Lessons in the language of Christ attract record numbers
21 December 2010
Academics are teaching ancient Aramaic to classes with attendance figures which may not have been seen since Jesus was speaking the language 2,000 years ago.
The free lunchtime classes, which are regularly attended by tens of people from across the country, are organised by Oxford University’s Classics Faculty and Faculty of Oriental Studies as part of Project Arshama, a collaboration between the Universities of Oxford and Liverpool which is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
Dr John Ma, Oxford University classicist and one of the leaders of the Arshama project, said: ‘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.’
The classes are part of the Arshama Project, which aims to study 13 letters written in a particular dialect of Aramaic, the ‘imperial Aramaic’ used by the Persian empire as a language of administration, on leather by Arshama, the satrap of Egypt, in the fifth century BC and held in the Bodleian Libraries – even though the Persian administrators and many subjects of the empire did not use this language among themselves. These letters are a crucial resource, because many records of imperial Aramaic written on parchment or papyrus have been lost.’
Dr Ma added: ‘We hope this project will change the way a new generation of historians approach the ancient world, by integrating semitic sources into their worldview and the way they "do" history - so that reading Aramaic or Syriac (a dialect that emerged from the Aramaic spoken at the time of Christ) might be as natural as them as reading Homer or Tacitus.
‘Of course, there’s always the chance that people might just file away their class notes and never look at them again, but it’s had an effect on me already – by the second lesson I was able to understand the words Christ said on the cross ("my God my God why did you forsake me") and have an idea of the grammar. Recently I even found myself dreaming in Aramaic!’
Boris Chrubasik, an Oxford Classics graduate who attends the classes, said: ‘Learning Aramaic is fun; getting used to a semitic language is all but easy, and when the radicals start dropping one gets upset, but the course has definitely proven that with a number of classes one can actually read original sentences, opening a wide field of fascinating material which can contribute to my studies of the Eastern Mediterranean.’
Dialects of Aramaic are still spoken today but, the Project Arshama team believe, numbers of speakers have been badly affected by the war in Iraq. The Arshama project's ultimate aim is to promote the study of the Persian empire in one of the main source languages (workshops and exhibition), but also to increase awareness of the lingustic landscape of the ancient and the modern near east. The culmination of Project Arshama will be an exhibition from 28 June-23 July 2011 and a public lecture on 5 July 2011.
For more information, contact Matt Pickles at the University of Oxford Press Office on matt.pickles@admin.ox.ac.uk or 01865 270046. Dr John Ma, leader of Project Arshama, is contactable on john.ma@ccc.ox.ac.uk or 07905 386595.
Boris Chrubasik, a Classics graduate student who has been learning Aramaic for the first time, is contactable on boris.chrubasik@classics.ox.ac.uk