Ancient Aramaic Classes Are Very Popular at Oxford

All those who are curious about the language spoken 2,000 years ago by Jesus, should be pleased to know that at the University of Oxford, academics are teaching ancient Aramaic to classes of over 50 people at a time.

These lessons become more and more popular, and this couldn't be better for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project.

The goal of this project was to promote the study of the Persian Empire through one of its main source languages, and the free lunchtime classes are a success, with tens of people from all across the country attending regularly.

The courses are organized by Oxford University’s Classics Faculty and Faculty of Oriental Studies as part of Project Arshama -- the result of a collaboration between the Universities of Oxford and Liverpool.

The Project wants to study 13 letters written on leather, in a specific dialect of Aramaic – the ‘imperial Aramaic’, used by the Persian empire as a language of administration, by Arshama, the satrap of Egypt, in the fifth century BC.

And even though the Persian administrators and many subjects of the empire did not use this language among themselves, these letters, held in the Bodleian Libraries, are priceless, since many records of imperial Aramaic written on parchment or papyrus have been lost.

Dr John Ma is an Oxford University classicist and one of the leaders of the project, and he said that “it was a real surprise for the lecturer David Taylor, who in previous years has taught Aramaic to groups of three or four students in his study, to find 56 people at his first class.

“You would probably have to go back two thousand years to find a room so full with people speaking Aramaic – the time when Jesus would have been speaking the language!

‘David has developed a new grammar which makes it much easier to teach the language to beginners, and it has been exciting to see three Oxford professors of ancient languages sitting next to ancient history graduates, all of them learning something new.

“Everyone is welcome to attend the classes, whether to learn or just to watch and listen – people come from London and Liverpool for the lessons.”

Besides promoting the study of the Persian empire in one of its main languages, the Arshama project also wants to depict an image of the linguistic landscape of the ancient and the modern near east.

The peak of the project will be an exhibition from 28 June-23 July 2011 and a public lecture on 5 July 2011.

More information about Project Arshama can be found at http://arshama.classics.ox.ac.uk
and the Aramaic classes are here: http://arshama.classics.ox.ac.uk/aramaic/index.html