Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [22]
When at the end of the third millennium Ur, the greatest Sumerian city, fell to more Semitic speakers, this time nomadic Amorites from the north-west, a new pattern set in: for the next 1500 years the land was periodically unified under Akkadian-speaking dynasties ruling from Babylon in the south or Assyria in the north, only to have their power disrupted every few centuries by power struggles between them, or invasions from the west or east. The invasions, although they might last a long time, notably four hundred years after the Kassites took control of Babylon in 1570 BC, never had any great linguistic effect. Like the various Turks who would conquer north China, or the Germans who were to topple Roman control of western Europe, these were all invaders who acquiesced in their victims’ languages. From about 2000 BC, Akkadian had become the only language spoken throughout the region. But Sumerian was not forgotten. It moved upmarket, and kept its influence in the written language. Babylon and Assyria went on for a millennium and a half as the two powers within Mesopotamia, competing often with ruthless savagery, but speaking dialects of the same language.
While Akkadian held the central area until the middle of the first millennium BC, it was surrounded to the east, north and west by unrelated languages. Hurrian, replaced later by ‘Urartian’ (whose name lives on in Mount Ararat), was the major language of the north, spoken from modern Armenia as far south as Kirkuk in modern Iraq. (Its surviving relatives, tiny languages such as Avar and Lezgian in the East Caucasian family, are still spoken on the western shores of the Caspian.)
To the west of this, in the central plain of Anatolia, which is now Turkey, we see the first known Indo-Europeans, Hittites, with their close relatives who spoke Luwian and Palaic.* The Hittites, flourishing from the sixteenth to the thirteenth century BC, created a massively literate civilisation, and their royal library at Hattusas, discovered in modern Boğaz Köy, 150 kilometres west of Ankara, contains materials not only in Hittite and Akkadian, but also in Hurrian, Luwian and Palaic, interspersed here and there with phrases in Hattic, Sumerian and the Indo-Aryan language of the Mitannian aristocracy. The Hittites were often a threat to Sumer and Akkad, and it had been a swift Hittite invasion, not followed up, which had left Babylon open to the Kassite takeover already mentioned. In the event, the Hittite empire collapsed about the end of the thirteenth century, but related languages lived on for many centuries, particularly Luwian, and farther to the west Lydian.†
South of the Hittites but due west of Sumer and Akkad, in modern Syria, the languages were Semitic, close relatives of Akkadian. We have seen that it was from this direction that the Amorite invasion came (named after the region Amurru, Akkadian for ‘the west’, in northern Syria), which had delivered the coup de gršce to Sumerian independence, and hence Sumerian as a spoken language, around 2000 BC.
There seems, in fact, to have been some fraternity among these cities of Semitic speech, from Ugarit (on the coast near Lataqieh) through Iamhad (Aleppo), Karkemish and Qatna in northern Syria to Mari on the Euphrates. Mari and Ugarit both left massive libraries from the second millennium BC. But as to foreign influence in this period, there was a tendency here to look south towards the power centre in Egypt, rather than to their linguistic cousins in Mesopotamia. The Phoenician port city of Gubla