Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Nicholas Ostler

Greek made little headway with the general public against Aramaic; but certain local groups, such as long-distance merchants, and surprisingly the Jews resident in Alexandria in Egypt, seem to have taken it up.

      The advent of the Romans in the west, and the Parthians in the east, in the middle of the second century bc, meant that Greek was challenged. It responded in different ways. To Latin, it yielded legal and military uses, but very little else, so that Syria, Palestine and Egypt found themselves now areas where three languages or more were in contention. But before Parthian, which was a close relative of Persian (and whose speakers shared allegiance to the Zoroastrian scriptures, the Avesta), Greek was effectively eliminated, while Aramaic had something of a resurgence at least as a written language. Its use went on to inspire all but one of the writing systems henceforth used for the Iranian languages, Parthian and Persian (Pahlavi) in the west, Khwarezmian, Sogdian and the Scythian languages Śaka and Ossetic in the east, as well as for the Avesta scriptures themselves.*

      Aramaic was by now an official language nowhere, and a majoritycommunity language only in the Fertile Crescent. Nevertheless, it remained the predominant language over this large area for almost a thousand years until the seventh century ad, when a completely new language overwhelmed it.

      This was Arabic, brought with Islamic inspiration and a fervent will by the early converts of the prophet Mu

ammad. The progress of this virtually unknown

      language over two generations, so as to cover the whole Near East to the borders of Iran, and the whole of North Africa to the Pillars of Hercules, is one of the most striking events in history. But its progress was not totally irresistible: and it will be interesting, when we describe it in greater detail below, to ponder the linguistic obstacles that proved unyielding.

      This ends our exhaustingly rapid review of language leapfrog in West Asia, a linguistic zone which ultimately expanded to take in most of North Africa. We can now slow down a little, and look more closely at some of the individual languages: many were unique pioneers in the known language history of the world.

       Sumerian—the first classical language: Life after death

      Father Enki answers Ninshubur:

      ‘What has happened to my daughter! I am troubled,

      What has happened to Inanna! I am troubled,

      What has happened to the queen of all the lands! I am troubled,

      What has happened to the hierodule of heaven! I am troubled.’

      From his fingernail he brought forth dirt, fashioned the kurgarru,

      From his other fingernail he brought forth dirt, fashioned the kalaturru.

      To the kurgarru he gave the food of life.

      To the kalaturru he gave the water of life.

      Father Enki says to the kalaturru and kurgarru:…

      ‘Sixty times the food of life, sixty times the water of life, sprinkle upon it,

      Surely Inanna will arise.’⁸

      Sumerian knows better than any the tantalising evanescence of life and fame for a language. All knowledge of this language had been lost for almost two thousand years when the royal library of the ancient Assyrian capital, Nineveh, was excavated in 1845, and it turned out that the earliest documents were written in a language older than Akkadian, and so different from it that the Assyrians of the seventh century BC had approached it armed with a student’s panoply of bilingual dictionaries, grammars and parallel texts. Nothing in the Greek or biblical record of Mesopotamia had prepared the new researchers to expect such an alien foundation for this civilisation; the majority of the documents after all were written in a language reassuringly similar to Hebrew and Aramaic. Whatever had survived down the ages of the greatness of Nineveh and Babylon, the linguistic basis of their achievements had been totally effaced.

      Sumerian, the original speech of šumer, as they called the southernmost part of Mesopotamia, had in fact already been dead for another 1300 years when those documents from Sennacherib’s library were written. But it turned out that the only way to understand Akkadian cuneiform writing was to see it as an attempt to reinterpret a sign system that had been designed for Sumerian use. The intricacy, and probably the prestige, of the early Sumerian writing had been such that any outsiders who wanted to adopt it for their own language had largely had to take the Sumerian language with it.

      This was not too big a problem in cases where signs had a clear meaning: signs that stood for Sumerian words were just given new pronunciations, and read as the corresponding words in Akkadian. But Akkadian was a very different language from Sumerian, both in phonetics and in the structure of its words. Since no new signs were introduced for Akkadian, these differences largely had to be ignored: in effect, Akkadian speakers resigned themselves to writing their Akkadian as it might be produced by someone with a heavy Sumerian accent. Sumerian signs that were read phonetically went on being read as they were in Sumerian, but put together to approximate Akkadian words; and where Akkadian had sounds that were not used in Sumerian, they simply made do with whatever was closest.

      So Sumerian survived its death as a living language in at least two ways. It lived on as a classical language, its great literary works canonised and quoted by every succeeding generation of cuneiform scribes. But it also lived on as an imposed constraint on the expression of Akkadian, and indeed any subsequent language that aspired to use the full cuneiform system of writing, as Elamite, Hurrian, Luwian, Hittite and Urartian were to do, over the next two millennia. It is as if modern western European languages were condemned to be written as closely as possible to Latin, with a smattering of phonetic annotations to show how the time-honoured Roman spellings should be pronounced to give a meaningful utterance in Dutch, Irish, French or English.*

      The origin of Sumerian is obscure; only some Georgians claim that their language is related,⁹ but the claim has not been widely accepted. Whatever their previous history, there was evidently a lively set of communities active in southern Mesopotamia from the fourth millennium BC, absorbing the gains from the then recent institutionalisation of agriculture, and establishing the first cities, which seem first of all to have been collectives each holding all

      their goods in the name of a presiding deity, with effective managerial power in the hands of the priesthood. The potter’s wheel, the swing-plough and the sail all came into use, and a beginning was made in working gold, silver and bronze. Since pictograms, and their development into cuneiform writing, were invented in this period, this gives us our first direct testimony of the language history of the world. It seems that commercial uses came first: impressions of symbols on clay began as convenient substitutes for sets of clay tokens, used for inventories and contracts.¹⁰

      The unprecedented riches and cultural brilliance of the city-states in thirdmillennium Sumer had soon attracted unwelcome attention from the north, resulting in a hostile takeover and political consolidation under the king of Akkad. The result of Sargon’s invasion in the twenty-fourth century, and the five generations of Akkadian dominance that followed, must have been much greater contact between the Sumerian and Akkadian languages. Sumerian–Akkadian bilingualism would have become common in the elite, and one can see evidence of this at the highest level, since Sargon’s daughter Enheduanna is supposed to have composed two cycles of Sumerian hymns, and the most famous (to Inanna) has been found in some fifty copies.¹¹

      This participation by women, especially princesses and priestesses, in Sumerian literature was not uncommon. They wrote funeral hymns, letters and especially love songs.

      Thy city lifts its hand like a cripple,