Egypt. Farther south, in Palestine, the general level of wealth and urbanisation was lower, and marauding Habiru (known to the Egyptians as ‘apiru) were a threat to more settled communities. Perhaps the ancestors of the nation later calling themselves ‘ibri (Hebrews) were among them.

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

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

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

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

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

      But most immediately significant for the linguistic history of the Middle East is a third group, the Aramaeans, desert nomads from northern Syria speaking a Semitic language. They are first heard of as a particularly persistent enemy in an inscription of the same Tiglath Pileser I at the end of the twelfth century bc. Soon after we hear that Damascus was an Aramaean city. By the tenth century they had established themselves as a significant power, largely at the expense of the remaining Hittite–Luwian colonies. Then they

      spread out towards the east, despite resistance from Assyrian monarchs, and by the end of the ninth century there were apparently settlements of them all over the land of Sumer and Akkad. The succession to the throne of Babylon was not routine in this period, and at least one dynasty, Bît Bazi in the early tenth century, appears to have been Aramaean. The Chaldaeans (Kaldû) were also an Aramaean tribe who settled in Sumer, and went on to found the last Babylonian dynasty in the seventh to sixth centuries, including Nabupolassar, Nebuchadrezzar II and Nabonidus. The Aramaeans had made themselves very much part of the establishment.

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

      While this was going on in Asia, the Phoenicians themselves, strung out along the Mediterranean coast of what is now Lebanon, were expanding, or rather exploring