a vast area from western Mongolia to the Aegean Sea. As Xiongnu and Tabgatch, their speakers had harried and overrun the Chinese in the third and fourth centuries AD; in the fifth they were terrorising northern India as the HūIn the eighth and ninth centuries, Turks were writing funeral inscriptions in the Orkhon valley in Outer Mongolia in a runic alphabet of their own devising. Then they took up Sogdian writing, converting it into the vertical Uighur script of central Asia. In the eleventh century they encountered the Persians, and adopted Arabic script from them, even writing a dictionary of their language and a long didactic poem, the Kutadğū Bilig, ‘The Knowledge of Auspiciousness’. In fourteenth-century Persia and Samarkand, the form of Turkic known as Chagatay—after the second son of Genghis Khan—was the language of culture in courts of the Mongolian khans,80 and when Babur, the first of the Mughals, swept down from Afghanistan to conquer India in 1505, this was the language he spoke to his men, even if he preferred to write in Persian.81
It would almost be fair to take Babur’s approach as the spirit of Ottoman Turkish up to the twentieth century. Official Turkish was always heavily infused with literary Persian finery until Atatürk’s attempts to reform it in the 1930s.82
If Turkish deserves its own treatment, so does its cultural big sister, Persian, or Farsī, a highly literate language since the sixth century BC. To this day, untutored Westerners tend to see Persia as rather an indistinct eastern part of the Arab world: yet Persian—as a language—has far more in common with languages of Europe or northern India than it does with Arabic or Turkish. Despite 1200 years of practice, the phonetic distinctions in Arabic which Westerners find hard to master, s, z, t, d versus
Although it is has never ceased to be spoken in Iran over the last two thousand years, culturally it has been unfortunate, overlaid and disadvantaged by a series of political setbacks. First, in the sixth century BC Darius decided to make Aramaic the official language of the Persian empire; in the fourth century BC, when the empire was conquered, the Seleucids tried to impose Greek. Parthians and Sassanids reasserted its self-esteem for eight centuries from 140 BC, but then came the phenomenal spread of Islamic forces in the seventh century AD, elevating Arabic into a privileged position in religion, scholarship and government for three centuries. ‘No assistance should be sought from pagans in office work,’ scribes were enjoined.83
A resurgence of Persian began in the tenth century, but it was overlaid almost at once by the Turkic-speaking (nominally Mongol) incursions in the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. Nevertheless, Persian remained a prestige language; and thanks to Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals who followed, Persian also became the principal official language of Indian administration, from the thirteenth century until it yielded to English in the nineteenth.
Persian’s relatives have also been highly significant in central Asia. Scythian had been spoken across most of the Eurasian steppes in the first millennium BC. (It survives as Ossetic, a language of the Caucasus.) In the first millennium AD, Śaka-Khotanese was an important cultural language of early Buddhism; and Bactrian, spoken farther west, was taken by the Kushāna kings across northern India in the first and second centuries AD. Sogdian, centred on Samarkand, was the lingua franca of the Silk Road to China in the eighth to the tenth centuries. (It survives as Yaghnobi, still spoken in the Pamir mountains.)
For all its ups and downs, Persian is still spoken beyond the borders of Iran in the northern half of Afghanistan (as Darī, ‘courtly’), and beyond that in Tajikistan (as Tajik). And despite its speakers’ frequent lack of political dominance even in their own lands, wherever it is known it has always remained a language of high cultural prestige, famed particularly for its poetry.
Three things have modelled themselves on three of yours –
Rose on cheek, grape on lip, beauty on face.
Three things each year are taken from three of mine –
Grief from heart, tears from cheek, fancy from eye.
Abul Qasim ‘Unsuri (b. c.968 in Balkh, central Asia; d. c.1040 AD)
A Middle Eastern inheritance: The glamour of the desert nomad
The present-day globalised world is full of Arabic. It is the language that would-be Islamist revolutionaries in Europe and the USA feel they have to learn to give authenticity to their struggle; and its ironic similarity to Hebrew, newly revived in the land of Canaan, is a standing reminder of how the bitterest conflicts set long-lost cousins at each other’s throats: salām contends against š∂lōm, but the common meaning, ‘peace’, continues to elude them. Meanwhile the classical language is still intoned every day in Muslim prayer, and broadcast to an audience of well over 200 million souls, all of whom think when they converse, in their very different ways, that they are talking Arabic, ‘arabīya.
The language tradition of large-scale, unitary Semitic languages to which they are all heirs goes back demonstrably for five thousand years. In that time, there has been opportunity for a lot of innovations; the world has seen in their tradition the first adoption of a foreign language as a classic model for literature, the first system of writing with multilingual application, the first lingua franca of international diplomacy, the first archival libraries, the first alphabetic scripts, the first spread of language through trading colonies, the first substitution of one language for another without breakdown of a single literate tradition, the first use of a language as the talisman of a minority religious sect, the first designation of the written record of a particular language as the unchangeable word of God.
That is a fair record of firsts for a single tradition, even if its dominant language has twice been replaced, or, to put it perhaps better, renewed. We shall consider elsewhere the significance of all these examples in the general pattern of the development of human language systems.
An
