HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Introduction

“Chinese is only one of a very few languages whose history is documented in an unbroken tradition extending back to the second millennium BC” (Norman 1988: ix). There are two main causes for this situation: (i) the unity of Chinese culture in spite of periods of political disunity; (ii) the use of a script which has been independent of any particular phonetic manifestation of the languages it represented.

Chinese is usually divided into Ancient Chinese (gudai hanyu) and Contemporary Chinese (xiandai hanyu; the pronunciation of all Chinese characters is herein given in the modern standard language putonghua, in the standard romanization pinyin). Ancient Chinese is simply defined as “the language of the writings of the past” (Wang 1979:1). It covers a very long period, from the first Chinese inscriptions known to us, dated to the fourteenth century BC, until the nineteenth century. One then distinguishes generally for Ancient Chinese three basic stages: (i) the Archaic period (shanggu), until the second century BC; (ii) the Middle or Medieval period (zhonggu), from the first century BC to the middle of the thirteenth century AD; (iii) the Modern period (jindai), from the middle of the thirteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century.

It is during the Archaic period that what is known today as Classical Chinese (wenyan) is fixed.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Georgian is a member of the Kartvelian family, one of the three indigenous Caucasian language families. Its sister languages are Mingrelian and Laz, two closely related languages spoken in western Georgia and northeast Turkey, and Svan, spoken in the highlands of northwest Georgia. There has been much speculation about the relation of Kartvelian to other language families. Typological similarities with Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic and an impressive number of vocabulary items which appear to be shared with these families have led some linguists to include Kartvelian as a peripheral member of the so-called Nostratic macrofamily, a phyletic grouping encompassing many of the principal Eurasiatic language groups. Even if the Nostratic hypothesis is not correct, the Kartvelian languages show the imprint of long-standing contact with Indo-European and Semitic speech communities, going back four thousand years or more. Most specialists locate the Proto-Kartvelian speech community either in or somewhat to the south of modern-day Georgia.

Ancient Near Eastern documents as early as the twelfth–eleventh centuries BC mention tribal groups which are likely to have included Proto-Georgian speakers. The first clear indications of Georgian political entities date from the seventh–sixth centuries BC, by which time Greek colonies are installed in Colchis, on the east coast of the Black Sea, and much of Transcaucasia and Asia Minor is under Persian domination. The two major early Georgian kingdoms – Colchis in the west and Iberia in the east – began to consolidate at this time.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

The land of Caria lay during the first millennium BC in the southwest of Anatolia between Lydia and Lycia. A few dozen texts in the epichoric language, mostly very short or fragmentary, have been found in Caria itself or on objects likely to have originated there. These are dated very approximately to the fourth to third centuries BC. There is also a very fragmentary Carian–Greek bilingual from Athens, dated to the sixth century. By far the largest number of Carian texts consists of tomb inscriptions and graffiti left by Carian mercenaries in Egypt, dating from the seventh to fifth centuries BC. A new epoch in Carian studies has now begun with the dramatic discovery in 1996 of an extensive Carian–Greek bilingual by Turkish excavators in Kaunos and its remarkably swift publication by Frei and Marek (1997).

WRITING SYSTEM

The Carian script surely stands in some relationship to the Greek alphabet. The direction of writing is predominantly right to left in texts from Egypt, and left to right in those from Caria. Scriptio continua is frequent, and use of word-dividers is sporadic.

Decipherment of the Carian script has been a long and arduous task. Pioneering efforts by A. H. Sayce at the end of the nineteenth century were followed by several false steps based on the erroneous assumption of a syllabic or semisyllabic system and a long period of relative neglect.

In his discussion of the philosopher Cleobulus from the Rhodian city of Lindus – at times identified as one of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece – Diogenes Laertius, chronicler of the philosophers, rehearses for his readers the inscription that was carved upon the tomb of the Phrygian King Midas – reported to have been composed by the wise and riddling Cleobulus (though some say it was Homer's work, commissioned by Midas' sons after Homer had lost a poetic contest to Hesiod):

If Midas' tomb and its inscription shall stand forever, resisting the onslaught of time and testifying to the Phrygian king's existence upon this earth, until earth no longer is, the people over whom this monarch reigned and the language that they spoke would seem to occupy a no less transcendent place in the unwinding of time – at least to judge from Herodotus' report of a discovery that was made in the reign of the Egyptian Pharaoh Psammetichus:

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

The land called Lydia in Greek sources lay during the first millennium BC on the west central coast of Anatolia, centering on the River Hermos (modern Gediz), with its capital at Sardis (near modern Turgutlu). The indigenous language is attested in graffiti and on coins from the end of the eighth or beginning of the seventh century down to the third, but well-preserved inscriptions of significant length are presently limited to the fifth and fourth centuries, during the period of Persian domination. Lydian texts are thus effectively contemporaneous with those in Lycian.

Extant Lydian texts now number slightly over one hundred, but fewer than thirty of these consist of more than a few words and are reasonably complete. Aside from coins, graffiti, and very short inscriptions on various objects, the overwhelming majority of the inscriptions are on stone. The bulk of these are sepulchral in content, but several of the texts are decrees of one sort or another. Some half-dozen texts are in verse, with a stress-based meter and vowel assonance at line end (see Eichner 1986a and 1993:114ff., with references). All but a handful of the Lydian texts have been found in or near Sardis. For several isolated finds much farther afield see Gusmani 1995:9f. One short Lydian–Aramaic bilingual text helped establish the rudiments of Lydian grammar, but no extensive Lydian–Greek bilingual comparable to the Létôon Trilingual for Lycian (see Ch. 5, §1) has yet come to light.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

History of the language and its speakers

From the late ninth to the late seventh century BC, Urartian was written in the empire of the Urartian kings, stretching from present-day Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iranian Azerbaijan, and northeastern Iraq to the Euphrates. Neither its geographical origin can be conclusively determined, nor the area where Urartian was spoken by a majority of the population. It was probably dominant in the mountainous areas along the upper Zab Valley and around Lake Van. The center of Urartu is the region surrounding Lake Van with its capital of Ṭušpa (citadel of Van). We do not know when the language became extinct, but it is likely that the collapse of what had survived of the empire until the end of the seventh or the beginning of the sixth century BC caused the language to disappear.

Urartian is closely related to Hurrian (see Ch. 9, §1.1), especially to the dialect conventionally called Old Hurrian (see Ch. 9, §1.3). Presumably Urartian branched off from Hurrian not much later than approximately 2000 BC.

The earliest inscriptions of the Urartian kings are written in the Neo-Assyrian script and language (a dialect of Akkadian; see WAL Ch. 8), though after a single generation the Urartian language, for most purposes, replaced the use of Assyrian. The eighth century BC witnessed the climax of Urartian power and the greatest production of Urartian royal inscriptions (the Annals of Argišti I and Sardure II).

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Old Persian is one of two Old Iranian languages which are attested in the Achaemenid royal inscriptions (see below), members of that branch of the Indo-European language family called Indo-Iranian, or Aryan (the Persians designate themselves and their language by the term ariya–). The Iranian languages began to take shape when the ancestors of the Indo-Aryans left the common homeland in the steppes of Central Asia in the first half of the second millennium BC. The Western Iranian peoples, the Medes who settled in Media and the Persians in Fārs (speaking a Northwesternand Southwestern Iranian dialect respectively), step into the light of history in the ninth century BC, when Median names are first attested in Assyrian documents.

While “Old Persian” was certainly the language of Fārs, the variety which is attested in the Achaemenid inscriptions appears to be a rather artificial idiom, peppered with dialectal and archaic words, unlike any dialect actually spoken (characteristics of a distinct spoken Old Persian may be discerned from certain spontaneous phonetic developments, and from Old Persian words and names as rendered in other languages). The language called Old Persian was thus restricted to royal usage (as was the cuneiform script in which Old Persian was recorded). Even so, Old Persian was neither the lingua franca nor the administrative language of the Achaemenid Empire, roles fulfilled by Aramaic and, to a limited extent, various regional languages spoken within the empire.