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

Extinction of Greek over this vast area was not immediate. In the east, there is the fact that Bactrian, the official language of the Kushāna empire, which lasted from the middle of the first to the end of the second century AD, came to be written in Greek script. This is unique among Iranian languages, and it shows that the Kushāna had a longish period of cultural interaction with the Greeks. In AD 44, 190 years after the fall of the Indo-Greek kings, the sage Apollonius of Tyana is said to have had no difficulty communicating in Greek on a tour that took him all the way across the Hindu Kush to Taxila, where he was entertained (in Greek) by a Parthian king, who expatiated on his own Greek-style education. [414]We know from official inscriptions that in the western regions Greek-speaking communities continued for several generations within the Parthian empire. There are Greek inscriptions at Susa, which had been the Greek capital as ‘Seleuceia on the Eulaeus’, one of them from AD 21; and farther west in Mesopotamia, in Seleuceia on the Tigris, there is a bilingual inscription in Greek and Parthian explicitly dated as late as AD 151, recording a Parthian victory over a (presumably) Greek-speaking Mesene, on the Persian Gulf, near modern Basra. (It is tellingly inscribed on the loins of a statue of Hercules, one language on each thigh. [414]) Mesene was also home to Isidorus of Charax, a Greek who around the time of Christ wrote a book, The Parthian Stations , describing the route across Parthia from south-west to north-east.

The Parthians’ own language policy was to reverse history. They reinstated Aramaic as the lingua franca of their empire, leaving numerous inscriptions in it, and also using its writing system for their own (Iranian) language. The fact that this was possible shows that Greek had never fully replaced it during the two centuries of Seleucid rule.

But the Parthians were not anxious to efface the heritage of Greek rule in Iran. Their coins all bear a legend in Greek:

BASILEOS BASILEON ARSAKOU EUERGETOU DIKAIOU EPIPHANOUS PHILELLENOS

Of the King of Kings, Arsaces, Beneficent, Just, Outstanding, Greek-loving.

And Plutarch recounts the story that when in 53 BC the Parthian king Orodes received the gruesome evidence of the Roman general Crassus’s defeat, his severed head, he was actually attending a performance of Euripides’ Bacchae . [824]

Perhaps because Greek remained the language of the neighbouring superpower, the Roman empire, its prestige lasted in Parthia long after its use must have actually died out. The Parthian kingdom in Iran lasted for five centuries. In AD 224 the last Parthian yielded to Ardashir, the first king of the next dynasty, the Sassanids, who spoke Persian. And yet when his son Shapur came to have his own achievements inscribed on rock at Naqsh-i Rustam, facing the tombs of the Persian kings at Persepolis, he wrote them up in three languages: Persian, Parthian and Greek. [414]

Iran was never part of the Roman empire, and Mesopotamia only in very small part. [825]So they never acquired the sense of permanent Greek possessions that came to characterise Syria, Palestine and Egypt. They had been incorporated into the empire of Alexander, hence ‘Hellenised’, in 332 BC; in 64 BC the Roman general Pompey had incorporated Syria and Palestine as a directly governed province of the empire; and in 30 BC Augustus had added Egypt, deposing Cleopatra, last of the Ptolemies. These Roman conquests, as we have seen, had no linguistic effect, except to introduce some use of Latin in the army and the courts. But they did serve to underline the sense that this part of the world, the far south-east of the Mediterranean, was to be permanently, and as far as possible stably, under western control. Greek remained widely spoken there by foreign elites, and in some special cities such as Palmyra, Gaza and Alexandria by many more.

A sense of the language situation in a centre of international pilgrimage in the region is given by Egeria, who visited Jerusalem around AD 400:

Seeing that in that country part of the people know both Greek and Syriac, another part only Greek and yet another part only Syriac, given also that the bishop, although he knows Syriac, always speaks in Greek and never in Syriac, there is always by his side a priest who, while the bishop is speaking in Greek, translates his comments into Syriac so that everyone may understand them. Similarly for the lessons that are read in church: since these must be read in Greek, there is always somebody there to translate them into Syriac for the benefit of the people, that they may receive instruction. As for the Latins who are there, i.e. those who know neither Syriac nor Greek, to them also is an interpretation given lest they be displeased; for there are some brethren and sisters, proficient in both Greek and Latin, who give explanations in Latin. [414]

We have already considered (see Chapter 3, ‘Arabic — eloquence and equality: The triumph of ‘submission”, p. 93) the series of lightning campaigns by the newly declared Muslims which reversed this state of affairs, and so created the linguistic situation that has lasted to the present day. A single decade from the death of Muhammad in 632 sufficed to draw a thin, but indelible, line under 950 years of Greek control and Greek language, and to turn the page, opening what is so far 1300 years of Arabic sway in these same lands. A shock for all concerned, but particularly so since it came a couple of years after the emperor Heraclius had reasserted the imperial defences, and in four years of campaigning rolled back a Sassanid invasion of these same territories which had denied them to the Greeks since the beginning of the century.

This was a devastating blow to the empire politically and economically: the losses included Egypt, still after 650 years the major supplier of grain to the empire’s capital. And the best estimates [826]suggest that the Arab conquests deprived the empire of over half its population. But it could have been worse. The Arabs failed in repeated attempts to take Constantinople itself, and also failed to detach Anatolia, despite raiding it virtually every year for the next two centuries. [414]The region had been reorganised by Heraclius, effectively combining civil and military administration, and imposing martial law. The clear perception that the enemy was at the gate imposed this new discipline, and kept the empire effectively mobilised for defence.

There is an interesting pattern to the Byzantine losses in the mid-seventh century. The places that held firm were precisely those where Greek was the majority language, spoken by the people at large and not just elites. This had an effect on the linguistic self-image of the Roman empire (for they still considered themselves Roman). Latin had been dropping out of use for some time, losing even its last redoubt in the law: since the time of Justinian, a century before, most legislation had been drafted in Greek; and the emperor’s second-in-command, the praetorian prefect, was now often a man who knew no Latin. The empire still held much of southern Italy, and would hang on to parts of it for another four hundred years, until the middle of the eleventh century. But now for the first time Greek, not Latin, was seen as the unifying language of the whole community. Confusingly for moderns, they called Greek rōmaíika , ‘Romanish’, contrasting it with latiniká. But looking back from the mid-tenth century, the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus remarked that it had been in the time of Heraclius that the Romans ‘had been Hellenized and discarded the language of their fathers, the Roman tongue’. [414]

Although the unsettling bellows motion of the imperial frontiers did not stop, the attrition of Greek-language areas effectively now did, for the next four hundred years. This would not have been clear at the time, for while the southeastern lands of the Levant were being lost, the north too was in turmoil.