ARAMAIC WATCH -- Some interesting epigraphic material has been excavated in Turkey:

Ancient stone tablets could shed light on Surtepe excavations

Wednesday, May 31, 2006 (Turkish Daily News)

Results are being presented this week at the 28th International Congress on Excavations, Surveys and Research in Turkey, which started on Monday in Çanakkale, a western province that is also home to the ruins of ancient Troy

ANKARA - Turkish Daily News

Ancient stone tablets and seals unearthed during archaeological excavations at the Surtepe tumulus, seven kilometers north of Birecik in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa, could shed light on other ancient structures discovered in the area.

A team of experts headed by project director Jesus Gil Fuensanta of Spain who have been working in the area as part of the Tilbes salvage project, discovered a monumental building -- believed to belong to the Persian-Achaemenid period prior to the conquest by Alexander the Great -- at the Surtepe mound during excavations in 2005.

[...]

Another impression on a jar shows a typical iconograph of royal worship. Experts say the excavations provided evidence of ostraca (ceramic fragments with inscriptions). According to Herbert Sauren, a German specialist in ancient Semitic languages, one of the seals has official Aramaic (the administrative language of the Achaemenids) writing and refers to the capacity of a vessel.

Fuensanta believes that an enigmatic finding from the same archaeological season, a stone tablet with an inscription, could be associated with the Persian building. According to a preliminary study by Sauren the inscription on the find was made in Semitic, in use around the middle of first millennium B.C. The language has the main elements of usual big groups of Semitic languages. After Sauren's translation and interpretation, it was discovered that the stone document was issued by the leader of this city (Surtepe, the ancient name of which is not yet clear) to thank a deity for his assumption of power.

[...]

That last bit is rather odd. If it's that decipherable it should be possible to classify the language of the inscription more precisely than just "Semitic." I suspect the reporter is confused here.

The excavation results will be presented in a conference in Turkey which starts started on Monday.