final reflection here might be to consider whether there is any distinctive continuity of character in this ancient tradition. Is there something about Arabic which it shares with Aramaic and Akkadian? Or have so many innovations, on the way through remote antiquity and the Middle Ages into the modern world, in effect revised away any common core?
Fernand Braudel saw in the total success of Muslim advance, so sudden and apparently so inexplicable, the natural reassertion of the Near Eastern tradition, after a Greek and Roman interruption of a thousand years.84 He did see the Arabic language as the surest proof that countries are truly part of Muslim civilisation,85 yet the examples he gives of continuity in Near Eastern civilisation—dress, food, domestic architecture, even monotheistic faith—have nothing to do with language.86
At the most obvious level, the values promoted in Islam are the polar opposite of what their great imperialist predecessors the Assyrians embraced. The Muslims put forward their unique conception of God as a reason to accept their rule, emphasising all the while His infinite compassion. The Assyrian armies rolled over their neighbours to prove the greater might of their kings, and demonstrated their power through orgies of ruthlessness. Their gods followed, and if many chose to worship them, this was purely an acknowledgement of the greater power of all they stood for, an act of prudence and diplomacy, not the acceptance of a revelation or an act of sincere submission.
The Arabs going into battle for Islam can be seen in fact as an alloy of three very different preceding traditions among their fellow-speakers of Semitic languages: the abstract theology of the Jews, the embracing inclusiveness of the Aramaic Christians, and the military momentum of the Assyrians. Indeed, if one includes their propensity for long-distance navigation and speculative trading, they can also be ranged with the Phoenicians.
But there is one thing in the cultural background which does unite all the Semites, of whatever religion or desired level of opulence. However successful their cities, however developed their religions and philosophies, they never escaped the memory that they had all arisen from desert nomads. Arabic was the language of nomads, and Islam was founded by nomad aggression from Arabia. Aramaic penetrated the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, and so became established, through nomads spreading from Aram. The Hebrews and Phoenicians developed their cities and their cultures when Habiru nomads had finally settled down in the land of Canaan; explicitly, the Torah talks of the children of Israel wandering through the wilderness of Sinai for forty years. And the Akkadians might never have taken over from Sumer without the incursions of those little-known nomads of the west, the Amorites. Ultimately, surely, it must have been nomads who brought the Semitic languages in prehistoric times out of Africa and into the Fertile Crescent.
Nomads may be hard to find in the modern Semitic world. But aspects of nomadism are still central to the unsolved problems of the Arabs: the homelessness of the Palestinians, the moral queasiness about the unearned riches welling up from the desert wastes of Arabia, the wild men of al-Qa’eda in self-imposed exile while they plan destruction for the iniquitous cities. In all this, speakers of Arabic are very true to their tradition. Indeed, the histories of Akkadian, Phoenician, Aramaic and Arabic are a five-thousand-year demonstration of the benefits of the desert—as a place to come in from.
4 Triumphs of Fertility: Egyptian and Chinese
Zi-lu said, ‘If the Prince of Wei were awaiting you, Sir, to take control of his administration, what would be the Master’s priority?’
‘The one thing needed is the correction of names!’ the Master replied.
‘Are you as wide of the mark as that, Sir?’ said Zi-lu. ‘Why this correcting?’
‘How uncultivated you are, Yu!’ responded the Master. ‘A wise man, in regard to what he does not understand, maintains an attitude of reserve. If names are not correct then statements do not accord with facts. And when statements and facts do not accord, then business cannot be properly executed. When business is not properly executed, order and harmony do not flourish. When order and harmony do not flourish, then justice becomes arbitrary. And when justice becomes arbitrary, people do not know how to move hand or foot. Hence whatever a wise man states he can always define, and what he so defines he can always carry into practice; for the wise man will on no account have anything remiss in his definitions.’
Confucius, Lúnyû† (Analects), xiii:3 (Chinese, early fifth century BC)2
Two ancient languages, widely distant in their lands and their eras, are yet strangely similar in their careers. In their attributes they are unmatched, except by each other.
Egyptian and Chinese are both vehicles of single cultural traditions of immense prestige. For each, the role as universal language was uncontested in their homeland. By the dawn of their recorded histories they were already established over the central zone of the lands where they were to be spoken. Each maintained this position of solitary and basically unchanging dominance for an awesome period of over three thousand years, or more than 120 generations. Yet, in each case, despite the fame and prestige of the culture among neighbours, who were often dominated politically by these powers, the languages never assumed any role as lingua franca beyond the territory that they considered their homeland.
Another parallel concerns their scripts. Each language originated its own unique system of writing, based on pictograms in a particular style; and each of these scripts early attained a form that would not change. Each was later taken up by another people, and simplified to yield the basis for a phonetic writing system: Egyptian hieroglyphs were the starting point for the Phoenicians’ alphabet, and the Japanese drew their kana syllabary from Chinese characters. But in each case the original language culture disregarded the innovation, and maintained its ancient system essentially unchanged, despite the vast overhead this entailed in continuing lengthy scribal education.
Their careers are parallel. For us, their main interest lies in considering how a language can achieve steady state, a kind of homoeostasis where it appears to absorb any perturbation that might affect it. This steadiness is particularly interesting in the cases of Egypt and China, since the languages have not simply survived in isolation, but can be seen coping with human incursions for much of their history, and occupy spaces large enough to pose difficulties for a unitary government.
Another aspect of this puzzling unity, especially in the case of Chinese, is the strange coherence of the language itself. Certainly Chinese has dialects, and they are different enough often to be considered distinct languages. But this famous fact is less interesting than a less noted one: over 70 per cent of Chinese speakers speak a single variety, known as Mandarin or Pŭtōnghuà,* and this, the official language of the Chinese state, is spoken in more than 75 per cent of the country’s area. It has some local accents but essentially no internal variation. Since both the Chinese population
