Hebrew_and_Aramaic_papyri | TriviaQuestions.online

⭐ In the context of the Caspians, what evidence from Hebrew and Aramaic papyri suggests a connection to Iranian cultures?

Aramaic papyri from Egypt show that certain Caspian names, identified as 'kaspai' within the documents, share etymological origins with Iranian languages, indicating either Iranian ancestry or substantial cultural influence.

⭐ Core Definition: Hebrew and Aramaic papyri

Hebrew and Aramaic papyri have increasingly been discovered from the 1960s onwards, although these papyri remain rare compared to papyri written in Koine Greek and Demotic Egyptian (no relation except in name, "popular," to modern demotic Greek). The most valuable and religious texts were written on leather scrolls, parchment - such as the literary texts from Masada and Qumran, while papyrus was employed for cheaper, domestic use.

A standard work is the Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum of Victor Tcherikover and Alexander Fuks (Cambridge, Massachusetts Vol.I 1957, II 1960, III ed. Menahem Stern 1964) which is largely of Greek language papyri but includes examples of Hebrew and Aramaic papyri from Israel, Jordan, and Egypt.

↓ Menu

👉 Hebrew and Aramaic papyri in the context of Caspians

The Caspians (Persian: کاسپی‌ها, Kaspyn; Greek: Κάσπιοι, Káspioi; Aramaic: ܟܣܦܝ, kspy; Old Armenian: Կասպք, Kaspk’; Latin: Caspi, Caspiani) were an people of antiquity who dwelt along the southwestern shores of the Caspian Sea, in the region known as Caspiane. Caspian is the English version of the Greek ethnonym Kaspioi, mentioned twice by Herodotus among the Achaemenid satrapies of Darius the Great and applied by Strabo. The name is not attested in Old Iranian.

The Caspians have generally been regarded as a pre-Indo-European people. They have been identified by Ernst Herzfeld with the Kassites, who spoke a language not identified with any other known language group and whose origins have long been the subject of debate. Onomastic evidence bearing on this point has been discovered in Aramaic papyri from Egypt published by P. Grelot, in which several of the Caspian names that are mentioned—and identified under the gentilic כספי kaspai—are, in part, etymologically Iranian. The Caspians of the Egyptian papyri are therefore generally considered as either an Iranian people or strongly under Iranian cultural influence.

↓ Explore More Topics