First page Back Continue Last page Overview Graphics
- The Wikipedia article on the Elephantine papyri confirms that Aramaic was used for the majority of these, and that Aramaic was the lingua franca, or common language, of the Persian Empire:
- “The dry soil of Upper Egypt preserved documents from the Egyptian border fortresses of Elephantine and Syene (Aswan). Hundreds of these Elephantine papyri, written in hieratic and Demotic Egyptian, Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Coptic, span a period of 1000 years. Legal documents and a cache of letters survived, turned up on the local 'gray market' of antiquities starting in the late 19th century, and were scattered into several Western collections.”