Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (15 page)

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.)

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.
^*

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-u
ur
, ‘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: