In some cases even Semitic rulers attempted to fight a rearguard action on behalf of Sumerian culture. In the kingdom of Isin, which held the three most important Sumerian cities of Nippur, Uruk and Eridu in the twentieth to nineteenth centuries BC, the ruling dynasty stemmed from Mari, in the Akkadian-speaking north of Mesopotamia; yet its king termed himself 'King of Ur, King of Sumer and Akkad', all its official inscriptions were in Sumerian, and there was flourishing production of new editions of the cla.s.sics of Sumerian literature.

One factor working against the survival of Sumerian as a living language alongside Akkadian may have been the fact that the influential newcomers already spoke a Semitic language, and so found it easier just to get by in Akkadian. Only the Akkadians had lived in close proximity with Sumerian from time immemorial, and perhaps become bilingual. Others would be more impatient of the cultural complications they found down south. It is easy to imagine the average Amorite on the move saying: 'After all, they all speak Akkadian, don't they?' The whole Fertile Crescent was familiar with some Semitic language or other, and by their nature they were all very similar, and to some extent mutually comprehensible. For all their cultural prestige (which clearly never diminished), the Sumerians found themselves having to compromise on language in their daily and business lives.

In a sense, though, Akkadian had already taken up the burden that the speakers of Sumerian were laying down. It remained unthinkable, as it always had been, to learn to write Akkadian in any way but as an extension of Sumerian, and this despite the fact that Sumerian and Akkadian were poles apart as languages, with all their basic vocabulary totally unrelated, and quite different sound systems. The system never provided the means to distinguish consistently between b and p, among d, t and t, or among g, k and q in Akkadian. Akkadian appears to be rather lacking in many of the phonetic subtleties that are characteristic of many of its Semitic sisters, having only one h sound where they may have up to three, three s sounds where they have up to four. It is difficult to tell whether it is just the poverty of Sumerian spelling which causes this appearance.

The only innovations that Akkadian scribes appear to have permitted themselves were a new sign for the glottal stop, ', and considerable licence with the Sumerian word symbols or logograms: they had always been available as punning devices, able to symbolise the same sound as the word they signified in Sumerian; now they could do the same trick for Akkadian as well. So, for example, the Sumerian sign , meaning 'hand', could now be read as idu, 'hand', in Akkadian; it could also represent the syllables id, it, it, ed, et and et.

Sumerian word symbols, and Sumerian literature, remained the basis of written Akkadian, even as the language swept all round the Fertile Crescent, and well beyond the domains of the Semitic-speaking peoples, as a lingua franca for international communication. The same educational system, based on the edubba 'tablet-house' schools, was maintained for at least two millennia, since sign lists to teach the symbols, in the same order, have been found in the Sumerian city of Uruk dating from the third millennium and Ashurbanipal's library in the a.s.syrian capital Nineveh from the mid-seventh century BC. Mastery of the cla.s.sics of Sumerian literature, a canon of texts which was not extended after the mid-second millennium, remained the pinnacle of scholarly achievement, and the focus of later years spent at school. Even in mathematics, most of the terminology was in Sumerian, though the textbooks were written in Akkadian. It appears that Sumerian went on being spoken in the cla.s.sroom: this has made the remaining exercises and textbooks less explicit on p.r.o.nunciation than we should have liked.

It is the Akkadian culture's enthusiasm for all things Sumerian which has in fact saved Sumer's finer culture. Almost all the Sumerian literary texts that have been found were copied, often by schoolboys, in the first half of the second millennium, after the death of Sumerian as a living language; by contrast, most of what has come down from the pre-Akkadian days, when the cities of Sumer were proud and free (and still spoke Sumerian), is a ma.s.s of inscriptions and administrative doc.u.ments.

But this six-hundred-year-long Sumerian heyday, after the death of the living language, at last came to an end, and showed that Akkadian could not support it indefinitely. After the fall of Babylon to the marauding Hitt.i.te King Mursilis in 1594 BC, and the takeover of Mesopotamia by the Ka.s.site mountain tribes which followed, true appreciation of Sumerian culture never recovered. For the rest of the second and first millennia (indeed down to the Greek takeover under the Seleucid empire in 323 BC), no more Sumerian compositions were attempted, and in fact only two literary texts continued to be copied: The Exploits of Ninurta (which we have already sampled), and a companion piece, Angim, about Ninurta's return from the mountains to Nippur. Henceforth, the rest of the Sumerian cla.s.sics would be known only in translation.

As a poet had remarked (on the earlier destruction of an Akkadian city that aspired to take the Sumerians under their control): iribia gatus bindugga kitus nummandadug.

agadea ganu bindugga kinu nummandadug.

agade hula inana zami..

He who said 'I would dwell in that city' found not a good dwelling place there.

He who said 'I would sleep in Agade' found not a good sleeping place there.

Agade is destroyed. Praise Inanna.15 Since Akkadian too was destined ultimately to be replaced-and when it happened, by a language whose literacy did not depend on the ancient tradition of cuneiform writing-Sumerian was ultimately to die out. Aside from the tablets waiting to be discovered in the tells of Iraq, it left no trace.

FIRST INTERLUDE: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ELAMITE?.

The clay tokens that had given rise to Sumerian script seem to have been widespread: not surprisingly, since they would have played a key role as bills of lading for long-distance trade. The development into groups of symbols on clay came independently in Sumer, and farther to the east in Shusim (known to the Greeks as Susa), the heartland of Elam. Elam's pictographic symbols never went far beyond their initial stage as a medium for inventories, although a proto-Elamite script, apparently a syllabary, was in use in the early third millennium. This line of development was aborted in the middle of the third millennium when the Sumerian system, which was by then a true writing system, even if one heavily adapted for the Sumerian language, was taken over.

In fact, Elam went farther than borrowing the writing system: for the nine hundred years from 2200 BC almost all the official inscriptions that have been found are in Akkadian. For much of this time it was under the direct political control of one of the powers to its west, Sumerian, Babylonian or a.s.syrian. Nevertheless, Elamite must have continued to be spoken in Elam, since in 1300 BC it springs back to life as the official language, replacing Akkadian for all written purposes, except curses.16 Elamite's subsequent career showed persistence for at least eight hundred years.

From 1300 BC Elam pursued a succession of wars, not always defensive, with its neighbours from across the Tigris marshes. Through the vagaries of these power struggles, which often resulted in periods of foreign control, Elam was able to retain its independence in the long term through retaining access to a large but defensible hinterland, Anshan, in the Zagros mountains to its south-east, never penetrated by Akkadian speakers.17 The real disaster came only in the seventh century BC when the Elamites lost this stronghold: it was taken by the Persians, whose attack came, for the first time, from the south. Thereafter Anshan came to be called Parsa. (The area is called Fars to this day.) The Elamites had lost their safe redoubt for emergencies. Almost at once, in 646, the a.s.syrian a.s.shurbanipal sacked Susa. This calamity put an end to the last independent kingdom of Elam, if not to the Elamites or their language. But in the characteristic a.s.syrian way, a.s.shurbanipal deported many of the population, to a.s.syria on his own account, and according to the Book of Ezra (iv.9-10) as far away as Samaria in Palestine.

But events were now moving beyond the traditional pendulum swing of power shifts within Mesopotamia. The Elamites scarcely had the satisfaction of seeing a.s.syria itself fall to the Medes and Babylonians in 612 before they found themselves under Babylonian control, and then, within a generation, under Persian. This put Elam, for the first time, at the centre of world events. Two generations later, in 522 BC, Darius (Darayavaus), the Persian heir to Anshan, took control of the whole Persian empire, which by now extended from Egypt and Anatolia to the borders of India. Despite two abortive Elamite rebellions shortly after his accession, he chose Elam as the hub of this empire, with Susa itself (known to him as Susan) as the administrative capital, and Parsa, i.e. Anshan, as the site for a new ceremonial capital, to be better known in the West by its Greek name of Persepolis.

The Persians had never prized literacy very highly. Famously, their leaders were educated in three things only: to ride a horse, to shoot a straight arrow, and to tell the truth. So their Elamite neighbours, with two thousand years of cuneiform education behind them, were well placed to be extremely useful in the more humdrum side of empire-building.

On the monumental inscriptions that Darius set up round his domains (most notably at Behistun, on the Silk Route), the legend was written not only in Persian and Akkadian but in Elamite. And although the official language of the empire was designated as Aramaic, it is clear that until about 460 the central administration was actually conducted in Elamite, since an archive of several thousand administrative doc.u.ments on clay was discovered in Persepolis in the 1930s. They most likely owed their preservation to arson by Alexander's conquering soldiers in 330 BC.

But these are the last Elamite doc.u.ments to have survived anywhere.18 Aramaic took over as the language of written administration, and Elamite, lacking any political focus to sustain the cuneiform tradition, apparently ceased to be written. Some time later, perhaps much later, the spoken language too must have simply died away. Arabs writing in the tenth century AD mention a language spoken in Khuzistan which was not Persian, Arabic or Hebrew: they do not record any words, so no one knows whether that was the last of Elamite.19 It has been speculated that Sumer and Akkad's struggles for control of the mountains behind Elam, with their raw material riches in stone, timber and metals, may be reflected somewhat abstractly in the surviving literature of the period.20 In the poem Lugale u melambi nirgal, known in English as The Exploits of Ninurta, the G.o.d greets his mother, who has come to visit him in his mountain conquests: Since you, Madam, have come to the rough lands, Since you, n.o.ble Lady, because of my fame, have come to the enemy land, Since you feared not my terrifying battles, I, the hero, the mound I had heaped up Shall be called hursag, and you shall be its queen, From now on Ninhursag is the name by which you shall be called-thus it shall be.

The hursag shall provide you amply with the fragrance of the G.o.ds, Shall provide you with gold and silver in abundance, Shall mine for you copper and tin, shall carry them to you as tribute, The rough places shall multiply cattle large and small for you, The hursag shall bring forth for you the seed of all four-legged creatures.

In fact the king who had achieved the conquest of Elam and Anshan had been Gudea of Lagash (2141-2122 BC): and he served the G.o.d Ningirsu, not Ninurta. Still, Ninurta was the G.o.d of Nippur, which later became the cultural centre of the Sumerian cities, and so the change of central G.o.d would have given the piece a certain disinterested grandeur, which fitted it to be the literary cla.s.sic it became.

Akkadian-world-beating technology: A model of literacy.

Now all the earth had one language and words in common. And moving east, people found a plain in Shinar and settled there. And they said to each other: 'Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly!' They used brick instead of stone, and tar instead of mortar. Then they said: 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.' But Yahweh came down to see the city that the sons of man were building. And Yahweh said: 'So this is what they can do when all share one language! There will be no limit on what they can accomplish if they have a mind for it. I shall go down and stupefy their languages so that they may not understand one another.' So Yahweh scattered them from there all over the earth. And they stopped building the city. That is why it is called Babylon (babel) because there he mixed up (balsl) the language of all the earth. And from there Yahweh scattered them all over the earth.

Hebrew scriptures, Genesis x This Jewish myth, evidently inspired by the stupendous architecture on show in the cosmopolitan city of Babylon, and the polyphony of languages to be heard on its streets, is still deeply symbolic for European culture. But somehow the central mechanism of conflict between an arrogant superpower and a jealous G.o.d has been lost. It is now taken as a story of how a single language can give unity, the kind of unity that is necessary to bring off a magnificent enterprise: just confound their languages, and cooperation becomes impossible. As such, it is bizarrely ill placed as a fable of Babylon, which was notable throughout its history for the leading role of a single language. For almost two thousand years this language was Akkadian, although in the last few centuries of its empire, as already seen, it yielded to Aramaic.

Perhaps the dream of Babylonians scattered and disorganised was a comforting exercise in wish fulfilment for the sixth-century Jews who had been shattered and driven from their homeland by the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadrezzar II. Perhaps it might even be taken as an ironic comment on how the a.s.syrian a.s.shurbanipal had been able to sack Babylon in the seventh century: many Babylonian traditionalists must after all have questioned the spreading influence of those rough-talking Aramaeans, and speculated that no good would come of it. But although Babylon was to lose its glory in time-indeed, very soon after Nebuchadrezzar-its decline cannot be blamed on language decadence, or some failure in communication. People went on speaking Aramaic, and studying Akkadian, for many centuries after the Persians, and then the Greeks, had taken away all their power.

Yet at its acme, Akkadian was pre-eminently a language of power and influence. If Sumerian had spread beyond Sumer as the touchstone of an educational standard, Akkadian spread through economic and political prestige.

Akkadian is named after Agade or Akkad, once the major city of southern Mesopotamia but whose location is now a mystery. (It was possibly not far from Babylon.) Records of the language begin in earnest with the middle of the third millennium, with an early climax in those conquests by Sargon (whose long reign centred on the turn of the twenty-fourth and twenty-third centuries BC). He campaigned successfully in all directions, thus not only spreading the official use of Akkadian in the north (Mari and Ebla), but also beginning a millennium-long official dominance of the language in Elam to the west. We have seen that this first fit of imperial exuberance was followed by a collapse in the fourth generation (end of the twenty-second century BC), and a brief linguistic resurgence of the subject populations, with the return of Sumerian and Elamite to official use for a century or so. Soon, however, the Amorites, Semitic-speaking 'Westerners', began to make their appearance all over Mesopotamia.* Their movements did not strengthen Akkad politically, but did seem to crowd out the wide-scale use of anything but Akkadian as a means of communication; and the written record (outside literature) from the beginning of the second millennium is exclusively in this language.

In the early days, there was some parity, and perhaps some specialisation of function, as between Akkadian and Sumerian: we have already noted that Sargon's own daughter had been an accomplished poetess in Sumerian. But the bilingualism proved unstable. While Akkadian was fortified as the major language of the Fertile Crescent by its everyday use for all literate purposes, and some degree of mutual intelligibility with the Semitic languages of the west, Sumerian was guaranteed only by its role in education and culture. The period of the rise of Babylon (2000-1600 BC) still fostered this, but when the power bases were shattered, and foreign rulers (the Ka.s.sites) took over, serious learning in Sumerian must have seemed an irrelevance. It was retained merely as an adjunct to Akkadian studies, in the same spirit as the list of Latin tags sometimes still found at the end of an English dictionary.

This 'Old Babylonian' period turned out to be as significant for Akkadian as it was for Sumerian, but in a different way. It was in this period that some fairly slight dialect differences are first noticeable between the south (Babylonian) and the north (a.s.syrian). Different dialects of Akkadian also become visible farther afield, in Mari, in Susa and to the east in the valley of the Diyala. Letters are extant from all periods, and provide the best evidence for spoken language.

At the same time, the dialect of Babylon (which even the Babylonians still called Akkadu) became established as the literary standard, the cla.s.sic version of which would be used for official purposes throughout Mesopotamia. This privileged position endured for the rest of the language's history, essentially regardless of whether Babylon, a.s.syria or neither of them was the current centre of political power. The great model of cla.s.sic Babylonian is the Laws of Hammurabi, compiled in the eighteenth century BC when this dialect was still the vernacular. But the best-known literary texts, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and Enuma elis ('When on high ...', the Creation Epic), are also in this dialect, written down when it was no longer current.

In the north, the use of Akkadian was to die out about 600 BC, fully replaced by Aramaic. But use of the language persisted in Babylon till the beginning of the first century AD; it seems that by this stage most of the knowledge of the language was in the hands of professional scribes, who would read, write and translate even personal letters-but not without interference from the Aramaic in which they were actually thinking and talking.

Besides its use as a native language by most of the inhabitants of Mesopotamia, and its historic role as the first language of literacy for Semites anywhere, Akkadian also came to achieve a wider role as a lingua franca among utter foreigners. How was this possible? Ultimately, it was due to its a.s.sociation with the most sophisticated technology of its day, writing.

The first evidence of this cosmopolitan spread is the activity of a.s.syrian merchants in central Anatolia far to the north of the Taurus mountains, in a complex of market centres or karum set up between Nesas and Hattusas (Kultepe and Boaz Koy on modern maps). This was in the first quarter of the second millennium, 1950-1750 BC. The merchants came from rich families of a.s.shur, and used donkey caravans for transport through the Taurus mountains. Their motive was trade in metals: they had found a source of silver, gold and copper. In the reverse direction, they brought tin, goat-hair felt, woven textiles and perfumes. The traders were apparently ready to pay duties to the local Hatti authorities. This is known from the trading correspondence (on clay tablets in clay envelopes) which they left behind, written in Old a.s.syrian, a dialect of Akkadian.

The trade seems to have been ended around 1750, perhaps by Human incursions, perhaps by the first stirrings of Hitt.i.te expansion, the 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 Hitt.i.tes 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 Hitt.i.tes provide just one example of how Akkadian was taken up by the literate cla.s.s 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 doc.u.ments 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 Hitt.i.tes and Luwians, in Alalah and Ugarit near the Mediterranean coast for speakers of other Semitic languages as well as Human, 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 cla.s.sic 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 Hitt.i.te and one in Human).

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 Ka.s.site control for two centuries, and a.s.syria in va.s.salage to the Mitanni for a century. In northern Syria, established Mitanni control was being disputed by the Hitt.i.tes. And the rest of Palestine was a collection of va.s.sal 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 cla.s.sics of Sumerian and Akkadian literature. Although Babylonia and a.s.syria 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 a.s.sociated states. For curiously, just as Akkadian had reached the height of its prestige and extension during a long eclipse of a.s.syro-Babylonian power, its decline began when the a.s.syrian 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 Ka.s.sites eight hundred years before in Babylon, Aramaic speakers would have been culturally and linguistically a.s.similated 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 a.s.similate 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 a.s.syrian 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 c.u.mbersome 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 a.s.syrian 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 a.s.syrians and Babylonians?

The answer lies in an unexpected effect of a.s.syrian military policy.

We have already noted the first hostile contacts between the Aramaean nomads and the a.s.syrians, 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, a.s.syrian 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 a.s.syrian king Adad-nirsri (911-891 BC), who drove the Aramaeans out of the Tigris valley and the Kashiari mountains to the north. Thereafter, the a.s.syrian 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 a.s.syria, 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 a.s.syrian business correspondence or the archaeological record, of any subsequent attempt to spread a.s.syrian culture thereafter, or even to establish the ruling caste on a wider basis. Wealth was transferred one way, and at the point of a sword. From Tiglath-Pileser III (744-727) to Sennacherib (704-681), a new tactic was added: vast numbers of the conquered populations were led off to some other distant part of the empire. Estimates attribute thirty-seven deportations to Tiglath-Pileser III (totalling 368,543 people), thirty-eight to Sargon II (totalling 217,635), twenty to Sennacherib (totalling 408,150). All in all, the a.s.syrians claimed to have displaced some 4.5 million persons over three centuries.25 A majority of these deportations would have involved Aramaic speakers, although the most famous, carried out by Sargon II against Samaria, capital of Israel, in 721 BC, probably involved speakers of Hebrew: At the beginning of my rule, I took the town of the Samarians for the G.o.d ... who let me achieve this triumph. I led away as prisoners 27,290 inhabitants of it and equipped from among them soldiers to man 50 chariots for my royal corps ...The town I rebuilt better than it was before and settled therein people from countries which I myself had conquered. I placed an officer of mine as governor over them and imposed upon them tribute as for a.s.syrian citizens.26 The Hebrew scriptures (2 Kings xvii.6, 24) give more details of where the Israelite exiles were sent (including Aram Naharaim on the Khabur river, and the north-eastern extremity of the empire in Media), and of who were sent to replace them. (They included some Babylonians.) Now and then, correspondence gives an insight into how these deportees were viewed when they arrived in Mesopotamia.27 A letter to the king contrasts qinnate sa Ninua labiruti, 'old-time families of Nineveh', with nasi'anni, 'social upstarts', and sagluti, 'deportees', itself perhaps a pun on sakluti, 'ignorants'. But it is clear that people with western Semitic names were often entrusted with significant responsibility.

This scattering of a.s.syria's subject peoples could be seen as a shrewd policy to unify the diverse populations of the empire by cutting them off from their traditions-an imposed 'melting pot' solution.28 All deportees, as the above inscription mentioned, are to be 'regarded as a.s.syrians'; as such they were deemed to have a duty to pala ili u sarri, 'to fear G.o.d and King'.

Tending in the same direction was another new policy to b.u.t.tress imperial unity, the recruitment of a royal guard, the kisir sarruti. This was drawn from non-Mesopotamian provinces, supplementing the more feudally organised a.s.syrian troops. In fact, bearers of western Semitic names crop up quite commonly as a.s.syrian army officers. Particularly famous was the force of Itu 'aia, made up of Aramaeans of the Itu ' tribe, which turns up at many of the hot spots, on duty to crush dissent within Babylonian provinces.29 The situation in the Fertile Crescent, then, over the period of the eleventh to the eighth century BC, was one of an extreme flux of populations. Aramaeans had settled themselves over the whole area in the earlier two centuries, and although they had been under more effective state control in the latter two, a.s.syrian policy had served not to push them back but to distribute them even more widely, either as forced migrants, or as members of the armed forces. Since the Aramaeans were the largest group being scattered in this way, when other western Semites, such as Israelites or Phoenicians, found themselves transplanted, they could tend to find themselves speaking more and more like their new neighbours.*

The a.s.syrians had therefore contrived to reinforce the spread of a new lingua franca across their domains, one that was not dependent on literacy or any shared educational tradition. Its effective usefulness would have increased as the a.s.syrian domain was spread yet wider, and its population of western Semitic speakers, predominantly Aramaic speakers, came to outnumber more and more the original population of Mesopotamia, who spoke Akkadian. The ruling cla.s.s in the triad of capital cities, a.s.shur, Nineveh and Kalhu (Nimrud), maintained continuity, but elsewhere there was increasing social flux, and people had to make accommodations with the newcomers. In Babylon, particularly, this must have happened early on.

Nor were the newcomers handicapped by lack of the basic art of civilisation, literacy. Although the Aramaeans had appeared originally as nomads, presumed illiterate, they had even before the first millennium begun taking over cities (most notably Damascus) and whole countries (the last Hitt.i.te kingdom, its capital at modern Zincirli, in the Turkish province still known as Hatay). Many of them would have come to know the value of writing, and since the cities they knew were of the west, the writing system they would have learnt was simple and alphabetic.

As they moved eastward, we can only presume that alphabetic literacy spread with at least some of the Aramaeans, since the new materials, ink and papyrus or leather, are biodegradable, and do not survive in the archaeological record. In fact, the earliest inscriptions in Aramaic, not clearly distinguishable from Canaanite languages at this time, are from the middle of the ninth century.30 The short-term practical advantages of the new media (less bulk, greater capacity) must soon have made an impression. A new word for 'scribe' came into use in Akkadian, sepiru, as opposed to the old upsarru, 'tablet writer', which went right back to the Sumerian word dubsar. Pictures of scribes at work from the mid-eighth century show them in pairs, one with a stylus and a tablet, the other with a pen and a sheet of papyrus or parchment. As with the onset of computers, good bureaucrats must have ensured that the old and the new coexisted for a long time: the 'clay-free office' did not happen in a.s.syria till the destruction of the empire by the Medes in 610 BC The net result seems to have been that spoken use of Akkadian receded before that of Aramaic with scarce a murmur of complaint. An officer in Ur does once ask permission to write to the king in Aramaic.31 But no pedantic or puristic murmur has yet been found in any Akkadian tablet. The closest we have is an exchange of correspondence between a scribe and King Sargon (721-705): SCRIBE: If it please my Lord, I will write an [Aramaic] doc.u.ment.

SARGON: Why do you not write Akkadian?32 Indeed, on the evidence of the pattern of words borrowed in Akkadian from Aramaic, as against those borrowed in the reverse direction, it has been claimed that Akkadian, by the time the changeover was taking place, was the less favoured language, with those who wrote it essentially thinking in Aramaic, while struggling (and failing) to put their Aramaic verbs out of their minds.33 The triumph of Aramaic over Akkadian must be ascribed as one of practical utility over ancient prestige, but the utility came primarily from the fact that so many people already spoke it. The fact that its a.s.sociated writing system was quicker and easier was an added bonus; if anything, it just removed one argument that might have made sections of the Aramaic-speaking population want to learn Akkadian too. After all, what was the point? One would never be accepted as anything other than sagluti; and even the royal court was taking up Aramaic.

As once had Sumerian, so now Akkadian fell victim to a new language brought by nomads and newcomers; unstable bilingualism followed, together with the death of the older language.

In such times, the only argument for an education in Akkadian was to maintain the link with the literature of the previous two thousand years, and the traditions of grandeur a.s.sociated with the great cities of Mesopotamia. It lived on in Babylon as a cla.s.sical language for six hundred years after its probable death: not only did the last dynasty of Babylon (625-539 BC) use it for chronicles of their rule, despite being of Chaldaean (i.e. Aramaic) extraction, but foreign conquerors, the Persians Cyrus (557-529 BC) and Xerxes (485-465 BC) and even the Greek Antiochus Soter (280-261 BC), all left inscriptions in the royal language glorifying their own reigns. There was certainly a new and, some would say, barbarous resonance when a Greek monarch could write: 'I am An-ti- 'u-ku-us [Antiochus], the great king, the legitimate king, the king of the world, king of E [Babylon], king of all countries, the caretaker of the temples Esagila and Ezida, the first born of Si-lu-uk-ku [Seleucus], Ma-ak-ka-du-na-a-a [Macedonian], king of Babylon.'34 But there were few who could still understand them.*

Phoenician-commerce without culture:.

Canaan, and points west.

mi -or k-umah bo hayyam.

Who was ever silenced like Tyre, surrounded by the sea?

Ezekiel xxvii.

The Canaan sisters grew up together, but then set out on very different paths in life.

Phoenicia (not her real name, but one that recalls the l.u.s.trous colour for which she was famous*) chose the high life, and became a.s.sociated with jewellery, fine clothing and every form of luxury. She travelled extensively, became known and admired in all the best social circles, and was widely imitated for her sophisticated skills in communication. She surrounded herself with all the most creative, intelligent and wealthy people of her era, and as a skilled hostess put them in contact with one another. She also had a daughter, Elissa, who was not perhaps as brilliant or as versatile as her mother, but who set up her own household, and went on to expand her mother's network, when Phoenicia's own energies were waning.

The other sister, Judith, had an obscure and perhaps disreputable youth, but then settled down to a quiet life at home. She never ventured outside her own neighbourhood, contenting herself with domestic duties. For all her homeliness, many thought she had far too high an opinion of herself, and she had considerable difficulties with local bullies: occasionally she was attacked in her own home and dragged off screaming; ultimately she lost her home altogether. All she could do was try to survive wherever she was led, in a dogged but non-a.s.sertive way, relying above all on her memories of her home as she had once kept it, and her unswerving religious devotion. She had no children of her own, but now and then she acted as a foster mother, undiscouraged though she received little grat.i.tude or loyalty from her charges.

The world reversed the fortunes of these two sisters. Despite Phoenicia's glittering career, her enterprising nature and all her popularity, she quite suddenly disappeared, and among the people she had frequented, stimulated and dazzled for so long, she left no memory at all. Her daughter did perpetuate her memory, but in the end she did no better: she was mortally wounded by a rival, lost all her looks and wealth, and then wasted away to nothing.

Now it is as if Phoenicia and her daughter had never been. Yet Judith is still with us, often derided and dishonoured-especially by her foster children, who have been strangely resentful of her-but apparently as st.u.r.dy as ever. She has even, just recently, returned to her old home, and seems thereby to have gained a fresh lease of life.

This little parable points out the strange irony in the fates of the languages of the land of Canaan. Hebrew (often self-named as [yudith], 'she of Judah') and Phoenician are two of the languages of ancient Canaan, the others being Ammonite, Moabite and Edomite, spoken east of the River Jordan. There was also Ugaritic, spoken on the coast north of Phoenicia. All may have begun as the languages of nomadic tribes in this area, marauding Habiru. But some settled on the coast of Lebanon. During the first millennium BC, their trading activities developed mightily, and their language, Phoenician, became much the most widely spoken of the group. Hebrew and the others, by contrast, never became major languages, being restricted to the south-west of Canaan, and that only in the first part of that millennium. In the sixth century BC, Hebrew was weakened, and probably finished as a vernacular, by virtue of the enforced exile of the Jews to Babylon, coinciding with the spread of Aramaic all over the Babylonian empire.

Phoenician appears to have gone on being spoken on the coast of Lebanon until the first century BC (where it was replaced by Aramaic), and in North Africa until at least the fifth century AD. But although Hebrew had ceased to be spoken many centuries before this, its written and ritual use by Jews as the sacred language of Judaism had never lapsed. This underground existence was protected by a tradition of teaching in schools, and persistent reading, exposition and copying of the Jewish texts, of which the Bible's 'Old Testament' is quite a small part.*

The Canaanite languages are very much typical Semitic languages. One distinctive property they all have in common is a tendency to round their long A sound: hence Hebrew s'lom for Arabic salam, 'peace'. In Phoenician (and Punic) this tendency goes farther, with even short A rounded to o, and long A even more rounded to u: so the Phoenician for eternity is 'ulom (versus Hebrew 'olam, Aramaic 'al'm), and their chief magistrates hold the t.i.tle sufet, equivalent to Hebrew sopet, the word for 'judge' in the Old Testament. The evidence for Phoenician vowels is necessarily indirect, since their writing system marked consonants only.

Beyond its homeland in Lebanon, Phoenician inscriptions are found in Egypt, in southern Anatolia, in Cyprus, North Africa, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia and the south of Spain. These far-flung inscriptions tend to be in the dialect of Phoenician a.s.sociated with the neighbouring cities of Tyre and Sidon, and Tyre is usually quoted as the mother city of Phoenician settlements abroad. In particular, it is the legendary original home of Elissa, or Dido, the Phoenician princess who is said to have founded Carthage (Phoenician qart hadast, 'new city'). Many of the inscriptions are bilingual, showing active relations with Luwians, Greeks, Cypriots and ultimately Romans.

We also read of major Phoenician archives, the earliest being in an Egyptian tale of the eleventh century BC, where an Egyptian agent, Wen-Amun, goes to Byblos to order timber, and has to bargain aggressively with King Zakar-baal, who reads out the precedents from deals in earlier generations, written on rolls of papyrus. The city of Tyre also kept records, since Josephus records that the Greek historian Menander of Ephesus had compiled his history of Tyre from them.

As it happens, the earliest inscription in Phoenician is the epitaph of Ahiram, king of Byblos. It is dated (by its language) to the eleventh century BC.

Coffin which Ittobaal, son of Ahiram, king of Byblos, made for Ahiram his father, when he placed him in the house of eternity.

Now if a king among kings or a governor among governors or a commander of an army should come up against Byblos and uncover this coffin, may the sceptre of his rule be torn away, may the throne of his kingdom be overturned, and may peace flee from Byblos! And as for him, may his inscription be effaced ...

For all its thousand years of recorded history, there is no surviving artistic literature in Phoenician. However, a discovery in 1929 revealed an ancient literature in the neighbouring city directly to the north, Ugarit, dated to the fourteenth or thirteenth century BC* The central characters in the myths and epics recorded here are G.o.ds known to have loomed large in the cults in Phoenician cities, especially Hadad or Baal (which means simply 'the Lord'), his father Dagon, a beautiful consort G.o.ddess who has various names, including Ashtoreth and Asherah, El, the benign high G.o.d, and Kothar, the divine craftsman and smith. Thirteen hundred years later, after Phoenician had largely died out as a language, one Philo of Byblos wrote in Greek a Phoenician History, claiming that it was derived from the work of Sanchuniathon of Beirut, who had himself read it on ammouneis, the pillars of Baal Ammon that stood in Phoenician temples. Since Philo, in typical ancient fashion, identifies many of the Phoenician G.o.ds by Greek names (of those of whom similar tales were told), his unsupported account of Phoenician mythology was received (for almost two thousand years) with some scepticism. But Philo does in fact mention El as the name of Kronos, and makes Dagon his son. Dagon later fathers an unknown Demarus, and after much action Demarus, Astarte (aka Asteria) and Adodos end up as governors of the world, under El's direction. Khusor is the craftsman G.o.d, important in the creation of the world and the origin of inventions. Since Astarte and Asteria are plausible Greek transliterations of Ashtoreth and Asherah, and Adodos without its Greek ending -os would (with its long O) be a natural Phoenician p.r.o.nunciation of Hadad, the basic cast of Phoenician G.o.ds is in place.

The Ugaritic texts also give us a hint of how close Hebrew literature comes to the missing Phoenician works. Remember that Hebrew is a close relative of Ugaritic, but not as close as Phoenician. Now consider how the G.o.ddess Anath of Ugarit decks herself out to meet the emissaries of Baal: She draws some water and bathes; Sky-dew of the fatness of earth, Spray of the Rider of the Clouds; Dew that the heavens do shed Spray that is shed by the stars.

The words for 'Sky-dew of the fatness of earth' are l smm smn 'r. This is precisely what Isaac promises to Jacob (and denies to Esau) in the blessing scene in Genesis: May G.o.d give you of dew of heaven and of fatness of earth36 (Traditionally, of course, Hebrew spelling too marked only consonants, as well as some long vowels.) Hebrew and Ugaritic were close enough, then, to share some fixed phrases. Combining the dramatis personae of the Ugaritic epics with the phraseology of the Old Testament, and the narratives of Philo's Phoenician History of Sanchuniathon, we may be able to reconstruct something of the verbal culture of Byblos, Tyre and their sister cities.

There is a clear echo of what Tyrian poetry may have been like in a famous pa.s.sage of Ezekiel. In the course of a series of prophecies of the downfall of Judah's various neighbours, the prophet digresses on the past glories of one city for which he foresees destruction: You say, O Tyre, 'I am perfect in beauty.'

Your domain was on the high seas; your builders brought your beauty to perfection.

They made all your timbers of pine trees from Senir; they took a cedar from Lebanon and made a mast for you.

Of oaks from Bashan they made your oars; of cypress wood from the coasts of Cyprus they made your deck, inlaid with ivory.

Fine embroidered linen from Egypt was your sail and served as your banner; your awnings were of blue and purple with the coasts of Elishah.

Men of Sidon and Arwad were your oarsmen; your skilled men, O Tyre, were aboard as your seamen.

Veteran craftsmen of Byblos were on board as shipwrights to caulk your seams.