Empires Of The Word Part 10

And so despite the incursions, and the splits and discontinuities in the dynastic tradition, Egypt remained true to its religion, and the concept of a pharaoh ruling through maR 'at.

But invasions ultimately did undo the Egyptian language in its homeland: after all, Egypt is today a predominantly Muslim country with a Christian minority, everyone speaking Arabic. How did Egyptian finally come to lose its grip on its speakers?

First of all, there must have been a progressive weakening and dilution of the Egyptian-speaking part of the population. It gradually became a highly multilingual society. Egypt, after all, underwent many invasions in its last five hundred years of independent existence, at the hands of a.s.syrians, Persians, Greeks and Romans. In the h.e.l.lenistic period (332-30 BC) there was also a major influx of Jews, whose major lingua franca was Greek. None of these brought a language that was to achieve full vernacular status in Egypt. But as we have seen, the Aramaic a.s.sociated with the a.s.syrians and the Persians did spread within Egyptian society beyond the official sphere, and each of these succeeding powers brought in and fostered new communities that would have spoken something other than Egyptian.

Nevertheless, when Arabs in the first flush of Islam took possession of the country in the mid-seventh century AD, Egyptian was still the princ.i.p.al language spoken in its streets and fields.

The Arabs were not the first force of nomads to penetrate Egypt: the Libyans, and perhaps the Hyksos, had achieved this long before in the second millennium, and there may have been many other smaller incursions over the three poorly doc.u.mented Intermediate Periods of Egyptian history. The Arabs were not the first power to use a foreign language for purposes of government: all of the Persians, Greeks and Romans had done this. The Arabs were not the first substantial power with a centre abroad to take possession of Egypt, and rule it as a colony: this had been done before for two centuries by the Persians, and for seven centuries by the Romans. The Arabs were not even the first to introduce a new religion: this had been successfully attempted by the Christians in the Roman period.

Why, then, was Arabic the first language successfully to replace Egyptian in its home country? The answer must lie in the combination of all these circ.u.mstances. Egyptian's strengths were subverted one by one.

First the a.s.syrian and Babylonian wars in Palestine created a large Aramaic-speaking emigre community in the Delta area. This would have been the end of Egyptian's language monopoly in the country, not very significant in itself. But then the country was penetrated by numerous business-minded Greeks, brought in by the Saite dynasty to b.u.t.tress an alliance against Near Eastern powers, and granted their own, Greek-speaking, entrepot in Naucratis in the Delta. Egypt was now very much a multilingual society, with foreigners' languages more and more a.s.sociated with higher prestige. The Persian conquest, and a succession of foreign rulers from Persia and then (after Alexander) Greece, meant that now higher-level administration began to be conducted in a language foreign to Egypt: in Aramaic for two hundred years, and then in Greek for a millennium.*

Linguistically, not much would have changed when the Romans unseated the Greeks in 30 BC, other than a small influx of Latin speakers, princ.i.p.ally soldiers. But this change of government was to prove the profoundest turning point for the fate of the language: Egypt was no longer to be governed by its own kings in its own interest, but by provincial governors as a useful bread basket for Rome, and (increasingly) a destination for rich tourists.

What all the invasions had in common was the fact that they were not nomadic movements: they were military affairs conducted by well-organised armies in pursuit of commanders' global political aims. The point in controlling Egypt was to be a.s.sociated with its ancient glory, and to appropriate its present agricultural wealth. Otherwise, Egypt was to be kept true to its traditions, and so the only population movements were movements of elites, and small groups such as the Jews. Egyptian civilisation had, however, become a hollow show. There was no longer any pharaoh to hold the country through maR 'at and perform the sacrifices, unless the Roman emperor happened to be visiting, and by the third century AD even this pretence had been abandoned.

The one elite activity retained by Egyptians was religion, and the language provided a link between its priests and the common people. Nevertheless, after three centuries of Roman rule even this link was to weaken. The local Christian community had grown, first in the face of Roman persecution, and then with official support, adopting Egyptian rather than Greek as its language. In this way, it provided a new focus, of a spiritual kind, for Egyptian loyalty. But its growing strength was characteristically marked with intolerance, particularly towards the ancient religion. How were the Christians to know that in destroying it, they were also pruning away the deepest roots that anch.o.r.ed and sustained their separate ident.i.ty? By the fourth century AD, Egypt had become a Christian country whose populace spoke Egyptian, but whose administration and cultural life were conducted in Greek. It was still true that Egyptian's one elite activity was religion, but now this was the local version of the Christian faith.

In 641, when political control moved to Arabic speakers, there was no s.p.a.ce left for the elite activities in Greek. They soon withered, although some formal use of Greek continued for over a century. Religion was to yield much more slowly. But this was not just another political conquest: Islam, unlike Alexander and Augustus Caesar, aspired to win over all. When it did, the last motive for retaining Egyptian was removed: converts moved into a new confessional community, Arabic-speaking and cosmopolitan. Egyptian was left as the language of liturgy for those who were determined to hang on to their Christian faith, a gradually shrinking minority.

Even in hindsight, it is difficult to say whether Christianity was more of a blessing or a bane to Egyptian. It provided a strong ritual focus for the Egyptian-speaking community under Roman secular rule; but it was militant in cutting the links the language had had with its national pagan past. It provided a new synthetic ident.i.ty, that of 'Egyptian Christian' or Copt, to replace the ancient one, an ident.i.ty that was to last for many centuries, and for a small minority even until the present day. But the theological motivation for a separate Egyptian sect of Christianity, promoted as a universal faith, was nil. Egyptian was correspondingly weaker when it faced the challenging embrace of the Arabic-speaking community: what ground was there to maintain their Egyptian ident.i.ty when the G.o.ds and rituals of the land of Egypt had all been long forgotten?

Ultimately, Egyptian could not sustain itself when it ceased to be a majority language in its one and only environment, the land of Egypt. The language, like the pharaonic religion, had been a symbol of Egyptian ident.i.ty. Egyptian could survive a government speaking a foreign language, as long as its religion was based in Egypt. It could not survive a foreign government and a truly cosmopolitan religion, for its speakers had nothing national left as a focus for their ident.i.ty. They might as well become Arab Muslims, just like all the rest.

Coping with invasions: Chinese unsettled.

Recognised Chinese strategies for border management.

The final decline of Egyptian can be understood as the long-term effect of losing the sense of its own centre.

After the Roman conquest, Egypt was at best a curiosity on the edge of Rome's Mediterranean world, no longer responsible for its own destiny, but looking hopefully to the west. Four centuries later, the change of focus from Rome to Byzantium had had little impact; Egypt's ident.i.ty was sustained by its contributions to the new and growing faith of Christianity. Three centuries later still, the further shock of being incorporated into a quite different alien empire, one that was centred now to its east (in Damascus, then Baghdad), was more than its separate ident.i.ty could stand. For the first and last time, Egyptian went into decline.

China has always viewed itself as being at the centre of its world, traditionally Tian Xia, 'Heaven Below', encompa.s.sed on every side by lesser peoples, inferior in cultivation and morals. The modern word for the country, Zhongguo, 'Central Realm', seems to say it all. But another way of referring to the whole country is Sinsi zhinei, 'Within the Four Seas', going back at least to Confucius. The Chinese conventionally saw themselves as living in Nine Continents within Four Seas. Each of those seas was seen as the haunt of a barbarian people, the so-called Siyi, 'The Four Yi': Dong Yi Bei Di Xi Rong Nan Man, 'east the Yi, north the Di, west the Rong, south the Man'. This idea of the steppes that surround China's heartland as seas, bizarre to anyone who looks at a modern map, had a certain reality when those steppes were populated by pastoral nomads, roaming the gra.s.sy plains to prey on the sedentary farmers who lived round the oases, the islands in this ocean. And beyond the Siyi in the traditional world-view lay the Bahuang, 'the Eight Wastes', so it is understandable that the traditional Chinese was little tempted to explore farther abroad.*

Within this ring of hostiles, the Chinese saw themselves at its centre, with a shared conception of civilised values, and a persistent aspiration to bring willing neighbours into their fold.

There were three features of the Chinese situation that kept their vast community not only centred but also united, socially and linguistically. The first was a fact about their human environment, which quite literally came with the territory that they inhabited. The second was an inst.i.tution invented quite distinctively by the Chinese, which turned out to be remarkably persistent. And the third was the paradoxical result of the barbarian conquests when they came.

The fact was the periodic influx of hostile marauding nomads, speaking languages radically different to Chinese, and preying on settled Chinese farmers. This had an objective effect on the language, and a subjective effect on Chinese consciousness. Linguistically, the periodic influxes kept the northern Chinese population on the move, preventing it from settling into distinct dialect areas. But even when, as in the golden ages of the Han and the Tang, the barbarian threat was effecively countered for centuries at a time, the consciousness of barbarians at the gate still remained, naturally causing a greater sense of unity in the population. The external threat of invasion kept the Chinese focused on what they had to lose; and recurrent partial failures of the centre's defences against it kept the north of China in flux, and so perversely maintained the cohesion of its spoken language.

The inst.i.tution was the system of public examinations, persistent over thirteen centuries, where success was the key to a career in government. This meant that from a very early era China could boast a formally const.i.tuted civil service. When it was working, this had an effect on social order a.n.a.logous to the influxes of invaders on the linguistic order. Both tended to reduce local groupings, and emphasise higher-level loyalties. The meritocratic civil service built loyalties to the state, and undercut the personal loyalties which, when the central government was weakening, tended to develop and split the country into the power bases of contending warlords. But it also had a further effect, bound up with the Chinese language.

The syllabus was almost entirely literary, including composition of cla.s.sical poetry (introduced under the empress Wu at the end of the eighth century) and of the notorious baguwen, 'eight-legged essays', which rigorously elicited clear expression of the ideas from the cla.s.sical texts and their application to contemporary problems. As such, it could only promote national standards for the major language in which it was conducted, wenyan, cla.s.sical Chinese.

In this sense it is fair to say that the Chinese state, outside the imperial court, was const.i.tuted as the political manifestation of the Chinese literary elite. Cai Xiang, himself a brilliant product of the system, remarked negatively in the middle of the eleventh century: Nowadays in appointing people it can be observed that they are advanced in office mainly on the basis of their literary skills. The highest office-holders are literary men; those attending the throne are literary men; those managing fiscal matters are literary men; the chief commanders of the border defences are literary men; all the Regional Transport Commissioners are literary men; all the Prefects in the provinces are literary men.38 Accounts of the examination system are full of caveats about the distance between its meritocratic theory and its aristocratic and plutocratic reality. It could hardly have been otherwise in an inst.i.tution that lasted for over two thousand years, every so often dropped or reconst.i.tuted. Nevertheless, however unsatisfactory it may often have been for the vast number of bright individuals whom it failed to favour (all women, for example, were excluded), it was never a dead letter: it always existed as a potential means which could be resurrected or reformed to bring new talent into power and influence, a built-in agitator of the sediments of the Chinese establishment, a perpetual grain of sand in the government oyster.

Just as invasion by Altaic hordes kept northern China's populace on the boil, so the examination system, and appointments based on it, kept the power structures open. It therefore promoted the cohesion of the body politic as a whole, with a common language whose standards were clearly defined by the examination syllabus.

The paradoxical result was the fact that although China was ultimately unable to stem the pressure from militarised pastoral nomads, and had to yield its throne to the Mongols and the Manchus, China remained Chinese. The struggle with the barbarians was, in the last a.n.a.lysis, lost-yet it did not matter for the future of the language, or of the culture that it conveyed. In a way, Chinese showed that it could transcend the most fundamental defeat.

Strategically, this may be characterised-in Chinese terms-as: -tou liang huan zhu Steal the beams, change the pillars.

This maxim from the Chinese '36 Strategems' refers to a technique whereby an opponent is gradually lulled into a false sense of confidence, thinking the structures he relies on are still sound, although in fact they have been undermined or suborned. Evidently to do this the strategist must be on close terms with the enemy's organisation, as he may well be, after suffering apparent total defeat and accepting surrender. In the case of the Mongols-who never, incidentally, accepted serious use of the examination system, and so were vulnerable to the growth of local lords.h.i.+ps-it proved possible within a century to build up sufficient regional power bases to unseat the central government. With the Manchu, it was more difficult, since they themselves, conscious of their small numbers, made effective use of Chinese inst.i.tutions such as the examinations to recruit loyal cadres. They also concentrated themselves in the military. Still, making up no more than 2 per cent of the population, it proved impossible for them to live with the Chinese and not be absorbed by them. In vain were they forbidden by law from intermarrying with Chinese or adopting Chinese customs, in vain compulsorily educated in Manchu, a language that continued in government papers until the fall of the dynasty in 1911: nevertheless, within 150 years of their successful conquest of China, all those of Manchu ancestry were speaking Chinese.40 It also leads us to the current Chinese response to the challenge from the Western world. Bizarrely, but revealingly, China is again adopting this traditional strategy.

After its traumatic experiences at the hands of Western powers in the nineteenth century, China abolished the examination system in 1905 and the imperial monarchy itself in 1911. A general air prevailed of bringing the country up to date, European-style. One suggestion considered was even to abolish the Chinese language itself in favour of Esperanto, an artificial but would-be international language fas.h.i.+oned by a Pole out of European roots in the late nineteenth century, and in particular vogue at the time. In the event, during the 1920s and 1930s the official form of Chinese was redefined: in place of wenyan, which went back to the fifth century BC, came baihua, 'white speech', the colloquial form of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. Written in characters, it represents colloquial grammar and lexicon, but is of course neutral on actual p.r.o.nunciation. This was not too much of a shock, since it had been current, and indeed used in popular literature,* since at least the middle of the first millennium AD, but had never previously had the feel of a language for serious business.

China is now in a period of extremely rapid economic development, in which it has consciously adopted Western methods. In a sense this is the third Western-inspired revolution in a century, since the foundation of the republic in 1911, the communist revolution in 1949 and the initiation of capitalist reforms since Mao's death were all applications of Western ideas. All this in a country that had not internalised a major Western idea since the widespread take-up of Buddhism in the sixth and seventh centuries AD. If China succeeds in adopting and adapting these ideas in its own long-term interests, it will once again have turned the apparently conclusive victory of its adversary into a longer-scale triumph of its own. New beams and pillars indeed.

But if we take up again our comparison with the Egyptian case, the long-term future of the Chinese language may be hanging in the balance. The common feature we have found, which explains both Egyptian and Chinese persistence over so many millennia, is the maintenance of a distinct centre of ident.i.ty and loyalty within the language community.

Gradually losing aspects of its historic centre, in the form first of its monarchy, then of its political independence, then of its own national religion, and finally of its national form of Christianity, Egyptian weakened steadily over the ages, and has now, as a language simply recited in formal liturgy, come close to disappearing altogether. If the a.n.a.logy is valid, Chinese, despite its billion speakers, might consider that it too has now entered on a perilous path. To accommodate the challenge from the modern, European-inspired, world, it has already given up the link with its own monarchy, an ideal with which it had identified for over two millennia. It has not given up its political independence, but it has, at least officially, resigned its own religion: since the fall of the monarchy, it has no longer actively sustained the value of Confucian, much less Taoist, ideas.

China's political independence may yet save its language from the downward slide of Egyptian. And even under foreign rule, Chinese has shown itself much more resilient, and indeed absorbent, than Egyptian ever was in its last two millennia. It has the advantage, which Egyptian never had, not just of high density but also of vast absolute population size. In its written mode, there is nothing yet in the history of Chinese to compare with Egyptian's loss of its indigenous writing system and adoption of the Greek script, though romanisation may yet come.

In sum, the cultural retreats that we identified as leading to Egyptian's demise all have their a.n.a.logues in the recent history of Chinese, except for political conquest. The writing may already be on the wall for the language now spoken by one fifth of mankind.

* This Pinyin romanisation represents a modern Mandarin p.r.o.nunciation of this text from the fifth century BC. As such it represents the words and the sentence structure, but not the sounds that Confucius would have used.

In this book, Chinese is transcribed using the pinyin zimu 'phonetic alphabet' system, usually known as Pinyin, officially promoted by the Chinese government since 1958. In it, the accents (v,v,v,v) denote tone patterns, not different vowel sounds. Among consonants, c is English ts, j is English j, q English ch, and x English sh. You will also see zh, ch and sh: these are p.r.o.nounced similarly to j, q and x, but with retroflex tongue, as if there were an r immediately following. Most Chinese outside the north-east area are in fact incapable of making the distinction. Pinyin has the virtue of being compact, accurate and consistent (without the irritating apostrophes of the older Western systems, Wade-Giles and Yale) but it can only claim to represent modern p.r.o.nunciation. This can be misleading when it is applied to very old words and names.

* The word Mandarin is not Chinese at all, but a deformation of the Sanskrit word mantrin, 'counsellor', with some influence from the Portuguese verb mandar, 'command'. Putonghua means 'common language', a term with an inclusive feel, which has largely replaced older terms such as guaNnhua, 'official language' (the closest to a Chinese equivalent for Mandarin), or guyu, 'national language', which referred to much the same thing. Hanyu, 'Han language', is another term used.

* The origin of this name seems to be an early Greek attempt to represent late Egyptian n-irw-aR, 'the-rivers-great', referring to the Nile's many streams in the Delta area. This is related to jatruw, '(the) river', always its name in cla.s.sical Egyptian (Luft 1992).

The original name was Kiang alone, an Austro-Asiatic word, related to words for 'river' in Vietnamese song (once p.r.o.nounced 'krong') and Mon kru, showing the kind of language spoken here before Chinese came in from the north (Norman 1988: 18).

Compare san, 'brother', with sanat, 'sister'. Most abstract nouns share this femininity, e.g. maR 'at, 'righteousness' (always conceived as a G.o.ddess). See pp. 35ff. for a longer description of Semitic features.

This common word for the king of Egypt was established by its use in the Hebrew Bible. It represents the Egyptian pr- 'r (House-Great), and so is like using 'the Palace' to refer to the British monarch.

* The name Memphis actually refers to King Pepi's pyramid there, built some seven hundred years later: 'stable in beauty'. Egypt is inexact as a name for the country. Reflecting the Greek word Aiguptos, it is in fact a t.i.tle of Memphis: a slurring of yt kRUW pta, 'temple of the Ka-energy of Ptah'. kruw was the sustenance to the life force kaR, given by food and drink, and sacrificial offerings.

* Based in Sarw (Sais) in the Delta area, they are rumoured to have been of Libyan ancestry.

* Yet, when the hero of the fictional Tale of Sinuhe reached Retjenu, in northern Palestine (the tale is set at the end of the twentieth century BC, with Retjenu ranged with Egypt's enemies), he was told: 'You will be happy here. You will hear the language of Egypt.' As Sinuhe recounts, there were already Egyptians with the ruler of Retjenu, who had spoken up for him (verse 30). The ruler's name was Ammulanasi, recognisably Amorite.

* Herodotus, ii. 154, recounts that Psamtek put some Egyptian boys into the service of the Ionians and Carians, to be taught Greek, and thereby founded the Egyptian caste of interpreters. There is no reference to any Greeks studying Egyptian.

* Plutarch, Antony, xxvii.4-5. All these languages must have been heard on the streets of Alexandria in Cleopatra's day. Ethiopian would be the language of Kush, and Syriac is a form of Aramaic. TroG.o.dyte would have been spoken along the Red Sea coast, and is perhaps the ancestor of modern Beja. The Medjay, supposed to be the same, had been an eastern desert people employed in Egypt as police in the fifteenth to thirteenth centuries (Gardiner 1957: 183, n. 2). There is no mention here of Libyan-or of Latin, although Plutarch adds that Cleopatra is said to have spoken many other languages besides the ones he does mention. Most likely her amours with Caesar, and later Antony, were conducted in Greek.

* The last inscription was made on the sacred island of Philae, just above the Nile's first cataract and symbolically the farthest outpost of the land of Egypt. The final desecration of the shrine, the last as well as the farthest in Egypt, was ratified by the Roman emperor Justinian (Johnson 1999: 229).

* Materials for writing changed over the millennia. For the early period our knowledge of what was current is of course reliant on its durability, hence the early prominence of bronze and bone. Later on (from the first millennium) the brush was used to write on strips of bamboo. More flexible materials, distinctive Chinese inventions, came later: rolls of silk from the second century BC, and paper from AD 105. Printing too was a Chinese contribution to world language technology: fixed blocks were cut to print whole pages from the end of the ninth century AD, and movable type was introduced from the eleventh. Naturally this last was harder work with a writing system that has always used several thousand symbols.

Mencius (c.250 BC according to Brooks 2002), 3.B.6: 'Suppose some great officer of Chu wanted his son to learn to speak Qi ...' Evidently, the ambitious were already setting themselves to learn Chinese. Qi was approximately modern Shandong, at the mouth of the Huang-he, and so at the centre of the spread of Chinese. Strangely, a text written only a decade or so later seems to pick Chu to contrast with an eastern barbarian language: 'Let a Chu man grow up among Rong, or a Rong man grow up in Chu, and the Chu man will speak Rong, while the Rong man will speak Chu' (Lus.h.i.+ Chunqiu, 4.E).

* These moves can be compared with the depopulations ordered by the kings of a.s.syria and Babylon after major military victories. (See Chapter 3, 'Akkadian-world-beating technology: A model of literacy', p. 64.) But since the Mesopotamian kings saw the greatest threat in foreigners, they ended up seeding their empire with a foreign language, Aramaic; the Chinese emperor, seeing threat in Chinese feudal lords, disseminated them (and therewith the Chinese language) to the farthest corners of his realm.

This is often proposed as the etymology for the name China, a name that seems to have reached the West through Persian and Italian. But the Chinese use rather the names of the Han or Tang dynasties as the name of their nation, and the form of the name suggests that it is derived from the Sanskrit name, Cina. This applied mainly to the area of Tibet, though also on occasions included a.s.sam and Burma (Sircar 1971: 104-5). China as a whole was known to the Indians as Mahacina, 'Great China': this, for example, is where the Chinese pilgrim Xuan Zang told the Indians he was from, when he visited in 629. Si-Yu-Ki, v. 1 (in Beal 1884, part 1: 216).

* The Altai mountains of central Asia, the source of this name, are themselves named for their gold: cf. Turkish altin.

* This looks very much like a Chinese rendition of Hunnu, which would allow these people to be identified with those known to the Indians as Huna, and to the Europeans as Hunni. But the phonetic resemblance unfortunately remains the only strong evidence. (See Sinor 1990: 177-9.) * Called in modern Chinese Tuoba, using characters that at the time would have been p.r.o.nounced Tak-B'uat. The name has become the modern Chuvash: it still designates a Turkic-speaking people of whom there are 1.5 million scattered across Russia and Siberia (Clauson 2002 [1962]: 38; Dalby 1998: 134-5).

* The Statute of Kilkenny was pa.s.sed in 1366, requiring the English colonists (section III) 'to use the English language, and be called by an English name, leaving off entirely the manner of naming used by the Irish ...'

Briefly put, northern Chinese lost all its final consonants; and strings of previously free monosyllables became congealed into longer words. No one knows why, but some explanations for the changes have been proposed. Perhaps the semantic vagueness of Chinese morphemes, after losing so many distinctive consonants, meant that reinforcing one word with another was necessary in order to communicate effectively. Perhaps the sheer phonetic weakness of the new shorter syllables meant that doubling up had to occur to give the language an acceptable speech rhythm (Feng 1998). Perhaps the advent of Buddhism, with chanting in Sanskrit and Pali which introduced longer words, and the complicated expressions that arose when they were translated into Chinese, inured people to polysyllabism. The various trends and possible influences are clearly discussed in Wilkinson (2000:31-40).

* But this same trend can be seen in all Chinese dialects (and indeed farther south in the Yi and Vietnamese languages).

* 'Southern Yue'. Mandarin Nan-Yue and modern Vietnamese Vi&t Nam are just the same words, p.r.o.nounced differently and reordered, so the name is still going strong two millennia on, its designation moved 750 kilometres to the south-west.

* In the Philippines, there are half a million Chinese, and in Thailand 1.8 million, almost all speaking Southern Min. Of Malaysia's 4.5 million Chinese speakers, half speak Southern or Eastern Min, a quarter speak Hakka, a sixth speak Yue, the rest (still half a million of them) speaking Mandarin. Chinese has largely died on the lips of Indonesia's 6 million ethnic Chinese, and only a third of them still speak some form of it in the home: but of those who do, over a third speak Min, a little less than a third Hakka, just under a tenth Yue. The remaining quarter speak Mandarin (Grimes 2000).

* This term, first applied to the Portuguese, derives from Arab-Persian firengi, ultimately from Frank.

* Both empires very occasionally permitted a woman to take up the office of king, notably Hatshepsut ( 1473-1458 BC) and Cleopatra (51-30 BC) of Egypt, and the empresses Wu (AD 690-705) and Ci Xi (AD 1895-1908) of China. Eerily, it was in the reign of a woman that both monarchies, after so many millennia, came to their end.

* Their views of India are considered at pp. 192ff. below.

Sanskrit atlta, pratyutpanna, anagata, 'past by', 'given in the presence', 'not come'.

* So generally impressed were they with the way that their Chinese contemporaries did things that in the seventh century AD Korea and j.a.pan even introduced the system of public examinations for entry into the government. (Vietnam, meanwhile, was spending the whole first millennium AD under direct Chinese rule.) But they did it as copycats, emphatically not because they appreciated the point of the system: the j.a.panese permitted only n.o.bles to sit the examination; and in Korea, sons of higher-graded families were exempted.

* Aside from Cleopatra's well-known bravura performance, Peremans ( 1964) finds little evidence of bilingualism in Ptolemaic Egypt, and much of Greeks and Egyptians (egkhorioi, 'locals') sticking to their own languages. Some famous Egyptians, such as the high priest and Greek historian of Egypt, Manetho, did reach high rank in what remained to the end a Greek-speaking hierarchy. But so many public doc.u.ments were bilingual (the most famous being the Rosetta Stone, but also judicial notices relating to private cases) that the population could not have been. He also quotes a touching letter: 'I was glad, both for you and for myself, to learn that you were learning Egyptian writing, because now you can come to the city and teach the children of Phalu ... es the enema doctor, and have a means of support for your old age' (p. 57). Despite the mention of writing, the tutor was presumably to be employed to teach the middle-cla.s.s Egyptian children Greek, not vice versa.

* The Chinese have been unlike most other dominant language communities reviewed in this book in one way: they have not lumped all those speaking other languages under one unflattering name. The single term 'barbarian' is inescapable in English translation, but Chinese has many words, in principle all with different designations. Already in the third-century BC dictionary Erya ('Examples of Refined Usage'), the term sihsi is defined: jiuyi badi qirong liuman, 'the 9 Yi, the 8 Di, the 7 Rong and the 6 Man' (Erya, s.v. Sidi, cited in Wilkinson 2000: 710). Yet another term was Fan, from the Chinese point of view divided into the , shengfan, and , shufan, 'raw' or 'cooked', depending on whether they had begun to settle to civilised Chinese ways. Not that this multiplicity betokened any particular discernment or respect for the lesser breeds. Although the different words were part of the language, they were often lumped together, e.g. Rongdi, Yidi, or used undiscriminatingly. In fact, the monosyllabic blanket terms are supplemented with more specific terms for particular tribes. These were often written out, as a kind of Chinese private joke, with insulting characters, e.g. nu, 'slave', in Xiongnu, and wo, 'dwarf', in Woguo, 'dwarf-realm', i.e. j.a.pan. With urbane malice, this chanced to be p.r.o.nounced in j.a.panese identically with wa, 'harmony', the term the j.a.panese preferred when referring to themselves.

* The famous Chinese novels of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, notably Hongloumeng, "The Dream of the Red Chamber', by Cao Xueqin, Sanguozhi Yanyo, 'Romance of the Three Kingdoms', by Luo Guanzhong, and Xiyouji, 'Journey to the West', by Wu Cheng-en, were all written in this dialect of Chinese.

There were also a number of attempts to replace Chinese characters with a romanised script, but with the acknowledged difficulty of finding a system that could be neutral in terms of the different dialects, none succeeded in becoming anything more than an aid to learners and foreigners. The Pinyin romanisation used in this book represents standard Mandarin, and is now close to being an international standard. It was developed in collaboration with Russian scholars, and published officially in 1957.

5.

Charming Like a Creeper: The Cultured Career of Sanskrit.

bhaa prasasta sumano lateva.

keam na cetasy avarjayati.

Language, auspicious, charming, like a creeper, whose minds does it not win over?*

(sukta-traditional maxim).

The story in brief.

There is a persistent image of Sanskrit as a creeping plant, luxuriant and full blossomed. Over two thousand years it spread itself round the centres of Asian population: from north to south of the Indian subcontinent, and thence to South-East Asia and the East Indies, to the Tibetan plateau and to the Far East.

The word Sanskrit (saskta) means 'composed' or 'synthesised'. It is a term for the language as formulated in the grammar books, contrasting it with its colloquial dialects, known as the Prakrits (prata), the 'naturals'. It also distinguishes it from an older form, sometimes called Vedic, known from its use in the Veda, 'the knowledge': these are hymns to the G.o.ds which appear to go back to the earliest days of the language as spoken in India, in the last centuries of the second millennium BC, but which are still recited unchanged in Hindu rituals today. Most of the modern languages of northern and central India are descendants of Sanskrit, developed versions of the Prakrits, much as the Romance languages developed from forms of vulgar Latin. But outside the Indian subcontinent, Sanskrit was never taken up as a popular language; it remained purely a medium of learned communication and sacred expression, strongest where the dominant religion had come from India.

Although it is religious tradition which has proved the most reliable preserver of Sanskrit in many an avatara ('descent', as of a divine being from heaven), and despite the heavy a.s.sociation, in the West today, of the language with transcendental spiritualism, Sanskrit was never just a liturgical language.

Even the Vedic corpus contains a joyous yet wry evocation of mauka,1 'frogs', doubly like the priestly caste of Brahmans: they take a vow of silence for a year (until the rainy season); and when they do pipe up 'one of them repeats the speech of the other, as the learner does of his teacher'. It also brings us the wry self-pity of a compulsive gambler,2 enslaved to babhrava, 'the browns', the nuts then used as dice: raja cid ebhyo nama it koti, 'even a king bows before them...' he excuses himself, going on: tasmai komi, 'na dhana ruadhmi' dasaham pracis, 'tad tam vadami'. 'I show him my empty palms: "I am not holding out on you-it's the truth, I tell you."'

Later on, Sanskrit becomes very wide ranging in its content, including among its most widely known works romantic comedy, theoretical linguistics, economics, s.e.xology (notably the Kama Sutra), lyrical verse, history and moral fables, along with a continuing production of epic poetry and religious and philosophical tracts. It is a very self-conscious literary tradition, full of learned allusions, and above all the most elaborate development of the pun known anywhere on earth.

We begin with an outline of how Sanskrit was spread across Asia.

A dialect of Indo-Iranian, it is first heard of in the North-West Frontier area of Swat and the northern Panjab (now in Pakistan), spoken by peoples who have evidently come from farther north or west, and who like to call themselves arya (later a common word for 'gentleman', and always the Buddhists' favourite word for sheer n.o.bility of spirit). Somehow their descendants, and even more their language, spread down over the vast Indo-Gangetic plain, as well as up into the southern reaches of the Himalaya ('snow-abode') mountains, so that by the beginning of the fifth century BC the language was spoken in an area extending as far east as Bihar, and as far south, perhaps, as the Narmada. Sanskrit literature from the period, princ.i.p.ally the epic poems Mahabharata ('Great Bharata') and Ramayaa ('The Coming of Rama'), is full of military exploits and conquests.

The result was the present-day situation, a northern Indian heartland, stretching from sea to sea, of languages more or less closely related to Sanskrit. This centre is always known in India as Aryavarta ('abode of the Aryas'). It also gained one offshoot in $SAri Lanka to the far south, creating the Sihala ('lion-y') community there: according to tradition, this group had come from Gujarat, on the north-western coast, in the fifth century BC. The advance of Aryan is continuing to this day in the northern regions of a.s.sam and Nepal, where the official languages (a.s.samese, and Nepali or Gurkhali) are both Aryan, but have not yet become the vernaculars of large majorities of their populations.

Not all the spread of Sanskrit was through full take-up of the language as a vernacular. Even when pre-existing languages, such as Telugu, Kannada and Tamil, held their own, they were usually permeated with terminology from Sanskrit. It is quite possible for these borrowed words (called tat-sama, 'that-same') to be overwhelmingly numerous in a language whose grammar is non-Aryan. Conversely, in Urdu, or even Hindi, majority languages of northern India, Aryan roots may be almost invisible under the heavy influence of later borrowings from Persian and Arabic. (This widespread culturally induced borrowing has been the bane of Indian historical linguistics: nowhere has it been harder to sift the inherited part of languages from foreign borrowings, and so piece together their history.) The process of Sanskritisation did not stop at the boundaries of the subcontinent. Over the course of the first millennium AD, Indian seafaring traders or missionaries made landfall, not only in ri Lanka, but also in many places along the coasts of South-East Asia. Here, the language spread above all as a language of elite civilisation and religion (whether Hindu or Buddhist), but the influence, and evidently the study made of Sanskrit as a vehicle of high culture, was profound. The region is known as Indo-China, quite rightly, for it became a crucible for the competing cultural influences of India and China.

But when Sanskrit took its path northward, round the Himalayas to Tibet, China, Korea and j.a.pan, it was above all the attractions of the Buddha's teachings which caused the spread of the language. The Buddha had lived in the fifth century BC, in the lower valley of the Ganges, speaking a Prakrit known as Magadhi. In the next two hundred years the faith he founded spread all over India and ri Lanka, as well as into Burma, its scriptures largely written in a closely related Prakrit, Pali, but also, more and more over time, in cla.s.sical Sanskrit. Besides the spread to South-East Asia, the most influential path that Buddhism took was to Kashmir, and back to the homeland of Sanskrit itself in Panjab and Swat.

Hence in the first century AD Buddhism, with its attendant scriptures, spread northward, perhaps here again trekking back up the historic route that Sanskrit speakers had used to enter India over a millennium before. But past Bactria, instead of turning left into the central Asian steppes, it turned right and, picking up the Silk Road, headed into China. Received by the rising Tang dynasty, and ultimately propagated by them, Buddhism became coextensive with Chinese culture. Thence it was ultimately transmitted, along with its Sanskrit and Pali scriptures, to Korea and j.a.pan, its most easterly homes, arriving at the end of the sixth century.

Other, closer, areas took much longer to receive the doctrine, borne as ever by its vehicles Pali and Sanskrit. Nepal had been part of the early Indian spread of Buddhism under Asoka, in the third century BC; but the first Indian monk invited into Tibet, antarakita, came in the second half of the eighth century AD, a full 1200 years after the Buddha had lived just two hundred miles to the south (admittedly, over the Himalayas) in Magadha; and the religion was firmly established in Tibet only in the eleventh century.

The last area to be exposed to Buddhism (and hence sacred Sanskrit) on a large scale was Mongolia, its northernmost home. For many centuries there were strong links between the Tibetans and the Mongols, who from 1280 to 1368 achieved ascendancy over China. Kublai Khan, for example, the Mongol emperor of China well known in the West as the host of Marco Polo, was keen to spread Buddhism to the Mongol homeland in the early fourteenth century. But this aim was only achieved permanently by Chinese preachers rather later: in 1578 the Altan Khan of Mongolia accepted a version of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, on behalf of his whole realm.

Sanskrit, then, has a far-flung history, and has been in contact with cultures conducted in other languages all over southern, eastern and central Asia. And an interesting generalisation emerges. Nowhere has this linguistic contact led to loss or replacement of other linguistic traditions, even though Sanskrit has always been central to new cultural developments wherever it has reached. This record makes a striking contrast with the impact, too often devastating, of languages of large-scale campaigning civilisations, such as Greek, Latin, Arabic, Spanish, French and English.

But in another way this widespread embrace of Indian culture is highly reminiscent of the enthusiasm for Americana that captured the whole world, and certainly the South-East Asian region, in the second half of the twentieth century. In that advance too the primary motives were the growth of profits through trade, and a sense that the globally connected and laissez-faire culture that came with the foreigners was going to raise the standard of life of all who adopted it. As with the ancient advance of Indianisation, there has been little or no use of the military to reinforce the advance of Microsoft, Michael Jackson or Mickey Mouse. There has been little sense that the advance is planned or coordinated by political powers in the centre of innovation, whether in India then, or in the USA today. And the linguistic effects are similar too: English, like Sanskrit, has advanced as a lingua franca for trade, international business and cultural promotion.