Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Nicholas Ostler

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СКАЧАТЬ by Carthaginians, did get established in North Africa. It evidently long survived the downfall of Carthage as a state in 146 bc, some 655 years after its foundation, and even the Latin-speaking Roman administration that followed for another five hundred years, since Augustine of Hippo is still quoting words of the language in the fifth century ad, remarking on its utility for a priest in a country parish in Numidia.⁶ But tantalisingly and heartbreakingly, this language, once so widely used and the vehicle that had spread alphabetic literacy to Europe, could not ensure the survival of a single book from antiquity.

      Back in western Asia, from the mid-seventh century the pace of change seemed to accelerate. In four decades to 627 BC Assyria expanded its power to its maximum, taking in Lydia in the north, Phoenicia in the west, the Nile delta of Egypt in the south, and Elam in the east. But just fifteen years later it collapsed. The Chaldaeans in Babylon had overthrown the Assyrians, enlisting the Medes to help them, and proceeded to rebuild their empire from their own perspective. This was the final incandescence of Mesopotamian power, under the last great emperor of Babylon, Nebuchadrezzar II. He died

      in 562 BC. Twenty-five years earlier, even as he had been conquering Jerusalem, and deporting its Jews, others were beginning a process of political consolidation that would erase the greatness of Babylon. The Medes defeated the Urartians in the 580s and so established control of most of the north; but in 550 BC they themselves succumbed to a royal putsch executed by their south-western neighbour Persia, under its new king Cyrus. Cyrus went on to absorb first Lydia (thus grabbing the rest of Anatolia), then the eastern extremities of Iran, as far as modern Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Baluchistan. Finally he turned on the Babylonian empire itself, and took it with hardly a battle. His son Cambyses even conquered Egypt, though he died soon after. By 522 BC, there was a single overlord of all the land from Anatolia and Egypt to the borders of modern Turkestan and the Indus valley. If this had been a typical Mesopotamian achievement, a collapse would have been expected within a generation; but Persians used different methods, and the unitary empire they had created was to last for two hundred years.

      The overlord’s name was Darius, and he had administrative talents comparable to Cyrus’s genius for winning victories and retaining the loyalty of those conquered. Most interestingly from our point of view, he decreed that the administrative language of the empire should be not Persian or Lydian, but Aramaic. The result was the effective spread of the use of this Semitic language beyond all previous bounds—across to the coast of the Aegean, the Balkans and Egypt in the west, and out to the Hindu Kush and the banks of the Indus in the east.

      This decision must have been purely pragmatic, for Aramaic was not the language that Persian royalty, the Achaemenid clan, actually spoke. Perhaps to remedy this problem, the same reign undertook to make Persian too a literary language for the first time, devising a syllabary with which to write it (based on cuneiform symbols) and using it, together with Elamite and Akkadian, on monumental inscriptions. (The Aramaic alphabet, which could just as easily have been used to write Persian, was evidently seen as too informal for imperial monuments.) But the script did not catch on, and had been abandoned by 338 BC, even before the fall of the Persian empire to the Greeks. Nonetheless, the spoken language lived on, and indeed flourished, since it is the ancestor of the modern Persian language and related dialects, spoken in Iran up to the present day.

      Although Aramaic did not live on as the language of western Asia, the unification of administrative language by Darius, essentially realised during the next two hundred years of Persian administration, had a number of important consequences.

      It created a familiarity with administration conducted in a lingua franca, separate from the vernacular languages. So the structures were in place to allow the rapid spread of Greek, for the same purposes, after the fall of the empire to Alexander and his successors. Greek flowed through channels made for Aramaic for the next two hundred years. (See Chapter 6, ‘Kings of Asia: Greek spread through war’, p. 243.)

      This superficial linguistic unity gave different long-term results in the various parts of the empire. In Anatolia, Greek seems to have gone deeper in its two centuries than Aramaic had: it replaced all the remaining indigenous languages. (These had largely been Lydian and its smaller relatives, but also Phrygian, the language of King Midas.) In the area of modern Iran and Afghanistan, where Iranian languages related to Persian were widely spoken, it supplanted Aramaic as lingua franca, but did not touch the vernaculars. The newly founded Greek colonies, however far flung, were of course exceptions to this.⁷ In Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine and Egypt, Greek made little headway with the general public against Aramaic; but certain local groups, such as long-distance merchants, and surprisingly the Jews resident in Alexandria in Egypt, seem to have taken it up.

      The advent of the Romans in the west, and the Parthians in the east, in the middle of the second century bc, meant that Greek was challenged. It responded in different ways. To Latin, it yielded legal and military uses, but very little else, so that Syria, Palestine and Egypt found themselves now areas where three languages or more were in contention. But before Parthian, which was a close relative of Persian (and whose speakers shared allegiance to the Zoroastrian scriptures, the Avesta), Greek was effectively eliminated, while Aramaic had something of a resurgence at least as a written language. Its use went on to inspire all but one of the writing systems henceforth used for the Iranian languages, Parthian and Persian (Pahlavi) in the west, Khwarezmian, Sogdian and the Scythian languages Śaka and Ossetic in the east, as well as for the Avesta scriptures themselves.*

      Aramaic was by now an official language nowhere, and a majoritycommunity language only in the Fertile Crescent. Nevertheless, it remained the predominant language over this large area for almost a thousand years until the seventh century ad, when a completely new language overwhelmed it.

      This was Arabic, brought with Islamic inspiration and a fervent will by the early converts of the prophet Mu

ammad. The progress of this virtually unknown

      language over two generations, so as to cover the whole Near East to the borders of Iran, and the whole of North Africa to the Pillars of Hercules, is one of the most striking events in history. But its progress was not totally irresistible: and it will be interesting, when we describe it in greater detail below, to ponder the linguistic obstacles that proved unyielding.

      This ends our exhaustingly rapid review of language leapfrog in West Asia, a linguistic zone which ultimately expanded to take in most of North Africa. We can now slow down a little, and look more closely at some of the individual languages: many were unique pioneers in the known language history of the world.

       Sumerian—the first classical language: Life after death

      Father Enki answers Ninshubur:

      ‘What has happened to my daughter! I am troubled,

      What has happened to Inanna! I am troubled,

      What has happened to the queen of all the lands! I am troubled,

      What has happened to the hierodule of heaven! I am troubled.’

      From his fingernail he brought forth dirt, fashioned the kurgarru,

      From his other fingernail he brought forth dirt, fashioned the kalaturru.

      To the kurgarru he gave the food of life.

      To the kalaturru he gave the water of life.

      Father Enki says to the kalaturru СКАЧАТЬ