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

Old Chinese, by contrast, was an extreme example of an isolating language, its roots, monosyllabic and marked with significant tone patterns, largely functioning as independent words, and using word order as the most significant aspect of syntax. Again, there was some change visible over the millennia: but Chinese moved to become less analytic, with longer words developing on the basis of the previously detachable roots, and some of the roots changing into grammatical morphemes, marking such things as plurality, copular links between subject and predicate, or markers of relative and subordinate clauses. Unlike Egyptian, which was challenged by languages of its own type, the threat to Chinese came from the Altaic languages, which were, as we have seen, fundamentally different in type. In fact, where it was in contact with languages of similar type (in the south), Chinese was the incoming language, and tended to replace them.

Religious outlook is another important aspect of cultures, where we might look for a clue to their stability, which might then be reflected in language. We have seen (Chapter 3, ‘Second interlude: The shield of faith’, p. 86) that especially in the Middle East attachment to a religion could preserve a language against the odds. But here again, Egypt and China diverged.

Faith in an afterlife was important to Egyptians: they deliberately made their tombs the most permanent part of their built environment, and we find them in their literature very much concerned with what they could know about life after death, judgement and individual survival. Certainly they preserved their religion for most of the lifespan of their language, and they no more actively preached it abroad than they attempted to spread their language when they enlarged the boundaries of their power. But aspects of their faith did spread without the language none the less: their mother-goddess Isis became one of the most widely revered deities in the Roman empire, and has been seen as a root of the Christian cult of Mary as Mother of God. And paradoxically, when the Christians suppressed the Egyptian cult, Egyptian as a language took on a new life as the local language of Christianity. Egyptian religion was certainly favourable to the survival of the Egyptian language, but the two became detached long before the end.

The Chinese attitude to religion was very different, mostly characterised by down-to-earth practicality. There were two major traditions. One followed Confucius (Kung Fu-zi, ‘Master Kung’), taking a highly socialised and worldly definition of virtue; the other followed the Dào ( , ‘way’) of Lao-zi and Zhuang-zi, seeking to merge with the patterns discerned in nature. Aside from popular animist beliefs, no fulfilment of any Chinese yearnings for another world was available until Buddhism began to penetrate from India in the first millennium AD. (This, for the Chinese, was a Western religion.) It prospered in the troublous times of the third, fourth and fifth centuries, and then became the established faith of the Tang dynasty that returned strong universal government to China; the Pali and Sanskrit classics were translated in Chinese, and Buddhism became a naturalised Chinese faith.

Buddhism, with its emphasis on suffering, resignation and the ultimate unimportance of the daily round of life, was never a positive influence on kings who must preserve their realms against external aggression. No Buddhist king in its homeland of India, not even Aśoka, managed to found a dynasty that would endure more than a couple of generations; and the strange attraction of Buddhism to invading Altaic peoples, especially the Tabgach and Genghis Khan’s Mongols, brought their soldierly virtues to an early end once they had settled in China. As Grousset remarks: ‘These ferocious warriors, once touched by the grace of the bodhisattva, became so susceptible to the humanitarian precepts of the śramanas [i.e. Buddhist monks] as to forget not only their native belligerence but even neglect their self-defence.’ [348] Grousset (1970: 66).

But there was one aspect of Egyptian and Chinese religion which was similar, and is probably connected with the gross survivability of their languages in situ over many millennia. This is the attitude that each of them took to their emperor, and his relation to his land, his people and their gods.

Both these empires achieved early unity under a single ruler, Egypt under the legendary Menes, China under the historical Shi Huang Di. Although afterwards there were often divisions, and competition among the different kingdoms, the two civilisations never found such disunity tolerable: their histories, as we have seen, distinguished firmly between prosperous periods, when a single royal house controlled the whole country, and interregna, which may have been perfectly peaceable, but suffered from the cardinal flaw that the country was divided. These were very much centred countries, and the centre was not a place (each of them had many different imperial capitals—Thebes, Memphis, Tanis, Leontopolis, Sais in Egypt, Chang-an, Luoyang, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Beijing in China) but a royal court. In each case, the king’s position [74] This term, first applied to the Portuguese, derives from Arab-Persian firengi , ultimately from Frank. was sanctified by the national faith. The Egyptian pharaoh was seen as the incarnation ( ẖam ) of kingship, maintaining a direct relation with the gods on behalf of all his people of the Two Lands. Likewise the Chinese emperor was Son of Heaven ( tiān zî ), guaranteeing order in the Central Kingdom.

Both rulers were absolute, deriving their sovereignty not from the people but the gods. Nevertheless each was subject to an explicit moral constraint. In Egypt, this was called maR ‘at , ‘order’, the moral and natural law. The pharaoh had a duty to put maR ‘at in place of jazfat , ‘wrong’, in his kingdom. The Chinese emperor had a duty to rule justly, and abstain from oppression; only so long as he did this, according to the influential doctrine of Mencius (Meng-zi), could he retain the Mandate of Heaven ( tiān mìng ), i.e. legitimacy: the oppressive ruler had forfeited his right to rule, and could be justly deposed by the people.

Both Egypt and China, therefore, had the same simple but sustaining political doctrine, which based the country’s identity on the rule of a single emperor, and based the emperor’s sovereignty on righteousness. The national philosophy therefore contained a built-in theodicy: the proof of a ruler’s righteousness was his success in maintaining a ruling dynasty. The gods were ensuring that only righteous monarchs would be successful, and so, whether the king was failing or prospering, all was right with the world, and the Egyptian or Chinese citizen, whether recent interloper or long-standing resident, could give the system his loyalty.

This doctrine was extemely fitting for a stable long-term culture, with the linguistic consequences that we have seen. But it could be maintained that it was the result, rather than the cause, of the culture’s stability. At least as revealing, from a more outward, objective point of view, is the gross fact of population density.

In absolute size, Egypt and China are very different. Although they are comparable in terms of their duration, their populations and areas are of quite different orders. Egypt’s population in ancient times has been estimated at 2 million in the Old Kingdom, rising to 8 million over the three thousand years to the Roman conquest. The area inhabited, the Nile valley and the Fayyum, encompasses about 30,000 square kilometres. By contrast, Chinese census figures (first available in AD 2) show 57 million, rising to over 80 million in 1000, and over 1200 million at the recent turn of the millennium. The area of ‘China inside the Wall’ (excluding Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, and western areas such as Gansu and Qinghai, always very sparsely inhabited) amounts to some 4.5 million square kilometres. [349] Mote (1999: 25, 980). The Chinese language, and Chinese history, has had fifty times more adherents than Egyptian, and 150 times the space in which to act.