Die Sprache der Aḥiqarsprüche

This work constitutes the authors 1989 dissertation at Phillips University— Marburg, Germany. In his Introduction (pp. 1-5), Kottsieper surveys the different views as to the dialect of the Ahiqar Proverbs from J. Greenfields 1967-68 view that they are based on a West Aramaic dialect, to Kutscher's opinion that the text represents a mixture of West and East Aramaic dialects, to J. M. Lindenberger, who in his edition of the text (The Aramaic Proverbs of Ahiqar [Baltimore-London, 1983]) concluded that the language of this text is older than that of Imperial Aramaic and should be considered as having originated in the locale of ancient Syria. Kottsieper similarly advocates an Ancient Aramaic base for the language of the Ahiqar Proverbs, purports to substantiate that contention by his thorough grammatical analysis of the text (pp. 27-179), and provides a comparative study of its language with other relevant Semitic languages in his Dictionary (pp. 185-238).