INTRODUCTION

Functional domains of languages and the difference between spoken and written language

In bi- or multilingual societies, the use of one or another language depends on a few basic parameters and a number of social variables which have been put together in the sociolinguistic concept of ‘functional domains’. Speakers can use, for example, one language within their families, another one in business affairs, etc. Empirical studies have brought to light typical clusters of functional domains, resulting from common speaker attitudes towards their languages, which can frequently be classified within a binary scheme as ‘Dominant’ vs. ‘Minority’ languages (see Table 17.1). These assumptions, reasonable as they are, have not yet been fully applied to the field of ancient bilingualism, where the use of a certain language is often simply taken as a shibboleth of a correlative personal identity. Although in some circumstances language use may indeed function as a claim of belonging to a societal group, or express a sense of identity with that group, we cannot draw conclusions from occasionally attested connections between persons and languages without taking the full range of their language options into account, including their spoken medium(s) too, which usually have to be guessed, or reconstructed.

In everyday bi- or multilingual spoken communication, it is the speakers' social competence, their acquired knowledge of language behaviour, which serves as an ‘intrinsic’ guide to more or less appropriate language choices, similar to the way in which they would choose certain lexical and/or phraseological means belonging to different registers of a single language in order to form stylistically different utterances, simply depending on actual circumstances of speech.

The following story told by Cassius Dio is often repeated. In AD 43, after the emperor Claudius provincialised the territory of the Lycian Koinon on account of internal unrest, an embassy of Lycians appeared before the Senate in Rome. In the course of the discussion it happened that one of the ambassadors did not understand the question posed by Claudius in Latin. In consequence Claudius deprived him of the Roman citizenship, maintaining that no one could be a Roman citizen who did not also understand Rome's language. We may get the impression that command of Latin was required of a Roman citizen, or was a prerequisite in order to become one. In fact nothing of the sort was true under Claudius or any other Roman emperor, as is implied in another story from the same reign preserved by the same author. Soon after assuming power Claudius saw a theatrical performance of a Pyrrhic dance by young people whom Caligula had brought from Achaia. After the performance Claudius bestowed the Roman citizenship on the troupe and sent it home. It is of course unlikely that any of the young men knew any Latin. Nonetheless the Roman citizenship was given not only to them but also to their relatives: parents, siblings, as well as grandparents and great uncles – as witnessed in the many inscriptions from Achaia which mention the family of T. Statilius Lamprias who died at the age of 18. This young man happened to be one of the dancers whom Claudius rewarded with the Roman citizenship.

The Jewish diaspora of Asia Minor, one of the most vital centres of Jewish diaspora life in antiquity, has left us many testimonies of its life: material remains, ranging from synagogue buildings to lamps; written sources, both pagan and Christian; and, of course, inscriptions. The evidence of inscriptions has the distinct advantage of having been written for and by the Jews of Asia Minor themselves: we are looking not through the eyes of foreign observers, but through their own eyes – even if they adapted themselves to their surroundings and joined the world of epigraphy, the world of communication established by the Greek inhabitants of Asia Minor. Even if we know only about 250 Jewish inscriptions, their distribution in time and place corresponds perfectly with that of inscribed texts in general. The Jewish inscriptions can therefore be seen as media of communication both with the outside world and within the community (sections on ‘The epigraphic habit’ and ‘The use of different kinds of inscriptions’); if pagans, Christians and Jews used, in part, the same language and the same means of expression, we shall have to look at the consequences for identity in the Jewish diaspora: to what extent did the Jews accept local identities (section on ‘Local Identities’)? Of course, there were always differences among religious identities, but were these differences strong enough to overcome the similarities which grew out of living together in the cities and in the countryside of Asia Minor, and sharing the same social and local conditions (‘Religious Identities’)?

The ability to use the same words for the diaspora in Asia Minor and in Syria suggests (at first glance) that circumstances were almost identical.

The interest of modern scholarship in the history of the Samaritan people, their literature and the material remains of their past is a continuous trend started in 1907 by James Allen Montgomery. The script on the early silver coins of Samaria from the fourth century BCE is palaeo Aramaic, however, using in some cases palaeo-Hebrew letter forms. Meshorer and Qedar referred to the script of the legends on these coins as revealing a ‘mixed nature’. The early history of the Samaritan alphabet and in particular the period of its inception have remained an enigma. Montgomery refrained from suggesting a precise date for its beginning, whilst Purvis concluded ‘that the Samaritan script branched off from the paleo-Hebrew in the late Hasmonaean period’. Other scholars have suggested the first century CE. The present discussion aims to establish at what time the Samaritan alphabet was introduced, or rather created, and what its uses were.

THE MOUNT GERIZIM INSCRIPTIONS

The publication in 2004 of the Aramaic, Hebrew and Samaritan inscriptions excavated on Mt Gerizim in 1982–2004 presents a very important corpus of epigraphic material. The 395 inscriptions (almost all fragmentary) include 380 in Aramaic and ‘square’ Jewish script (nos. 1–380: ‘Lapidary Aramaic and Proto-Jewish’) and 9 in palaeo-Hebrew (nos. 382–90: ‘New-Hebrew’ script) ascribed to the third and second centuries BCE, antedating the ruthless destruction of the Samaritan temple by John Hyrcanus I in contributor. 113/112 BCE. The excavations revealed only four Samaritan inscriptions (nos. 392–5) attributed to medieval times. Only ten of several dozens of Greek inscriptions from the excavations were published and attributed to Samaritans during the fourth and fifth centuries CE.

DYING LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTIC SEAMS

Dozens of languages were spoken in the ancient world during the period stretching from the Hellenistic to the Islamic conquests. There were far fewer writing systems than spoken languages, which means that not every language had a cognate script, and many died out before ever being written down. But for those languages with a tradition and formalised system of writing, the connection between language and script was strong. Long integral texts written in the script of another language are a medieval phenomenon; they were not produced as a mainstream cultural activity in antiquity. The concept of separating language from script was not entirely absent, but it is our thesis that a transcribed text invariably indicates marginality or liminality of some kind: a language or script which is dying, an individual on a cultural/linguistic seam, a peripheral medium such as magic, a scholastic exercise. These exceptional cases constitute the first part of the current investigation. In the second part, we shall examine the more complex instance of rabbinical traditions regarding the scripts and languages used in writing biblical books.

In antiquity, it seems, language and script were thought of generally as a unit, to the extent that reference to a particular system of ‘letters’ or ‘writing’ could signify the literary or even the spoken language itself. For example, when Herodotus relates (4.87) that Darius set up two stelae on the Bosporos, ἐνταμὼν γράμματα ἐς μὲν τὴν 'Aσσύρια, ἐς δὲ τὴν ‘Eλληνικά, he of course means not strictly two scripts but two languages, i.e. a bilingual inscription in Aramaic and Greek, each written in its cognate script.

When the Arabs conquered Egypt in 641, they found a deeply divided Christian church – in fact what they found amounted to two quite separate churches. They are usually called, in neutral terms, ‘Chalcedonian’ and ‘anti-’ or ‘non-Chalcedonian’, with reference to the Council of Chalcedon where their split had been consummated two centuries earlier. The two churches disagreed deeply on Christological questions, and during the two centuries that followed the Council, there were several, often heavy-handed, attempts to bring the non-Chalcedonian churches back into the imperial sphere. These events are unfortunately known mainly from polemical sources from both sides, and although this last fact does allow us to get a more balanced view, it also creates the impression that the Chalcedonian conflict dominated life in the Empire after the fifth century, an impression that certainly needs qualification.

In Egypt, the non-Chalcedonian or Monophysite church modelled itself on the highly centralised structure of the existing patriarchate of Alexandria, which, contrary to the other four patriarchates, did not have an intermediate level of metropoles between the patriarch and the local bishops. Both churches had their leaders in Alexandria, heading two welldeveloped parallel networks of episcopal sees and affiliated monasteries which covered most of the valley. In 641, the Chalcedonian church had, for over a century, been actively backed by the imperial power structure, often forcing the non-Chalcedonian hierarchy to leave the city centres and retreat to monasteries from where they managed their communities. The political break with Constantinople brought about by the Arab conquest eventually weakened the position of the Chalcedonian Church.

In his recent discussion of the tomb and nefesh of the Benei Ḥezir at Jerusalem, D. Barag described and identified palpable Nabataean elements in the architecture and decorations of this monument from first-century BCE Jerusalem. As evidenced by a scatter of finds, ‘Nabataeanising’ was fashionable among at least some Judaean families. Jewish–Nabataean contacts in the first centuries BCE/CE operated on the levels of politics, trade, and settlement, and are inscribed within the larger context of Judaean/Jewish presence in Transjordan and North Arabia from Achaemenid times to the coming of Islam.

Political relations between the Jewish and Nabataean principalities might briefly be summarised, although for a rich family like the Benei Ḥezir (whose wealth, based on trade and land leasing, is evidenced by the splendour of their tomb) they were largely irrelevant. As the biblical book of Ruth demonstrates so well, there had always been emigration from Judah to Moab, and immigration from Moab to Judah. Most scholars date Ruth to the fifth century BCE, but the basic situation of the protagonists is timeless and applies to the whole ‘pre-modern world’ from the beginnings of settled life to the end of the Ottoman period. The Moabite plateau is 200 m higher than the mountains of Judah, thus receiving more precipitation than any area south of Hebron, and becomes an area of refuge in times of drought. It is, from the point of view of the geography of traffic, fairly isolated and less accessible from the north, west and south, and becomes an area of refuge in times of crisis and instability, especially if the aggressors come from the north, west or south.

The Novella of 553 CE, if seen from a political viewpoint, dates from a centralised era and an Empire that was by and large Christian. And yet it attests to a multilingualism that was a characteristic of the Roman Empire at all periods even in the public realm. Given this fact, linguistic data documented by inscriptions could serve as just one way of evaluating the impact of Rome on local pagan practices in second- to fourth-century Palestine. The questions that this issue arouses go beyond the current theoretical debate about ‘Romanisation’. That has many aspects, of varying significance depending on the particular issue that is addressed, whether juridical, social or cultural. This paradigm, long dominant in studies of Roman provinces, was based on two prejudices: first, a colonial-like con-flict category (Romans vs. natives), and second, a preconceived idea of verticality combined with uniformity when studying the governance of cultural procedures. It has been applied mainly to western situations, but, even there, the term is so protean and coloured by historiography that S. Alcock (following other scholars) announced its fall a few years ago! For research on eastern provinces, the concept is even less accurate, because realia, possibly resulting from an actual ‘Roman’ impact, are generally embedded within Hellenistic trends that have a strong legacy in those areas. Yet this should not prevent us from asking about the impact of Rome on local paganisms, if there was any, and from trying to draw methodological lines in order to clarify the process.

As a historian of the late Roman/early Islamic Middle East I read enviously the publications available to historians of western Europe for the same period, such as those by Patrick Geary, Walter Pohl, Peter Heather and others, which treat so well the Roman interaction with and integration of the ‘western barbarians’. Geary's point regarding the Franks that ‘their very existence as well as every phase of their history makes sense only within the context of Roman presence in northern Europe, for their genesis as a people and gradual transformation into the conquerors of much of Europe were from the start part of the Roman experience’ has long struck me as pertinent to understanding the rise of the Muslim Arab Empire. Yet sadly no such studies have been composed treating the same subject in respect of the ‘eastern barbarians’, i.e. the tribes on Rome's eastern frontier, and these tribes never get more than the briefest of mentions in survey works on the Roman/medieval Mediterranean world. Irfan Shahid has done the great service of laying the groundwork with his exhaustively documented volumes on Byzantium and the Arabs, but no one has used these to produce a narrative/discursive study à la Geary or Pohl. Unable to claim to be intrinsic to the formation of Europe, these ‘eastern barbarians’ still suffer from a lack of focused attention and from a lingering sense that their role in the history of the late Roman Empire was minimal. Arabists are less likely to think along these lines, but they rarely have the depth of knowledge of the Roman Empire necessary to redress this imbalance.

The ‘Old Syriac’ inscriptions of the first three centuries CE (the earliest is dated to 6 CE) are best classified along with the other local Middle Aramaic dialects which made their epigraphic appearance, each with its own distinctive script, around the turn of the Common Era, namely Nabataean (first century BCE to mid-fourth century CE), Palmyrene (mid-first century BCE to late third century CE), and Hatran (mid-first century BCE to early third century CE). Th e number of known Old Syriac inscriptions is relatively small (c. 100) compared with the other Middle Aramaic dialects (Nabataean, c. 5,500; Palmyrene, c. 2,850; Hatran, c. 450). Since it was the local Aramaic dialect of Edessa (Syriac Orhay, modern (Şanli) Urfa), it is not surprising that most of the Old Syriac inscriptions come from Edessa or its vicinity, and all belong to Osrhoene (though the two earliest ones, dated 6 CE and 73 CE, are from Birecik, on the Euphrates, and Serrin, in the western part of Osrhoene). An isolated ostracon has turned up in Germany, but otherwise there is nothing comparable to the geographic spread of the Nabataean and, above all, the Palmyrene inscriptions, the latter spanning from South Shields (in northern England) to Soqotra.

The majority of the Old Syriac inscriptions belong to the second half of the second and first half of the third century, and quite a few are dated (see Appendix). They are to be found on stone and in mosaic, and in both categories many are funerary in character.

Rabbi Jonathan of Eleutheropolis (third century) is the author of this famous statement regarding the respective qualities of the four languages: Greek, Latin, Syriac and Hebrew. According to his view, Greek is most suitable for ‘zemer’, which in this instance means song in the broader sense of the word – poetry. The other qualifications do not require comments.

In the Roman Near East, various languages were used for written and oral communication. The relative importance of these languages is a topic frequently studied and discussed. Two of the languages were imported by conquerors from the west. Of these, it is clear that Latin, unlike Greek, was never used widely, but it is also obvious that the first language of the Empire played a role in communications. In the present paper I shall attempt to consider the question of the extent to which Latin may have been more than the language of government and military organisation in the cities of the Near East from Pompey to the third century. This is only one aspect – but an important one – of the impact of western, Roman influence on the cities of the Near East.

The region to be considered for present purposes is more narrowly that of Syria, Judaea/Palaestina and Arabia, excluding the numerous cities of Asia Minor.