Aramaic Epigraphy from Assyria

New Data and Old Issues*

Frederick Mario Fales

I. Discoveries of Aramaic Texts on Neo-Assyrian Clay Tablets in Syria

and Elsewhere

Recent years have seen, in almost all of Syria and Iraq, the dramatic interruption of
activities centered on international cultural cooperation – among which archaeological
excavations stand at the fore – due to conditions of outright warfare or of hostile occu-
pation of the territory. This dire contingency has of course forced many researchers
customarily bound to a yearly routine of some months “in the field” to stick to their
university libraries. It has resulted, however, on the positive side, in the publication of
the tail-end of a set of Aramaic alphabetic texts written on clay tablets of the Neo-
Assyrian period, deriving from official excavations or from illicit digging activities,
which had first appeared on the research scene in the 1990s.
This newly attained state of the art thus provides the occasion for updating a set of
conclusions on “multilingualism and multiple media in the Neo-Assyrian period,”
which I published in 2007.1 On the other hand, as the title of this paper implies, the
addition of newer and more complete data has, once all is said and done, brought only
sporadic novelties to the basically flimsy methodological and factual fabric that forms
“Assyro-Aramaic” research – even though one should not discount the altogether felic-
itous fact that its few frequent participants now display a more sophisticated and real-
istic approach to this subject-matter.
Let us start by reviewing the evidence itself: I am obviously forced here to negotiate
very rapidly and deftly among the essentials. In the first place, as is well known, the
Neo-Assyrian period has left us some 6,000 documents on clay tablets of so-called
“everyday” character/scope, from legal texts to administrative lists to letters, etc.2
Secondly, this corpus, made out in the cuneiform script of Neo-Assyrian date/type,
also comprises some evidence of Aramaic epigraphy in alphabetic script (and specifi-
cally, in an ad hoc “argillary” alphabetic ductus, which constituted a transition from

* The preliminary version of this paper was sent to the 2017 RIAB meeting, where it was read to
the audience by a colleague. I am very glad to be contributing here to the publication of the proceed-
ings, with many thanks to Aren Maeir and Angelika Berlejung for their friendly support.
1
FALES 2007.
2
For a history of Assyria viewed essentially from the perspective of the “everyday” documents of
the NA period, see FALES 2001.