Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [60]
*The name Hittite (from the Hebrew ittī) comes from their power centre in the land of Hatti, where the natives spoke a quite unrelated language, Hattic. The Hittites in fact called their language Nesian (nešili), after their city of Nešaš (or Kanesh, modern Kültepe, in south-eastern Turkey) but the biblical misnomer ‘Hittite’ has stuck.
†Croesus, the proverbially rich last king of Lydia, fell to Cyrus the Persian in 547 BC. Linguistically, this was the ultimate death rattle of Hittite power.
*This is his name in Hebrew. His real name was Tukulti-apil-Esharra, meaning ‘my trust is in the son of Esharra’, namely the Assyrian god Asshur. The Mushki are equated b55555tty Igor Diakonov with the Mysians, Thracian settlers in western Anatolia, and also the Armenians, named Sa-mekhi by the Georgians. The Bible also speaks of Meshech as a foreign people.
*The Phoinîkes, especially the Sidonians, are renowned in the Iliad for fine weaving and metalwork, and in the Odyssey as travelling merchants.
*There are 6 million tons of ancient slag, covering 3/4 of a square kilometre, at the silver mines of Rio Tinto, near Huelva (probably the site of Tartessos, believed to be the same as Tarshish in Hebrew). Despite this massive activity, extending over centuries, archaeological evidence tends to show that Phoenician settlements in Spain were commercial enclaves rather than towns (Markoe 2000: 182-6).
†Another ideographic system, invented at the other end of Asia, had similar effects. The Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages, all of which became literate through the use of Chinese characters, have sustained major linguistic (and cultural) borrowings from Chinese which are by and large still present today.
*The one exception is Bactrian, later to become the language of the Kushāna empire (first to second centuries AD), written in the Greek alphabet. This shows the lasting cultural influence of the independent Greek dynasties in the far east, whom the Kushāna supplanted.
* And this is precisely what we do with our number symbols, whether Arabic or Roman.
*The Amorites did not have their own literate tradition, but their language can be partially reconstructed when their names are quoted in other languages, usually Sumerian. This provides a link with the later western Semitic languages, such as Ugaritic, Phoenician and Hebrew, which do not show up in the written record for another five hundred years or more. Since there was a tendency to assign names that are full sentences, they give a fuller picture of the language than might have been expected: Aya-dadu, ‘Where is Daddu?’, Šūb-addu, ‘Return, Addu!’, Yašub-’ilu, ‘God returns’, Samsu-’ilu-na, ‘The Sun is our god.’
*This, after all, is exactly what happened to the various tribes of Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Danes who settled along with Frisians in Britain in the first millennium AD. Middle English, closest to Frisian, was the result.
* In Babylon some diehards were still writing Akkadian on clay six centuries later.
*As it happens, the last we hear about Akkadian is from a Syrian novelist writing in Greek in the second century AD: Iamblikhos (whose strange name is evidently Aramaic or Arabic, ya-mlik, ‘may he rule’) said he had learnt ‘Babylonian’ from his Babylonian tutor, a man ‘learned in the wisdom of the barbarians’. (The third-hand source for this can be traced from Stephens and Winkler 1995:181.)
†Hebrew and Phoenician include some of the complexities of their grammar in their spelling: most of the stop consonants are pronounced as fricatives in the middle of a word. In our romanisation, we represent this with an under- or overline: thus , , g, , p, are pronounced v, th (as in then), gh (a gargling sound), ch (as in loch),f, th (as in thin). Dots under s, t and d in Phoenician, Hebrew and Arabic mean that they are pronounced ‘emphatically’, giving them a somewhat dull,