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

Despite their many pretensions, their cultural fertility and sometimes truly universal power, they have left no heirs. Something of this was foreseen by at least one of their own writers:

      Servant, listen to me.

      Yes, master, yes.

      I will benefit my country.

      So do, master, do.

      The man who benefits his country

      has his good deeds set down in the [record] of Marduk.

      No, servant, I will not benefit my country.

      Do not do it, master, do not.

      Go up to the ancient ruin heaps and walk around; look at the skulls of the lowly and the great. Which belongs to one who did evil, and which to one who did good?

      from ‘The Dialogue of Pessimism’, Akkadian²

      But perhaps it is a little harsh to weigh up the persistence of political achievements after a gap of two to four millennia. Some of their works really did defy the ages. It was here that writing was invented, and developed from a medium for taking notes into the basis for a full, explicit record of human life and thought; as a lucky complement to this, a plentiful and non-biodegradable material had been adopted to write on, patties of river clay, rolled out, inscribed, and sometimes baked hard. As a result we can trace not just the broad outlines of events, but the personalities and even the diplomatic dialogue of royal families, the myths and rituals of the peoples’ gods as well as their images, the laws under which they lived and the love songs they sang, and above all their multifarious languages.

      This last gift is a particular godsend of the last two hundred years of archaeology, since among the peoples of the area only the Hebrews on the western margin and the Iranians on the east have texts and cultural traditions that have survived to modern times. Yet their scriptures, the Old Testament and the Zend-Avesta, supplemented by the hearsay of bystanders such as the Greek Herodotus—all that was available to eighteenth-century scholars—give a very partial view, and that only of the latter stages of what was done, with no sense at all of what was said by those who did it.

      Without nineteenth-century Europe’s discovery that it could do historical research through digging, and the novel skills of decipherment and language reconstruction then heroically applied to what was unearthed, we should know nothing at all of the founding cities in Sumer and Elam, the steadily expanding might of Urartu from the Caucasus, or the pre-eminence of Hittites in what is now Turkey. Each of these groups spoke a language quite unrelated to that of its neighbours, hinting at radically different origins, and a wealth of unknown stories in their even more remote past. This fact of different languages amazingly shines through the single script that so many of them used, based on patterns of wedge-shaped marks, even though it was originally designed to represent the meanings of words rather than how they sounded.

       Six languages written in cuneiform—

       Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, Hurrian, Urartian, Hittite

      This is a region of so many world firsts for linguistic innovation. Unlike Egypt, China or India, its cities and states had always been consciously multilingual, whether for communication with neighbours who spoke different languages, or because their histories had made them adopt a foreign language to dignify court, religion or commerce. This is the area where we find the first conscious use of a classical language; but also, by contrast, the first generalised use of a totally foreign language for convenience in communication, as a lingua franca, an early apparent triumph of diplomatic pragmatism over national sentiment.

      This area contains the site of the earliest known writing, in the lower reaches of the Euphrates valley. But in its western zone, in the coastal cities of Syria, it was also the first to make the radical simplification from hieroglyphs that denoted words and syllables to a short alphabet that represented simple sounds. The political effects of this were massive. For the first time, literacy could spread beyond the aristocratic scribal class, the people who had leisure in childhood to learn the old, complicated, system; positions of power and influence throughout the Assyrian empire were then opened to a wider social range.

      The area also contains the first known museums and libraries, often centralised, multilingual institutions of the state. But by an irony of fate which has favoured the memory of this clay-based society, its documents were best preserved by firing, most simply through conflagrations in the buildings in which they were held, a circumstance that was not uncommon in its tempestuous history. These catastrophes were miracles of conservation, archiving whole libraries in situ, on occasion with even their classification intact, and have materially helped the rapid reading of much unknown history in our era.

      Not all the states of the area stayed focused within the Fertile Crescent, the zone of well-watered land that runs from the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates up round the southern slopes of the Taurus mountains and down the Mediterranean coasts of Syria and Palestine. From the western coast of Palestine, the cities of Phoenicia sent trading expeditions far and wide, mostly within the Mediterranean. One result was the foundation of Carthage, and hence the world’s first colonial empire, precursor of the kind of institution that has made English a global language. Others were the first circumnavigation of Africa (on behalf of the Egyptian pharaoh), and the discovery of navigable routes to Britain for tin, and the Baltic Sea for amber. On the way, the Phoenicians spread the practice of alphabetic writing throughout their network of trading emporia, providing perhaps the most important single key to unlock the progress of their great rivals, the Greeks and the Romans, who would ultimately supplant them as masters of the Mediterranean.

      The best word for this Middle Eastern society is cosmopolitan, citizens of the world, but its world was never a sheltered one. Good communications and absence of natural borders made it difficult for any culture to hold power stably. We find a succession of kingdoms coming from every different direction, and (it turns out) many different language families, to seize control of the central area that is modern Iraq. After three thousand documented years of shifting power balances within the region, control was yielded to groups based far away, the Greeks and later the Romans from the west, then the Parthians from the north-eastern corner of Iran in the east. But these foreign powers were no more effective in achieving stability: Arabs, Mongols and Turks have succeeded one another through the centuries of the modern era, with the twentieth century from start to finish being a particularly bitterly contested period in its history.

       Three sisters who span the history of 4500 years

      The only stability this society has enjoyed has been in the substance of its ruling language. Akkadian, the language spoken by Sargon I, the first Assyrian king in 2300 BC, is a close relative of the Arabic spoken by his successor in this same land, Saddam Hussein, in AD 2000; another close relative, the Middle East’s old lingua franca, Aramaic, bridges the gap between the decline of Akkadian around 600 BC and the onset of Arabic with the Muslims around AD 600. They are all sister languages within the very close Semitic family.*

      They have many distinctive points in common. They have consonants pronounced with constriction of the throat (said to be glottalised or pharyngealised). Feminine words end in -at. There are only two or three cases in noun inflexion; there is an ending in -ī to make adjectives, and a prefix m- to make nouns; there is distinction in verbal forms between dynamic and stative tenses—dynamic have prefixes to mark the persons, but stative have suffixes. Above all, Semitic languages are highly inflected, using a distinctive system

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