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• Thus, when the Greek empire swept across the Middle East, there is no doubt that the military conquests of Alexander the Great impressed people. They wanted to know more about these people, the Greeks, and the Macedonians. The process of cultural interchange was starting to happen. Hellenisation, or the process of learning and adopting Greek philosophies and ideas, was unavoidable. People and places may have adopted Greek names. The language of business may have changed, in adopting Greek words for coins and other artefacts. And a smattering of common Greek words and ideas no doubt infused the spoken language, Aramaic, of the peoples living across the vast territory of the Middle East and beyond.
• But in terms of a wholesale adoption of the Greek language, and the ousting of the Aramaic language - a language that had been spoken throughout the Middle East for the past two thousand years amongst the ordinary people - no, that just did not happen.