There’s Something Bad in the Packs: A Vernacular Aramaic Phrase in al-Ṭabarī’s and al-Masʿūdī’s Histories?

Abstract

Although Aramaic was spoken throughout the Middle East before the Muslim Conquest and continues to be spoken by communities across the region and beyond, evidence for its spoken forms is scarce before the early modern period. One rare such witness is a stray Aramaic phrase, transcribed and translated into Arabic, which appears within the Taʾrīx of al-Ṭabarī (d. 923 ce) and the Murūj al-ḏahab of al-Masʿūdī (d. 956 ce). Its immediate context is a narrative concerning the conflict between Tadmur/Palmyra and al-Ḥīra contemporary with the rise of the Sasanians. Based upon its attested versions and the morpho-syntactic evidence of the phrase itself, we nonetheless conclude that it likely represents a vernacular form of ʿIrāqī Aramaic which must have been transparent within Arabic-Islamic scholarly milieus of the second and third century AH/eighth and ninth century ce, rather than an authentically transmitted Aramaic proverb from the third century ce.