HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Hittite is a member of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family, and the earliest attested Indo-European language. Anatolian is generally regarded as the first branch to have separated from the other Indo-European languages. Aside from Hittite it includes Luvian (Cuneiform and Hieroglyphic) and Palaic, all from the second millennium BC, and Hieroglyphic Luvian, Lycian, Lydian, and the scantily attested Carian, Pisidian, and Sidetic in the first millennium BC.

The speakers of Hittite were in place in Central Anatolia by the nineteenth–eighteenth century BC, since a few words of the language (notably išḫiul- “contract”) appear in Old Assyrian documents from the merchant colonies like Kārum Kaneš, Hittite Nešaš, modern Kültepe. As an Old Hittite origin legend shows (Otten 1973), the Hittites regarded this city as their original home; it is the base of their designation of their own language, URUnišili, nešumnili “in Hittite,” literally “in the language of (the inhabitants of) Nešaš.” With the beginning of our documentation of the language proper we distinguish Old Hittite (seventeenth or early sixteenth century–c. 1500), Middle Hittite (c. 1500–c. 1375), and Neo-Hittite (c. 1375–c. 1200). Adherents of the “short chronology” would lower these dates somewhat, particularly at the upper end.

Speakers of what was to be the Anatolian branch of the Indo–European family apparently migrated into Asia Minor, probably from the Balkans across the Bosporus, in the course of the third millennium BC.

Introduction

This chapter will necessarily be rather different from most of those that precede, since it deals with languages of which no direct record survives – languages which are, by definition, prehistoric. Prehistoric languages can only be studied inferentially, and the only sound basis for our inferences is the well-known uniformitarian principle (UP). As applied in historical linguistics, the UP states the following:

Since the only alternative is unconstrained guesswork, all scientific historical linguists must take the UP seriously. It follows that we must not interpret what we find in the written historical record in any way that is inconsistent with the range of structures and changesin-progress that we can observe in languages currently spoken, nor must we posit for a prehistoric language any type of structure or change that is not actually attested somewhere among the known languages of theworld. This very general principle has remarkably specific consequences, especiallywith regard to phonological change (see §3 below), which constrain and guide our hypotheses with a precision often surprising to interested observers outside the field.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Luvian (or Luwian) was arguably the most widely spoken member of the Anatolian sub-group of Indo-European. Evidence for the language is twofold. First, the cuneiform archives of the Hittite capital Hattuša in central Anatolia contain a number of texts with passages in a language designated luwili; that is, of the land Luwiya, which the Old Hittite Laws list as one of three major divisions of the Hittite state.

Starke (1985) has shown in his excellent edition of the Cuneiform Luvian (CLuvian) corpus that the apparently extensive texts actually represent variations on scarcely a dozen distinct compositions (aside from a few fragments). With one or two exceptions, the texts are rituals, some of a private, therapeutic nature, others belonging to the state cult. The CLuvian manuscripts, like the Hittite, date from the sixteenth to thirteenth centuries BC, including a few from the Old Hittite period (see Ch. 2, §1). Beyond this highly restricted material, there are also many isolated Luvianisms scattered throughout the Hittite texts, both as foreign words and as genuine loanwords adapted to Hittite inflection. Starke (1990 and elsewhere) has demonstrated that Luvian influence on Hittite was both earlier (including prehistoric) and more extensive than previously acknowledged. However, the fact that the two languages are very closely related makes it difficult to distinguish with certainty Luvian loanwords into Hittite from native Hittite cognates of Luvian lexemes, and not all of Starke's claims are equally persuasive (see Melchert 1992).

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Sanskrit is an Indo-European language, a member of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-Iranian subgroup of that family. It is chronologically and in terms of linguistic development the “oldest” Indo-Aryan language and consequently often referred to as Old Indic (Altindisch) or Old Indo-Aryan; its descendants include a range of linguistic varieties classified under the rubric Middle Indic (or Prākrit, see Ch. 3), as well as the Modern Indic (New Indo-Aryan) languages spoken today, such as Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali. It is not related genetically to the Dravidian languages of South India, such as Tamil and Telegu.

The oldest form of Sanskrit is so-called Vedic Sanskrit, the language of the four collections of liturgical texts known as the Vedas and of the early exegetical literature on these texts. The oldest Veda is the Ṛgveda (Rig-veda), a compilation of 1,028 hymns which took shape around 1500 BC in northwest India, though the composition and collection of hymns clearly occupied several centuries. In language, style, and phraseology the Ṛgveda resembles the earliest texts of its closest linguistic relative, the Gāthās attributed to the prophet Zarathustra, composed in Old Avestan (see Ch. 6).

Though the composition of Vedic texts can be dated with fair confidence to the period of c. 1500–500 BC, direct records of them are only found several millennia later. The “texts” were transmitted orally, with minimal alteration, and even after they were also committed to writing, the manuscripts were perishable and less reliable than the oral tradition.

The present volume covers far greater geographic space than any of its companion volumes: all of Asia is included – excepting the linguistically rich regions of Asia Minor, with Transcaucasia (see The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor) and southwest Asia (which readers will find covered within the volumes entitled The Ancient Languages of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Aksum and The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia) – as well as the American continents (or continent, as one prefers). Over half of the languages examined in the chapters that follow were spoken in ancient Iran, central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent; and of these, all were Indo-European languages, with the exception of the Dravidian language of Old Tamil.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Palaic was once the spoken language of the land of Palā, generally agreed to have been located to the northwest of Hittite territory across the Halys River (modern Kizil Irmak) in what is now north central Turkey. The country name is surely reflected in the later classical Blaëne and Paphlagonia. Palaic is attested in scarcely a dozen ritual fragments from the cuneiform archives of the ancient Hittite capital Hattuša (modern Boğazköy). The documents are contemporary with the Hittite (sixteenth to thirteenth centuries BC), including a couple of manuscripts from the Old Hittite period.

What little Palaic we have owes its preservation to liturgical use by the Hittites, chiefly for the cult of the Hattic god Za/iparfa. Palā, mentioned in the Old Hittite Laws as one of the three divisions of the Hittite state along with Hatti and Luwiya, appears only rarely in later texts. Its decline in importance is sometimes attributed to the depredations of the Kaskeans, a people of the northern mountains who caused serious problems for the Hittites throughout their history. It is likely that Palaic was extinct as a spoken language by the thirteenth century, and it may well have been so by the time of our earliest texts in the sixteenth. The extremely sparse documentation makes all aspects of the following description provisional. Palaic is interpreted largely in light of the much better attested Hittite so far as the facts permit.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

The term Pahlavi is used to describe a variety of closely related Middle Iranian languages, including a more archaic variety – the language of early inscriptions – and a more innovative one, so-called Book Pahlavi. Given the sparseness of attestation of the earliest varieties of Pahlavi, this sketch will focus on Book Pahlavi, which is in fact quite richly attested. Book Pahlavi is the name generally used to designate that particular variety of Western Middle Iranian used in Zoroastrian writings. Its use in this function covers both a long temporal span (the third century BC to the eighth/ninth century AD) and a broad geographic area. Given this spatio-temporal range, it can be safely assumed that the language showed considerable variation, particularly in the phonological domain. However, the archaizing writing system in which virtually all of our Pahlavi records survive remained quite stable throughout this period and in these diverse regions. Many details of the interpretation of the Pahlavi records thus remain somewhat speculative, our sketches doubtless (inadvertently, of course) combining features of diverse temporal (and perhaps geographical) strata.

The “golden age” of Pahlavi was almost certainly the third to seventh centuries AD, during which time it served as the “standard” language of the Sasanian realms, both for government and for commerce.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Middle Indic (or Prākrit) is the designation for a range of Indo-Aryan languages displaying characteristic phonological and grammatical developments from Old Indic (i.e., Sanskrit, see Ch. 2). Like Sanskrit they belong to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family and are directly attested beginning in the latter part of the first millennium BC and through the first millennium AD. Middle Indic is not strictly a chronological term, but rather refers to logical stages of linguistic development. Some of the defining characteristics of Middle Indic phonology are found already in lexical items in the oldest Sanskrit text, the Rig-veda, and Middle Indic languages are attested alongside Sanskrit for all of their history. The alternate designation, Prākrit, means “natural, unrefined,’ hence “vernacular,” as opposed to saṃskr̥ta- “perfected,” applied to the prescriptive, rule-governed Classical Sanskrit of the grammarians. As well as sometimes designating all Middle Indic speech forms, Prākrit is often used in the narrow sense to refer to a subset of these languages. This latter usage will be followed here.

In the following sections, we will enumerate the various Middle Indic languages and describe the evidence for them.

Inscriptions

Though forms showing characteristic Middle Indic sound changes are found in our earliest Vedic Sanskrit text, no Middle Indic languages are directly attested until the third century BC. At this time appear the earliest inscriptional records of any Indo-Aryan languages, the inscriptions of the Buddhist Mauryan emperor Aśoka (Aś.).

In the following pages, the reader will discover what is, in effect, a linguistic description of all known ancient languages. Never before in the history of language study has such a collection appeared within the covers of a single work. This volume brings to student and to scholar convenient, systematic presentations of grammars which, in the best of cases, were heretofore accessible only by consulting multiple sources, and which in all too many instances could only be retrieved from scattered, out-of-the-way, disparate treatments. For some languages, the only existing comprehensive grammatical description is to be found herein.

This work has come to fruition through the efforts and encouragement of many, to all of whom the editor wishes to express his heartfelt gratitude. To attempt to list all – colleagues, students, friends – would, however, certainly result in the unintentional and unhappy neglect of some, and so only a much more modest attempt at acknowledgments will be made. Among those to whom special thanks are due are first and foremost the contributors to this volume, scholars who have devoted their lives to the study of the languages of ancient humanity, without whose expertise and dedication this work would still be only a desideratum. Very special thanks also go to Dr. Kate Brett of Cambridge University Press for professionalism, her wise and expert guidance, and her unending patience, also to her predecessor, Judith Ayling, for permitting me to persuade her of the project's importance.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Armenian forms an independent branch of the Indo-European language family. Although Armenian was spoken in areas adjacent to those inhabited by speakers of Anatolian languages, it shares few significant linguistic features with the Anatolian subgroup of Indo-European. Its closest linguistic relatives are Greek and the Indo-Iranian subgroup. These three branches of Indo-European show shared developments in their morphology and vocabulary which are not found in other Indo-European languages: for example, the use of the augment *e- to mark past tense verb forms; the use of a marker *-bhi (s) for the instrumental case; and the prohibitive particle *mē.

Some scholars have thought that the agreements between Armenian and Greek are sufficient to allow the reconstruction of a Helleno-Armenian subgroup of Indo-European, but their arguments are not conclusive, since it cannot be clearly proved that the agreements represent shared common innovations. Others, relying on an ancient tradition that the Armenians were a “colony of the Phrygians” (Herodotus 7.73) have tried to identify developments shared by Armenian and Phrygian, but have met with little success. Some of the phonetic developments which have been claimed for Phrygian also took place in Armenian, but all too often these sound changes rest upon very uncertain etymologies, and the close link between the languages is called into question by several well-established Phrygian forms. For example, the Phrygian form matar is generally taken to be a nominative singular meaning “mother,” from Proto-Indo-European *mātēr; the cognate Armenian form is mayr.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Linguistic prehistory and history

The language described herein as Mayan is known from a hieroglyphic script that was employed in a large region in Mesoamerica, encompassingmuch of what is today southeastern Mexico, northern and eastern Guatemala, all of Belize, and the western part of Honduras. The earliest securely dated and geographically provenienced hieroglyphic text from this region is Stela 29 from Tikal in northeastern Guatemala, which bears a date of 6 July AD 292. The script was in continuous use in this region until the second half of the sixteenth century, when it was replaced by the Latin-based alphabet introduced by the Spaniards.

Lyle Campbell and Terrence Kaufman (1985) have classified the thirty or so Mayan languages in terms of five branches, each of which is further divided into groups and subgroups (Fig. 9.1). At the time of the Spanish Conquest, the inhabitants of the region where hieroglyphic texts have been found spoke languages representing the Yucatecan and Greater Tzeltalan groups (Fig. 9.2). The Yucatecan languageswere confined to the Yucatan peninsula in the north. South of them was a broad band of Cholan languages, running from Chontal and Chol in the west to Cholti and Chorti in the east. Tzeltal was the only language in Tzeltalan Proper that was spoken in the region under consideration.

Kaufman's (1976) glottochronological estimates suggest that by AD 292 Yucatecan had already separated from Huastecan, and that Cholan and Tzeltalan Proper had already differentiated from each other.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Old Tamil stands alongside Sanskrit as one of India's two classical languages. First attested about 254 BC, Old Tamil is the oldest recorded member of the Dravidian languages, a family which today encompasses twenty-four distinct languages. Old Tamil belongs to the southern branch of this family, which includes Malayalam, Irula, Kota, Toda, Kannada, Badaga, Kodagu, and Tulu, as well as Modern Tamil (see Steever 1987).

The era of Old Tamil extends until roughly the seventh century AD, a period of transition to Medieval Tamil. Medieval Tamil differs from Old Tamil in several respects: Old Tamil has two simple tenses – past and non-past – while Medieval Tamil has three: past, present, and future. Old Tamil has relatively few Indo-Aryan lexical borrowings, while Medieval Tamil admits many. During the fourteenth century AD, Medieval Tamil develops into Modern Tamil, a language spoken by nearly 50 million people today. All three periods of Tamil possess a rich literature.

Old Tamil was spoken throughout southern India, in what are now the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, as well as in northern Śri Lanka. It is the immediate predecessor of not only Medieval Tamil, but also Malayalam. The western dialects of Late Old Tamil or Early Medieval Tamil, geographically separated from the others by the Western Ghats, developed into Malayalam. Malayalam lost rules of subject–verb agreement so that finite verbs in the modern language lack personal endings.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

When the Phrygians emerged as a political entity in the middle of the eighth century BC, they occupied the central part of Anatolia. They were often settled on sites which were previously occupied by the Hittites (Gordion, the city of Midas, Boğazköy, etc.).

Their arrival has long been associated with the collapse of the Hittite Empire (around 1200 BC). However, archeological findings more often than not reveal a hiatus on the relevant sites between the last Hittite level, generally punctuated by a catastrophe involving fire, and the first Phrygian level. In Hattusas/Boğazköy, the capital of the empire, following a fire on the citadel, Büyükkale (c. 1180 BC), about four centuries of abandonment seem to have preceded the Phrygian occupation (see Gunter 1991:106). In Gordion, however, where no break is observed between the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age, the first traces of a “European” presence are found from the very start of the first millennium (see Sams 1994).

Even so, Tiglathpilesar I of Assur (1112–1072 BC)speaks of his battles against the Mushkis, on the upper Tigris (cf. Der kleine Pauly, vol. IV, col. 822, s.v. Phryger [G. Neumann]).