Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [135]
In the Fertile Crescent, Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine, the Aramaic-speaking lands at the core of the old Assyrian empire, which became the actual centre of gravity of the new Seleucid government, the penetration of Greek was likewise significant, but seems to have led to a situation of more or less stable diglossia, people using different languages in different communities and for different purposes. Babylon, despite its strategic importance to the Seleucids, probably never had more than a small Greek community, and they and their language are unlikely to have flourished after the city was yielded to Parthia in AD 126. Edessa, modern Urfa, which came to be on the border with Parthia, maintained a strong Aramaic (Syriac) literary tradition throughout the Greek and Roman periods.
However, round northern Syria, Seleucus I made a serious attempt at establishing Greek colonies, which have by and large survived to the present day: Antioch (Antakya), Apamea (Hamah), Seleuceia (Silifke), and Laodiceia (Latakia). Antioch on the Mediterranean coast, which went on to a glorious career as capital of Roman Syria, started with a core of 5300 Athenians and Macedonians transplanted from a nearby Greek colony. Nevertheless, they always had a large Aramaic-speaking, as well as a Jewish, community. Nearby Palmyra seems to owe its Greek speakers (and its name—it was previously Tadmor) to the advent of Roman control (AD 17-19); and there is a famous Greek-Aramaic inscription on tariffs (AD 137) found there, to show that both languages had status. But nine hundred years later, when Greek control was ended by the Arab conquest, it appears that Greek had never spread outside these few cities.17
In Jerusalem, there was major trouble beginning in 168, led by Judas Maccabaeus,* involving resistance to the Seleucid government’s perceived measures to Hellenise the Jews, although unsurprisingly the religious cult rather than the language aspect was to the fore. It led to the setting up of the Hasmonaean kingdom, which ruled Judaea from 142 to 63 BC, minimising Greek influence. Aramaic remained the dominant language in Palestine, with Hebrew restricted to liturgical use, and Greek interestingly assigned a role in the more cosmopolitan aspect of Jewry, and such spin-offs as the Christians. But as Acts of the Apostles, chapter 2, graphically recounts, every language still spoken in the Roman empire could be heard in the streets of Jerusalem at the time of the Passover festival.†
Greek texts of the Hebrew scriptures were in fact commissioned by Ptolemy II,§ the second in the Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt after Alexander’s death. (He ruled 308-246 BC) The process by which this was achieved is detailed, with some legendary accretions, in the Alexandrian ‘Letter of Aristeas’. Whatever the true details, the Greek Septuagint (named—in Latin—for the seventy-two scholars supposedly summoned from Jerusalem to work on it) became an authoritative text of the Bible, and was widely used by Jews outside Palestine, as well as the later Christian movement. Greek therefore became the vehicle for a major culture outside its own traditions, freed from associations with Athenian eleuthería (or by now Macedonian magnificence), and in a sense thereby secularised as a language. On pragmatic grounds, it became able, when in later centuries the need was felt for new Christian scriptures to transmit to the wider world, to assume equivalent, and then superior, status to Aramaic.
In Egypt as a whole, although the Ptolemies, like all the Hellenistic Diadochi (diádokhoi—heirs of Alexander),