Introduction

All modern human societies are reliant on language. Human languages, whether spoken or signed, are unlike any other communication system in the natural world. Language has the capacity to allow us to express new ideas or to interact with each other in new situations, and to structure the ways in which we understand events and institutions. Homo sapiens is the only creature on the planet endowed with a communication system of such utility and complexity, and the origin of language is intricately bound up with the evolution of our species. Humans have been speaking to each other for at least 100, 000 years; but for 95 per cent of that time there was no means of keeping a record of speech. The first writing systems that could fully represent human language arose in the Ancient Near East around 3000 BCE, and thereafter the practice of writing, in numerous different scripts, gradually spread westward across the Mediterranean and into surrounding lands. With the advent of writing, the historic record begins. Surviving written texts from the ancient world, when understood, can provide unmatched detail about everything from the price of fish to philosophical speculation on the origin of the universe. Writing also reveals something about the linguistic variety of past societies, both through the range of languages and dialects spoken, and through the different ways in which individuals and societies chose how to express themselves.

This book explores how ancient languages and language use can function as a window onto the history of the ancient world. My principal focus is the Greek and Roman civilizations between around 800 BCE and 400 CE. Most of the historical evidence for this period comes from texts written in two of the major languages of the Mediterranean in the period, Greek and Latin, and much of this book will be concerned with evidence for ancient societies gleaned from the use of the Greek and Latin languages.

The case of Old Persian

‘Darius the king proclaims: This is what I did after I became king.’ In around 520 BCE the Persian King Darius thus recorded his achievements in a massive Res Gestae, a rock inscription covering over 350 m, located over 100 m up a cliff face on Mount Bisitun in western Iran. The rock is engraved with Darius's own record of his achievements in three different language versions. The first version is in Elamite, a non-Indo-European language of ancient Iran which had been used as the administrative language even before the advent of the Achaemenid dynasty under Cyrus the Great forty years earlier. The second is in Akkadian (in particular, in the variety known as Babylonian), which was the usual language of administration and international affairs in the Near East from 1500 to 500 BCE (for instance, the fourteenth-century BCE correspondence between the renegade Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten and the rulers of the Hittites and the Mitanni was in Akkadian). The third version is in Old Persian, Darius's native language, and here written in its own semi-syllabic cunei- form script, which the king claims to have invented. Old Persian is written on a number of other, less extensive, inscriptions erected by Darius. It continued in use by the later Achaemenids up until the mid-fourth century bce, although the false archaisms and corruptions of the texts written in the reigns of Artaxerxes II (404 — 358 BCE) and Artaxerxes III (358 — 338 BCE) show a loosening grip on the language. Old Persian is also found written on prestige objects such as seals and alabaster bowls and in texts on precious metals buried under the foundations of buildings, when it is nearly always accompanied by parallel versions in other languages, including in some cases another international language, hieroglyphic Egyptian.

Introduction

In modern nation-states language can function as a marker of individual or political identity. This is particularly true in cases where there is more than one officially recognized language in the community: the choice of which language to speak or write down may reveal not only individuals' relations with and expectations of their audience, but also their self-ascribed political identity and their place within or attitude towards larger power structures, including government or religious groups. The sociolinguistic literature is well served by examples of the various ways in which language in the modern world overlaps with ethnic, cultural or national identities. Language is widely recognized to be a potential marker of identity: groups of speakers or societies may select a shared competency in a particular language as part of the ‘stuff’ out of which their identity is constructed. However, a shared language is not a necessary feature of an ethnic or cultural identity, and there are many examples where identity construction cuts across linguistic divisions. Furthermore, spoken and written forms of the same language may function in different ways in the formation of identities.

British citizens are generally not well known for their command of more than a single language, but even so, the constituent parts of the United Kingdom can provide some useful examples of the intersections between language and identity. Consider, for instance, the National Assembly of Wales. Since its inception in 1989, the National Assembly has allowed elected members to speak either Welsh or English in its formal sessions. No member of the Assembly is unable to speak English fluently, but speeches and questions to ministers are regularly made in Welsh by members of all political parties, not just the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru. Moreover, the nationalist members of the Assembly do not all necessarily speak Welsh inside or even outside the Assembly.

Historians ‘have long been aware that the texts they employ offer only partial glimpses of life as lived’ (Osborne 2011 : 25). Osborne's statement occurs in a plea to historians to be more aware of evidence from sources other than the written, illustrated by his consideration of what can be learnt from Classical Greek representations of the human body. He argues that categories of thought with which text-based historians might choose to operate, such as free or enslaved, Greek or barbarian, may be reframed or refocused by paying closer attention to visual media. In this book, I have shown another way in which the historian can supplement the direct evidence given by surviving ancient literature, documents and inscriptions, namely through an examination of the languages and idioms in which texts were written. Authors, scribes, stone-cutters and engravers all made choices when they committed a text to a written medium. Some decided to write in a particular language or dialect which was not the same as their native tongue, others chose to record bi- ormultilingual versions of the same message. Even monolingual speakers made conscious selections of lexical items, constructions or idioms. The linguistic choices made by ancient writers are rarely without a wider significance, and I have demonstrated how language use can be revealing both of the imperial ambitions of cities and states and of local attitudes towards empires. The vocabulary of a particular individual can shed light on his or her class, gender, age and ethnicity; it may reveal religious or political sympathies and antipathies.

Inscriptions, documents and literary works do not allow a 360-degree view of ancient life as lived, and neither do they give a complete picture of language as spoken. All the languages discussed in this book are ‘dead languages’, an expression that neatly encapsulates the truism that languages live in the minds and mouths of their speakers.