Lands of Asia layouts (Eng) 26.11.21

3.1
King Darius I, carved in three cuneiform script languages – Old Persian, Elamite, and
Akkadian, describing the king’s exploits in Central Asia and accompanied by a relief
depicting representatives of conquered peoples, the Sakas, Bactrians and the people
of Margiana, among others.
Clearly, these images and inscriptions indicate that the peoples of Central Asia
were familiar with cuneiform. Some of them must have mastered another script that
was widespread in the Achaemenid state – Aramaic.
The Arameans, a people of the North Semitic group, originally lived in Syria, and
from the end of the 2nd/early 1st millennium BC migrated to Central Mesopotamia.
Arameans adopted and refined the Phoenician alphabet, slightly changing the forms
of graphemes (base units of a writing system), and introducing spaces and vowel
signs. The Aramaic alphabet was an Abjad-type alphabet (all letters were primarily
consonants, although some could also represent vowels). Vowels were usually indicated
with specific marks such as dots and the like, which were often left out. As a rule, vowels
were marked at the beginning and at the end of a word. In the middle of a word, a letter
could express either just a consonant or a whole syllable (consonant plus vowel).
Over time, Arameans began to use vowel signs, most often long ones, in the
middle of a word as well, but they did this very inconsistently. The most ancient
specimens of Aramaic script from the 9th–8th centuries BC have been found in Syria
(the inscription of Bar-Hadad) and south-eastern Turkey (at Zincirli).
In the 7th–6th centuries BC, the Aramaic script, which was easy to learn (it had
only about 20 letters) was effectively replacing a number of cumbersome systems
of cuneiform that had previously prevailed in Western Asia, namely Akkadian,
Elamite and Urartian cuneiform. In the vast and multi-tribal Achaemenid kingdom,
in almost all satrapies from Asia Minor to Northwest India, including Central Asia,
the Aramaic language became the main means of communication and the language
of the administrative apparatus and record keeping.
According to Herodotus, every satrap in the Achaemenid kingdom had royal
scribes who used to read documents sent by the king. Moreover, nobles who were
close to the king could also read and write. When King Darius decided to send a
noble Persian called Bagaeus to Oroetes, a satrap of Lydia, Bagaeus wrote up several
documents on behalf of the king and on his arrival in Sardis, the capital of Lydia,
gave them to the royal scribe to read (Herodotus. III,: 128). Aramean scribes often
prepared to write documents dictated by local officials (Persians, Medes, Parthians,
Bactrians and Sogdians) by first making a mental translation into Aramaic. The
same process was followed when a document was received by the chancellery of the
satrapy it was intended for: the scribe would orally translate it from Aramaic into the
local language. As a result of this practice, a system of local lexical and grammatical
125