literature 111
an inscribed decree about fugitives or agents (Kai 317), some inscribed
weights, and some brief records.
aramaic texts continued to be produced in the Neo-Babylonian period
(late 7th and 6th centuries B.c.), but for this period as well we have only
a few poorly preserved texts. the main aramaic text of this period is the
fragmentary 6th-century-B.c. letter of adon, King of ekron, to the pha-
raoh (Kai 266), which was discovered in Saqqarah.
at the end of the 6th century B.c., the achaemenid imperial adminis-
tration began to use aramaic as the official language of the western part
of the persian empire. this stage of the aramaic language is outside the
chronological (and geographical) limits of this book, but it is important
to mention here a single major literary text: the story of aḥiqar and the
proverbs collection. the oldest version of this well-known text is attested
on a 5th-century-B.c. papyrus found at elephantine, a Judaeo-aramaean
military colony in egypt (taD c 1.1), but its language provides some hints
that the original story probably dates back to the 6th and 7th centuries
B.c. additionally, the close aramaic-assyrian connections of the story give
evidence of a Syrian background. the literary tradition of the aḥiqar story
(somewhat later) and of the proverbs (somewhat earlier) should therefore
be placed into the Syrian cultural milieu of the 7th century B.c.8
4. Historical Narrative in Royal inscriptions
the corpus of Old aramaic royal inscriptions has been primarily studied
either from a linguistic perspective or in order to reconstruct historical
events. a pure historical or linguistic analysis is not the only valid herme-
neutic approach, because these old texts also present some literary char-
acteristics consisting of various narrative patterns and stylistic phrases. in
other words, it is possible to shift the focus of the analysis from the histori-
cal or linguistic level to the literary one, since many of these inscriptions
show clear literary patterns.9 in this chapter some literary clichés10 incor-
porated in the ancient aramaic royal inscriptions will be examined.
8 So contini 2005: 16f, 40f; Niehr 2007: 11, and others. parpola 2005: 106 suggests an
assyrian background.
9 a similar literary approach applied mainly to the assyrian royal inscriptions has
been put forward since 1970 by the “italian school” of Mario Liverani (“our attention is no
more centered on the events, but on how they are narrated”: Liverani 1973: 179). On this
approach, cf. also fales 1981.
10 for more comprehensive analyses, cf. tawil 1974; parker 1997; id. 1999; röllig 2004;
Green 2010.