HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Phoenician is a member of the Semitic language family, specifically the Northwest Semitic branch of Central Semitic. Within Northwest Semitic it is a Canaanite language, the closest relatives of which are Hebrew, Moabite, Ammonite, and Edomite.

Phoenicia

A description of the sources for the Phoenician language depends to a certain extent on what “Phoenician” is held to mean. The term “Phoenicia” is generally reserved for the strip of land sixty miles long (from Acco in the south to Tell Sukas in the north) and at most thirty miles wide, on the northern coast of the Levant, bounded on the west by the Mediterranean and on the east by the Lebanon Mountains – that is, the modern coast of Lebanon and part of the northern coast of modern Israel. As a scholarly convention, this area is referred to as Phoenicia after 1200 BC, the beginning of the Iron Age. In the early Iron Age, the ravages of the so-called Sea Peoples along the coast of ancient Canaan and into Egypt forced the withdrawal of Egyptian control over Canaan. This withdrawal allowed the Philistines and other Sea Peoples to gain control over the southern coastal plain, and even to expand eastward, where they met a westward-expanding Israel.

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1 ἐάσετε Future of ἐάω.

2 ἣν This is accusative s. fem. of the relative pronoun: ‘she whom …’

3 ἣ What is this?

4 ἣ This has a smooth breathing, so it cannot be a relative pronoun. Try ‘or’.

5 ἐλήλνθεν What tense? What verb? Learn it!

6 ψηφιεῖσθεν This comes from ψηφίζομαι, whose future is ψηφιοῦμαι. Cf. νομίζω νομιέω.

8–9 πρίν is followed by two accusative and infinitive clauses ‘before she did x and y, and before you did z’. Do not translate πρότερον, which prepares for πρίν.

10 ἐπειδὴ δὲ πέπνσθε καὶ ἴστε … Notice the present force of the perfect ‘since you have found out and you all know (now, at this moment)’.

Translation for 14A

Gentlemen of the jury, will you then allow this Neaira to insult the city so disgracefully and so contemptuously, [this woman] who was neither left a citizen by her parents nor was she made a citizen by the people? Will you allow her to act irreverently towards the gods with impunity, she who has openly prostituted herself throughout the whole of Greece? For where has she not worked with her body? Or where has she not gone for her day-to-day earnings? Now that Neaira is clearly known by all as the kind of woman she is, will you vote that she is a citizen? And if you vote in this way, what fine thing will you say that you have accomplished to those who ask you?

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Ancient (or Epigraphic) South Arabian (for terminology see Macdonald 2000:30), which is considered part of the southern branch of the Semitic language family, is divided into four main dialects, Sabaic, Minaic, Qatabanic, and Hadramitic, which are named after the most important peoples of southwest Arabia in the first millennium BC. These peoples founded their towns at the eastern edges of the central Yemeni highlands, in the wadi deltas that lead into Ramlat as-Sab‘atayn, the desert edge of the Rub‘al-ḫālī, where favorable natural and geographical conditions prevail. Since Ramlat as-Sab‘atayn is also called Ṣayhad by the medieval Yemenite geographers, the term Ṣayhadic, coined by A. F. L. Beeston, has also been used in Sabaic scholarship recently as a generic term for the Ancient South Arabian dialects.

The dialect attested for the longest period and by the most inscriptions by far is Sabaic, the core area of which comprises the region of Mārib and Ṣirwāḥ, but which later also extended to a large part of the highland.

The first Sabaic inscriptions begin in the eighth century BC; the first Sabaic monuments of any length that can be dated reliably by a synchronism with Assyrian sources are to be placed in the early seventh century BC (Wissmann 1982:148).

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

The term “Sabellian” refers to a group of genetically related languages that were spoken throughout a substantial portion of pre-Roman Italy. Oscan and Umbrian are considered the major representatives of this group because they are attested by the largest corpora of inscriptions. The former was spoken in the southern half of the Italian peninsula, in the territories of Samnium, Campania, Lucania, and Bruttium; the latter was spoken east of the Tiber River in Umbria. Other Sabellian languages include Paelignian, Marrucinian, Vestinian, Marsian, Volscian, Hernican, Aequian, and Sabine – languages which were spoken in central Italy in the hill districts lying east and southeast of Rome. Recently, South Picene, a language spoken in southern Picenum and in northern Samnium, and Pre-Samnite, the language of Sabellian peoples who inhabited southern Campania before the arrival of the Oscan-speaking Samnites, have been added to the inventory of Sabellian tongues.

Archeological evidence has not yet shed sufficient light on the dates at which or the routes by which, Sabellian speakers moved into the Italian peninsula. By the beginning of the historical period (c. 700 BC), however, Sabellian speakers had spread over a considerable portion of central Italy, from Umbria and Picenum in the northeast to the Sorrentine peninsula in the southwest (see Map 2). Sabellian tribes were still on the move during the fifth and fourth centuries. Roman historical sources document the invasion of Campania and the capture of Capua, Cumae, and Paestum by Oscan-speaking Samnites.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Ugaritic is the only well-attested example known today of the West Semitic languages spoken in the Levantine area in the second millennium BC. The position of Ugaritic among the Semitic languages has been a matter of dispute, in part because of a confusion of categories, namely between literary and linguistic criteria. Literarily, the poetic texts show strong formal (poetic parallelism), lexical, and thematic affinities with Biblical Hebrew poetry. Linguistically, however, Ugaritic is considerably more archaic than any of the well-attested Northwest Semitic languages, and probably descends directly from a Levantine “Amorite” dialect. All indications are that it is not more directly related to East Semitic (Akkadian) than to West Semitic. Within the latter branch, it shares certain important isoglosses with Northwest Semitic as opposed to Arabic (e.g., roots Iw → Iy) and with Canaanite as opposed to Aramaic (e.g., /ḍ/ → /ṣ/). The isoglosses shared with Arabic (e.g., consonantal inventory) represent for the most part features commonly inherited from Proto-Semitic.

Ugaritic is a one-period language, attested only for the last part of the Late Bronze Age, approximately 1300–1190 BC. This is because the writing system in which known Ugaritic texts are inscribed was not invented (at least according to present data) until the early thirteenth century, whereas the city of Ugarit – virtually the only site where Ugaritic texts have been discovered – was destroyed early in the twelfth century.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Lycian was the autochthonous language of the land of Lycia at least during the middle and late first millennium BC. Recent evidence from the Hieroglyphic Luvian inscription of Yalburt – specifically, forms of the place names for Tlos, Pinara, and Xanthos – has now proven that the “Lukka-Lands” of the second-millennium Hittite cuneiform texts do refer to historical Lycia, that is, roughly the mountainous peninsula on the southwest coast of Anatolia lying between the Gulf of Telmessos and the Bay of Attaleia (modern Gulf of Fethiye and Gulf of Antalya; see Poetto 1993). Obviously, without direct textual evidence from Lycia itself during the second millennium it is quite impossible to characterize with any precision the language of “Lukka” in that era.

Lycian shares a number of specific features, including innovations, with Luvian, and it is widely held that Lycian and Luvian form a subgroup within the Anatolian family; in other words, that they reflect a prehistoric “Proto-Luvian” language which had developed out of Proto-Anatolian along different lines from Hittite, Palaic, and Lydian, the other assured members of the Anatolian group (see, inter alios, Oettinger 1978). One may even read that Lycian is a later form of Luvian, though not necessarily of that form of Luvian which is directly attested in the second millennium.

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.