Spray of the Rider of the Clouds;
Dew that the heavens do shed
Spray that is shed by the stars.35
The words for ‘Sky-dew of the fatness of earth’ are l šmm šmn ’r. This is precisely what Isaac promises to Jacob (and denies to Esau) in the blessing scene in Genesis:
May God give you of dew of heaven and of fatness of earth36
(Traditionally, of course, Hebrew spelling too marked only consonants, as well as some long vowels.)
Hebrew and Ugaritic were close enough, then, to share some fixed phrases. Combining the dramatis personae of the Ugaritic epics with the phraseology of the Old Testament, and the narratives of Philo’s Phoenician History of Sanchuniathon, we may be able to reconstruct something of the verbal culture of Byblos, Tyre and their sister cities.
There is a clear echo of what Tyrian poetry may have been like in a famous passage of Ezekiel. In the course of a series of prophecies of the downfall of Judah’s various neighbours, the prophet digresses on the past glories of one city for which he foresees destruction: You say, O Tyre, ‘I am perfect in beauty.’
Your domain was on the high seas;
your builders brought your beauty to perfection.
They made all your timbers of pine trees from Senir;
they took a cedar from Lebanon and made a mast for you.
Of oaks from Bashan they made your oars;
of cypress wood from the coasts of Cyprus
they made your deck, inlaid with ivory.
Fine embroidered linen from Egypt was your sail
and served as your banner;
your awnings were of blue and purple
with the coasts of Elishah.
Men of Sidon and Arwad were your oarsmen;
your skilled men, O Tyre, were aboard as your seamen.
Veteran craftsmen of Byblos were on board
as shipwrights to caulk your seams.
All the ships of the sea and their sailors
came alongside to trade for your wares.
Men of Persia, Lydia, and Put
served as soldiers in your army.
They hung their shields and helmets on your walls,
bringing you splendour.
Men of Arwad and Helech manned your walls on every side;
men of Gammad were in your towers.
They hung their shields around your walls;
they brought your beauty to perfection.
…*
The ships of Tarshish serve as carriers for your wares.
You are filled with heavy cargo
in the heart of the sea.
Your oarsmen will take you out to the high seas.
But the east wind will break you to pieces
in the heart of the sea.
…
As they wail and mourn over you
they will take up a lament concerning you:
’Who was ever silenced like Tyre,
surrounded by the sea?’37
The Carthaginians, like other Phoenicians, kept voluminous records. Those that would have been kept on papyrus are lost, but there are several thousand known inscriptions, assigning rights over sacrificial offerings, making dedications to the goddess Tank or the god Baal Hammon, or commemorating ceremonies. It is also clear that Carthage had passed on the administrative use of its language to the neighbouring states to the west, Massylia and Massaesylia: their coins bear inscriptions in Punic letters, as do boundary stones.38
Indeed, there is evidence for a whole literature in Punic. St Augustine remarked famously that ‘on the word of many scholars, there was a great deal of virtue and wisdom in the Punic books’.39 This view was shared by the Roman Senate, which even as the city of Carthage was being finally destroyed in 146 BC gave orders for a new translation and edition of one especially admired treatise on agriculture. ‘Our Senate presented the libraries of the city to African princes, with the sole exception of the 28 books of Mago, which they decreed should be translated into Latin … The text was entrusted to scholars learned in Punic.’40 Some forty fragments of it are quoted by later Latin authors, but the work as a whole is lost, even in Latin translation.
In fact, no Punic literary work has survived. The closest to it is a Greek translation, in about seven hundred words, of a Punic inscription engraved in the temple of Baal Hammon at Carthage, recording the voyage of exploration by a Carthaginian leader, Hanno, round the western coast of Africa (perhaps as far as Gabon). It ends:
… we came to the gulf named Horn of the South. In the corner was an island … and in it a lake with an island full of savage people. By far the majority of them were female, hairy in body, called by the interpreters ‘gorillas’. We could not catch the men because of their skill at climbing and defending themselves with stones, but we took three women, who fiercely resisted, biting and tearing. However, we killed them and skinned them, and brought the hides back to Carthage. We did not sail further since our supplies had given out.41
It is tantalising that this text, one of the few brief survivals from the wreck of Punic literature, should have recounted such a unique adventure.
How is the total loss of Phoenician, and its successor dialect Punic, to be explained, after such a widespread expansion across the Mediterranean world? We have here another unanswered, and as yet largely unasked, question.
After Alexander’s sack of Tyre in 332 BC, Phoenician trade remained prosperous for many centuries, with no further disasters to threaten the traders’ stability. The Punic language did not die out promptly, even in its overseas provinces, where all the administrative links to Carthage were cut by the end of the second century BC: in Sardinia, for example, several ‘neo-Punic’ inscriptions have been found, the latest, at Bithia in the extreme south, made as late as the end of the second century AD. And even if the life of Carthage as a city was brutally punctuated in 146 BC, it was refounded as a Roman town by Augustus a century later. It then enjoyed a flourishing later life till the end of the Roman empire in the west. We may surmise that its language survived in use in North Africa, until the fifth century AD: Augustine tells us that he had to quote his Punic proverbs in Latin since ‘not everybody’ would understand the original.42
Nevertheless, ever since Alexander’s conquest of western Asia there had been a general cultural levelling in the Near East, with Greek and Aramaic spreading at the expense of all the minority languages. Although Aramaic was a language closely related to Phoenician or Hebrew, Greek had still been taken up by a large part of the Jewish community (especially those in Egypt) in this period. Greek had also become a basic subject in the education of Romans, who were by the second century BC clearly recognised as the rising power.
The cultural undertow was thus running strongly in favour of Greek. And in fact it is possible that, despite its users’ commercial prowess, Phoenician or Punic had never been widely used as a lingua franca or even as a trade jargon outside Africa. The language of trade is, after all, perforce that of the customer, rather than that of the merchant.
The Roman comedian Plautus illustrates this in a scene from his play Poenulus, ‘the Punic guy’—’Punk’?—which came out in the early second century BC, soon after the end of the Second Punic War.43 A Carthaginian merchant tries talking to a couple of Romans in Punic, even though he knows Latin, but soon tires of their constant heavy puns and jokes on him and his language, to cloak the poor language skills of the one who claims to be a bit of Punic expert. (Hanno’s Punic is in bold, and the Latin that echoes it is in bold italics.)
HANNO: mechar bocca MILPHIO: Istuc tibi sit potius quam mihi. AGORASTOCLES: quid ait? MILPHIO: miseram esse praedicat buccam sibi. fortasse medicos nos esse arbitrarier.
AGORASTOCLES: si ita est nega esse; nolo ego errare hospitem.
MILPHIO: audin tu? HANNO: rufe ynny cho is sam
AGORASTOCLES: sic volo profecto vera cuncta huic expedirier. roga numquid opu’ sit. MILPHIO: tu qui sonam non habes, quid in hanc venistis urbem aut quid quaeritis?
HANNO: muphursa AGORASTOCLES: quid ait?
HANNO: mi uulech ianna
AGORASTOCLES: quid venit?
MILPHIO: non audis? mures Africanos praedicat in pompam ludis dare se velle aedilibus.
HANNO: Good morning to you. MILPHIO: Better you than me.
AGORASTOCLES: What is he saying? MILPHIO: He says his jaw hurts.
Perhaps he thinks we are doctors.
AGORASTOCLES: Then say we’re not; as a stranger, I don’t want him misled.
MILPHIO: Are you listening? HANNO: Doctor, no one is perfect.
AGORASTOCLES: Yes, I certainly want all this explained to me. Ask him if he needs anything. MILPHIO: YOU without a belt, why have you people come to this city, or what are you after?
HANNO: What do you mean? AGORASTOCLES: What is he saying?
HANNO: What is he on about to a stranger?
AGORASTOCLES: Why has he come?
MILPHIO: Don’t you hear? African mice [a joke for ‘elephants’?] he says he wants to present to the city wardens for the circus parade.44
Still, the fact that the Punic dialogue is in there at all suggests that a smattering of Punic was not strange to Romans at the time, and good for a laugh.
The Carthaginian army (largely made up of mercenaries from all over the western Mediterranean) is said to have been commanded in Greek; certainly the coins struck by the soldiers during the great mutiny in 241-238 BC, the so-called ‘Truceless War’, were inscribed in Greek. And it is known that the annalists who accompanied Hannibal on campaign in Italy, Silenos and Sosylos, wrote in Greek. When Hannibal put up a plaque recording his exploits in a temple of Hera in Sicily, it was in Greek as well as Punic.45
The Phoenicians and Carthaginians, notorious as shrewd businessmen, must have been pragmatists; like their modern analogues, they would have focused on the practical utility of a means of communication, and chosen a language accordingly. In the last couple of centuries BC, it was clear that the most generally useful international language in the Mediterranean was Greek.
In Carthage itself, and the North African provinces of Libya (to the east) and Numidia (to the west), Punic did continue to be used. But there is no evidence of Punic literary activity after the Roman conquest (146 BC). Literacy seems to have become restricted to the use of Latin and Greek. The Punic cultural traditions ceased to be fostered, and the physical record of this once highly literate society did not last much longer.
The universal medium for administrative and literary records had been papyrus, a material that survives long-term only in extremely dry conditions (such as those of the Egyptian desert). Texts that were not inscribed on a durable medium such as stone, ivory or clay would not survive unless they were repeatedly copied—a service that was maintained for seminal texts in Greek and Latin, and indeed Hebrew, throughout late antiquity and the Middle Ages, until the printing press made them safe. There was no tradition to preserve Phoenician or Punic texts, and so they perished with the papyrus on which they had been written.
As for the spoken dialects, they will most likely have survived until succeeded by larger-scale neighbouring languages. Interestingly, in both cases, these new languages were Semitic, closely related to Canaanite dialects and in fact rather similar to them. Phoenician in the Lebanon will have yielded to Aramaic in the first century BC; and the last remnants of Punic in North Africa probably succumbed to Arabic in the seventh or even eighth century AD.*
Aramaic—the desert song: Interlingua of western Asia
In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah’s reign, Sennacherib king of Assyria attacked all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them. Then he sent his field commander with a large army from Lachish to King Hezekiah at Jerusalem … The field commander said to [Eliakim, Shebna and Joah, Hezekiah’s emissaries]:
This is what the great king, the king of Assyria says: on what are you basing this confidence of yours? … Yahweh himself told me to march against this country and destroy it.
Then Eliakim, Shebna and Joan said to the field commander,
Please speak to us in Aramaic [’arāmīth], sir, since we understand it. Don’t speak to us in Hebrew [yūdīth] in the hearing of the people on the wall.
But the commander replied:
Was it only to your master and you that my master sent me to say these things, and not to the men sitting on the wall—who like you will have to eat their own shit and drink their own piss?
Then the commander stood and called out in Hebrew:
Hear the words of the great king, the king of Assyria! This is what the king says: do not let Hezekiah deceive you. He cannot deliver you!…
Isaiah xxxvi.1-14 (= 2 Kings xviii.17-29)
These events, which took place in 701 BC, show that at this stage Aramaic, although the lingua franca of senior officers in the Assyrian empire and the kingdom of Judah, was not the language of Judah’s common soldier.
This was to change. The policy of internal deportation so thoroughly applied by the Assyrians was continued by their successors, and this time a notable victim was the Hebrew language, along with many of its speakers in the land of Judah.
When in 609 BC Assyria was at last subjugated by an alliance of Medes from the east and Babylonians from the south, there were no direct linguistic effects, except that Akkadian ceased to be written in Assyria. Aramaic continued as the standard spoken language of Mesopotamia, which was henceforth governed (if at all) from Babylon. But others had noticed the momentous political change. Egypt, in particular, saw an opportunity and invaded Palestine and Syria.
Babylon’s crown prince Nebuchadrezzar (Nabū-kudurri-uur, ‘Nabŭ, protect my offspring’) responded effectively. Twenty years later, by the time this and perhaps two more Egyptian invasions had been repulsed, Jerusalem, which had twice sided with the Egyptians, was definitively in Babylonian hands. Most of its population went either as refugees to Egypt or as deportees to Babylon.
This is precisely the sort of treatment that kills off a language, as can be attested by the experience of so many indigenous people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, moved off their lands by colonists or social engineers, in regions as varied as North Carolina, Queensland, Ethiopia, Siberia and Tibet. There are Hebrew songs of lamentation, all too conscious of the danger:
’al naharō bābel šām yašbenō gam baînŭ bəzārēnŭ ěîôn …
By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
There on the poplars we hung our harps
for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors asked for songs of joy;
They said, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’
How can we sing the songs of Yahweh
while in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
may my right hand forget its skill.
May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you …
Psalm cxxxvii. 1-6
Yet they did forget, at least the speech of Jerusalem. Amid the crowds of Babylon, Aramaic, which had been the cosmopolitan language for the Jewish elite, became their vernacular, and Hebrew, the language of the people, became a tongue known only to the learned. It had already vanished from speech two generations later, when in 538 the Persian king Cyrus, in one of his first reforms after conquering Babylon, allowed the Jews to return.*
The Aramaic language was now inseparable from the Babylonian empire, and a new standard version of the language arose, usually known as Imperial Aramaic. It had developed in the eastern areas, where the Aramaean settlers had established themselves in Mesopotamia, and as such was more influenced by Akkadian than its more ancient, and some would say more authentic, version spoken in Aram and the rest of Syria. Yet this dialect was destined to become the standard not just for the Babylonian empire, but for the much greater Persian empire that replaced it, ‘over 127 provinces stretching from Hōdŭ to Kŭš’, in the awed phrase of the Book of Esther, i.e. from
Hindustan to the land of Kush, south of Egypt.
The distinctive traits of this dialect were fairly small things, such as plural-îm replaced by -în, plural -ayyā by -ē, and in some forms of the verb the dropping of initial h, to be replaced by a glottal stop ’ (rather reminiscent of colloquial London English). In fact, the model for this standard seems to have been Babylonian Aramaic as spoken and written by educated Persians.46 The fact of this colonial transplant becoming the effective standard is no more surprising than the current popularity of General American as a world standard for English. As ‘Standard Literary Aramaic’ it was to remain essentially unchanged for the next millennium.
More surprisingly, Aramaic was also used to an extent as a language for international communication. At Saqqara, near the site of the Egyptian capital Memphis, a late seventh-century papyrus from a Philistine king has been discovered, asking in Aramaic for the Egyptian pharaoh’s help against the king of Babylon; soon afterwards, Jeremiah, an adviser to the kings of Judah just before Babylon sacked Jerusalem, breaks into Aramaic in the midst of a tirade in Hebrew. This is for a slogan to cast in the teeth of foreign idolaters:
These gods, who did not make the heavens and the earth,
will perish from the earth and from under the heavens.
Jeremiah x. 11
In the event, the Aramaic-speaking believers in those gods were due to inherit the earth, at least from India to Kush. However, the language was usable across these vast distances not because it was actually spoken by the various populations, but because it acted as a written interlingua, understood by a network of literate translators and interpreters, the sepīru. A ruler or official would dictate a letter in his own language, and the sepīru would write it down in Aramaic; when the document reached its addressee—Persia was also renowned for its excellent postal service—it would be read by another sepīru who would speak it aloud in whatever was the language of his master or mistress. This process was called paraš, literally ‘declaration’ in Aramaic, or uzvārišn, ‘explanation’ in Persian.47
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World Page 10
