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

The Greeks came to have a sneaking respect for the nomadic Scythians: like them they would see off an attempted Persian invasion. In general, they were quite impervious to Greek ways: but Herodotus recalls two who had a taste for things Greek, Anacharsis (who became a legendary sage) and Scyles. In both cases, ultimately it was the forbidden charms of Greek religious ceremonies to which they yielded: the Greeks were not then seen in their modern light, as the arch-rationalists of the ancient world.

Hoi huméteroi prógonoi elthóntes eis Makedonían kaì eis tèbaren állbaren Helláda kak$oTbar;s epoíēsan hēmás oudèn proēdikēménoi; egòbar;o dè tòbar;n Hellébar;nōn hēgemòbar;n katastatheìs kaì timōrébar;sasthai boulómenos Pérsas diébēn es tèbar;n Asían, huparksántōn hum$oTbar;n…Kaì to$uT loipo$uT hótan pémpēis par’ éme, hōs pròs basiléa tŋbar;s Asías pémpe, mēdè ex ísou epístelle, all’ h$oTbar;s kuríōi ónti pántōn t$oTbar;n s$oTbar;n phráze eí tou déēi…

Your ancestors entering Macedonia and the rest of Greece wronged us without previous grievance; but I, constituted as leader of the Greeks and wishing to take vengeance on the Persians, have crossed into Asia, something that you people started… And in future when you send to me, send to me as King of Asia, and do not correspond on equal terms, but as to the lord of all that is yours, tell me if you need anything…

Alexander to Darius, king of Persia, 332 BC: Arrian, ii.14

About a quarter of the way through the three thousand years of Greek’s recorded history came the single decade that changed everything.

Over the period 334-325 BC a Greek army under Alexander III of Macedon eliminated the Persian empire, over almost the whole area of the modern states of Turkey, Syria, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Armenia, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Alexander’s declared motive was to take revenge for Persian aggression in the Persian Wars, still very present in Greek minds, although they had been an experience of their great-great-grandparents, a century and a half before, and Greece at least was now under very different management. On the same timescale Britain should now be preparing for Russia’s serious retaliation for the Crimean War.

The result of this lightning advance, the wholesale takeover by Greek military administrators of a multi-ethnic empire that had existed for over two hundred years, was an instant trebling of the area where the Greek language might be heard, and Greek cultural traditions known and appreciated. Unlike the colonial advance around the Mediterranean and Black Sea, this advance did not hug the coastline, but assumed supreme control over all the major established urban centres. Although the unitary control by a single ruler did not last (Alexander died two years after his momentous campaign, and his empire fell apart into the domains of his different marshals), Greek overlordship did survive. It lasted for a century in central Persia, until another Iranian-speaking power, this time the Parthians from south-east of the Caspian, reasserted control. But it was to be three hundred years before it relaxed its grasp on Egypt, Syria or Babylonia. And although Alexander’s claim on the west bank of the Indus was almost immediately annulled by the advance of the equally magnificent Indian emperor Chandragupta ruling from Patna, Greek kings based in Bactria (Afghanistan) continued an independent dominion for about as long as those in Syria. They moved south into Gandhara (Swat) and the Panjab (in what is now Pakistan); though they lost hold of Bactria itself, for a time they even reached as far to the east as Patna on the Ganges. [811]In fact, Greek kingdoms lasted longer here than in Greece itself, where Macedonian kings yielded sovereignty to Rome after two centuries in 146 BC.

The process of Hellenisation in the realms conquered by Alexander created the heartland of a vast Greek-speaking community that would dominate the eastern Mediterranean for over a thousand years. It had already existed for half this time when it was recognised officially, in AD 286, on the formal division of the Roman empire into east and west. The eastern Roman empire then transmuted gradually into a consciously Greek empire: appropriately, the word it used to describe itself, rōmaĩos , ‘Roman’, has become a popular word that now means ‘Greek’. [812]

Although Greeks were, for a long time, politically pre-eminent—never as democrats—all over this vast dominion, the actual spread of their language was probably much more patchy. For two hundred years, Aramaic, originally the lingua franca of Babylon and Canaan, had been the convenient standard for the whole Persian empire. As we have seen, its take-up had not been uniform. But Alexander’s new subjects must have expected a separate, common, language, for imperial administration. Effective conversion from one such language to another, if it happened at all, cannot have been instant.

Reviewing the evidence from east to west, we can begin with Greek spoken in India. In the mid-third century BC, when the emperor Aśoka was setting up edicts urging the importance of dhamma , virtue, all over north and central India in the local vernacular, he chose at Kandahar to write the inscription in Aramaic and Greek. Kandahar was better known to Greeks as Alexandria of the Arachosians, founded by Alexander in 329, and Aśoka’s rock edict is not the only Greek inscription to have been found there. [414]This would have been on, or beyond, the edge of his domain. Coin evidence is copious for the Greek monarchies of India, and this alleges some form of bilingualism, since the coins have Greek on one side, and an Indian Prakrit, written in Kharo⋅⃛hi script (another derivate of Aramaic script), on the other. In fact, Greek legends on coins continued for a century after the death of the last Greek king and queen, Hermaios and Calliope, who had ruled little more than Peshawar and the Khyber pass, and died about 30 BC. Since the government was by then in the hands of Śaka/Scythians, Pallava/Parthians and Kushāna, whose own (Iranian) languages stemmed from north of the Hindu Kush, this might argue for a persisting public of Greek speakers; but the Kharo⋅⃛hi Indian inscriptions on the coins continue too, so it might simply be an attempt to put the weight of tradition and continuity behind the currency, even as the real power moved into the hands of illiterate rulers.

Overall, the general picture is of a Greek-speaking government having relatively little impact on a populace persistently speaking Indian languages. Although both sides were literate, there is no record of bilingual grammars or dictionaries; and no account is given of what language was used when the most famous Greek king, Menander (Milinda to the Indians), engaged the sage Nagasena in a debate about Buddhism, recorded in the Milindapañha. Perhaps Prakrit-speaking Greeks were no great exception by then. Not long afterwards a pillar was erected (at Besnagar in modern Madhya Pradesh) by Heliodorus, an ambassador from King Antialkidas in Taxila. It is all in Prakrit. [414]One hundred and fifty years earlier, Megasthenes had served as a Greek ambassador (sent by King Seleucus) at the court of Chandragupta in Patna from 302 BC, and he had been followed by Deimakhos from the next king (Antiochus I), and Dionysius, from the competing Greek domain of Egypt; all had written books about their experiences which became current in Alexandria on the Nile, now the fast-emerging centre of Greek learning.

Back in the kingdom of the Seleucid successors to Alexander (Persia, the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia), there is evidence that Greek became ingrained more widely and deeply than in India, though the picture is not uniform. For instance, although in the eastern area of Iran Greek power yielded within a century ( c .230 BC) to the rising Parthians, the new rulers continued to issue their coins in Greek (occasionally too in Aramaic), only going over to Parthian (Pahlavi) legends in the first and second centuries AD, when the remaining Greek legends were becoming increasingly garbled. There are official documents written in Greek up until the fourth century. [414]But farther south, on the Persian Gulf, the small kingdom of Persis (in existence from 280 BC to AD 224) always issued its coins in Aramaic.