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over the whole of the Aramaic-speaking world, modern Syria and Iraq. Here Arabic could have replaced Aramaic almost word for word. It then overran quickly, and subsequently pervaded, the countries in North Africa, whose vernacular was Egyptian (now known as Coptic) and Berber, although in these cases the spread was far slower, and—at least in the case of Berber—is by no means complete. But in al-Fārs (Persia) and in el-Andalūs (southern Spain), despite their early reputation as centres of Arabic scholarship, the language was expelled, except in the liturgy of Islam. These are precisely the countries where the substrate language was Indo-European, respectively Persian and Spanish; perhaps it is not so easy for a population speaking an Indo-European language to pick up an Afro-Asiatic one.* Certainly, the next major language spreaders to come through, the Turks, did not pick up Arabic, although they did accept, and even spread into Europe, the religion of Islam. The Turks’ language is even less similar structurally to Arabic than Indo-European is. Islam continued to spread in the second millennium, into the Far East; but never again did it carry Arabic with it outside the mosques.

Consider the varying success of Greek in western Asia and Egypt, after Alexander’s epochal conquests in 332-323 BC. In principle the administration was everywhere converted from Aramaic to Greek, and there were Greek settlements all over, at least within bigger cities; but Greek only became pervasive in Asia Minor, the great peninsula of Anatolia. (See Chapter 6, ‘Kings of Asia: Greek spread through war’, pp. 247ff.) In other words, Greek was most successful in the old domain of the Phrygian language in the centre (known from inscriptions to have been closely related to it), and of the Lydian and other Anatolian languages, Indo-European tongues whose structure was also fairly similar to Greek. Greek was unsuccessful, except in planted communities of native speakers, in Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia (where people spoke Aramaic), in Egypt (where people spoke Aramaic and Egyptian), and in Persia (where people spoke Aramaic and Persian). It is most surprising structurally that Greek did not take root in Persia, since Persian is a fairly similar Indo-European language (and was famously learnt in a year by an ageing Greek Themistocles—see the Plutarch quote on p. 5); but perhaps there are non-linguistic reasons why an alien language should be particularly resented and so resisted in the heartland of what had been an independent and mighty empire for over two centuries.

A third example where language structure seems to have been crucial in the life prospects of a language is almost total absence of Mongolian from central and western Asia and from Europe, since the far-reaching conquests of the Mongols under Tamerlane across Iran in the fourteenth century, and previously under Genghis Khan and his successors in the thirteenth. The Golden Horde which sacked Kiev in 1240 was a Mongol army; and even Babur’s dynasty, which dominated India from the sixteenth century, rejoiced in the name ‘Mughal’, that is to say Mogul or Mongol, although his language, as we have seen, was Turkic. (See Chapter 3, “Third interlude: Turkic and Persian, outriders of Islam’, p. 106.) None of the Mongol invasions was soon undone or rolled back: what had happened to all these successful Mongolians?

A crucial feature of the Mongol-led invasions was the fact that they largely recapitulated earlier conquests of Turks (such as Huns and Khazars). Furthermore, they were conducted predominantly with contingents of Turkic-speaking warriors. Now Turkic and Mongolian, even if they are not genetically related, have become highly similar to each other structurally. (See Chapter 4, ‘Northern influences’, p. 145.) It was very easy, therefore, for a Mongol speaker to pick up Turkic, so to speak—and no doubt often quite literally—on the trot. Outside Mongolia, Mongols tended to be in a minority, and so their language was submerged in the language of their Turkic allies.

A fourth example has