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

In the Fertile Crescent, Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine, the Aramaic-speaking lands at the core of the old Assyrian empire, which became the actual centre of gravity of the new Seleucid government, the penetration of Greek was likewise significant, but seems to have led to a situation of more or less stable diglossia, people using different languages in different communities and for different purposes. Babylon, despite its strategic importance to the Seleucids, probably never had more than a small Greek community, and they and their language are unlikely to have flourished after the city was yielded to Parthia in AD 126. Edessa, modern Urfa, which came to be on the border with Parthia, maintained a strong Aramaic (Syriac) literary tradition throughout the Greek and Roman periods.

However, round northern Syria, Seleucus I made a serious attempt at establishing Greek colonies, which have by and large survived to the present day: Antioch (Antakya), Apamea (Hamah), Seleuceia (Silifke), and Laodiceia (Latakia). Antioch on the Mediterranean coast, which went on to a glorious career as capital of Roman Syria, started with a core of 5300 Athenians and Macedonians transplanted from a nearby Greek colony. Nevertheless, they always had a large Aramaic-speaking, as well as a Jewish, community. Nearby Palmyra seems to owe its Greek speakers (and its name—it was previously Tadmor) to the advent of Roman control (AD 17-19); and there is a famous Greek-Aramaic inscription on tariffs (AD 137) found there, to show that both languages had status. But nine hundred years later, when Greek control was ended by the Arab conquest, it appears that Greek had never spread outside these few cities. [414]

In Jerusalem, there was major trouble beginning in 168, led by Judas Maccabaeus, [816]involving resistance to the Seleucid government’s perceived measures to Hellenise the Jews, although unsurprisingly the religious cult rather than the language aspect was to the fore. It led to the setting up of the Hasmonaean kingdom, which ruled Judaea from 142 to 63 BC, minimising Greek influence. Aramaic remained the dominant language in Palestine, with Hebrew restricted to liturgical use, and Greek interestingly assigned a role in the more cosmopolitan aspect of Jewry, and such spin-offs as the Christians. But as Acts of the Apostles, chapter 2, graphically recounts, every language still spoken in the Roman empire could be heard in the streets of Jerusalem at the time of the Passover festival. [817]

Greek texts of the Hebrew scriptures were in fact commissioned by Ptolemy II, [818]the second in the Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt after Alexander’s death. (He ruled 308-246 BC) The process by which this was achieved is detailed, with some legendary accretions, in the Alexandrian ‘Letter of Aristeas’. Whatever the true details, the Greek Septuagint (named—in Latin—for the seventy-two scholars supposedly summoned from Jerusalem to work on it) became an authoritative text of the Bible, and was widely used by Jews outside Palestine, as well as the later Christian movement. Greek therefore became the vehicle for a major culture outside its own traditions, freed from associations with Athenian eleuthería (or by now Macedonian magnificence), and in a sense thereby secularised as a language. On pragmatic grounds, it became able, when in later centuries the need was felt for new Christian scriptures to transmit to the wider world, to assume equivalent, and then superior, status to Aramaic.

In Egypt as a whole, although the Ptolemies, like all the Hellenistic Diadochi ( diádokhoi —heirs of Alexander), relied on their armies to guarantee their authority, there was a major cultural project started to validate it. A Museum ( Mouseĩon —temple of the Muses) was established as a government-funded research institute, and the eternally famous Library, both close to the royal palace in Alexandria, the newly founded capital city. These attracted Greek-speaking scholars from all over the oikouménē , the inhabited world. Coinage was issued in Greek, from a single mint, also at Alexandria. Greek was gradually introduced as a new language of administration, in this country with the longest tradition of central administration in the world.

Greek seems to have remained a language for the ruling elite in Egypt. Although the literature that came out of Alexandria (which is copious) developed new genres for talking in prose and verse about picturesque features of everyday life, the everyday life talked about always seems to be somewhere else, more traditionally Greek, such as in the Aegean islands or perhaps in Syracuse. The last of the Ptolemies, Cleopatra, who ruled from 51 to 30 BC, is said to have been the first of them to learn Egyptian. [414]So it was still worth learning; the popular language, even after three hundred years of Greek government, was still Egyptian.

Documentation of actual ancient correspondence is more copious here than anywhere else in the ancient world, because of the general use of papyrus, and the preservative power of the dry soils away from the Nile valley. These give occasional glimpses of how the use of Greek was perceived from outside the charmed circle of the immigrant Hellenes. So in the mid-third century BC, a couple of generations after the conquest, a letter to Zenon, the Carian manager of a farm in the Fayŭm, complains (in Greek) that he is despised because he cannot speak Greek, or literally ‘Hellenise’ ( hellēnízein ).

In a way, the area least changed immediately by the new dispensation was Anatolia. But its conversion was to be the most long-lasting among Alexander’s new provinces. We know from inscriptions and coins that the penetration of Aramaic had been variable here: strongest in Cilicia (the south-eastern region bordering its homeland in Syria), weakest on the southwestern coasts, Lydia and Phrygia, and with some presence in bilingualism with Greek on the Black Sea. (See Chapter 3, ‘Aramaic—the desert song: Interlingua of western Asia’, p. 78.) The Greeks had been an influential presence on the periphery for at least a thousand years. They were now installed throughout, in what D. Musti calls a ‘military monarchy’, but allowing ‘a privileged relationship for cities ( póleis ) and a much-trumpeted respect for their freedom and democracy ( eleuthería kaì dēmokratía ).’ [414]

Although the Greek administration of the Seleucids was not to last more than two hundred years before yielding to the Romans, the language situation was much more consistent. For the next thousand years, Greek spread relentlessly, supplanting the local languages of the south coast and the interior. One example: although we still find inscriptions in Phrygian until the third century AD, local peasants’ votive tablets to Zeus (available even to poor people because of the availability of marble offcuts from the quarry at Dokimeion) are from the second century AD all in Greek. [414]

And there was a hidden symmetry in this sudden spread of Greek into the east, for the Aramaic that remained Greek’s principal competitor throughout the old Persian empire was a close relative of the Phoenician or, in Latin, Punic language, Greek’s main competitor in the colonial world of the Mediterranean’s western shores. Indeed, the two Semitic sisters had originated within a hundred miles of each other, their foci at Tyre and Damascus, in the west and centre of northern Syria. It was as if the entire region from Cadiz beyond the Pillars of Heracles to the banks of the Indus was now the field for a simple two-sided competition, between the Greek koinē and an alliance of Semitic twin sisters.

As one might expect from the self-centred Greeks, they never noticed. [815]