The most influential language you’ve never heard of…
By Daniel Nehemiah Oliver
What do Genghis Khan, Jesus Christ & Cyrus the Great all have in common?
The Aramaic language!
This Semitic cousin of Amharic, Arabic & Hebrew is the linguistic success story of the ancient world.
Going Viral
The original speakers of Aramaic, the Arameans, left almost no mark on history, but everybody you know knew them. They fought with the Akkadians, and had kingdoms near the ancient Israelites. They were conquered by the Assyrians and Babylonians, and ruled over by their successor states, the great Persian empires. Mesopotamian conquerors had a habit of scattering newly conquered subjects throughout the empire to prevent rebellion, and Aramaic quickly became the written and spoken lingua franca.
How, though? How did the wimpiest kids in the empire take over communications? Well, they had two advantages: they wrote, and they wrote in cursive.
Ancient civilisations didn’t write very much, some were even against it. Before Aramaic, the Akkadians & Babylonians used cuneiform, whose wedge-shaped markings are perfect for writing on stone or clay. But logosyllabic scripts are basically symbols, hundreds of them, whose combination had to be interpreted before the word they symbolised was formed. Imagine having to teach subjects your unrelated language, but then also the symbols for all your ideas, and how to read combinations of those symbols form each single word of this new language.
Growing empires need to announce laws, record taxes & communicate across vast distances. Cuneiform wasn’t going to allow that. In addition, in most provinces, the ruling people were a minority, if present at all. The widely dispersed Arameans were not, and they had an easy-to-read script, because like the Roman alphabet, Aramaic is phonetic. Just sound out the word, not decode it. The Arameans became the only ancient middlemen: everybody learned their language so they could communicate with everybody else, aloud and on paper. Theirs was the official language of successive empires from 1300 B.C. to the 7th century.
Globalisation
All of this only set the stage for Aramaic’s global prominence. Its easy legibility and imperial status made it one of the most valuable commodities on the Silk Road, which despite its name was a vast land and sea network.
Communication was key both within and between cultures in a dynamic system where information was exchanged as much as goods. Thus it swept over the steppes, scaled the Himalayas, master of beast and ship, from caravanserai to castle and port to palace. The Israelites exiled throughout Babylon adapted it, and eventually derived the square Hebrew script in use today, and formerly as far afield as Andalusian Spain. Many more of the Jews of Jesus’ time spoke and read Aramaic than Hebrew, and so with his other followers. Arabs also adapted the Aramaic alphabet to form their own, and after the advent of Islam, it became the script of conqueror and convert alike, even beyond where Arabic was ever a lingua franca.
In Central Asia, its adaptation spread eastward from Iranic language to Turkic, eventually reaching Mongolia and eventually Manchuria on modern China’s Pacific coast. All along the way changes were on the way, so that by the time we find the Mongol alphabet we are no longer reading from right to left, but from top to bottom!
That’s Jesus, Cyrus and Genghis right there, all using Aramaic in their own way. By now, some uses of Aramaic-based scripts have been replaced by the Roman or Cyrillic alphabet, as the story of colonisation only changes actors, but never ends. The Roman and Cyrillic alphabets, like Aramaic itself, all trace back to the Phoenician alphabet, and therefore, ultimately, to Egyptian hieroglyphics.
There’s nothing new under the sun, indeed…
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