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

The Egyptian scribe, zaẖRaw , represented from the earliest documented times the acme of ambition. This is amply confirmed by the kinds of texts that were copied in the scribal schools:

Behold there is no profession which is not governed;

It is only the learned man who rules himself. [354] Sallier 2,9,1 = Anastasi Papyri 7,4,6, quoted in Erman (1894: 328).

Set to work and become a scribe, for then thou shalt be a leader of men.

The profession of scribe is a princely profession; his writing materials and his rolls of books bring pleasantness and riches. [355] Anastasi Papyri 5, 10, 8ff., quoted in Erman (1894: 328).

In the Satire on Trades , the scribe boasts:

I have never seen a sculptor sent on an embassy,

nor a bronze-founder leading a mission.

This complacency generated an extreme conservatism that may ultimately have been Egypt’s undoing. Literacy in Egyptian remained the preserve of a small and highly educated caste long after the demise of the last independent Egyptian state, in fact until the Christians adapted the Greek alphabet for the language: this step was taken fully a thousand years after the rest of the Mediterranean, including the Assyrians and Babylonians, had adopted alphabetic writing.

But as if to show that there is no natural term to the life of a pictographic system in an alphabetic age, the Chinese system has survived even the turmoil of the twentieth century. It has persisted, essentially unchanged despite some simplification in penmanship, since Shi Huang Di’s imposed standardisation in the third century BC of a system that was already over a millennium old. This system established a particular stylised picture, or a combination of phonetic pun plus determiner, in a notional square box, for each word or root in the language. Once established, it was less phonetically based than the Egyptian system, and so its practical use was even less affected by the phonetic changes in the language that have come about over the following two and a half millennia. Scholarly Chinese will have watched with amused unconcern the modifications, truncations and additions conceived by foreigners to produce the Japanese kana —two sets of forty-eight simplified outlines chosen to represent the full set of Japanese syllables—and the Korean han-gŭl —a true phonetic alphabet, but designed to harmonise on the page with Chinese characters. Each was an original solution to the poor match between Chinese characters and their own polysyllabic, agglutinative and non-tonal languages—but this must have seemed no problem for Chinese itself.

In fact, in the last two and a half millennia the Chinese have become aware of a number of alphabetic scripts, conceived quite independently of their characters. The Buddhists brought the Siddha version of the Brahmi alphabet from India, and the Muslims who converted many of the Western peoples brought variants of the Aramaic scripts and Arabic. The Mongol emperor Kublai Khan even commissioned an alphabetic script for his empire, to be used officially for all its literate languages, Mongolian, Chinese, Turkic and Persian. Called ‘Phagspa, it was based on the Tibetan version of Brahmi, and promulgated in 1269. It was a version of the Tibetan script converted to be written vertically (though unlike Chinese characters in columns from left to right), and in deference to Chinese taste in rather a squared-off form. However, it never caught on, and was discontinued, along with the Mongolian dynasty, just a century later.

The great advantage of the Chinese system is its masterly representation of the highest common factor of structure and meaning shared by all the Chinese dialects, many of which are not mutually comprehensible. All the modern dialects, and wényán as well, are built on a common set of meaningful syllables, which may be pronounced and strung together in different orders in the various dialects, but are still recognisable in graphic form. By and large, every one of these syllables is represented in writing by a single character, and so the meaning of a written Chinese text will be relatively clear to any literate speaker of any dialect. No alphabetic script, based perforce on the sounds of a language, could now be so conveniently neutral in terms of all the different Chinese dialects, unless perhaps it were designed on historical principles with a knowledge of all varieties of Chinese. Such a tour de force would have to be a miracle of subtlety and ambiguity. And so the traditional characters survive.

Despite the difficulty of learning the system, in China mere literacy did not remain the elite accomplishment it always was in Egypt. Different levels would have been attained according to the wealth and opportunities of the family, but poor families continued to throw out the occasional intellectual star. Literacy skills were still prized in China, but at a higher functional level. So the status of the scribe in Egypt corresponds in Chinese society more with that of graduates of the higher levels of the imperial competitive examinations. These were held by and large every third year from AD 622 to 1905.

The only possible Chinese adoption from foreigners in respect of writing concerns not writing itself, but the analysis of pronunciation. The traditional fšnqiè system classifies a character’s pronunciation in respect of its initial consonant and its rhyme plus tone, but the déngyùn-xué “study of graded rhymes” sub-classifies these constituent parts phonetically. This invention of Chinese scholars of the seventh and eighth centuries AD came about very much under the influence of the subtle phonetic analysis of the Sanskrit pronunciation, derived from the Buddhist tradition. [356] Ramsey (1987: 121-3). See Chapter 5, p. 209. Even so, the analysis of the rhyme part of a character-syllable into its constituent semi-vowels, vowels and consonants had to await the more thoroughgoing approach of alphabetisation, and specifically romanisation, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. [357] Norman (1988: 257-63).

There was, then, a clear reluctance to continue the development of Egyptian and Chinese pictographic systems in the direction of reducing their complexity, despite awareness of simpler systems that foreigners were using. The civilisations were built around respect for tradition, and in particular the traditional difficulties in joining the literate class, who held the reins of government.

Both Egypt and China mostly lacked an active posture towards their neighbours, and towards parts of the world farther away.

Egypt early relied on foreign trade for some of its staple goods, particularly timber. But it secured this through intermediaries, mainly Phoenicians in the third and second millennia, later Greeks. It had control of Palestine and Syria around the end of the second millennium and the beginning of the first, but as we have seen did not actively spread its language (or its culture) to build permanent links there. It never spread out along the Mediterranean coast to the west: population movement was all in the reverse direction, and the city of Cyrene, when it was established c. 630 BC, was a Greek, not an Egyptian venture. It may have been more active southward, attempting to incorporate much of Kush (and its gold mines) permanently, and sending some of its own expeditions down the Red Sea to trade with the fabulous Land of Punt, perhaps in Somalia. Although there was seen to be cultural value in unifying the Black Lands, flooded by the Nile, and surrounded by desert wastes on either side, the net effect of these efforts was small. The populations in these harsh regions were just too scant. Politically, the most striking result was the reverse invasion of Egypt in the late eighth century—by Kushite enthusiasts for Egyptian culture.