Aramaic belongs to the Northwest Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family, closely related to Hebrew, and rose from a regional language of Aramean city-states in the early first millennium BCE to become the dominant administrative lingua franca of the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid Persian empires successively, a status that spread Aramaic across the entire Near East for the better part of a thousand years and left it as the everyday spoken language of Judea by the time of Jesus, alongside Hebrew's continued role as a more restricted liturgical and scholarly language.
Aramaic exists in numerous historical dialects and later distinct branches, including Biblical Aramaic, the language of portions of the books of Daniel and Ezra, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, the primary language of the Babylonian Talmud, Syriac, the literary Aramaic dialect of early Eastern Christianity, and Samaritan Aramaic, and several endangered Neo-Aramaic dialects survive today among small Assyrian, Chaldean and Jewish communities descended from these ancient linguistic communities. Aramaic's earliest attested inscriptions date to around the tenth century BCE, and the language passed through recognized historical stages including Old Aramaic, Imperial or Official Aramaic used administratively across the Achaemenid Persian Empire, and the later Middle Aramaic period from which Biblical Aramaic, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic and Syriac all descend.