“…The question inevitably arises why two Persians, one of them a member of the royal family, the other an official of the Persian administration in Egypt, should communicate with one another not in their own native tongue, nor even in a language spoken in Egypt, but in Aramaic. The only plausible answer is that the sender dictated his message in Persian, a scribe translated it ad hoc and wrote it down into Aramaic, and that a second scribe retranslated it ex tempore into Persian …" (de Blois 2007(de Blois : 1194. This notion of an Achaemenid scribe reading off in Persian (or some other language) a text written in Aramaic was famously imagined by Polotsky (1932: 273), who suggested that Achaemenid chancery practices were predicated on the twinned assumptions of a) monolingualism in writing practice and b) multilingualism of the scribe.…”