Empires Of The Word Part 4

All the s.h.i.+ps of the sea and their sailors came alongside to trade for your wares.

Men of Persia, Lydia, and Put served as soldiers in your army.

They hung their s.h.i.+elds and helmets on your walls, bringing you splendour.

Men of Arwad and Helech manned your walls on every side; men of Gammad were in your towers.

They hung their s.h.i.+elds around your walls; they brought your beauty to perfection.

The s.h.i.+ps of Tars.h.i.+sh serve as carriers for your wares.

You are filled with heavy cargo in the heart of the sea.

Your oarsmen will take you out to the high seas.

But the east wind will break you to pieces in the heart of the sea.

As they wail and mourn over you they will take up a lament concerning you: 'Who was ever silenced like Tyre, surrounded by the sea?'

The Carthaginians, like other Phoenicians, kept voluminous records. Those that would have been kept on papyrus are lost, but there are several thousand known inscriptions, a.s.signing rights over sacrificial offerings, making dedications to the G.o.ddess Tank or the G.o.d Baal Hammon, or commemorating ceremonies. It is also clear that Carthage had pa.s.sed on the administrative use of its language to the neighbouring states to the west, Ma.s.sylia and Ma.s.saesylia: their coins bear inscriptions in Punic letters, as do boundary stones.38 Indeed, there is evidence for a whole literature in Punic. St Augustine remarked famously that 'on the word of many scholars, there was a great deal of virtue and wisdom in the Punic books'.39 This view was shared by the Roman Senate, which even as the city of Carthage was being finally destroyed in 146 BC gave orders for a new translation and edition of one especially admired treatise on agriculture. 'Our Senate presented the libraries of the city to African princes, with the sole exception of the 28 books of Mago, which they decreed should be translated into Latin ... The text was entrusted to scholars learned in Punic.'40 Some forty fragments of it are quoted by later Latin authors, but the work as a whole is lost, even in Latin translation.

In fact, no Punic literary work has survived. The closest to it is a Greek translation, in about seven hundred words, of a Punic inscription engraved in the temple of Baal Hammon at Carthage, recording the voyage of exploration by a Carthaginian leader, Hanno, round the western coast of Africa (perhaps as far as Gabon). It ends: ... we came to the gulf named Horn of the South. In the corner was an island ... and in it a lake with an island full of savage people. By far the majority of them were female, hairy in body, called by the interpreters 'gorillas'. We could not catch the men because of their skill at climbing and defending themselves with stones, but we took three women, who fiercely resisted, biting and tearing. However, we killed them and skinned them, and brought the hides back to Carthage. We did not sail further since our supplies had given out.41 It is tantalising that this text, one of the few brief survivals from the wreck of Punic literature, should have recounted such a unique adventure.

How is the total loss of Phoenician, and its successor dialect Punic, to be explained, after such a widespread expansion across the Mediterranean world? We have here another unanswered, and as yet largely unasked, question.

After Alexander's sack of Tyre in 332 BC, Phoenician trade remained prosperous for many centuries, with no further disasters to threaten the traders' stability. The Punic language did not die out promptly, even in its overseas provinces, where all the administrative links to Carthage were cut by the end of the second century BC: in Sardinia, for example, several 'neo-Punic' inscriptions have been found, the latest, at Bithia in the extreme south, made as late as the end of the second century AD. And even if the life of Carthage as a city was brutally punctuated in 146 BC, it was refounded as a Roman town by Augustus a century later. It then enjoyed a flouris.h.i.+ng later life till the end of the Roman empire in the west. We may surmise that its language survived in use in North Africa, until the fifth century AD: Augustine tells us that he had to quote his Punic proverbs in Latin since 'not everybody' would understand the original.42 Nevertheless, ever since Alexander's conquest of western Asia there had been a general cultural levelling in the Near East, with Greek and Aramaic spreading at the expense of all the minority languages. Although Aramaic was a language closely related to Phoenician or Hebrew, Greek had still been taken up by a large part of the Jewish community (especially those in Egypt) in this period. Greek had also become a basic subject in the education of Romans, who were by the second century BC clearly recognised as the rising power.

The cultural undertow was thus running strongly in favour of Greek. And in fact it is possible that, despite its users' commercial prowess, Phoenician or Punic had never been widely used as a lingua franca or even as a trade jargon outside Africa. The language of trade is, after all, perforce that of the customer, rather than that of the merchant.

The Roman comedian Plautus ill.u.s.trates this in a scene from his play Poenulus, 'the Punic guy'-'Punk'?-which came out in the early second century BC, soon after the end of the Second Punic War.43 A Carthaginian merchant tries talking to a couple of Romans in Punic, even though he knows Latin, but soon tires of their constant heavy puns and jokes on him and his language, to cloak the poor language skills of the one who claims to be a bit of Punic expert. (Hanno's Punic is in bold, and the Latin that echoes it is in bold italics.) HANNO: mechar bocca MILPHIO: Istuc tibi sit potius quam mihi. AGORASTOCLES: quid ait? MILPHIO: miseram esse praedicat buccam sibi. forta.s.se medicos nos esse arbitrarier.

AGORASTOCLES: si ita est nega esse; nolo ego errare hospitem.

MILPHIO: audin tu? HANNO: rufe ynny cho is sam AGORASTOCLES: sic volo profecto vera cuncta huic expedirier. roga numquid opu' sit. MILPHIO: tu qui sonam non habes, quid in hanc venistis urbem aut quid quaeritis?

HANNO: muphursa AGORASTOCLES: quid ait?

HANNO: mi uulech ianna AGORASTOCLES: quid venit?

MILPHIO: non audis? mures Africanos praedicat in pompam ludis dare se velle aedilibus.

HANNO: Good morning to you. MILPHIO: Better you than me.

AGORASTOCLES: What is he saying? MILPHIO: He says his jaw hurts.

Perhaps he thinks we are doctors.

AGORASTOCLES: Then say we're not; as a stranger, I don't want him misled.

MILPHIO: Are you listening? HANNO: Doctor, no one is perfect.

AGORASTOCLES: Yes, I certainly want all this explained to me. Ask him if he needs anything. MILPHIO: YOU without a belt, why have you people come to this city, or what are you after?

HANNO: What do you mean? AGORASTOCLES: What is he saying?

HANNO: What is he on about to a stranger?

AGORASTOCLES: Why has he come?

MILPHIO: Don't you hear? African mice [a joke for 'elephants'?] he says he wants to present to the city wardens for the circus parade.44 Still, the fact that the Punic dialogue is in there at all suggests that a smattering of Punic was not strange to Romans at the time, and good for a laugh.

The Carthaginian army (largely made up of mercenaries from all over the western Mediterranean) is said to have been commanded in Greek; certainly the coins struck by the soldiers during the great mutiny in 241-238 BC, the so-called 'Truceless War', were inscribed in Greek. And it is known that the annalists who accompanied Hannibal on campaign in Italy, Silenos and Sosylos, wrote in Greek. When Hannibal put up a plaque recording his exploits in a temple of Hera in Sicily, it was in Greek as well as Punic.45 The Phoenicians and Carthaginians, notorious as shrewd businessmen, must have been pragmatists; like their modern a.n.a.logues, they would have focused on the practical utility of a means of communication, and chosen a language accordingly. In the last couple of centuries BC, it was clear that the most generally useful international language in the Mediterranean was Greek.

In Carthage itself, and the North African provinces of Libya (to the east) and Numidia (to the west), Punic did continue to be used. But there is no evidence of Punic literary activity after the Roman conquest (146 BC). Literacy seems to have become restricted to the use of Latin and Greek. The Punic cultural traditions ceased to be fostered, and the physical record of this once highly literate society did not last much longer.

The universal medium for administrative and literary records had been papyrus, a material that survives long-term only in extremely dry conditions (such as those of the Egyptian desert). Texts that were not inscribed on a durable medium such as stone, ivory or clay would not survive unless they were repeatedly copied-a service that was maintained for seminal texts in Greek and Latin, and indeed Hebrew, throughout late antiquity and the Middle Ages, until the printing press made them safe. There was no tradition to preserve Phoenician or Punic texts, and so they perished with the papyrus on which they had been written.

As for the spoken dialects, they will most likely have survived until succeeded by larger-scale neighbouring languages. Interestingly, in both cases, these new languages were Semitic, closely related to Canaanite dialects and in fact rather similar to them. Phoenician in the Lebanon will have yielded to Aramaic in the first century BC; and the last remnants of Punic in North Africa probably succ.u.mbed to Arabic in the seventh or even eighth century AD.*

Aramaic-the desert song: Interlingua of western Asia.

In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah's reign, Sennacherib king of a.s.syria attacked all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them. Then he sent his field commander with a large army from Lachish to King Hezekiah at Jerusalem ... The field commander said to [Eliakim, Shebna and Joah, Hezekiah's emissaries]:

This is what the great king, the king of a.s.syria says: on what are you basing this confidence of yours? ... Yahweh himself told me to march against this country and destroy it.

Then Eliakim, Shebna and Joan said to the field commander,

Please speak to us in Aramaic ['aramith], sir, since we understand it. Don't speak to us in Hebrew [yudith] in the hearing of the people on the wall.

But the commander replied:

Was it only to your master and you that my master sent me to say these things, and not to the men sitting on the wall-who like you will have to eat their own s.h.i.+t and drink their own p.i.s.s?

Then the commander stood and called out in Hebrew:

Hear the words of the great king, the king of a.s.syria! This is what the king says: do not let Hezekiah deceive you. He cannot deliver you!...

Isaiah x.x.xvi.1-14 (= 2 Kings xviii.17-29).

These events, which took place in 701 BC, show that at this stage Aramaic, although the lingua franca of senior officers in the a.s.syrian empire and the kingdom of Judah, was not the language of Judah's common soldier.

This was to change. The policy of internal deportation so thoroughly applied by the a.s.syrians was continued by their successors, and this time a notable victim was the Hebrew language, along with many of its speakers in the land of Judah.

When in 609 BC a.s.syria was at last subjugated by an alliance of Medes from the east and Babylonians from the south, there were no direct linguistic effects, except that Akkadian ceased to be written in a.s.syria. Aramaic continued as the standard spoken language of Mesopotamia, which was henceforth governed (if at all) from Babylon. But others had noticed the momentous political change. Egypt, in particular, saw an opportunity and invaded Palestine and Syria.

Babylon's crown prince Nebuchadrezzar (Nabu-kudurri-uur, 'Nabu, protect my offspring') responded effectively. Twenty years later, by the time this and perhaps two more Egyptian invasions had been repulsed, Jerusalem, which had twice sided with the Egyptians, was definitively in Babylonian hands. Most of its population went either as refugees to Egypt or as deportees to Babylon.

This is precisely the sort of treatment that kills off a language, as can be attested by the experience of so many indigenous people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, moved off their lands by colonists or social engineers, in regions as varied as North Carolina, Queensland, Ethiopia, Siberia and Tibet. There are Hebrew songs of lamentation, all too conscious of the danger: 'al naharo babel sam yasbeno gam bainu bzarenu eion ...

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept

when we remembered Zion.

There on the poplars we hung our harps

for there our captors asked us for songs,

our tormentors asked for songs of joy;

They said, 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion!'

How can we sing the songs of Yahweh

while in a foreign land?

If I forget you, O Jerusalem,

may my right hand forget its skill.

May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth

if I do not remember you ...

Psalm cx.x.xvii. 1-6.

Yet they did forget, at least the speech of Jerusalem. Amid the crowds of Babylon, Aramaic, which had been the cosmopolitan language for the Jewish elite, became their vernacular, and Hebrew, the language of the people, became a tongue known only to the learned. It had already vanished from speech two generations later, when in 538 the Persian king Cyrus, in one of his first reforms after conquering Babylon, allowed the Jews to return.*

The Aramaic language was now inseparable from the Babylonian empire, and a new standard version of the language arose, usually known as Imperial Aramaic. It had developed in the eastern areas, where the Aramaean settlers had established themselves in Mesopotamia, and as such was more influenced by Akkadian than its more ancient, and some would say more authentic, version spoken in Aram and the rest of Syria. Yet this dialect was destined to become the standard not just for the Babylonian empire, but for the much greater Persian empire that replaced it, 'over 127 provinces stretching from Hodu to Kus', in the awed phrase of the Book of Esther, i.e. from Hindustan to the land of Kush, south of Egypt.

The distinctive traits of this dialect were fairly small things, such as plural-im replaced by -in, plural -ayya by -e, and in some forms of the verb the dropping of initial h, to be replaced by a glottal stop ' (rather reminiscent of colloquial London English). In fact, the model for this standard seems to have been Babylonian Aramaic as spoken and written by educated Persians.46 The fact of this colonial transplant becoming the effective standard is no more surprising than the current popularity of General American as a world standard for English. As 'Standard Literary Aramaic' it was to remain essentially unchanged for the next millennium.

More surprisingly, Aramaic was also used to an extent as a language for international communication. At Saqqara, near the site of the Egyptian capital Memphis, a late seventh-century papyrus from a Philistine king has been discovered, asking in Aramaic for the Egyptian pharaoh's help against the king of Babylon; soon afterwards, Jeremiah, an adviser to the kings of Judah just before Babylon sacked Jerusalem, breaks into Aramaic in the midst of a tirade in Hebrew. This is for a slogan to cast in the teeth of foreign idolaters: These G.o.ds, who did not make the heavens and the earth, will perish from the earth and from under the heavens.

Jeremiah x. 11 In the event, the Aramaic-speaking believers in those G.o.ds were due to inherit the earth, at least from India to Kush. However, the language was usable across these vast distances not because it was actually spoken by the various populations, but because it acted as a written interlingua, understood by a network of literate translators and interpreters, the sepiru. A ruler or official would dictate a letter in his own language, and the sepiru would write it down in Aramaic; when the doc.u.ment reached its addressee-Persia was also renowned for its excellent postal service-it would be read by another sepiru who would speak it aloud in whatever was the language of his master or mistress. This process was called paras, literally 'declaration' in Aramaic, or uzvarisn, 'explanation' in Persian.47 In Ezra iv.18, the Persian king Artaxerxes receives in oral translation the Aramaic letter of some local government officials from Trans-Euphrates. He begins his reply (reported in Aramaic, but no doubt dictated in Persian): Greetings, and now:

the letter you sent us was translated and read in our presence ...

The same practical system was in use internationally, though it must have been limited by the availability of bilingual sepiru for languages beyond the Persian realm. In the Greeks' Peloponnesian War, a messenger from the Persian king to Sparta was intercepted in 428 by the Athenians: his letters then needed to be translated ek tn a.s.surion grammaton, 'from the a.s.syrian writing'. It is unlikely that its real addressees in Sparta would have been able to make any sense of them without the messenger's paras.48 The convenience of this system must have acted as a strong motive for the spread of the language, and it gets into some amazing places, notably the Jewish scriptures. Besides the Aramaic letters in the book of Ezra, long pa.s.sages in the book of Daniel (written in the second century BC) are written in Aramaic, appropriately so since it recounts the various adventures and visions of this Jewish counsellor at court in Babylon under a succession of Babylonian and then Persian kings. It begins with a Hebrew description of his training as a sepiru, after being recruited by the Babylonian king, a three-year course in epir u-lson kasdim, 'the writing and language of the Chaldaeans'.49 This discreet use of a lingua franca disguised by multilingual paras (rather reminiscent of that naive sort of fiction where travellers can go anywhere and at once get into serious conversations with the local people, never noticing any language barrier) was quite compatible with continuing use of local languages in other official functions. One example is the legends on coined money: in fact, this means of payment with a government guarantee had only recently been invented (in Lydia, western Anatolia). It spread only slowly in the Persian empire, and most contemporary coins come from the western provinces. So there are Persian-era coins inscribed in Greek and pretty much every other language of southern Anatolia (Lydian, Sidetic, Carian and Lycian-all related to Hitt.i.te and Luwian); Aramaic is used in northern parts of Anatolia (where Phrygian was probably still in use), in Cilicia (which had been part of the Babylonian empire, and had had strong links with Phoenicia) and in Mesopotamia. In Egypt there were also coins struck in demotic Egyptian.50 Still the Egyptians became heavy users of Aramaic, despite the lateness of Egypt's annexation to the Persian empire. The language would have come in beforehand, along with a sizeable population of refugees and emigres from Aram, Phoenicia, Edom, Judah and other countries threatened or dominated by Babylon, with a de facto common language in Aramaic. But many Egyptians were also drawn into this community, as the Egyptian names occurring in Aramaic texts show, and when the Persians were replaced by the Ptolemies Egyptians continued to use Aramaic for legal doc.u.ments.51 Egypt, because of its dry climate, has provided almost all the surviving texts in Aramaic from this period, written on papyrus or leather, particularly the correspondence of a Persian governor (satrap) called Arsames, a packet of letters from a family distributed between Luxor and Syene (Aswan) up and down the Nile, and at Syene the archives of the Jewish military garrison, including a fair number of legal doc.u.ments and business letters to Jerusalem. This also includes the proverbs of the sage Ahiqar, a legendary counsellor at the court of the a.s.syrian kings Sennacherib and Esarhaddon in the early seventh century BC, one of which appears as epigraph to the second section of this chapter. Having experience of life at court, he is particularly concerned about the power of leaks and malicious gossip: My son, Chatter not overmuch so that thou speak out every word that come to thy mind; for men's eyes and ears are everywhere trained upon thy mouth. Beware lest it be thy undoing. More than all watchfulness watch thy mouth, and over what thou hearest harden thy heart.

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

Treat not lightly the word of a king: let it be healing for thy flesh ...52 The letters reveal that some Jews, as Jeremiah had lamented, were indeed on pretty familiar terms with alien G.o.ds. Consider this from a valet, written on a piece of broken pottery: 'To my lord Micaiah, your servant Giddel. I send you welfare and life. I bless you by Yaho [i.e. Yahweh] and Khnub [a local G.o.d]. Now send me the garment you are wearing and they will mend it. I send the note for your welfare.'53 Away to the north in Anatolia, languages spoken must have been at least as various as the coin legends; nevertheless, inscriptions in Greek, Lydian and Lycian have been found accompanied by translation in Aramaic, especially for monumental inscriptions of laws.