- Before Islam
- Aramaic and Arabic are both very ancient languages. Aramaic is an umbrella name for a number of closely-related dialects, such as those referred to by scholars as Palmyrene Aramaic, Nabataean Aramaic, Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, Chaldaean, Syriac (the dialect of the Edessa region), etc. Arabic in the pre-Islamic period (what scholars call Old Arabic) belongs to Ancient North Arabian, another umbrella name for a number of closely related dialects, such as those referred to by scholars as Safaitic, Hismaic, Thamudic, etc., of which Arabic was the only one to survive.
- While those interested in Arabic in the first millennium BC and early first millennium AD are restricted to meagre scraps of evidence, those concerned with Aramaic in this period have an abundance of material. And more is being found. For example, sixteen hundred Aramaic ostraca, mostly receipts and demand notices, from fourth-century BC Idumaea have turned up, and more keep appearing, presumably whenever the local bed- ouin, who alone know their exact provenance, need a bit of extra cash. More recently, forty-eight documents (thirty leather, eighteen wooden) from north-central Afghanistan, ancient Bactria, appeared on the antiquities market, and tell us much about the admini- stration of the Achaemenid empire in the second half of the fourth century BC. And Aramaic texts continue to be unearthed in excavations in east Arabia, particularly in the modern Arab Emirates. However, with the Aramaic of this time we have an opposite problem to that of Arabic: we know where and when it was written, but we don’t know for sure where and when it was spoken. A famous case is that of the Nabataeans, who wrote all their monumental and funer- ary inscriptions, graffiti, and legal papyri in Aramaic, and yet they are usually suspected to have spoken Arabic.
Moving through space rather than through time, namely to north Syria and Mesopotamia, we can see that there Aramaic (or the local dialect thereof, called Syriac) exhibited no such embarrassment about showing itself in public. Certainly there were many, as in Palestine, Transjordan, and southern Syria, who were bilingual, who had the privilege of acquiring a Greek rhetorical education, and who preferred to write in Greek.
As regards the status of Arabic in this time and region, its written presence was even more shadowy than that of Aramaic. There are a few literary references to its existence. For example, the probably fourth-century writer Uranius notes that the place name Mô- thô means death in the speech of the Arabs (hê arabôn phônề); his near contemporaries Epiphanius of Salamis and Jerome refer also to its existence, the former in connection with a virgin goddess whom the inhabitants of Petra and Elusa praise in the arabikê dialektos and call her in Arabic (arabizi) Kaaba (cf. Arab kaaba, ‘buxom maiden’)
