ERC Starting Grant · 2024
The Aramaization of the Middle East: Revisiting the Fall and Rise of Written Traditions
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…
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