Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

We also read of major Phoenician archives, the earliest being in an Egyptian tale of the eleventh century BC, where an Egyptian agent, Wen-Amun, goes to Byblos to order timber, and has to bargain aggressively with King Zakar-baal, who reads out the precedents from deals in earlier generations, written on rolls of papyrus. The city of Tyre also kept records, since Josephus records that the Greek historian Menander of Ephesus had compiled his history of Tyre from them.

As it happens, the earliest inscription in Phoenician is the epitaph of Ahiram, king of Byblos. It is dated (by its language) to the eleventh century BC.

Coffin which Ittobaal, son of Ahiram, king of Byblos, made for Ahiram his father, when he placed him in the house of eternity.

Now if a king among kings or a governor among governors or a commander of an army should come up against Byblos and uncover this coffin, may the sceptre of his rule be torn away, may the throne of his kingdom be overturned, and may peace flee from Byblos! And as for him, may his inscription be effaced...

For all its thousand years of recorded history, there is no surviving artistic literature in Phoenician. However, a discovery in 1929 revealed an ancient literature in the neighbouring city directly to the north, Ugarit, dated to the fourteenth or thirteenth century BC.* (#litres_trial_promo) The central characters in the myths and epics recorded here are gods known to have loomed large in the cults in Phoenician cities, especially Hadad or Baal (which means simply ‘the Lord’), his father Dagon, a beautiful consort goddess who has various names, including Ashtoreth and Asherah, El, the benign high god, and Kothar, the divine craftsman and smith. Thirteen hundred years later, after Phoenician had largely died out as a language, one Philo of Byblos wrote in Greek a Phoenician History, claiming that it was derived from the work of Sanchuniathon of Beirut, who had himself read it on ammouneis, the pillars of Baal Ammon that stood in Phoenician temples. Since Philo, in typical ancient fashion, identifies many of the Phoenician gods by Greek names (of those of whom similar tales were told), his unsupported account of Phoenician mythology was received (for almost two thousand years) with some scepticism. But Philo does in fact mention El as the name of Kronos,† (#litres_trial_promo) and makes Dagon his son. Dagon later fathers an unknown Dēmarūs, and after much action Demarus, Astartē (aka Asteria) and Adōdos end up as governors of the world, under El’s direction. Khusor is the craftsman god, important in the creation of the world and the origin of inventions. Since Astarte and Asteria are plausible Greek transliterations of Ashtoreth and Asherah, and Adōdos without its Greek ending -OS would (with its long O) be a natural Phoenician pronunciation of Hadad, the basic cast of Phoenician gods is in place.

The Ugaritic texts also give us a hint of how close Hebrew literature comes to the missing Phoenician works. Remember that Hebrew is a close relative of Ugaritic, but not as close as Phoenician. Now consider how the goddess Anath of Ugarit decks herself out to meet the emissaries of Baal:

She draws some water and bathes; Sky-dew of the fatness of earth, Spray of the Rider of the Clouds; Dew that the heavens do shed Spray that is shed by the stars.

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The words for ‘Sky-dew of the fatness of earth’ are l šmm šmn ’rs. This is precisely what Isaac promises to Jacob (and denies to Esau) in the blessing scene in Genesis:

May God give you of dew of heaven and of fatness of earth

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(Traditionally, of course, Hebrew spelling too marked only consonants, as well as some long vowels.)

Hebrew and Ugaritic were close enough, then, to share some fixed phrases. Combining the dramatis personae of the Ugaritic epics with the phraseology of the Old Testament, and the narratives of Philo’s Phoenician History of Sanchuniathon, we may be able to reconstruct something of the verbal culture of Byblos, Tyre and their sister cities.

There is a clear echo of what Tyrian poetry may have been like in a famous passage of Ezekiel. In the course of a series of prophecies of the downfall of Judah’s various neighbours, the prophet digresses on the past glories of one city for which he foresees destruction:

You say, O Tyre, ‘I am perfect in beauty.’

Your domain was on the high seas; your builders brought your beauty to perfection.

They made all your timbers of pine trees from Senir; they took a cedar from Lebanon and made a mast for you.

Of oaks from Bashan they made your oars; of cypress wood from the coasts of Cyprus they made your deck, inlaid with ivory.

Fine embroidered linen from Egypt was your sail and served as your banner; your awnings were of blue and purple with the coasts of Elishah.

Men of Sidon and Arwad were your oarsmen; your skilled men, O Tyre, were aboard as your seamen.

Veteran craftsmen of Byblos were on board as shipwrights to caulk your seams.

All the ships of the sea and their sailors came alongside to trade for your wares.

Men of Persia, Lydia, and Put served as soldiers in your army.

They hung their shields and helmets on your walls, bringing you splendour.

Men of Arwad and Helech manned your walls on every side; men of Gammad were in your towers.

They hung their shields around your walls; they brought your beauty to perfection.

…* (#litres_trial_promo)

The ships of Tarshish serve as carriers for your wares.

You are filled with heavy cargo in the heart of the sea.

Your oarsmen will take you out to the high seas.

But the east wind will break you to pieces in the heart of the sea.

…

As they wail and mourn over you they will take up a lament concerning you: ‘Who was ever silenced like Tyre, surrounded by the sea?’

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The Carthaginians, like other Phoenicians, kept voluminous records. Those that would have been kept on papyrus are lost, but there are several thousand known inscriptions, assigning rights over sacrificial offerings, making dedications to the goddess Tanit or the god Baal Hammon, or commemorating ceremonies. It is also clear that Carthage had passed on the administrative use of its language to the neighbouring states to the west, Massylia and Massaesylia: their coins bear inscriptions in Punic letters, as do boundary stones.

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Indeed, there is evidence for a whole literature in Punic. St Augustine remarked famously that ‘on the word of many scholars, there was a great deal of virtue and wisdom in the Punic books’.

(#litres_trial_promo) This view was shared by the Roman Senate, which even as the city of Carthage was being finally destroyed in 146 BC gave orders for a new translation and edition of one especially admired treatise on agriculture. ‘Our Senate presented the libraries of the city to African princes, with the sole exception of the 28 books of Mago, which they decreed should be translated into Latin... The text was entrusted to scholars learned in Punic.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Some forty fragments of it are quoted by later Latin authors, but the work as a whole is lost, even in Latin translation.

In fact, no Punic literary work has survived. The closest to it is a Greek translation, in about seven hundred words, of a Punic inscription engraved in the temple of Baal Hammon at Carthage, recording the voyage of exploration by a Carthaginian leader, Hanno, round the western coast of Africa (perhaps as far as Gabon). It ends:

... we came to the gulf named Horn of the South. In the corner was an island... and in it a lake with an island full of savage people. By far the majority of them were female, hairy in body, called by the interpreters ‘gorillas’. We could not catch the men because of their skill at climbing and defending themselves with stones, but we took three women, who fiercely resisted, biting and tearing. However, we killed them and skinned them, and brought the hides back to Carthage. We did not sail further since our supplies had given out.

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It is tantalising that this text, one of the few brief survivals from the wreck of Punic literature, should have recounted such a unique adventure.

How is the total loss of Phoenician, and its successor dialect Punic, to be explained, after such a widespread expansion across the Mediterranean world? We have here another unanswered, and as yet largely unasked, question.

After Alexander’s sack of Tyre in 332 BC, Phoenician trade remained prosperous for many centuries, with no further disasters to threaten the traders’ stability. The Punic language did not die out promptly, even in its overseas provinces, where all the administrative links to Carthage were cut by the end of the second century BC: in Sardinia, for example, several ‘neo-Punic’ inscriptions have been found, the latest, at Bithia in the extreme south, made as late as the end of the second century AD. And even if the life of Carthage as a city was brutally punctuated in 146 BC, it was refounded as a Roman town by Augustus a century later. It then enjoyed a flourishing later life till the end of the Roman empire in the west. We may surmise that its language survived in use in North Africa, until the fifth century AD: Augustine tells us that he had to quote his Punic proverbs in Latin since ‘not everybody’ would understand the original.

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Nevertheless, ever since Alexander’s conquest of western Asia there had been a general cultural levelling in the Near East, with Greek and Aramaic spreading at the expense of all the minority languages. Although Aramaic was a language closely related to Phoenician or Hebrew, Greek had still been taken up by a large part of the Jewish community (especially those in Egypt) in this period. Greek had also become a basic subject in the education of Romans, who were by the second century BC clearly recognised as the rising power.

The cultural undertow was thus running strongly in favour of Greek. And in fact it is possible that, despite its users’ commercial prowess, Phoenician or Punic had never been widely used as a lingua franca or even as a trade jargon outside Africa. The language of trade is, after all, perforce that of the customer, rather than that of the merchant.

The Roman comedian Plautus illustrates this in a scene from his play Poenulus, ‘the Punic guy’—‘Punk’?—which came out in the early second century BC, soon after the end of the Second Punic War.

(#litres_trial_promo) A Carthaginian merchant tries talking to a couple of Romans in Punic, even though he knows Latin, but soon tires of their constant heavy puns and jokes on him and his language, to cloak the poor language skills of the one who claims to be a bit of Punic expert. (Hanno’s Punic is in bold, and the Latin that echoes it is in bold italics.)