Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

A majority of these deportations would have involved Aramaic speakers, although the most famous, carried out by Sargon II against Samaria, capital of Israel, in 721 BC, probably involved speakers of Hebrew:

At the beginning of my rule, I took the town of the Samarians for the god … who let me achieve this triumph. I led away as prisoners 27,290 inhabitants of it and equipped from among them soldiers to man 50 chariots for my royal corps …The town I rebuilt better than it was before and settled therein people from countries which I myself had conquered. I placed an officer of mine as governor over them and imposed upon them tribute as for Assyrian citizens. [266] Pritchard (1969: 284): from a display inscription in Sargon II’s show capital of Khorsabad (Dŭr Sharrukîn).

The Hebrew scriptures (2 Kings xvii.6, 24) give more details of where the Israelite exiles were sent (including Aram Naharaim on the Khabur river, and the north-eastern extremity of the empire in Media), and of who were sent to replace them. (They included some Babylonians.)

Now and then, correspondence gives an insight into how these deportees were viewed when they arrived in Mesopotamia. [267] Tadmor (1982: 451). A letter to the king contrasts qinnāte ša Ninua labīrūti , ‘old-time families of Nineveh’, with nasi’ānni , ‘social upstarts’, and šaglūti , ‘deportees’, itself perhaps a pun on šaklūti , ‘ignorants’. But it is clear that people with western Semitic names were often entrusted with significant responsibility.

This scattering of Assyria’s subject peoples could be seen as a shrewd policy to unify the diverse populations of the empire by cutting them off from their traditions—an imposed ‘melting pot’ solution. [268] Parpola (1999) claims it was quite deliberate: ‘The Aramaization of Assyria was a calculated policy aimed at creating national unity and identity of a kind that could never have been achieved, had the Empire remained a loose conglomeration of a plethora of different nations and languages.’ All deportees, as the above inscription mentioned, are to be ‘regarded as Assyrians’; as such they were deemed to have a duty to palāẖ ili u šarri , ‘to fear God and King’.

Tending in the same direction was another new policy to buttress imperial unity, the recruitment of a royal guard, the kisir šarruti. This was drawn from non-Mesopotamian provinces, supplementing the more feudally organised Assyrian troops. In fact, bearers of western Semitic names crop up quite commonly as Assyrian army officers. Particularly famous was the force of Itu ’aia , made up of Aramaeans of the Itu ’ tribe, which turns up at many of the hot spots, on duty to crush dissent within Babylonian provinces. [269] Garelli (1982:442).

The situation in the Fertile Crescent, then, over the period of the eleventh to the eighth century BC, was one of an extreme flux of populations. Aramaeans had settled themselves over the whole area in the earlier two centuries, and although they had been under more effective state control in the latter two, Assyrian policy had served not to push them back but to distribute them even more widely, either as forced migrants, or as members of the armed forces. Since the Aramaeans were the largest group being scattered in this way, when other western Semites, such as Israelites or Phoenicians, found themselves transplanted, they could tend to find themselves speaking more and more like their new neighbours. [23] As it happens, the last we hear about Akkadian is from a Syrian novelist writing in Greek in the second century AD: Iamblikhos (whose strange name is evidently Aramaic or Arabic, ya-mlik , ‘may he rule’) said he had learnt ‘Babylonian’ from his Babylonian tutor, a man ‘learned in the wisdom of the barbarians’. (The third-hand source for this can be traced from Stephens and Winkler 1995:181.)

The Assyrians had therefore contrived to reinforce the spread of a new lingua franca across their domains, one that was not dependent on literacy or any shared educational tradition. Its effective usefulness would have increased as the Assyrian domain was spread yet wider, and its population of western Semitic speakers, predominantly Aramaic speakers, came to outnumber more and more the original population of Mesopotamia, who spoke Akkadian. The ruling class in the triad of capital cities, Asshur, Nineveh and Kalhu (Nimrud), maintained continuity, but elsewhere there was increasing social flux, and people had to make accommodations with the newcomers. In Babylon, particularly, this must have happened early on.

Nor were the newcomers handicapped by lack of the basic art of civilisation, literacy. Although the Aramaeans had appeared originally as nomads, presumed illiterate, they had even before the first millennium begun taking over cities (most notably Damascus) and whole countries (the last Hittite kingdom, its capital at modern Zincirli, in the Turkish province still known as Hatay). Many of them would have come to know the value of writing, and since the cities they knew were of the west, the writing system they would have learnt was simple and alphabetic.

As they moved eastward, we can only presume that alphabetic literacy spread with at least some of the Aramaeans, since the new materials, ink and papyrus or leather, are biodegradable, and do not survive in the archaeological record. In fact, the earliest inscriptions in Aramaic, not clearly distinguishable from Canaanite languages at this time, are from the middle of the ninth century. [270] Kaufman (1997: 114-15). The short-term practical advantages of the new media (less bulk, greater capacity) must soon have made an impression. A new word for ‘scribe’ came into use in Akkadian, sēpiru , as opposed to the old ṯupsarru , ‘tablet writer’, which went right back to the Sumerian word dubsar. Pictures of scribes at work from the mid-eighth century show them in pairs, one with a stylus and a tablet, the other with a pen and a sheet of papyrus or parchment. As with the onset of computers, good bureaucrats must have ensured that the old and the new coexisted for a long time: the ‘clay-free office’ did not happen in Assyria till the destruction of the empire by the Medes in 610 BC

The net result seems to have been that spoken use of Akkadian receded before that of Aramaic with scarce a murmur of complaint. An officer in Ur does once ask permission to write to the king in Aramaic. [271] Dietrich (1967: 87-90). But no pedantic or puristic murmur has yet been found in any Akkadian tablet. The closest we have is an exchange of correspondence between a scribe and King Sargon (721-705):

SCRIBE: If it please my Lord, I will write an [Aramaic] document.

SARGON: Why do you not write Akkadian? [272] ibid.: 90, citing Dietrich (1979: item 10).

Indeed, on the evidence of the pattern of words borrowed in Akkadian from Aramaic, as against those borrowed in the reverse direction, it has been claimed that Akkadian, by the time the changeover was taking place, was the less favoured language, with those who wrote it essentially thinking in Aramaic, while struggling (and failing) to put their Aramaic verbs out of their minds. [273] Kaufman (1974: 165-70). And Parpola (1999) notes a slip of the stylus in Ashurbanipal’s library copy of Gilgamesh (mid-seventh century), which could only have been made by an Aramaic speaker: the glyph for ‘lord’ ( mara in Aramaic) in place of that for ‘son’ ( mara in Akkadian).

The triumph of Aramaic over Akkadian must be ascribed as one of practical utility over ancient prestige, but the utility came primarily from the fact that so many people already spoke it. The fact that its associated writing system was quicker and easier was an added bonus; if anything, it just removed one argument that might have made sections of the Aramaic-speaking population want to learn Akkadian too. After all, what was the point? One would never be accepted as anything other than šaglūti ; and even the royal court was taking up Aramaic.