Читать книгу Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World - Nicholas Ostler - Страница 31

That power, first focused in Assyria, later in Babylon, finally in Persia, continued to grow in influence over the next thousand years. As Egypt lost its control of Palestine (its last hurrah was the campaign of the Libyan pharaoh Shoshenq through Palestine around 925), and then the eighth century BC saw Assyria advance its control in the same region, Egypt began to attract refugees and exiles. The language they spoke was Aramaic, which by this time had spread all over the Semitic-speaking Middle East, and had even replaced Akkadian throughout the Assyrian empire.

In the seventh century BC, Aramaic entered Egypt in earnest, borne by the Assyrian invasion force of 671–667 which sacked Thebes and installed a puppet pharaoh. But Assyrian domination turned out to be transient, and Psamtek, the son of the quisling pharaoh Neko, was able to reclaim Egypt’s independence by 639. He soon began to reassert Egypt’s role in Palestine, occupying the Philistine capital Ashdod in 630, and defeating and killing Josiah, king of Judah, in 610. His successors continued the policy for another sixty-five years, taking advantage of the eclipse of Assyria by Babylon, and turning Palestine and Syria as a whole into a buffer zone for all the hostilities between Egypt and Babylon. The sack of Jerusalem in 587, and the exile of the Jews to Babylon, was one of the prices that others paid for this policy.

Probably the net effect of this on language was to bring into Egypt not Aramaic, but Greek. An opportunistic alliance with Ionian and Carian pirates had enabled Psamtek to shake off Assyria. This set the tone for the dynasty’s practice of acting in consort with Greeks, both militarily and commercially. An Egyptian fleet of Greek-built triremes patrolled the Red Sea and Mediterranean coasts, and there was a Greek mercenary contingent with the Egyptian forces sent up the Nile on a last mission against Nubia in the 590s. The Greek

trading colony of Naucratis was established close to Sais in the west of the Delta, as a treaty port very comparable to Shanghai in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries AD. There was a roaring trade, notably in Egyptian wheat and linen, paid for with Greek wine and silver. Greeks, when high on wine, says Bacchylides, a poet of the fifth century, would fantasise about ships from Egypt laden with wheat.⁹

This was the beginning of a rich, cosmopolitan atmosphere in the Delta that was to be fulfilled in the expansion of Alexandria as a Greek city three hundred years later. The sound of Greek would have become familiar in Egypt, even if few as yet would have been learning it.* But before Greek reached its acme, Egypt would undergo an involuntary infusion of Aramaic.

Aramaic, besides being the language of the Babylonians, was also adopted as the official language of the Persian empire, and it was this state which achieved the hitherto impossible task of subjecting Egypt durably to foreign rule. Egypt, drunk on Greek wine, was brought down to earth when the Persians marched in in 522 BC, deposed and killed the pharaoh Psamtek III, and set up a standard Persian administration with Egypt reduced to a province under a satrap.

Persian rule lasted for two centuries, tempered by a resurgence of Egyptian independence in the fourth century that was later crushed. The Aramaic language established itself not just as a language of government and law, but also as a widespread medium of private communication. In fact, an accident of climate rather distorts the record. Because of its dry climate, Egypt provides the vast bulk of documents in Aramaic that have survived from this period, whether on papyrus, parchment, painted on stone or incised on metal.

Aramaic, then, was the first language in three millennia to make a significant inroad into Egypt. When Alexander took the country in 332 BC, initiating three centuries of Greek rule, he found an administration run in Aramaic; in some respects, for instance in the law courts, this language persisted under the Ptolemies,¹⁰ but in general Aramaic was replaced in official use by Greek. Although the Ptolemies took their role as Greek successors to the pharaohs seriously, and Greek Egypt became an autonomous and prosperous country again, the Egyptian language was henceforth relegated to the extremes of sacred and profane: in the temples, and on the lips of the common people. Alexandria, which replaced Athens as the academic centre of the ancient world, was a Greek-speaking city. Famously, Queen Cleopatra, the last Ptolemy to rule (51–30 BC), was also the first to learn Egyptian—and that apparently only because she had a passion for languages.

There was pleasure in the very sound of her voice. Like a many-stringed instrument, she turned her tongue easily to whatever dialect she would, and few indeed were the foreigners with whom she conversed through an interpreter, since she answered most of them in her own words, whether Ethiopian, Trogodyte, Hebrew, Arab, Syriac, Median or Parthian. The kings before her had not even had the patience to acquire Egyptian, and some had even been lacking in their Macedonian.*