And so despite the incursions, and the splits and discontinuities in the dynastic tradition, Egypt remained true to its religion, and the concept of a pharaoh ruling through maR ‘at.
But invasions ultimately did undo the Egyptian language in its homeland: after all, Egypt is today a predominantly Muslim country with a Christian minority, everyone speaking Arabic. How did Egyptian finally come to lose its grip on its speakers?
First of all, there must have been a progressive weakening and dilution of the Egyptian-speaking part of the population. It gradually became a highly multilingual society. Egypt, after all, underwent many invasions in its last five hundred years of independent existence, at the hands of Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and Romans. In the Hellenistic period (332-30 BC) there was also a major influx of Jews, whose major lingua franca was Greek. None of these brought a language that was to achieve full vernacular status in Egypt. But as we have seen, the Aramaic associated with the Assyrians and the Persians did spread within Egyptian society beyond the official sphere, and each of these succeeding powers brought in and fostered new communities that would have spoken something other than Egyptian.
Nevertheless, when Arabs in the first flush of Islam took possession of the country in the mid-seventh century AD, Egyptian was still the principal language spoken in its streets and fields.
The Arabs were not the first force of nomads to penetrate Egypt: the Libyans, and perhaps the Hyksos, had achieved this long before in the second millennium, and there may have been many other smaller incursions over the three poorly documented Intermediate Periods of Egyptian history. The Arabs were not the first power to use a foreign language for purposes of government: all of the Persians, Greeks and Romans had done this. The Arabs were not the first substantial power with a centre abroad to take possession of Egypt, and rule it as a colony: this had been done before for two centuries by the Persians, and for seven centuries by the Romans. The Arabs were not even the first to introduce a new religion: this had been successfully attempted by the Christians in the Roman period.
Why, then, was Arabic the first language successfully to replace Egyptian in its home country? The answer must lie in the combination of all these circumstances. Egyptian’s strengths were subverted one by one.
First the Assyrian and Babylonian wars in Palestine created a large Aramaic-speaking émigré community in the Delta area. This would have been the end of Egyptian’s language monopoly in the country, not very significant in itself. But then the country was penetrated by numerous business-minded Greeks, brought in by the Saite dynasty to buttress an alliance against Near Eastern powers, and granted their own, Greek-speaking, entrepôt in Naucratis in the Delta. Egypt was now very much a multilingual society, with foreigners’ languages more and more associated with higher prestige. The Persian conquest, and a succession of foreign rulers from Persia and then (after Alexander) Greece, meant that now higher-level administration began to be conducted in a language foreign to Egypt: in Aramaic for two hundred years, and then in Greek for a millennium.*
Linguistically, not much would have changed when the Romans unseated the Greeks in 30 BC, other than a small influx of Latin speakers, principally soldiers. But this change of government was to prove the profoundest turning point for the fate of the language: Egypt was no longer to be governed by its own kings in its own interest, but by provincial governors as a useful bread basket for Rome, and (increasingly) a destination for rich tourists.
What all the invasions had in common was the fact that they were not nomadic movements: they were military affairs conducted by well-organised armies in pursuit of commanders’ global political aims. The point in controlling Egypt was to be associated with its ancient glory, and to appropriate its present agricultural wealth. Otherwise, Egypt was to be kept true to its traditions, and so the only population movements were movements of elites, and small groups such as the Jews. Egyptian civilisation had, however, become a hollow show. There was no longer any pharaoh to hold the country through maR ‘at and perform the sacrifices, unless the Roman emperor happened to be visiting, and by the third century AD even this pretence had been abandoned.
The one elite activity retained by Egyptians was religion, and the language provided a link between its priests and the common people. Nevertheless, after three centuries of Roman rule even this link was to weaken. The local Christian community had grown, first in the face of Roman persecution, and then with official support, adopting Egyptian rather than Greek as its language. In this way, it provided a new focus, of a spiritual kind, for Egyptian loyalty. But its growing strength was characteristically marked with intolerance, particularly towards the ancient religion. How were the Christians to know that in destroying it, they were also pruning away the deepest roots that anchored and sustained their separate identity? By the fourth century AD, Egypt had become a Christian country whose populace spoke Egyptian, but whose administration and cultural life were conducted in Greek. It was still true that Egyptian’s one elite activity was religion, but now this was the local version of the Christian faith.
In 641, when political control moved to Arabic speakers, there was no space left for the elite activities in Greek. They soon withered, although some formal use of Greek continued for over a century. Religion was to yield much more slowly. But this was not just another political conquest: Islam, unlike Alexander and Augustus Caesar, aspired to win over all. When it did, the last motive for retaining Egyptian was removed: converts moved into a new confessional community, Arabic-speaking and cosmopolitan. Egyptian was left as the language of liturgy for those who were determined to hang on to their Christian faith, a gradually shrinking minority.
Even in hindsight, it is difficult to say whether Christianity was more of a blessing or a bane to Egyptian. It provided a strong ritual focus for the Egyptian-speaking community under Roman secular rule; but it was militant in cutting the links the language had had with its national pagan past. It provided a new synthetic identity, that of ‘Egyptian Christian’ or Copt, to replace the ancient one, an identity that was to last for many centuries, and for a small minority even until the present day. But the theological motivation for a separate Egyptian sect of Christianity, promoted as a universal faith, was nil. Egyptian was correspondingly weaker when it faced the challenging embrace of the Arabic-speaking community: what ground was there to maintain their Egyptian identity when the gods and rituals of the land of Egypt had all been long forgotten?
Ultimately, Egyptian could not sustain itself when it ceased to be a majority language in its one and only environment, the land of Egypt. The language, like the pharaonic religion, had been a symbol of Egyptian identity. Egyptian could survive a government speaking a foreign language, as long as its religion was based in Egypt. It could not survive a foreign government and a truly cosmopolitan religion, for its speakers had nothing national left as a focus for their identity. They might as well become Arab Muslims, just like all the rest.
Coping with invasions: Chinese unsettled
Recognised Chinese strategies for border management37
The final decline of Egyptian can be understood as the long-term effect of losing the sense of its own centre.
After the Roman conquest, Egypt was at best a curiosity on the edge of Rome’s Mediterranean world, no longer responsible for its own destiny, but looking hopefully to the west. Four centuries later, the change of focus from Rome to Byzantium had had little impact; Egypt’s identity was sustained by its contributions to the new and growing faith of Christianity. Three centuries later still, the further shock of being incorporated into a quite different alien empire, one that was centred now to its east (in Damascus, then Baghdad), was more than its separate identity could stand. For the first and last time, Egyptian went into decline.
China has always viewed itself as being at the centre of its world, traditionally Tiān Xià, ‘Heaven Below’, encompassed on every side by lesser peoples, inferior in cultivation and morals. The modern word for the countr
y, Zhōnggŭo, ’Central Realm’, seems to say it all. But another way of referring to the whole country is Sìnši zhīněi, ‘Within the Four Seas’, going back at least to Confucius. The Chinese conventionally saw themselves as living in Nine Continents within Four Seas. Each of those seas was seen as the haunt of a barbarian people, the so-called Sìyí, ‘The Four Yi’: Dōng Yí Běi Dí Xī Róng Nán Mán, ‘east the Yi, north the Di, west the Rong, south the Man’. This idea of the steppes that surround China’s heartland as seas, bizarre to anyone who looks at a modern map, had a certain reality when those steppes were populated by pastoral nomads, roaming the grassy plains to prey on the sedentary farmers who lived round the oases, the islands in this ocean. And beyond the Sìyí in the traditional world-view lay the Bāhuāng, ‘the Eight Wastes’, so it is understandable that the traditional Chinese was little tempted to explore farther abroad.*
Within this ring of hostiles, the Chinese saw themselves at its centre, with a shared conception of civilised values, and a persistent aspiration to bring willing neighbours into their fold.
There were three features of the Chinese situation that kept their vast community not only centred but also united, socially and linguistically. The first was a fact about their human environment, which quite literally came with the territory that they inhabited. The second was an institution invented quite distinctively by the Chinese, which turned out to be remarkably persistent. And the third was the paradoxical result of the barbarian conquests when they came.
The fact was the periodic influx of hostile marauding nomads, speaking languages radically different to Chinese, and preying on settled Chinese farmers. This had an objective effect on the language, and a subjective effect on Chinese consciousness. Linguistically, the periodic influxes kept the northern Chinese population on the move, preventing it from settling into distinct dialect areas. But even when, as in the golden ages of the Han and the Tang, the barbarian threat was effecively countered for centuries at a time, the consciousness of barbarians at the gate still remained, naturally causing a greater sense of unity in the population. The external threat of invasion kept the Chinese focused on what they had to lose; and recurrent partial failures of the centre’s defences against it kept the north of China in flux, and so perversely maintained the cohesion of its spoken language.
The institution was the system of public examinations, persistent over thirteen centuries, where success was the key to a career in government. This meant that from a very early era China could boast a formally constituted civil service. When it was working, this had an effect on social order analogous to the influxes of invaders on the linguistic order. Both tended to reduce local groupings, and emphasise higher-level loyalties. The meritocratic civil service built loyalties to the state, and undercut the personal loyalties which, when the central government was weakening, tended to develop and split the country into the power bases of contending warlords. But it also had a further effect, bound up with the Chinese language.
The syllabus was almost entirely literary, including composition of classical poetry (introduced under the empress Wu at the end of the eighth century) and of the notorious bāgŭwén, ‘eight-legged essays’, which rigorously elicited clear expression of the ideas from the classical texts and their application to contemporary problems. As such, it could only promote national standards for the major language in which it was conducted, wényán, classical Chinese.
In this sense it is fair to say that the Chinese state, outside the imperial court, was constituted as the political manifestation of the Chinese literary elite. Cai Xiang, himself a brilliant product of the system, remarked negatively in the middle of the eleventh century:
Nowadays in appointing people it can be observed that they are advanced in office mainly on the basis of their literary skills. The highest office-holders are literary men; those attending the throne are literary men; those managing fiscal matters are literary men; the chief commanders of the border defences are literary men; all the Regional Transport Commissioners are literary men; all the Prefects in the provinces are literary men.38
Accounts of the examination system are full of caveats about the distance between its meritocratic theory and its aristocratic and plutocratic reality. It could hardly have been otherwise in an institution that lasted for over two thousand years, every so often dropped or reconstituted. Nevertheless, however unsatisfactory it may often have been for the vast number of bright individuals whom it failed to favour (all women, for example, were excluded), it was never a dead letter: it always existed as a potential means which could be resurrected or reformed to bring new talent into power and influence, a built-in agitator of the sediments of the Chinese establishment, a perpetual grain of sand in the government oyster.
Just as invasion by Altaic hordes kept northern China’s populace on the boil, so the examination system, and appointments based on it, kept the power structures open. It therefore promoted the cohesion of the body politic as a whole, with a common language whose standards were clearly defined by the examination syllabus.
The paradoxical result was the fact that although China was ultimately unable to stem the pressure from militarised pastoral nomads, and had to yield its throne to the Mongols and the Manchus, China remained Chinese. The struggle with the barbarians was, in the last analysis, lost—yet it did not matter for the future of the language, or of the culture that it conveyed. In a way, Chinese showed that it could transcend the most fundamental defeat.
Strategically, this may be characterised—in Chinese terms—as:
—tōu liáng huàn zhù
Steal the beams, change the pillars.39
This maxim from the Chinese ‘36 Strategems’ refers to a technique whereby an opponent is gradually lulled into a false sense of confidence, thinking the structures he relies on are still sound, although in fact they have been undermined or suborned. Evidently to do this the strategist must be on close terms with the enemy’s organisation, as he may well be, after suffering apparent total defeat and accepting surrender. In the case of the Mongols—who never, incidentally, accepted serious use of the examination system, and so were vulnerable to the growth of local lordships—it proved possible within a century to build up sufficient regional power bases to unseat the central government. With the Manchu, it was more difficult, since they themselves, conscious of their small numbers, made effective use of Chinese institutions such as the examinations to recruit loyal cadres. They also concentrated themselves in the military. Still, making up no more than 2 per cent of the population, it proved impossible for them to live with the Chinese and not be absorbed by them. In vain were they forbidden by law from intermarrying with Chinese or adopting Chinese customs, in vain compulsorily educated in Manchu, a language that continued in government papers until the fall of the dynasty in 1911: nevertheless, within 150 years of their successful conquest of China, all those of Manchu ancestry were speaking Chinese.40
It also leads us to the current Chinese response to the challenge from the Western world. Bizarrely, but revealingly, China is again adopting this traditional strategy.
After its traumatic experiences at the hands of Western powers in the nineteenth century, China abolished the examination system in 1905 and the imperial monarchy itself in 1911. A general air prevailed of bringing the country up to date, European-style. One suggestion considered was even to abolish the Chinese language itself in favour of Esperanto, an artificial but would-be international language fashioned by a Pole out of European roots in the late nineteenth century, and in particular vogue at the time. In the event, during the 1920s and 1930s the official form of Chinese was redefined: in place of wényán, which went back to the fifth century BC, came báihuà, ‘white speech’, the colloquial form of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. Written in characters, it represents colloquial grammar and lexicon, but is of course neutral on actual pronunciation. This was not too much of a shock, since it had been current, and indeed used in popular literature,* since at least the mi
ddle of the first millennium AD, but had never previously had the feel of a language for serious business.†
China is now in a period of extremely rapid economic development, in which it has consciously adopted Western methods. In a sense this is the third Western-inspired revolution in a century, since the foundation of the republic in 1911, the communist revolution in 1949 and the initiation of capitalist reforms since Mao’s death were all applications of Western ideas. All this in a country that had not internalised a major Western idea since the widespread take-up of Buddhism in the sixth and seventh centuries AD. If China succeeds in adopting and adapting these ideas in its own long-term interests, it will once again have turned the apparently conclusive victory of its adversary into a longer-scale triumph of its own. New beams and pillars indeed.
But if we take up again our comparison with the Egyptian case, the long-term future of the Chinese language may be hanging in the balance. The common feature we have found, which explains both Egyptian and Chinese persistence over so many millennia, is the maintenance of a distinct centre of identity and loyalty within the language community.
Gradually losing aspects of its historic centre, in the form first of its monarchy, then of its political independence, then of its own national religion, and finally of its national form of Christianity, Egyptian weakened steadily over the ages, and has now, as a language simply recited in formal liturgy, come close to disappearing altogether. If the analogy is valid, Chinese, despite its billion speakers, might consider that it too has now entered on a perilous path. To accommodate the challenge from the modern, European-inspired, world, it has already given up the link with its own monarchy, an ideal with which it had identified for over two millennia. It has not given up its political independence, but it has, at least officially, resigned its own religion: since the fall of the monarchy, it has no longer actively sustained the value of Confucian, much less Taoist, ideas.
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World Page 20