Kitabı oku: «Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World», sayfa 6

Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy

Now all the earth had one language and words in common. And moving east, people found a plain in Shinar and settled there. And they said to each other: ‘Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly!’ They used brick instead of stone, and tar instead of mortar. Then they said: ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’ But Yahweh came down to see the city that the sons of man were building. And Yahweh said: ‘So this is what they can do when all share one language! There will be no limit on what they can accomplish if they have a mind for it. I shall go down and stupefy their languages so that they may not understand one another.’ So Yahweh scattered them from there all over the earth. And they stopped building the city. That is why it is called Babylon (bābšl) because there he mixed up (bālăl) the language of all the earth. And from there Yahweh scattered them all over the earth.

Hebrew scriptures, Genesis x

This Jewish myth, evidently inspired by the stupendous architecture on show in the cosmopolitan city of Babylon, and the polyphony of languages to be

The Fertile Crescent Range of Akkadian

heard on its streets, is still deeply symbolic for European culture. But somehow the central mechanism of conflict between an arrogant superpower and a jealous god has been lost. It is now taken as a story of how a single language can give unity, the kind of unity that is necessary to bring off a magnificent enterprise: just confound their languages, and cooperation becomes impossible. As such, it is bizarrely ill placed as a fable of Babylon, which was notable throughout its history for the leading role of a single language. For almost two thousand years this language was Akkadian, although in the last few centuries of its empire, as already seen, it yielded to Aramaic.

Perhaps the dream of Babylonians scattered and disorganised was a comforting exercise in wish fulfilment for the sixth-century Jews who had been shattered and driven from their homeland by the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadrezzar II. Perhaps it might even be taken as an ironic comment on how the Assyrian Asshurbanipal had been able to sack Babylon in the seventh century: many Babylonian traditionalists must after all have questioned the spreading influence of those rough-talking Aramaeans, and speculated that no good would come of it. But although Babylon was to lose its glory in time—indeed, very soon after Nebuchadrezzar—its decline cannot be blamed on language decadence, or some failure in communication. People went on speaking Aramaic, and studying Akkadian, for many centuries after the Persians, and then the Greeks, had taken away all their power.

Yet at its acme, Akkadian was pre-eminently a language of power and influence. If Sumerian had spread beyond Sumer as the touchstone of an educational standard, Akkadian spread through economic and political prestige.

Akkadian is named after Agade or Akkad, once the major city of southern Mesopotamia but whose location is now a mystery. (It was possibly not far from Babylon.) Records of the language begin in earnest with the middle of the third millennium, with an early climax in those conquests by Sargon (whose long reign centred on the turn of the twenty-fouth and twenty-third centuries BC). He campaigned successfully in all directions, thus not only spreading the official use of Akkadian in the north (Mari and Ebla), but also beginning a millennium-long official dominance of the language in Elam to the west. We have seen that this first fit of imperial exuberance was followed by a collapse in the fourth generation (end of the twenty-second century BC), and a brief linguistic resurgence of the subject populations, with the return of Sumerian and Elamite to official use for a century or so. Soon, however, the Amorites, Semitic-speaking ‘Westerners’, began to make their appearance all over Mesopotamia.* Their movements did not strengthen Akkad politically, but did seem to crowd out the wide-scale use of anything but Akkadian as a means of communication; and the written record (outside literature) from the beginning of the second millennium is exclusively in this language.

In the early days, there was some parity, and perhaps some specialisation of function, as between Akkadian and Sumerian: we have already noted that Sargon’s own daughter had been an accomplished poetess in Sumerian. But the bilingualism proved unstable. While Akkadian was fortified as the major language of the Fertile Crescent by its everyday use for all literate purposes, and some degree of mutual intelligibility with the Semitic languages of the west, Sumerian was guaranteed only by its role in education and culture. The period of the rise of Babylon (2000–1600 BC) still fostered this, but when the power bases were shattered, and foreign rulers (the Kassites) took over, serious learning in Sumerian must have seemed an irrelevance. It was retained merely as an adjunct to Akkadian studies, in the same spirit as the list of Latin tags sometimes still found at the end of an English dictionary.

This ‘Old Babylonian’ period turned out to be as significant for Akkadian as it was for Sumerian, but in a different way. It was in this period that some fairly slight dialect differences are first noticeable between the south (Baby-lonian) and the north (Assyrian). Different dialects of Akkadian also become visible farther afield, in Mari, in Susa and to the east in the valley of the Diyala. Letters are extant from all periods, and provide the best evidence for spoken language.

At the same time, the dialect of Babylon (which even the Babylonians still called Akkadū) became established as the literary standard, the classic version of which would be used for official purposes throughout Mesopotamia. This privileged position endured for the rest of the language’s history, essentially regardless of whether Babylon, Assyria or neither of them was the current centre of political power. The great model of classic Babylonian is the Laws of Hammurabi, compiled in the eighteenth century BC when this dialect was still the vernacular. But the best-known literary texts, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and Enuma eliš (‘When on high...’, the Creation Epic), are also in this dialect, written down when it was no longer current.

In the north, the use of Akkadian was to die out about 600 BC, fully replaced by Aramaic. But use of the language persisted in Babylon till the beginning of the first century AD; it seems that by this stage most of the knowledge of the language was in the hands of professional scribes, who would read, write and translate even personal letters—but not without interference from the Aramaic in which they were actually thinking and talking.

Besides its use as a native language by most of the inhabitants of Mesopotamia, and its historic role as the first language of literacy for Semites anywhere, Akkadian also came to achieve a wider role as a lingua franca among utter foreigners. How was this possible? Ultimately, it was due to its association with the most sophisticated technology of its day, writing.

The first evidence of this cosmopolitan spread is the activity of Assyrian merchants in central Anatolia far to the north of the Taurus mountains, in a complex of market centres or karum set up between Nesas and Hattusas (Kültepe and Boğaz Köy on modern maps). This was in the first quarter of the second millennium, 1950–1750 BC. The merchants came from rich families of Asshur, and used donkey caravans for transport through the Taurus mountains. Their motive was trade in metals: they had found a source of silver, gold and copper. In the reverse direction, they brought tin, goat-hair felt, woven textiles and perfumes. The traders were apparently ready to pay duties to the local Hatti authorities. This is known from the trading correspondence (on clay tablets in clay envelopes) which they left behind, written in Old Assyrian, a dialect of Akkadian.

The trade seems to have been ended around 1750, perhaps by Hurrian incursions, perhaps by the first stirrings of Hittite expansion, the campaigns of the kings of Kussara. This, however, was already a distant memory by the time we find it described in the earliest chronicles of the Hittites themselves, written in the Nesas-Hattusas area about four hundred years later. And these, of course, are written in a cuneiform script, with copious use of Sumerian and Akkadian logograms, which itself derived from the Akkadian tradition.

The Hittites provide just one example of how Akkadian was taken up by the literate class in surrounding states. In the second millennium, Akkadian was being taught and used in every capital city that surrounded Mesopotamia, essentially regardless of the ambient language. Just going by the documents so far found which date from the middle of the second millennium, we can see that the same Sumerian edubba system was being practised in Susa for Elamite speakers, in Nuzi (modern Yorgan Tepe near Kirkuk) for Hurrians, in Hattusas for Hittites and Luwians, in Alalah and Ugarit near the Mediterranean coast for speakers of other Semitic languages as well as Hurrian, and in Akhetaten (briefly the Egyptian capital) for Egyptians.

The linguistic situations of the various nations were differently nuanced: in this period it seems that Elam, for example, had different segments of the population using predominantly either Akkadian (in the northern plain) or Elamite (in the mountainous south), while in Ugarit there was a much more general bilingualism, so that texts in Akkadian intended for home consumption may be tricked out with the odd explanatory gloss in Ugaritic.²² But whatever the home situation, the general practice seemed to be that Akkadian was used for international correspondence, and often for treaties.

The classic demonstration of this is the Amarna correspondence, a cache of diplomatic letters from the fourteenth century BC, found on the site of the then Egyptian capital. There are 350 letters and attachments in this collection, and all but three are in Akkadian (two in Hittite and one in Hurrian).

It is interesting to reflect on how Akkadian had achieved this role as an international lingua franca. The middle of the second millennium was not a glorious period for the speakers of Semitic languages. In 1400 BC Babylon had been firmly under Kassite control for two centuries, and Assyria in vassalage to the Mitanni for a century. In northern Syria, established Mitanni control was being disputed by the Hittites. And the rest of Palestine was a collection of vassal states under Egyptian sovereignty.

It was not recent political influence, then, which made Akkadian the language of convenience at this time. The only explanation is a cultural one, and specifically the matter of literacy, and the culture of the scribal edubba.

With the exception of Egypt, and its trading partners in Phoenicia, every one of the powers had become literate in the course of the previous millennium through absorbing the cuneiform culture of Sumer and Akkad. As we have seen, this writing system was extremely committed to its original languages, shot through with phonetic symbols that only made sense in terms of puns in Sumerian and Akkadian, and taught in practice through large-scale copying of the classics of Sumerian and Akkadian literature. Although Babylonia and Assyria aspired to be world empires—and both would see themselves at least once more as mistress of the whole Fertile Crescent—their cultural dominance was almost wholly a matter of having been the leaders in a shared language technology.

The next, and last, great question in the history of Akkadian is why its dominance, and indeed its use, came to an end. One thing that the history of this language does teach is that the life and death of languages are in principle detached from the political fortunes of their associated states. For curiously, just as Akkadian had reached the height of its prestige and extension during a long eclipse of Assyro-Babylonian power, its decline began when the Assyrian empire was at its zenith.

The paradox deepens the more closely it is considered. Not only was Akkadian, the language replaced, at the height of its political influence: its replacement language, Aramaic, had until recently been spoken mainly by nomads. These people could claim no cultural advantage, and were highly unlikely to set up a rival civilisation. The expectation would have been that, like the Kassites eight hundred years before in Babylon, Aramaic speakers would have been culturally and linguistically assimilated to the great Mesopotamian tradition. Similar things, after all, were to happen to others who burst in upon great empires—the Germans invading the Roman empire, or the Mongols the Chinese.

But it was in the cultural sphere that the Aramaic speakers brought their greatest surprise. They did assimilate largely to Akkadian culture, certainly. But there was one crucial respect in which they did not, the epoch-making one of language technology. With Aramaic came a new tradition of writing, which used an alphabetic script. Along with this revolution in language representation came new writing materials: people wrote their notes, and increasingly their formal records and literary texts, on new media, sheets of papyrus or leather.

These changes went to the heart of Assyrian and Babylonian culture; so much so that the traditional view has been that it explains the triumph of Aramaic as a language. So Georges Roux, for example, writes: ‘Yet to these barbaric Aramaeans befell the privilege of imposing their language upon the entire Near East. They owed it partly to the sheer weight of their number and partly to the fact that they adopted, instead of the cumbersome cuneiform writing, the Phoenician alphabet slightly modified, and carried everywhere with them the simple, practical script of the future.’²³ And John Sawyer: ‘The success of Aramaic was undoubtedly due in the main to the fact that it was written in a relatively easy alphabetical script.’²⁴

This cannot be right. Writing systems, after all, exist to record what people say, not vice versa. There is no other case in history of a change in writing technology inducing a change in popular speech. And even if it were possible, it is particularly unlikely in a society like the Assyrian empire, where a vanishingly small portion of the population were literate. The real significance of the change in writing system that came with the Aramaic is to give an extra dimension to the Aramaic paradox: how could a mobile, and politically subservient, group such as the Aramaeans not only spread its language but also get its writing system accepted among its cultural and political masters, the Assyrians and Babylonians?

The answer lies in an unexpected effect of Assyrian military policy.

We have already noted the first hostile contacts between the Aramaean nomads and the Assyrians, at the end of the twelfth century. The Aramaeans, coming in from the wilderness of northern Syria, were able, presumably by force of arms, to settle all over the inhabited parts of that country. They did not limit themselves to the area of Damascus, but spread out north, south and, significantly, to the east. The whole area of the upper reaches of the Euphrates between the rivers Balikh and Khabur became known as Aram Naharaim, ‘Aram of the Rivers’. Their progress southward towards Babylon was steady: they smashed the temple of Shamash in Sippar in the middle of the eleventh century, and by the early tenth century were sufficiently settled around Babylon to cut it off from its suburb Barsippa, and so prevent the proper celebration of New Year Festival, which required the idols of Marduk and Nabu to process to and from Babylon. Meanwhile, in the north, Assyrian resistance proved equally unable to stop their advance, and by the beginning of the ninth century they were on the banks of the Tigris itself.

The first successful resistance came from the Assyrian king Adad-nirâri (911–891 BC), who drove the Aramaeans out of the Tigris valley and the Kashiari mountains to the north. Thereafter, the Assyrian kings began a policy of annual campaigns against one or other of their neighbours, a policy of unrestrained aggression which lasted over 150 years, pausing only when the aggression turned inward, during the major civil wars of 827–811 and 754–745. Within a hundred years the whole Fertile Crescent was under their control, together with southern Anatolia as far as Tarsus, and large swathes of Elam in the east. Farther afield, they undertook a punitive expedition deep into Urartu (eastern Anatolia) and even a brief, but unsustainable, invasion of Egypt.

Truly these were glory days for Assyria, but that seems to have been the sole point of these wars: after a victory, a ruinous demand for tribute was imposed on the defeated city or tribe. There is no evidence, in Assyrian business correspondence or the archaeological record, of any subsequent attempt to spread Assyrian culture thereafter, or even to establish the ruling caste on a wider basis. Wealth was transferred one way, and at the point of a sword. From Tiglath-Pileser III (744–727) to Sennacherib (704–681), a new tactic was added: vast numbers of the conquered populations were led off to some other distant part of the empire. Estimates attribute thirty-seven deportations to Tiglath-Pileser III (totalling 368,543 people), thirty-eight to Sargon II (totalling 217,635), twenty to Sennacherib (totalling 408,150). All in all, the Assyrians claimed to have displaced some 4.5 million persons over three centuries. ²⁵

A majority of these deportations would have involved Aramaic speakers, although the most famous, carried out by Sargon II against Samaria, capital of Israel, in 721 BC, probably involved speakers of Hebrew:

At the beginning of my rule, I took the town of the Samarians for the god... who let me achieve this triumph. I led away as prisoners 27,290 inhabitants of it and equipped from among them soldiers to man 50 chariots for my royal corps... The town I rebuilt better than it was before and settled therein people from countries which I myself had conquered. I placed an officer of mine as governor over them and imposed upon them tribute as for Assyrian citizens.²⁶

The Hebrew scriptures (2 Kings xvii.6, 24) give more details of where the Israelite exiles were sent (including Aram Naharaim on the Khabur river, and the north-eastern extremity of the empire in Media), and of who were sent to replace them. (They included some Babylonians.)

Now and then, correspondence gives an insight into how these deportees were viewed when they arrived in Mesopotamia.²⁷ A letter to the king contrasts qinnāte ša Ninua labīrūti, ‘old-time families of Nineveh’, with nasi’ānni, ‘social upstarts’, and šaglūti, ‘deportees’, itself perhaps a pun on šaklūti, ‘ignorants’. But it is clear that people with western Semitic names were often entrusted with significant responsibility.

This scattering of Assyria’s subject peoples could be seen as a shrewd policy to unify the diverse populations of the empire by cutting them off from their traditions—an imposed ‘melting pot’ solution.²⁸ All deportees, as the above inscription mentioned, are to be ‘regarded as Assyrians’; as such they were deemed to have a duty to palā ili u šarri, ‘to fear God and King’.

Tending in the same direction was another new policy to buttress imperial unity, the recruitment of a royal guard, the kisir šarruti. This was drawn from non-Mesopotamian provinces, supplementing the more feudally organised Assyrian troops. In fact, bearers of western Semitic names crop up quite commonly as Assyrian army officers. Particularly famous was the force of Itu ’aia, made up of Aramaeans of the Itu ’tribe, which turns up at many of the hot spots, on duty to crush dissent within Babylonian provinces.²⁹

The situation in the Fertile Crescent, then, over the period of the eleventh to the eighth century BC, was one of an extreme flux of populations. Aramaeans had settled themselves over the whole area in the earlier two centuries, and although they had been under more effective state control in the latter two, Assyrian policy had served not to push them back but to distribute them even more widely, either as forced migrants, or as members of the armed forces. Since the Aramaeans were the largest group being scattered in this way, when other western Semites, such as Israelites or Phoenicians, found themselves transplanted, they could tend to find themselves speaking more and more like their new neighbours.*

The Assyrians had therefore contrived to reinforce the spread of a new lingua franca across their domains, one that was not dependent on literacy or any shared educational tradition. Its effective usefulness would have increased as the Assyrian domain was spread yet wider, and its population of western Semitic speakers, predominantly Aramaic speakers, came to outnumber more and more the original population of Mesopotamia, who spoke Akkadian. The ruling class in the triad of capital cities, Asshur, Nineveh and Kalhu (Nimrud), maintained continuity, but elsewhere there was increasing social flux, and people had to make accommodations with the newcomers. In Babylon, particularly, this must have happened early on.

Nor were the newcomers handicapped by lack of the basic art of civilisation, literacy. Although the Aramaeans had appeared originally as nomads, presumed illiterate, they had even before the first millennium began taken over cities (most notably Damascus) and whole countries (the last Hittite kingdom, its capital at modern Zincirli, in the Turkish province still known as Hatay). Many of them would have come to know the value of writing, and since the cities they knew were of the west, the writing system they would have learnt was simple and alphabetic.

As they moved eastward, we can only presume that alphabetic literacy spread with at least some of the Aramaeans, since the new materials, ink and papyrus or leather, are biodegradable, and do not survive in the archaeological record. In fact, the earliest inscriptions in Aramaic, not clearly distinguishable from Canaanite languages at this time, are from the middle of the ninth century.³⁰ The short-term practical advantages of the new media (less bulk, greater capacity) must soon have made an impression. A new word for ‘scribe’ came into use in Akkadian, sēpiru, as opposed to the old upsarru, ‘tablet writer’, which went right back to the Sumerian word dubsar. Pictures of scribes at work from the mid-eighth century show them in pairs, one with a stylus and a tablet, the other with a pen and a sheet of papyrus or parchment. As with the onset of computers, good bureaucrats must have ensured that the old and the new coexisted for a long time: the ‘clay-free office’ did not happen in Assyria till the destruction of the empire by the Medes in 610 BC.*

The net result seems to have been that spoken use of Akkadian receded before that of Aramaic with scarce a murmur of complaint. An officer in Ur does once ask permission to write to the king in Aramaic.³¹ But no pedantic or puristic murmur has yet been found in any Akkadian tablet. The closest we have is an exchange of correspondence between a scribe and King Sargon (721–705):

SCRIBE: If it please my Lord, I will write an [Aramaic] document.

SARGON: Why do you not write Akkadian?³²

Indeed, on the evidence of the pattern of words borrowed in Akkadian from Aramaic, as against those borrowed in the reverse direction, it has been claimed that Akkadian, by the time the changeover was taking place, was the less favoured language, with those who wrote it essentially thinking in Aramaic, while struggling (and failing) to put their Aramaic verbs out of their minds.³³

The triumph of Aramaic over Akkadian must be ascribed as one of practical utility over ancient prestige, but the utility came primarily from the fact that so many people already spoke it. The fact that its associated writing system was quicker and easier was an added bonus; if anything, it just removed one argument that might have made sections of the Aramaic-speaking population want to learn Akkadian too. After all, what was the point? One would never be accepted as anything other than šaglūti; and even the royal court was taking up Aramaic.

As once had Sumerian, so now Akkadian fell victim to a new language brought by nomads and newcomers; unstable bilingualism followed, together with the death of the older language.

In such times, the only argument for an education in Akkadian was to maintain the link with the literature of the previous two thousand years, and the traditions of grandeur associated with the great cities of Mesopotamia. It lived on in Babylon as a classical language for six hundred years after its probable death: not only did the last dynasty of Babylon (625–539 BC) use it for chronicles of their rule, despite being of Chaldaean (i.e. Aramaic) extraction, but foreign conquerors, the Persians Cyrus (557–529 BC) and Xerxes (485–465 BC) and even the Greek Antiochus Soter (280–261 BC), all left inscriptions in the royal language glorifying their own reigns. There was certainly a new and, some would say, barbarous resonance when a Greek monarch could write: ‘I am An-ti-’u-ku-us [Antiochus], the great king, the legitimate king, the king of the world, king of E [Babylon], king of all countries, the caretaker of the temples Esagila and Ezida, the first born of Si-lu-uk-ku [Seleucus], Ma-ak-ka-du-na-a-a [Macedonian], king of Babylon.’³⁴

But there were few who could still understand them.*