language history of the Near East—more objectively, of South-West Asia—does not need to be reconstructed: it is told in its own documents, from the late fourth millennium BC. It is brimming with interesting details, especially with linguistic and cultural firsts, but there are so many twists and turns in a narrative that takes in five thousand years that it is hard to keep one’s bearings. We shall start with a very brief run-through of the major players, from Sumerian to Arabic, situating them around the central area of the Fertile Crescent from Iraq to Palestine; then we return to look in more detail at their particular contributions to our understanding of languages through time.
The overall focus of the story is on its pulsating centre at the mouth of the Euphrates on the Persian Gulf. As the centuries roll by, the centre’s influence expands, first north, then westward, and neighbouring peoples come to take an interest, creating new, and often stronger, centres of their own, until the story becomes a struggle between the contending influence (and languages) of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Iran and Syria; and the frame of reference has expanded
to the borders of Greece and Egypt in the west, and Afghanistan and India in the east. The finale comes not once but twice, in two sweeping conquests that lead to linguistic cataclysm, first by Greek from the north, and then by Arabic from the south.
When the story opens, there are two cultures with the skill of writing, next door to each other in the upper reaches of the Persian Gulf: Sumer, the Biblical ‘land of Shin ‘ar’ at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and Elam, across the marshes to the east, between the Zagros mountains and the sea. Each was not so much a state as a gathering of towns and villages of people speaking a common language. The origins of Sumerian are quite unknown; Elamite, however, appears to be related to Dravidian, and so linked anciently with Brahui, still spoken by over 2 million in the west of Pakistan, and many more languages spoken in central and southern India.5
Both these cultures seem to have invented their writing systems independently, and approximately at the same time (around the thirty-first century bc). But Sumer was destined for a much more influential history than Elam. Elam did retain its language for over three thousand years (it was one of the three official media of the Persian empire in the late first millennium), yet already around 2400 Elamite is found written in Sumerian-style cuneiform, and its local script died out in the next couple of centuries. This cultural spread of Sumerian writing was actually occurring all over the Fertile Crescent: likewise by 2400 we find Sumerian words and cuneiform symbols common in inscriptions in Ebla, 1000 kilometres away on the Mediterranean coast of modern Syria. Eblaite was a Semitic language, like Akkadian, with a sound system and a morphological structure that, from a modern standpoint, makes Sumerian really quite awkward as a basis for writing: nevertheless the expressive power of Sumerian symbols was irresistible.
Politically, the boot was on the other foot. The Sumerians themselves were dominated a little later (2334–2200) by their Akkadian-speaking neighbours to the north when King Sargon—or more accurately šarrukîn, ‘the righteous king’—imposed himself. Although this Akkadian empire was overthrown after a few generations by invaders from Qutium in the north-east, and the Sumerians, spearheaded by the city of Ur, were able eighty years later to reclaim their independence, southern Mesopotamia was henceforth known to all under the joint name of ‘the land of Sumer and Akkad’.*
When at the end of the third millennium Ur, the greatest Sumerian city, fell to more Semitic speakers, this time nomadic Amorites from the north-west, a new pattern set in: for the next 1500 years the land was periodically unified under Akkadian-speaking dynasties ruling from Babylon in the south or Assyria in the north, only to have their power disrupted every few centuries by power struggles between them, or invasions from the west or east. The invasions, although they might last a long time, notably four hundred years after the Kassites took control of Babylon in 1570 bc, never had any great linguistic effect. Like the various Turks who would conquer north China, or the Germans who were to topple Roman control of western Europe, these were all invaders who acquiesced in their victims’ languages. From about 2000 bc, Akkadian had become the only language spoken throughout the region. But Sumerian was not forgotten. It moved upmarket, and kept its influence in the written language. Babylon and Assyria went on for a millennium and a half as the two powers within Mesopotamia, competing often with ruthless savagery, but speaking dialects of the same language.
While Akkadian held the central area until the middle of the first millennium bc, it was surrounded to the east, north and west by unrelated languages.
Hurrian, replaced later by ‘Urartian’ (whose name lives on in Mount Ararat), was the major language of the north, spoken from modern Armenia as far south as Kirkuk in modern Iraq. (Its surviving relatives, tiny languages such as Avar and Lezgian in the East Caucasian family, are still spoken on the western shores of the Caspian.)
To the west of this, in the central plain of Anatolia, which is now Turkey, we see the first known Indo-Europeans, Hittites, with their close relatives who spoke Luwian and Palaic.* The Hittites, flourishing from the sixteenth to the thirteenth century bc, created a massively literate civilisation, and their royal library at Hattusas, discovered in modern Boğaz Köy, 150 kilometres west of Ankara, contains materials not only in Hittite and Akkadian, but also in Hurrian, Luwian and Palaic, interspersed here and there with phrases in Hattic, Sumerian and the Indo-Aryan language of the Mitannian aristocracy. The Hittites were often a threat to Sumer and Akkad, and it had been a swift Hittite invasion, not followed up, which had left Babylon open to the Kassite takeover already mentioned. In the event, the Hittite empire collapsed about the end of the thirteenth century, but related languages lived on for many centuries, particularly Luwian, and farther to the west Lydian.†
South of the Hittites but due west of Sumer and Akkad, in modern Syria, the languages were Semitic, close relatives of Akkadian. We have seen that it was from this direction that the Amorite invasion came (named after the region Amurru, Akkadian for ‘the west’, in northern Syria), which had delivered the coup de grâce to Sumerian independence, and hence Sumerian as a spoken language, around 2000 BC.
There seems, in fact, to have been some fraternity among these cities of Semitic speech, from Ugarit (on the coast near Lataqieh) through Iamhad (Aleppo), Karkemish and Qatna a in northern Syria to Mari on the Euphrates. Mari and Ugarit both left massive libraries from the second millennium bc. But as to foreign influence in this period, there was a tendency here to look south towards the power centre in Egypt, rather than to their linguistic cousins in Mesopotamia. The Phoenician port city of Gubla (known to the Greeks later as Byblos) was growing rich on exporting timber, specifically the cedars of Lebanon, to the wood-starved Egyptians. The Amorite cities just mentioned all left quantities of royal vases, jewels and statues imported from
Egypt. Farther south, in Palestine, the general level of wealth and urbanisation was lower, and marauding Habiru (known to the Egyptians as ‘apiru) were a threat to more settled communities. Perhaps the ancestors of the nation later calling themselves ‘ibri (Hebrews) were among them.
Throughout the second millennium bc, the land of Sumer and Akkad already enjoyed serious cultural prestige. This is clearly reflected in the spread of its cuneiform writing system to all its neighbours, including even Elam, which had independently developed its own alternative. Besides the script, its language, Akkadian, was in this period the lingua franca for diplomacy, even where the Babylonians or Assyrians were not a party to the matters under discussion.
But
