ever disappeared or became restricted to a small elite, nor that the ethnic and cultural identity of the new settlers was anything other than "Assyrian" after one or two generations. Because the Assyrians never imposed their language on foreign peoples whose lands they conquered outside of the Assyrian heartland, there were no mechanisms in place to stop the spread of languages other than Akkadian. Beginning with the migrations of Arameans into Assyrian territory during the Middle Assyrian period, this lack of linguistic policies facilitated the spread of the Aramaic language. As the most widely spoken and mutually understandable of the Semitic languages (the language group containing many of the languages spoken through the empire), Aramaic grew in importance throughout the Neo-Assyrian period and increasingly replaced the Akkadian language even within the Assyrian heartland itself. From the 9th century BC onwards, Aramaic became the de facto lingua franca, with Akkadian becoming relegated to a language of the political elite (i.e. governors and officials). The widespread adoption of the language does not indicate a wholesale replacement of the original native population; the Aramaic language was used not only by Aramean settlers but also by native Assyrians, who adopted it and its alphabetic script. The Aramaic language had entered the Assyrian royal administration by the reign of Shalmaneser III (859–824 BC), given that Aramaic writings are known from a palace he built in Nimrud. By the time of Tiglath-Pileser III (745–727 BC), the Assyrian kings employed both Akkadian and Aramaic-language royal scribes, confirming the rise of Aramaic to a position of an official language used by the imperial administration. It is clear that Aramaic was spoken by the Assyrian royal family from at least the late 8th century BC onwards, given that Tiglath-Pileser's son Shalmaneser V (727–722 BC) owned a set of lion weights inscribed with text in both Akkadian and Aramaic. A recorded drop in the number of cuneiform documents late in the reign of Ashurbanipal (669–631 BC) could indicate a greater shift to Aramaic, often written on perishable materials like leather scrolls or papyrus, though it could perhaps alternatively be attributed to political instability in the empire. The denizens of Assur and other former Assyrian population centers under Parthian rule, who clearly connected themselves to ancient Assyria, wrote and spoke Aramaic. Pre-modern self-identities Though many foreign states ruled over the Assyrian heartland in the millennia following the empire's fall, there is