Before and after Babel by Marc Van De Mieroop

Author:Marc Van De Mieroop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

Phoenician and Aramaic were two closely related languages and scripts, but different people used them. Although these people lived in proximity to each other, perhaps even in the same places, there are no bilingual texts that combine the two languages, while both of them appeared alongside many other languages on monuments. One either used Phoenician or Aramaic—perhaps the languages were mutually intelligible so no one bothered to render a text in both. Yet they had different histories. Phoenician was already recorded in the second millennium, and the alphabetic script that would influence all others was invented late in that millennium to write it. In the first millennium its users were residents of flourishing mercantile cities with far-flung contacts. They inspired Neo-Hittite rulers who regularly carved inscriptions in Phoenician alongside their own language and script, hieroglyphic Luwian. Aramaic, however, was a newcomer in the written record whose popularity grew rapidly, probably because so many people spoke the language. It became the script Syrian elites used on their monuments and gradually replaced Phoenician in such places as Sam’al. It was used in opposition to Assyrian cuneiform to stress non-Assyrian identity, even by people whose position depended on the empire. Ironically the empires guaranteed Aramaic’s success, because they started to use it for administrative purposes. That practice climaxed under the Achaemenid Persians, who employed the language and its script for their transregional system of accounting and imperial correspondence, and the available corpus of such writings became very substantial. In contrast, no Phoenician administrative documents have survived. Considering the Phoenicians were such great traders who must have accounted for their transactions, it is most likely these were all lost. Also the literature and scholarship in the Phoenician language have disappeared—if they ever existed—whereas there are some scant remains of literature in Aramaic. The creation of that literature, too, needs to be considered within the context of empires, as an act of resistance. And it was the beginning of a long literary tradition that gave Aramaic a much greater long-term impact than Phoenician. Both cases, however, show how vernaculars in the first millennium became commonly recorded with wide-ranging effects. We will turn now to another language of the Levant, Hebrew, to explore the literate culture of the ancient Near East that had the greatest impact in later world history.

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