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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ been perfectly peaceable, but suffered from the cardinal flaw that the country was divided. These were very much centred countries, and the centre was not a place (each of them had many different imperial capitals—Thebes, Memphis, Tanis, Leontopolis, Sais in Egypt, Chang-an, Luoyang, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Beijing in China) but a royal court. In each case, the king’s position* was sanctified by the national faith. The Egyptian pharaoh was seen as the incarnation (am) of kingship, maintaining a direct relation with the gods on behalf of all his people of the Two Lands. Likewise the Chinese emperor was Son of Heaven (tiān zĭ), guaranteeing order in the Central Kingdom.

      Both rulers were absolute, deriving their sovereignty not from the people but the gods. Nevertheless each was subject to an explicit moral constraint. In Egypt, this was called maR ‘at, ‘order’, the moral and natural law. The pharaoh had a duty to put maR ‘at in place of jazfat, ‘wrong’, in his kingdom. The Chinese emperor had a duty to rule justly, and abstain from oppression; only so long as he did this, according to the influential doctrine of Mencius (Meng-zi), could he retain the Mandate of Heaven (tiān mìng), i.e. legitimacy: the oppressive ruler had forfeited his right to rule, and could be justly deposed by the people.

      Both Egypt and China, therefore, had the same simple but sustaining political doctrine, which based the country’s identity on the rule of a single emperor, and based the emperor’s sovereignty on righteousness. The national philosophy therefore contained a built-in theodicy: the proof of a ruler’s righteousness was his success in maintaining a ruling dynasty. The gods were ensuring that only righteous monarchs would be successful, and so, whether the king was failing or prospering, all was right with the world, and the Egyptian or Chinese citizen, whether recent interloper or long-standing resident, could give the system his loyalty.

      This doctrine was extemely fitting for a stable long-term culture, with the linguistic consequences that we have seen. But it could be maintained that it was the result, rather than the cause, of the culture’s stability. At least as revealing, from a more outward, objective point of view, is the gross fact of population density.

      In absolute size, Egypt and China are very different. Although they are comparable in terms of their duration, their populations and areas are of quite different orders. Egypt’s population in ancient times has been estimated at 2 million in the Old Kingdom, rising to 8 million over the three thousand years to the Roman conquest. The area inhabited, the Nile valley and the Fayyum, encompasses about 30,000 square kilometres. By contrast, Chinese census figures (first available in AD 2) show 57 million, rising to over 80 million in 1000, and over 1200 million at the recent turn of the millennium. The area of ‘China inside the Wall’ (excluding Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, and western areas such as Gansu and Qinghai, always very sparsely inhabited) amounts to some 4.5 million square kilometres.²⁴ The Chinese language, and Chinese history, has had fifty times more adherents than Egyptian, and 150 times the space in which to act.

      This immediately leads, however, to another aspect that they do have in common—high density of population. From the figures quoted for Egypt, the population density would be 65 rising to 250 per square kilometre over the period. China is much more varied in its environments; however, the census figures make it possible to abstract a little from the situation in the country as a whole: in the Han period they show a density of 58 per square kilometre in the valley of the Huang-he, and 12 per square kilometre in the lower valley of the Yangtze. A millennium later, in 1250, canals linked the two river systems, and more importantly the north had sustained invasions from Xiongnu, Tabgach, Khitan, Jurchen and Mongol: in this period, the lower Huang-he population had declined by 45 per cent, whereas on the northern bank of the Yangtze it had increased by 176 per cent and twice that (337 per cent) on the southern bank. This puts the two regions of China much on a par, with 30–40 per square kilometre; each, however, less than half the density found on the Nile.²⁵ Compare this with the densities in the age of Constantine (fourth century AD)²⁶ estimated for Italy—20 per square kilometre—and for eastern Anatolia—19.*

      By ancient standards, then, the density of population in Egypt and China was something truly exceptional. This too must have supported the long-term stability of their languages. The sheer numbers of speakers in their populated regions gave them immunity against swamping by incomers speaking foreign languages, even when they could not deny them entry. Strength in numbers reinforced languages already buttressed by their cultural prestige, and the robust institution of a monarchy endorsed by heaven.

      The self-sufficient, resilient character of Egyptian and Chinese is revealed in many situations where they, or their speakers, had to interact with foreigners and their linguistic traditions. These dense, centralised societies were not always impervious to foreign influence, even in the representation and use of their own languages. But for millennia they had sufficient equipoise, or sufficient inertia, to keep the outsiders under their own cultural control.

      In the remainder of this chapter, we shall consider three aspects of their cultures where foreigners were bound to have an impact: the history of writing, their knowledge of and attitudes to foreign powers, and their responses to invasion. In every case, the languages’ steady continuity depended on a resolute refusal to see themselves, or conduct themselves, on others’ terms.

       Holding fast to a system of writing

      Copy thy father and thy ancestors…Behold their words remain in writing. Open, that thou mayest read and copy wisdom. The skilled man becomes learned.

      Instruction for King Merikare, line 35 (Egyptian, mid-twentieth century BC)²⁷

      Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas.

      Yì Jīng (Classic of Changes), Xì Cí Appendix (attrib. Confucius), i.12 (Chinese, pre-fifth century BC)

      Egypt’s writing system is strange in that it has no known precursors. The first hieroglyphic inscriptions, on seals, cosmetics palettes, epitaphs and monuments, though they may be short, are well formed in the system that was to persist for the next 3500 years. They use pictures phonetically, making an illustrated word’s characteristic consonants do multiple duty, as if a picture of a knife were to stand in English not just for ‘knife’, but also for ‘niffy’, ‘nephew’ and ‘enough’. Nevertheless, the characteristic style is prefigured in illustrations made by artists before the advent of writing, suggesting that the system was set up on an indigenous basis.²⁸

      The usual assumption is that the inspiration came from Mesopotamia, where writing had developed out of accounting tallies, using similar principles of phonetics, a few hundred years before. There were ancient trade routes along the Wadi Araba which connected the Nile valley with the Red Sea, and for all we know the origin may have been due to a genius like that of Sequoya, the illiterate Cherokee who in the nineteenth century AD took the fact of English literacy as a proof of concept, and proceeded then to develop a syllabary for his own language from first principles.

      However it was, the system was immediately standardised in an Egyptian style of illustration. Although cursive forms of the hieroglyphs were developed for daily uses, a rigid pictorial exactitude was kept up for monumental inscriptions. This was maintained despite the fact that the materials used by the Egyptians, paint on walls or ink on papyrus laid on with a brush, would have permitted total freedom of style. The practice СКАЧАТЬ