Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Nicholas Ostler
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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
Who was ever silenced like Tyre, surrounded by the sea?†
Ezekiel xxvii.32
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 lustrous colour for which she was famous*) chose the high life, and became associated 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-assertive 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 gratitude 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 sturdy 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 [y∂hūdīth], ‘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 š∂lōm for Arabic salām, ‘peace’. In Phoenician (and Punic) this tendency goes farther, with even short A rounded to ō, and long A even more rounded to ū: so the Phoenician for eternity is ‘ūlōm (versus Hebrew ‘ōlām, Aramaic ‘āl∂m), and their chief magistrates hold the title sūfet, equivalent to Hebrew šōet, 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 associated 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 hadašt, ‘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 gods 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 goddess who has various names, including Ashtoreth and Asherah, El, the benign high god, 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 gods by Greek names (of those of whom similar tales were told), his unsupported account of Phoenician mythology was received (for almost two thousand years)