How did Aramaic become a lingua franca in ancient Middle East?

I think it's an understatement to state that it was the lingua franca of the Fertile Crescent, as by the time of the Arab conquests Aramaic had displaced just about every other language in the region, and was the native language of just about every inhabitant in the region. read more

Notice that I say the Fertile Crescent, and not the middle East. It wasn’t the lingua franca across the entirety of what we today consider the Middle East. read more

After Alexander the Great conquered Persia in the fourth century B.C.E., for instance, Greek, itself an exceptionally complicated language, eventually edged out Aramaic as Eurasia’s lingua franca (though Aramaic held on in places like Judea, meaning it was almost certainly Jesus’s native language). read more

By the 8th century bce it had become accepted by the Assyrians as a second language. The mass deportations of people by the Assyrians and the use of Aramaic as a lingua franca by Babylonian merchants served to spread the language, so that in the 7th and 6th centuries bce it gradually supplanted Akkadian as the lingua franca of the Middle East. read more