In the course of the nineteenth century Aramaic—known down to the time of Michaelis as “Chaldee”(191)—was more thoroughly studied. The various branches of this language and the history of its progress became more or less clearly recognisable. Kautzsch’s grammar of Biblical Aramaic(192) (1884) and Dalman’s(193) work embody the result of these studies. “The Aramaic language,” explains Meyer, “is a branch of the North Semitic, the linguistic stock to which also belong the Assyrio‐Babylonian language in the East, and the Canaanitish languages, including Hebrew, in the West, while the South Semitic languages—the Arabic and Aethiopic—form a group by themselves.” The users of these languages, the Aramaeans, were seated in historic times between the Babylonians and Canaanites, the area of their distribution extending from the foot of Lebanon and Hermon in a north‐ easterly direction as far as Mesopotamia, where “Aram of the two rivers” forms their easternmost province. Their immigration into these regions forms the third epoch of the Semitic migrations, which probably lasted from 1600 B.C. down to 600. The Aramaic states had no great stability. The most important of them was the kingdom of Damascus, which at a certain period was so dangerous an enemy to northern Israel. In the end, however, the Aramaean dynasties were crushed, like the two Israelitish kingdoms, between the upper and nether millstones of Babylon and Egypt. In the time of the successors of Alexander, there arose in these regions the Syrian kingdom; which in turn gave place to the Roman power. But linguistically the Aramaeans conquered the whole of Western Asia. In the course of the first millennium B.C. Aramaic became the language of commerce and diplomacy, as Babylonian had been during the second. It was only the rise of Greek as a universal language which put a term to these conquests of the Aramaic. In the year 701 B.C. Aramaic had not yet penetrated to Judaea. When the _rabshakeh_ (officer) sent by Sennacherib addressed the envoys of Hezekiah in Hebrew, they begged him to speak Aramaic in order that the men upon the wall might not understand.(194) For the post‐exilic period the Aramaic edicts in the Book of Ezra and inscriptions on Persian coins show that throughout wide districts of the new empire Aramaic had made good its position as the language of common intercourse. Its domain extended from the Euxine southwards as far as Egypt, and even into Egypt itself. Samaria and the Hauran adopted it. Only the Greek towns and Phoenicia resisted.