nor Arabic but a cousin of the two. Salam in Aramaic, for example, is shela’m (the apostrophe denotes a glottal stop, a sort of gulping pop of breath). Aramaic began as a pidgin language in the Middle East a few hundred years before Christ and had become the standard tongue in Jerusalem by the first century of the current era.
On the main floor of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a little grotto. Visitors line up to go into it because only a half-dozen people can fit at a time. It was dark when I entered. Candles flickered in the shadows, and an old priest, Greek Orthodox by the look of his clothes, stood guard. Behind him was a small rocky space, smooth with all the hands that have reached out for it. It is said to be the tomb of Christ. I waited for a moment, hoping for a revelation. I waited for the light of understanding to hit me, but there was nothing. Not for me at least. I still couldn’t feel a thing.
Later that same afternoon, sick of the crowds, dirt, and heat, I went for a walk outside the old city walls. There, up ahead, was a garden, almost a park. I could see the tree branches poking above the dusty walls, and in this desert land I was drawn toward the greenery. The only problem was that an old nun was standing at the gate. What belief system was she going to foist on me? I wondered. I walked up, still desperate to sit among the flowers, and she smiled and simply said, “Welcome.” That was it. I actually hesitated, expecting her to say more. Didn’t she want to ask if I’d found Jesus in my heart? Didn’t she want to tell me that fire and brimstone would rain down on me for eternity?
Well, apparently, she didn’t. She invited me in with a graceful movement of her hand, didn’t say another word, and continued to smile.
The place is called the Garden Tomb. Charles Gordon, a British general, discovered it in 1883. He had come to Jerusalem with some doubts about the true location of the religious sites. Golgotha, in ancient Hebrew, means “place of the skull,” and Gordon couldn’t help but notice a strange rock formation outside the old walls several hundred metres from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. And here, in the Garden Tomb, I saw it, too. On a little rise there is a tumble of rocks and a crevice that looks like the eye sockets and jawbone of a skull. At the bottom there is, indeed, another small tomb carved out of the rock. There is no church here, only a garden, but of all my time in Jerusalem, this was the first occasion I actually felt something click. That was what I’d been waiting for. Not enough to make me become celibate perhaps. Not enough to inspire me to wander into the desert for forty days and forty nights. But there it was.
Something, finally, had touched me. For all the anger and turmoil of this holy city, for all its guns and wars and violence, for all its crowded, desperate clawing for territory, there is something grand here. Something like the sense of wonder a child feels gazing into a starry sky for the first time. Jerusalem really is like no other place on the planet. Elie Wiesel, the writer, survivor of the Holocaust, and Nobel Prize laureate, said: “You don’t go to Jerusalem. You return to it.”
That means, I guess, a part of us has always been there. Metaphorically, at least, our hearts are all in the same place, and though we’ve been “scattered across the face of the Earth,” though our languages have been “confused” so that we can no longer understand one another, we need to find our way back. We need to understand one another again. We need to start building a new Tower of Babel.
2 At the Gates of the Western World
I got on the wrong bus. All the signs were in Greek, and the lettering was indecipherable to me. Ironic, considering that the Greek letters alpha and beta make up the English word alphabet. In Hebrew they are aleph and bet; in Arabic alif and ba. It didn’t make any difference, though. I couldn’t read any of it.
When I bought a ticket to Athens, the man in the booth waved me generally in the direction of a row of buses behind him. I hoisted my backpack and trudged toward them, squinting at the cardboard signs displayed on their windshields. Finally, after a little deliberation, I got on the bus whose sign read:
I tried to check that I had the right bus, but when I asked the driver, I got completely confused. To say yes in Greek, one says né, which to me sounded a lot like no. And to further complicate matters, no in Greek is okhi, which sounds suspiciously like okay. So when I asked the driver if his bus was going to Athens, he said, “Okay,” and waved his head at me.
After I climbed on, we took off in approximately the right direction. It wasn’t until we’d been travelling for an hour that I knew something was wrong. We came to a broad stretch of water, and I was pretty sure we weren’t supposed to be crossing anything like that. With a sinking heart I glanced around the bus for someone who might speak English. I found a middle-aged woman from France. “But, of course, we’re not going to Athens,” she said. “Unless you want to go the long way.” She laughed cruelly. “Mais oui … a very, very long way.”
I sat with her, anyway. For an hour or two she lectured me on the geometric period in ancient Greek pottery shards, often breaking into French when her English wouldn’t do. It turned out she was a professor in Paris and looked down on the world over a long, aquiline nose. I tried to keep up, but mostly it was beyond me. Our bus puttered into the green mountains past almond trees and olive groves until we stopped at a little town on the edge of the Gulf of Corinth. We had arrived at Itea, just down from
Back behind the town a huge mountain, Parnassus, reared up, and we waited a while for the connecting bus that would carry us to a natural amphitheatre in the rock that held Delphi, home of the legendary Oracle.
Delphi is where the human world touches the divine. Zeus, it is said, released two golden eagles. One flew west and the other soared eastward. They circled the globe, and where they met again was Delphi, the centre of the world, the navel of the universe.
I had come to Greece to search for beginnings, so perhaps I hadn’t made a mistake getting on that bus, after all. Maybe it was fate, since there was little doubt that I had come to the right place.
No one really knows how languages began. Somewhere in the primordial jungle a system of sounds developed. A particular shout, “yeeee,” for example, might have alerted our ancestors to a predator that was on its way, while another, “yaaaa,” might have told them that a snake was coiled in a tree. And that, in a nutshell, is what language is: a random set of sounds to which we’ve affixed meanings. Simple as pie.
Languages developed almost organically, so much so that we can talk about them in terms of families. We can build the lineages for most of them, tracing their relationships and their roots farther back than one might think. Joseph Greenberg, one of the grand old masters of linguistics, hypothesized a proto-language for the Earth’s tongues. By reverse engineering from a mountain of data, he and his colleagues came up with a list of twenty-seven words from this presumed initial language.
The sniffing out of bloodlines, a favourite pastime of linguists, is usually based on the study of cognates, which are similar-sounding root words in different languages. Salam in Arabic and shalom in Hebrew are good examples and clearly demonstrate a common ancestry. Cognates, typically, tend to show up in the roots of the most basic
