Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [37]
Now and then, correspondence gives an insight into how these deportees were viewed when they arrived in Mesopotamia.27 A letter to the king contrasts qinnāte ša Ninua labīrūti, ‘old-time families of Nineveh’, with nasi’ānni, ‘social upstarts’, and šaglūti, ‘deportees’, itself perhaps a pun on šaklūti, ‘ignorants’. But it is clear that people with western Semitic names were often entrusted with significant responsibility.
This scattering of Assyria’s subject peoples could be seen as a shrewd policy to unify the diverse populations of the empire by cutting them off from their traditions—an imposed ‘melting pot’ solution.28 All deportees, as the above inscription mentioned, are to be ‘regarded as Assyrians’; as such they were deemed to have a duty to palā ili u šarri, ‘to fear God and King’.
Tending in the same direction was another new policy to buttress imperial unity, the recruitment of a royal guard, the kisir šarruti. This was drawn from non-Mesopotamian provinces, supplementing the more feudally organised Assyrian troops. In fact, bearers of western Semitic names crop up quite commonly as Assyrian army officers. Particularly famous was the force of Itu ’aia, made up of Aramaeans of the Itu ’ tribe, which turns up at many of the hot spots, on duty to crush dissent within Babylonian provinces.29
The situation in the Fertile Crescent, then, over the period of the eleventh to the eighth century BC, was one of an extreme flux of populations. Aramaeans had settled themselves over the whole area in the earlier two centuries, and although they had been under more effective state control in the latter two, Assyrian policy had served not to push them back but to distribute them even more widely, either as forced migrants, or as members of the armed forces. Since the Aramaeans were the largest group being scattered in this way, when other western Semites, such as Israelites or Phoenicians, found themselves transplanted, they could tend to find themselves speaking more and more like their new neighbours.*
The Assyrians had therefore contrived to reinforce the spread of a new lingua franca across their domains, one that was not dependent on literacy or any shared educational tradition. Its effective usefulness would have increased as the Assyrian domain was spread yet wider, and its population of western Semitic speakers, predominantly Aramaic speakers, came to outnumber more and more the original population of Mesopotamia, who spoke Akkadian. The ruling class in the triad of capital cities, Asshur, Nineveh and Kalhu (Nimrud), maintained continuity, but elsewhere there was increasing social flux, and people had to make accommodations with the newcomers. In Babylon, particularly, this must have happened early on.
Nor were the newcomers handicapped by lack of the basic art of civilisation, literacy. Although the Aramaeans had appeared originally as nomads, presumed illiterate, they had even before the first millennium begun taking over cities (most notably Damascus) and whole countries (the last Hittite kingdom, its capital at modern Zincirli, in the Turkish province still known as Hatay). Many of them would have come to know the value of writing, and since the cities they knew were of the west, the writing system they would have learnt was simple and alphabetic.
As they moved eastward, we can only presume that alphabetic literacy spread with at least some of the Aramaeans, since the new materials, ink and papyrus or leather, are biodegradable, and do not survive in the archaeological record. In fact, the earliest inscriptions in Aramaic, not clearly distinguishable from Canaanite languages at this time, are from the middle of the ninth century.30 The short-term practical advantages of the new media (less bulk, greater capacity) must soon have made an impression. A new word for ‘scribe’ came into use in Akkadian, sēpiru, as opposed to the old upsarru, ‘tablet writer’, which went right back to the Sumerian word dubsar. Pictures of scribes