The Aramaization of the Middle East: Revisiting the Fall and Rise of Written Traditions

Description du projet

Le processus de l’influence araméenne au Moyen-Orient

Les langues écrites sumériennes et akkadiennes étaient dominantes au Moyen-Orient entre 3000 et 500 ans avant notre ère, mais elles ont perdu de leur importance sous l’empire assyrien (935-612 avant notre ère), au cours duquel l’araméen a commencé à les remplacer. Ce changement marque un point critique dans l’histoire linguistique de la région. Le projet ARAMAIZATION, financé par le CER, rassemblera et analysera toutes les preuves disponibles de ce processus. Plus précisément, il s’agira d’étudier comment l’influence croissante de l’araméen a été déterminée par les décisions prises par les individus et les institutions impliqués dans la commande et la production d’œuvres écrites. En développant des méthodes de recherche sociolinguistique innovantes, le projet mettra en lumière les facteurs de changement linguistique et les implications plus larges pour notre compréhension de la dynamique des langues dans l’ancien Moyen-Orient.

Objectif

For more than two thousand years, the Sumerian and Akkadian languages and the cuneiform script dominated the written record of the Middle East (c.3000–500 BCE). Yet the hegemonic cultural position of these languages began to erode under the Assyrian Empire (935–612 BCE), when the region was subject to an imperial order closely aligned with the Sumero-Akkadian tradition. How did Aramaic writing, lacking a comparable pedigree or status, manage to establish itself alongside Sumero-Akkadian before displacing it altogether?

Answering this question has significance far beyond the first millennium BCE. The Aramaization of the Middle East is the story of the fall of the world’s oldest literate tradition and its replacement by an upstart language and script. Making sense of this transition will be instructive for our understanding of processes of language change in the long term. It will also contribute to our understanding of later sociolinguistic transformations in the Middle East and elsewhere, including in our own time of global linguistic and cultural flux.

The Aramaization of the Middle East has evaded adequate treatment because of the difficulty and dispersal of the data, enduring disciplinary divisions, and outdated interpretative paradigms. The publication in recent decades of much new evidence adds to the urgency of the problem. The ARAMAIZATION project will investigate the Aramaization of the Middle East across disciplinary boundaries, bringing together expertise in Assyriology, Aramaic studies, and historical sociolinguistics. We will approach Aramaization as a process rooted in the choices of the people and institutions who commissioned and produced writing. We will examine these choices by surveying all available evidence together as part of a single linguistic landscape. Our research will pioneer sociolinguistic research methods with broad applicability to the study of language choice and language change across the ancient world and beyond.