Aramaic Sentence Examples

Its source may be an Aramaic or a Hebrew document.

That culture was naturally Aramaic.

Another chief characteristic of Aramaic appears in nouns, viz.

The new Arab invaders who soon pressed forward into their seats found the remnants of the Nabataeans transformed into fellahin, and speaking Aramaic like their neighbours.

As Hebrew became less familiar to the people, a system of translating the text of the Law into the Aramaic vernacular verse by verse, was adopted in the synagogue.

Aramaic targem, to translate.

Syriac is the eastern dialect of the Aramaic language which, during the early centuries of the Christian era, prevailed in Mesopotamia and the adjoining regions.

The form q`tal illustrates one main peculiarity of Aramaic, as opposed to the other Semitic languages, viz.

Hence the head of the Babylonian Jews was the exilarch (in Aramaic Resh Galutha) .

The series of native inscriptions, written in Aramaic, begins a few years after; the earliest bears the date 304 of the Seleucid era, i.e.

Its characteristic civilization grew out of a mixture of various elements, Arabic, Aramaic, Greek and Roman.

The language spoken at Palmyra was a dialect of western Aramaic, and belongs to the same group as Nabataean and the Aramaic spoken in Egypt.

The technical terms of municipal government are mostly Greek, transliterated into Palmyrene; a few Latin words occur, of course in Aramaic forms. For further characteristics of the dialect see Nuldeke, ZDMG.

The language throughout southern and middle Syria as high as Killis is Arabic, which has entirely ousted Aramaic and Hebrew from common use, and tends to prevail even over the speech of recent immigrants like the Circassians.

The last survivals of Aramaic are to be sought in certain remote villages of Anti-Lebanon, and in the Syriac known to the clergy.

The numerous Aramaisms point to a time certainly not earlier than the 4th century B.C., and probably (though the history of the penetration of Aramaic into Hebrew speech is not definitely known) not earlier than the 3rd century.

Not only are new words employed, and old words in new significations, but the grammatical structure has a modern stamp - some phrases have the appearance of having been translated out of Aramaic into Hebrew.

By about the beginning of our era the Jews had given up Hebrew and wrote in Aramaic; the process of expulsion had been going on, doubtless, for some time; but comparison with the later extant literature (Chronicles, the Hebrew Ecclesiasticus or Ben-Sira, Esther) makes it improbable that such Hebrew as that of Koheleth would have been written earlier than the 2nd century B.C. (for details see Driver's Introduction).

The former literature was generally written in Hebrew or Aramaic, and seldom in Greek; the latter naturally in Greek.

The language was Western Aramaic, the mother tongue of Jesus and his apostles.

The Jewish War (I Ept Tou'IovIcdKoli 7ro%Egov), the oldest of Josephus' extant writings, was written towards the end of Vespasian's reign (69-79) The Aramaic original has not been preserved; but the Greek version was prepared by Josephus himself in conjunction with competent Greek scholars.

In Palestine and western Syria, the home of pre-Christian Aramaic dialects, the vernacular Semitic speech had under Roman dominion been replaced by Greek for official and literary purposes.

It is now known to have existed in Aramaic as far back as the 5th century B.C., appearing on Jewish papyri which were lately discovered by the German mission to Elephantine.'

The old Syriac version, which is to be found in a number of MSS., was probably made from an early Aramaic version, if not from the original itself (which must surely have been Semitic).

Eastward rose the mountains of Elam, southward were the sea-marshes and the Kalda or Chaldaeans and other Aramaic tribes, while on the west the civilization of Babylonia encroached beyond the banks of the Euphrates, upon the territory of the Semitic nomads (or Suti).

The marshes in the south like the adjoining desert were frequented by Aramaic tribes; of these the most famous were the Kalda or Chaldaeans who under Merodach-baladan made themselves masters of Babylon and gave their name in later days to the whole population of the country.

Under the second Assyrian empire, when Nineveh had become a great centre of trade, Aramaic - the language of commerce and diplomacy - was added to the number of subjects which the educated class was required to learn.

Aramaic endorsements on business documents repeating in Aramaic transliteration the names of parties mentioned in the texts have also been of service in fixing the phonetic readings of names.

Hence it still seems best to assume some unknown Aramaic form equivalent to 7rapaicX y as, and then to take the latter in the sense of comfort or encouragement.

This hypothesis is not intrinsically improbable - and in Aramaic, a language closely related to Hebrew, " to be " actually is hawa - but it should be noted that in adopting it we admit that, using the name Hebrew in the historical sense, Yahweh is not a Hebrew name.

In the absence of any precise evidence on the point it is impossible to give more than a rough estimate as to the period at which Hebrew, as a spoken language, was finally displaced by Aramaic. It is, however, certain that the latter language was firmly established in Palestine in the 1st century A.D.

By that time, as we know from many sources, Aramaic was not only the language in common use, but had also received official recognition,' despite the fact that Hebrew still remained the learned and sacred tongue.

The practice of accompanying these readings with a translation into Aramaic is, further, so generally recognized by the 2nd century A.D.

The same word is found in Hebrew and Aramaic as well as in ancient Arabic (Sabaean).

This temple had been razed and a fortress built upon its ruins, in the Greek or Seleucid period, some of the bricks found bearing the inscription in Aramaic and Greek of a certain Hadad-nadin-akhe, king of a small Babylonian kingdom.

As a Hebrew scholar he made a special study of the history of the Hebrew text, which led him to the conclusion that the vowel points and accents are not an original part of the Hebrew language, but were inserted by the Massorete Jews of Tiberias, not earlier than the 5th century A.D., and that the primitive Hebrew characters are those now known as the Samaritan, while the square characters are Aramaic and were substituted for the more ancient at the time of the captivity.

There are relatively few traces of it in Nehemiah's memoirs and in the Aramaic documents, but elsewhere the sources are largely coloured, if not written from the standpoint of his age.

This is highly improbable, but he may have derived particular sayings from the Aramaic source itself of that document by independent translation; and may also have learned both sayings and narratives in other ways.

The etymology of the word Tophet is obscure; it is possibly of Aramaic origin and means,"fire-place," cf.

This confirms the view that the Hebrew kipper, which appears to be a late word (specially employed in Ezek, and P.), originally had the meaning which belongs to the Aramaic viz.

This, in fact, is the old Aramaic word for a priest (with suffixed article, kumra).

We further possess a Samaritan Targum of the Pentateuch written in the Samaritan dialect, a variety of western Aramaic, and also an Arabic translation of the five books of the law; the latter dating perhaps from the 11th century A.D.

A god Hadad who was a prominent deity in ancient Syria is identical with Adad, and in view of this it is plausible to assume - for which there is also other evidence - that the name Adad represents an importation into Assyria from Aramaic districts.

However this name may have originally been pronounced, so much is certain, - that through Aramaic influences in Babylonia and Assyria he was identified with the storm-god of the western Semites, and a trace of this influence is to be seen in the designation Amurru, also given to this god in the religious literature of Babylonia, which as an early name for Palestine and Syria describes the god as belonging to the Amorite district.

The ultimate source of the subject matter in question, or of the most distinctive and larger part of it, was in all probability an Aramaic one, and in some parts different translations may have been used.

Aram-Damascus, which means, the Damascus portion of the Aramaic domain; and har-Ephraim, which means, the Ephraim portion of the (Israelitish) highlands - EV "Mount Ephraim."

As they gradually adopted settled life in various parts of the country the use of Aramaic spread more and more (see below, § "Persians").

The large Aramaic infusion had by this time been merged in the general body of the people.

Although Aramaic inscriptions of the Assyrian period, like those of Zanjirli or that of King ZKR of Hamath, have not been found in Mesopotamia, already in the time of Shalmaneser II.

Weights with Aramaic inscriptions (the oldest from the reign of Shalmaneser IV., 727-22) were found at Calah.

By the Achaemenian period Aramaic had become the international language, and was adopted officially.

For the purposes of everyday life, however, the people spoke not Greek, but Aramaic. As elsewhere, the Roman rule tended to obliterate characteristic features of national life, and under it the native language and institutions of Phoenicia became extinct.

The name " Hebrew " is derived, through the Greek `E$3paios, from `ibhray, the Aramaic equivalent of the Old Testament word `ibhri, denoting the people who commonly spoke of themselves as Israel or Children of Israel from the name of their common ancestor (see JEws).

In the New Testament it denotes the native language of Palestine (Aramaic and Hebrew being popularly confused) as opposed to Greek.

In general, the later books of the Old Testament show, roughly speaking, a greater simplicity and uniformity of style, as well as a tendency to Aramaisms. For some centuries after the Exile, the people of Palestine must have been bilingual, speaking Aramaic for ordinary purposes, but still at least understanding Hebrew.

Not that they forgot their own tongue in the Captivity and learnt Aramaic in Babylon, as used to be supposed.

As the popular use of Aramaic was gradually restricted by the spread of Arabic as the vernacular (from the 7th century onwards), while the dispersion of the Jews became wider, biblical Hebrew again came to be the natural standard both of East and West.

No other vernacular (except, of course, Aramaic) ever had the same influence upon Hebrew, largely because no other bears so close a relation to it.

In the Targums. - The word "Shekinah" is of constant occurrence in the Targums or Aramaic paraphrases of the Biblical lections that were read in the synagogue-service to the people.

They are written in an alphabet derived from an Aramaic source and recount the history of the northern branch of the Turks or Tu-kiue of Chinese historians.

Symeon and Simon are both well-known names in Aramaic and Greek respectively, but Cephas and Peter are previously unknown.

Symeon was no doubt his original Aramaic name, and the earliest gospel, Mark, which has some claim specially to reproduce Petrine tradition, is careful to employ Simon until after the name Peter had been given, and not then to use it again.

At the same time the prevalent tone of the populace was, no doubt, Hellenistic, as is shown by the fact that the Jews who settled there acquired Greek in place of Aramaic as their mother-tongue, and in its upper circles Alexandrian society under the Ptolemies was not only Hellenistic, but notable among the Hellenes for its literary and artistic brilliance.

At that time, along with foreign ideas, many foreign words had crept into the language; especially Aramaic terms for religious conceptions of Jewish or Christian origin.

There is, for instance, no difficulty in deriving the Arab meaning of " revelation " from the common Aramaic " salvation," and this transference must have taken place in a community for which salvation formed the central object of faith, i.e.

Milla is properly " word " (= Aramaic melltha), but in the Koran " religion."

Although of the Aramaic dialects none employs the term Melltha in the sense of religion, it appears that the prophet found such a use.

So again the word mathani is, as Geiger has conjectured, the regular plural of the Aramaic mathnitha, which is the same as the Hebrew Mishnah, and denotes in Jewish usage a legal decision of some of the ancient Rabbins.

Aramaic papyri written principally by Jews of the Persian period (5th century B.C.) have been found at Syene and Memphis.

For the following reigns Egyptian documents hardly exist, but some papyri written in Aramaic have been found at Elephantine and at Memphis.

Not improbably they spoke a dialect (or dialects) akin to Arabic or Aramaic. 5 According to the Mahommedans, Ishmael, who is recognized as their ancestor, lies buried with his mother in the Kaaba in Mecca.

It enjoyed a great reputation for letters and the arts (Cicero pro Archia, 3); but the only names of distinction in these pursuits during the Seleucid period, that have come down to us, are Apollophanes, the Stoic, and one Phoebus, a writer on dreams. The mass of the population seems to have been only superficially Hellenic, and to have spoken Aramaic in non-official life.

The nicknames which they gave to their later kings were Aramaic; and, except Apollo and Daphne, the great divinities of north Syria seem to have remained essentially native, such as the "Persian Artemis" of Meroe and Atargatis of Hierapolis Bambyce.

His proverbial sayings, in particular, a great number of which were written down partly in Aramaic, partly in Hebrew, strongly affected the spirit both of his contemporaries and of the succeeding generations.

On the coins struck in India, the well-known Indian alphabet (called Brahmi by the Indians, the older form of the Devanagari) is used; on the coins struck in Afghanistan and in the Punjab the Kharoshthi alphabet, which is derived directly from the Aramaic and was in common use in the western parts of India, as is shown by one of the inscriptions of Asoka and by the recent discovery of many fragments of Indian manuscripts, written in Kharoshthi, in eastern Turkestan (formerly this alphabet has been called Arianic or Bactrian Pali; the true name is derived from Indian sources).

It is derived from the adjective rab (in Aramaic, and frequently also in Hebrew, "great"), which acquired in modern Hebrew the signification of "lord," in relation to servants or slaves, and of "teacher," "master," in relation to the disciple.

A great darkness shrouded the scene for three hours, and then, in His native Aramaic, Jesus cried in the words of the Psalm, " My God, My God, why has Thou forsaken Me?"

But in the Aramaic versions Rekem is the name of Kadesh; Josephus may have confused the two places.

Sometimes the Aramaic versions give the form Rekem-Geya, which recalls the name of the village El-ji, south-east of Petra; the capital, however, would hardly be defined by the name of a neighbouring village.

Thus all Bedouins in that region came to be called Saraceni, in Aramaic Sarkaje, usually with no very favourable meaning.

Most authorities have held that the new form was derived from E by dropping the lowermost crossbar; some have held that it developed out of the old Vau, a view which is not impossible in itself and has the similar development in Aramaic (Tema) in its favour.

The oldest records in Aramaic were found at Sindjirli, in the north of Syria, in 1890, and date to about Boo B.C. At this epoch the Aramaic. Aramaic alphabet, or at any rate the alphabet of these records, is but little different from that shown upon the Moabite stone.

Either two sounds are confused under one symbol, or these records represent a dialect which, like Hebrew and Assyrian, shows sh, z, and c, where the ordinary Aramaic representation is t, d, and t, the Arabic tic, dh, and th.

The Aramaic became in time by far the most important of the northern Semitic alphabets.

Two changes, the inception of which is early, but the completion of which belongs to the Persian period, gave the impulse which Aramaic obeyed in all its later developments.

These characteristics were naturally emphasized in the Aramaic writing on papyrus which, beginning about 500 B.C., during the Persian sovereignty in Egypt, lasted on there till about zoo B.C. The gradual development of this script into the square Hebrew, and the more ornamental writing of Palmyra, may be traced in the works of Berger and Lidzbarski.'

In the land of the Nabataeans, a people of Arabian origin, the Aramaic alphabet was employed in a form which ultimately de- Arabic. veloped into the modern Arabic alphabet.

Probably the earliest example of the Aramaic script in Arabia is the stele of Tema, in north-western Arabia, whereon is commemorated the establishment of a worship of an Aramaic divinity.

Another form of the Aramaic alphabet, namely, the so-called Estrangela writing which was in use amongst the Christians of northern Syria, was carried by Nestorian missionaries into Central Asia and became the ancestor of a multitude of alphabets spreading through the Turkomans as far east as Manchuria.

We have seen that at Babylon itself the Aramaic language and character were well known.

It is probable therefore, a priori, that from the Aramaic alphabet the later writing of Persia should be developed.

The conclusion is confirmed by the coins, the only records with Iranian script which go back so far; but the special form of Aramaic from which the Iranian alphabet is derived must at present be left undecided.

As Buhler shows in detail, the Kharosthi alphabet is derived from the alphabet of the Aramaic inscriptions which date from the earlier part of the Achaemenid period.

The Aramaic alphabet passed into India with the staff of subordinate officials by whom Darius organized his conquests there.

The Kharosthi is then the gradual development under local conditions of the Aramaic alphabet of the Persian period.

The Book of Tobit has reached us in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Aramaic and Hebrew versions; of these the Hebrew are the latest, and need not be considered.

Jerome's version is from the Aramaic, or, as it used to be called, the Chaldee.

It was only in 1878 that the Aramaic version was brought to light, being published by Adolph Neubauer from a unique MS. in the Bodleian Library.

But he is there as the companion and friend of man, which is Aryan and not Semitic. So alien indeed is this from the Semitic mind that in the Aramaic and Hebrew versions the dog does not appear.

The Mishnah is written in a late literary form of Hebrew; but the Gemara is in Aramaic (except the Baraithas), that of the Bab.

With such materials the cuneiform script could not be used; instead, the Persian language was written in, Aramaic characters, a method which later led to the so-called Pahlavi, i.e.

In Cappadocia, Aramaic inscriptions have been discovered (1900), in which the indigenous god, there termed Bel the king, recognizes the Mazdayasnian Religion (Din Mazdayasnish)i.e.

The district of Persis, also, became independent soon after the time of Antiochus IV., and was ruled by its own kings, who perpetuated the Achaemenian traditions, and on their coinswhich bear the Persian language in Aramaic characters, i.e.

The script was derived from the Aramaic.

Henceforward Greek culture practically vanishes and gives place to Aramaic; it is significant that in future the kings of Mesene stamped their coinage with Aramaic legends.

This Aramaic victory was powerfully aided by the ever-increasing progress of Christianity, which soon created, as is well known, an Aramaic literature Christianity.

After that Greek culture and Greek literature were only accessible to the Orientals in an Aramaic dress.

He regarded many books of the Old Testament as spurious, questioned the genuineness of 2 Peter and Jude, denied the Pauline authorship of Timothy and Titus, and suggested that the canonical gospels were based upon various translations and editions of a primary Aramaic gospel.

He also wrote a Hebrew and an Aramaic grammar.

But the question at once arises, was the original Aramaic or Hebrew?

Certain proper names in the Latin Version ending in -in seem to bespeak an Aramaic original, as Cettin, Filistin, &c. But since in all these cases the Ethiopic transliterations end in -m and not in -n, it is not improbable that the Aramaism in the Latin Version is due to the translator, who, it has been concluded on other grounds, was a Palestinian Jew.'

This idiom could, of course, be explained on the hypothesis of an Aramaic original.

And it is indeed likely that Papias himself closely associated the latter with the Hebrew (or Aramaic) work by Matthew, of which he had been told, since the traditional connexion of this Greek Gospel with Matthew can hardly have begun later than this time.

But the original Aramaic Logian document may have been more largely reproduced in our Greek Matthew.

Klostermann, however, takes the ch to be part of the Aramaic root demach, " to sleep "; the word would then mean " field of sleep " or cemetery (Probleme im Aposteltexte, 1-8, 1883), an explanation which fits in well with the account in Matthew xxvii.

Similar forms are also found in early Aramaic, but another form 1 or L, which is found in the Phoenician of Cyprus in the 9th or 10th century B.C. has had more effect upon the later development of the Semitic forms. The length of the two back strokes and the manner in which they join the upright are the only variations in Greek.

When subsequently the Babylonian language went out of use and Aramaic took its place, the latter tongue was wrongly termed "Chaldee" by Jerome, because it was the only language known to him used in Babylonia.

Various attempts have been made to explain the sudden change from Hebrew to Aramaic in ii.

It was long thought, for example, that Aramaic was the vernacular of Babylonia and was consequently employed as the language of the parts relating to that country.

Aramaic. It must be supposed then that, certain parts of the original Hebrew manuscript being lost, the missing places were supplied from the current Aramaic translation.'

That the Book of Enoch was written in Semitic is now accepted on all hands, but scholars are divided as to whether the Semitic language in question was Hebrew or Aramaic. Only one valuable contribution on this question has been made, and that by Halevy in the Journal Asiatique, AvrilMai 186 7, pp. 35 2 -395.

A prolonged study of the text, which has brought to light a multitude of fresh passages the majority of which can be explained by retranslation into Hebrew, has convinced the present writer' that, whilst the evidence on the whole is in favour of an Aramaic original of vi.-xxxvi., it is just as conclusive on behalf of the Hebrew original of the greater part of the rest of the book.

In order to recover the original text, it is from time to time necessary to retranslate the Ethiopic into Greek, and the latter in turn into Aramaic or Hebrew.

It ought to be borne in mind that the Aramaic portion of the Megillath Taanith (a document considerably older than the treatises in the Mishna) gives a catalogue only of the days on which fasting was forbidden.

History, There is good reasonto regard the Druses as, racially, a mixture of refugee stocks, in which the Arab largely predominates, grafted on to an original mountain population of Aramaic blood and Incarnationist tendencies.

Thus the Aramaic languages may be geographically defined as the Semitic dialects originally current in Mesopotamia and the regions extending south-west from the Euphrates to Palestine.

The Aramaic. and Hebrew v, which seem so different, arise from a circle left open at the top, 0, a form which can be traced in Aramaic from the 5th or 6th century B.C. In the Greek alphabets the circle appears sometimes with a dot in the centre, but in many cases it is doubtful whether this mark is, intentional, or is only the result of fixing a sharp point there while describing the circle.

The oldest certain form is the Aramaic Urhai (" Western " pronunciation Urhoi), which appears in Greek as an adjective as Oppor i vi t, 2 -voi 3 (perhaps also as a fortress with spring, as Oppa),4 and in Latin as Orr(h)ei, 5 and (in the inscription on Abgar's grave) Orrhenoru(m).

When Aramaic began to take the place of Assyrian in written documents is not known; but just across the Euphrates the change had occurred as early as the 8th century B.C. (Zengirli, Hamath; see also Pognon).

Certain it is that the earliest documents that have survived in Syriac, or Edessene Aramaic, do not represent an experimental stage.

The names of the other kingsAbgar, Ma`nu, Bekr, &c. - are for the most part Arabic, as the people (in whose inscriptions the same mixture of names occurs) are called by classical authors; but the rulers, among whom an occasional Iranian name betrays the influence of the dominant Parthians, 13 would hardly maintain their distinctness from the Aramaic populace.

Inscriptions there from the third century BC were written in good Persian chancellery Aramaic.

There was a ' general Aramaic indisposition to literary composition at the time in question ' .

He supplies the Syriac evidence that supports the Aramaic retroversion and its meaning.

Also included are Syriac and Aramaic language materials and texts, also studies in comparative Semitics.

Of books of this period which are known to have existed in Hebrew or Aramaic up to the time of Jerome (and even later) we now possess most of the original Hebrew text of Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus) in a somewhat corrupt form, and fragments of an Aramaic text of a recension of theTestaments of theTwelve Patriarchs,both discovered within recent years.

Its name is derived from the Hebrew shanah, corresponding to the Aramaic tend, and therefore a suitable name for a tannaitic work, meaning the repetition or teaching of the oral law.

It is probable that, as in Palestine an Aramaic paraphrase of the Hebrew text was found to be necessary, so in Alexandria the Septuagint grew up gradually, as need arose.

Aramaic gives to the noun instead an ending a, 1 On the place of Aramaic among the Semitic languages, and of Syriac among the various dialects, see Semitic Languages.

In the older Aramaic dialects this is used exactly as the noun with prefixed article is used in other languages; but in Syriac the emphatic state has lost this special function of making the noun definite, and has become simply the normal state of the noun.

The main grammatical distinction between Syriac and all the west Aramaic dialects is that in Syriac the 3rd person of the imperfect (singular and plural) of the verb begins with n, but in west Aramaic, as in the other Semitic languages, it begins with y.

In the Phoenician alphabet the earliest forms are or more rounded The rounded form appears also in the earliest Aramaic (see ALPHABET).

KhalepBeroea, we may infer, remained a native town and a focus of Aramaic influence, a fact which will explain the speedy oblivion of its Macedonian name and the permanent revival of its ancient title, even by Greeks.

The Targums are the Aramaic translations - or rather paraphrases - of the books of the Old Testament, and, in their earliest form, date from the time when Aramaic superseded Hebrew as the spoken language of the Jews (see Hebrew Language).

Hence we may reasonably infer that the mass of the people had adopted Aramaic at a considerably, earlier period, probably, as early as the 2nd century B.C., and that the need of Aramaic translations of the sacred text made itself felt but little later.

According to Dalman, 13 its language differs in many material particulars from the Aramaic dialects of the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, and is more closely allied to the biblical Aramaic. On the linguistic side, therefore, we may regard Onkelos " as a faithful representative of a Targum which had its rise in Judaea, the old seat of Palestinian literary activity."

The translation, as a whole, is good, and adheres very closely to the Hebrew text, which has not been without its influence on the Aramaic idiom; at times, especially in the poetical passages, a freer and more paraphrastic method is employed, and the version shows evident traces of Halakhic and Haggadic expansion.

The Targums, or Aramaic paraphrases of the books of the Old Testament (see Targum), date from the time when Hebrew had.

It is idle indeed to rewrite the Gospel narratives in the Aramaic dialect spoken by Christ and the apostles, but the main watchwords of the Gospel theology - phrases like " the Kingdom of God," " the World to come," the " Father in Heaven," " the Son of Man," - can be more or less surely reconstructed from Jewish writings, and their meaning gauged apart from the special significance which they received in Christian hands.

By this time Christianity had secured a foothold, perhaps first among the Jews (see Edessa), and we enter upon the earliest period from which documents in the Edessan dialect of Aramaic, known as Syriac, have been preserved.

The relationship between the Pahlavi and the Aramaic is clearest in the records written in the " Chaldaeo-Pahlavi " characters; the a conclusion which is not invalidated by the fact that some important modifications are found beyond this area, nor by Dr Stein's discovery of a great mass of documents in this alphabet at Khotan in Turkestan, for, according to tradition, the ancient inhabitants of Khotan were emigrants banished in the time of King Agoka from the area to which Buhler assigns this alphabet (see Stein's Preliminary Report, 1901, p. 51).

But the Aramaic version has Greek birthmarks (see especially p. 7, line 18), which other scholars than its editor have thought decisive against its originality.

Nor is it possible to follow the theory of Merx, that Aramaic, which was the popular tongue of the day when the Book of Daniel was written, was therefore used for the simpler narrative style, while the more learned Hebrew was made the idiom of the philosophical portions.

Yiddish is referred to as the "mother tongue," while Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic are called the "holy tongue."

It is now known, however, that they were true Arabs - as the proper names on their inscriptions show - who had come under Aramaic influence.

Iap,apeta from the Hebrew "an outlook hill," or rather from the Aramaic form 7734, whence also comes the Assyrian form Samirina.

The term came in time to mean " a beggar " and with that meaning has passed through Aramaic and Hebrew into many modern languages; but though the Code does not regard him as necessarily poor, he may have been landless.

The legends are in Aramaic characters and Persian (Pahlavi) language; among them occur Artaxerxes, Darius (from a dynast of this name the town Darabjird, "town of Darius," in eastern Persia seems to derive its name), Narses, Tiridates, Manocihr and others; the name Vahuburz seems to be identical with Oborzos, mentioned by Polyaenus vii.

In catalogues and bibliographies, however, the expression is now generally used, conveniently if incorrectly, as synonymous with Jewish literature, including all works written by Jews in Hebrew characters, whether the language be Aramaic, Arabic or even some vernacular not related to Hebrew.

The Arabian tribes began to take possession of the partly cultivated lands east of Canaan, became masters of the Eastern trade, gradually acquired settled habits, and learned to speak and write in Aramaic, the language which was most widely current throughout the region west of the Euphrates in the time of the Persian Empire (6th-4th century B.C.).

The bulk of the population was of Arab race, and though Aramaic was used as the written language, in common intercourse Arabic had by no means disappeared.

The writing is a modified form of the old Aramaic character, and especially interesting because it represents almost the last stage through which the ancient alphabet passed before it developed into the Hebrew square character.

Its form in inscriptions of Melos, Selinus, Syracuse and elsewhere in the 6th and 5th centuries suggests the influence of Aramaic forms in which the head of the letter is opened,9.