Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [44]
This was to change. The policy of internal deportation so thoroughly applied by the Assyrians was continued by their successors, and this time a notable victim was the Hebrew language, along with many of its speakers in the land of Judah.
When in 609 BC Assyria was at last subjugated by an alliance of Medes from the east and Babylonians from the south, there were no direct linguistic effects, except that Akkadian ceased to be written in Assyria. Aramaic continued as the standard spoken language of Mesopotamia, which was henceforth governed (if at all) from Babylon. But others had noticed the momentous political change. Egypt, in particular, saw an opportunity and invaded Palestine and Syria.
Babylon’s crown prince Nebuchadrezzar (Nabū-kudurri-uur, ‘Nabŭ, protect my offspring’) responded effectively. Twenty years later, by the time this and perhaps two more Egyptian invasions had been repulsed, Jerusalem, which had twice sided with the Egyptians, was definitively in Babylonian hands. Most of its population went either as refugees to Egypt or as deportees to Babylon.
This is precisely the sort of treatment that kills off a language, as can be attested by the experience of so many indigenous people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, moved off their lands by colonists or social engineers, in regions as varied as North Carolina, Queensland, Ethiopia, Siberia and Tibet. There are Hebrew songs of lamentation, all too conscious of the danger:
’al naharō bābel šām yašbenō gam baînŭ bəzārēnŭ ěîôn …
By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
There on the poplars we hung our harps
for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors asked for songs of joy;
They said, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’
How can we sing the songs of Yahweh
while in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
may my right hand forget its skill.
May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you …
Psalm cxxxvii. 1-6
Yet they did forget, at least the speech of Jerusalem. Amid the crowds of Babylon, Aramaic, which had been the cosmopolitan language for the Jewish elite, became their vernacular, and Hebrew, the language of the people, became a tongue known only to the learned. It had already vanished from speech two generations later, when in 538 the Persian king Cyrus, in one of his first reforms after conquering Babylon, allowed the Jews to return.*
The Aramaic language was now inseparable from the Babylonian empire, and a new standard version of the language arose, usually known as Imperial Aramaic. It had developed in the eastern areas, where the Aramaean settlers had established themselves in Mesopotamia, and as such was more influenced by Akkadian than its more ancient, and some would say more authentic, version spoken in Aram and the rest of Syria. Yet this dialect was destined to become the standard not just for the Babylonian empire, but for the much greater Persian empire that replaced it, ‘over 127 provinces stretching from Hōdŭ to Kŭš’, in the awed phrase of the Book of Esther, i.e. from Hindustan to the land of Kush, south of Egypt.
The distinctive traits of this dialect were fairly small things, such as plural-îm replaced by -în, plural -ayyā by -ē, and in some forms of the verb the dropping of initial h, to be replaced by a glottal stop ’ (rather reminiscent of colloquial London English). In fact, the model for this standard seems to have been Babylonian Aramaic as spoken and written by educated Persians.46 The fact of this colonial transplant becoming the effective standard is no more surprising than the current popularity of General American as a world standard for English. As ‘Standard Literary Aramaic’ it was to remain essentially unchanged for the next millennium.
More surprisingly, Aramaic was also used to an extent as a language for international communication. At Saqqara, near the site of