• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 409 0

confirmed by the Amarna diplomatic correspondence, which relates to the years from 1345 to 1330 BC, and is largely taken up with exchanges of letters between the pharaoh and many of his Canaanite vassals, notably Ribhadda, the ruler of Byblos. This part of the correspondence is exclusively in Akkadian. The letters from the Egyptian side are in quite good Akkadian, but the answers that came back are in a dialect heavily influenced by Canaanite languages.8 Neither side was fully at ease in this lingua franca. But the point for us is that after a century of political domination Egypt had not transmitted effective knowledge of its language, not even to kings and officials who were professing themselves servants of an Egyptian master.* Instead they communicated in the language of the principal eastern power.

Competition from Aramaic and Greek

That power, first focused in Assyria, later in Babylon, finally in Persia, continued to grow in influence over the next thousand years. As Egypt lost its control of Palestine (its last hurrah was the campaign of the Libyan pharaoh Shoshenq through Palestine around 925), and then the eighth century BC saw Assyria advance its control in the same region, Egypt began to attract refugees and exiles. The language they spoke was Aramaic, which by this time had spread all over the Semitic-speaking Middle East, and had even replaced Akkadian throughout the Assyrian empire.

In the seventh century BC, Aramaic entered Egypt in earnest, borne by the Assyrian invasion force of 671-667 which sacked Thebes and installed a puppet pharaoh. But Assyrian domination turned out to be transient, and Psamtek, the son of the quisling pharaoh Neko, was able to reclaim Egypt’s independence by 639. He soon began to reassert Egypt’s role in Palestine, occupying the Philistine capital Ashdod in 630, and defeating and killing Josiah, king of Judah, in 610. His successors continued the policy for another sixty-five years, taking advantage of the eclipse of Assyria by Babylon, and turning Palestine and Syria as a whole into a buffer zone for all the hostilities between Egypt and Babylon. The sack of Jerusalem in 587, and the exile of the Jews to Babylon, was one of the prices that others paid for this policy.

Probably the net effect of this on language was to bring into Egypt not Aramaic, but Greek. An opportunistic alliance with Ionian and Carian pirates had enabled Psamtek to shake off Assyria. This set the tone for the dynasty’s practice of acting in consort with Greeks, both militarily and commercially. An Egyptian fleet of Greek-built triremes patrolled the Red Sea and Mediterranean coasts, and there was a Greek mercenary contingent with the Egyptian forces sent up the Nile on a last mission against Nubia in the 590s. The Greek trading colony of Naucratis was established close to Sais in the west of the Delta, as a treaty port very comparable to Shanghai in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries AD. There was a roaring trade, notably in Egyptian wheat and linen, paid for with Greek wine and silver. Greeks, when high on wine, says Bacchylides, a poet of the fifth century, would fantasise about ships from Egypt laden with wheat.9

This was the beginning of a rich, cosmopolitan atmosphere in the Delta that was to be fulfilled in the expansion of Alexandria as a Greek city three hundred years later. The sound of Greek would have become familiar in Egypt, even if few as yet would have been learning it.* But before Greek reached its acme, Egypt would undergo an involuntary infusion of Aramaic.

Aramaic, besides being the language of the Babylonians, was also adopted as the official language of the Persian empire, and it was this state which achieved the hitherto impossible task of subjecting Egypt durably to foreign rule. Egypt, drunk on Greek wine, was brought down to earth when the Persians marched in in 522 BC, deposed and killed the pharaoh Psamtek III, and set up a standard Persian administration with Egypt reduced to a province under a satrap.

Persian rule lasted for two centuries, tempered by a