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

campaigns of the kings of Kussara. This, however, was already a distant memory by the time we find it described in the earliest chronicles of the Hittites themselves, written in the Nesas-Hattusas area about four hundred years later. And these, of course, are written in a cuneiform script, with copious use of Sumerian and Akkadian logograms, which itself derived from the Akkadian tradition.

      The Hittites provide just one example of how Akkadian was taken up by the literate class in surrounding states. In the second millennium, Akkadian was being taught and used in every capital city that surrounded Mesopotamia, essentially regardless of the ambient language. Just going by the documents so far found which date from the middle of the second millennium, we can see that the same Sumerian edubba system was being practised in Susa for Elamite speakers, in Nuzi (modern Yorgan Tepe near Kirkuk) for Hurrians, in Hattusas for Hittites and Luwians, in Alalah and Ugarit near the Mediterranean coast for speakers of other Semitic languages as well as Hurrian, and in Akhetaten (briefly the Egyptian capital) for Egyptians.

      The linguistic situations of the various nations were differently nuanced: in this period it seems that Elam, for example, had different segments of the population using predominantly either Akkadian (in the northern plain) or Elamite (in the mountainous south), while in Ugarit there was a much more general bilingualism, so that texts in Akkadian intended for home consumption may be tricked out with the odd explanatory gloss in Ugaritic.²² But whatever the home situation, the general practice seemed to be that Akkadian was used for international correspondence, and often for treaties.

      The classic demonstration of this is the Amarna correspondence, a cache of diplomatic letters from the fourteenth century BC, found on the site of the then Egyptian capital. There are 350 letters and attachments in this collection, and all but three are in Akkadian (two in Hittite and one in Hurrian).

      It is interesting to reflect on how Akkadian had achieved this role as an international lingua franca. The middle of the second millennium was not a glorious period for the speakers of Semitic languages. In 1400 BC Babylon had been firmly under Kassite control for two centuries, and Assyria in vassalage to the Mitanni for a century. In northern Syria, established Mitanni control was being disputed by the Hittites. And the rest of Palestine was a collection of vassal states under Egyptian sovereignty.

      It was not recent political influence, then, which made Akkadian the language of convenience at this time. The only explanation is a cultural one, and specifically the matter of literacy, and the culture of the scribal edubba.

      With the exception of Egypt, and its trading partners in Phoenicia, every one of the powers had become literate in the course of the previous millennium through absorbing the cuneiform culture of Sumer and Akkad. As we have seen, this writing system was extremely committed to its original languages, shot through with phonetic symbols that only made sense in terms of puns in Sumerian and Akkadian, and taught in practice through large-scale copying of the classics of Sumerian and Akkadian literature. Although Babylonia and Assyria aspired to be world empires—and both would see themselves at least once more as mistress of the whole Fertile Crescent—their cultural dominance was almost wholly a matter of having been the leaders in a shared language technology.

      The next, and last, great question in the history of Akkadian is why its dominance, and indeed its use, came to an end. One thing that the history of this language does teach is that the life and death of languages are in principle detached from the political fortunes of their associated states. For curiously, just as Akkadian had reached the height of its prestige and extension during a long eclipse of Assyro-Babylonian power, its decline began when the Assyrian empire was at its zenith.

      The paradox deepens the more closely it is considered. Not only was Akkadian, the language replaced, at the height of its political influence: its replacement language, Aramaic, had until recently been spoken mainly by nomads. These people could claim no cultural advantage, and were highly unlikely to set up a rival civilisation. The expectation would have been that, like the Kassites eight hundred years before in Babylon, Aramaic speakers would have been culturally and linguistically assimilated to the great Mesopotamian tradition. Similar things, after all, were to happen to others who burst in upon great empires—the Germans invading the Roman empire, or the Mongols the Chinese.

      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.’²³ 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.’²⁴

      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