I am perplexed at these things; I cannot tell what they mean.

from Ludlul Bel Nemeqi, 'I will Praise the Lord of Wisdom', Akkadian1 The names of civilisations that arose in the ancient Near East now ring with the note of remote antiquity. Three dozen and more are known that flourished in the three millennia from the start of records c.3300 BC until the invasion of Alexander in 330 BC, among them such powers as Babylon, a.s.syria, Phoenicia, Lydia and Persia. They bring to mind visions of oriental absolutism, breathtaking ruthlessness and gaudy magnificence. 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: arad mitanguranni annu beli annu umma usatu ana matia luppus kimi epus beli epus amelu sa usatam ana matisu ipus sakna usatu-su in kippat sa marduk e arad anaku usatamma ana matia ul epus la teppus beli la teppus ilima ina mui tillani labiruti itallak amur gulgulle sa arkuti u panuti ayyu bel lemuttima ayu bel usati 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' G.o.ds 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 G.o.dsend 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 Hitt.i.tes 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.

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 cla.s.sical 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 ma.s.sive. For the first time, literacy could spread beyond the aristocratic scribal cla.s.s, the people who had leisure in childhood to learn the old, complicated, system; positions of power and influence throughout the a.s.syrian empire were then opened to a wider social range.

The area also contains the first known museums and libraries, often centralised, multilingual inst.i.tutions of the state. But by an irony of fate which has favoured the memory of this clay-based society, its doc.u.ments were best preserved by firing, most simply through conflagrations in the buildings in which they were held, a circ.u.mstance that was not uncommon in its tempestuous history. These catastrophes were miracles of conservation, archiving whole libraries in situ, on occasion with even their cla.s.sification 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 inst.i.tution that has made English a global language. Others were the first circ.u.mnavigation 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 doc.u.mented 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 a.s.syrian 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 -i 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 in which the consonantal skeleton of the word has a meaning independent of the varying patterns of vowels and consonants that may come between them: to give the simplest of examples, in Akkadian, the root k-s-d, 'catch', can be discerned in kasadu, 'to attain, catch', ika.s.sadu, 'they were catching', kisidtu, 'booty', and kussudu, 'captured', just as s-p-r, 'order', is reflected in saparu, 'to send, rule, write', and sipirtu, 'mission, letter', and s-l-m, 'rest', in salamu, 'to be well', salimtu, 'peace', and sulmu, 'peace, greeting, rest, sunset'.

Besides covering the major languages of the ancient and modern Middle East, the Semitic group also takes in some of the most populous languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea, including Amharic, Tigre, Tigrinya and the ancient language of the Ethiopian Church, Ge'ez.

These Semitic languages in fact share most of these properties with a larger group, called Afro-Asiatic or Hamito-Semitic, which includes Egyptian, Berber and some language families spoken farther south, Cus.h.i.tic, Omotic and Chadic (including the now vast Hausa language). They are all spoken in northerly parts of Africa, and the usual a.s.sumption is that this is the primeval home of the Semitic languages too. There is in fact some indirect evidence of a ma.s.s movement of tribes at a prehistoric date, rather than simple diffusion of the languages among neighbours: in certain ways Akkadian and Ethiopic are more alike than their intervening Semitic cousins; and the rampant desertification of the Sahara c.3500 BC would have provided a fair motive to be moving out of North Africa.3 At any rate, by the time we first encounter them in their own historical record, about 2400 BC,* there are Semitic language speakers (and by the nature of the evidence, writers) in centres dotted along the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent, pretty much on the borders of modern Syria, from Ebla (60 kilometres south of Aleppo) through Nabada (Tell Beydar, 20 kilometres north of Al Hasake) and down to Mari on the Euphrates (near Abu Kamal) and Kish (15 kilometres due east of Babylon). (The names of the kings who ruled at Kish suggest that it was a mixed settlement of Semites with Sumerians.) All these communities were steadfastly using Sumerian logograms as the staple of their cuneiform script, but the language is discernibly Semitic, written with phonetic symbols to show the verb and noun endings and function words, and in a different word order from Sumerian. There are also bilingual school texts which specify how at least some of the Sumerian logograms should be p.r.o.nounced. The language of Ebla does not seem to be written very consistently, and is in general difficult to differentiate from early forms of Akkadian, occurring in Kish and down in Sumer after the conquests of Sargon I in the twenty-fourth century.

These conquests are the first historical evidence of political unification, but mostly they unified people who were already speaking closely related Semitic dialects. The language history of the Middle East opens therefore with its leading player already on stage, Semitic written in Sumerian cuneiform. We do not know how the Semitic speakers had got there, how their remarkably unified dialects (or languages) had spread out to cover the whole Fertile Crescent. On the map, the deserts of Syria and Arabia look like good central points from which to start an expansion-but they seem inconceivable as areas in which to bring up the necessary large surplus populations.

As one result of Semitic language persistence, it can be shown that counting to ten has hardly changed here in over four thousand years, or two hundred generations:

The story in brief: Language leapfrog.

'al thaswi la 'rabi yams ulidoni bars.

ki 'sbidathem priss.

Do not show an Arab the sea nor a Sidonian the desert; for their work is different.

Aramaic: Proverbs of Ahiqar, 1104.

The language history of the Near East-more objectively, of South-West Asia-does not need to be reconstructed: it is told in its own doc.u.ments, from the late fourth millennium BC. It is br.i.m.m.i.n.g with interesting details, especially with linguistic and cultural firsts, but there are so many twists and turns in a narrative that takes in five thousand years that it is hard to keep one's bearings. We shall start with a very brief run-through of the major players, from Sumerian to Arabic, situating them around the central area of the Fertile Crescent from Iraq to Palestine; then we return to look in more detail at their particular contributions to our understanding of languages through time.

The overall focus of the story is on its pulsating centre at the mouth of the Euphrates on the Persian Gulf. As the centuries roll by, the centre's influence expands, first north, then westward, and neighbouring peoples come to take an interest, creating new, and often stronger, centres of their own, until the story becomes a struggle between the contending influence (and languages) of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Iran and Syria; and the frame of reference has expanded to the borders of Greece and Egypt in the west, and Afghanistan and India in the east. The finale comes not once but twice, in two sweeping conquests that lead to linguistic cataclysm, first by Greek from the north, and then by Arabic from the south.

When the story opens, there are two cultures with the skill of writing, next door to each other in the upper reaches of the Persian Gulf: Sumer, the Biblical 'land of Shin'ar' at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and Elam, across the marshes to the east, between the Zagros mountains and the sea. Each was not so much a state as a gathering of towns and villages of people speaking a common language. The origins of Sumerian are quite unknown; Elamite, however, appears to be related to Dravidian, and so linked anciently with Brahui, still spoken by over 2 million in the west of Pakistan, and many more languages spoken in central and southern India.5 Both these cultures seem to have invented their writing systems independently, and approximately at the same time (around the thirty-first century BC). But Sumer was destined for a much more influential history than Elam. Elam did retain its language for over three thousand years (it was one of the three official media of the Persian empire in the late first millennium), yet already around 2400 Elamite is found written in Sumerian-style cuneiform, and its local script died out in the next couple of centuries. This cultural spread of Sumerian writing was actually occurring all over the Fertile Crescent: likewise by 2400 we find Sumerian words and cuneiform symbols common in inscriptions in Ebla, 1000 kilometres away on the Mediterranean coast of modern Syria. Eblaite was a Semitic language, like Akkadian, with a sound system and a morphological structure that, from a modern standpoint, makes Sumerian really quite awkward as a basis for writing: nevertheless the expressive power of Sumerian symbols was irresistible.

Politically, the boot was on the other foot. The Sumerians themselves were dominated a little later (2334-2200) by their Akkadian-speaking neighbours to the north when King Sargon-or more accurately Sarrukin, 'the righteous king'-imposed himself. Although this Akkadian empire was overthrown after a few generations by invaders from Qutium in the north-east, and the Sumerians, spearheaded by the city of Ur, were able eighty years later to reclaim their independence, southern Mesopotamia was henceforth known to all under the joint name of 'the land of Sumer and Akkad'.*

When at the end of the third millennium Ur, the greatest Sumerian city, fell to more Semitic speakers, this time nomadic Amorites from the north-west, a new pattern set in: for the next 1500 years the land was periodically unified under Akkadian-speaking dynasties ruling from Babylon in the south or a.s.syria in the north, only to have their power disrupted every few centuries by power struggles between them, or invasions from the west or east. The invasions, although they might last a long time, notably four hundred years after the Ka.s.sites took control of Babylon in 1570 BC, never had any great linguistic effect. Like the various Turks who would conquer north China, or the Germans who were to topple Roman control of western Europe, these were all invaders who acquiesced in their victims' languages. From about 2000 BC, Akkadian had become the only language spoken throughout the region. But Sumerian was not forgotten. It moved upmarket, and kept its influence in the written language. Babylon and a.s.syria went on for a millennium and a half as the two powers within Mesopotamia, competing often with ruthless savagery, but speaking dialects of the same language.

While Akkadian held the central area until the middle of the first millennium BC, it was surrounded to the east, north and west by unrelated languages. Hurrian, replaced later by 'Urartian' (whose name lives on in Mount Ararat), was the major language of the north, spoken from modern Armenia as far south as Kirkuk in modern Iraq. (Its surviving relatives, tiny languages such as Avar and Lezgian in the East Caucasian family, are still spoken on the western sh.o.r.es of the Caspian.) To the west of this, in the central plain of Anatolia, which is now Turkey, we see the first known Indo-Europeans, Hitt.i.tes, with their close relatives who spoke Luwian and Palaic.* The Hitt.i.tes, flourishing from the sixteenth to the thirteenth century BC, created a ma.s.sively literate civilisation, and their royal library at Hattusas, discovered in modern Boaz Koy, 150 kilometres west of Ankara, contains materials not only in Hitt.i.te and Akkadian, but also in Hurrian, Luwian and Palaic, interspersed here and there with phrases in Hattic, Sumerian and the Indo-Aryan language of the Mitannian aristocracy. The Hitt.i.tes were often a threat to Sumer and Akkad, and it had been a swift Hitt.i.te invasion, not followed up, which had left Babylon open to the Ka.s.site takeover already mentioned. In the event, the Hitt.i.te empire collapsed about the end of the thirteenth century, but related languages lived on for many centuries, particularly Luwian, and farther to the west Lydian.

South of the Hitt.i.tes but due west of Sumer and Akkad, in modern Syria, the languages were Semitic, close relatives of Akkadian. We have seen that it was from this direction that the Amorite invasion came (named after the region Amurru, Akkadian for 'the west', in northern Syria), which had delivered the coup de grsce to Sumerian independence, and hence Sumerian as a spoken language, around 2000 BC.

There seems, in fact, to have been some fraternity among these cities of Semitic speech, from Ugarit (on the coast near Lataqieh) through Iamhad (Aleppo), Karkemish and Qatna in northern Syria to Mari on the Euphrates. Mari and Ugarit both left ma.s.sive libraries from the second millennium BC. But as to foreign influence in this period, there was a tendency here to look south towards the power centre in Egypt, rather than to their linguistic cousins in Mesopotamia. The Phoenician port city of Gubla (known to the Greeks later as Byblos) was growing rich on exporting timber, specifically the cedars of Lebanon, to the wood-starved Egyptians. The Amorite cities just mentioned all left quant.i.ties of royal vases, jewels and statues imported from Egypt. Farther south, in Palestine, the general level of wealth and urbanisation was lower, and marauding Habiru (known to the Egyptians as 'apiru) were a threat to more settled communities. Perhaps the ancestors of the nation later calling themselves 'ibri (Hebrews) were among them.

Throughout the second millennium BC, the land of Sumer and Akkad already enjoyed serious cultural prestige. This is clearly reflected in the spread of its cuneiform writing system to all its neighbours, including even Elam, which had independently developed its own alternative. Besides the script, its language, Akkadian, was in this period the lingua franca for diplomacy, even where the Babylonians or a.s.syrians were not a party to the matters under discussion.

But this favourable situation was ultimately upset by outside events: developments now occurred in the east, north and west which were to affect Mesopotamia, and its linguistic influence, profoundly.

At the end of the second millennium BC and the beginning of the first, new companies of Indo-Europeans were entering the northerly territory of Anatolia. They would have come from the Balkans, bringing speakers of Phrygian, and later Armenian, into the central and northern areas. They are known as Muski on the one occasion (1115 BC) when they broke through to confront the a.s.syrian ruler Tiglath Pileser I,* but otherwise they had little direct impact on Mesopotamia, largely shielded as it was by the buffer kingdom of the Urartians in the east of Anatolia.

In the east, at about the same time, there came another large-scale invasion by people with an Indo-European language: for the first time Persian, or its direct ancestor (closely related to Vedic Sanskrit), was spoken on the plateaux of Iran. This language was a cousin of the Iranian speech of the people who remained widespread on the plains of the Ukraine and southern Siberia for at least another two thousand years, under the names Scythian or aka. Those who invaded Iran would become literate only after some centuries of contact with Mesopotamia, so the early evidence for their arrival is purely archaeological. Among the names of the tribes were two which (from the Akkadian records) seemed to settle close to the borders with Sumer and Akkad, the Madai in the north round Agbatana (modern Hamadan), and those who inhabited the Parsua or 'borderlands' in the south (modern Fars province): these were to be the Medes and Persians, and they now hemmed in the land of Elam respectively from the north and the south. At first, they seemed just to be a rotation of the barbarians in the Zagros mountains on the eastern flank, successor to the Quti, Lulubi and Ka.s.sites who had been there from time immemorial; but from the seventh century they were to undermine, and then destroy, Mesopotamia as an independent centre of power.

Many now believe that the spread of all these Indo-European languages was achieved without ma.s.sive change of people, but through wars that put a new elite in control of the old lands, with new languages spreading in the old populations through the prestige of the new social order. As to why these interlopers were able to force an entry, presumably it is no coincidence that this was also the era in which the use of iron became established.

But most immediately significant for the linguistic history of the Middle East is a third group, the Aramaeans, desert nomads from northern Syria speaking a Semitic language. They are first heard of as a particularly persistent enemy in an inscription of the same Tiglath Pileser I at the end of the twelfth century BC. Soon after we hear that Damascus was an Aramaean city. By the tenth century they had established themselves as a significant power, largely at the expense of the remaining Hitt.i.te-Luwian colonies. Then they spread out towards the east, despite resistance from a.s.syrian monarchs, and by the end of the ninth century there were apparently settlements of them all over the land of Sumer and Akkad. The succession to the throne of Babylon was not routine in this period, and at least one dynasty, Bit Bazi in the early tenth century, appears to have been Aramaean. The Chaldaeans (Kaldu) were also an Aramaean tribe who settled in Sumer, and went on to found the last Babylonian dynasty in the seventh to sixth centuries, including Nabupola.s.sar, Nebuchadrezzar II and Nabonidus. The Aramaeans had made themselves very much part of the establishment.

This must be part of the explanation for the way in which, beginning in the eighth century, their language came to replace Akkadian as the universal medium of Mesopotamia, and soon (as a.s.syria conquered Syria and Palestine) established itself as the lingua franca of the whole Fertile Crescent. This was not a culture-led expansion, since the Aramaeans are not a.s.sociated with any distinctive style or civilisation of their own; nevertheless, they were the ones who brought simple alphabetic writing, the invention of their neighbours the Phoenicians, into the heart of the old empire, where for over two thousand years all culture and administration had been built on skill in the complicated cuneiform writing. They had thereby revolutionised its communications, and perhaps its social structure as well. Twenty-two simple signs could now do the work previously requiring over six hundred.

While this was going on in Asia, the Phoenicians themselves, strung out along the Mediterranean coast of what is now Lebanon, were expanding, or rather exploring and exploiting, in the opposite direction. In language, the Phoenicians (or Canaanites, as they called themselves) were very similar to their neighbours inland and to the south, the Hebrews; but they had a very different att.i.tude to their homeland.

'Phoenicia' is a linguistic, and even more an economic, expression for the trading cities of coastal Lebanon.* There is no record of a political unit linking them even as a league, but from the middle of the second millennium BC this line of a dozen or so independent cities (Byblos, Sidon and Tyre the most famous among them) had established themselves as the preferred centres for the supply of copper and tin from Cyprus, timber from Lebanon and luxury goods, especially clothing and jewellery. Since either their suppliers or their customers (especially Egypt, for the timber) often lived overseas, this fostered the development of ships and the know-how for navigation. With these, uniquely in the Middle East, the cities had the wherewithal for exploration much farther afield. The original expeditions may have been earlier (ancient historians suggest the end of the twelfth century), but it is clear that by the eighth century there was a network of Phoenician settlements from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, with particular concentration on Sicily, Sardinia, the north-western sh.o.r.es of Africa and Cadiz (Phoenician gader, 'the fortress'). Mostly they were trading posts, and above all mining outlets, rather than cities, but in one case the settlement became much more than a commercial venture. This was Carthage, situated on a natural harbour in modern Tunisia, and soon developing not just a trade network but an empire of its own, in North Africa, Sicily and Sardinia.

By their presence, the Phoenician settlements will have spread far and wide a sense of what the cultivated and literate society of the Near East was like, as well as opening up a long-distance export trade in metals. The Phoenicians were the globalisers of Mesopotamian culture. Most concretely, they spread knowledge of their alphabetic writing system to the Greeks and Iberians, and just possibly also to the Etruscans and Romans; so they can claim to have given Europe its primary education.

Phoenician could be heard all round the Mediterranean, especially in its islands and on its southern rim, for most of the first millennium BC. Yet linguistically it had very little long-term impact on Europe. The Greeks and others accepted, quite explicitly, the Phoenicians' writing system as the basis of their own (using the term phoinik$eAia grammata), but not a single element of their language. This is partly perhaps a comment on how little of their culture the Phoenicians, always thinking of themselves as outsiders, only there on business, were in fact pa.s.sing on to their new customers or partners.*

But further, it shows how much more abstract a tool an alphabet is than an ideographic writing system. With an alphabet, properly understood, you get a means of cleanly writing your own language, without further baggage. Contrast this with the knock-on effects when ideas of Sumerian cuneiform had been taken up. Two thousand years later, Babylonian scribes were still using bits of Sumerian as shorthand symbols for equivalent words in Akkadian, and indeed had still not worked out a way to express all the Akkadian sounds when they went beyond those in Sumerian. Nor was this a particular weakness on the part of Akkadian scribes: similar effects can be seen in other languages written in cuneiform, such as. .h.i.tt.i.te and Urartian.

Paradoxically, then, Phoenician had little linguistic impact in Europe, even though the effect its speakers had on the languages they contacted was truly momentous. But Punic, as the same language is known when spoken by Carthaginians, did get established in North Africa. It evidently long survived the downfall of Carthage as a state in 146 BC, some 655 years after its foundation, and even the Latin-speaking Roman administration that followed for another five hundred years, since Augustine of Hippo is still quoting words of the language in the fifth century AD, remarking on its utility for a priest in a country parish in Numidia.6 But tantalisingly and heartbreakingly, this language, once so widely used and the vehicle that had spread alphabetic literacy to Europe, could not ensure the survival of a single book from antiquity.

Back in western Asia, from the mid-seventh century the pace of change seemed to accelerate. In four decades to 627 BC a.s.syria expanded its power to its maximum, taking in Lydia in the north, Phoenicia in the west, the Nile delta of Egypt in the south, and Elam in the east. But just fifteen years later it collapsed. The Chaldaeans in Babylon had overthrown the a.s.syrians, enlisting the Medes to help them, and proceeded to rebuild their empire from their own perspective. This was the final incandescence of Mesopotamian power, under the last great emperor of Babylon, Nebuchadrezzar II. He died in 562 BC. Twenty-five years earlier, even as he had been conquering Jerusalem, and deporting its Jews, others were beginning a process of political consolidation that would erase the greatness of Babylon. The Medes defeated the Urartians in the 580s and so established control of most of the north; but in 550 BC they themselves succ.u.mbed to a royal putsch executed by their southwestern neighbour Persia, under its new king Cyrus. Cyrus went on to absorb first Lydia (thus grabbing the rest of Anatolia), then the eastern extremities of Iran, as far as modern Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Baluchistan. Finally he turned on the Babylonian empire itself, and took it with hardly a battle. His son Cambyses even conquered Egypt, though he died soon after. By 522 BC, there was a single overlord of all the land from Anatolia and Egypt to the borders of modern Turkestan and the Indus valley. If this had been a typical Mesopotamian achievement, a collapse would have been expected within a generation; but Persians used different methods, and the unitary empire they had created was to last for two hundred years.

The overlord's name was Darius, and he had administrative talents comparable to Cyrus's genius for winning victories and retaining the loyalty of those conquered. Most interestingly from our point of view, he decreed that the administrative language of the empire should be not Persian or Lydian, but Aramaic. The result was the effective spread of the use of this Semitic language beyond all previous bounds-across to the coast of the Aegean, the Balkans and Egypt in the west, and out to the Hindu Kush and the banks of the Indus in the east.

This decision must have been purely pragmatic, for Aramaic was not the language that Persian royalty, the Achaemenid clan, actually spoke. Perhaps to remedy this problem, the same reign undertook to make Persian too a literary language for the first time, devising a syllabary with which to write it (based on cuneiform symbols) and using it, together with Elamite and Akkadian, on monumental inscriptions. (The Aramaic alphabet, which could just as easily have been used to write Persian, was evidently seen as too informal for imperial monuments.) But the script did not catch on, and had been abandoned by 338 BC, even before the fall of the Persian empire to the Greeks. Nonetheless, the spoken language lived on, and indeed flourished, since it is the ancestor of the modern Persian language and related dialects, spoken in Iran up to the present day.

Although Aramaic did not live on as the language of western Asia, the unification of administrative language by Darius, essentially realised during the next two hundred years of Persian administration, had a number of important consequences.

It created a familiarity with administration conducted in a lingua franca, separate from the vernacular languages. So the structures were in place to allow the rapid spread of Greek, for the same purposes, after the fall of the empire to Alexander and his successors. Greek flowed through channels made for Aramaic for the next two hundred years. (See Chapter 6, 'Kings of Asia: Greek spread through war', p. 243.) This superficial linguistic unity gave different long-term results in the various parts of the empire. In Anatolia, Greek seems to have gone deeper in its two centuries than Aramaic had: it replaced all the remaining indigenous languages. (These had largely been Lydian and its smaller relatives, but also Phrygian, the language of King Midas.) In the area of modern Iran and Afghanistan, where Iranian languages related to Persian were widely spoken, it supplanted Aramaic as lingua franca, but did not touch the vernaculars. The newly founded Greek colonies, however far flung, were of course exceptions to this.7 In Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine and Egypt, 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 aka and Ossetic in the east, as well as for the Avesta scriptures themselves.*

Aramaic was by now an official language nowhere, and a majority-community 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 Muhammad. 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 cla.s.sical 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 a.s.syrian capital, Nineveh, was excavated in 1845, and it turned out that the earliest doc.u.ments were written in a language older than Akkadian, and so different from it that the a.s.syrians 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 doc.u.ments after all were written in a language rea.s.suringly 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 Sumer, as they called the southernmost part of Mesopotamia, had in fact already been dead for another 1300 years when those doc.u.ments 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 p.r.o.nunciations, 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 cla.s.sical 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, Hitt.i.te 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 inst.i.tutionalisation 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 subst.i.tutes for sets of clay tokens, used for inventories and contracts.10 The unprecedented riches and cultural brilliance of the city-states in third-millennium 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 partic.i.p.ation 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, O my lord Shu-Sin, It lies at thy feet like a lion-cub, O son of Shulgi.

O my G.o.d, the wine-maid has sweet wine to give, Like her date-wine sweet is her v.u.l.v.a, sweet is her wine ...12 There is also the occasional lullaby.

usa anu usa anu usa anu ki dumuase usa kulu ki dumuase igi badbadani u kunib igi gunani suzu arbi u eme za malilikani za mallilil u nagule...

Come sleep, come sleep, Come to my son, Hurry sleep to my son, Put to sleep his restless eyes, Put your hand on his sparkling eyes, And as for his babbling tongue Let not the babbling hold back his sleep.

He will fill your lap with wheat.

I will make sweet for you the little cheeses, Those little cheeses that are the healer of man...

My garden is lettuce well-watered...

May the wife be your support, May the son be your lot, May the winnowed barley be your bride, May Ashnan the G.o.ddess of fruitfulness be your ally, May you have an eloquent guardian angel, May you achieve a reign of happy days ...13 These works are usually written in Emesal, 'the fine tongue', a separate dialect of Sumerian, well doc.u.mented in scribal dictionaries. In dialogue works this dialect is used for the speech of G.o.ddesses. It differs from standard Sumerian, Emegir, 'the princely tongue', both in vocabulary (including the names of many G.o.ds) and also in p.r.o.nunciation (consonants by and large being articulated farther forward in the mouth); it differs not at all in its grammar. For example, when the G.o.ddess Inanna is affecting to repel the advances of an importunate suitor, she cries: kuli Mulila su bamu emese daen amau lulase ta munaben amau Gasangale lulase ta munaben Friend of Enlil, let me free! Let me go to my house!

What lie shall I tell my mother?

What lie shall I tell my mother Ningal?

Both Enlil and Ningal are, of course, G.o.ds. In Emegir this would have been (with the differences highlighted): kuli Enlila su bamu euse gaen amau lulase ana munaben amau Ningale lulase ana munaben14.

So it seems that Sumerian, like many other languages all over the world, had a special dialect for women's speech. What marks out Sumerian is that this had gained a special, explicit, status, recorded in the grammar books: this could be taken as further evidence of the high status of women in Sumerian literature.

Returning to the question of Sumerian-Akkadian bilingualism, specialists agree that the balance of language spoken in Sumer shifted over the period 2400-1600 BC from total Sumerian to total Akkadian. Sumer began this period as a collection of independent city-states, suffered Akkadian domination in the twenty-third century, Amorite and (briefly) Elamite domination in the nineteenth, and the Babylonian rule of Hammurabi in the eighteenth. It ended with a restored independence, or rather anarchy, after the breakdown of this first Babylonian empire, but the language on the streets and in the homes was now Akkadian.

It was an interesting example of unstable bilingualism, since in many ways the situation is reminiscent of the relation between Greek and Latin in the Roman empire, one dominating cultural and the other political life. In that case, despite the political instability, and the generally shifty reputation of the Greeks, contrasting with the towering political prestige and steadiness of the Romans, Greek nowhere lost ground to Latin. Yet here in Mesopotamia, where the various Semitic peoples, for all their political dominance, were sources of disruption, where there was apparently no major movement of the Sumerian population, and where Sumerian culture's prestige was unchallenged, Sumerian steadily lost ground.