لبيروت
من قلبي سلامٌ لبيروت
و قُبلٌ للبحر و البيوت
لصخرةٍ كأنها وجه بحارٍ قديمِ
هي من روحِ الشعب خمرٌ
هي من عرقِهِ خبزٌ و ياسمين
فكيف صار طعمها طعم نارٍ و دخانِ

served a succession of empires (Assyrian, Babylonian, and
Persian) from the seventh century until the fourth century B.C. During the Persian period (538–333 B.C.), Aramaic was the language of the empire, and this included the small Persian province of Yehud.

Before the eighth century B.C., the Aramaic “language” is known in a variety of dialects. The empire, however, succeeded in standardizing the Aramaic language, and the new literary standard — usually classified by scholars as “Imperial Aramaic” or “Official Aramaic” — ...

The gods who dwell in heaven and earth, and in that city, listened with favor to my word, and granted me the eternal boon of building that city and growing old in its midst (Luckenbill 1968: 2.65–66 §122).""

light of the gods, lord of all, I carried off at Assur, my lord’s command, by the might of my scepter. I made them of one mouth
and settled them therein. Assyrians, fully competent to teach them how to fear god and the king, I dispatched as scribes and overseers...

In the Dûr-Sharrukîn cylinder inscription, the task of linguistic unification is given to the Assyrian
monarch Sargon, who ruled from 722 to 705 B.C.:

""Peoples of the four regions of the world, of foreign tongue and divergent speech, dwellers of mountain and lowland, all that were ruled by the..

The emergence of the Aramaic language as a lingua franca in the ancient Near East begins in the eighth century B.C. with the spread of the Assyrian empire who adopted Aramaic as the imperial language as part of their political strategy for integrating the western provinces into the empire.

Stefan Fischer

The revival of Hebrew scribal traditions went hand in hand with the development of independent political institutions. However, the revival of the Hebrew scribal tradition — that is, the revival of written Hebrew — also reflected a significant historical and cultural disjunction.

period — that is, when Aramaic no longer served as the language of the empire and was replaced by Greek. By the third century B.C., the (written) Hebrew language had been revived alongside indigenous Jewish political institutions.

that the scribal institutions for Hebrew languished. Despite this decline (and perhaps because of it), the Hebrew language continued to serve an emblematic role for social differentiation, political legitimacy, and social identity. The Hebrew scribal tradition was revived in the Hellenistic...

their historical language (i.e., Classical Hebrew as reflected in biblical texts and inscriptions from the late eighth through early sixth centuries B.C.) and adopted the Aramaic language of the Persian empire. One might say that the written Hebrew language died, or more precisely....

What if the Torah never became authoritative? The usual story is it was more like interesting divine advice until the Hellenistic period when it became canonical in an agonizingly drawn-out processl. What it was only the Halakha, the traditions around it, that ever really had authority?

"One of the most interesting cases of language shift in an ancient linguistic community took place in southern Palestine during the sixth through second centuries B.C. During this period, I would argue that the Jewish people living in the Persian province of Yehud “lost” — to some extent...

"Aramaic, the death of written Hebrew, and language shift in the Persian period" by William M. Schniedewind

The Gezer Calendar

Inscription:
"The (two) months of harvest; the (two) months of sowing; the (two) months of late planting; the month of reaping flax; the month of reaping barley; the month of reaping and measuring; the (two) months of (vine-)tending, the month of summer(-fruit)."

copy sensitive information about people and valuable resources while working far away from the imperial centre. Having two people register the same data separately with two distinct recording systems is an effective way to prevent tampering and minimise collusion.

in the wall decorations of the Assyrian palaces of the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, always in the administrative context of registering spoils of war, booty, or tribute, typically in the aftermath of battle. Such scenes indicate that the two scribes working in tandem record in double...

the tribute of the king of Unqu, a client state of the
Empire centred on the Amuq plain in northwestern Syria, as it is being brought before the Assyrian king. Similar depictions of the pair of scribes (with the cuneiform scribe either holding a clay tablet or a writing board) are common...

probably as fitters’ marks. The earliest Assyrian depiction of a scribe writing in alphabet script with a pen on a leather scroll, alongside a cuneiform scribe with a stylus and tablet, dates to his reign too. As identified by a cuneiform caption accompanying the scene, the two scribes record...

The use of Aramaic is well documented in the Assyrian heartland
from the reign of Shalmaneser III (r. 858–824 BCE) onwards. The best evidence is provided by the letters of the Aramaic alphabet painted on the glazed bricks of Shalmaneser’s military palace (“arsenal”) in his capital city of Kalhu...

consequence of the Empire’s integration of Aramaic-
speaking polities, as the scribes serving these states were now incorporated into the Assyrian administrative structures, just like the defeated soldiers were added to the imperial armies.

Despite its promotion of the cuneiform script from the late 9th century BCE onwards, the Empire used a digraphic double-copy system to document information in Akkadian and Aramaic. The Aramaic language and script came to be used by the imperial administration in direct...

Given the Empire’s expansive reach, cuneiform texts were once again composed in regions in what are today Iran, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan – areas that had left the cultural koiné of the Bronze Age cuneiform world centuries ago.

Yeah "rompecabezas" is widely used in central and south america, interesting word for puzzle.

Hebrew, and Arabic) and non-Semitic languages (e.g., the Indo-European languages Luwian and Median; the Hurrian languages Šubrian and Urartian; and the isolates Mannean and Elamite) were spoken.

By the second half of the 8th century BCE, the Empire formed a highly multilingual environment, as the provinces of this sizable and complex state encompassed regions in modern Iran, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan where various Semitic
languages (including Aramaic, Phoenician...

and Arbail (Erbil) corresponds to northern Iraq and whose core population spoke Neo-Assyrian, a dialect of Akkadian of the Semitic language family. Since the restructuring of the state under Ashurnasirpal II (884–859 BCE), the imperial palace was unequivocally the heart of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

"The Neo-Assyrian period is the time from ca. 900–600 BCE when the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean were politically and culturally dominated by the Neo-Assyrian Empire, whose heartland in the triangle between the cities Assur (Qal’at Sherqat), Nineveh (Mosul)...

"Diglossia and the Neo-Assyrian Empire’s Akkadian and Aramaic Text Production" by Karen Radner