Write Dr. Barrick

In the photograph two Assyrian scribes (the two on the right) are either taking dictation for a communication, recording court speech in real time, or counting and recording tribute. The fascinating aspect of this relief's depiction is that these two scribes are employing different media. The first scribe has a rigid object in his left hand that would indicate that it is a block of soft clay into which he will impress (by means of the stylus in his right hand) cuneiform graphics in the Akkadian language. The second scribe's left hand appears to be holding a non-rigid media, since it is drooped over his fingertips. Such media might be parchment or even papyrus. Rather than cuneiform, this scribe is evidently recording in the alphabetic script of the Aramaic language. Akkadian was the official language of the Assyrians, but Aramaic was the lingua franca of the empire. Simultaneous translation and recording took place in the royal courts by appointed scribes for the respective languages.

The Assyrians, Babylonians (see Daniel 4:1-18), and Persians (see Ezra 6:1-12) promulgated royal decrees to subject nations in the Aramaic language. Aramaic resolved the language diversity problem. It script was much simpler and efficient than the old cuneiform ("wedge writing"). Scribes were very important to the royal court. They were powerful men who, on occasion, might have been more literate than the kings they served. Opportunities arose for scribes to influence the affairs of state significantly. Our modern title "Secretary of State" reflects that power and control.

When we consider the texts of Aramaic scribes we discover an attention to detail, even in the transliteration of proper names from other languages. According to Alan Millard,

Scribes of Aramaic had to write foreign names with their alphabet, and it is clear they tried to represent what they heard. When we put the ways they wrote the names of Assyrian kings beside the writings of the same names in the Hebrew text, it is striking to see how similar they are.

In both, the names Tiglath-pileser and Sargon, for example, are written TGLTPLSR and SRGN (the vowels are not certain). In the dialect of Babylon the names were reflected in Aramaic documents as TKLTPLSR and SHRKN. . . .

The evidence of the Aramaic sources shows that, whatever later scribes did to the texts handed down to them, they kept these names in the old-fashioned forms of the Assyrian dialect and copied them faithfully.

[Treasures from Bible Times (Tring, England: Lion Publishing, 1985), 150-51]