Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [20]
Three sisters who span the history of 4500 years
The only stability this society has enjoyed has been in the substance of its ruling language. Akkadian, the language spoken by Sargon I, the first Assyrian king in 2300 BC, is a close relative of the Arabic spoken by his successor in this same land, Saddam Hussein, in AD 2000; another close relative, the Middle East’s old lingua franca, Aramaic, bridges the gap between the decline of Akkadian around 600 BC and the onset of Arabic with the Muslims around AD 600. They are all sister languages within the very close Semitic family.*
They have many distinctive points in common. They have consonants pronounced with constriction of the throat (said to be glottalised or pharyngealised). Feminine words end in -at. There are only two or three cases in noun inflexion; there is an ending in -ī to make adjectives, and a prefix m- to make nouns; there is distinction in verbal forms between dynamic and stative tenses—dynamic have prefixes to mark the persons, but stative have suffixes. Above all, Semitic languages are highly inflected, using a distinctive system in which the consonantal skeleton of the word has a meaning independent of the varying patterns of vowels and consonants that may come between them: to give the simplest of examples, in Akkadian, the root k-š-d, ‘catch’, can be discerned in kašādu, ‘to attain, catch’, ikaššadu, ‘they were catching’, kišidtu, ‘booty’, and kuššudu, ‘captured’, just as š-p-r, ‘order’, is reflected in šapāru, ‘to send, rule, write’, and šipirtu, ‘mission, letter’, and š-l-m, ‘rest’, in šalāmu, ‘to be well’, šalimtu, ‘peace’, and šulmu, ‘peace, greeting, rest, sunset’.
Besides covering the major languages of the ancient and modern Middle East, the Semitic group also takes in some of the most populous languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea, including Amharic, Tigre, Tigrinya and the ancient language of the Ethiopian Church, Ge’ez.
These Semitic languages in fact share most of these properties with a larger group, called Afro-Asiatic or Hamito-Semitic, which includes Egyptian, Berber and some language families spoken farther south, Cushitic, Omotic and Chadic (including the now vast Hausa language). They are all spoken in northerly parts of Africa, and the usual assumption is that this is the primeval home of the Semitic languages too. There is in fact some indirect evidence of a mass movement of tribes at a prehistoric date, rather than simple diffusion of the languages among neighbours: in certain ways Akkadian and Ethiopic are more alike than their intervening Semitic cousins; and the rampant desertification of the Sahara c.3500 BC would have provided a fair motive to be moving out of North Africa.3
At any rate, by the time we first encounter them in their own historical record, about 2400 BC,* there are Semitic language speakers (and by the nature of the evidence, writers) in centres dotted along the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent, pretty much on the borders of modern Syria, from Ebla (60 kilometres south of Aleppo) through Nabada (Tell Beydar, 20 kilometres north of Al Hasake) and down to Mari on the Euphrates (near Abu Kamal) and Kish (15 kilometres due east of Babylon). (The names of the kings who ruled at Kish suggest that it was a mixed settlement of Semites with Sumerians.) All these communities were steadfastly using Sumerian logograms as the staple of their cuneiform script, but the language is discernibly Semitic, written with phonetic symbols to show the verb and noun endings and function words, and in a different word order from Sumerian. There are also bilingual school texts which specify how at least some of the Sumerian logograms should be pronounced. The language of Ebla does not seem to be written very consistently, and is in general difficult to differentiate from early forms of Akkadian, occurring in Kish and down in Sumer after the conquests of Sargon I in the twenty-fourth century.
These conquests are the first historical evidence of political unification, but mostly they unified people who were already