Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [45]
These gods, who did not make the heavens and the earth,
will perish from the earth and from under the heavens.
Jeremiah x. 11
In the event, the Aramaic-speaking believers in those gods were due to inherit the earth, at least from India to Kush. However, the language was usable across these vast distances not because it was actually spoken by the various populations, but because it acted as a written interlingua, understood by a network of literate translators and interpreters, the sepīru. A ruler or official would dictate a letter in his own language, and the sepīru would write it down in Aramaic; when the document reached its addressee—Persia was also renowned for its excellent postal service—it would be read by another sepīru who would speak it aloud in whatever was the language of his master or mistress. This process was called paraš, literally ‘declaration’ in Aramaic, or uzvārišn, ‘explanation’ in Persian.47
In Ezra iv.18, the Persian king Artaxerxes receives in oral translation the Aramaic letter of some local government officials from Trans-Euphrates. He begins his reply (reported in Aramaic, but no doubt dictated in Persian):
Greetings, and now:
the letter you sent us was translated and read in our presence …
The same practical system was in use internationally, though it must have been limited by the availability of bilingual sēpiru for languages beyond the Persian realm. In the Greeks’ Peloponnesian War, a messenger from the Persian king to Sparta was intercepted in 428 by the Athenians: his letters then needed to be translated ek t໗n Assuríōn grammátōn, ‘from the Assyrian writing’. It is unlikely that its real addressees in Sparta would have been able to make any sense of them without the messenger’s paraš.48
The convenience of this system must have acted as a strong motive for the spread of the language, and it gets into some amazing places, notably the Jewish scriptures. Besides the Aramaic letters in the book of Ezra, long passages in the book of Daniel (written in the second century BC) are written in Aramaic, appropriately so since it recounts the various adventures and visions of this Jewish counsellor at court in Babylon under a succession of Babylonian and then Persian kings. It begins with a Hebrew description of his training as a sepīru, after being recruited by the Babylonian king, a three-year course in ēpir ū-ləšôn kasdîm, ‘the writing and language of the Chaldaeans’.49
This discreet use of a lingua franca disguised by multilingual paraš (rather reminiscent of that naive sort of fiction where travellers can go anywhere and at once get into serious conversations with the local people, never noticing any language barrier) was quite compatible with continuing use of local languages in other official functions. One example is the legends on coined money: in fact, this means of payment with a government guarantee had only recently been invented (in Lydia, western Anatolia). It spread only slowly in the Persian empire, and most contemporary coins come from the western provinces. So there are Persian-era coins inscribed in Greek and pretty much every other language of southern Anatolia (Lydian, Sidetic, Carian and Lycian—all related to Hittite and Luwian); Aramaic is used in northern parts of Anatolia (where Phrygian was probably still in use), in Cilicia (which had been part of the Babylonian empire, and had had strong links with Phoenicia) and in Mesopotamia. In Egypt there were also coins struck in demotic Egyptian.50
Still the Egyptians became heavy users of Aramaic, despite the lateness of Egypt’s annexation to the Persian empire. The language would have come in beforehand,