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

from a family distributed between Luxor and Syene (Aswan) up and down the Nile, and at Syene the archives of the Jewish military garrison, including a fair number of legal documents and business letters to Jerusalem. This also includes the proverbs of the sage Ahiqar, a legendary counsellor at the court of the Assyrian kings Sennacherib and Esarhaddon in the early seventh century BC, one of which appears as epigraph to the second section of this chapter. Having experience of life at court, he is particularly concerned about the power of leaks and malicious gossip:

      My son,

      Chatter not overmuch so that thou speak out every word that come to thy mind; for men’s eyes and ears are everywhere trained upon thy mouth. Beware lest it be thy undoing. More than all watchfulness watch thy mouth, and over what thou hearest harden thy heart.

      For a word is a bird: once released no man can recapture it. First count the secrets of thy mouth: then bring out thy words by number. For the instruction of a mouth is stronger than the instruction of war.

      Treat not lightly the word of a king: let it be healing for thy flesh...⁵²

      The letters reveal that some Jews, as Jeremiah had lamented, were indeed on pretty familiar terms with alien gods. Consider this from a valet, written on a piece of broken pottery: ‘To my lord Micaiah, your servant Giddel. I send you welfare and life. I bless you by Yaho [i.e. Yahweh] and Khnub [a local god]. Now send me the garment you are wearing and they will mend it. I send the note for your welfare.’⁵³

      Away to the north in Anatolia, languages spoken must have been at least as various as the coin legends; nevertheless, inscriptions in Greek, Lydian and Lycian have been found accompanied by translation in Aramaic, especially for monumental inscriptions of laws.

      The pervasiveness of Aramaic is also demonstrated at the opposite end of the empire by three propaganda inscriptions of the Indian emperor Aśoka (see Chapter 5, ‘Sanskrit in Indian life’, p. 187). These date from a later era, the third century BC, when Aramaic had already been supplanted by Greek as the official language of administration across Iran. Nevertheless, Aśoka still saw fit to put up these permanent exhortations to virtue—with vegetarianism specifically recommended—in Aramaic as well as Greek, three or four generations after the change.

      ... and abstains

      the King from animals and the rest still

      of men and all hunters and fishermen

      of the King have ceased hunting…

      And besides, as regards food, for our lord the King few [animals] are killed: seeing this, all men have ceased; even fish catchers, those people are under a prohibition...⁵⁴

      There have been three Aramaic inscriptions discovered so far in this border area, in Kandahar, in Laghman, east of Kabul (Lampāka),⁵⁵ and the academic centre of Taxila (Takaśila), all of which would have been in the Persian province claimed as Gandhara. In modern terms, they are on the borders of Afghanistan, but on its far borders abutting Pakistan, demonstrating the penetration of Aramaic to the very limits of Persian control and perhaps even beyond, presumably with some cultural momentum of its own.*

      When Aramaic came to the end of its glory, it was not through infiltration, as Aramaic had ended the long reign of Akkadian. It was through outright and sudden conquest.

      Five generations after the Persian kings Darius and Xerxes had tried and failed to end the independence of the Greek city-states across the Aegean (although they had quite easily tamed the Greek cities that bordered Anatolia), another power succeeded where Persia failed. Philip of Macedon reduced all of European Greece, claiming all the while to be a Greek himself. This claim, made on grounds of language and culture, is surprisingly difficult to substantiate, since hardly a word of the Macedonian language has survived.⁵⁶ But his son Alexander, perhaps with an aggression that stemmed from insecurity,† decided to demonstrate his belonging by undertaking to avenge the affront that the Greeks had suffered when the Persians tried to invade. (Not that this prevented him, after the reigning king of Persia had been assassinated by his own people, from claiming to the Persians that he was the rightful successor.)

      Within the ten years 333–323 BC he had succeeded totally. Although he had not campaigned in every province, the vast Persian empire, including its extremities in Egypt and Afghanistan, was now a possession of the royal house of Macedon. Macedonians stayed in control of the Persian and Mesopotamian part for almost two hundred years, yielding to Arsaces, first of the Parthians, only in 140 BC.

      It is likely that in this ‘Hellenistic’ period the Middle East was in fact governed in a mixture of languages, the new masters’ Greek competing with the old masters’ Aramaic. (See Chapter 6, ‘Kings of Asia: Greek spread through war’, p. 243.) Aramaic clearly held its ground far better in Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine, where it had at least five hundred more years of background than in Anatolia and Iran, where it had only been established as a language of government by the King of Kings’ fiat, a bare two hundred years before. In addition, after Alexander’s conquest, Greek settlement would have been much heavier in Anatolia, already surrounded as it was by Greek colonies on its coasts, than in Iran, far beyond the Taurus and Zagros mountains, even if Persia’s Royal Road from Sardis in Lydia to Persepolis meant that the area already enjoyed better communications than anywhere else in the known world.

      This led to rather different subsequent careers for Greek in these different parts of Alexander’s empire. Greek remained as no more than a lingua franca in the centre and east. The Greek administration here was ended by the rise of the Parthians (from eastern Iran, and speaking a language close to Persian) in the second century BC, and this put an end to official status for Greek. It seems that there may have been a return to a language situation rather like the early years of the Persian empire, with Aramaic continuing for all practical purposes in Mesopotamia, but a form of Persian now in use farther east.

      In the west, by contrast, Greek had fully replaced the previous languages (notably Lydian, Lycian and Aramaic). When the Romans took it over in the first century BC they kept Greek on as the de facto language of administration, insisting on Latin only in the courts and the army. (Educated Romans all knew Greek anyway.) This meant that Anatolia became almost monolingual in Greek, while in Syria and Palestine Greek was used to govern a public that still predominantly spoke Aramaic. In Egypt, the situation was complicated by the survival of the Egyptian language, as well as the extremely cosmopolitan society encouraged by the Ptolemies around their capital, Alexandria, where, for example, the Jewish community was largely Greek-speaking.

      The advent of the single language Greek across the Persian empire, a domain supposedly already unified under Aramaic, thus had a remarkable effect in bringing the linguistic differences to the surface.

      SECOND INTERLUDE: THE SHIELD OF FAITH

      Jesus of Nazareth spoke Aramaic, though not of the best, by the standards of his own people. His native Galilee was generally reckoned to speak a substandard variety, a ‘North Country’ accent to the ears of the educated of Jerusalem and Judaea; famously, his disciple Peter’s accent gave him away at a crucial moment, and even in the learned Talmud there is the occasional joke at the expense of Galilean pronunciation.*

      The language of the group that formed after Jesus’s death clearly was Aramaic; and Samaritan Christians