An Aramaic Verb Form in a Neo-Babylonian Letter

Abstract This paper offers an interpretation of an insufficiently understood verb form in the Neo-Babylonian letter OIP 114, 17:8, 29, thereby clarifying its contents. The word in question is shown to be an Aramaic verb form. This interpretation is supported by observations on the orthography and phonology of early Neo-Babylonian. It follows from the study that in eighth-century Neo-Babylonian two glottalized (‘emphatic’) consonants in the same word still underwent dissimilation, as in the second millennium bce (Geers’ law). The paper also demonstrates that, against communis opinio, erstwhile Aramaic fricative interdentals had shifted to stops by the eighth century bce, while the orthography of contemporaneous Aramaic alphabetic texts reflected an earlier stage of language evolution. This conclusion has been reached by means of comparing cuneiform renderings of proto-Semitic interdentals in West Semitic personal names in eighteenth-century bce Old Babylonian texts and in Neo-Babylonian texts from the ninth and eighth centuries bce.