Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

The Aramaic language was now inseparable from the Babylonian empire, and a new standard version of the language arose, usually known as Imperial Aramaic. It had developed in the eastern areas, where the Aramaean settlers had established themselves in Mesopotamia, and as such was more influenced by Akkadian than its more ancient, and some would say more authentic, version spoken in Aram and the rest of Syria. Yet this dialect was destined to become the standard not just for the Babylonian empire, but for the much greater Persian empire that replaced it, ‘over 127 provinces stretching

from Hōdû to Kûš’, in the awed phrase of the Book of Esther, i.e. from Hindustan to the land of Kush, south of Egypt.

The distinctive traits of this dialect were fairly small things, such as plural -îm replaced by -în, plural -ayyā by -ē, and in some forms of the verb the dropping of initial h, to be replaced by a glottal stop’ (rather reminiscent of colloquial London English). In fact, the model for this standard seems to have been Babylonian Aramaic as spoken and written by educated Persians.

(#litres_trial_promo) The fact of this colonial transplant becoming the effective standard is no more surprising than the current popularity of General American as a world standard for English. As ‘Standard Literary Aramaic’ it was to remain essentially unchanged for the next millennium.

More surprisingly, Aramaic was also used to an extent as a language for international communication. At Saqqara, near the site of the Egyptian capital Memphis, a late seventh-century papyrus from a Philistine king has been discovered, asking in Aramaic for the Egyptian pharaoh’s help against the king of Babylon; soon afterwards, Jeremiah, an adviser to the kings of Judah just before Babylon sacked Jerusalem, breaks into Aramaic in the midst of a tirade in Hebrew. This is for a slogan to cast in the teeth of foreign idolaters:

These gods, who did not make the heavens and the earth, will perish from the earth and from under the heavens.

Jeremiah x.11

In the event, the Aramaic-speaking believers in those gods were due to inherit the earth, at least from India to Kush. However, the language was usable across these vast distances not because it was actually spoken by the various populations, but because it acted as a written interlingua, understood by a network of literate translators and interpreters, the sepīru. A ruler or official would dictate a letter in his own language, and the sepīru would write it down in Aramaic; when the document reached its addressee—Persia was also renowned for its excellent postal service—it would be read by another sepīru who would speak it aloud in whatever was the language of his master or mistress. This process was called paraš, literally ‘declaration’ in Aramaic, or uzvārišn, ‘explanation’ in Persian.

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In Ezra iv.18, the Persian king Artaxerxes receives in oral translation the Aramaic letter of some local government officials from Trans-Euphrates. He begins his reply (reported in Aramaic, but no doubt dictated in Persian):

Greetings, and now: the letter you sent us was translated and read in our presence…

The same practical system was in use internationally, though it must have been limited by the availability of bilingual sēpiru for languages beyond the Persian realm. In the Greeks’ Peloponnesian War, a messenger from the Persian king to Sparta was intercepted in 428 by the Athenians: his letters then needed to be translated ek tn Assuríōn grammátōn, ‘from the Assyrian writing’. It is unlikely that its real addressees in Sparta would have been able to make any sense of them without the messenger’s paraš.

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The convenience of this system must have acted as a strong motive for the spread of the language, and it gets into some amazing places, notably the Jewish scriptures. Besides the Aramaic letters in the book of Ezra, long passages in the book of Daniel (written in the second century BC) are written in Aramaic, appropriately so since it recounts the various adventures and visions of this Jewish counsellor at court in Babylon under a succession of Babylonian and then Persian kings. It begins with a Hebrew description of his training as a sepīru, after being recruited by the Babylonian king, a three-year course in ēir ū-l∂šôn kasdîm, ‘the writing and language of the Chaldaeans’.

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This discreet use of a lingua franca disguised by multilingual paraš (rather reminiscent of that naive sort of fiction where travellers can go anywhere and at once get into serious conversations with the local people, never noticing any language barrier) was quite compatible with continuing use of local languages in other official functions. One example is the legends on coined money: in fact, this means of payment with a government guarantee had only recently been invented (in Lydia, western Anatolia). It spread only slowly in the Persian empire, and most contemporary coins come from the western provinces. So there are Persian-era coins inscribed in Greek and pretty much every other language of southern Anatolia (Lydian, Sidetic, Carian and Lycian—all related to Hittite and Luwian); Aramaic is used in northern parts of Anatolia (where Phrygian was probably still in use), in Cilicia (which had been part of the Babylonian empire, and had had strong links with Phoenicia) and in Mesopotamia. In Egypt there were also coins struck in demotic Egyptian.

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Still the Egyptians became heavy users of Aramaic, despite the lateness of Egypt’s annexation to the Persian empire. The language would have come in beforehand, along with a sizeable population of refugees and émigrés from Aram, Phoenicia, Edom, Judah and other countries threatened or dominated by Babylon, with a de facto common language in Aramaic. But many Egyptians were also drawn into this community, as the Egyptian names occurring in Aramaic texts show, and when the Persians were replaced by the Ptolemies Egyptians continued to use Aramaic for legal documents.

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Egypt, because of its dry climate, has provided almost all the surviving texts in Aramaic from this period, written on papyrus or leather, particularly the correspondence of a Persian governor (satrap) called Arsames, a packet of letters from a family distributed between Luxor and Syene (Aswan) up and down the Nile, and at Syene the archives of the Jewish military garrison, including a fair number of legal documents and business letters to Jerusalem. This also includes the proverbs of the sage Ahiqar, a legendary counsellor at the court of the Assyrian kings Sennacherib and Esarhaddon in the early seventh century BC, one of which appears as epigraph to the second section of this chapter. Having experience of life at court, he is particularly concerned about the power of leaks and malicious gossip:

My son,

Chatter not overmuch so that thou speak out every word that come to thy mind; for men’s eyes and ears are everywhere trained upon thy mouth. Beware lest it be thy undoing. More than all watchfulness watch thy mouth, and over what thou hearest harden thy heart.

For a word is a bird: once released no man can recapture it. First count the secrets of thy mouth: then bring out thy words by number. For the instruction of a mouth is stronger than the instruction of war.

Treat not lightly the word of a king: let it be healing for thy flesh...

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The letters reveal that some Jews, as Jeremiah had lamented, were indeed on pretty familiar terms with alien gods. Consider this from a valet, written on a piece of broken pottery: ‘To my lord Micaiah, your servant Giddel. I send you welfare and life. I bless you by Yaho [i.e. Yahweh] and Khnub [a local god]. Now send me the garment you are wearing and they will mend it. I send the note for your welfare.’

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Away to the north in Anatolia, languages spoken must have been at least as various as the coin legends; nevertheless, inscriptions in Greek, Lydian and Lycian have been found accompanied by translation in Aramaic, especially for monumental inscriptions of laws.

The pervasiveness of Aramaic is also demonstrated at the opposite end of the empire by three propaganda inscriptions of the Indian emperor Aśoka (see Chapter 5, ‘Sanskrit in Indian life’, p. 187). These date from a later era, the third century BC, when Aramaic had already been supplanted by Greek as the official language of administration across Iran. Nevertheless, Aśoka still saw fit to put up these permanent exhortations to virtue—with vegetarianism specifically recommended—in Aramaic as well as Greek, three or four generations after the change.

... and abstains

the King from animals and the rest still

of men and all hunters and fishermen

of the King have ceased hunting…

And besides, as regards food, for our lord the King few [animals] are killed: seeing this, all men have ceased; even fish catchers, those people are under a prohibition...

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There have been three Aramaic inscriptions discovered so far in this border area, in Kandahar, in Laghman, east of Kabul (Lampāka),

(#litres_trial_promo) and the academic centre of Taxila (Takaśila), all of which would have been in the Persian province claimed as Gandhara. In modern terms, they are on the borders of Afghanistan, but on its far borders abutting Pakistan, demonstrating the penetration of Aramaic to the very limits of Persian control and perhaps even beyond, presumably with some cultural momentum of its own.* (#litres_trial_promo)

When Aramaic came to the end of its glory, it was not through infiltration, as Aramaic had ended the long reign of Akkadian. It was through outright and sudden conquest.

Five generations after the Persian kings Darius and Xerxes had tried and failed to end the independence of the Greek city-states across the Aegean (although they had quite easily tamed the Greek cities that bordered Anatolia), another power succeeded where Persia failed. Philip of Macedon reduced all of European Greece, claiming all the while to be a Greek himself. This claim, made on grounds of language and culture, is surprisingly difficult to substantiate, since hardly a word of the Macedonian language has survived.

(#litres_trial_promo) But his son Alexander, perhaps with an aggression that stemmed from insecurity,† (#litres_trial_promo) decided to demonstrate his belonging by undertaking to avenge the affront that the Greeks had suffered when the Persians tried to invade. (Not that this prevented him, after the reigning king of Persia had been assassinated by his own people, from claiming to the Persians that he was the rightful successor.)

Within the ten years 333–323 BC he had succeeded totally. Although he had not campaigned in every province, the vast Persian empire, including its extremities in Egypt and Afghanistan, was now a possession of the royal house of Macedon. Macedonians stayed in control of the Persian and Mesopotamian part for almost two hundred years, yielding to Arsaces, first of the Parthians, only in 140 BC.

It is likely that in this ‘Hellenistic’ period the Middle East was in fact governed in a mixture of languages, the new masters’ Greek competing with the old masters’ Aramaic. (See Chapter 6, ‘Kings of Asia: Greek spread through war’, p. 243.) Aramaic clearly held its ground far better in Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine, where it had at least five hundred more years of background than in Anatolia and Iran, where it had only been established as a language of government by the King of Kings’ fiat, a bare two hundred years before. In addition, after Alexander’s conquest, Greek settlement would have been much heavier in Anatolia, already surrounded as it was by Greek colonies on its coasts, than in Iran, far beyond the Taurus and Zagros mountains, even if Persia’s Royal Road from Sardis in Lydia to Persepolis meant that the area already enjoyed better communications than anywhere else in the known world.

This led to rather different subsequent careers for Greek in these different parts of Alexander’s empire. Greek remained as no more than a lingua franca in the centre and east. The Greek administration here was ended by the rise of the Parthians (from eastern Iran, and speaking a language close to Persian) in the second century BC, and this put an end to official status for Greek. It seems that there may have been a return to a language situation rather like the early years of the Persian empire, with Aramaic continuing for all practical purposes in Mesopotamia, but a form of Persian now in use farther east.

In the west, by contrast, Greek had fully replaced the previous languages (notably Lydian, Lycian and Aramaic). When the Romans took it over in the first century BC they kept Greek on as the de facto language of administration, insisting on Latin only in the courts and the army. (Educated Romans all knew Greek anyway.) This meant that Anatolia became almost monolingual in Greek, while in Syria and Palestine Greek was used to govern a public that still predominantly spoke Aramaic. In Egypt, the situation was complicated by the survival of the Egyptian language, as well as the extremely cosmopolitan society encouraged by the Ptolemies around their capital, Alexandria, where, for example, the Jewish community was largely Greek-speaking.

The advent of the single language Greek across the Persian empire, a domain supposedly already unified under Aramaic, thus had a remarkable effect in bringing the linguistic differences to the surface.

SECOND INTERLUDE: THE SHIELD OF FAITH

Jesus of Nazareth spoke Aramaic, though not of the best, by the standards of his own people. His native Galilee was generally reckoned to speak a substandard variety, a ‘North Country’ accent to the ears of the educated of Jerusalem and Judaea; famously, his disciple Peter’s accent gave him away at a crucial moment, and even in the learned Talmud there is the occasional joke at the expense of Galilean pronunciation.* (#litres_trial_promo)

The language of the group that formed after Jesus’s death clearly was Aramaic; and Samaritan Christians (Samaria is just south of Galilee) have gone on speaking the language to the present day. But the new faith had cosmopolitan aspirations, and their first public event (recorded in Acts ii) was the pentecostal feast at which its apostles miraculously became able to preach in all manner of languages. This sudden gift for languages did not persist, and so a convenient medium had to be found to publish the scriptures. Given that they were in the Roman empire, centred on the Mediterranean, Greek was a reasonable choice. It was also free of the Jewish associations that hung about Aramaic, and might have tarnished Christianity’s appeal to gentiles. Greek accordingly was the language in which the Christian scriptures, the so-called ‘New Testament’, were composed. It became the first language of the Church in the west.

Nevertheless, the world was bigger than Rome and the ‘circle of lands’ (orbis terrārum) that surrounded its sea. Significantly, the first foreigners mentioned as witnesses to the pentecostal miracle are Parthians, Medes, Elamites and dwellers in Mesopotamia, none of them at the time under Roman rule, and as we have seen by this time (seven generations after the fall of the Seleucid empire in the east) much more likely to understand Aramaic than Greek.

It took two hundred years to get established, but the early Christian Church did get a major wing oriented towards the east. It was based at Edessa (modern and ancient Urfa† (#litres_trial_promo)), a city on the major route east from Antioch on the Mediterranean towards Nisibis (Nusaybin) in Aram Naharaim, and Agbatana (Hamadan) in Media. The language of Edessa and its believers was Aramaic, here known as Syriac. This is our first example of a radically new motive for language spread, the drive to win converts to a new religion. Although the originals were in Greek, the New Testament and most early Christian literature was translated into Syriac, and became the basis of a literature of its own, of hymns, sermons and wider disquisitions, continuing actively until the thirteenth century AD, despite the swirls of Islamic invasions that passed round and about it.§ (#litres_trial_promo)