clarius faceret, sparsa congregaret imperia ritusque molliret et tot populorum discordes ferasque linguas sermonis commercio contraheret ad colloquia et humanitatem homini daret, breviterque una cunctarum gentium in toto orbe patria fieret.
I am aware that I may be quite rightly thought thankless and lazy if I touch so lightly on that land which is both the foster-child and parent of all lands, called by Providence to make the very sky brighter, to bring together its far-flung domains, to civilise their ways of life, to unite in conversation the wild, quarrelsome tongues of all their many peoples through common use of its language, to give culture to mankind, and in short to become the one fatherland of every nation in the world.
Pliny the Elder (AD 24–79), Naturalis Historia, iii.39
The yoke of arms is shaken off more readily by subject peoples than the yoke of language.
attributed to Lorenzo Valla, Italian humanist (1406–57), in his Elegantiarum Libri VI
3 The Desert Blooms: Language Innovation in the Middle East
Who can know the will of the gods in heaven?
Who can understand the plans of the underworld gods?
Where have humans learned the way of a god?
He who was alive yesterday is dead today.
One moment he is worried, the next he is boisterous.
One moment he is singing a joyful song,
A moment later he wails like a funeral mourner.
Their condition changes like opening and closing [the legs].
When starving they become like corpses,
When full they oppose their god.
In good times they speak of scaling heaven,
When they are troubled they talk of descent to hell.
I am perplexed at these things; I cannot tell what they mean.
from Ludlul Bēl Nēmeqi, ‘I will Praise the Lord of Wisdom’, Akkadian1
The names of civilisations that arose in the ancient Near East now ring with the note of remote antiquity. Three dozen and more are known that flourished in the three millennia from the start of records c.3300 BC until the invasion of Alexander in 330 BC, among them such powers as Babylon, Assyria, Phoenicia, Lydia and Persia. They bring to mind visions of oriental absolutism, breathtaking ruthlessness and gaudy magnificence. Despite their many pretensions, their cultural fertility and sometimes truly universal power, they have left no heirs. Something of this was foreseen by at least one of their own writers:
Servant, listen to me.
Yes, master, yes.
I will benefit my country.
So do, master, do.
The man who benefits his country
has his good deeds set down in the [record] of Marduk.
No, servant, I will not benefit my country.
Do not do it, master, do not.
Go up to the ancient ruin heaps and walk around; look at the skulls of the lowly and the great. Which belongs to one who did evil, and which to one who did good?
from ‘The Dialogue of Pessimism’, Akkadian2
But perhaps it is a little harsh to weigh up the persistence of political achievements after a gap of two to four millennia. Some of their works really did defy the ages. It was here that writing was invented, and developed from a medium for taking notes into the basis for a full, explicit record of human life and thought; as a lucky complement to this, a plentiful and non-biodegradable material had been adopted to write on, patties of river clay, rolled out, inscribed, and sometimes baked hard. As a result we can trace not just the broad outlines of events, but the personalities and even the diplomatic dialogue of royal families, the myths and rituals of the peoples’ gods as well as their images, the laws under which they lived and the love songs they sang, and above all their multifarious languages.
This last gift is a particular godsend of the last two hundred years of archaeology, since among the peoples of the area only the Hebrews on the western margin and the Iranians on the east have texts and cultural traditions that have survived to modern times. Yet their scriptures, the Old Testament and the Zend-Avesta, supplemented by the hearsay of bystanders such as the Greek Herodotus—all that was available to eighteenth-century scholars—give a very partial view, and that only of the latter stages of what was done, with no sense at all of what was said by those who did it.
Without nineteenth-century Europe’s discovery that it could do historical research through digging, and the novel skills of decipherment and language reconstruction then heroically applied to what was unearthed, we should know nothing at all of the founding cities in Sumer and Elam, the steadily expanding might of Urartu from the Caucasus, or the pre-eminence of Hittites in what is now Turkey. Each of these groups spoke a language quite unrelated to that of its neighbours, hinting at radically different origins, and a wealth of unknown stories in their even more remote past. This fact of different languages amazingly shines through the single script that so many of them used, based on patterns of wedge-shaped marks, even though it was originally designed to represent the meanings of words rather than how they sounded.
Six languages written in cuneiform—
Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, Hurrian, Urartian, Hittite
This is a region of so many world firsts for linguistic innovation. Unlike Egypt, China or India, its cities and states had always been consciously multilingual, whether for communication with neighbours who spoke different languages, or because their histories had made them adopt a foreign language to dignify court, religion or commerce. This is the area where we find the first conscious use of a classical language; but also, by contrast, the first generalised use of a totally foreign language for convenience in communication, as a lingua franca, an early apparent triumph of diplomatic pragmatism over national sentiment.
This area contains the site of the earliest known writing, in the lower reaches of the Euphrates valley. But in its western zone, in the coastal cities of Syria, it was also the first to make the radical simplification from hieroglyphs that denoted words and syllables to a short alphabet that represented simple sounds. The political effects of this were massive. For the first time, literacy could spread beyond the aristocratic
