Usually, when a language becomes dominant, it is due to the widespread conquest and longstanding governance of a particular language group. But according to Wikipedia:
"The Arameans never formed a unified state but had small independent kingdoms across parts of the Near East, (present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestinian territories, the northwestern Arabian peninsula and south-central Turkey). Their political influence was confined to a number of states such as Aram Damascus, Hamath, Palmyra, Aleppo and the partly Aramean Syro-Hittite states, which were entirely absorbed into the Neo-Assyrian Empire (935–605 BC) by the 9th century BC."
Why then did the Assyrians - who were a dominant ethnic group who had two, longstanding, vast empires, not make their own language the language of the empire?
Wikipedia explains as follows:
"By contrast, Imperial Aramaic came to be the lingua franca of the entire Near East and Asia Minor after King Tiglath-Pileser III of Assyria (ruled 745–727 BC) made it one of two official languages of the vast Neo-Assyrian Empire (the other being Akkadian) in the mid-8th century BC, in recognition of the mostly-Aramean speaking population in areas Assyria had conquered west of the Euphrates and the large numbers of Arameans in Mesopotamia."
But this is like the British Empire making Hindi the official language of the empire since it conquered India alongside Latin because it's the historic literary language of Britain. I don't get it. What am I missing here?
There's always more to be said on the topic, but I wrote about this in How exactly did Aramaic somehow replace Akkadian and become adopted by much of the Neo-Assyrian Empire?
Note that one of the links is now dead; I was referring to this painting from Til Barsip.
