Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

Certain obvious possibilities can be eliminated at once, since in them Egyptian and Chinese are at opposite extremes.

In the most evident linguistic aspect, the structural type of their languages, Egyptian and Chinese were intrinsically always very different, and have developed in different directions over their recorded histories. And looking at them a little more abstractly, we can see too that they were also quite unlike in another aspect of their linguistic environments: their degree of similarity or difference to their neighbouring languages.

Egyptian remained throughout its history a highly inflected language with complex verbal morphology, and flexible word order, though it did develop somewhat over the millennia into a more analytic structure, with separable articles and personal pronouns becoming constituents of noun and verb phrases, and more rigid word order. Furthermore, the languages that might have been expected to influence or replace it, especially Libyan and Aramaic, were typologically similar to it—just as was its ultimate nemesis, Arabic. There seems no reason in linguistic structure, absolute or relative, to explain its stability.

Old Chinese, by contrast, was an extreme example of an isolating language, its roots, monosyllabic and marked with significant tone patterns, largely functioning as independent words, and using word order as the most significant aspect of syntax. Again, there was some change visible over the millennia: but Chinese moved to become less analytic, with longer words developing on the basis of the previously detachable roots, and some of the roots changing into grammatical morphemes, marking such things as plurality, copular links between subject and predicate, or markers of relative and subordinate clauses. Unlike Egyptian, which was challenged by languages of its own type, the threat to Chinese came from the Altaic languages, which were, as we have seen, fundamentally different in type. In fact, where it was in contact with languages of similar type (in the south), Chinese was the incoming language, and tended to replace them.

Religious outlook is another important aspect of cultures, where we might look for a clue to their stability, which might then be reflected in language. We have seen (Chapter 3, ‘Second interlude: The shield of faith’, p. 86) that especially in the Middle East attachment to a religion could preserve a language against the odds. But here again, Egypt and China diverged.

Faith in an afterlife was important to Egyptians: they deliberately made their tombs the most permanent part of their built environment, and we find them in their literature very much concerned with what they could know about life after death, judgement and individual survival. Certainly they preserved their religion for most of the lifespan of their language, and they no more actively preached it abroad than they attempted to spread their language when they enlarged the boundaries of their power. But aspects of their faith did spread without the language none the less: their mother-goddess Isis became one of the most widely revered deities in the Roman empire, and has been seen as a root of the Christian cult of Mary as Mother of God. And paradoxically, when the Christians suppressed the Egyptian cult, Egyptian as a language took on a new life as the local language of Christianity. Egyptian religion was certainly favourable to the survival of the Egyptian language, but the two became detached long before the end.

The Chinese attitude to religion was very different, mostly characterised by down-to-earth practicality. There were two major traditions. One followed Confucius (Kung Fu-zi, ‘Master Kung’), taking a highly socialised and worldly definition of virtue; the other followed the Dào (

, ‘way’) of Lao-zi and Zhuang-zi, seeking to merge with the patterns discerned in nature. Aside from popular animist beliefs, no fulfilment of any Chinese yearnings for another world was available until Buddhism began to penetrate from India in the first millennium AD. (This, for the Chinese, was a Western religion.) It prospered in the troublous times of the third, fourth and fifth centuries, and then became the established faith of the Tang dynasty that returned strong universal government to China; the Pali and Sanskrit classics were translated in Chinese, and Buddhism became a naturalised Chinese faith.

Buddhism, with its emphasis on suffering, resignation and the ultimate unimportance of the daily round of life, was never a positive influence on kings who must preserve their realms against external aggression. No Buddhist king in its homeland of India, not even Aśoka, managed to found a dynasty that would endure more than a couple of generations; and the strange attraction of Buddhism to invading Altaic peoples, especially the Tabgach and Genghis Khan’s Mongols, brought their soldierly virtues to an early end once they had settled in China. As Grousset remarks: ‘These ferocious warriors, once touched by the grace of the bodhisattva, became so susceptible to the humanitarian precepts of the śramanas [i.e. Buddhist monks] as to forget not only their native belligerence but even neglect their self-defence.’

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But there was one aspect of Egyptian and Chinese religion which was similar, and is probably connected with the gross survivability of their languages in situ over many millennia. This is the attitude that each of them took to their emperor, and his relation to his land, his people and their gods.

Both these empires achieved early unity under a single ruler, Egypt under the legendary Menes, China under the historical Shi Huang Di. Although afterwards there were often divisions, and competition among the different kingdoms, the two civilisations never found such disunity tolerable: their histories, as we have seen, distinguished firmly between prosperous periods, when a single royal house controlled the whole country, and interregna, which may have 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* (#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) Compare this with the densities in the age of Constantine (fourth century AD)

(#litres_trial_promo) estimated for Italy—20 per square kilometre—and for eastern Anatolia—19.* (#litres_trial_promo)

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)

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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.

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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 of fluid, stylish calligraphy never began in Egypt. In their steadfast approach, Egyptian scribes were very different from the masters of such systems as Chinese characters or Mayan glyphs.

Furthermore, although new hieroglyphs were added from time to time, the basic principle of the script, the punning use of the consonants in words pictured, clarified by the use of more pictures to determine the range of meaning and sound, did not change. We find experimental uses of the hieroglyphs to found an alphabet at quarry sites in the Sinai peninsula; and ultimately radically new uses were made of a small set of the symbols by their trading partners, the Phoenicians, to found their alphabet, the apparent progenitor of all the alphabets in the world today. But while some of these foreigners were taking perverse inspiration from them, the Egyptians themselves never modified the hieroglyphic system to write their own language.

This resistance to script reform, a trait shared by the Chinese, really shows no more than that these cultures had already—both very early by regional and global standards—achieved a stable incorporation of writing into their way of life. Asking for a replacement of the writing system in such a literate administration was no more practicable than the various attempts to introduce spelling reform into modern English. It could only become feasible if the systems of education and administration were so severely disrupted that the succession was broken, and a new start could be made. This never happened in Egypt until the country was taken over by cultures with rival administrative traditions, Persian, Greek and Roman. Then the use of Egyptian in administration was undermined, and replaced by Aramaic and Greek. But even so, it was only when Christianity provided a whole new use for literacy that Egyptian could make the leap to writing in a ready-made, alphabetic script. In China, the change to alphabetic writing has never happened at all, despite the 1905 abolition of the imperial examination system, which had indeed been the central educational and administrative institution, and despite all the radical speculation about the future of the character system in the first half of the twentieth century, which had even included the People’s Republic’s authorisation of a new system for romanisation, Pinyin (used throughout this book).

The Egyptian scribe, zaRaw, represented from the earliest documented times the acme of ambition. This is amply confirmed by the kinds of texts that were copied in the scribal schools:

Behold there is no profession which is not governed; It is only the learned man who rules himself.

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Set to work and become a scribe, for then thou shalt be a leader of men. The profession of scribe is a princely profession; his writing materials and his rolls of books bring pleasantness and riches.

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In the Satire on Trades, the scribe boasts:

I have never seen a sculptor sent on an embassy, nor a bronze-founder leading a mission.

This complacency generated an extreme conservatism that may ultimately have been Egypt’s undoing. Literacy in Egyptian remained the preserve of a small and highly educated caste long after the demise of the last independent Egyptian state, in fact until the Christians adapted the Greek alphabet for the language: this step was taken fully a thousand years after the rest of the Mediterranean, including the Assyrians and Babylonians, had adopted alphabetic writing.

But as if to show that there is no natural term to the life of a pictographic system in an alphabetic age, the Chinese system has survived even the turmoil of the twentieth century. It has persisted, essentially unchanged despite some simplification in penmanship, since Shi Huang Di’s imposed standardisation in the third century BC of a system that was already over a millennium old. This system established a particular stylised picture, or a combination of phonetic pun plus determiner, in a notional square box, for each word or root in the language. Once established, it was less phonetically based than the Egyptian system, and so its practical use was even less affected by the phonetic changes in the language that have come about over the following two and a half millennia. Scholarly Chinese will have watched with amused unconcern the modifications, truncations and additions conceived by foreigners to produce the Japanese kana—two sets of forty-eight simplified outlines chosen to represent the full set of Japanese syllables—and the Korean han-gŭl—a true phonetic alphabet, but designed to harmonise on the page with Chinese characters. Each was an original solution to the poor match between Chinese characters and their own polysyllabic, agglutinative and nontonal languages—but this must have seemed no problem for Chinese itself.

In fact, in the last two and a half millennia the Chinese have become aware of a number of alphabetic scripts, conceived quite independently of their characters. The Buddhists brought the Siddha version of the Brahmi alphabet from India, and the Muslims who converted many of the Western peoples brought variants of the Aramaic scripts and Arabic. The Mongol emperor Kublai Khan even commissioned an alphabetic script for his empire, to be used officially for all its literate languages, Mongolian, Chinese, Turkic and Persian. Called ‘Phagspa, it was based on the Tibetan version of Brahmi, and promulgated in 1269. It was a version of the Tibetan script converted to be written vertically (though unlike Chinese characters in columns from left to right), and in deference to Chinese taste in rather a squared-off form. However, it never caught on, and was discontinued, along with the Mongolian dynasty, just a century later.

The great advantage of the Chinese system is its masterly representation of the highest common factor of structure and meaning shared by all the Chinese dialects, many of which are not mutually comprehensible. All the modern dialects, and wényán as well, are built on a common set of meaningful syllables, which may be pronounced and strung together in different orders in the various dialects, but are still recognisable in graphic form. By and large, every one of these syllables is represented in writing by a single character, and so the meaning of a written Chinese text will be relatively clear to any literate speaker of any dialect. No alphabetic script, based perforce on the sounds of a language, could now be so conveniently neutral in terms of all the different Chinese dialects, unless perhaps it were designed on historical principles with a knowledge of all varieties of Chinese. Such a tour de force would have to be a miracle of subtlety and ambiguity. And so the traditional characters survive.

Despite the difficulty of learning the system, in China mere literacy did not remain the elite accomplishment it always was in Egypt. Different levels would have been attained according to the wealth and opportunities of the family, but poor families continued to throw out the occasional intellectual star. Literacy skills were still prized in China, but at a higher functional level. So the status of the scribe in Egypt corresponds in Chinese society more with that of graduates of the higher levels of the imperial competitive examinations. These were held by and large every third year from AD 622 to 1905.

The only possible Chinese adoption from foreigners in respect of writing concerns not writing itself, but the analysis of pronunciation. The traditional fănqiè system classifies a character’s pronunciation in respect of its initial consonant and its rhyme plus tone, but the déngyùn-xué “study of graded rhymes” sub-classifies these constituent parts phonetically. This invention of Chinese scholars of the seventh and eighth centuries AD came about very much under the influence of the subtle phonetic analysis of the Sanskrit pronunciation, derived from the Buddhist tradition.

(#litres_trial_promo) Even so, the analysis of the rhyme part of a character-syllable into its constituent semi-vowels, vowels and consonants had to await the more thoroughgoing approach of alphabetisation, and specifically romanisation, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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