Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [83]
Despite the difficulty of learning the system, in China mere literacy did not remain the elite accomplishment it always was in Egypt. Different levels would have been attained according to the wealth and opportunities of the family, but poor families continued to throw out the occasional intellectual star. Literacy skills were still prized in China, but at a higher functional level. So the status of the scribe in Egypt corresponds in Chinese society more with that of graduates of the higher levels of the imperial competitive examinations. These were held by and large every third year from AD 622 to 1905.
The only possible Chinese adoption from foreigners in respect of writing concerns not writing itself, but the analysis of pronunciation. The traditional fšnqiè system classifies a character’s pronunciation in respect of its initial consonant and its rhyme plus tone, but the déngyùn-xué “study of graded rhymes” sub-classifies these constituent parts phonetically. This invention of Chinese scholars of the seventh and eighth centuries AD came about very much under the influence of the subtle phonetic analysis of the Sanskrit pronunciation, derived from the Buddhist tradition.31 Even so, the analysis of the rhyme part of a character-syllable into its constituent semi-vowels, vowels and consonants had to await the more thoroughgoing approach of alphabetisation, and specifically romanisation, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.32
There was, then, a clear reluctance to continue the development of Egyptian and Chinese pictographic systems in the direction of reducing their complexity, despite awareness of simpler systems that foreigners were using. The civilisations were built around respect for tradition, and in particular the traditional difficulties in joining the literate class, who held the reins of government.
Foreign relations
Both Egypt and China mostly lacked an active posture towards their neighbours, and towards parts of the world farther away.
Egypt early relied on foreign trade for some of its staple goods, particularly timber. But it secured this through intermediaries, mainly Phoenicians in the third and second millennia, later Greeks. It had control of Palestine and Syria around the end of the second millennium and the beginning of the first, but as we have seen did not actively spread its language (or its culture) to build permanent links there. It never spread out along the Mediterranean coast to the west: population movement was all in the reverse direction, and the city of Cyrene, when it was established c.630 BC, was a Greek, not an Egyptian venture. It may have been more active southward, attempting to incorporate much of Kush (and its gold mines) permanently, and sending some of its own expeditions down the Red Sea to trade with the fabulous Land of Punt, perhaps in Somalia. Although there was seen to be cultural value in unifying the Black Lands, flooded by the Nile, and surrounded by desert wastes on either side, the net effect of these efforts was small. The populations in these harsh regions were just too scant. Politically, the most striking result was the reverse invasion of Egypt in the late eighth century—by Kushite enthusiasts for Egyptian culture.
China was in a very different position from Egypt, by an irony of fate having to defend an intrinsically open border in the north and west, but actively developing and colonising across a naturally occluded frontier in the south. The coasts to the east were seen more as another border, which left China open to pirate attack, rather than offering an opportunity for maritime expansion.
But beyond the encircling zones of barbarians, there was a sense that farther to the west, in India and the Persian and Roman empires, there