Preliminary remarks

What makes a language ancient? The term conjures up images, often romantic, of archeologists feverishly copying hieroglyphs by torchlight in a freshly discovered burial chamber; of philologists dangling over a precipice in some remote corner of the earth, taking impressions of an inscription carved in a cliff-face; of a solitary scholar working far into the night, puzzling out some ancient secret, long forgotten by humankind, from a brittle-leafed manuscript or patina-encrusted tablet. The allure is undeniable, and the literary and film worlds have made full use of it.

An ancient language is indeed a thing of wonder – but so is every other language, all remarkable systems of conveying thoughts and ideas across time and space. And ancient languages, as far back as the very earliest attested, operate just like those to which the linguist has more immediate access, all with the same familiar elements – phonological, morphological, syntactic – and no perceptible vestiges of Neanderthal oddities. If there was a time when human language was characterized by features and strategies fundamentally unlike those we presently know, it was a time prior to the development of any attested or reconstructed language of antiquity.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Latin – the language of Ancient Rome – takes its name from Latium, a region encompassing Rome on the west coast of Italy and bordered by the river Tiber to the northwest, the Apennines to the northeast and the Pontine marshes to the south. The Roman antiquarian Varro dated the founding of Rome to 753 BC, but there is archeological evidence for settlement much earlier than this, and it was only later, in the sixth century BC, that Rome became an organized and sophisticated city-state. Latium itself did not achieve political unity until it came under Rome's dominance in the fourth century BC, but the Latini – as the inhabitants of Latium are termed – appear to have shared cultural and religious practice, as well as their language, from well before the period of the first city-states.

The increasing control over Latium was the first stage of Rome's rise to power throughout the Italian peninsula a dominance achieved through conquest, alliance, and colonization. By the second century BC, Rome's military power was great enough to make possible the conquest and annexation of territory outside Italy, including North Africa, Spain, Southern France and Greece. Civil wars throughout much of the first century BC led to the end of the Roman Republic and the foundation of the Roman Empire under Augustus.

In this section you are introduced to the verse of Greek Tragedy in a touching scene from Euripides' Alkestis (produced in 438 BC). Consult GE p. 310, #286 for a list of tragic usages. Note (e) here contains the warning: ‘Word order in verse can be far more flexible than in prose; again, utterances can be far more oblique and tightly packed with meaning.’ While it is probably true that you will find an increase of difficulty in this section, the Greek should prove manageable. We have tried to keep the translation as literal as possible throughout.

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1 ἴστω The third person singular imperative of οἶδα (GE #207). οἶδα is followed by a participle (‘know that …’, see GE #247). The vocabulary tells you that κατθανουμένη is the future participle of καταθθνῄσκω.

εὐκλεές = ‘a glorious [woman]’. It is easiest to translate it as an adverb, ‘gloriously’.

3 πῶς δ' οὐκ …; πῶς γὰρ οὔ (literally ‘for how not?’ = ‘of course’) has appeared from Section 1 onwards.

4–5 Difficult. Consult the translation.

11 ἐκ … ἑλοῦσα This splitting of a verb from its prepositional prefix is called ‘tmesis’ (‘cutting’). It is quite common in verse authors, but it is not always easy to recognise whether the preposition is there in its own right or if it is a case of ‘tmesis’.

13 ‘Εστία Hestia is the goddess of the hearth, crucial for the continued existence of the home.

Preliminary remarks

What makes a language ancient? The term conjures up images, often romantic, of archeologists feverishly copying hieroglyphs by torchlight in a freshly discovered burial chamber; of philologists dangling over a precipice in some remote corner of the earth, taking impressions of an inscription carved in a cliff-face; of a solitary scholar working far into the night, puzzling out some ancient secret, long forgotten by humankind, from a brittle-leafed manuscript or patina-encrusted tablet. The allure is undeniable, and the literary and film worlds have made full use of it.

An ancient language is indeed a thing of wonder – but so is every other language, all remarkable systems of conveying thoughts and ideas across time and space. And ancient languages, as far back as the very earliest attested, operate just like those to which the linguist has more immediate access, all with the same familiar elements – phonological, morphological, syntactic – and no perceptible vestiges of Neanderthal oddities. If there was a time when human language was characterized by features and strategies fundamentally unlike those we presently know, it was a time prior to the development of any attested or reconstructed language of antiquity.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

History of the language and its speakers

Hurrian is an ancient Near Eastern language widely spoken in the northern parts of the Fertile Crescent (present-day northern Iraq, northern Syria, southeast Turkey) from at least the last quarter of the third millennium BC on until the end of the second millennium BC. It survived for another half millennium in small pockets in the mountainous areas north of ancient Assyria.

A cognate language of Hurrian is Urartian (see Ch. 10) which is attested in texts from the late ninth to the late seventh century BC. Apart from Urartian, Hurrian is an isolated language without a genetic relation to any other known ancient Near Eastern language. A genetic relation between (reconstructed) Proto-Urarto-Hurrian and (reconstructed) Northeast Caucasian has been argued for, but it is not generally accepted. If the connection could be demonstrated, it would be a rather distant one.

Hurrian is first attested in a few words and personal or place names mentioned in Akkadian texts of the Akkade period (twenty-third to twenty-second centuries BC). The term Old Hurrian (herein abbreviated OH) has been coined for the language of a royal inscription most likely to be dated to the Ur III period (twenty-first to twentieth centuries BC), but it is also used for the more archaic dialect(s) of the second millennium.