palestinian Question

Häberl¹

2021

JAOS

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Mandaic and the Palestinian Question Charles häberl rutgers university-the state university of new JerseyIn his 1875 description of the language, Theodor Nöldeke describes Mandaic as among the purest of the Aramaic languages and the furthest from Western Aramaic, particularly with respect to its lexicon. As Mandaeans identify their faith with that of John the Baptist and his community of followers, this observation is not without relevance for assessing the veracity of their accounts and reconstructing their history prior to the advent of Islam. Departing from the assumption that these accounts are either inaccurate or willfully dishonest, all recent descriptions of the Mandaic language maintain that it is completely free from any western influences whatsoever, employing a considerably stronger form of Nöldeke's original claim. This article subjects the strong form of this claim to a critical analysis, surveying the evidence for western influence upon the lexicon of the Mandaean scriptural canon, principally the Canonical Prayerbook, the Great Treasure, and the Mandaean Book of John. It finds that these works contain numerous lexemes of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Western Aramaic origin that are otherwise unparalleled within Eastern Aramaic, and concludes that the scholarly consensus must either be revised to account for this evidence or abandoned.In the scholarly classification of Aramaic, the later phases are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: Eastern Aramaic, which emerged under Iranian rule in Mesopotamia and eastern Syria, and Western Aramaic, which emerged under Hellenistic and Roman rule in the region between Syria in the north and Arabia to the south. 1 This is the story of one of these languages.Mandaic is an Eastern Aramaic language. Within the context of the philological tradition of the study of the Aramaic languages, as it has evolved over the past two centuries, few such categorical statements are so incontrovertible. No less an authority than Theodor Nöldeke Author's note: I would like to thank my hosts at the American Academy in Berlin, who have graciously provided me with a fellowship and a much-needed respite from the administrative responsibilities of chairing the Rutgers Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures, without which it would have been completely impossible for me to complete any research. This paper in its present form emerged from a Session on academia.edu, a virtual space where invited members can discuss or provide feedback on another's paper. After twenty-one days their comments become archived for future access. At the time it was archived, the Session had forty-three participants who had contributed twenty-nine comments. I am particularly indebted to

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“…The latter, spread far and wide by the Achaemenid Empire, is now well known to us from Persian‐period corpora like the Elephantine Papyri (cf. Folmer, 1995, 2022; Gzella, 2015, pp. 157–211; Muraoka & Porten, 2003).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The meaning of Aramaic is uncontroversial: (any variety belonging to) a certain family of closely related Semitic languages/dialects that descend from a shared ancestor presumably spoken in late second‐millennium bce Syria, with many shared features and a long written history (e.g., Healey, 2013, pp. 23–24; Huehnergard, 1995; Gzella, 2015). Some of the other terms that are crucial to this investigation have been used in different or vague ways and require clarification.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What can Nabataean Aramaic tell us about Pre‐Islamic Arabic?

Suchard

2023

Arab Archaeol Epigr

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Nabataean Aramaic contains a large number of loanwords from Arabic. Together with other evidence, this has been taken as an indication that the Nabataeans used Aramaic as a written language only, while a Pre‐Islamic variety of Arabic was their spoken language. Based on a comprehensive review of the evidence, however, this article concludes that both Arabic and Aramaic were in spoken use in the Nabataean Kingdom and Late Antique Northwest Arabia. Departing from this modified understanding of the linguistic status of Nabataean Aramaic, various features of Pre‐Islamic Arabic are then examined based on the Nabataean evidence: the realisation of the voiceless sibilant /s/, nominal morphology, the reflexes of stem‐final *y, verbal syntax, and the lexicon.

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A Cultural History of Aramaic

Cited by 44 publications

References 0 publications

Mesopotamian Civilization and the Origins of the New Testament

Mesopotamian Civilization and the Origins of the New Testament

Mandaic and the Palestinian Question

What can Nabataean Aramaic tell us about Pre‐Islamic Arabic?

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