River Valleys and States
When people began to till the earth, it soon turned out that some areas were better suited for farming than others. The most fruitful soils were found in some river valleys, and around the Euphrates and the Tigris as well as along the Nile many people settled close to each other. In these valleys they learnt to regulate the water supply through irrigation canals and dams.
A person who wants to plough and sow a piece of land and then harvest it has to rely on some kind of societal order that prevents other people from taking the crop. Even more stability and security is necessary for people to invest in digging canals. A canal is made to water several plots of land for many years, and will be dug only by people who stand a good chance of being able to retain both land and canal for a considerable time.
Sure enough, stable and orderly societies appeared in the river valleys. Those are the oldest communities we know any details about, and that is because of an innovation, the most important of all the inventions of mankind—writing.
In the Euphrates and Tigris valley the Sumerians were the first to use what is known as cuneiform writing, starting around 5,200 years ago. After many centuries the Sumerians disappeared from the scene of history, and were succeeded by the Akkadians, and much later the Assyrians.All used the same type of script, although their languages were different. Cuneiform means “wedge-shaped,” and the distinctive feature of this kind of writing is that the characters are formed by wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets.
The system was used continuously for 3,000 years, and was adapted to the requirements of about fifteen different languages. Still, many signs and basic features remained the same over the millennia, and Sumerian in fact lived on as a literary language for a very long time. It seems to have disappeared as a spoken language around 1800 or 1700 bc, but the scribes in Babylon in the sixth century bc still learnt to read and write Sumerian as well as their own language. Obviously, one of the important features of a script is that it can preserve old languages and language forms.
We shall concentrate here on a slightly younger script; we turn to the Nile valley and the Egyptian state.
The State, The Language, and The Script
The first specimens of Egyptian writing are about 5,000 years old. At that time there already existed a strong, centralized Egyptian state that controlled the long, low, fertile part of the Nile valley with its large population. We know of this kingdom through the inscriptions in hieroglyphic writing, but also via thousands of monuments, works of art, and other archaeological remains. The Egyptian state under the Pharaohs surpasses all other political organizations in longevity. The Egyptian language was used officially in the state for around 2,700 years. Only after Alexander’s conquest of Egypt in 332 bc was the language pushed into the background in favour of Greek, and not until 300 years later did Egypt cease to be an independent state.
As early as the first centuries of the kingdom, the Egyptians accomplished their most spectacular achievements by constructing the big pyramids. With the technology of that time, the building of one pyramid may have involved perhaps 100,000 people for decades. How was this possible?
A prerequisite was that all in this large realm could communicate with each other. This was simple if everyone spoke the same language, and that seems to have been the case, by and large. The Old Kingdom in Egypt may have been one of the first instances, if not the first, of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people using the same language. It meant, among other things, that representatives of the central power could travel to all parts of the country and make themselves understood.
The available information indicates that almost all inhabitants of Egypt spoke Egyptian, from oldest times up to the collapse of the kingdom 3,000 years later. Possibly one small language group had become much larger when agriculture was introduced. We cannot be certain what happened and why.
But what is really remarkable is that a large population kept talking the same language for thousands of years, and that it did not split up into dialects, which in turn developed into separate languages. This tells strongly against what is said above about languages being liable to change and split. The Egyptian language did change over time, as all languages do, but it did not break up into several languages; it remained a unit. Why was this so?
The answer is obvious enough. The political homogeneity and the need for communication throughout the country were the forces that prevented the language from falling apart. Those who inhabited the Kingdom of Egypt just had to stick to the Egyptian language. This country is the first instance of how a people speaking one language established a large state and dominated it for a long time. The language and the state became allies, as it were, mutually supporting each other.
To be sure, this is only part of the explanation. For if this were the whole truth, why do not all states with only one language remain intact for three millennia? To counter this, it would be necessary to discuss the traditionalistic culture of the Egyptians in more detail. But the general lesson is still valid. A strong state mostly has a dominant language,and the state supports that language. Languages depend on states, and states depend on languages.
But back to the question of how the Egyptians could manage the building of pyramids. In addition to a common language, there had to be a surplus of labour. When all necessary work had been done in the fields and in the canals, in order to ensure food for all, many people must have had time left to attend to other tasks.
That labour force had to be used for the pyramids, and other projects decided by the state. Therefore hundreds of thousands must have got food and lodging while they were building, without doing any farming of their own. In some way, then, the food had to be taken from the farmers and given to the builders. Or in other words, to maintain the construction work the state had to exact heavy taxes from the farmers. And that was indeed the case.
But taxation requires a system including delivery dates, checks, lists of taxes and taxpayers, and receipts. And what is needed for lists and receipts? A written language. An organization as complex as the one needed to construct a giant pyramid requires the use of writing.
Many believe that the need for taxes and receipts was the original impetus for the invention of writing. In the case of cuneiform writing, there was clearly a preliminary stage before the development of a complete writing system, when there were symbols for numbers and for goods that were used in lists and receipts, but no method for writing complete texts. But in the case of the hieroglyphs, even the earliest examples show a system that can be used to write down any kind of message.
Hieroglyphs
The Egyptian hieroglyphic script is often seen as writing by means of pictures. Many of the signs do indeed clearly depict something, and the meaning of the sign is often in some way connected with what is depicted. But there is no way to guess the sense of the text just by focusing on the depicted objects. As a matter of fact, most signs represent just sounds of the language, and others carry an abstract or grammatical meaning.
All this may sound complicated; it is. Learning to read and write hieroglyphs was very time-consuming, and only a tiny portion of the population mastered the art. Experts estimate that perhaps one person out of every hundred could read and write in ancient Egypt.
Some of those who did possess this knowledge were people in the highest echelons of society, but most of them were the ones who made reading and writing their profession, the scribes or secretaries. They dealt with taxes, of course, but also with official correspondence and bookkeeping. There were many inscriptions, often glorifying the Pharaoh or other important people, and numerous sepulchral monuments. But beyond that, there were hardly any texts for the general public to read.
For that reason there is much that we do not know about the linguistic situation in Ancient Egypt. In order for us to know about previous epochs it is necessary that the knowledge has been transferred. The earliest Egyptians wrote down little about other things than the official business of the state, and other facts are hard to come by.
As few people mastered the written language, it seems improbable that it could have influenced speech to any large extent. In modern times, the written language quite often is perceived as a model, or even an ideal, for the spoken form to imitate, but in a society with so few readers this can hardly have been the case.
Egyptologists have shown that the spoken language must have changed very much in the course of the three millennia of the Kingdom. But the hieroglyphic writing remained more or less the same for a very long time. It was used without any major alterations from the middle of the third millennium bc up to around ad 400. It is true that other writing systems appeared during this time and were used in parallel, but the hieroglyphic one remained in use throughout. It was based on the spoken language at the time of its introduction.
Those who became scribes employing the traditional script in the first centuries ad first had to learn a very complex way of rendering a spoken language in writing. They also had to learn what the language sounded like several thousand years before their time; otherwise they were not able to spell the words in the correct, traditional way. Hieroglyphs were difficult even at the beginning, but in the late period the learning task must have been tremendous. The last scribes may have faced a challenge almost as great as that of modern Egyptologists.
Writing Systems and Society
There are other writing systems similar to the Egyptian one and the Sumerian one. The most important one still in use is the Chinese script. Such systems are often called logographic, meaning “word-writing,” although as we have seen many characters actually stand for syllables or single speech sounds.
While the Egyptian system was probably created under some influence from the cuneiform script, the Chinese writing probably evolved quite independently. However, it is considerably younger; texts in Chinese first appear around 1200 bc. But by now, the script has been in use for more than 3,000 years, and is still very much alive; it is used by hundreds of millions of people.
This type of writing is by its nature more conservative than alphabets are. An alphabet conveys sounds, and as the sounds of a spoken language are always in a state of change the difference between written and spoken language constantly becomes larger. But it is possible to reform the spelling so that the direct connection between the spoken sound and the written symbol is restored.
In a script of a more symbolic kind some signs denote meanings without any relation to the pronunciation. Even those signs that principally denote sounds are connected with an object or a notion. That is, the signs do not convey only sounds but also another kind of content. For this reason, such a script is more liable to remain unchanged even if the spoken language is thoroughly transformed.
It may not be entirely accidental that two of the most longlived and most conservative cultures in history, the Egyptian and the Chinese, have both employed symbolic writing systems. The very nature of the script may have contributed towards retention of norms, notions, and societal order.
However that may be, it is a fact that logographic writing systems have been in use for a very long time and that one of them is used now by a substantial part of humanity. Such systems have some drawbacks in comparison to alphabetic systems, but also some advantages. There is no reason to regard one of the systems as superior; mainly, they are just different.
It should also be mentioned that there are and have been several writing systems in which the most important level of representation is neither the word nor the sound, but the syllable. The most important of these is Japanese writing. It was developed from the Chinese system, and a large number of Chinese logograms are still used, together with the characters that denote syllables. This system too is quite viable and has been in use for a long time in an important culture.
In Western societies with alphabetical writing systems it is sometimes believed or even taken for granted that logographic and syllabic writing systems are inflexible or somehow antiquated, and that they will eventually be abandoned in favour of the alphabet. There does not seem to be any reason to believe that this will happen. The systems work very well, and they are perfectly adaptable to modern technology.
As for book printing, that art was practised in China for several hundred years before it was introduced in Europe. When it comes to computer technology, only alphabetic characters could be handled in the early days, but that time is long gone. At present, Chinese and Japanese are used much on the Internet, and the rate of growth is very high.
So there are no intrinsic reasons why logographic or syllabic writing systems should not dominate the world. As a matter of fact, though, the alphabetic system conquered Europe, and from there eventually spread over much of the globe. The next chapter is about the first language with an alphabet.
You May Also Need To Check:
- Languages Before History
- Chapter #2 | The Large Language Groups
- Chapter #3 | Writing and the Egyptians
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