Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Nicholas Ostler
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have gone on speaking the language to the present day. But the new faith had cosmopolitan aspirations, and their first public event (recorded in Acts ii) was the pentecostal feast at which its apostles miraculously became able to preach in all manner of languages. This sudden gift for languages did not persist, and so a convenient medium had to be found to publish the scriptures. Given that they were in the Roman empire, centred on the Mediterranean, Greek was a reasonable choice. It was also free of the Jewish associations that hung about Aramaic, and might have tarnished Christianity’s appeal to gentiles. Greek accordingly was the language in which the Christian scriptures, the so-called ‘New Testament’, were composed. It became the first language of the Church in the west.
Nevertheless, the world was bigger than Rome and the ‘circle of lands’ (orbis terrārum) that surrounded its sea. Significantly, the first foreigners mentioned as witnesses to the pentecostal miracle are Parthians, Medes, Elamites and dwellers in Mesopotamia, none of them at the time under Roman rule, and as we have seen by this time (seven generations after the fall of the Seleucid empire in the east) much more likely to understand Aramaic than Greek.
It took two hundred years to get established, but the early Christian Church did get a major wing oriented towards the east. It was based at Edessa (modern and ancient Urfa†), a city on the major route east from Antioch on the Mediterranean towards Nisibis (Nusaybin) in Aram Naharaim, and Agbatana (Hamadan) in Media. The language of Edessa and its believers was Aramaic, here known as Syriac. This is our first example of a radically new motive for language spread, the drive to win converts to a new religion. Although the originals were in Greek, the New Testament and most early Christian literature was translated into Syriac, and became the basis of a literature of its own, of hymns, sermons and wider disquisitions, continuing actively until the thirteenth century AD, despite the swirls of Islamic invasions that passed round and about it.§
As honey drips from a honeycomb, and milk flows from a woman full of love for her children, so is my hope upon you, my God.
As a fountain gushes forth its water, so does my heart gush forth the praise of the Lord and my lips pour out praise to him; my tongue is sweet from converse with him, my face exults in the jubilation he brings, my spirit is jubilant at his love and by him my soul is illumined.
He who holds the Lord in awe may have confidence, for his salvation is assured; he will gain immortal life, and those who receive this are incorruptible. Hallelujah!
Odes of Solomon, no. 4057
The spread of a language has to be distinguished from the spread of the religion, of course. Edessa was the source, for example, of the Christianity that reached Armenia in 303. But the Armenians were not tempted to give up their own language, even if they were setting up the first national Christian Church in history, and even though without Aramaic script Bishop Mesrop Mashtotz would never have designed the Armenian alphabet, still in use today.
Still, the language did travel, at the very least in liturgical and written form, with the preachers. Christians of the Nestorian persuasion, judged heretical and exiled from Edessa by imperial order in 489, carried Syriac out to Persia, where as already seen Aramaic was still very much at home. Their next base was just up the road in Nisibis. But the Nestorians did not stop there. Their missionaries went on into India, where they established a bishopric in Kalyana (near Mumbai), and a cluster of monasteries farther south, especially in Kerala, joining forces with the St Thomas Christians, supposedly dating from the missionary activities of the apostle—another native speaker of Aramaic, naturally. When they were rediscovered by Europeans in the nineteenth century, they still had Bibles and religious manuscripts written in Syriac, though it seems the language was little used in worship.
The Nestorians also kept travelling east from Persia along the Silk Road into central Asia, at last reaching Karakorum in Mongolia, and the northern cities of China. The arrival of the monk Alopen in the Chinese capital Chang-an (Xian) in 635 is commemorated on a stele set up in 781, bilingual in Syriac and Chinese.58
Two centuries later they had largely disappeared from China; and remnants of the Church farther west were mostly exterminated in the fourteenth century by the warlord Timur-i-leng (Tamburlaine). But Nestorians survived closer to their founding areas, in Mesopotamia and farther north in Kurdistan. Their tradition, and the use of Syriac, survives in the Assyrian and Chaldaean churches. Other Syriac speakers, of the so-called Syrian Jacobite Church, who stayed more at home round Antioch and Edessa, and whose missionary activity was aimed more along caravan routes in Arabia, have also survived in small numbers.*
The net result of all this heroic proselytism has been modest: Aramaic or Syriac has survived in small pockets quite close to its original homes.† But the language has survived. It owes its survival to its speakers’ determination to maintain their communities, and those communities have all been based on a religion.
This ‘confessional’ route to survival is at most two and a half thousand years old, and seems characteristic of the languages of the Near East, particularly Afro-Asiatic languages. The most notable language to survive by this strategy is Hebrew: we have already noted how it is the adherence to its own identity, marked out by a religious code, which explains its survival by contrast with the total oblivion suffered two thousand years ago by its sister language Phoenician. For the strategy to work, the religion of the language community must be significantly different from that of the population that surrounds it.
Another example is the Coptic language, the final survival of Egyptian. This had simply been Egypt’s ancestral language,§ as distinct from the interloping
Alopen stele in Chang-an
The bulk of the inscription in Chinese summarises the Christian creed (the shining doctrine from Dà Qín) and a history of the Church under imperial patronage in China. The Syriac part (at bottom left) is in vertical columns, like Chinese. It reads: ‘In the year 1092 of the Greeks, my lord Yazedbouzid, priest and chorepiscopus of Kudan, royal city, son of the late Milis, priest from Balkh, city in Tahouristan, erected this monument, wherein it is written the law of Him, our saviour, the Preaching of our forefathers to the Rulers of the Chinese.’ On the sides are lists of names in Chinese and Syriac.
Aramaic and Greek that had come in from the Near East, but after the Muslim conquest it became associated more and more with the Christian population of Egypt; for as in most parts of the empire, Christians had come to be the majority after the Roman emperor Constantine’s public embrace of their faith in the early fourth century.
The Muslims’ treatment of the Copts gradually soured. No one knows how fast the percentage of Christians in the population fell, but fall it did, especially in the north of the country, so that for some centuries Coptic was stronger in the south. Through the seventh to ninth centuries the Copts were guaranteed freedom of religion and civil autonomy, although like non-Muslims everywhere they were subject to special taxes. But in 829 the Copts revolted against tax collectors, and were severely put down. Thereafter conditions sporadically worsened and occasionally improved under a variety of Muslim dynasties, but the consistent trend was for the Coptic population—and use of the language outside the liturgy—to diminish. Theological works were still being written until 820, and new hymns went on being composed until early in the fourteenth century. The language community was in fact sufficiently lively for the Delta dialect, Bohairic, to supplant Sahidic, the dialect of Upper Egypt, as the standard: it was consecrated for use in liturgy by Patriarch Gabriel II in 1132–45. Although there were cultural revivals after the fourteenth century, the language did not come back into daily life. But it has persisted