Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [42]
It is tantalising that this text, one of the few brief survivals from the wreck of Punic literature, should have recounted such a unique adventure.
How is the total loss of Phoenician, and its successor dialect Punic, to be explained, after such a widespread expansion across the Mediterranean world? We have here another unanswered, and as yet largely unasked, question.
After Alexander’s sack of Tyre in 332 BC, Phoenician trade remained prosperous for many centuries, with no further disasters to threaten the traders’ stability. The Punic language did not die out promptly, even in its overseas provinces, where all the administrative links to Carthage were cut by the end of the second century BC: in Sardinia, for example, several ‘neo-Punic’ inscriptions have been found, the latest, at Bithia in the extreme south, made as late as the end of the second century AD. And even if the life of Carthage as a city was brutally punctuated in 146 BC, it was refounded as a Roman town by Augustus a century later. It then enjoyed a flourishing later life till the end of the Roman empire in the west. We may surmise that its language survived in use in North Africa, until the fifth century AD: Augustine tells us that he had to quote his Punic proverbs in Latin since ‘not everybody’ would understand the original.42
Nevertheless, ever since Alexander’s conquest of western Asia there had been a general cultural levelling in the Near East, with Greek and Aramaic spreading at the expense of all the minority languages. Although Aramaic was a language closely related to Phoenician or Hebrew, Greek had still been taken up by a large part of the Jewish community (especially those in Egypt) in this period. Greek had also become a basic subject in the education of Romans, who were by the second century BC clearly recognised as the rising power.
The cultural undertow was thus running strongly in favour of Greek. And in fact it is possible that, despite its users’ commercial prowess, Phoenician or Punic had never been widely used as a lingua franca or even as a trade jargon outside Africa. The language of trade is, after all, perforce that of the customer, rather than that of the merchant.
The Roman comedian Plautus illustrates this in a scene from his play Poenulus, ‘the Punic guy’—’Punk’?—which came out in the early second century BC, soon after the end of the Second Punic War.43 A Carthaginian merchant tries talking to a couple of Romans in Punic, even though he knows Latin, but soon tires of their constant heavy puns and jokes on him and his language, to cloak the poor language skills of the one who claims to be a bit of Punic expert. (Hanno’s Punic is in bold, and the Latin that echoes it is in bold italics.)
HANNO: mechar bocca MILPHIO: Istuc tibi sit potius quam mihi. AGORASTOCLES: quid ait? MILPHIO: miseram esse praedicat buccam sibi. fortasse medicos nos esse arbitrarier.
AGORASTOCLES: si ita est nega esse; nolo ego errare hospitem.
MILPHIO: audin tu? HANNO: rufe ynny cho is sam
AGORASTOCLES: sic volo profecto vera cuncta huic expedirier. roga numquid opu’ sit. MILPHIO: tu qui sonam non habes, quid in hanc venistis urbem aut quid quaeritis?
HANNO: muphursa AGORASTOCLES: quid ait?
HANNO: mi uulech ianna
AGORASTOCLES: quid venit?
MILPHIO: non audis? mures Africanos praedicat in pompam ludis dare se velle aedilibus.
HANNO: Good morning to you. MILPHIO: Better you than me.
AGORASTOCLES: What is he saying? MILPHIO: He says his jaw hurts.
Perhaps he thinks we are doctors.
AGORASTOCLES: Then say we’re not; as a stranger, I don’t want him misled.
MILPHIO: Are you listening? HANNO: Doctor, no one is perfect.
AGORASTOCLES: Yes, I certainly want all this explained to me. Ask him if he needs anything. MILPHIO: YOU without a belt, why have you people come to this city, or what are you after?
HANNO: What do you mean? AGORASTOCLES: