Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [66]
On the simplest level, the sounds of the language change: r and the feminine ending t are lost at the end of words, and (ch in church) and d (j in judge) are simplified away, replaced by simple t and d. But there are structural changes too. They are reminiscent of the way in which Italian came to differ from Latin, or Middle English from Anglo-Saxon. In the older period, Egyptian had been highly inflected, with a set of endings for number and gender; it had had no definite or indefinite article (corresponding to English the or a); and the characteristic word order had the verb first in the sentence, followed by subject and then object. In the later period the noun endings tend to be lost, but articles come into play, expressing the distinctions in a different way. The verb system becomes more dependent on auxiliaries, and so less highly inflected. Furthermore, the subject now tends to come first in the sentence (as it does in modern English).
Take a single example, the Egyptian for ‘Hallowed be thy name’. This changed from
uw’obu rin-k. tomare pe-k-ran ouop.
shall-be-purified name-your let-do the-your-name be-pure
The pieces of classical Egyptian are still basically there, but now put together quite differently.
Charmingly, the first glimpse of this later language to appear in the record is the more popular style of writing seen under the religious reformer Pharaoh Akhenaten; this writing reform came along with official portraits that for the first time emphasised a pharaoh’s home life, with his queen Nefertiti and their daughters, around 1330 BC.
Although the state religion and the decorum of official iconography were restored after his reign, the antiquated style of written expression never fully came back. Religious texts (rituals, mythology and hymns) did continue to be written in the classical form of the language; indeed it persisted until the end of hieroglyphic writing in the fourth century AD; but popular literature, school texts and administrative documents show that a different variant of the language was now being used generally.
The language persisted in Egypt as the main medium of daily life for another two thousand years from the time of Akhenaten.
Against this underlying continuity, the main dramatic interest was provided by contact with other languages whose speakers came to live in Egypt. There were four such languages: Libyan, Kushite, Aramaic and Greek.
Immigrants from Libya and Kush
The Libyans first put pressure on Egypt in the thirteenth century BC, a generation after the fall of Akhenaten. We read of desert campaigns by the pharaohs Seti I and Ramses II, but there appears to have been a steady trickle of immigration. Companies of Libyan troops, notably the Qahaq, Shardana and Mashwash, were accepted into the Egyptian army as auxiliaries.4 Ramses’ successor Merneptah (1211-1202) reports a massive victory against would-be invading armies of Libyan peoples, Libu, Mashwash and Tjehenu. And Ramses III, a generation later, tells of similar defensive actions c. 1179 and 1176. Nevertheless, a steady infiltration into Egypt seems to have continued, and the Libyan presence became a fixture in the Delta area. Ramses III himself had a Libyan slave, Ynene, serving him at court.5 Two hundred and seventy years later, the Libyan faction had established itself with sufficient stability to marry into the royal family. The XXII dynasty, ruling not from Memphis but from Tanis in the Delta, was founded by the Libyan parvenu Shoshenq, a Mashwash. It lasted 230 years, although it was riven by family feuding and was forced to accept a joint (equally Libyan-dominated) kingdom with a separate dynasty set up in another Delta town, Taremu (Leontopolis).
The incoming Libyans would have spoken a language related to modern Berber or Tamazight, still spoken in much of North Africa. But the linguistic effect of their arrival is imperceptible. An Egyptian pharaoh of the twenty-first century, Inyotef, had had a dog called ‘abaqero, which seems to be the Tuareg Berber name for a greyhound,