Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler Page A

literacy. Although the Aramaeans had appeared originally as nomads, presumed illiterate, they had even before the first millennium begun taking over cities (most notably Damascus) and whole countries (the last Hittite kingdom, its capital at modern Zincirli, in the Turkish province still known as Hatay). Many of them would have come to know the value of writing, and since the cities they knew were of the west, the writing system they would have learnt was simple and alphabetic.
    As they moved eastward, we can only presume that alphabetic literacy spread with at least some of the Aramaeans, since the new materials, ink and papyrus or leather, are biodegradable, and do not survive in the archaeological record. In fact, the earliest inscriptions in Aramaic, not clearly distinguishable from Canaanite languages at this time, are from the middle of the ninth century. 30 The short-term practical advantages of the new media (less bulk, greater capacity) must soon have made an impression. A new word for ‘scribe’ came into use in Akkadian,
sēpiru
, as opposed to the old
upsarru
, ‘tablet writer’, which went right back to the Sumerian word
dubsar.
Pictures of scribes at work from the mid-eighth century show them in pairs, one with a stylus and a tablet, the other with a pen and a sheet of papyrus or parchment. As with the onset of computers, good bureaucrats must have ensured that the old and the new coexisted for a long time: the ‘clay-free office’ did not happen in Assyria till the destruction of the empire by the Medes in 610 BC
    The net result seems to have been that spoken use of Akkadian receded before that of Aramaic with scarce a murmur of complaint. An officer in Ur does once ask permission to write to the king in Aramaic. 31 But no pedantic or puristic murmur has yet been found in any Akkadian tablet. The closest we have is an exchange of correspondence between a scribe and King Sargon (721-705):
    SCRIBE : If it please my Lord, I will write an [Aramaic] document.
    SARGON : Why do you not write Akkadian? 32
     
    Indeed, on the evidence of the pattern of words borrowed in Akkadian from Aramaic, as against those borrowed in the reverse direction, it has been claimed that Akkadian, by the time the changeover was taking place, was the less favoured language, with those who wrote it essentially thinking in Aramaic, while struggling (and failing) to put their Aramaic verbs out of their minds. 33
    The triumph of Aramaic over Akkadian must be ascribed as one of practical utility over ancient prestige, but the utility came primarily from the fact that so many people already spoke it. The fact that its associated writing system was quicker and easier was an added bonus; if anything, it just removed one argument that might have made sections of the Aramaic-speaking population want to learn Akkadian too. After all, what was the point? One would never be accepted as anything other than
šaglūti
; and even the royal court was taking up Aramaic.
    As once had Sumerian, so now Akkadian fell victim to a new language brought by nomads and newcomers; unstable bilingualism followed, together with the death of the older language.
    In such times, the only argument for an education in Akkadian was to maintain the link with the literature of the previous two thousand years, and the traditions of grandeur associated with the great cities of Mesopotamia. It lived on in Babylon as a classical language for six hundred years after its probable death: not only did the last dynasty of Babylon (625-539 BC) use it for chronicles of their rule, despite being of Chaldaean (i.e. Aramaic) extraction, but foreign conquerors, the Persians Cyrus (557-529 BC) and Xerxes (485-465 BC) and even the Greek Antiochus Soter (280-261 BC), all left inscriptions in the royal language glorifying their own reigns. There was certainly a new and, some would say, barbarous resonance when a Greek monarch could write: ‘I am
An-ti- ’u-ku-us
[Antiochus], the great king,