ARAMAIC LANGUAGE. Among the Semitic languages, which are variously grouped as Northern or Assyrian, Central or Aramaic, Western or Canaanite, Southern or Arabic and Ethiopic, according to Wright, or as East Semitic, that is Babylonian and Assyrian, and West Semitic, Aramaic, Canaanite, Arabic, Ethiopic, which is Zimmern's broader and more historical division, the Aramaic has many elements of distinction and covers a long range of centuries. It includes monuments of litera ture as well as the literature of monuments. While of its original home nothing definite is known, at an early date Aramaic appears in the Old Testament to designate certain dis tricts in Syria of Damascus))) and in Mesopotamia ("Aram of the Two Rivers"). A number of Aramaisms in the vocabulary of the older Biblical books shows the close rela tionship between Hebrew and Aramaic, al though the latter was considered by the He brews a foreign tongue and 100 years before the Babylonian Exile was understood in Jeru salem only by people of culture, a fact proved by the episode in 2 Kings xviii, 26; Isaiah xxxvi, 11. Centuries earlier kinship was illustrated by genealogical tablets and primitive narratives, as for instance, when Kemuel, a son of Nahor, the brother of Abraham, is called 'father of Aram' (Gen. xxii, 21). Jacob is termed wandering Aramaean' (Dent. xxvi, 5). Dur ing the entire period of the Kings, Israel and the Aramzans of the west, whose land was later called Syria and lies north and northeast of Palestine, were in steady intercourse. By a curious fate, Aramaic was to supplant Hebrew, after national decline, as the vernacular and acquire a prominent rank, with the adoption of Aramaized Hebrew forms, as the literary lan guage of the Jews for many centuries in the lands of their dispersion. Before Palestine was Aramaized the language spread gradually and occupied all Syria. It was spoken in the Euphrates toward the east and throughout the districts of the Tigris north and west of the Armenian and Kurdish mountains. °The coun try of the Arammans* was the name applied to the province in which the capitals of the Ar sacids and the Sassanids were situated. We know, too, that although Assyrian was the lan guage of the government, at a very early date a large body of the people in Babylonia and Assyria were probably Aramwans.
Dialects.— Owing to the rapid spread of the Arammans, their language received varied development both in grammatical form and idiom as well as in its literary development. Among its chief dialects may be mentioned the Syriac of northern Mesopotamia, in particular the district around Edessa, and it flourished as a literary language from the 2d to the 13th century. Then the Aramaic, as commonly known, includes besides two words in Genesis (xxxi, 47) and a verse in Jeremiah (x, 2), as its oldest remains in the branch passages in Ezra (iv, 8; vii, 8; vii, 12, 26) dating from the end of the 6th or beginning of the 5th century B.c. Next come the portions of the book of Daniel, whose exact date is still a matter of doubt. A much more extensive mon ument is the Targum literature, which in On kelos and Jonathan differ little from Biblical Aramaic. To this must be added Talmud and Midrash, which contain much Hebrew as well as Aramaic. The Aramaic portions of both Talmuds (Babylonian, completed at end of 5th century, and Palestinian, completed in be ginning of 5th) are of great value. The Ara maic literature of the Jews includes as well certain portions of the Apocrypha, legal de cisions of the Geonim, rabbinical authorities in the early centuries of the Diaspora, when Aramaic at first was the vernacular; liturgical selections, the book Zohar, famous in the Cabala, together with a large part of rabbinical literature. Further must be added the dialect of the Samaritans, exemplified in their Targum of the Pentateuch, their liturgy and hymns; Egyptian Aramaic; the Nabatean and Pal myrene of the inscriptions. There is also to be mentioned the dialect retained for some time by the Christians of Palestine as a literary and ecclesiastical language and in which ap pear Gospel translations and fragments of other works dating from about the 5th century. The language of the Mandman writings closely resembles that of the Babylonian Talmud. The spread of the Aramaic was effectually checked in the 7th century by the Arab conquests and it gradually lost its predominance for more than 10 centuries, yielding to a more forceful rival.