Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Nicholas Ostler
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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:
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 cxxxvii.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 Hōdû to Kûš’, 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 -îm replaced by -în, plural -ayyā by -ē, 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 gods, 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 gods 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 sepīru. A ruler or official would dictate a letter in his own language, and the sepīru would write it down in Aramaic; when the document reached its addressee—Persia was also renowned for its excellent postal service—it would be read by another sepīru who would speak it aloud in whatever was the language of his master or mistress. This process was called paraš, literally ‘declaration’ in Aramaic, or uzvārišn, ‘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 sēpiru 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 Assuríōn grammátōn, ‘from the Assyrian writing’. It is unlikely that its real addressees in Sparta would have been able to make any sense of them without the messenger’s paraš.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 passages 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 sepīru, after being recruited by the Babylonian king, a three-year course in ēir ū-l∂šôn kasdîm, ‘the writing and language of the Chaldaeans’.49
This discreet use of a lingua franca disguised by multilingual paraš (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 Hittite 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 émigrés 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 documents.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