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

Men of Arwad and Helech manned your walls on every side;

men of Gammad were in your towers.

They hung their shields around your walls;

they brought your beauty to perfection.

… [30] Elimam (1977) suggests that the Punic story had a happier ending, and that Punic is still alive today, as the ancestor of Maghrebi ‘Arabic’ ( maghreb is Arabic for ‘west’). It is certainly true that this Semitic language, usually characterised as a dialect of Arabic, diverges strongly from the classic language of the Koran; but this is true of all the Arab vernaculars. Where Punic did survive after the Roman period, it would very likely have made a significant contribution to Maghrebi. Unfortunately, the restricted evidence of what Punic was really like makes it hard to know to what extent this happened. Elimam himself suggests, on the basis of the longest Punic speech in Poenulus (ten lines, eighty-two words), that Punic has 62 per cent in common with Maghrebi, and a further 18 per cent has undergone some semantic evolution.

The ships of Tarshish serve as carriers for your wares.

You are filled with heavy cargo

in the heart of the sea.

Your oarsmen will take you out to the high seas.

But the east wind will break you to pieces

in the heart of the sea.

…

As they wail and mourn over you

they will take up a lament concerning you:

’Who was ever silenced like Tyre,

surrounded by the sea?’ [277] Ezekiel xxvii.3-11, 25-6, 32.

The Carthaginians, like other Phoenicians, kept voluminous records. Those that would have been kept on papyrus are lost, but there are several thousand known inscriptions, assigning rights over sacrificial offerings, making dedications to the goddess Tank or the god Baal Hammon, or commemorating ceremonies. It is also clear that Carthage had passed on the administrative use of its language to the neighbouring states to the west, Massylia and Massaesylia: their coins bear inscriptions in Punic letters, as do boundary stones. [278] Lancel (1997: 357); Cribb et al. (1999: 225, 227).

Indeed, there is evidence for a whole literature in Punic. St Augustine remarked famously that ‘on the word of many scholars, there was a great deal of virtue and wisdom in the Punic books’. [279] Augustine, Letters , xvii.2 (Letter to Maximus Madaurus). This view was shared by the Roman Senate, which even as the city of Carthage was being finally destroyed in 146 BC gave orders for a new translation and edition of one especially admired treatise on agriculture. ‘Our Senate presented the libraries of the city to African princes, with the sole exception of the 28 books of Mago, which they decreed should be translated into Latin … The text was entrusted to scholars learned in Punic.’ [280] Pliny, Naturalis Historia , xviii.22. Some forty fragments of it are quoted by later Latin authors, but the work as a whole is lost, even in Latin translation.

In fact, no Punic literary work has survived. The closest to it is a Greek translation, in about seven hundred words, of a Punic inscription engraved in the temple of Baal Hammon at Carthage, recording the voyage of exploration by a Carthaginian leader, Hanno, round the western coast of Africa (perhaps as far as Gabon). It ends:

… we came to the gulf named Horn of the South. In the corner was an island … and in it a lake with an island full of savage people. By far the majority of them were female, hairy in body, called by the interpreters ‘gorillas’. We could not catch the men because of their skill at climbing and defending themselves with stones, but we took three women, who fiercely resisted, biting and tearing. However, we killed them and skinned them, and brought the hides back to Carthage. We did not sail further since our supplies had given out. [281] Hanno, Periplus (Codex Palatinus Graecus 398, fols 55r-56r).

It is tantalising that this text, one of the few brief survivals from the wreck of Punic literature, should have recounted such a unique adventure.

How is the total loss of Phoenician, and its successor dialect Punic, to be explained, after such a widespread expansion across the Mediterranean world? We have here another unanswered, and as yet largely unasked, question.

After Alexander’s sack of Tyre in 332 BC, Phoenician trade remained prosperous for many centuries, with no further disasters to threaten the traders’ stability. The Punic language did not die out promptly, even in its overseas provinces, where all the administrative links to Carthage were cut by the end of the second century BC: in Sardinia, for example, several ‘neo-Punic’ inscriptions have been found, the latest, at Bithia in the extreme south, made as late as the end of the second century AD. And even if the life of Carthage as a city was brutally punctuated in 146 BC, it was refounded as a Roman town by Augustus a century later. It then enjoyed a flourishing later life till the end of the Roman empire in the west. We may surmise that its language survived in use in North Africa, until the fifth century AD: Augustine tells us that he had to quote his Punic proverbs in Latin since ‘not everybody’ would understand the original. [282] Augustine, Sermones , clxvii.4.

Nevertheless, ever since Alexander’s conquest of western Asia there had been a general cultural levelling in the Near East, with Greek and Aramaic spreading at the expense of all the minority languages. Although Aramaic was a language closely related to Phoenician or Hebrew, Greek had still been taken up by a large part of the Jewish community (especially those in Egypt) in this period. Greek had also become a basic subject in the education of Romans, who were by the second century BC clearly recognised as the rising power.

The cultural undertow was thus running strongly in favour of Greek. And in fact it is possible that, despite its users’ commercial prowess, Phoenician or Punic had never been widely used as a lingua franca or even as a trade jargon outside Africa. The language of trade is, after all, perforce that of the customer, rather than that of the merchant.

The Roman comedian Plautus illustrates this in a scene from his play Poenulus , ‘the Punic guy’—’Punk’?—which came out in the early second century BC, soon after the end of the Second Punic War. [283] Plautus, Poenulus , 930-1028. A Carthaginian merchant tries talking to a couple of Romans in Punic, even though he knows Latin, but soon tires of their constant heavy puns and jokes on him and his language, to cloak the poor language skills of the one who claims to be a bit of Punic expert. (Hanno’s Punic is in bold, and the Latin that echoes it is in bold italics.)

HANNO: mechar bocca

MILPHIO: Istuc tibi sit potius quam mihi.

AGORASTOCLES: quid ait?

MILPHIO: miseram esse praedicat buccam sibi. fortasse medicos nos esse arbitrarier.

AGORASTOCLES: si ita est nega esse; nolo ego errare hospitem.

MILPHIO: audin tu? HANNO: rufe ynny cho is sam

AGORASTOCLES: sic volo profecto vera cuncta huic expedirier. roga numquid opu’ sit.

MILPHIO: tu qui sonam non habes, quid in hanc venistis urbem aut quid quaeritis?

HANNO: muphursa

AGORASTOCLES: quid ait?

HANNO: mi uulech ianna

AGORASTOCLES: quid venit?

MILPHIO: non audis? mures Africanospraedicat in pompam ludis dare se velle aedilibus.

HANNO: Good morning to you.

MILPHIO: Better you than me.

AGORASTOCLES: What is he saying?

MILPHIO: He says his jaw hurts.