Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [19]
This is a region of so many world firsts for linguistic innovation. Unlike Egypt, China or India, its cities and states had always been consciously multilingual, whether for communication with neighbours who spoke different languages, or because their histories had made them adopt a foreign language to dignify court, religion or commerce. This is the area where we find the first conscious use of a classical language; but also, by contrast, the first generalised use of a totally foreign language for convenience in communication, as a lingua franca, an early apparent triumph of diplomatic pragmatism over national sentiment.
This area contains the site of the earliest known writing, in the lower reaches of the Euphrates valley. But in its western zone, in the coastal cities of Syria, it was also the first to make the radical simplification from hieroglyphs that denoted words and syllables to a short alphabet that represented simple sounds. The political effects of this were massive. For the first time, literacy could spread beyond the aristocratic scribal class, the people who had leisure in childhood to learn the old, complicated, system; positions of power and influence throughout the Assyrian empire were then opened to a wider social range.
The area also contains the first known museums and libraries, often centralised, multilingual institutions of the state. But by an irony of fate which has favoured the memory of this clay-based society, its documents were best preserved by firing, most simply through conflagrations in the buildings in which they were held, a circumstance that was not uncommon in its tempestuous history. These catastrophes were miracles of conservation, archiving whole libraries in situ, on occasion with even their classification intact, and have materially helped the rapid reading of much unknown history in our era.
Not all the states of the area stayed focused within the Fertile Crescent, the zone of well-watered land that runs from the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates up round the southern slopes of the Taurus mountains and down the Mediterranean coasts of Syria and Palestine. From the western coast of Palestine, the cities of Phoenicia sent trading expeditions far and wide, mostly within the Mediterranean. One result was the foundation of Carthage, and hence the world’s first colonial empire, precursor of the kind of institution that has made English a global language. Others were the first circumnavigation of Africa (on behalf of the Egyptian pharaoh), and the discovery of navigable routes to Britain for tin, and the Baltic Sea for amber. On the way, the Phoenicians spread the practice of alphabetic writing throughout their network of trading emporia, providing perhaps the most important single key to unlock the progress of their great rivals, the Greeks and the Romans, who would ultimately supplant them as masters of the Mediterranean.
The best word for this Middle Eastern society is cosmopolitan, citizens of the world, but its world was never a sheltered one. Good communications and absence of natural borders made it difficult for any culture to hold power stably. We find a succession of kingdoms coming from every different direction, and (it turns out) many different language families, to seize control of the central area that is modern Iraq. After three thousand documented years of shifting power balances within the region, control was yielded to groups based far away, the Greeks and later the Romans from the west, then the Parthians from the north-eastern corner of Iran in the east. But these foreign powers were no more effective in achieving stability: Arabs, Mongols and Turks have succeeded one another through the centuries of the modern era, with the twentieth century from start to finish being a particularly bitterly contested period