Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [59]
The Arabs going into battle for Islam can be seen in fact as an alloy of three very different preceding traditions among their fellow-speakers of Semitic languages: the abstract theology of the Jews, the embracing inclusiveness of the Aramaic Christians, and the military momentum of the Assyrians. Indeed, if one includes their propensity for long-distance navigation and speculative trading, they can also be ranged with the Phoenicians.
But there is one thing in the cultural background which does unite all the Semites, of whatever religion or desired level of opulence. However successful their cities, however developed their religions and philosophies, they never escaped the memory that they had all arisen from desert nomads. Arabic was the language of nomads, and Islam was founded by nomad aggression from Arabia. Aramaic penetrated the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, and so became established, through nomads spreading from Aram. The Hebrews and Phoenicians developed their cities and their cultures when Habiru nomads had finally settled down in the land of Canaan; explicitly, the Torah talks of the children of Israel wandering through the wilderness of Sinai for forty years. And the Akkadians might never have taken over from Sumer without the incursions of those little-known nomads of the west, the Amorites. Ultimately, surely, it must have been nomads who brought the Semitic languages in prehistoric times out of Africa and into the Fertile Crescent.
Nomads may be hard to find in the modern Semitic world. But aspects of nomadism are still central to the unsolved problems of the Arabs: the home-lessness of the Palestinians, the moral queasiness about the unearned riches welling up from the desert wastes of Arabia, the wild men of al-Qa’eda in self-imposed exile while they plan destruction for the iniquitous cities. In all this, speakers of Arabic are very true to their tradition. Indeed, the histories of Akkadian, Phoenician, Aramaic and Arabic are a five-thousand-year demonstration of the benefits of the desert—as a place to come in from.
* The family is named after Noah’s second son, Shem, introduced in Genesis ix.18, and the linguistic use goes back to A. L. Schloezer, writing in 1781. He drew his inspiration from the fact that many of the peoples named as the descendants of Shem in Genesis x.21-31 spoke languages of this family, notably Hebrew (coming via Arphaxad), Asshur and Aram. But the term is not well chosen: Shem also had among his sons Elam and Lud, the patriarchs for Elamite and Lydian, which are quite unrelated languages; and Canaan (first of the Sidonians, as well as Amorites and Arwadites) and Nimrod (first of the Babylonians and Akkadians) are given as descendants of Ham, though their languages are in fact closely related to Hebrew, Assyrian and Aramaic.
*The first Semitic names (in fact from Akkadian) appear even earlier, in Sumerian documents c.2800 BC (Caplice 1988: 3).
†Pronounce š as English ‘sh’, h as the sound for blowing on glasses to mist them, θ as English ‘th’ in thin, ‘ as the clearing of a throat, ā as a long ‘a’ as in father, and ē as the long ‘e’ in Beethoven.
*The Greeks, on the scene too late to know any of these early origins, called the place Mesopotamia, ‘Mid-River-land’, emphasising the framing role of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, Greek versions of the names Purattu and Idiqlat. But in this early period the Euphrates is much more central, flowing through Babylon and