Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

But it was in the cultural sphere that the Aramaic speakers brought their greatest surprise. They did assimilate largely to Akkadian culture, certainly. But there was one crucial respect in which they did not, the epoch-making one of language technology. With Aramaic came a new tradition of writing, which used an alphabetic script. Along with this revolution in language representation came new writing materials: people wrote their notes, and increasingly their formal records and literary texts, on new media, sheets of papyrus or leather.

These changes went to the heart of Assyrian and Babylonian culture; so much so that the traditional view has been that it explains the triumph of Aramaic as a language. So Georges Roux, for example, writes: ‘Yet to these barbaric Aramaeans befell the privilege of imposing their language upon the entire Near East. They owed it partly to the sheer weight of their number and partly to the fact that they adopted, instead of the cumbersome cuneiform writing, the Phoenician alphabet slightly modified, and carried everywhere with them the simple, practical script of the future.’

(#litres_trial_promo) And John Sawyer: ‘The success of Aramaic was undoubtedly due in the main to the fact that it was written in a relatively easy alphabetical script.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

This cannot be right. Writing systems, after all, exist to record what people say, not vice versa. There is no other case in history of a change in writing technology inducing a change in popular speech. And even if it were possible, it is particularly unlikely in a society like the Assyrian empire, where a vanishingly small portion of the population were literate. The real significance of the change in writing system that came with the Aramaic is to give an extra dimension to the Aramaic paradox: how could a mobile, and politically subservient, group such as the Aramaeans not only spread its language but also get its writing system accepted among its cultural and political masters, the Assyrians and Babylonians?

The answer lies in an unexpected effect of Assyrian military policy.

We have already noted the first hostile contacts between the Aramaean nomads and the Assyrians, at the end of the twelfth century. The Aramaeans, coming in from the wilderness of northern Syria, were able, presumably by force of arms, to settle all over the inhabited parts of that country. They did not limit themselves to the area of Damascus, but spread out north, south and, significantly, to the east. The whole area of the upper reaches of the Euphrates between the rivers Balikh and Khabur became known as Aram Naharaim, ‘Aram of the Rivers’. Their progress southward towards Babylon was steady: they smashed the temple of Shamash in Sippar in the middle of the eleventh century, and by the early tenth century were sufficiently settled around Babylon to cut it off from its suburb Barsippa, and so prevent the proper celebration of New Year Festival, which required the idols of Marduk and Nabu to process to and from Babylon. Meanwhile, in the north, Assyrian resistance proved equally unable to stop their advance, and by the beginning of the ninth century they were on the banks of the Tigris itself.

The first successful resistance came from the Assyrian king Adad-nirâri (911–891 BC), who drove the Aramaeans out of the Tigris valley and the Kashiari mountains to the north. Thereafter, the Assyrian kings began a policy of annual campaigns against one or other of their neighbours, a policy of unrestrained aggression which lasted over 150 years, pausing only when the aggression turned inward, during the major civil wars of 827–811 and 754–745. Within a hundred years the whole Fertile Crescent was under their control, together with southern Anatolia as far as Tarsus, and large swathes of Elam in the east. Farther afield, they undertook a punitive expedition deep into Urartu (eastern Anatolia) and even a brief, but unsustainable, invasion of Egypt.

Truly these were glory days for Assyria, but that seems to have been the sole point of these wars: after a victory, a ruinous demand for tribute was imposed on the defeated city or tribe. There is no evidence, in Assyrian business correspondence or the archaeological record, of any subsequent attempt to spread Assyrian culture thereafter, or even to establish the ruling caste on a wider basis. Wealth was transferred one way, and at the point of a sword. From Tiglath-Pileser III (744–727) to Sennacherib (704–681), a new tactic was added: vast numbers of the conquered populations were led off to some other distant part of the empire. Estimates attribute thirty-seven deportations to Tiglath-Pileser III (totalling 368,543 people), thirty-eight to Sargon II (totalling 217,635), twenty to Sennacherib (totalling 408,150). All in all, the Assyrians claimed to have displaced some 4.5 million persons over three centuries.

(#litres_trial_promo)

A majority of these deportations would have involved Aramaic speakers, although the most famous, carried out by Sargon II against Samaria, capital of Israel, in 721 BC, probably involved speakers of Hebrew:

At the beginning of my rule, I took the town of the Samarians for the god... who let me achieve this triumph. I led away as prisoners 27,290 inhabitants of it and equipped from among them soldiers to man 50 chariots for my royal corps... The town I rebuilt better than it was before and settled therein people from countries which I myself had conquered. I placed an officer of mine as governor over them and imposed upon them tribute as for Assyrian citizens.

(#litres_trial_promo)

The Hebrew scriptures (2 Kings xvii.6, 24) give more details of where the Israelite exiles were sent (including Aram Naharaim on the Khabur river, and the north-eastern extremity of the empire in Media), and of who were sent to replace them. (They included some Babylonians.)

Now and then, correspondence gives an insight into how these deportees were viewed when they arrived in Mesopotamia.

(#litres_trial_promo) A letter to the king contrasts qinnāte ša Ninua labīrūti, ‘old-time families of Nineveh’, with nasi’ānni, ‘social upstarts’, and šaglūti, ‘deportees’, itself perhaps a pun on šaklūti, ‘ignorants’. But it is clear that people with western Semitic names were often entrusted with significant responsibility.

This scattering of Assyria’s subject peoples could be seen as a shrewd policy to unify the diverse populations of the empire by cutting them off from their traditions—an imposed ‘melting pot’ solution.

(#litres_trial_promo) All deportees, as the above inscription mentioned, are to be ‘regarded as Assyrians’; as such they were deemed to have a duty to palā ili u šarri, ‘to fear God and King’.

Tending in the same direction was another new policy to buttress imperial unity, the recruitment of a royal guard, the kisir šarruti. This was drawn from non-Mesopotamian provinces, supplementing the more feudally organised Assyrian troops. In fact, bearers of western Semitic names crop up quite commonly as Assyrian army officers. Particularly famous was the force of Itu ’aia, made up of Aramaeans of the Itu ’tribe, which turns up at many of the hot spots, on duty to crush dissent within Babylonian provinces.

(#litres_trial_promo)

The situation in the Fertile Crescent, then, over the period of the eleventh to the eighth century BC, was one of an extreme flux of populations. Aramaeans had settled themselves over the whole area in the earlier two centuries, and although they had been under more effective state control in the latter two, Assyrian policy had served not to push them back but to distribute them even more widely, either as forced migrants, or as members of the armed forces. Since the Aramaeans were the largest group being scattered in this way, when other western Semites, such as Israelites or Phoenicians, found themselves transplanted, they could tend to find themselves speaking more and more like their new neighbours.* (#litres_trial_promo)

The Assyrians had therefore contrived to reinforce the spread of a new lingua franca across their domains, one that was not dependent on literacy or any shared educational tradition. Its effective usefulness would have increased as the Assyrian domain was spread yet wider, and its population of western Semitic speakers, predominantly Aramaic speakers, came to outnumber more and more the original population of Mesopotamia, who spoke Akkadian. The ruling class in the triad of capital cities, Asshur, Nineveh and Kalhu (Nimrud), maintained continuity, but elsewhere there was increasing social flux, and people had to make accommodations with the newcomers. In Babylon, particularly, this must have happened early on.

Nor were the newcomers handicapped by lack of the basic art of civilisation, literacy. Although the Aramaeans had appeared originally as nomads, presumed illiterate, they had even before the first millennium began taken over cities (most notably Damascus) and whole countries (the last Hittite kingdom, its capital at modern Zincirli, in the Turkish province still known as Hatay). Many of them would have come to know the value of writing, and since the cities they knew were of the west, the writing system they would have learnt was simple and alphabetic.

As they moved eastward, we can only presume that alphabetic literacy spread with at least some of the Aramaeans, since the new materials, ink and papyrus or leather, are biodegradable, and do not survive in the archaeological record. In fact, the earliest inscriptions in Aramaic, not clearly distinguishable from Canaanite languages at this time, are from the middle of the ninth century.

(#litres_trial_promo) The short-term practical advantages of the new media (less bulk, greater capacity) must soon have made an impression. A new word for ‘scribe’ came into use in Akkadian, sēpiru, as opposed to the old upsarru, ‘tablet writer’, which went right back to the Sumerian word dubsar. Pictures of scribes at work from the mid-eighth century show them in pairs, one with a stylus and a tablet, the other with a pen and a sheet of papyrus or parchment. As with the onset of computers, good bureaucrats must have ensured that the old and the new coexisted for a long time: the ‘clay-free office’ did not happen in Assyria till the destruction of the empire by the Medes in 610 BC.* (#litres_trial_promo)

The net result seems to have been that spoken use of Akkadian receded before that of Aramaic with scarce a murmur of complaint. An officer in Ur does once ask permission to write to the king in Aramaic.

(#litres_trial_promo) But no pedantic or puristic murmur has yet been found in any Akkadian tablet. The closest we have is an exchange of correspondence between a scribe and King Sargon (721–705):

SCRIBE: If it please my Lord, I will write an [Aramaic] document.

SARGON: Why do you not write Akkadian?

(#litres_trial_promo)

Indeed, on the evidence of the pattern of words borrowed in Akkadian from Aramaic, as against those borrowed in the reverse direction, it has been claimed that Akkadian, by the time the changeover was taking place, was the less favoured language, with those who wrote it essentially thinking in Aramaic, while struggling (and failing) to put their Aramaic verbs out of their minds.

(#litres_trial_promo)

The triumph of Aramaic over Akkadian must be ascribed as one of practical utility over ancient prestige, but the utility came primarily from the fact that so many people already spoke it. The fact that its associated writing system was quicker and easier was an added bonus; if anything, it just removed one argument that might have made sections of the Aramaic-speaking population want to learn Akkadian too. After all, what was the point? One would never be accepted as anything other than šaglūti; and even the royal court was taking up Aramaic.

As once had Sumerian, so now Akkadian fell victim to a new language brought by nomads and newcomers; unstable bilingualism followed, together with the death of the older language.

In such times, the only argument for an education in Akkadian was to maintain the link with the literature of the previous two thousand years, and the traditions of grandeur associated with the great cities of Mesopotamia. It lived on in Babylon as a classical language for six hundred years after its probable death: not only did the last dynasty of Babylon (625–539 BC) use it for chronicles of their rule, despite being of Chaldaean (i.e. Aramaic) extraction, but foreign conquerors, the Persians Cyrus (557–529 BC) and Xerxes (485–465 BC) and even the Greek Antiochus Soter (280–261 BC), all left inscriptions in the royal language glorifying their own reigns. There was certainly a new and, some would say, barbarous resonance when a Greek monarch could write: ‘I am An-ti-’u-ku-us [Antiochus], the great king, the legitimate king, the king of the world, king of E [Babylon], king of all countries, the caretaker of the temples Esagila and Ezida, the first born of Si-lu-uk-ku [Seleucus], Ma-ak-ka-du-na-a-a [Macedonian], king of Babylon.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

But there were few who could still understand them.* (#litres_trial_promo)

Phoenician—commerce without culture: Canaan, and points west

Who was ever silenced like Tyre, surrounded by the sea?† (#litres_trial_promo)

Ezekiel xxvii.32

The Canaan sisters grew up together, but then set out on very different paths in life.

Phoenicia (not her real name, but one that recalls the lustrous colour for which she was famous* (#litres_trial_promo)) chose the high life, and became associated with jewellery, fine clothing and every form of luxury. She travelled extensively, became known and admired in all the best social circles, and was widely imitated for her sophisticated skills in communication. She surrounded herself with all the most creative, intelligent and wealthy people of her era, and as a skilled hostess put them in contact with one another. She also had a daughter, Elissa, who was not perhaps as brilliant or as versatile as her mother, but who set up her own household, and went on to expand her mother’s network, when Phoenicia’s own energies were waning.

The other sister, Judith, had an obscure and perhaps disreputable youth, but then settled down to a quiet life at home. She never ventured outside her own neighbourhood, contenting herself with domestic duties. For all her homeliness, many thought she had far too high an opinion of herself, and she had considerable difficulties with local bullies: occasionally she was attacked in her own home and dragged off screaming; ultimately she lost her home altogether. All she could do was try to survive wherever she was led, in a dogged but non-assertive way, relying above all on her memories of her home as she had once kept it, and her unswerving religious devotion. She had no children of her own, but now and then she acted as a foster mother, undiscouraged though she received little gratitude or loyalty from her charges.

The world reversed the fortunes of these two sisters. Despite Phoenicia’s glittering career, her enterprising nature and all her popularity, she quite suddenly disappeared, and among the people she had frequented, stimulated and dazzled for so long, she left no memory at all. Her daughter did perpetuate her memory, but in the end she did no better: she was mortally wounded by a rival, lost all her looks and wealth, and then wasted away to nothing.

Now it is as if Phoenicia and her daughter had never been. Yet Judith is still with us, often derided and dishonoured—especially by her foster children, who have been strangely resentful of her—but apparently as sturdy as ever. She has even, just recently, returned to her old home, and seems thereby to have gained a fresh lease of life.

This little parable points out the strange irony in the fates of the languages of the land of Canaan. Hebrew (often self-named as [y∂hūdīth], ‘she of Judah’) and Phoenician are two of the languages of ancient Canaan, the others being Ammonite, Moabite and Edomite, spoken east of the River Jordan. There was also Ugaritic, spoken on the coast north of Phoenicia. All may have begun as the languages of nomadic tribes in this area, marauding Habiru. But some settled on the coast of Lebanon. During the first millennium BC, their trading activities developed mightily, and their language, Phoenician, became much the most widely spoken of the group. Hebrew and the others, by contrast, never became major languages, being restricted to the south-west of Canaan, and that only in the first part of that millennium. In the sixth century BC, Hebrew was weakened, and probably finished as a vernacular, by virtue of the enforced exile of the Jews to Babylon, coinciding with the spread of Aramaic all over the Babylonian empire.

Phoenician appears to have gone on being spoken on the coast of Lebanon until the first century BC (where it was replaced by Aramaic), and in North Africa until at least the fifth century AD. But although Hebrew had ceased to be spoken many centuries before this, its written and ritual use by Jews as the sacred language of Judaism had never lapsed. This underground existence was protected by a tradition of teaching in schools, and persistent reading, exposition and copying of the Jewish texts, of which the Bible’s ‘Old Testament’ is quite a small part.* (#litres_trial_promo)

The Canaanite languages are very much typical Semitic languages. One distinctive property they all have in common is a tendency to round their long A sound: hence Hebrew š∂lōm for Arabic salām, ‘peace’. In Phoenician (and Punic) this tendency goes farther, with even short A rounded to ō, and long A even more rounded to ū: so the Phoenician for eternity is ‘ūlōm (versus Hebrew ‘ōlām, Aramaic ‘āl∂m), and their chief magistrates hold the title sūfet, equivalent to Hebrew šōet, the word for ‘judge’ in the Old Testament. The

evidence for Phoenician vowels is necessarily indirect, since their writing system marked consonants only.

Beyond its homeland in Lebanon, Phoenician inscriptions are found in Egypt, in southern Anatolia, in Cyprus, North Africa, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia and the south of Spain. These far-flung inscriptions tend to be in the dialect of Phoenician associated with the neighbouring cities of Tyre and Sidon, and Tyre is usually quoted as the mother city of Phoenician settlements abroad. In particular, it is the legendary original home of Elissa, or Dido, the Phoenician princess who is said to have founded Carthage (Phoenician qart hadašt, ‘new city’). Many of the inscriptions are bilingual, showing active relations with Luwians, Greeks, Cypriots and ultimately Romans.