Back in Syria-Palestine, by 1050 some important changes had been made (though some would place them later – the dating is difficult due to the scarcity of evidence). The script now ran regularly from right to left, rather than whichever way best fit the inscribed surface. Similarly, the letters faced consistently in the same direction from one text to the next. The number of letters was pared down to 22, not coincidentally the number of consonants in the Canaanite language of those responsible for these changes – the Phoenicians.
The Phoenicians lived along the coast of Syria-Palestine, mostly in the region now known as Lebanon. These times were good for Syria-Palestine. The region had previously found itself on the borders between great empires – the Egyptians to the southwest, the Hittites to the north. But the Hittite Empire fell in 1180 BC, and Egypt’s New Kingdom was considerably weakened soon thereafter, both due in part to widespread disturbance caused by the mysterious Sea Peoples (who may also have helped bring about the collapse of Mycenaean civilization). Assyria, at times a threat, was temporarily in a period of decline. In the resulting political vacuum, Phoenician city-states flourished along the coast; the Aramaeans, West Semitic neighbors of the Phoenicians, established a variety of city-states and small kingdoms in modern Syria; and the kingdom of Israel was founded in Palestine by the Hebrews.
These new states required administration. The Phoenicians adapted the linear Old Canaanite alphabet to this purpose and soon passed their easy, 22-letter system on to the Aramaeans and then to the Israelites (see figure 9.1). Neither Aramaic nor Hebrew had 22 consonant phonemes (Aramaic at the time had 26, and Hebrew may have had 25), but neither the Aramaeans nor the Hebrews thought of making any significant changes: the traditionalism of literacy was already beginning to make itself felt. Over the years, however, by a natural process of evolution, Phoenician, Aramaic, and Hebrew became three noticeably distinct national scripts. Each was to play a starring role on the world stage.
The Phoenician script looked westward, along with its seafaring users. In North Africa, the Phoenicians founded the great city of Carthage (in modern-day Tunisia; see appendix, figure A.6) in 825 or 814 BC. The Carthaginian dialect of Phoenician and its version of the Phoenician script, both known as Punic, spread as far as Sicily, Sardinia, Malta, and even into southern Spain. Carthage was eventually destroyed by Rome in 146 BC; but Punic was still spoken in the surrounding rural areas until the fifth century ad. A modified descendant of the Punic script, Tifinagh, is still used by the Tuareg Berbers today.
Closer to their original homeland, the Phoenicians taught writing to the Greeks, who substantially altered the nature of the alphabet by giving vowel phonemes their own letters, and in so doing founded a new family of scripts (chapter 12).
Meanwhile the Old Hebrew, or Palaeo-Hebrew, script stayed closer to home, though it was used for the Canaanite languages Moabite and Edomite (of today’s western Jordan) as well as Hebrew. This script gained its claim to fame by being used to write the first parts of the Hebrew Bible. However, it is not the script in which the Hebrew Bible was completed after the Babylonian exile. The Babylonian exile disrupted the Hebrew literary tradition; afterwards the Jews came to use the Aramaic script and a great many Aramaic loanwords in their writing. Some of the Bible is even written in Aramaic rather than Hebrew (e.g. Daniel 2:4–7:28 and Ezra 4:8–6:18 and 7:12–26). The Palaeo-Hebrew script continued to be used for certain purposes: in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, most of the text is written in the new script, but the tetragrammaton (the four-letter name of God, YHWH) and sometimes the word ′El (“God”) are written in Palaeo-Hebrew. Its last use by the Jewish people was on coins struck during the Bar-Kokhba revolt of AD 132–5.
Figure 9.1 Ancient alphabets. At left, the Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet, with the original set of 27 consonantal letters plus a three-letter appendix. Next, the Phoenician 22-letter alphabet and its virtually identical daughter scripts, early Aramaic and Old Hebrew (as used also for Moabite). Ugaritic was read from left to right, the others from right to left.
Palaeo-Hebrew continued to be used, however, by the Samaritans, and is still used liturgically by the few hundred members of this nearly extinct community. The Samaritans, who used only the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) rather than the whole Hebrew Bible, claimed to be descended from those people of the northern kingdom of Israel who had not been exiled to Assyria after the fall of Samaria in 722 BC. The Jews, however, considered them to have intermingled with Gentile immigrants to the region and to have the lost the true faith. Acrimony between the Jews and the Samaritans probably encouraged the use of different scripts by the two peoples.
While the Phoenician script looked westward and the Hebrew script wrote the Bible, the Aramaic script looked eastward and proceeded to take over much of the known world. First, however, the Aramaeans introduced a few innovations. The Phoenician script, like ProtoCanaanite before it (and the uniconsonantal signs of Egyptian hieroglyphs before that), had represented only consonants. This was appropriate to the structure of the languages involved and rarely made trouble for readers. N fct, wrtng wtht vwls cn b dn n Nglsh s wll, s ths sntnc shws. However, some ambiguities did arise, and the accurate spelling of foreign names was a problem.
The Aramaeans introduced the use of certain letters as matres lectionis(“mothers of reading”), beginning in the ninth century BC. A mater lectionis was a letter of the alphabet used to spell a long vowel. The letter h, representing the consonant [h], was used as a mater lectionis for [a:], [e:], and [o:], while ww, [w], was used for [u:] and yod, [j], for [i:]. The letter y has a similar dual function in English, representing a consonant in a word like yes and a vowel in a word like sky.
At first matres lectionis were used only at the end of words, but later inside words as well. Short vowels remained unwritten, but were not particularly regretted. In a time when all writing was done by hand, there was no reason to make the spelling of words more work than it had to be. The use of matres lectionis spread from Aramaic to Hebrew and may even have inspired the Greek use of vowel letters. A second useful Aramaic innovation was spaces between words, replacing the earlier dots or slashes.
The Aramaeans become known to history during the eleventh and tenth centuries BC, building small kingdoms and city-states such as Damascus in Syria. Other Aramaeans spread as far east and south as Babylonia, settling in the marshy “Sealand” at its southern end. The warlike Assyrians found themselves surrounded by the upstart Aramaeans. Resolidifying their power, the Assyrians lashed out and subdued tribe after tribe of Aramaeans, starting in the ninth century. They built themselves a larger and larger empire as they went, eventually conquering Damascus in 732 BC.
That should have been the end of the Aramaeans and their script. Nevertheless, there were still Aramaic speakers living along much of the Fertile Crescent from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, going about their business in important trade cities such as Damascus. The Aramaeans had a talent for commerce – and the literacy to keep good accounts – and continued to dominate the trade routes of the Near East despite their political subjugation. Many of their trade practices, including their alphabet and their system of weights and measures, came to be used in the empire of their Assyrian conquerors. By the seventh century BC Aramaic had become the common trade language – the lingua franca – of the Near East.
The Assyrians continued to use cuneiform for formal purposes, but Aramaic, with its simple set of only 22 letters, made deepening inroads in more practical areas. The fact that Akkadian and Aramaic were related languages must have helped make Aramaic more attractive. Oddly enough, however, the Aramaic script was not used to write Akkadian; each language was written in its own script, by its own scribes. There were even different words for a scribe who wrote in cuneiform versus one who wrote in Aramaic. Had the Akkadian tradition been willing to consider a change of script, the language might have survived longer.
Some Aramaeans – those living in Babylonia, known as Chaldaeans – assimilated
to Babylonian culture and rose to prominence in Babylonian society. When the Babylonians rebelled against their Assyrian overlords, it was a Chaldaean, Nabopolassar (626–605 BC), who ended up on the throne of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The dynasty he founded included Nebuchadnezzar II (605–562), who captured Jerusalem and was responsible for the Babylonian exile. The Chaldaeans adopted Babylonian cuneiform for official purposes, but their informal language remained Aramaic.
When Cyrus the Great of Persia (559–530 BC) conquered Babylon in 539, Aramaic was once again the clear winner. The Persian Empire soon stretched from Egypt to northern India – the largest empire the world had yet seen – and it needed an administrative language and a script. Old Persian cuneiform was soon developed for monumental inscriptions, but for administrative purposes the Persians took to Aramaic, despite the lack of any similarity between their Indo-European language and the Semitic Aramaic. They adopted it because it was there, co-opting the bureaucracies of the lands they conquered, many of which were already functioning in Aramaic. It was a long time before anyone thought to use the Aramaic script to write Persian; meanwhile Persian scribes and clerks had to learn Aramaic.
The Aramaic of the Persian period, known as Imperial Aramaic, was a remarkably uniform dialect, written in a uniform script. Local variants of Aramaic were spoken, but the written language was standardized. After Alexander the Great conquered Persia, taking Persepolis in 330 BC, official support for Aramaic was lost in favor of Greek. In the absence of any central authority, Imperial Aramaic evolved over the next few centuries into a number of distinct national scripts which were used both for varieties of Aramaic and for other local languages (see figure 9.2).
One of these scripts was the new Square Hebrew script of Judaea. Cyrus had allowed the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple, and they had brought the Aramaic language and script with them. Exactly when the Jews began using the Aramaic script for Hebrew is not clear, yet eventually a distinctively Jewish version of the script (known as Square Hebrew, Assyrian Hebrew, or Jewish script) evolved and came to be used for even the most sacred Hebrew texts. Once fully established, the script was remarkably stable: with only a brief adjustment, a reader of modern Hebrew letters can read the two-thousand-year-old Hebrew script of the Dead Sea Scrolls quite easily. Cursive versions of the script have been much less stable, but the square book hand has changed very little.
One change that did occur was the addition of an optional system of vowel notation. Once Hebrew was no longer a spoken language, it became important to preserve the accurate pronunciation of biblical words and to eliminate any potential for ambiguity. An elaborate system of diacritical dots and lines was developed, known as vowel points, which indicated the precise vowel pronunciations used in Hebrew at that time. When added to the consonant mm, , for example, the vowel points gave [mi], [me], [mε], with length shown with the addition of the appropriate mater lectionis. There were also points for the so-called reduced vowels, extra-short pronunciations of vowels that occur in certain unstressed syllables in a word: (sometimes reduced to just [m]). Symbols known as cantillation marks were also added to indicate stress, pauses, and the correct pattern of intonation and voice pitch to be used in the liturgical reading of a phrase.
Figure 9.2 The Aramaic alphabet and three of its descendants, Estrangelo Syriac, Nabataean, and the Square Hebrew or Jewish script that is used for Hebrew today. As in most Aramaic descendants, the letters have variant forms according to where they occur in a word. The variants are shown only for Hebrew, in which the one on the left is used in word-final position (all these alphabets read from right to left). At right are the standard transliteration and the modern pronunciation of the letters in standard Israeli Hebrew.
These marks were included in the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible, the authoritative text assembled and codified between the sixth and tenth centuries ad. With both vowel points and cantillation marks, biblical Hebrew is one of the most painstakingly written languages, recording much more detail than texts written in the Roman alphabet, which do little beyond the occasional piece of punctuation or accent mark to depict stress and intonation. Conscientious inclusion of such detail in a mundane text would serve no useful function and only slow the reader down. It would certainly slow down the writer! Nonbiblical texts, therefore, are not written with cantillation marks, and even the use of vowel pointing is nowadays limited to school books, prayer books, poetry, and occasional places where ambiguity might otherwise arise.
Modern Hebrew is the result of revival efforts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the last centuries BC, Aramaic gradually ousted Hebrew as the vernacular language of Judaea and Galilee, and Hebrew was reserved for liturgical and literary use until its modern revival. Because of this switch in spoken languages, Aramaic can claim Jesus of Nazareth as its most famous native speaker.
The local Aramaic took on a distinctly Jewish flavor, and was written, like Hebrew, in the Square Hebrew script. This script accompanied the Jews throughout the Diaspora, and has subsequently been used to write distinctively Jewish varieties of Arabic (Judeo-Arabic) and Spanish (Ladino), as well as the Germanic Jewish language, Yiddish, and numerous other Jewish language varieties around the world.
Other varieties of Aramaic persisted in other parts of the former Persian Empire. The city of Palmyra, in Syria, became a prosperous independent state in the centuries after Alexander and went right on writing in Imperial Aramaic, though its inhabitants originally spoke Arabic. Imperial Aramaic evolved smoothly into a specifically Palmyrene variety of the Aramaic language and script. In later centuries, it was to be the first forgotten ancient script to be deciphered, by Abbé Barthélemy in the 1750s.
The local Aramaic of Edessa (now Urfa, in southern Turkey, geographically Syrian) became known as Syriac; it was to become the most important literary dialect of Aramaic. Edessa was the capital of the Arabic kingdom of Osrhoene, founded in 132 BC, and it remained an important city even after it was taken by the Romans in the third century ad. Its literary accomplishments included the Peshitta, an early translation of the Bible into Syriac whose Old Testament predates the codified Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible and whose New Testament is one of the earliest translations from the original Greek. (Though Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic, the New Testament was written in Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern Roman Empire.)
Edessa became an important center of Christianity in the lands east of the Roman Empire, and so Syriac became an important literary language, the language of education and religion throughout much of the former Persian Empire. A schism in AD 489 between the Jacobites of the Syrian Orthodox Church (who believed that Christ had a single, divine nature) and the Nestorians of the Church of the East (who believed that Christ had two natures, human and divine, quite independent of each other) brought about a parallel split in the Syriac language and script. The earlier Syriac script, termed Estrangelo, broke into Nestorian (eastern) and Jacobite (western) versions.
After the advent of Islam both forms of Syriac began to be overshadowed by Arabic. The eclipse was not immediate, however, and before Syriac stopped being used as a literary language a number of historically important works were translated from Syriac into Arabic, including works of Greek philosophy and science. These translations helped stimulate the rise of Islamic intellectual culture and preserved much of the Greek tradition that was later lost in the West. Eventually, however, Syriac stopped being spoken and stopped being the language of new literary composition. It is still used as a liturgical language in the Syrian Orthodox Church and by Maronite Catholics.
A very small number of Christians and Jews in the Middle East still use dialects of Aramaic as their mother tongue. Modern Aramaic generally uses Syriac script, except for Mandaic, an Aramaic language used by members of a monotheistic Gnostic religion of southern Iraq and neighboring Iran. Mandaic uses its own version of the Aramaic script, adopted from the Parthian version.
The language that
replaced Syriac as the vehicle of culture and religion across the Middle East was Arabic. The origins of the Arabic script are to be found in the kingdom of the Nabataeans, whose capital city of Petra – located south of the Dead Sea in modern Jordan – is famous for its rock-hewn buildings. The Arab Nabataean kingdom arose around 200 BC and adopted Aramaic for its written needs. The Nabataeans spoke Arabic, but like the Palmyrenes and the Edessans they learned to write in Aramaic. Such is the power of written language. However, the Nabataeans continued to speak Arabic, and here and there slipped a few Arabic words into their texts. The oldest surviving example of written Arabic, dating from the first century ad, is written in the Nabataean script.
The Nabataean version of the Aramaic script was to become very cursive, its letters rounded and connected to each other. Eventually a distinctively Arabic script arose from the Nabataean, coming to full maturation with the writing down of the Qur’n and the need to represent the revealed word of God fully and accurately.
Back in Persia, meanwhile, the overthrow of the empire had ended the homogeneity of written Aramaic, but did little to discourage the use of the Aramaic script. Greek made inroads during the Seleucid period (330 to c.210 BC), but was soon ousted by the Parthians (IndoEuropean relatives of the Persians) who established their own kingdom in Persia (210 BC to AD 224), later to be succeeded by the Sasanian Persians. The scribes serving the Parthians went right on using the Aramaic language and script, as they had for centuries. The rulers they served, however, did not speak Aramaic. The scribes listened to Parthian, wrote down Aramaic, and read back Parthian. Over time, more and more words of Parthian made their way into the written records. Eventually the texts were more or less completely Parthian, though interspersed with Aramaic words. Those remaining Aramaic words became essentially logograms – word symbols to be read in Parthian. The Aramaic mlk? (“king”), for example, would be read as Parthian Sah. That the words were read in Parthian rather than Aramaic is evident from the Parthian inflections added to them.
The Writing Revolution Page 19