Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

There was, then, a clear reluctance to continue the development of Egyptian and Chinese pictographic systems in the direction of reducing their complexity, despite awareness of simpler systems that foreigners were using. The civilisations were built around respect for tradition, and in particular the traditional difficulties in joining the literate class, who held the reins of government.

Foreign relations

Both Egypt and China mostly lacked an active posture towards their neighbours, and towards parts of the world farther away.

Egypt early relied on foreign trade for some of its staple goods, particularly timber. But it secured this through intermediaries, mainly Phoenicians in the third and second millennia, later Greeks. It had control of Palestine and Syria around the end of the second millennium and the beginning of the first, but as we have seen did not actively spread its language (or its culture) to build permanent links there. It never spread out along the Mediterranean coast to the west: population movement was all in the reverse direction, and the city of Cyrene, when it was established c.630 BC, was a Greek, not an Egyptian venture. It may have been more active southward, attempting to incorporate much of Kush (and its gold mines) permanently, and sending some of its own expeditions down the Red Sea to trade with the fabulous Land of Punt, perhaps in Somalia. Although there was seen to be cultural value in unifying the Black Lands, flooded by the Nile, and surrounded by desert wastes on either side, the net effect of these efforts was small. The populations in these harsh regions were just too scant. Politically, the most striking result was the reverse invasion of Egypt in the late eighth century—by Kushite enthusiasts for Egyptian culture.

China was in a very different position from Egypt, by an irony of fate having to defend an intrinsically open border in the north and west, but actively developing and colonising across a naturally occluded frontier in the south. The coasts to the east were seen more as another border, which left China open to pirate attack, rather than offering an opportunity for maritime expansion.

But beyond the encircling zones of barbarians, there was a sense that farther to the west, in India and the Persian and Roman empires, there were foreigners worthy of considerably more respect. In fact the Chinese court sent one or two emissaries to discover and report on these exotic civilisations; and Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity and Islam all penetrated China under Tang rule, to the extent that the first three suffered official persecution in 845. (Only Buddhism and Islam survived it.) The Chinese emperor Yi Zong famously impressed the Muslim visitor Ibn Wahab in 872 with his knowledge of the principal facts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But the only material links with the countries that had produced them came through foreign traders visiting Chinese ports. Until the sixteenth century these were all from the Indian Ocean economies, Arabia, Persia and India.

The case of India was different. Once Buddhism had reached China (in the first century AD, through Indian initiative) and begun to establish itself, Chinese monks starting with Fa-Xian in the late fourth century were drawn to make the journey from China themselves, sometimes in stealthy disregard of the law. The most famous of them, Xuan-Zang, had to depart illegally and furtively in 627, but was able to return to an official welcome from the emperor Tai Zong in 644.* (#litres_trial_promo) It became fashionable to fund large-scale centres for translation of Buddhist literature. There was also a series of expeditions by Chinese monks to study and gather literature in India—fifty-six are known before the tenth century, of whom thirty-four travelled by sea from Guangzhou (Canton) and twenty-two overland past the Taklamakan desert and the Hindu Kush.

(#litres_trial_promo) All this must represent the greatest sustained initiative that China undertook before the modern period to make contact with outside civilisations.

There was a lasting effect on Chinese from the many thousands of new terms which the translations produced, usually building on existing simple Chinese words but combining them in new ways. Three characteristic examples are guò-qu, ‘past’, xiàn-zài, ‘present’, and wèi-lái, ‘future’, each built of two elements: passing/go, appear/be-there, not-yet/come. Each precisely reflects the metaphor of a corresponding Pali word: atīta, paccuppanna, anāgata.† (#litres_trial_promo) Such words became central to active Chinese vocabulary.

There is an irony here, or rather a significant correspondence between grammar and government. Other countries and languages may simply have borrowed some mangled version of the Sanskrit or Pali words, and supplemented the language that way. This is what was happening all over South-East Asia, even though its languages were just as different from the Indian languages as was Chinese. (See Chapter 5, p. 183.) But the fact that new words were reconstructions in Chinese of the concepts derived from Sanskrit or Pali words is of a piece with China’s general strategy in conducting its foreign relations: to attempt always to keep them under domestic control.

This attempt to maintain control was also a feature of China’s management of its front and back doors, the ‘Silk Roads’ round the Taklamakan desert to Dunhuang and the ports along the eastern seaboard. Although China was prepared to defend the security of the Silk Roads against the neighbouring barbarians from Roman times onward, the importance of the route was gradually eclipsed by the growth of the maritime trade. The maritime route was actually closed to private trade during the three centuries of the Ming period from around 1368, but when allowed this trade was concentrated mostly at Guangzhou (Canton), with some competition allowed from the more northerly port of Quanzhou in Fujian. From 1757 to 1842 and 1949 to 1979, Guangzhou enjoyed a monopoly, continuing the Chinese government preference for monitoring and easy taxation. This was forcibly broken open by European and American interests in the intervening century.

A strange exception to the general policy of the Chinese—which was to admit foreign trade on terms, but not to initiate it or to seek diplomatic contact with foreign powers—comes in the apparently unique case of Admiral Zheng-He, who undertook seven great voyages round the Indian Ocean between 1405 and 1433, reaching the Red Sea and Mogadishu.

In the Indian subcontinent Zheng-He’s attention was mostly concentrated on Śri Lanka, where on his second voyage in 1411 he is known to have left a trilingual inscription on a stone tablet (prepared in advance in China) in Chinese, Tamil and Persian.

It conveys greetings from the Chinese Ming emperor, and in its three languages expresses respect to the Buddha, the god Tenavarai-Nenavar and Allah respectively, listing massive offerings in gold, silver, silk, etc. These expeditions were evidently not mere courtesy visits, and have a certain dramatic similarity to the notorious behaviour of Europeans abroad: faced with resistance, the Chinese abducted the Śri Lankan king and took him forcibly to the emperor in Nanjing, but then returned him, along with the most holy relic in the island, the Sacred Tooth of Buddha. This resulted in a Chinese claim of sovereignty over Śri Lanka, which was actually respected through payment of tribute by the Śri Lankans until 1459.

Despite their apparent success, such imperialist initiatives ceased abruptly after Zheng-He’s final voyage, and were never renewed. No one really knows why. China’s foreign policy returned to its characteristic inward-looking and defensive stance.

Nevertheless, as seen above (‘Beyond the southern sea’, p. 146), Chinese expatriates have given China, and the Chinese, a bridgehead into South-East Asia which its government never looked for—and indeed discouraged over many centuries. Now, in all the major countries of South-East Asia, Chinese-language communities are the principal source of investment capital.

Zheng-He tablet

In the Philippines, the overseas Chinese make up 1% of the country’s population, but control over half of the stock market. In Indonesia the proportions are 4% and 75% respectively, in Malaysia 32% and 60%. In Thailand the overseas Chinese account for at least half of the wealth…According to one estimate, the 51 million overseas Chinese control an economy worth $700 billion—roughly the same size as the 1.2 billion mainlanders.

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Growing Chinese-dominated businesses will have the opportunity of communicating with one another in Chinese, whether Mandarin or Southern Min; and so for the first time the Chinese language has potential for expansion outside the mainland. China itself is no longer keeping its distance from its fellow-Chinese who have chosen to make their living abroad, and it is possible that this new, more diplomatic face of China will become openly influential, perhaps even hegemonic.

China’s disciples

Although China was always reserved in accepting any influence from foreigners, its smaller neighbours who achieved some level of settled civilisation and independent statehood were nothing like so circumspect in their acceptance of influence from China. The states and peoples of Korea, Japan and Vietnam adopted this position. Each of them spoke a language unrelated to Chinese. Each of them had to resist sporadic Chinese attempts at conquest (though Japan suffered this only in the first flush of Mongol imperialism). But each first learnt to read and write not in their own languages but in classical Chinese. And each developed writing systems for their own languages by transforming or supplementing the use of Chinese characters.

Unlike Chinese with Sanskrit and Pali, they each adopted vocabulary from Chinese as it was, regardless of the fact that it did not fit well within the sound systems of their own languages. For them, after all, China represented the fountainhead of advanced civilisation.* (#litres_trial_promo) As a result their languages became full of Chinese loan vocabulary, modified for their own pronunciation, and have remained so ever since. They soon had as clear an appreciation of the meanings of the syllables they borrowed, and the characters associated with them, as the Chinese had themselves—indeed, perhaps clearer, since they also used the same characters to represent words in their own languages, related only by meaning.

This faithful adoption and incorporation of Chinese language has provided a useful time capsule of a kind for modern comparative research on the history of Chinese. These three ‘Sinoxenic’ dialects, Sino-Korean, Sino-Japanese, Sino-Vietnamese, are made up of syllables and words borrowed from Chinese. They are so complete that it is possible to use them to read out whole texts in wényán. As such, they have preserved an echo of Chinese as it was pronounced when the words were borrowed. In fact, in the case of Japanese—complex as ever—there are three distinct echoes: go-on, kan-on and tō-on, depending on whether the word was borrowed in the sixth century, the eighth century or early in the second millennium. So the Mandarin word nèi, ‘within’, written

, is now noi, pronounced in the sixth tone in Vietnamese, nae in Korean and dai or nai in Japanese. These antiquated styles proved vital when in 1954 the Swedish scholar Bernhard Karlgren came up with a reconstruction of the sounds of seventh-century Chinese.

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This avid cultural discipleship of its neighbours could be considered a major secondary spread of the Chinese language. It is often compared to the role of Latin within English and other modern European languages, or Arabic within Persian and Turkish, but it is really more comparable with the fundamental role of Sumerian within Akkadian. Chinese was a language quite unrelated to its disciple languages, and totally unlike them structurally. Nevertheless, its writing system became the root of their literacy, its words became inescapable for any sort of educated discourse, and its literature was adopted as the foundation for their own education system.

With their neighbours so in awe of them, it must have been hard for the Chinese to see their superiority as anything but a universal, objective fact.

Coping with invasions: Egyptian undercut

Foreigners from the desert have become people everywhere…Indeed, the desert is spread throughout the land. The cultivated districts are destroyed. Barbarians from outside have come to Egypt…There are really no people anywhere…

Admonitions of Ipuwer, lines i.5, iii.1ff. (Egyptian, late third millennium BC)

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This is from a pessimistic analysis of Egyptian society, which became a literary classic. (The one surviving manuscript was copied out some thousand years after the text was written.) It shows that even early in its recorded history conservatives were bewailing barbarian influxes into Egypt, which as they saw it disrupted the social order: ‘Serfs have become owners…She who looked at her face in the water is now the owner of a mirror…’ The word for barbarian is pīdjeti, ‘bowman’, bringing his desert home (Rswt) with him, and pointedly contrasted with real people, proper Egyptians.

This text pre-dates any foreign incursions into Egypt that we know about, but evidently the immigrant, particularly unwelcome if he was a social success, was already a stock figure. Yet this ancient Egyptian insularity is telling us more about perennial attitudes than any actual crisis for patriots: the persistence of the Egyptian language shows that the country was able to absorb all the foreign immigration of the following two millennia without losing its central character and traditions.

It is an interesting feature of Egyptian history that, until the advent of the Muslims, they suffered no overwhelming nomadic invasions comparable to the coming of the Amorites and Aramaeans to Mesopotamia. Yet we know that Libyan immigration was significant over many centuries, and among Egyptian dynasties at least the Hyksos kings and the Kushites were foreigners who installed themselves by force. Why, then, so little effect on Egypt’s language and culture? Part of the reason must have been the high density of the Egyptians on the ground (pace Ipuwer): there were so many of them, benefiting from the bounty of the Nile, that interlopers were doomed to merge.

And so despite the incursions, and the splits and discontinuities in the dynastic tradition, Egypt remained true to its religion, and the concept of a pharaoh ruling through maR ‘at.

But invasions ultimately did undo the Egyptian language in its homeland: after all, Egypt is today a predominantly Muslim country with a Christian minority, everyone speaking Arabic. How did Egyptian finally come to lose its grip on its speakers?

First of all, there must have been a progressive weakening and dilution of the Egyptian-speaking part of the population. It gradually became a highly multilingual society. Egypt, after all, underwent many invasions in its last five hundred years of independent existence, at the hands of Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and Romans. In the Hellenistic period (332–30 BC) there was also a major influx of Jews, whose major lingua franca was Greek. None of these brought a language that was to achieve full vernacular status in Egypt. But as we have seen, the Aramaic associated with the Assyrians and the Persians did spread within Egyptian society beyond the official sphere, and each of these succeeding powers brought in and fostered new communities that would have spoken something other than Egyptian.

Nevertheless, when Arabs in the first flush of Islam took possession of the country in the mid-seventh century AD, Egyptian was still the principal language spoken in its streets and fields.

The Arabs were not the first force of nomads to penetrate Egypt: the Libyans, and perhaps the Hyksos, had achieved this long before in the second millennium, and there may have been many other smaller incursions over the three poorly documented Intermediate Periods of Egyptian history. The Arabs were not the first power to use a foreign language for purposes of government: all of the Persians, Greeks and Romans had done this. The Arabs were not the first substantial power with a centre abroad to take possession of Egypt, and rule it as a colony: this had been done before for two centuries by the Persians, and for seven centuries by the Romans. The Arabs were not even the first to introduce a new religion: this had been successfully attempted by the Christians in the Roman period.

Why, then, was Arabic the first language successfully to replace Egyptian in its home country? The answer must lie in the combination of all these circumstances. Egyptian’s strengths were subverted one by one.

First the Assyrian and Babylonian wars in Palestine created a large Aramaic-speaking émigré community in the Delta area. This would have been the end of Egyptian’s language monopoly in the country, not very significant in itself. But then the country was penetrated by numerous business-minded Greeks, brought in by the Saite dynasty to buttress an alliance against Near Eastern powers, and granted their own, Greek-speaking, entrepôt in Naucratis in the Delta. Egypt was now very much a multilingual society, with foreigners’ languages more and more associated with higher prestige. The Persian conquest, and a succession of foreign rulers from Persia and then (after Alexander) Greece, meant that now higher-level administration began to be conducted in a language foreign to Egypt: in Aramaic for two hundred years, and then in Greek for a millennium.* (#litres_trial_promo)

Linguistically, not much would have changed when the Romans unseated the Greeks in 30 BC, other than a small influx of Latin speakers, principally soldiers. But this change of government was to prove the profoundest turning point for the fate of the language: Egypt was no longer to be governed by its own kings in its own interest, but by provincial governors as a useful bread basket for Rome, and (increasingly) a destination for rich tourists.

What all the invasions had in common was the fact that they were not nomadic movements: they were military affairs conducted by well-organised armies in pursuit of commanders’ global political aims. The point in controlling Egypt was to be associated with its ancient glory, and to appropriate its present agricultural wealth. Otherwise, Egypt was to be kept true to its traditions, and so the only population movements were movements of elites, and small groups such as the Jews. Egyptian civilisation had, however, become a hollow show. There was no longer any pharaoh to hold the country through maR ‘at and perform the sacrifices, unless the Roman emperor happened to be visiting, and by the third century AD even this pretence had been abandoned.

The one elite activity retained by Egyptians was religion, and the language provided a link between its priests and the common people. Nevertheless, after three centuries of Roman rule even this link was to weaken. The local Christian community had grown, first in the face of Roman persecution, and then with official support, adopting Egyptian rather than Greek as its language. In this way, it provided a new focus, of a spiritual kind, for Egyptian loyalty. But its growing strength was characteristically marked with intolerance, particularly towards the ancient religion. How were the Christians to know that in destroying it, they were also pruning away the deepest roots that anchored and sustained their separate identity? By the fourth century AD, Egypt had become a Christian country whose populace spoke Egyptian, but whose administration and cultural life were conducted in Greek. It was still true that Egyptian’s one elite activity was religion, but now this was the local version of the Christian faith.

In 641, when political control moved to Arabic speakers, there was no space left for the elite activities in Greek. They soon withered, although some formal use of Greek continued for over a century. Religion was to yield much more slowly. But this was not just another political conquest: Islam, unlike Alexander and Augustus Caesar, aspired to win over all. When it did, the last motive for retaining Egyptian was removed: converts moved into a new confessional community, Arabic-speaking and cosmopolitan. Egyptian was left as the language of liturgy for those who were determined to hang on to their Christian faith, a gradually shrinking minority.

Even in hindsight, it is difficult to say whether Christianity was more of a blessing or a bane to Egyptian. It provided a strong ritual focus for the Egyptian-speaking community under Roman secular rule; but it was militant in cutting the links the language had had with its national pagan past. It provided a new synthetic identity, that of ‘Egyptian Christian’ or Copt, to replace the ancient one, an identity that was to last for many centuries, and for a small minority even until the present day. But the theological motivation for a separate Egyptian sect of Christianity, promoted as a universal faith, was nil. Egyptian was correspondingly weaker when it faced the challenging embrace of the Arabic-speaking community: what ground was there to maintain their Egyptian identity when the gods and rituals of the land of Egypt had all been long forgotten?

Ultimately, Egyptian could not sustain itself when it ceased to be a majority language in its one and only environment, the land of Egypt. The language, like the pharaonic religion, had been a symbol of Egyptian identity. Egyptian could survive a government speaking a foreign language, as long as its religion was based in Egypt. It could not survive a foreign government and a truly cosmopolitan religion, for its speakers had nothing national left as a focus for their identity. They might as well become Arab Muslims, just like all the rest.

Coping with invasions: Chinese unsettled

Recognised Chinese strategies for border management