Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [49]
The Nestorians also kept travelling east from Persia along the Silk Road into central Asia, at last reaching Karakorum in Mongolia, and the northern cities of China. The arrival of the monk Alopen in the Chinese capital Changan (Xian) in 635 is commemorated on a stele set up in 781, bilingual in Syriac and Chinese.58
Two centuries later they had largely disappeared from China; and remnants of the Church farther west were mostly exterminated in the fourteenth century by the warlord Timur-i-leng (Tamburlaine). But Nestorians survived closer to their founding areas, in Mesopotamia and farther north in Kurdistan. Their tradition, and the use of Syriac, survives in the Assyrian and Chaldaean churches. Other Syriac speakers, of the so-called Syrian Jacobite Church, who stayed more at home round Antioch and Edessa, and whose missionary activity was aimed more along caravan routes in Arabia, have also survived in small numbers.*
The net result of all this heroic proselytism has been modest: Aramaic or Syriac has survived in small pockets quite close to its original homes,† But the language has survived. It owes its survival to its speakers’ determination to maintain their communities, and those communities have all been based on a religion.
This ‘confessional’ route to survival is at most two and a half thousand years old, and seems characteristic of the languages of the Near East, particularly Afro-Asiatic languages. The most notable language to survive by this strategy is Hebrew: we have already noted how it is the adherence to its own identity, marked out by a religious code, which explains its survival by contrast with the total oblivion suffered two thousand years ago by its sister language Phoenician. For the strategy to work, the religion of the language community must be significantly different from that of the population that surrounds it.
Another example is the Coptic language, the final survival of Egyptian. This had simply been Egypt’s ancestral language,§ as distinct from the interloping Aramaic and Greek that had come in from the Near East, but after the Muslim conquest it became associated more and more with the Christian population of Egypt; for as in most parts of the empire, Christians had come to be the majority after the Roman emperor Constantine’s public embrace of their faith in the early fourth century.
The Muslims’ treatment of the Copts gradually soured. No one knows how fast the percentage of Christians in the population fell, but fall it did, especially in the north of the country, so that for some centuries Coptic was stronger in the south. Through the seventh to ninth centuries the Copts were guaranteed freedom of religion and civil autonomy, although like non-Muslims everywhere they were subject to special taxes. But in 829 the Copts revolted against tax collectors, and were severely put down. Thereafter conditions sporadically worsened and occasionally improved under a variety of Muslim dynasties, but the consistent trend was for the Coptic population—and use of the language outside the liturgy—to diminish. Theological works were still being written until 820, and new hymns went on being composed until early in the fourteenth century. The language community was in fact sufficiently lively for the Delta dialect, Bohairic, to supplant Sahidic, the dialect of Upper Egypt, as the standard: it was consecrated for use in liturgy by Patriarch Gabriel II in 1132-45. Although there were cultural revivals after the fourteenth century, the language did not come back into daily life. But it has persisted in liturgy to the present day, and there are signs of serious attempts to revive it.
Coptic, then, is another example of a language of the Near East which has been sustained through a period of growing adversity through its association with a distinctive faith. It can be contrasted with a survival