Jens Braarvig and Markham J. Geller

Multilingualism, Lingua Franca and Lingua Sacra

Series Editors
Ian T. Baldwin, Gerd Graßhoff, Jürgen Renn, Dagmar Schäfer, Robert Schlögl, Bernard F. Schutz

Edition Open Access Development Team
Lindy Divarci, Samuel Gfrörer, Klaus Thoden, Malte Vogl, Dirk Wintergrün

Scientific Board
Markus Antonietti, Ian Baldwin, Antonio Becchi, Fabio Bevilacqua, William G. Boltz, Jens Braarvik, Horst Bredekamp, Jed Z. Buchwald, Olivier Darrigol, Thomas Duve, Mike Edmunds, Yehuda Elkana†, Fynn Ole Engler, Robert K. Englund, Mordechai Feingold, Rivka Feldhay, Gideon Freudenthal, Paolo Galluzzi, Kostas Gavroglu, Mark Geller, Domenico Giulini, Günther Görz, Gerd Graßhoff, James Hough, Manfred Laubichler, Glenn Most, Klaus Müllen, Pier Daniele Napolitani, Alessandro Nova, Hermann Parzinger, Dan Potts, Sabine Schmidtke, Circe Silva da Silva, Ana Simões, Dieter Stein, Richard Stephenson, Mark Stitt, Noel M. Swerdlow, Liba Taub, Martin Vingron, Scott Walter, Norton Wise, Gerhard Wolf, Rüdiger Wolfrum, Gereon Wolters, Zhang Baichun.

First published 2018
Edition Open Access
http://www.edition-open-access.de
Published under Creative Commons by-nc-sa 3.0 Germany Licence
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/de/
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Max Planck Research Library for the History and Development of Knowledge
Studies 10

List of Contributors

Daniel C. Andersson

Research Fellow in History

Wolfson College, University of Oxford

Ecole Normale Superieure, Lyon

daniel.andersson@wolfson.ox.ac.uk

Florentina Badalanova Geller

Professor at the Excellence Cluster Topoi and the Seminar für Katholische Theologie

Head of the Slavonic Database of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London

Freie Universität Berlin

fgeller@zedat.fu-berlin.de

William G. Boltz

Professor of Classical Chinese

University of Washington, Seattle

boltzwm@u.washington.edu

Jens Braarvig

Professor of Religious Studies

The Norwegian Institute of Philology

Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages

University of Oslo

j.e.braarvig@ikos.uio.no

Kathrin Chlench-Priber

Germanistische Mediävistik

Universität Bern

kathrin.chlench@germ.unibe.ch

Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst

Research Fellow

Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften

durkin-meisterernst@bbaw.de

Lutz Edzard

Chair for Arabic Studies and Semitics

Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg

lutz.edzard@fau.de

Adjunct Professor of Semitics,

University of Oslo

l.e.edzard@ikos.uio.no

Kurt Gärtner

Emeritus Professor of German Philology

Universität Trier

gaertnekstaff.uni-marburg.de

Markham J. Geller

Professor für Wissensgeschichte at the Excellence Cluster Topoi

Freie Universität Berlin

Jewish Chronicle Professor

University College London

mark.geller@fu-berlin.de

Alexandra von Lieven

Seminar for Egyptology

Extracurricular Professor for Egyptology

Freie Universität Berlin

alexandra.von.lieven@fu-berlin.de

Lars Kirkhusmo Pharo

Moses Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project

Harvard University

Nord University

Norway

Velizar Sadovski

Associated Professor for Indo-European Studies

Institute of Iranian Studies

Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften

Velizar.Sadovski@oeaw.ac.at

Reinier Salverda

Professor of Dutch Language and Literature

University College London

Honorary Professor

Fryske Akademy, Leeuwarden, Netherlands

rsalverda@fryske-akademy.nl

Jan Tavernier

Université catholique de Louvain

Centre d'études orientales/Institut orientaliste de Louvain

Jan.Tavernier@uclouvain.be

Vladimir Tikhonov

Professor of Korean and East Asian Studies

Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages

University of Oslo

vladimir.tikhonov@ikos.uio.no

Klaus Wagensonner

Research Fellow

Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

Yale Babylonian Collection

Yale University

klaus.wagensonner@yale.edu

Preface

Markham J. Geller and Jens Braarvig

The present collection of essays is intended to open new paths into the relatively unchartered territory of multilingualism, which has been attracting increasing scholarly interest within the past few years. The present volume originated within a larger theme of the globalization of knowledge, which was the subject of a monumental and multifaceted collection of essays, The Globalization of Knowledge in History (2012); the volume was edited by Jürgen Renn and dedicated to the memory of two inspirational colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Peter Damerow and Malcolm Hyman, who were both instrumental in bringing this theme of “globalization of knowledge” into the forefront of academic consciousness. The present collection of essays is aimed at filling an important gap within the globalization discourse, with the recognition that knowledge transfer ultimately depends upon cross-border and cross-cultural communication, which turns out to be much more complex than originally realized, and the quest for a fuller understanding of language as the key to such transfers has harnessed the energies of a network of scholars in different disciplines, with the present volume representing initial results. More studies will follow.

The theme of multilingualism and lingua franca as presented in this book has an extensive pre-history, since it represents results from a number of conferences and workshops exploring similar themes. The initial step, setting the stage for multilingualism, was taken by the 97th Dahlem Workshop in 2007 and held at the MPIWG, Berlin, making the case for knowledge transfer in many different contexts; the proceedings were published in (Renn 2012), noted above. At the same time, a similar theme featured at a Melammu conference in Sofia (2008), the proceeds of which were published as The Ancient World in an Age of Globalization (2014). In 2009, a conference was organized by Jens Braarvig at the Norwegian Institute at Athens, dedicated exclusively to the theme of “Multilingualism, Linguae Francae and the Global History of Religious and Scientific Concepts,” as a continuation of earlier and less formal discussions on the subject. No less than five articles published here (Andersson, Braarvig, Chlench-Priber, Edzard, and Pharo) were given as papers at the Athens conference. The momentum was maintained by Peter Damerow, who single handedly organized a workshop on the theme of “Writing and the Transmission of Knowledge” (2009), held at the Werner Oechslin Library, Einsiedeln, and one paper in the present volume (Geller) originated from this workshop, although most of the contributions remain unpublished. In early 2010, Velizar Sadovski organized a meeting in Vienna on “Multilingualism in Central Asia, Near and Middle East, from Antiquity to Early Modern Times,” with a core group of participants from the Athens workshop, to ensure continuity. Generally speaking, these conferences and workshops viewed multilingualism against the background of knowledge transfer or globalization, or alternatively as examples of how individual languages or even language groups could influence each other.

Shortly afterwards, at a meeting in Harnack Haus Dahlem in 2010, the two editors of the present volume, together with Florentina Badalanova Geller, decided to change the discourse. The idea was to treat Wissenschaftsgeschichte as a philological discipline and to launch a new, more focused initiative to explain how the instruments of language actually allow knowledge to diffuse globally through translation and multilingual encounters, employing the vehicles of lingua franca and lingua sacra. The result of this discussion was a 2010 Berlin conference, under the auspices of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Topoi Excellence Cluster of the Freie Universität Berlin, on the theme of “Crossing Boundaries, Multilingualism, Lingua Franca and Lingua Sacra.” Many of the papers presented here represent the fruits of that conference. This was hardly the end of the matter, since research groups within the Max Planck Institute and the Research Group D-5 of the Topoi Excellence Cluster have continued to address the subject of multilingualism, and a recent new project at the MPIWG, “Thinking in Many Tongues,” organized by Dagmar Schäfer and Glenn Most, is currently approaching this theme from fresh perspectives.

The editors would like to acknowledge the constant collaboration of Velizar Sadovski of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), Institut für Iranistik, in this work. He not only has a paper in this volume, but he founded the Multilingualism Research Group, which included many of the contributors to the present volume, representing a partnership between institutions in Vienna, Berlin, and Oslo; he also organized two events on multilingualism at the Deutsche Orientalistentag in 2011 and 2013, as well as workshops in Vienna in 2011 and 2016.

The editors express their gratitude to the Topoi Excellence Cluster and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science for financial and institutional support, but we are especially indebted to Jürgen Renn for his continuous backing and interest in this project. We also thank Lindy Divarci and the Edition Open Access team for their prodigious efforts in preparing the manuscript for print, in particular Bendix Düker and Sylvia Szenti for their meticulous compilation of the index. We would like to acknowledge the Freie Universität Berlin and University of Oslo, and further the Norwegian Philological Institute, as well as the ERC Advanced Grant BabMed, for providing the favorable working environments in which work on this volume could be brought to completion.

References

Geller, M. J., ed. (2014). Melammu: The Ancient World in an Age of Globalization. Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium of the Melammu Project, Held in Sophia, Bulgaria, September 1–3, 2008. Max Planck Research Library for the History and Development of Knowledge, Proceedings 7. Berlin: Edition Open Access.

Renn, J., ed. (2012). The Globalization of Knowledge in History. Berlin: Edition Open Access.

Introduction

Markham J. Geller and Jens Braarvig

Communication across borders, in connection with diffusion of knowledge and commerce, usually requires a lingua franca. Historically a number of such common languages, written or spoken and often the languages of great empires and religions, have influenced the various national languages of their users formally and conceptually, making communication possible beyond national and ethnic borders while serving the purpose of sharing knowledge, even globally. On this basis, we have decided to put together a number of studies related to lingua franca and its counterpart lingua sacra to see how they operate within various multilingual environments.

The study opens with two theoretical contributions of Salverda and Braarvig, which present the essential arguments for lingua franca within both non-European and European contexts, from antiquity through modernity. Reinier Salverda leads off with actual theories of lingua franca and lingua sacra in modernity, with his own examples derived from various literary genres within the humanities and social sciences (e.g. anthropology, cultural / intellectual history, Wissensgeschichte, etc.), ending with a few thoughts on lingua franca in antiquity. Jens Braarvig, on the other hand, delves into a discussion of dependent languages, drawn from a wide variety of examples known from written records before c. 1500 CE. Braarvig explores the multi-faceted relationships between a dominant lingua franca and other (minor) languages which are bound to it through commerce, administration, religion, warfare, and other kinds of political and social relationships.

The first case studies in this volume treat aspects of historical situations and literatures related to multilingualism within a European context. These individual studies are presented thematically rather than chronologically or geographically, and since such patterns of semantic and linguistic influence are easiest to determine in more recent periods, we begin with European languages in close proximity and showing influences on the deepest levels of semantics as well as lexicography and grammar. The first example, therefore, concerns the intimate relationships between Latin and German, as explained by Kurt Gärtner, who provides a detailed summary of loanwords and loan concepts between Latin and medieval German. Gärtner’s study leads naturally into that of Kathrin Chlench-Priber, who describes the translations of Konrad of Megenberg from Latin to German, and how Konrad adopted Greek and Latin terms into German as technical vocabulary, but that these coined terms never succeeded in entering spoken German.

At the same time as these efforts to translate Latin or Greek into German were taking place, Slavonic scholarship was busy translating religious and scientific texts into Church Slavonic after the introduction of Christianity into Eastern Europe, resulting in Church Slavonic’s widespread influence in the East. This leads us to a second category of language related to lingua franca, which can be classified as lingua sacra, characterized by the formal adoption of a language for the dissemination of sacred texts, either as the primary language of holy scriptures or as a translation of religious texts. In some cases, the categories of lingua franca and lingua sacra overlap (e.g. Arabic), although often with a primary and secondary status, so that either a lingua franca becomes adopted as a lingua sacra or vice versa; in this way, an already widely spoken language can be used to translate sacred texts (e.g. Targumic Aramaic or Syriac) and develop a new status as lingua sacra—also used in liturgy—or a language used to compose holy texts becomes used as a lingua franca (e.g. Sanskrit). Two examples of this phenomenon provided by Florentina Badalanova Geller are somewhat unusual and not normally considered in this connection, namely Old Church Slavonic and Turkish, very different examples of the use of a lingua sacra reflecting both biblical and parabiblical traditions which also found their way into popular narratives. She brings evidence from Slavonic texts being used in both Christian and Muslim contexts to convey holy texts and stories from canonical scriptures in local languages (e.g. Bulgarian or Russian), with the assumption being that these were the original languages of these accounts, as reflected in the “domestication” of biblical toponyms and personal names into the localities of the translators and narrators. In a second contribution, Badalanova Geller presents the unusual case of a Turkish poem originating from an Alevi community in Bulgaria which was designated as “Quran,” with the language showing a mixture of Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. Daniel Andersson’s article also deals with translation and reception in seventeenth-century England, but in this case he describes the earliest translations of Arabic into English.

The next case studies refer to older traditions from the Near East, with questions raised about writing systems and ancient languages in contact, and although the semantics of ancient Near Eastern texts are not yet always perfectly understood, there is a wealth of data being constantly re-evaluated by modern scholarship. In fact, writing systems can vary greatly within cuneiform syllabaries as well as within alphabets, as shown by the extensive data produced by Klaus Wagensonner’s study of Sumerian orthographies from the end of the second millennium BCE (the so-called Middle Assyrian period), long after Sumerian ceased to be spoken but retained its status as the classical language of scholarship, incantations, and liturgy. Wagensonner argues that the processes of translating Sumerian into Akkadian contributed to the survival of Sumerian, even if orthographies no longer reflected the standard writings of earlier periods. A short paper from Mark Geller questions whether Semitic roots could have been identified by Mesopotamian scholars writing in syllabic cuneiform script, or whether it was the invention of the alphabet (first attested in Ugarit) which first drew attention to the three-root radicals of Semitic languages. Although this might reflect psycholinguistics, the evidence of ancient lexicography forms the basis for the present argument that syllabaries had to find other kinds of ordering principles than those known from alphabetic scripts.

This point has ramifications for other aspects of lingua franca, since great cultural languages often exported their writing systems to other languages, and particularly important in this connection was the Aramaic writing system which diffused all over Eurasia. The question is whether the scriptura franca of the alphabet was also the first writing system to order words according to radicals of roots. A good case can also be made for the lists of roots (dhātu, “elements”) of all Sanskrit words in the Indian grammarian Pāṇini (c. 400 BCE), whose Dhātupaṭha would be the first to employ the idea of verbal roots.[1]

Jan Tavernier adds to the discussion by contrasting the multilingualism of Elam and the relationships between Elamite and its neighbors, Sumerian and Akkadian, with the more elaborate multilingualism in the same region under Achaemenid rule, in which Aramaic (rather than Persian) was adopted as lingua franca. This paper shows that relationships between a lingua franca and other languages can vary greatly within the same region over time, and that Elamite existed alongside Sumerian and Akkadian for some two millennia prior to the emergence of the Persian Empire. The next contribution dealing with Mesopotamia also views the role of lingua franca over an extended period, but in this case from antiquity into modern uses of language. Lutz Edzard takes a highly original approach to Semitic (and European) languages within the registers of treaties and diplomatic correspondence, through which he compares famous treaties in antiquity between Egypt and its northern neighbors (i.e. Mesopotamia and Anatolia), but then making the surprising leap into comparisons of treaties between the modern State of Israel and its neighbors (e.g. Security Council Resolution No. 242); for modernity, Edzard compares translations of diplomatic texts between Hebrew, Arabic, and Amharic with versions in Italian, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Russian. Edzard concludes that modern translations of such documents, even after millennia of experience, cannot entirely prevent misunderstandings between versions of the same documents.

Alexandra von Lieven’s paper, the final contribution to the Near East, counters the usual perception that Egyptians in Roman Egypt were enthusiastic learners of Greek; she presents clear examples of Greeks who learned or attempted to learn Egyptian, for a variety of reasons, among these being Cleopatra VII. She also highlights instances of texts which appear to be translations from Greek into Egyptian, although the translators themselves and their specific motives are unknown.

The focus of contributions now shifts to the India and Central Asia, beginning with Velizar Sadovski’s comparisons between the liturgical and ritual texts of the Veda and Avesta and how motifs were catalogued within learned environments. Comparisons between these literatures demonstrate remarkable parallels and similar patterns, showing how religious motifs can cross boundaries and cultures. Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst’s survey of the scope and variety of extant texts found in the Silk Road site of Turfan presents a remarkable picture of multilingualism in a cross-road of competing cultures. This article catalogues more than twenty different languages and scripts preserving Manichaean texts in Turfan, which makes this place into a unique repository of examples of lingua franca and lingua sacra. The Turfan scenario contrasts sharply with the picture of multilingualism from ancient China, which is the next region under consideration.

William Boltz’s paper finds no evidence of multilingualism or lingua franca in pre-imperial China, prior to political unification in the third century BCE, and even after unification, little evidence of multilingualism can be found apart from that introduced by the advent of Buddhism to China in the second century CE. Boltz documents the virtual silence of Chinese sources regarding non-Chinese languages and foreign scripts. Jens Braarvig’s second contribution to this volume examines the process of Buddhism being imported into China and Tibet through the medium of Sanskrit, but with somehow different results and methods. In both cases, the introduction of Buddhist texts into Chinese and Tibetan cultures involved translation and the invention of new vocabulary, but with very different results based on the respective recipient cultures. The discussion raises many important issues of reception history, both on the level of lingua franca and lingua sacra. A somewhat different picture is posed by Vladimir Tikhonov, who discusses how non-Chinese peoples of East Asia used Chinese as both a lingua franca and lingua sacra (for Buddhism and Confucianism). In fact, Chinese as lingua sacra was so heavily influenced by Sanskrit that it became referred to as Buddhist Hybrid Chinese, which spread throughout East Asia. Moreover, classical Chinese functioned as a lingua franca for administrative purposes until the late nineteenth century, in addition to its traditional role as lingua sacra. The final contribution in this collection, by Lars Pharo, shifts our attention to the West, to the phenomenon of lingua franca and lingua sacra in the Americas from the sixteenth century, which is a highly complex linguistic environment in which regions with numerous indigenous languages were invaded by Europeans speaking other languages. The contacts and competition between languages produced many instances of loanwords and loan concepts which make for invaluable case studies of multilingualism in this region.

This unusual selection of topics related to lingua franca and lingua sacra are far from representing the last word on these themes, but the present study is intended to re-open the discussion of the topic from a multidisciplinary and multi-faceted perspective, both on the levels of theory and actual examples from various regions in which lingua franca and lingua sacra have played key roles in cultural exchange. Although the scope of the volume is global, drawing examples chiefly from recorded historical cultures, it shows that there are many topics still awaiting further study within the broad spectrum of universal comparative philology. The present collection of articles shows how complex a theme multilingualism remains and that we are far from having the full picture of how complex relationships between languages in close contact and proximity reflect deep-seated exchanges of information and cultural norms.

Footnotes

[1] In Pāṇini you have the word dhātu, which means “place” (where you put or place something; the root(!) being dhā- “to place,” related to τίθημι, θήσις), best translated as “element.” The Dhātupāṭha is an ordered list to which any word can be reduced, hence the equivalent of the modern term “root.” The concept in the form of dhātu is known at the time of Pāṇini, that is, c. 400 BCE.

Part I: General Reflections

1. Empires and their Languages: Reflections on the History and the Linguistics of Lingua Franca and Lingua Sacra

Reinier Salverda

Introduction

This contribution on lingua sacra and lingua franca comes in four main sections. Section 1.1 will set out the linguistic and historical preliminaries necessary for our investigation. In section 1.2, we will take a closer look, first, at the historic Lingua Franca that was spoken for centuries around the Mediterranean; then also at the development and properties of lingua franca as a general category in modern linguistics. In section 1.3, we will explore the varieties of lingua sacras and the sources of their sacredness; then next go on to discuss the linguistic properties of lingua sacra, in particular with respect to sociolinguistics, speech act performatives and orality.

Our interest in the history of lingua franca and lingua sacra is a contemporary one, and while examining a range of historic cases we will start from a modern point de vue, using concepts, categories and analyses from contact linguistics. Beyond history and linguistics, we will draw also on disciplines such as anthropology, cultural history, theology, the social history of language, Wissensgeschichte, global intellectual history, and so forth. Underpinning this eclectic approach is the endeavor to assemble our findings on lingua franca and lingua sacra into an integrated framework of investigation, using a systematic Jakobsonian, functional-structural approach to the study of language.

Throughout, our focus will be on questions such as: What are the characteristic properties of lingua sacra, and of lingua franca? What connection, if any, is there between the function or purpose each of them serves and their linguistic form and structure? And what about their history and the difference in longue durée between the two—lingua sacra often as a stable, continuous symbolic cultural capital down the centuries, while lingua franca appears to enjoy a different kind of longevity: not continuous but intermittently and recurrently, more like a weed that will always grow anew, however much one tries to cut it back.

In section 1.4, we will look into the historic interaction of lingua franca and lingua sacra, and look forward to what is the ultimate purpose of this contribution, viz. to serve as a springboard towards studying the role, the interplay and the dynamics of lingua franca and lingua sacra in the empires of the Ancient World.

1.1 Multilingualism in Linguistic and Historical Perspective: Preliminary Considerations

1.1.1 Introduction

Lingua franca and lingua sacra are two very different notions, involving very different disciplines and domains of knowledge. On the one hand, lingua franca—as a vehicle necessary for bridging gaps of communication and comprehension between speakers of different languages—clearly belongs within the domain of linguistics, and today it has a central place in the study of multilingualism and language contact. In contrast, however, lingua sacra or “sacred language,” is currently only of marginal interest to linguists, though it does occupy an important place in the history of religions, ideas, cultures and civilizations, and in social and political history—domains, where lingua franca is mostly absent.

Meanwhile, from the history of languages we learn that at the end of Classical Antiquity it was St. Jerome’s Vulgate, his translation of the Bible into Vulgar Latin (at that time the lingua franca of the West Roman Empire), which was used to spread the Christian religion across Europe. For this translation St. Jerome did not use the elegant classical literary Latin of the golden age of Cicero and Seneca, but rather the common, much debased, corrupted and simplified lingo spoken in his own time—a choice justified by St. Augustine with a resounding missionary argument: “‘Melius est reprehendant nos grammatici quam non intelligant populi’ (It is better for our grammarians to reproach us than for the masses not to understand).”[1] In later centuries, this Bible Latin became the lingua sacra of the Roman Church, and this elevation has been a powerful force for the longue durée[2] of this language and for its maintenance until today. A comparable case from early modern history concerns Hebrew, which in eighteenth-century Europe served simultaneously as the lingua sacra of Judaism and as the lingua franca of the Jews living in many different countries of the diaspora.[3]

So what else do we know of such language constellations, and what insights do we have that can help us to understand them? How, for example, did the particular, historical Lingua Franca that used to be spoken all round the Mediterranean, become a byword for the general category of lingua francas? Which lingua francas and which lingua sacras do we encounter in history; how were they used and by whom; how did they function; and what linguistic properties did they have? And, from a more general perspective: could it be that with lingua franca and lingua sacra we have to do not with two actual languages, but rather with different roles, uses or functions of language—instances, perhaps, of De Saussure’s distinction between the esprit de clocher and the force d’intercourse,[4] two very different and counteracting, although not mutually exclusive forces, the interaction of which generates the dynamics of language in history?

These and other such questions will be discussed in this contribution, the purpose of which is to try and clarify the notions of lingua franca and lingua sacra, defining their place in history and in linguistics, as well as the conceptual networks around them. But, faced with the very different disciplinary perspectives mentioned above, we will also have to explore how these may be combined into an integrated approach that can do justice to both, and contribute to our understanding of the dynamics and interaction of lingua franca and lingua sacra. As a framework for this investigation we will adopt a systematic structural-functional approach to linguistics along the lines of Jakobson’s Linguistics and Poetics.[5] This will involve us in questions such as: What can we say about the characteristic linguistic features of lingua sacra and lingua franca? What, if any, is the connection between their linguistic form and the function they serve? And what about their histories, evolution, dynamics, and the difference in longue durée between lingua sacra and lingua franca?

As for the structure of this contribution, in this first section, we will discuss the linguistic and historical preliminaries necessary for our investigation. In the next section, we will take a closer look, first at the historic Lingua Franca as spoken for many centuries around the ports of the Mediterranean until the beginning of the twentieth century; then also at the development of lingua franca as a general category in modern contact linguistics. In section 1.3, we will explore the notion of linga sacra as well as the linguistic features associated with it. In the closing section, our focus will be on the dynamics of lingua franca and lingua sacra in contact in history, as a springboard towards studying the interaction of languages and empires in the Ancient World.

1.1.2 Linguistic Preliminaries

On language(s) and linguistics in general

The following preliminary assumptions and considerations appear to me crucial when studying language(s), multilingualism, lingua franca and lingua sacra in modern (contact) linguistics.

(1) Language is always much more than “just” language Every language comes with its own characteristic and richly varied structures, the operation of which involves all kinds of underlying mechanisms of our minds and our brains. But every language also comes with many other equally significant characteristic aspects: with symbolic power and with meaning, content and information; with a context in culture and history plus a range of functions to serve in communication; with implications in the interaction between people, in relation to the conventions of the relevant social setting; but also as a marker of its speakers’ identity, class, personality, intentions, gender, ideology, education, and so forth. Each of these different aspects—in fact, anything that is humanly possible, ranging from emotion, imagination, reason, worldview and religion through to politeness, humor, attitude, health, cooperation, trust, misunderstanding, prejudice or outright hostility and aggression—can exert its influence and leave a trace in the shape of the language concerned or in the linguistic behavior of its speakers, in its structure, content or vocabulary; its sound shape, tone of voice and silences; its social register, style or choice of words; in meanings expressed or implied in speech acts; and in its use and functioning in context.

The discipline of modern linguistics is no less complex and diverse in character. As Ferenc Kiefer and Piet van Sterkenburg have demonstrated with their collection of keynote lectures for the five-yearly international conferences of the Comité International Permanent de Linguistes (CIPL), over the century since the Cours de Linguistique Générale of Ferdinand de Saussure[6] the discipline of linguistics has taken an enormous flight.[7] With 32 very different major subject areas, the landmark 10-volume Elzevier Encyclopedia of Linguistics[8] mirrors the complexity of our object of investigation, language. So does the Blackwell Handbook of Linguistics by Aronoff and Rees-Miller,[9] which is just one volume in a series of 35 authoritative handbooks, each containing between thirty and forty expert chapters, which, taken together, cover all the major subdisciplines within linguistics today. The same holds for CIPL’s Linguistic Bibliography Online, published by Brill, and its vast, annual coverage since 1949 of scholarly publications from all subdisciplines of theoretical linguistics, both general and language-specific, from all geographic areas, and with special attention to non-Indo-European, endangered and extinct languages. What these various tools of the trade demonstrate is that the study of language today is as wide-ranging, diverse and complex a field of inquiry as the object, language, with which we are concerned.

(2) Language is never just “a” language With an estimated 7,000 languages in the world today,[10] broadly divided into 250 very different language families, of which the Indo-European family, containing some 439 languages and dialects, is just one,[11] linguistic diversity is a basic fact of life all around the world. The large majority of the world’s population today are living in situations where having a multilingual repertoire is a daily, “normal and unremarkable necessity.”[12]

Now, if we combine this enormous diversity of languages with the complexity of the discipline of linguistics which we noted above, we will quickly run into a myriad multiplicity of questions and problems for investigation—testimony to the ongoing growth, expansion and deepening of the domain of linguistics. Note, for example, that while Aronoff and Rees-Miller’s Handbook of Linguistics contains just one single chapter on the subject of multilingualism,[13] the later Handbook of Bilingualism and Multilingualism by Bhatia and Ritchie needs no fewer than 36 expert chapters to cover the key issues involved in this subfield alone.[14]

Interestingly, in the opening chapter of this Handbook, John Edwards, in an attempt to bring some order to the discussion, presents an ecolinguistic typology and classification of different situations of multilingualism.[15] There is a clear need for this, as it is extremely difficult to arrive at tenable comparisons and generalizations, since so many language situations are so very different in so many respects. So, it makes good sense to start from a range of in-depth case studies, based on careful observation, comparison, and solid description. But at the same time, we cannot simply restrict ourselves to doing case studies, studying each and everyone of all those very many and very different languages individually, in and by themselves in all their unique and rich variety, however fascinating this would be. Amidst all this linguistic diversity, there is a clear need to ensure coherence of approach, and for this we will need a common ground and a shared focus of inquiry. In my view, we have this in the human language faculty. But this notion is not discussed in Bhatia and Ritchie’s Handbook (see further below, in subsection (4)).

(3) The perspective of time At this point, we may ask how old multilingualism and linguistic diversity really are. It is not just the world of today which is multilingual; the past has had its fair share too. Many languages have vanished, and from Anglosaxon and Etruscan via Ostrogothic, Punic and Sumerian to Tocharian, Vandal and Wiradhuri we can draw up a long list of extinct languages[16]—some of which we may still know today, if they have been preserved in writing and deciphered; while others we may still know of, if at some point somebody has cared to leave a mention or a name.

When we travel back in time, what we find is that, at each and every stage of the written record for the past 5,000 years, there have always been many languages in the world. Three millennia BCE, Uruk in Sumer, the city of Gilgamesh and cuneiform writing, was a large multilingual metropolis[17]—and so were many other city states in the Ancient Orient, such as Babylon, Ebla, Hattusa, Mari, Niniveh, Nippur or Palmyra. Ever since those ancient times, monolingualism may have been a most powerful dream, ideal or norm,[18] but the fact is that there has always been linguistic diversity in the world. Going back in time from today’s multilingual New York[19] and London[20] to the time of Uruk, we can track its existence at all intermediate stages of known history—in eighteenth-century Europe,[21] the Renaissance.[22] and the Middle Ages[23] no less than in the Roman Empire,[24] the Celtic and the Germanic world,[25] the Hellenistic World,[26] Persia,[27] the Phoenician Mediterranean,[28] as well as the pre-classical Orient,[29] and beyond this along the Silk Road and farther.[30] As Rankin put it: “It is not easy to assume the monolingual uniformity of any inhabited area in ancient time.”[31]

And before Uruk? Here, as Steven Fischer has observed,[32] there is “an absolute boundary of linguistic reconstruction” in “the teeming linguascape of 10,000 years ago.” Beyond that boundary, we move into evolutionary time—when it may well have taken very long indeed, from the earliest beginnings of language (perhaps about 100,000, or possibly 200,000 years ago)[33] until the final assemblage of the disparate components—such as vocal imitation and language play, signaling behavior and communicative interaction, speech sound production, the use of structured and meaningful units and verbal memory, plus the growth of the brain, of the so-called “speech organs,” and of the neural mechanisms required for this—which eventually evolved into our human faculty of language.[34] A common assumption here is that “languages with grammars and vocabularies similar to today’s have been spoken for at least 40,000 years.”[35]

With linguistic diversity of such substantial character as ancient as that, one can understand why Fischer has come to reject the notion that there has ever been one single protolanguage,[36] just as much as the idea of monogenesis, that is, the hypothesis that all languages in the world today derive from one single source language or Ursprache that was once shared by all mankind.

(4) Our human language faculty If, now, on the one hand, with Fischer, what we are looking for is no longer that putative, single, universal but nonexistent Ursprache, then, at the same time, we must also note, conversely, that the unfettered variation and multiplicity of languages which we encounter in Bhatia and Ritchie’s Multilingualism Handbook does not, in and of itself, offer a coherent and unified focus of inquiry. So, somewhere in between these two extremes we shall have to find a way forward, making the most of what we know, and using anything we can that modern linguistics has to offer in ideas, expertise, data, methods, concepts and theories about language and languages.

In my view, in the investigation of linguistic diversity our primary focus should not just be on all those very many languages taken individually, however fascinating that is, but rather go beyond this to the underlying human language faculty, which enables us humans to generate all those very different languages, and also to cope with and overcome—however (im)perfectly, as the case may be—the differences, gaps and barriers between those languages. We humans do not come into the world equipped with a single, particular, fully-fledged language. We are born unfinished, helpless and dependent on others, but fortunately endowed with all kinds of abilities, faculties and senses—one of which is the human language faculty. And as Wilhelm von Humboldt (1836, lxvi—“Die Sprache ist das bildende Organ des Gedanken”),[37] Ferdinand de Saussure (1972, 26—“la faculté de constituer une langue”) and Noam Chomsky (1965, 4—“the Humboldtian conception of underlying competence”) have pointed out over the past two centuries, it is this human language faculty which constitutes the unifying focus that should be at the centre of investigation within the multi-faceted discipline of linguistics, and which should ultimately enable us to make sense of that 7,000-fold complexity of languages that exists in the world in which we live.

The same holds true when we are studying lingua sacra and lingua franca, and so the question that should concern us here is: What can these two tell us about the capabilities, the structure and functioning of our human language faculty?

On lingua franca and lingua sacra in contact linguistics

(5) The centrality of language contact and contact linguistics Given the pervasive presence and extent of linguistic diversity all round the world, everywhere we go we will find languages and their speakers in contact, and people for whom having a multilingual repertoire is an everyday living reality and necessity. That makes language contact a central and crucial phenomenon in everyday life.

The problem this poses for linguistics is a major one: How is it possible for us humans to handle this enormous complexity and diversity at all? How can our language abilities, our minds and brains, our language faculty cope with this? How can we overcome all the obstacles and barriers that are facing us here?

Yet, the point is: We can. And we do so through language contact. That is to say, however deeply each one of us may be stamped by the imprint of our mother tongue, the fact is that no one is for ever locked into their own particular language: we can always find ways to escape from this prison house. That makes language contact—and our ability to overcome gaps and barriers between languages—one of the most intriguing feats of human behavior there is.

The study of language contact today constitutes a major area of interest in linguistic research, as we can see in Yaron Matras’s Language Contact[38] and in Raymond Hickey’s Handbook of Language Contact.[39] This field of study was inaugurated early last century by “the omniscient Hugo Schuchardt,”[40] a pivotal figure in modern linguistics, who inspired an important tradition of Central European multilingual scholarship carried forward by members of the Prague Linguistics Circle. By the middle of the twentieth century Uriel Weinreich published his Languages in Contact,[41] and demonstrated how language contact can affect all levels, elements and dimensions of the languages and language systems involved.[42] From 1996 contact linguistics has had its own encyclopedia, Kontaktlinguistik,[43] which details the research program, historical development, major contributions, geolinguistic scope and disciplinary perspectives of this subfield—which is by no means general knowledge, not even among linguists.

Today, stimulated certainly also by the seminal Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics of Sarah Thomason and Terrence Kaufmann,[44] this is a thriving field, with its three basic “laws” of language contact formulated by Peter Nelde: (i) contact between languages is always contact between human beings speaking those languages; (ii) language contact is always asymmetrical and unequal; and (iii) language conflicts are never “just” about language, but always also about other matters, such as religion, land, race, power, water, food, resources, and so forth.[45]

As for the research questions that contact linguists are interested in, Els Oksaar has given an important programmatic statement:

Contact linguistics research today is a broad interdisciplinary area of research. From a macro-analytic perspective, language contact originates from cultural, economic, political and scientific contact between ethnic and demographic groups. Micro-analytically considered, the starting point and the medium of these contacts are multilingual people who speak, besides their mother tongue, another or several other languages (dialects, sociolects). Language contact arises from the direct or indirect social interaction of speakers, influenced by the units of the communicative act and its sociocultural context. Appropriate topics for language contact are all levels of language system and language use at which changes arise when two or more languages, dialects or sociolects come into contact. Included in investigations today are also psychological, sociological, cultural, political and geographical aspects and conditions of language contact, when it is a question of determining not only what is at issue in a case of contact, but also how and why which contact phenomena arise or have arisen. This complex of questions has only been systematically formulated since the early 1950s.[46]

(6) The necessity of lingua franca in language contact When we now take a closer look, the question is: How does this contact between languages and their speakers actually work? And what sort of mechanisms and processes does it involve? A good starting point here is offered by Larry Trask, who defines language contact as:

Any change in a language resulting from the influence of a neighboring language of which the speakers of the first have some knowledge; the passage of linguistic objets or features from one language to another. The effects of contact may range from the trivial to the overwhelming, and may involve vocabulary, phonology, morphology, syntax or just about anything else. The simplest contact is borrowing, but far more radical types are possible, including (for example) metatypy, the creation of non-genetic languages and (the ultimate) language shift.[47]

And indeed, in language contact, it seems that almost anything can happen. Language contact comes in many different shapes, forms and modes, and may have the most diverse effects: not just coexistence of languages, borrowing and bilingualism (active and passive), but also linguistic and cultural transfer, imitation, interference, corruption, innovation (or its rejection in purism), accommodation, diglossia, convergence, code switching, (de- and re-)structuration, pidginization, creolization, language mixing, (mis)translation and (mis-) transmission, asymmetric interaction, attitudinal reactions (positive or negative), linguistic rivalries, interventions of power and repression, language endangerment, destruction and loss of knowledge of other-language civilizations, or even linguicide.

The central fact here is that, in language contact between people of a completely different mother tongue and culture, we humans are capable of reaching out, adapting our language, constructing comprehension, and producing some sort of agreement—or not, as the case may be. But whatever the outcome of language contact, the need to do something to overcome the barriers hampering it is clear and pressing. Thus, language contact “forces people to develop adaptive strategies such as creating and using a lingua franca.”[48] Or, as John Edwards put it: “In such a world [sc. ‘of many languages,’ RS] lingua francas and translation are required.”[49] This statement about the necessity of lingua franca, in the first paragraph of the opening chapter on core concepts of multilingualism in the Handbook by Bhatia and Ritchie,[50] is a mark of the central place which lingua franca has in multilingualism studies, and especially within contact linguistics today.

Indeed, lingua franca and translation—arising as they both do from need and necessity—provide us with two great methods for overcoming gaps and barriers between languages in order to achieve some form or degree of communication and understanding. There are other such methods—people may engage in language learning; they may adapt and accommodate their language behavior; engage in code switching, or borrow words from the other language; develop a pidgin, or produce a new interlect or interlingua; or perhaps they will go over, partially or completely, to the other language[51]—but always, lingua franca is one of the strategic options we have in our linguistic repertoire when we need to establish communication across a language barrier.

About the general notion of lingua franca, and about the historic Lingua Franca of the Mediterranean we will have more to say below, in section 1.2.

(7) Terra incognita: the problem of lingua sacra What we do not find in contact linguistics, however, is lingua sacra. Or at least, all we find in Goebl’s Kontaktlinguistik is just one single statement, in the chapter about languages in contact in Sweden: “Finnish has been the lingua sacra for most Saami speakers.”[52]

The Finnish referred to here is the language of Laestadianism, a Low Church revivalist movement that developed in the Finnish-speaking Torne Valley during the nineteenth century and spread over the Northern Calotte. As Bodrogi explains, this concerns the Tornedalians in northern Sweden, a linguistic minority of some 50,000 people, originally Finnish speaking, but landed in Sweden because of a repartition of Finland between Russia and Sweden in the eighteenth century.[53] During the nineteenth century they were subject to a very strong Swedish policy of assimilation, which outlawed the use of Finnish in school. However, in small village communities, Finnish—that is: Tornedalian Finnish, also known as Meänkieli—always remained in use as the home language. Then, by the middle of the nineteenth century, up came a strong identity movement led by Lar Levi Lastedius, whose mother tongue was Swedish, with Sami as his second language, while he also spoke excellent Finnish. “The Finnish language he used has become the lingua sacra (sacred language) of Pietism and has remained so ever since among the Sami as well.”[54] It is this fact, viz. that Meänkieli was the language of religion, which since the 1980s has successfully been used to revitalize Finnish as the language of identity of this minority language community. And today, this has been officially approved in the Swedish Language Law of the year 2000.

Beyond this, however, one will find nothing on lingua sacra in Goebl’s Kontaktlinguistik,[55] or in contact linguistics in general.[56] Lingua sacra also does not come up in Price’s Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe,[57] nor in Johnston’s standard work Ancient Religion.[58] Darquennes and VandenBussche offer a useful contribution on the sociology of language and religion, but no discussion of the notion of lingua sacra.[59] The single reference to lingua sacra in Goebl’s Kontaktlinguistik above remains the telling exception: a historic case of language repression, religious resistance and language revitalization.

The problem is: as linguists, we do not have a working view of what lingua sacra really is, or what its specific linguistic features are. Crystal appears to be the only modern linguist to have taken a scholarly interest in sacred and religious languages,[60] and we would be really hard put to determine that this or that particular language is indeed a sacred language, or state why this is so, or why not. Also, as things stand, it would appear that lingua sacra is rather more a belief about language, and that this has to do, essentially, with religion and with sacralization—hence, more a category in religious studies than in (contact) linguistics. So, if we are interested in lingua sacra, we shall need to look beyond contact linguistics and draw on studies in other fields—in theology and the history of religion, in cultural anthropology, cultural history, biblical scholarship and philology—in order to come to grips with the notion “sacred” and the factors involved in this.

About these and other questions concerning the notion of lingua sacra, we will have more to say in section 1.3 of this contribution.

1.1.3 Languages(s) in History: Considerations and Approaches

(8) The longue durée of lingua sacra and lingua franca As the examples above—about Uruk, Fischer and Finnish—demonstrate, when it comes to language, we cannot do without history.

When we now turn to the historical disciplines and the study of language in history,[61] we encounter a variety of perspectives, ranging from historical sociolinguistics and the social history of language through cultural history and the history of civilizations, of religion, of ideas, thought and ideologies, to Global Intellectual History and Wissensgeschichte. Common to them all is the view that, when looking at language, the dimension of time is crucial. Our central focus, correspondingly, will be on language phenomena and developments of the longue durée.

Here, to begin with, we note that having the status of lingua sacra may contribute enormously to the longevity of the language in question. This is certainly the case with Latin, which—as the language of the Christian message of salvation, of the Bible as God’s word, of the Book, of the liturgic rituals, and of the Church as institution—enjoyed a cumulation of sacredness which has ensured it a very long afterlife as a (or perhaps the) major language of culture and civilization in European history.

But in the case of lingua franca too, we may well be looking at a very much longer time-span than is often thought. The original Lingua Franca of the Mediterranean may have some connection to the Vulgar Latin spoken in late Antiquity all around what was then—for more than five hundred years, from 100 BCE till about 600 CE—“mare nostrum.”[62] During that long period, it was the spoken Latin of soldiers, colonists, slaves, traders, sailors and the common people, always in contact with other languages,[63] that was widely used as the common linguistic currency around it—not least in North-Africa with its five hundred Roman towns, where in the fifth century this lingua franca Latin, now upgraded to lingua sacra of the Bible and Christianity, had its fiercest champions in the church fathers St. Jerome and St. Augustine. When, after the fall of the West Roman Empire, North Africa came under Byzantine rule, this linguistic legacy endured for centuries. And after the eighth century Arab Conquest, the new rulers often maintained the existing administrative systems and the literate elites running them; so the Latin language continued to be used alongside the dominant Arabic; and by the twelfth century, as the Andalusian cartographer Al-Idrisi reported, Latin was still in use in the city of Capsa, not far from Carthago in North Africa.[64]

Now it is true that for the historic Lingua Franca spoken in North Africa, Thomason and Elgibali have given the fifteenth century as the date of its earliest record in writing.[65] But this leaves wide open the possibility that the spoken use of this language was by then already very much older. Here—unlike in Italy, where Roman Latin developed through spoken Vulgar Latin into early Italian[66]—one could not speak of direct continuation, descendance or filiation. But the fact that some form of late Vulgar Latin, in contact with Arabic, was still around in North Africa by the time the Crusades began, seems relevant and needs to be taken into account when studying the Lingua Franca.

Put differently: while on the European continent its sacredness as lingua sacra ensured the continuity of Latin as a language of culture, religion, law, administration and learning throughout the Middle Ages and well into the modern era, in contrast around the Mediterranean the longevity of the original Lingua Franca appears to have resided in its potentiality: every time it was needed in a multilingual contact situation, it could be readily made up again, the same communicative necessity triggering the same impulse to bridge the language gap, and this, again and again, would produce the Lingua Franca anew. We seem to have here two very different kinds of longue durée—with lingua sacra Latin growing and functioning, tree-like, as a stable and continuous, central social, cultural and powerful symbolic capital lasting through the centuries, whereas lingua franca Vulgar Latin enjoyed quite a different kind of longevity, not continuous but intermittent and recurrent, as a practical and disposable ready-made, unstable, spoken and marginal, but very necessary and extremely adaptable—like a weed that will always grow up again, however much one tries to cut it back.

On this reading, lingua franca and lingua sacra can both achieve longue durée and longevity for the particular language concerned—though certainly by very different routes, mechanisms and chains of transmission.

(9) Sociohistorical linguistics and cultural history of language For the further study of languages in history, a relevant field is that of Historical sociolinguistics, which is the “investigation of language in relation to society from times before the human voice is recorded.”[67] There is a conundrum here: when we aim to reconstruct the realities of the spoken world of the past, we can only do so on the basis of the surviving written documents.[68] But more is possible here than one might think, in particular when we adopt the strategy of socio-historical linguistics as defined by Larry Trask:

The application of the concepts, techniques and findings of sociolinguistics to the problems of historical linguistics. The idea is that the observed properties of contemporary speech communities, such as variation, the social significance of variants, and social stratification, must also have been typical of earlier speech communities, and hence that what we can learn by studying change in progress today can be usefully applied in elucidating earlier language change.[69]

In this domain, Richter has demonstrated how, with good use of the available medieval records written in Latin—however marginal, fragmented, corrupted or biased these may be—, one can in fact uncover a lot of interesting information about the other languages that were spoken at the time, and find out who spoke what language to whom, when, where, how, about what and why, in the early medieval world outside the chronicles he studied.[70] On this basis, Richter has established that, within a century of the Norman Conquest, the Norman-French elite in England—a small minority in a sea of Anglosaxon speakers—had to send back their sons to France in order to acquire proper French, which was not possible in England. And this in turn means that, however dominant and persistent until today (e.g. in British legal and parliamentary formulas), the Norman-French language has always remained the foreign language of a small ruling elite and did not become the language of England.

Comparable findings have been reported from the cultural history of the vernacular languages of early modern Europe by Peter Burke,[71] Michel de Certeau[72] and Willem Frijhoff,[73] who on the basis of the available historical records have delved deeply into the sociopolitical, cultural and historical side of those languages and the individuals and communities using them, thus shining a new light on processes such as the rise of the vernaculars, community formation, linguistic unification and the beginning of state formation in early modern Europe. As it turns out, when exploring such language issues in cultural history we can find out much more about the sociolinguistics of the past than previously thought, in particular about linguistic diversity and the range of languages spoken back then. Here too, even though we do not have recordings, the surviving texts can inform us about the coexistence of different languages, and about the linguistic and communicative interactions that were going on at the time.

Of special interest here is the role, mentioned above by Els Oksaar,[74] of intermediaries in language contact. This involves questions such as: What kinds of bilinguals were there, who were they, what was their status, what levels and kinds of contact did they participate in, and what was their linguistic repertoire? What do we know about the language(s) and language varieties they used? How do such contact processes roll out over time in the course of history? And what do we know about the go-betweens and intermediaries involved—at court, the elite, learned scholars, diplomats, Jews, medical men and well to do travelers; but also, the merchants, missionaries and skippers who may have been educated (i.e. knew how to read and write); and beyond that, in the streets, markets and harbors, the common people, sailors, soldiers, fishermen, traders, peasants, slaves and prostitutes.

We will come back to these and similar questions in the two main sections of this chapter.

(10) The history of ideas and the sacralization of languages in nineteenth-century Europe As we noted earlier, the issue of lingua sacra does not come up in contact linguistics. Neither does it in historical sociolinguistics. We will therefore have to move beyond those disciplines and look elsewhere.

To begin with we note that, from the Renaissance onwards, and alongside the vernaculars discussed by Burke[75] and Frijhoff,[76] there has been a long tradition of studying the three sacred languages of Christianity—Hebrew, Greek and Latin.[77] Much later, for the nineteenth century, we have Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities[78] and Maurice Olender’s Languages of Paradise.[79] These two studies both take their approach from the history of ideas and ideologies, and demonstrate in detail how, on the ideological basis of Herder’s Origin of Language,[80] all around Europe the national language became the epitome of the national spirit; how then, at the conference of Vienna in 1815, the vernacular languages of the major European nations (instead of their religions, as in 1648 at the Peace of Westphalia) were taken as the fundamental principle of political state-building; and how in the course of the nineteenth century the special status of those state languages was reinforced by all available institutions and mechanisms of national culture and society.

What we see here is a post-Latin sacralization of the major European vernaculars, turning them into a new but now secular kind of lingua sacra within their respective states, the essential vehicle of the standardization and centralization characteristic of the nation state formation and imperialism of Modern Europe. The same analysis can be applied to the publication by David Levi in London of Lingua Sacra,[81] his three-volume work on the grammar and lexicon of Hebrew. With this title, Levi underlined and reasserted the sacredness of the Hebrew language, and thus, just like the ideology of linguistic nationalism in Herder’s Origin of Language, Levi’s book heralded a religiously inspired, anti-Enlightenment backlash.

As analyses of nineteenth-century language ideology the case studies by Anderson and Olender fall well outside, but are a necessary and valuable complement to the domains of both contact linguistics and historical sociolinguistics (this contra James Milroy’s statement that ideology has no place in linguistics;[82] it certainly has in the history of languages).

(11) Sanskrit as the language of the gods Yet another perspective, this time focused on a sacred language from outside the European orbit, is presented in the work of Sheldon Pollock on Sanskrit as the language of the gods.[83] According to Pollock, the deep-seated belief in the sacredness of Sanskrit, together with the widely proclaimed perfection of this language, has proved immensely influential in the history of Indian civilization. Over thousands of years, and despite half a millennium of Buddhist and vernacular resistance, the cultural preponderance of Sanskrit vis à vis the other languages of the Indian subcontinent, together with its enormous weight in terms of culture, history, learning, and supporting belief systems, have all strongly contributed to the dissemination of this “language of learning” and the Hindu-Buddhist culture associated with it, to the farthest corners of the Indian cultural sphere of influence throughout Asia.[84]

We will come back to Sanskrit as a lingua sacra in section 1.3. What is worth mentioning here is the parallel which Pollock draws between, on the one hand, the spread of Sanskrit culture throughout Asia plus the great time-depth of civilizational processes involved, and, on the other, in pre-modern Europe, the dynamics of vernacularization vis à vis Latin.[85] As Pollock explains:

Latin (like Sanskrit) shaped the revolution [i.e. the rise of the vernacular languages, RS] far more profoundly than it was shaped by it. Vernacular literacy everywhere in Europe for centuries to come not only presupposed and was mediated by Latin literacy (being able to read and write the vernacular without being able to read and write Latin must have been a rarity), but the very sense of what literature meant as a cultural form was taken from Latin.[86]

The forms and conventions of Latin literature have had a very long afterlife in the European vernaculars which came to the fore during the Middle Ages. The French Song of St. Alexis, the German Minnesänger, the Castilian Cid, Dante’s Divina Comedia, Occitan lyrics and the Anglo-Norman poets are all “subsequent and secondary phenomena to be analyzed in terms of the primacy of Latin.”[87] In effect, Latin literature continued as a living tradition, offering a fertile frame of literary reference for writers in the vernaculars, certainly until the end of the eighteenth century, for example, with Diderot and Goethe.[88] Exactly the same hegemony of Latin we encounter in the field of language study, where for many centuries Latin grammar was the model of universal grammar,[89] even if the discovery, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of so many non-European languages—Tupí in Brazil,[90] Malay in the Indonesian archipelago,[91] Japanese, Chinese, the languages of India, if not the Arabic and Hebrew with which European scholars had been familiar for far longer—should have brought home that this was as incorrect as the idea that the earth is flat and the sun moves around it.

The point made by Curtius and Pollock about the hegemonic afterlife of the Roman Empire is clear enough. Taking “hegemonic” in the language-historical and political sense of Antonio Gramsci,[92] we see that in almost any sphere of life and culture across Europe, Latin models have continued to dominate for many centuries after the rise of the vernaculars, not just in the field of language and literature, but also in church, school and learning, in law, administration and government, in engineering, architecture and the sciences. And not just within Europe. For centuries too, the general outlook on the newly discovered worlds outside Europe was dominated by the classical model of imperial colonization developed by European scholars such as Sepúlveda, on the authority of Aristotle’s Politics and biblical divine law.[93] This in turn reinvigorated the classical Roman idea of Empire which, through the modern empires of the European expansion, has remained powerfully alive until this very day, in particular through their mission civilisatrice.[94] Its hegemonic status comes out clearly in the challenge addressed to the British Empire (which was consciously built on the Roman model) by an unknown Indian, Nirad Chaudhuri, in 1951: “Civis Britannicus sum, because all that was good and living within us was made, shaped, and quickened by [...] British rule.”[95]

When it comes to the afterlife of these classical ideals, or models, whether the language concerned is Latin or Sanskrit, we really are looking here at developments of the very longue durée. A notion like lingua sacra, to my mind, is cut from this same cloth: it is a hegemonic idea, of ancient standing, with a very long afterlife and vitality, surviving the test of time, and thus even if it may not quite stand the scrutiny of modern linguistics, lingua sacra is a notion no less significant in language history than lingua franca.

1.1.4 Language Is the Key

(12) Language history and Wissensgeschichte Having the status of “sacred language”—as we saw earlier in the case of Tornedalian Finnish, and as Pollock’s contribution to Global Intellectual History has demonstrated for Sanskrit and Latin[96]—clearly is a very strong force for the development, dissemination, cultivation, maintenance and longevity of the particular language concerned, and of the traditions of culture, learning and transmission associated with it. Such “sacredness”—together with the belief systems and societal values behind it, the symbolic power of the relevant language, its historic and cultural weight, its status as a written language, its function as a normative model in culture—is a key factor in long term civilizational processes, and may help to understand the hegemonic role acquired (or not) by the language in question. In this respect, Pollock’s analysis—as Cooper commented[97]—provides a basis on which to analyze and compare similar longterm developments in other parts of the world, such as Hellenization, Indianization, Sinicization, Christianization, Islamization and Romanization. All these are far reaching and complex civilizational processes, involving power, religion, symbols, cultural transmission, writing and, crucially, language. And all are of very longue durée.

On this basis we may draw a comparison between Anglicization as a longterm cultural aftereffect of the British Empire with its Pax Brittannica,[98] and Romanization as a long term trend in the Ancient World, with a similar imperial power and culture behind it. In this respect, there is nothing new: just as the Romans in Gallia wiped out the Celts and the Celtic wisdom and knowledge their Druids possessed,[99] so too, the modernization which Macauley brought to India, however attractive it may have been to Chaudhuri,[100] was at the same time also a direct attack on the ancient native Indian traditions of education, learning and cultural transmission.

Seen from this perspective, language history and the contact it involves are central to Wissensgeschichte and its processes of knowledge transmission.[101] It goes without saying that decipherment, historical philology, and their painstaking detective work on languages, writing and the practices involved, are indispensable here.[102]

The same goes for translation, for example, of god names, a well-known channel of transmission and assimilation from one culture into another, witness the equation, at Palmyra in the third century CE, of the Anonymous God (developed from the local Bac/alshamên, the Lord of Heaven), with the Greek Zeus Hypsistos and the Roman Iuppiter Optimus Maximus.[103] Going beyond philology and translation, here we aim to explore what contribution a particular lingua franca or lingua sacra has made to the transmission of Wissen in history. To this end we will need an analytic framework that can bring together Global Intellectual History[104] with the history of language(s) and language contact. This will require, on the one hand in contact linguistics, that we take on board issues of cultural, societal and political symbolism to do with a language’s sacredness, and conversely, when doing Wissensgeschichte, that we include the role and contribution of intermediaries to cross-cultural contact and transmission, as advocated by Smith.[105]

(13) Language contact and the transmission of Wissen A short excursion into the domain of translation may be useful at this point. In Borges’s tale, Averroes Search,[106] the focus is on Averroës as an intermediary between different languages and cultures, who, while translating Aristotle’s treatise on comedy from Greek into Arabic, misses out on the very notion of comedy, of which he has no experience, so that—even if in the courtyard outside there is a comedy going on under his very eyes—he ends up adapting Aristotle’s notion to what he can think of in his own language and culture.

Apart from reminding us of the immense contribution of Arabic civilization to modern world culture through many centuries of translation, knowledge transfer and cultural crossover,[107] Borges’s story also serves as a parable of the mishaps that can befall ideas, stories, knowledge, beliefs and practices while they are traveling wherever they may find a curious and receptive audience. In translation—no less than in the domain of lingua franca—language is never “just” language; it always crucially involves the transmission of knowledge and content; and the very processes of interpretation, transmission, critical commentary and reception may bring along all sorts of interference, distortion, innovation, corruption and further arbitrariness, through which the content that is conveyed and translated is at the same also being refractured and transformed.

Leaving aside the more general vicissitudes and disruptions to which Wissensgeschichte is exposed, such as the destruction of books,[108] this is how the transmission of languages and cultures has worked for millennia: through such slow, long term contacts, chains of local exchanges and continuities of language, of knowledge, of stories, of culture, in a never ending process of Chinese whispers, with all the errors and misunderstandings (creative or otherwise) this may cause—and which can bring about enrichment and the creation of new meanings[109] as well as defiguration, destruction even, of the knowledge content so conveyed. A case in point is the migration—from ancient times, over many centuries, through countless markets and other meeting points, relayed by innumerable travelers, traders and story tellers—of the stories about Alexander (Iskandar), which travelled east through Persia and India and far beyond, to the Spice Islands of Indonesia; plus the counter migration of Indian fables to the west, through Persia and the Orient to Europe, which has enriched western literatures from Aesop and the Arabian Tales of Shehrazad to the present.[110]

In our globalized world of today—when it seems as if travel, trade and technology have more or less done away with difference and distance in time and place; when English is so globally dominant that other languages may hardly seem necessary anymore; when the disappearance of “remoteness” brings very serious threats to the future of many smaller languages in faraway places;[111] when one can almost instantly be in contact with anyone anywhere, and when even the language obstacles in cross-cultural contact seem to have been overcome by Google Translate App—it is not yet too late to look back towards that millennia old world and study the everyday social language mechanisms and contact processes by which it used to function. As, for example, Stuurman has done in his comparative study of intermediaries involved in cultural contacts of the past such as Herodotus, Sima Qian and Ibn Khaldun.[112]

Language is the key here, and in our further pursuits it will have centre stage, as the tracer element on which we will focus our inquiry into the dynamics of contact and the ensuing transfer, transmission and translation of knowledge. An issue of particular relevance in this context is how lingua franca and lingua sacra appear to be connected to two very different chains of transmission. To find out more, our focus here will be on the points of contact, the bridges from one language into the next, as well as the intermediaries by and through whom knowledge is conveyed into new languages, cultures and societies. In my view, this is how language history, and the history of language contact we envisage, can make an important contribution to Wissensgeschichte.

1.2 Lingua Franca: History and Theory

1.2.1 Lingua Franca Today

(1) English as the global lingua franca To begin with the present, one of the reasons for the interest in lingua franca today is the position of English as the dominant international language of the world.[113]

In almost every domain of life, English is very widely used today: news and infotainment, popular culture, fashion and consumerism; the internet, the digital world, social media, mobile phones and apps; trade, finance, logistics, air travel and tourism; sports, medicine, health care and education; world politics, international organizations, intelligence and communication; science, technology and military power; law, standards and regulation; etcetera.[114] Having a common language of contact for as many people as possible is a basic necessity in a world where some 7,000 different languages are spoken today—as is particularly evident in multilingual mass conurbations such as New York[115] and London with its three hundred different languages.[116] English is the most chosen foreign language in the world today; and already by the year 2000 the business of teaching English was worth an estimated 7.8 billion pounds a year. With 1.35 billion people on Facebook today, enormous numbers of people are now everyday users of some form of English. Driven by the ever intensifying flow of information, the main trend in global communication is the use of English as the central lingua franca between speakers of the most diverse languages, “the first truly global language ever to exist.”[117] English today is at the top of the world’s language pyramid, the dominant working language of the United Nations, the European Union and many other international bodies; and the official or unofficial second language of very many states around the world.[118] It is not the intrinsic quality of the English language that is behind this status, but rather its cultural, historical, political and technological weight, its clout as the language of Empire, and not least its phenomenal rise over the past half century under the super power umbrella of the United States.

It is this shared English lingua franca, with the rich, open, diverse and dynamic culture that comes with it, which today is the powerful and lasting legacy of the British Empire—just as, 1500 years ago, the Roman Empire left the world its Latin language, with a concomitant rich, dynamic and lasting culture and civilization. And just as Latin began to change when it was spoken by and with people speaking different mother tongues,[119] so too in the case of English. Through centuries of such contact the English language has undergone dramatic changes, turning from a typical Germanic language with a rich and complex morphology into a predominantly analytic language with little morphology; its vocabulary transformed by massive importation from French, Latin, Greek and a hundred other languages;[120] and with dramatic changes in pronunciation. Over the last 200 years alone, spoken English has moved away from French-style pronunciations such as Birón, balcóny, contémplate, obléeged, unspiled and agrements to a much more heavily word-initial stress pattern and a much more open pronunciation of the vowels, as in Býron, bálcony, cóntemplate, oblige, unspoilt and agreements.[121] Such vernacularizations were going on throughout the former British Empire, where English, used in communication between speakers of widely different linguistic background, was usually learned informally from the colloquial varieties spoken by sailors, soldiers and colonists, and indigenized in contact with speakers of local languages, giving rise to all kinds of New or World English.[122]

(2) Perspective In this second section, in an attempt to move beyond the specific case of English, and in order to further define the notion of lingua franca, we will start from Cremona’s distinction of two different senses of the term, the first historical, the second generic.[123] First, we will take a closer look at the original, historical Lingua Franca that used to be spoken around the Mediterranean. Then, secondly, we will undertake a critical exploration of lingua franca as a generic term in contact linguistics, its definition, its characteristic features, structures and processes, as well as the network of notions this concept is part of.

1.2.2 The Historical Lingua Franca of the Mediterranean

(3) Descriptions and questions The original Lingua Franca “was one of the languages which Gulliver tried out on the Lilliputians.”[124] It was part of the impressive multilingual repertoire he had acquired as a student in Cambridge and Leiden, as a ship’s surgeon, a traveler and an ardent learner of languages. And he did try them all when he came to Lilliput, far out in the Indian Ocean somewhere near the Indonesian archipelago: “High and Low Dutch, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and lingua franca; but all to no purpose.”[125]

In the linguistic literature, different and divergent descriptions have been given of this Lingua Franca. Cremona for example, states:

The name ‘Lingua Franca’ is probably an Italianization of Byzantine Greek and Arabic forms meaning ‘Frankish language,’ that is, ‘language of western Europeans,’ especially French, Occitan, Catalan and Italian (since the Byzantines and the Arabs had applied the term ‘Franks’ to all the Crusaders whatever their ethnic origins), … the ‘Mediterranean Lingua Franca’ was a spoken pidgin language used for communication between Romance-speaking western Europeans on the one hand, and Arabs (and later Turks) around the shores of the Mediterranean from at least the fourteenth c. onwards.[126]

In contrast, Hancock discusses:

The extinct Sabir or Sabeir, which gained impetus in the Middle East during the time of the Crusades, and which existed in various forms in many Mediterranean ports for several centuries. Known also as the Lingua Franca. Basically a pidginized variety of Provençal, influenced lexically by French, Catalan, Italian, etc., and various languages of the eastern Mediterranean.[127]

Similarly, in Perego we read:

Les auteurs paraissent s’accorder en général pour appeler ‘sabir’ un mélange de différentes languages romanes, de grec, d’arabe et de turc en usage dans les ports méditerranéens. Le type même du sabir est donc la ‘langue franque.’[128]

More recently, Trask has taken the view that:

The original Lingua Franca was a variety of Italian, laced with words from a number of other languages, used as a trade language in the eastern Mediterranean in the late Middle Ages.[129]

The descriptions above present us with a number of difficulties. While Cremona and Trask speak of Lingua Franca, Hancock and Perego are using a different term, Sabir, though apparently for the same thing. Hancock agrees with Cremona that this was a pidgin, while Perego describes it as a mixed contact language involving Romance, Greek, Turkish and Arabic. For Trask, the Lingua Franca was a variety of Italian, but for Hancock and Cremona it had a different basis, involving Provençal, Catalan, Occitan as well as French. There is no unambiguous agreement here,[130] and we cannot exclude the possibility that the Lingua Franca itself may have been polymorphous and chameleon-like, shifting and shading depending on location, time, speakers and the other language(s) involved. For the moment though, we note the point made by Jeff Siegel:

Progress in the study of languages in contact has been hindered by terminology often as unfixed as some of the languages it is used to describe.[131]

This holds in particular for core notions such as creolization, koinè, contact language and language mixing, and Siegel quotes Mühlhäusler to the effect that in the study of language mixing we are faced with “a conceptual mess aggravated by a terminological mess.” To remedy this, what we need is “an attempt to clarify some of the terminology used to describe language contact and mixing.”[132]

That is what the present exploration is about: a clarification of the relevant terms and concepts, in order to get a better grip on the Lingua Franca.

(4) About the Franks and their language Some authors have suggested that the term lingua franca may be linked to porto franco (freeport); Lingua Franca would then be “the language of free trade.” While this may apply to the global English of today, the original sense of the term Lingua Franca is, as Cremona says above, “the language of the Franks.”[133]

Note here that franqui, faranji or feringi was the Arabic name for people from western Europe—a usage we also encounter in Italian, for example with the Farangi (Franks, Europeans, Christians) living at the Mughal court under Shah Jahan and Shah Aurangzeb, and mentioned in Manucci’s Storia di Mogor.[134] Similarly, in the old sabir of colonial Algiers, the term used to denote the French from France was Frankaouis.[135] From Arabic, this usage was adopted into many eastern languages as well: Farangi in Persian, Amharic and Urdu, Firangi in Hindi, Parangi in Tamil, and further afield Farang in Thai.[136] It is this name that has become attached to the language that was used for many centuries throughout the Mediterranean, in the Arabic world and beyond, in many different shapes and admixtures, in contact, trade and intercourse with those Franks.

The Franks were the strongest political power to emerge in medieval times after the demise of the West Roman Empire. In 732, with the battle of Poitiers, it was the Franks under Charles Martel who halted the Islamic advance on the European continent, and if they hadn’t, we might now all be writing the European languages with Arabic script, as is the case today with the Persian language (Farsi, Iranian). From then on, the Franks were the driving force of a most powerful expansion in all directions, to the north with the incorporation of Frisia under Charles Martel; to the east into the Slavonic world; to the south into the Romance world; then later, in the eleventh century, beyond this, and into the Middle East. When Charlemagne was crowned emperor of Rome in the year 800, his Frankish empire stretched all the way from the Frisian Sea in the North down to the Mediterranean and into Italy;[137] and from the eighth century onwards, there was a thriving slave trade from Verdun to Cordova.[138] Also, crusades were undertaken regularly into Spain, against the Moorish kingdoms there.[139] Contact and conflict between Arabs and Franks thus predate the Crusades into the Holy Land by many centuries—and throughout those centuries, there would always be the need for Lingua Franca to facilitate their exchanges.

The question here is: What do we know of the language spoken by those Franks? In the Franks’ heartlands in the former Germania they were speaking their own Germanic language, Frankish.[140] But when they settled in Gallia, it was a different matter.[141] Like all the other Germanic tribes who settled there, such as the Burgundians, the Alamans, the Goths and later the Normans, they were christianized and romanized, shifting to Gallo-Romance, which eventually became French. The process was in full swing in the sixth century, when bishop Gregory of Tours wrote his History of the Franks in a plain and unadorned style, “sermone rustico,” “the everyday spoken Latin of Gaul in the sixth century,” a vernacular which he himself called provincial.[142] By the early ninth century, the Franks in Gaul had completed this linguistic and cultural shift and were aware that they were speaking something different from Latin:[143] at the Synod of Tours in 813, priests in Francia were called upon to do the church prayers in the vulgar tongue, the lingua romana rustica, since the written standard Latin of Rome and of the Carolingian Renaissance had become incomprehensible to the illiterate common people.[144] This situation—with the people in Germania, like Charlemagne himself, continuing to use their traditional Frankish Germanic, while Gaul was dominated by Romance and French—was consolidated in Charlemagne’s language policies.[145] In consequence, Lingua Franca, the so-called “Frankish” language used in Mediterranean contacts with the Arabs and others, was not the original Germanic dialect, but rather some form of Romance, of which quite possibly neither the Franks nor the Arabs were native speakers.

(5) The Italian connection We must also, however, consider the view of Trask that the Lingua Franca was a variety of Italian.[146] After all, it does make a difference whether the basis of the Lingua Franca was supplied by romanized Franks or instead by vulgarized Italians. So what can we say about this Italian hypothesis?

First of all we must think here of Dante and his interest in the spoken vernacular of his own time; how he began to write the vulgar tongue instead of literary, cultured and elegant Latin; and how in this he was followed by writers of the various other national Renaissance movements in Europe who championed their own vernaculars. We must think also of the great trading empires of Venice and Genua stretching into the Levant, the Black Sea and the Silk Roads; and of the many Italians who went abroad in early modern history—Marco Polo to China, Christopher Columbus to the Americas, and Antonio Pigafetta, who sailed out on the first circumnavigation with Magellan and as a true Renaissance man sampled word lists of the languages spoken in the lands they visited. Ever since Dante they all took their languages with them wherever they went, speaking Italian in many different varieties and dialects,[147] as well as pidgin Italian and Lingua Franca, with varying admixtures of other Romance and Arabic elements. During the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, Italians played their role in the Elizabethan Renaissance in England, where today an Italian-based variety of the Lingua Franca survives, known as Polari;[148] but also in India, where the Taj Mahal was built by an Italian architect; and throughout the Ottoman empire, where Italian became the language favored for contact and transactions between Europeans and Orientals.

In view of this expansion, together with the prestige and the impact of the Italian Renaissance, Trask’s suggestion that Italian was the basis of the Lingua Franca is certainly not implausible.[149] Even so, this leaves open the possibility that other languages, such as Provençal and Catalan, Spanish, French and Portuguese may have been influential too in shaping the Lingua Franca, in different locations, times and social settings. In this respect, it is worth mentioning Abulafia’s reminder that “It would be a mistake to think of lingua franca as a language with formal rules and an agreed vocabulary; indeed, it was its fluidity and changeability that expressed most clearly the shifting identities of the people of the early modern Mediterranean.”[150]

What we must take into account here is a key feature of lingua francas which we noted above in subsection (1) for English in the Hobson-Jobson dictionary of Anglo-Indian usage,[151] viz. their easy adoption and incorporation of words from many other languages.

(6) No man’s language Having come this far, it would appear that things are beginning to shift and change. For, if the “Franks” were not really the Franks, but could be anyone from western Europe; if their language was not a Germanic dialect, but some form of Romance; if their lingua romana rustica was not the same as the Lingua Franca, while spoken Italian may have been involved too in its development—then what can we say about the Lingua Franca?

There is considerable indeterminacy here, and we must acknowledge—as Dakhlia has documented[152]—how little we really know, and how unstable, variable, and undefinable the real Lingua Franca has always been. A relevant circumstance here is the paucity of data we have. In this respect, we note, first of all, that the Lingua Franca was always used in far away places, with strangers across the sea, for barter in the streets, the brothels and the markets—rather than in the metropolis, where Latin was the dominant mode of written culture, in church and in the chancelleries, at court and in the world of learning. Secondly, what we are dealing with here, long after its demise, is a language that may have been spoken for centuries, but was always ignored, condemned, even loathed.[153] So even if we have an idea of who were speaking the Lingua Franca, it is very much harder to see who might have written down this language. At the time, if one was able to write at all, one would have written in Latin; and if one was literate in Latin, as Dante was, one might have moved into writing Italian; but writing Lingua Franca—who would, or could do this, and who would ever read this? Latin literacy and its cultural prestige were a formidable barrier to acknowledging the vernaculars of poets and scholars, and all the more so to writing the debased Lingua Franca, the spoken lingo of illiterate sailors, fishermen and market traders. Thirdly, we must take into account the longue durée, and note that, if one of the first people to write Italian was Dante, he was certainly not the first to speak it. The diversification of Latin into Italian and the other vernaculars had started centuries earlier.[154] On the same reasoning, Lingua Franca too will have begun to be spoken much earlier than the time of its first recording in writing. Taken together, these three factors—of distance, of sociocultural prestige, and of time—go a long way towards explaining why there is so little and so late that has come down to us, and why we only have written records of Lingua Franca dating from the fourteenth century onwards and not earlier.

Beyond the paucity of data there is, however, another consideration—as Dakhlia has made clear,[155] taking her cue from a Franco-Amerindian contact vernacular, now long extinct, about which the missionary Paul le Jeune wrote in a letter in 1632: “The Frenchmen who spoke it supposed it to be good Indian, and the Indians believed it to be French.”[156] Such a confusion is less uncommon than it may seem at first sight. It is well known that language names used in the past do not tell us what exactly they referred to: in general, if someone’s speech was called Lingua Franca, then in the absence of language data we cannot tell from this label alone what it was they (and/or their interlocutors) were actually speaking (or hearing). Moreover, it would appear that the name Lingua Franca was given by others than those who actually spoke it. The Synod of Tours, at any rate, described the speech of the Franks as lingua romana rustica, and I am not sure that the Franks themselves used the term lingua franca for their own language. But since they were known as “Franks,” it would have been common for others with whom they were in contact, such as the Arabs and Byzantines, to then call their language the Lingua Franca. On this logic the term Lingua Franca could have denoted the lingua romana rustica of the Synod of Tours; but since “Franks” also meant Europeans in general, the term Lingua Franca could equally include and refer to other languages such as Italian or Provençal. Eventually this will lead us to Cremona’s scenario above—viz. that the term Lingua Franca was used by the Arabs as a label for the speech of the Franks with whom they were in contact, and then later borrowed (and Italianized) by the Italians. This scenario may well reflect the complex history of the Lingua Franca, but it does not give us a clue as to what language this really was.

More specifically, Lejeune’s comment gives rise to the following question: What were those French and Native American Indian people thinking at the time, when they both believed to be speaking each other’s language, and used the name of the other’s language as a label for their own speech? Applying this question to the Lingua Franca, Dakhlia comes up with some very interesting reflections. Did the Franks, and the speakers of other languages they were in contact with, perhaps believe, just as in Lejeune’s case, that they were speaking each other’s languages? So, did the Franks, when they spoke Lingua Franca, think that they were actually speaking the local eastern contact language, while conversely the Orientals believed that they were using the language of the Franks? Could it be that the Lingua Franca was an attempt by Arabs and others at reproducing Italian, or at any rate an Italian-based variety of Romance, when they were speaking with the Franks? Or conversely, was the Lingua Franca the result of the Franks’ resorting (when they could not speak Arabic) to using a simplified “foreigners’ talk” in order to communicate with the Orientals they met, in the belief that this was how one did this? So, was this perhaps a case of mutual adaptation and accommodation in a contact situation?[157]

Underneath all this is a basic question: What does it mean to use the name of somebody else’s language to describe one’s own speech? As Dakhlia argues, in the case of Lingua Franca, if this language name was given not by those who spoke it but by others, and if for those naming it, it was not their own language, then the conclusion can only be that what we have before us here is no man’s language.[158] With Lingua Franca we have before us a language of which no one will say “this is my language.” At best, it is somebody else’s language, like gibberish, or double dutch, gobbledygook, slang, etcetera. It has no native speakers, it just serves as a communicative tool, an occasional bridge between native speakers of other languages; and for those who speak it, it is not a badge of their identity.

With this new notion of no man’s language Dakhlia takes her distance from much modern thinking about language. Established ideas concerning national standard languages are not relevant here, simply because Lingua Franca is not a national language: there is no nation, no cultivation, and no standard here. The same goes for the core notions of modern linguistics—such as de Saussure’s notion of the langue as a structured whole in and by itself, as well as structural linguistics and its conception of the object of inquiry as an autonomous formal system.[159] What we need instead, in order to come to grips with the Lingua Franca, is a view of language as a tool, useful and effective in verbal interaction; spoken for the purpose of communication, in contact, trade and exchanges; made up and fit for purpose on the occasion, but readily disposable afterwards.

(7) Basic points: Schuchardt and after We now turn to where any study of lingua francas in modern linguistics has to begin, that is, with the first scholarly examination of the historical Lingua Franca, the pathbreaking article of 1909 in which Hugo Schuchardt established a range of fundamental points.[160]

To begin with, as he saw clearly, the Lingua Franca was a trade language born from exigence and need. Today this is widely accepted, as we saw above with Edwards[161] and Calvet,[162] but Schuchardt was the first to formulate this crucial point. His conclusion of 1909 is also worth noting: panta rhei, that is: in Lingua Franca everything is always in flux, there is immense variation and fluidity, in time, location, composition, data, forms and usage—the same point as we find today in Abulafia.[163]

Secondly, with respect to the characteristic features of the Lingua Franca, Schuchardt established that it was a reduced form of Romance, with a highly simplified grammatical structure, typical of pidgin languages, with admixtures from different other languages in a lexicon that was largely Italian-based but with important Spanish contributions, plus some Provençal elements and a very few Arabic words. An example is the expression Mi andar (Me go), constructed from bare Romance roots (basic concepts, almost): Mi, a first person singular personal pronoun in the accusative, together with andar, a verb in the infinitive, in a simple two-word sentence with no morphology, no case or inflection. As Perego put it—“le système pronominal est réduit à sa plus simple expression (mi: je, me, moi); le verbe ne comprend que deux formes: un present-futur (mi andar: je vais) et un passé (mi andato: je suis allé).”[164] Further such reductions—a turn from synthetic forms to analytic syntax, and the lexicalization of grammatical relations—can all be found in the Lord’s Prayer in Lingua Franca.[165]

Thirdly, Schuchardt identified geographic variation and dialects within “the Lingua Franca itself, as it was spoken along the North African coast. In the west, Lt was unquestionably Spanish; in the east, Lt was Italian; in the center was a transition zone showing varying degrees of relexification.”[166] Similarly, temporal variation was identified by Lanly in his monograph of 1970, in which he described the sabir in use in North Africa during the French colonial era, spoken in the backstreets of Algiers, as Langue franque à base du Français, with admixture of elements from Italian and Spanish plus some Arabic. Lanly saw this as a new, nineteenth-century variety and continuation of the original historic Lingua Franca. Of particular interest here is the historic parallel Lanly drew between, on the one hand, this sabir as it developed in contact with colonial French as spoken in Algiers—which was very different from the metropolitan French of faraway Paris—, and, on the other, the development in Gaul, far away from the schools and the literary culture of metropolitan Rome, of the vulgar Latin spoken from the second and third centuries CE onwards by Roman soldiers and colonists settling there, who had “abandoned the complicated structure of classical Latin”[167] and mixed it in with words, sounds and turns of phrase they adopted from Gallic.[168]

Contact is the key factor here, and beyond Lanly’s parallel there is a more general suggestion, viz. that, actually, any speaker is capable of producing such variation, and will if necessary always be able to resort to such reduced forms when a language barrier occurs in a contact situation.

(8) Further questions Our findings thus far: The historical Lingua Franca was widely spoken around the Mediterranean, and clearly a matter of the longue durée in the sense of Fernand Braudel.[169] It was a pidgin built on roots deriving from the various Romance languages of the Mediterranean, mixed in with Arabic. For many centuries it was used in many different locations and between many different parties, but always for communication and negotiation in contact, trade, war, diplomacy, exchange of prisoners etcetera. Over time, under the impact of a succession of Romance languages and their speakers as these made their way across the Mediterranean, the language shows enormous change and variation. The same goes for its geographical variation—depending on their dominance, we get an influx of Italian, Provençal, Catalan, Occitan, Spanish or Portuguese. With all this variation, there is no common or fixed standard, and the general impression is one of shifts and changes—not just in the language itself, but also in its history, geography and social setting. Panta rhei, indeed.

Beyond this, however, many questions are still wide open. For example, there is the interesting issue of its geographical dissemination. Matras, referring to the “medieval Romance-based pidgin spoken around the Mediterranean coastal regions, termed Lingua Franca,” has called the idea that all other lingua francas are derived from this basis “the most speculative hypothesis, which is quite impossible to either prove or disprove.”[170] This may be so for the idea of monogenesis; but when it comes to the issue of diffusion, we may consider, first, how Arends has convincingly argued for the historical spread of Lingua Franca, together with Spanish, Portuguese and Ladino, by Sephardic Jewish traders from the Italian freeport of Livorno all the way to Brazil and Surinam in the seventeenth century.[171] Secondly, to the east as well, from about 800 CE, there were Jewish trading networks running all the way from Charlemagne’s Aachen, Cordoba in Spain and Tangiers in North Africa, through the Arab world, via the Baghdad of Harun al-Raschid down to Calicut in India and over the sea to Kuang-chu in China, but also overland from Byzantium along the Silk Roads, north of the Black Sea,[172] via Khazaria, Kashgar and Khotan to Chang-an and Kai-feng in central China—which was the site of a synagogue built in 1163, and where there still was a Jewish community in the 1850s.[173] Thirdly, as we know from the Hobson-Jobson dictionary of Anglo-Indian slang, the term commonly used by British traders operating in Asia for the interpreters they employed—a role often fulfilled by the Portuguese speaking go-betweens already established there—was lingoa.[174] Given these glimpses from history, we may consider that Gulliver’s use of the Lingua Franca as an alternative to Latin, French, Spanish and Italian on the island of Lilliput was, perhaps, not so strange after all; and that the diffusion hypothesis dismissed by Matras may well merit further investigation.

Another issue concerns the question: Is the historic Lingua Franca still in use today? There does not appear to be a clear end date for this language, and the question may be hard to answer—but why is that so? Several possibilities come to mind here. Was Lingua Franca, a maritime and coastal lingo mostly used in harbors and at markets, perhaps too marginal and ephemeral even for its demise to be noticed? Has it simply vanished, thrown away as the disposable tool it was, too unstable and too variable to survive, a disparate collection of spoken varieties belonging to the slums and the harbor riffraff, with no support in writing, in education, or from a native speaker community, and was it done down by strong normative pressures against this no man’s language? Or is the explanation a practical one—was it simply because, after the end of the Age of Sail and the ensuing decline of language contact in harbor conditions, there was no longer the communicative need which there had always been for Lingua Franca? So, conversely, might it be that Lingua Franca does not really have an end date, as it can always be revived when people from different language background in migratory contact meet and need to communicate across language barriers? These are open questions, which invite reflection, speculation, and further research.

1.2.3 Lingua Franca as a Conceptual Category in Contact Linguistics

In the second part of this section, we will now consider lingua franca as a category, focusing on the current understanding of this concept within linguistic theory; its definition and place within a network of related concepts within contact linguistics; and relevant distinctions such as langue francque, sabir, langue véhiculaire etcetera.

(9) On lingua francas in general The question before us is: What is a (rather than the) lingua franca? This time there appears to be considerable agreement; the authors whose views on the historic Lingua Franca we discussed above, have all four distilled the same key point, defining the concept of lingua franca as a contact language used by people who do not speak each other’s language, for interaction and communication in all kinds of situations: trade, war, markets, colonization, and so on.

Thus, by way of extension, abstraction and generalization,[175] we move from history to concept. As Cremona has it, a lingua franca is “a language widely used for intercommunication among different linguistic groups (e.g. Akkadian in the Middle East in the 2nd millennium BCE, Greek in Classical and Christian times, Latin in much of medieval Europe, Swahili in East Africa, English in many parts of the globe).”[176] Similarly, Trask notes that lingua franca is

A language which is routinely used in some region for dealings between people who have different mother tongues. In the past this term was often applied to any interlect, even a pidgin, but today is more usually restricted to a mother tongue, though possibly to a version different from that used by native speakers.[177]

Matras agrees:

The term lingua franca refers to languages that are used for interethnic communication, that is, in interactions in which the participants have diverse background languages.[178]

English is by no means the only lingua franca. There are, in fact, many other such contact languages, on all the continents of the world.[179] In Australasia today, we have Chinese, Malay, Tok Pisin and Kriol. In the Americas, Chinook (an Indian-French-English mixed language on the NW Pacific coast of the USA), Guarani, Nahuatl, Quechua, and Tupí. In Africa, Afrikaans, Ewe, Haussa, Nigerian Pidgin English, an Arab-based sabir in the Sudan, Swahili, and everywhere on the coasts of Africa “des sabirs dits commerciaux.”[180] In the Middle East, Arabic and Turkic. And in Europe, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Russenorsk and Spanish. In the Ancient World too, lingua francas were used: Akkadian, Aramaic, Atlantic Celtic, Greek, Latin, Pāli, Persian, Phoenician and Sanskrit. And along the Silk Road, in the early centuries of the Christian era, Khotanese “was the language of trade along the Silk Road, until it was replaced by Soghdian speech and script as the lingua franca of the bridge between West and East.”[181]

All these languages, from all phases of history, and in use across wide regions on all the known continents, have been (and often still are) extremely useful for contact and communication between speakers of widely different linguistic background.

(10) Research perspectives There is a variety of reasons why linguists such as Matras, Hicks, Trask, Weinreich and others have taken to the study of lingua franca, pidgins, creoles and language contact. To name a few scholars working in this domain: Mühlhausler[182] and Calvet[183] have made important contributions to (post-)colonial linguistics, that is, the study of how many of these languages emerged under conditions of colonial power, control and inequality; Thomason and Kaufman have established how, when studying these languages, the conditions of emergence and use of these languages must systematically be taken into account, since the linguistic outcome of language contact always depends on the historical context and circumstances in which they arise;[184] Hagège has focused on what he calls the dialogic species and its creole laboratory, which provides insights into basic properties of the human language faculty;[185] and Bickerton[186] has leapt from creolistics to studying the roots of language under his bioprogram, with its central focus on the universal endowment and language abilities of the human species.

The following three observations may offer some background and perspective here. First, these languages are topical, important for their role both in world history and in the world of today. Apart from the phenomenal rise of English as the first global lingua franca, there are many other such trade languages. The interest in these languages is recent; there has been a long history of neglect, during which these languages were often much maligned, the butt of sociocultural and political dédain.[187] Today, they are better known and receive more recognition; they are used in literature (Rushdie, Chamoiseau), where creole and créolité is celebrated for the raw energy of its broken language and oral poetry, with “Caliban tearing up the pages of Prospero’s magic book,”[188] as David Dabydeen put it, adding: “It’s hard to put two words together in creole without swearing.”[189] At the same time, however, there often still is enormous cultural resistance and prejudice against what for many people is no more than the spoken patois and street lingo of the uneducated and the illiterate. All this reflects the world we live in: as it changes and gets smaller, contact increases, and so does the need for a common vehicle for communication.

Secondly, studying these kinds of languages serves the purpose of critical scrutiny and scholarly hygiene within linguistics: Creoles and lingua francas defy conventional and established ideas and theories about language, providing counter examples that contribute to the testing and falsification of linguistic theories. Thus, for example, Schuchardt disproved the Neogrammarian Hypothesis, and also dismissed Saussurean structuralism. And in more recent times, Weinreich[190] and Labov[191] precede Dakhlia[192] in arguing that the study of language contact, transfer and interference serves to disprove the rigid formal and abstract notion of system that dominates in much of twentieth century structural and generative linguistics.

Thirdly, we are witnessing here the “birth of new languages,”[193] which stand out by their intriguing features and pose a clear investigative challenge. They are new in the sense that they are not based on a single transmitted, ancestral variety of language, but on a combination of source languages. Their genetic affiliation or linguistic parentage can therefore not easily be determined, and does not fit easily into the existing schemes of comparative-historical (or structural) linguistics.[194] Put differently, pidgins, creoles and lingua francas invite new analyses, ideas and perspectives as to their emergence and development, their structure and use, and the sorts of complexities they exhibit. Studied in this way, they may contribute to the development of new insights into core aspects of verbal behavior and the human language faculty, and how these operate under specific socio-historical and political conditions.

Such questions are the subject matter of the new field of contact linguistics which grew quickly at the end of the twentieth century, and is today in full flow. With its new knowledge and insights, its new discoveries and its important theoretical issues and debates, contact linguistics has much to offer if we want to come to grips with lingua franca.

(11) Lingua franca as part of a network of notions: necessary distinctions As a category in modern contact linguistics, the notion of lingua franca is now being applied to the study of other languages with comparable properties, of the present as well as of the past. So our first question must be: What are those properties?

According to Matras a lingua franca can be a pidgin, but it can also be a creole, and could equally be an already existing language.[195] The question is, how exactly are these various notions linked? In his dictionary of linguistics, Trask constructs an interesting trail of links and references, running from lingua franca to pidgin, creole, interlect and koinè, via Greek and Aramaic, language contact and crystallization, to linguistic convergence and models of linguistic descent.[196] Following his lead, we will below explore the network of concepts within modern contact linguistics that lingua franca is part of.

We do so in four steps. Our first step here is to do away with the notion of “mixed language.” Trask defines this as “A language which does not descend from a single ancestor in the normal way but which has instead been assembled by combining large chunks of material from two (or more) existing languages: one type of non-genetic language. The term is commonly applied only to mother tongues and not to pidgins, which otherwise may have a similar origin, and it is not usually applied to creoles either.”[197] To which he immediately adds a critical note: “At least since the days of Hugo Schuchardt in the late nineteenth century, linguists have wondered whether mixed languages truly exist, and many linguists have doubted their reality,”[198] and “the term mixed language has sometimes been applied far more broadly to any language which has been significantly influenced by another such as English, but this broad usage seems objectionable, since in this sense there are hardly any unmixed languages.” One can only agree—all languages are mixed, as Sapir noted, so this is a meaningless label, for which we have no use.

Our next step is to consider the notion of koinè. “This term refers to a variety of a language that serves as a means of communication among speakers of related varieties or dialects; in effect, a koinè is a lingua franca used among speakers of related dialects. There is, however, a general understanding that the role of a koinè entails a certain amount of structural leveling and cross-dialectal accommodation, processes that occur much more easily when the speech varieties involved are related and to some extent mutually comprehensible.”[199] From history we know that Koinè Greek was the general, simplified Greek commonly used throughout the Hellenistic world in the post-Alexandrian era, spoken everywhere in an area far larger than its original homeland in Greece and Macedonia, and which included settlements around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, in Egypt, the Middle East, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Persia, and all the way to the Indus, where it was used in the inscriptions on the Pillars of Asoka.[200] The point here is: a koinè can serve as a lingua franca, as it did in the Hellenistic world, but not conversely: the historic Lingua Franca—even if it had regional and temporal variation—was not a koinè and was not used between speakers of related varieties of a language. On the contrary, it was used precisely between speakers who did not have a language in common.

We come a lot closer, thirdly, when we consider the relationship between lingua franca and pidgin. According to Price a pidgin is

a contact vernacular [...] for purposes of intercommunication, frequently in trading contexts but sometimes for other reasons (e.g. communication between masters and servants or slaves), in situations involving speakers of two or more languages, each of which contributes something of its pronunciation, grammar or lexicon to the pidgin. Pidgins are restricted languages in the sense that their range of functions and their vocabulary are significantly more limited than those of more conventional languages and that they have a simplified grammar lacking many of the features of the languages from which they derive. Nevertheless, a pidgin is not unstructured but obeys widely accepted conventions of pronunciation, grammar and lexical meaning.[201]

In line with this view, Matras observes that “pidgins might be seen as a kind of make-shift lingua franca.”[202] Thus, to some extent, the notions of pidgin and lingua franca overlap.

In this context, fourthly, what about lingua franca and creole? The question matters, because many creoles arose in colonial language contact situations, giving rise to English-based, French-based, Spanish-based, Portuguese-based, Dutch-based and Arabic-based creoles,[203] with a range of typical “broken language” features.[204] A creole language derives from a pidgin, when this comes into use as the first language of a community, develops an expanded vocabulary and a more elaborate grammar, and by that process evolves into a creole.[205] More in detail:

Creoles derive typically from pidgin languages but, whereas a pidgin is an accessory language and no one’s first language, a creole arises when a pidgin becomes the mother tongue of a speech community. The simple structure that characterized the pidgin is carried over into the creole but since a creole, as a mother tongue, must be capable of expressing the whole range of human experience, the lexicon is expanded and frequently a more elaborate system evolves.[206]

Here, again, we encounter a degree of overlap, this time between lingua franca and creole.

Given the overlap we encounter here between lingua franca, pidgin and creole, if we are to contribute from linguistics to a better understanding of languages in contact, we do need clear and careful distinctions that can help to disentangle the confusion of distinct but partially overlapping notions.

What is needed here is the distinction between function and structure. As Matras put it, “The principal challenge facing the study of contact languages is to relate their particular structural profile to the circumstances of their emergence and the purpose for which they are created and used”—and his own view that, “the term ‘lingua franca’ remains strictly confined to the sociolinguistic role of the language concerned, with no direct implications as to its structural composition.”[207] Thus, lingua franca is a role of language, a function or purpose, viz. to serve as vehicle for contact and communication, whereas pidgin and creole have to do first of all with the form and structure of the language variety concerned.

This provides us with a useful basic distinction. But things are more complex, and given the overlap that often occurs between lingua franca, pidgin and creole[208] we must ask, what exactly is the relation between function and structure here? Is there perhaps a correlation between, on the one hand, a language’s role as lingua franca and, on the other, aspects of its structure, for example, a more analytic syntax, less inflection and an influx of foreign vocabulary?

The answer comes in two steps. First of all, pidgins and creoles emerge to serve the same purpose of contact and communication as lingua franca, but a lingua franca does not necessarily have to be a pidgin or creole: it can also be an existing language such as Latin, English or French—so there is no necessary, bi-unique connection between function and structure here. But secondly, even so, in practice a close connection between the two is quite common: lingua francas often are pidgin or creole, and in particular, the historic Lingua Franca definitely was a broken form of language, a pidgin built from Romance roots, simplified and reduced so as to serve the purpose of facilitating contact and communication across a language gap or barrier.

(12) Core features of lingua franca From the preceding discussion of the historical Lingua Franca and of lingua francas in general, the following core features emerge.

The first, and essential, point was established by Schuchardt: In Lingua Franca everything is always born of necessity, in a situation of contact between speakers of different language background, that is, always in a multilingual situation where everyone needs, and therefore also converges toward, one central vehicle for communication.

Secondly. The central purpose to be served by a lingua franca is for spoken interaction and oral communication across language barriers in a contact situation. What is needed is interactive behavior that can produce results in the market and on the street. Here, it would seem, anything goes. Do as Gulliver did, trying out his whole linguistic repertoire, in order to overcome the language barrier, choosing the language or communication instrument that offers the best returns. It all depends on the situation.

Thirdly, the key point is: the simpler the better. The key example from the original Lingua Franca is Mi andar. Do not go in for elaborate code, just stick with basic communication—that is the first priority, which overrides all niceties of form, rules and regulation. If necessary, we can reduce the structures of our verbal behavior and our language, using only basic roots, key words and short utterances, thus making a pidgin with broken down and restricted morphology, syntax, phonology and lexicon, all aiming for maximum comprehensibility.

Fourthly, as for the manner and channel of transmission, note that the broken language variety used as lingua franca is a readymade instrument for practical use; a disposable variety of language, very necessary but handled without care, easily discarded and quickly forgotten afterwards; not standardized, not taught in school, not one’s own, always somebody else’s language—in fact no man’s language. Its preferred channel of transmission is in the streets and markets, the harbors, the drinking houses, the brothels, the plantations, in the army and on board ships—with the lingua franca as the unregulated core of the oral culture that thrives there.

Fifthly, note that in practice a close connection between function and form, purpose and structure, is very common and prevalent. This means that we will always have to inquire into the concrete relationship between on the one hand the social role and purpose of a language variety in contact, and on the other hand the specific structural consequences this may entail.[209] It is this very complexity which we also encounter in the case of the mixed language varieties that arose in Dutch-Malay language contact during the colonial era in the Dutch possessions in the Indonesian archipelago, where it is always that particular mix, at that time and place, in that context and setting.[210] There are, in other words, no standards and no fixed language rules here, only variation; lingua franca is always flexible and adaptable.

With these intriguing properties, Lingua Franca is the polar opposite of the solemn Lingua Sacra, which, moreover, usually strongly benefits from being written. More about this in the next section.

1.3 Lingua Sacra: History and Theory

1.3.1 Religions and their Languages

(1) Introduction: religions and their languages today In London today, as in many other mass conurbations around the world, we encounter a wide range of different religions.[211] Nothing new here: ever since the ancient city of Uruk five millennia ago,[212] there have always been many gods in our cities, many creeds, many faiths and beliefs.

Take Mithras, the old Iranian sun-god, imported from the East in the first century CE by the Romans as the god of mysteries, and worshipped all over the Roman empire as late as the fifth century, especially by soldiers who disseminated his cult throughout Europe to places as far away as Martigny, Mainz and London.[213] Today long dead and forgotten, Mithras was present in Londinium almost two thousand years ago, amidst a wide range of other creeds, cults and religions, alongside Roman gods, romanized Celtic deities, Germanic gods, Greek and Oriental ones, right next to the Christian god as well as prehistoric animistic beliefs.[214] In Rome itself this was no different: the eternal city was never monotheistic and offered hospitality to gods from Etruria, Greece, Israel, Egypt, Palmyra and many other places,[215] while the Roman Empire created the necessary traveling conditions.

Today, this is as common as it has ever been. In London today, as one of the after-effects of the British Empire, many gods are being worshipped: Allah and God, Dieu, Jahweh, Theos, Bog, the Hindu pantheon, the Buddha, Ganesha, and many more. There are also very large Anglican, Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox cathedrals in London, as well as the largest mosque of Europe (in Regent’s Park), the largest Sikh temple (in Southwark), and the largest Hindu temple (in West London). Even Zoroastrianism, one of the oldest religions, established by the Iranian prophet Zarathustra long before our common era, is being practiced in London today—its high priest of the ritual of fire and light working as a baggage handler at Heathrow airport.[216]

So many gods, so many languages. In London’s religious domain, multilingualism is a pervasive reality today: more than twenty languages other than English are regularly used for religious services, ranging from Afrikaans, Amharic, Arabic and Aramaic, Chinese, Danish and Dutch through Farsi, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Patois, Punjabi and Russian to Sanskrit, Spanish and Turkish.[217]

Of these languages the following eight belong to what are traditionally considered to be lingua sacra: Classical Arabic, Aramaic, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Punjabi, and Sanskrit. Two more can be added if we assume that “Russian” is actually the Old Church Slavonic of the Russian Orthodox Church, and that the Amharic mentioned above is actually Ge’ez, an Ethiopian Semitic language in use as a liturgical language by Ethiopian Jews in the Orthodox Tewahedo and by Ethiopian Christians in the Catholic church. Altogether then, about half the languages on the list above can be considered lingua sacra.[218]

The other half are languages which are used for religious services within the relevant linguistic communities. The Dutch language, for example, is used to celebrate the Christian religion within the Dutch speaking community living in London. But note that using Dutch—or Afrikaans, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish and Turkish—for a religious service does not automatically turn that language into a lingua sacra. That is, we will have to make a distinction here between a language of religion such as Hebrew, and languages used for a religious service such as Dutch.

With respect to the first of these two categories, the languages of religion, there often seems to exist a one-to-one correlation between language and religion. For Moslems, Classical Arabic is the only true language of Islam, since the Koran is quite literally the Word of God himself. No human being can truly comprehend it, no translation is possible, and no other language can be used in acts of worship, and for this reason, Classical Arabic is the sacred language of Islam, even if the Koran has been rendered into more than a hundred languages, including Chinese, Dutch, English, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Polish and Spanish,[219] and even if the Muslim community in London, although unified by Islam and their worship of “the same God in the same sacred language” (Koranic Arabic), is culturally heterogeneous and linguistically diverse, speaking English and/or Punjabi, Urdu, Mirpuri, Pashto, Gujarati, Bengali, Hindi, Somali, Malay and a host of other Asian and African languages.[220]

For other languages, however, the correlation may not be as strictly bi-unique. Sanskrit, for example, is the sacred language not only of the Vedas and Hinduism, but also of Mahayana Buddhism and of Jainism. Conversely, even if Buddhism’s most important canon is in Pāli,[221] there are also Buddhist canons in Classical Chinese, Sanskrit and Tibetan. Thus, Sanskrit is a (and not the) sacred language of Buddhism. Meanwhile, Classical Chinese is the language not only of Confucianism and Buddhism but also of Taoism. And in Christianity too, multilingualism is everywhere, and right from the beginning.

The Bible comes in a number of sacred languages—of which two are Semitic, viz. Aramaic-Syriac and Hebrew, while the other two are Indo-European, respectively koinè Greek, “the post-classical variety in which the New Testament is written” and which is the liturgical language of Greek Christianity,[222] and Ecclesiastical Latin, the language of St. Jerome’s Vulgata and the dominant liturgical language of the Roman Catholic Church. In addition, there is the long-standing tradition of Bible translation, a case of customer-friendly multilingualism in support of outreach and missionary purposes, beginning early on with translations into Armenian, Gothic, Old Church Slavonic, Coptic—“a form of ancient Egyptian, written in the Greek alphabet, which died out as a spoken language in about the fourteenth century, but is still used today as a liturgical language by Coptic Christians”[223]—and into very many other languages.[224] There is no strict, one-to-one correspondence here between language and religion: Latin is only one of the lingua sacras of Christianity.[225] It is also the universal language of the Church, alongside the many vernaculars which—since the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965)—may be used to celebrate Mass if the liturgical texts, translated from Latin, have been legitimately approved within the Roman Catholic world church.

At this point we are moving into the second category distinguished above, the languages for religious service. When these are used, for example when the Lord’s Prayer is translated into Dutch, this translation does not in and by itself turn Dutch into a sacred language. Equally, when the German linguist Johann Christoph Adelung, in his Mithridates, presented the Lord’s Prayer in 500 different languages,[226] this did not turn each of those 500 into lingua sacra. For religious people and church members, however, this may be different, and the sacredness of the original may carry over onto the translation. An interesting example is the Bible in the Early Modern Dutch Statenvertaling of 1637, today still in use amongst ultra-orthodox Calvinist denominations in the Netherlands, who do not see it as a translation but as God’s Word itself.[227] Here, the translation can partake in the sacredness of the original, with Dutch functioning as a lingua sacra in the same way as Latin, that is, as the language of God’s Word, in a Dutch that is marked by archaic, at times even incomprehensible, formations, and by a precise and solemn delivery within the liturgical ritual of the church.

1.3.2 So What Makes these Languages Sacred?

(2) Ancient conceptions of sacredness: clearing a space for investigation Having identified a number of existing lingua sacras, from Arabic to Sanskrit, our next question is: What can we say about their sacredness? What is it that makes or made those languages sacred? What concepts, distinctions or factors are involved in saying that a particular language is a lingua sacra?

In section 1.1, we noted how the notion of lingua sacra takes us into new territory: viz. the domain of what is held sacred by people in the domain of religious language—a vast and rather complicated field of deeply-held socio-cultural ideas, beliefs, traditions and values about language and its magic, power and symbolism. So, before we proceed, we will have to consider the existence and impact of these age-old beliefs about the sacredness of language.

To begin with the Bible, note that this a vast repository of stories concerning language. There is, to begin with, the notion of the logos spermatikos—that is, the creative language and the words spoken by God at the Creation, from which the world emanates.[228] On account of this story, present both in the opening chapters of Genesis and in the final Book of Revelations, God’s language is presented as the Alpha and the Omega of the biblical universe—an interesting use of the alphabet as a metaphor to signify His eternity.[229] Then, next, Adam receives from God the gift of language. And what a gift that was: an instrument for naming and labelling, which brings order to the world around us; an instrument also for communication and dialogue with our fellow men, for question and answer, for satisfying one’s curiosity, for seduction, deceit, lies and storytelling; as well as an instrument for dialogue with God, in prayer, confession, grace and worship, but also revelations, commandments, injunctions, lessons and parables, and finally punishment and expulsion from Paradise. Thus, not only is language—from which the universe emanates and with which mankind can make its own worlds—god-given; it is also clearly a most powerful instrument which can serve every imaginable purpose, function or endeavor.

The Bible is also the source of a number of conceptual traditions concerning language and the plurality of languages. In the Old Testament, the book of Genesis tells the story of the Babylonian confusion of tongues which God inflicted as a punishment upon those who had the audacity of building the Tower of Babel—thus keeping mankind divided, while simultaneously asserting the immense power of monolingualism and a monopoly of language.[230] In the New Testament though, things were rather different. When Jesus was crucified, there was a multilingual sign on the cross, in Hebrew, Greek and Latin—giving us the three sacred languages of the Bible.[231] Later, at Pentecost, the Apostles could suddenly speak in many previously unknown tongues, reflecting age old practices of ecstatic religious glossolalia.[232] There is an acceptance here of multilingualism which underpins the missionary tradition of translating the Bible into other languages so as to spread God’s Word around the world.

We should not underestimate the continuing influence of these ancient conceptions, or the implications they have for the sacredness of language. But we should also see these conceptions for what they are: myths—that is, religious ways of coming to terms with language and multilingualism. They may be ancient and powerful, but they are and remain myths. In our evolutionary times today, no one can seriously maintain that the universe did indeed emanate from God’s Word; that language really was God’s gift to mankind; that the snake did actually speak to Eve; that Hebrew was the language of Paradise; that the world has ever been “all of one tongue,” and so on. And while the Bible holds a rich collection of such viewpoints, these go off in all directions, and do not constitute a consistent body of testable propositions. Historically, furthermore, it is precisely from these and other such religious preconceptions that the discipline of modern linguistics has had to emancipate itself—in a secularization process beginning in the eighteenth century with the Encyclopédie and its systematic empirical investigations of language and languages, then continuing in the nineteenth century with the breakthrough and formidable successes of historical comparative linguistics. At this point we may ask—from a Wissensgeschichtlich point of view—whether “sacredness” and the practice of calling language (or a language) “sacred” are perhaps tied in with this early modern secularization process. Could it be that “sacredness of language” is a notion belonging to the speculative eighteenth century, just like its ideas on the origin of language, the plurality and the harmony of languages, or the ideal language? And how was this connected to the assertion of Judaism and Jewish orthodoxy in the eighteenth century, which went hand in hand with the promotion of the Hebrew language as its lingua sacra?[233] Are we looking here at an early modern sacralization of language, in an attempt perhaps to counter the ongoing disenchantment of the world by the Enlightenment?

However this may be, for us, today, “sacredness,” based as it is on biblical or religious grounds, would appear to be just a belief, at best a speculative and pre-scientific notion, not an object of scholarly investigation. But then, if these biblical notions are no longer valid or relevant, the whole question of lingua sacra may be wrongly conceived and mal posé—and in that case, shouldn’t we reject the whole idea of “sacredness,” and abandon our pursuit?

My answer to this question is no—not until we have first investigated what we can say, from a linguistic point of view, with Crystal[234] and Jakobson,[235] about the characteristics of lingua sacra.

(3) Varieties of lingua sacra and sources of sacredness A practical starting point for such an investigation is provided by the article on “Sacred Languages” in Wikipedia,[236] which invites many questions. Is lingua sacra actually an identifiable kind of language or category of language use? How are sacred languages different from non-sacred languages? If Latin is a sacred language, what does it mean to say so? When, or how, can we say that something is actually the Word of God? If Sanskrit is a sacred language, then why? Is it, as Pollock says, because it is the language of the gods? Or perhaps because of some writing, scripture or a book that within the context of the relevant religion is held to be sacred? So, is sacredness perhaps a concept that only holds within the domain of religion or even within the particular religion involved?

For an exploration of these questions we will now first take a closer look at the varieties of lingua sacra and the factors involved in their sacredness.

(3.1) Sacred and profane: the mana of language As a first step, we take the distinction between “sacred” and “profane” as developed in the comparative anthropology of religion, in particular in the work of Mircea Eliade.[237] In Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion the central notion is that of “Hierophanies,” that is, items which manifest something which is sacred, “das ‘ganz andere’.”[238] There is an immense variety and diversity of such hierophanies, since almost anything can be sacred—trees, rivers, the wind, the sun, the stars, ancestors, war, objects, locations, views, sounds, gestures, images, shells, horses, stones, events, games, and so on. So too can language.

Eliade’s work does not contain a separate chapter on “sacred languages,” but it does offer a lot of information on incantations, spells, names, formulas, words on paper—all sorts of things which one can do in and with language, with a symbolic power governed by practices of mana and taboo. It is not the language itself that is sacred here—rather, the sacredness of a language is determined by its mana. As far as I can see, the mana of language involves, first of all, the intrinsic symbolic power of a word, a speech sound, a tone of voice, a chant, curses, a prophecy, and so on; secondly, its mana may be enhanced by rituals and practices necessary to achieve the intended effect, for example, in magic or in divination (such as initiation, the use of fixed formulas, the requirement of precise, correct and unchanged repetition in mantras and chants, the strict observation of the secrets, sanctions and exclusions required by taboo); and thirdly, its mystical dimension may involve meditation, visions, mysteries, revelations and ecstasies, all focussed on the spiritual and creative powers of language, going from symbolism to das Numinöse and eventually the ineffable, in grammars of creation, real presences, gnosis, and the deepest inner intensities of belief, myth and revelation.[239]

This mana-aspect of language may have come down to us from magical thinking and ancient times, but it is alive and well today, and can be observed in everyday language behavior; and in the religious domain it exists in more concentrated and intensified form in lingua sacra.

Here, with Crystal,[240] we can envisage a linguistics of religious language. Having opened this field of investigation, we shall discuss it further below, in subsection (4). In the meantime, we shall continue to explore here in subsection (3) what other sources, beyond mana and taboo, there may be for the sacredness of lingua sacra.

(3.2) Ancientness of language, and of religions: the time factor in sacredness Amongst the sacred languages mentioned above, we note that Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, Avestan, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Latin, Russian and Sanskrit are all venerable, ancient languages of religion, and have been in use as such for a very long time. Their ancientness, longevity and very longue durée definitely underscore and enhance their sacredness. A thousand years, it would appear, is indeed no more than a blink in the eyes of the Lord. New languages, at any rate, do not quickly become lingua sacra, whereas dead languages, such as Latin, Classical Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac (the liturgical language of the Syrian Jacobite Church), do remarkably well as liturgical language.[241]

The time factor may go far deeper yet. The ancientness of a language may be linked to some beginning, or at least to a very significant moment in time long ago—an initial text or foundational event, perhaps the start of a new era and calendar such as we find in the major religions of the world. Here it is not the ancientness of the language which ensures its sacredness; the decisive factor appears to be the longevity of the relevant cults and religions—the tradition and continuity of devotion and worship, perhaps of some long lost ancestor deity on the list of dead gods in Mencken’s Prejudices.[242] Once a religion or cult is gone, the names of its gods as well as their languages will be forgotten too; whereas, conversely, for the Tornedalian Finnish in Sweden their religion was the inner core and decisive factor in the maintenance and revitalization of their Meänkieli language.

An example of the kind of cultic longue durée involved in lingua sacra, is the persistence of magical practices in the butter letter from Fryslân, a mishmash of writing, signs and symbols, written at the end of the eighteenth century by a village pastor, and in use until well into the twentieth century to ward off evil, and to break a witch’s spell on the butter. Its writer used ancient Hebrew, Greek and Latin symbols, rituals and liturgic formulas—such as amen Adrata Bldrata Boldat Belial—all dead and incomprehensible, but full of age-old magical power.[243] Here, instead of the decline of magic observed by Thomas,[244] what we witness is the continuity of such magical practices, incorporated somehow into the village religion, facilitated by a written text, and enduring long after the Enlightenment could have put an end to it. Those symbols and formulas may have been dead letters all along, but the belief in their efficacy as a remedy against witchcraft kept them alive as lingua sacra.

(3.3) Rituals, repetition and incomprehensibility The cultic words and symbols, the formulas in ancient sacred languages and the magical practices used in the Frisian butter letter go back a very long time. Like this letter, at one time or another, Etruscan script, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Mene Tekel, secret signs in an unknown language, Greek and Latin charms, alphabet magic, spells and curses written backwards, formulas such as Hocus Pocus, Sesame open up and Sim Sala Bim, etcetera were used for religious or magical purposes.[245]

The astounding longevity of these practices testifies to the crucial importance of keeping the formulas concerned always and unchangeably the same. The underlying belief is that “the repetitive statement of certain words can produce the reality stated.”[246] All that matters is exact repetition—a feature we often encounter in lingua sacra.

Note, however, that this unchangeability requirement on lingua sacra sits uneasily alongside the fact that language is a dynamic entity, always in flux and in change. As a consequence, within a few generations, a sacred text, formula or ritual may become dated; its archaisms and ancient character causing obscurity and incomprehension; and triggering a need for exegesis, interpretation and clarification. This is not really a problem, however, since one doesn’t have to be able to understand what is said in those texts, as long as they are precisely and faithfully repeated and delivered. In view of this, we may wonder whether a language or text, in order to qualify as sacred, actually has to be incomprehensible. The answer to that is no, but it sure helps: incomprehensibility is definitely an asset for a lingua sacra and its longevity. The incomprehensibility may even be deliberate: codes, cryptography, secret languages and many other forms of language play can be used by initiates to keep outsiders out and to keep their cult and its secrets hidden from the uninitiated.

Rituals are there to ensure the precise repetition and delivery of always the same sound in the same way. The effort to maintain the original formula and keep it unchanged tends to be supported by strong sanctions—against accepting the change and dynamics of language; against the use of an updated version in contemporary language; and against the translation of a sacred text into the common language or a vernacular. For many centuries, Church Latin thus withstood Dante’s vernacular revolution and maintained its monopoly as lingua sacra of Christianity. William Tyndale was burnt at the stake, in Vilvoorde on 6 September 1536, for daring to translate the Bible into English.

(3.4) Lingua sacra, sacred books and the word of God Yet another source of sacredness in lingua sacra is the existence of a Sacred Book or Text. Avestan, for example, is the language of the sacred texts of Zoroastrianism, written down in the third century CE.[247] Similarly, for Muslims, Classical Arabic is the only true language of the eighth-century Koran—which therefore has always dominated over colloquial Arabic as spoken in many different varieties throughout the Islamic world. Another interesting example is Sikhism, with a sacred book dating from the eighteenth century, and with Classical Punjabi (already different from the various dialects of Punjabi that exist today) as its lingua sacra, even if a plurality of other languages, such as Sindhi, Sanskrit, Gujarati, Marathi, Hindi, some Persian and Arabic, is also used in these holy scriptures.

Here, again, it is not the language itself that is sacred. Rather, its sacredness derives from a text that is holy. The term often used for these languages is “canonical languages.”[248] The classical canonical languages—such as Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Pāli and Sanskrit—are languages of the major religions. Since these are extremely reluctant to allow the use of the vernacular, this gives a very restricted definition of the term “canonical”—a term to be used if and only if it is the original language of a sacred text, and only the language of that sacred text. These languages are often not understood by the congregation, with the result that they can be “endowed with a sacred quality and creative power.”[249]

Religion plays a very powerful role here, as it is ultimately the holiness of the Book which underpins the status of its language as lingua sacra. The Sacred Book, in turn, is often sacred because it is accepted as the actual Word of God—whether this is in Sanskrit as the Language of the Gods,[250] or in Classical Arabic as the sacred language of Islam, or in the many languages of the Bible, or most recently, in the Korean language, of which the Unification Church’s founder, Sun Myung Moon, has said—a very strong claim indeed—that Korean is “the language closest to God’s Heart.”[251]

(3.5) Writing and canonization The sacred character of lingua sacra may also be due to the writing and the script in which the texts of a religion are couched.

Writing in itself can bestow prestige, as we can see in the story in Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques of the headman who pretends he can read so as to enhance his status within the tribe by the power, magic and worship attached to writing and reading.[252] Nothing new here—since time immemorial, religious and magic powers have been ascribed to the invention of writing. “Many ancient cultures attributed the origin of writing to divine intervention”,[253] and Crystal mentions Toth, Nabu, Odin and Brahma as gods of script and writing.[254] Writing carries great symbolic power, and for many centuries, the Sybilline books in the Etruscan language, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Gothic runes have all been invested with magical powers.

So, we must consider the question: Is the sacredness of lingua sacra due to the script and writing it comes in? Fact is that most of the existing lingua sacras are written. Aramaic, Sanskrit, Greek, Hebrew have all been written for thousands of years. Writing preserves, gives permanence, and makes a visual and symbolic impact, which carries great prestige. Power and religion have always been a driving force in the spread of writing and scripts. It is writing which confers sacredness on a language; and this may even, as for example in Hebrew, require a special “sacred literacy.”[255] So, in view of this, shouldn’t we stop speaking of sacred language, and instead only talk about sacred writing, sacred texts, or sacred books?

Note that Bouquet says that ancient script and writing are not necessarily, and have not always been, ipso facto sacred as such.[256] Writing and its invention may well be tied into the organization and continuity of ancient institutions that one could not run very well without it—administration, law giving and taxation, the school, the library and archives, architecture, religion, foreign affairs and the army.[257] Very often the origin of writing appears to have been secular, and there is “no evidence in the ancient civilizations of the Indus valley, of Mesopotamia, or of China that writing was restricted to or specifically associated with religious purposes.”[258]

Even so, even if writing does not have a religious origin, “much ancient writing is connected with sacred affairs, events, and persons”,[259] and “Literacy, both in ancient and modern times, has been closely associated with religion.”[260] From small beginnings—sentences inscribed on stones, bowls, walls, prayers, invocations, charms, “answers given by sacred men and women on behalf of a deity”[261]—slowly grew a larger and more varied literature. The result—as Bouquet’s anthology documents—is an extensive amount of material that has come down to us from many different cultures, periods, languages and scripts, of sacred writings and religious literature, ranging from sayings of the deity, prayers, invocations, charms and formulaic spells through hymns, myths, liturgies, prayers, instructions and codifications, prophesies and revelations, all the way to stories and dramatic representations.[262]

Eventually, this process produced sacred books, validated and canonized by a religious community that sets its seal on the standard compilation of the relevant sacred literature. And this is the core point here: the crucial role of canonization processes. It is not just the symbolic power of writing; behind those sacred books there has always been an authority, a process of selection, and a decision about the canon they are part of.

Again, then, it is not the language itself that is sacred. Rather, it is the writing and the script, together with the relevant canonization process, which determine the sacredness of the texts and books concerned, from which lingua sacra takes its sacred character.

(3.6) Lingua sacra before the written word As we see, many sacred languages have the weight of a long written tradition behind them. For these languages, the combined power of writing, tradition and longevity ensures a cumulation of sacredness, or as we might say today, an accumulation of symbolic and cultural capital.[263]

Writing also offers sustainability and endurance. Without it, many sacred texts would not have been preserved. We shall never know the oral traditions of the Druïds, since “the Celtic world, like the rest of barbarian Europe, was one of non-literate oral tradition, which was the time honoured and socially approved mode for the conservation and transmission of law, genealogy, story, song and myth in the vernacular,” and “the Druids were specifically concerned with the preservation and continuance of this ancient convention, which avoided the use of writing.”[264] There is a caveat here: writing may enhance the sacredness of a language and may also be crucial to ensure its preservation and survival, but equally, lingua sacra is not necessarily and not always a written language.

So what about religions without writing? How do those religions manage without the accumulated and institutionalized power of writing and tradition? Are there oral lingua sacras? How do these work, and what can this tell us about lingua sacra in general? Are our findings about written lingua sacra applicable here, when there is no sacred book? Or, if not, in what way are oral lingua sacras different?

In this domain of oral lingua sacras we encounter a wide variety of verbal behavior: chants, hymns, celebrating mass and liturgies; sermons, lessons and oral delivery of myths and epics; prayers in holy locations, murmured by a sea of voices; re-enactments and other spoken performances with kathartic or healing impact; oracles, prophecies, mysteries and rituals; the use of magical formulas, riddles, taboos; garbling, abracadabra and other incomprehensibilities in secret spoken languages.

This takes us well beyond the classical written canonical and liturgical languages, to the category of “secret esoteric languages”—a special category of language, which is used to converse with the powers of the unseen.[265] At their core, these have to do with what Williams calls “sacred sounds.” Words like Amen and Hallelujah, for example, which have always been retained unchanged in their original sound shape and have never been translated, are sacred because of the “virtue [...] deemed to be inherent in the sound.”[266]

Utterances of such sacred sounds can be a “release from an ‘overwhelming psychic pressure’” and “a spontaneous expression of the inner experience.”[267] An example is glossolalia in the New Testament story of the effusion of the Holy Spirit through the Apostles’ speaking in tongues,[268] which is at the root of Pentecostalism and other forms of charismatic Christianity. In glossolalic trance utterances there may be a lot of unintelligible speech, pseudo-words, transformed by all kinds of poetic devices and speech permutations, with vowel and consonant changes of a sometimes very complicated nature, frequent alliteration and rhyme, protraction and repetition of vowels, and often special stress and intonation patterns, peculiar sing-song rhythms and melody, etcetera.[269] Similar phenomena occur in the language of the possessed, as in Jamaican Maroon Spirit Possession Language, spoken by Jamaican Maroons, the descendants of runaway slaves in the mountains of Jamaica, during their Kromanti Play, in which the participants are possessed by their ancestors and speak like they used to long ago.

Mantras too can achieve such a language-transcending effect, since “the very repetition of the mantra may be thought to release creative power.”[270] In the case of ancient Sanskrit mantras this has been ascribed to the fact that they share significant features with other “fringe linguistic phenomena—like the recitation of prayers, the chanting of magical spells, or the ecstatic experience of speaking in tongues.”[271] In Sinhalese mantras, for example, “Sanskrit expressions, Pāli words and classical Sinhalese literary forms are employed, while in exorcist rites a polyglot mixture of ancient and modern languages is used.”[272] And as with glossolalia, it is by virtue of their lack of meaning and/or unintelligibility that mantras have power and efficacy in exorcism.[273]

All this is supported by the ancient Sanskrit belief that the spoken word is a thing of great power, that the utterance of the mantra is itself an act, and that by saying the OM mantra we can overcome any difficulty.[274] “OM,” or rather “AUM,” one of the oldest and best known Sanskrit mantras, transmitted through a longstanding practice of devotion from ancient times to the present, owes its mantra-qualities—and its sacredness—to spiritual vibration and the mysticism of sound.[275] Not only is this mantra always repeated with the same sound always produced in the same way, but in addition, within the syllable, each sound value is given its symbolic interpretation:

Thus, ‘A’ represents the waking consciousness, ‘U’ the inner world of dreams, ‘M’ the dreamless state of deep sleep, and beyond these states is the highest consciousness of all, turiya, and this all-encompassing consciousness is represented by a combination of that one syllable AUM and the silence into which the final ‘M’ subsides.[276]

Invested with this elaborate sound symbolism, the mystery and grandeur of “AUM” is that it is “the Whole,” which is “invisible, ineffable, intangible, indefinable, inconceivable, not designable, whose essence is the experience of its own Self.”[277] In this way, the “AUM” mantra is “the one profound and all-embracing vibration of the sacred sound OM,” in fact “the seed-syllable of the universe.”[278]

The key into all those “sacred sounds” is the mysticism of sound. There is a deep link here—at the level of dream language and the subconscious—between glossolalia (the language of the angels), mantras (demon language) and shamanic (or spirit) language.[279] And we may speculate that in these sacred sounds we encounter the full force of the original mana from time immemorial which gives a spoken lingua sacra a sacredness of its own, more ancient and therefore much deeper and stronger than that of a written text.

This type of sacredness is very different from that of the preceding sections. It has to do with orality, with the power of the voice, of ritual repetition and oral tradition, with sound symbolism and mysticism—through all of which vocal energies can be activated and channelled into mantras, or into a liturgy, a Gregorian chant, a religious performance, and so on.

We will come back to this matter below in subsection (4.3) of this section, where these and other questions concerning lingua sacra and orality will be discussed.

(3.7) Sources of sacredness In the preceding subsections we have discussed a network of notions of which lingua sacra is part. In the process, we have distinguished various categories of lingua sacra—sacred languages, canonical languages, liturgical languages and languages used for religious purposes. We also encountered a great variety of lingua sacra—secret, esoteric languages; demon language, language of the angels, shamanic spirit language; religious language; language of rituals; verbal magic, mystical language, glossolalia, sacred sounds, and so on. The list could probably go on, as it would appear that there is no limit to the religious inventiveness and credulity of humankind.

We also identified a range of sources of sacredness, viz. (i) mana or taboo, with language as a hierophany; (ii) ancientness of language, in combination with longevity of the cult associated with it; (iii) ritual, exact repetition, plus a concomitant archaic character of the language used; (iv) incomprehensibility, Delphic character, perhaps deliberate secrecy, hence the need for exegesis; (v) a Holy Book or sacred text; (vi) writing and canonization; (vii) spoken practices such as mantras, glossolalia, chants, spells, prophecies, all to do with orality.

Sacredness thus comes in different shapes and modes, and can be linked to many different things. What we have before us is a broad complex of relevant factors, where sacredness cuts right across the whole spectrum. Again and again, it is the source—mana, ancientness, tradition, ritual, archaisms, incomprehensibility, secrets, writing, book, canonization, religion, orality—which ensures the sacredness of the lingua sacra in question. Thus, sacredness is an attribute: it is not the language itself which is sacred, but something else that makes it so.

1.3.3 A Linguistic Perspective

(4) Introduction The central question of this third section is: What is a sacred language, what is it that makes it a sacred language, and how is it different from language in general? So far, in subsection (1) above we have surveyed which sacred languages there are in the world of today; in (2) we examined ancient biblical preconceptions and myths about sacredness, and in (3) we discussed a variety of sacred languages plus a range of factors that ensure their sacredness.

The question now before us in this subsection (4) is: What can we make of the findings above in today’s modern linguistics? Is lingua sacra a viable category of language? Suppose it is a type of language or language use with specific functions and structures that is in some sense comparable to lingua franca, then what linguistic features and which functions are characteristic of the language forms and behaviors used as lingua franca? Is a general definition of the concept of lingua sacra possible? How can we make this work in linguistic analysis? What distinctions and concepts can help us to get a better grip on sacred languages? And how do we bridge the gap between the disciplines involved in lingua sacra versus lingua franca, such as contact linguistics and the religious-anthropological insights reported above?

What we need, in other words, is a linguistic perspective, that can help us in going beyond all those varieties of lingua sacra. To this end, and following on from the discussion of the linguistics of religious language in Crystal (1956), we adopt the framework of functional-structural linguistics as developed by Jakobson[280] in our search for the characteristic properties of lingua sacra. Since this is a first step, we will restrict our inquiry to the following three soundings into the major dimensions of Sociolinguistics, Speech acts, and Orality.

(4.1) The sociolinguistics of lingua sacra The investigation of language and religion as a sociolinguistic field of study is a new and recent development.[281] It is a complex field, involving links with fields as diverse as anthropology, theology, linguistics, language management, colonization, standardization, social history and identity discourses. Within this complex field we will focus here on the issue of lingua sacra, and our first question is: Can we apply a sociolinguistic criterion to determine the sacredness of a lingua sacra?

It would appear the answer to this question is yes. Let us start, first, from the situation where the religious community and the language community at large share the same vernacular (as is often the case in the Protestant nations). In this case we can define lingua sacra as a matter of in-group communication within that religious community, involving a special religious vocabulary, special practices and rituals, incomprehensibility even. Now, secondly, compare the alternative: a religious community which has a lingua sacra that is different from the everyday vernacular used by both the believers and the world outside—as, for example, the exclusive use of Latin in the Roman Catholic Church up until the Second Vatican Concilium.

In the first case, the lingua sacra is a different use of the same vernacular; in the second case it is a different language altogether. But in both these cases, what sets the lingua sacra apart is a matter of using a solemn register, a special vocabulary, archaic formulas, prescribed rituals and liturgy, etcetera. Whether the language serving as lingua franca is Latin or a vernacular, it is marked as “religious” (i.e. used for worship), and different from the language used in the outside world. This way, we can define lingua sacra as an in-group phenomenon in use for worship within the relevant religious community, a language with a religious monopoly that is protected through all kinds of in-group behavior, such as: exclusivity (only for the initiates); authority (a privileged priesthood of interpreters who keep the secrets and know precisely the texts, the formulas and their established meaning); ritual transmission (via liturgy, catechism and rote learning); and sanctions (against using the vernacular, or against translation of the sacred texts). And note that changing (or attempting to change) any of these social practices can be matter of serious contestation, as we know from Frisian.[282]

At the same time, through such institutionalization and its practices a religion and its language can become a crucial factor in the sociocultural vitality of the language community concerned, as we have seen in the revitalization of Finnish amongst a Piëtist community in north Sweden.[283] In the religious communities of London, it is often the priests performing the services, rituals and liturgies of worship in the sacred language who maintain the purity of this language. Having the role of lingua sacra can enhance a particular language’s chance of survival, maintenance, longevity or continuity.[284]

Spolsky’s comparative sociolinguistic analysis of language in the religious domain can tell us a lot about the social function, role and use of religious language, and offers valuable insights into religious language as an in-group phenomenon, plus the social practices and conventions surrounding this. This is obviously useful and valid. But note that—as we found in the case of London’s 23 “languages for religious purposes”[285]—while those languages all clearly belong in the domain of the sociolinguistics of language and religion, the fact that they are used for religious purposes does not in itself turn a language into lingua sacra. It is not the domain and social purpose that makes a language sacred, but rather, it would seem, this depends on the intrinsic symbolic power which that language has for its community.

That is to say, there is more to lingua sacra than social setting, usage and conventions. Here, sociolinguistics can only go so far. Or, more precisely, while the sociolinguistics of religion and language is necessary, it is not sufficient. There is a need to make further distinctions here within the domain of religious language, and for this, we will need to look beyond sociolinguistics, into issues involved in symbolic behavior.[286]

(4.2) Lingua sacra and speech act theory In our next sounding we will take a closer look at lingua sacra from the point of view of speech acts and performative language use.

An important first consideration here is that in lingua sacra it is not the language as such which is sacred; also, it is not the language as a whole, but rather, the particular speech act which is being performed. When the Pope in Rome delivers his urbi et orbi blessing in 70 different languages, it is his act of blessing as God’s representative on earth which guarantees its sacredness. It is the specific religious speech act performed by the Pope that is sacred, rather than the language in which it is delivered. This example triggers the question: How does lingua sacra work? If it is a certain use of language that is sacred here, as in the performative analysis of Austin,[287] what is it in the Pope’s blessing that makes it sacred? And what about other speech acts in the domain of religion and language? In short, what contribution can a speech act analysis make to our understanding of lingua sacra?

From the point of view of speech act theory, lingua sacra constitutes a wide-ranging domain of language acts and practices, such as prayer, worship, glorification, baptism, naming, consecration and blessing, confessing and forgiving, the sacraments, oaths, bans, cursing, purification and exorcism, etcetera—all of which are used in religious rituals.[288] Together, they constitute a collection of exclusive, usually prescribed formulaic speech acts, in a specific language or register, to be uttered according to precise instructions, within a community of fellow initiates, in particular settings (e.g. a consecrated location), and by a serving priest, who has the competence and authority to enact the particular speech act in conformity with the canonical liturgy of the church as institution.

This approach provides us with interesting insights into the characteristics of religious speech acts, which by analogy can be applied to the sacred languages of other religions. A mantra, for example, can be described as a performative utterance which relates to the ritual action which it accompanies, conferring divine status on its practitioner and divine significance to the action, while situating the participants in key events of their religion.[289]

Here, speech act/performative analysis of lingua franca makes a necessary contribution, which usefully complements the sociolinguistic analysis above. It makes clear that what is sacred here is not the language as such, but rather a range of religious speech acts, specific acts of meaning, symbolization and communication performed in and with language. Note, however, that as its focus is primarily on liturgic rituals and the rules governing it, speech act analysis does not have much to say on sacred performances as in prophecy, glossolalia, chants, hymns, visions, revelations and oracles. These are also part of oral lingua sacra, and as such deserve to be taken into consideration. Thus, it would appear that, like sociolinguistic analysis, speech act analysis is necessary, but not sufficient for an analysis of lingua sacra. So, again, we will need to look further, if we are to do justice to the full range of sacred language.

(4.3) Lingua sacra and orality: on the power of mantras In our third sounding, we will be following on from our discussion of non-written religions and their languages in subsection (3.6) above, and look into the domain of orality for religious purposes—as, for example, in confession, chants, prayers, blessings, sermons, readings, liturgies, performances, mantras, trance utterances, glossolalia, prophecies, visions, revelations, oracles, and so on.

An interesting testimony to the special status of ancient and sacred sounds is the story of Friedrich Max Müller, the famous nineteenth-century Sanskrit scholar, who shortly after the invention of the phonograph in 1888 was invited to speak a few words into the new machine, and the first thing he wanted to record was: “Agnim ile purohitam Yajnasya devam ritvijam—hotaram ratnadhatamam [i.e. Agni I worship—the chief priest of the sacrifice—the divine priest—the invoker—conferring great wealth].” These words, as he explained, were the first verse of the Rig-Veda, “the oldest hymn in the world,” which he himself, together with Sayāna’s commentary, had edited between 1849 and 1873, to make it widely known in the east and the west, and to help the Hindus in recovering the original spirit of their religion.[290]

There is a deep symbolic value to this story, for here this oldest hymn of the world, after millennia of oral transmission and ritual repetition by Hindus in India, was now being reproduced and disseminated in late nineteenth-century England, with the use of modern technologies, in printed book form and on the phonograph, with the same aim as in the tradition of devotion, viz. to ensure its longevity by capturing as exactly as possible the most ephemeral of events, the speaking voice and the momentary sound it produces—but with pride of place clearly going to the oldest and most sacred of them all.[291] Mantras such as “OM” enjoy a similar special status, as we saw in subsection (3.6) above. In the tradition various reasons have been adduced for their sacredness: not just their ancientness, but also the use of sacred sounds, of sound symbolism, the mysticism of sound, the deep psychological impact sounds may have, perhaps even the true mana?

Here, we will restrict discussion to mantras. Going beyond the views from tradition, the question here is: Are mantras sacred? If so, what is it that makes them so? What can we say about mantras from a linguistic point of view? What is so special about the use of such sacred sounds? What can we say about the power of orality—the use of the voice, sound, speech and other oral means and modes, plus the impact they can have—that we encounter in the varieties of lingua sacra?

Of great interest here is the tradition of the Sanskrit grammarians in India who, understanding the importance of the Vedic mantras, very early on, in the grammar of Pānini (500 BCE), developed a precise phonetic analysis and description of the correct pronunciation of those mantras, and thus managed to make those sounds repeatable exactly.[292] We find the same in the ceremonial ritual of the Arval Brethren, an ancient priesthood in Rome, which has left us a careful description (anno 218 CE) of their annual festival, with precise instructions for the sacrifices, processions, meals, dances, the liturgy, the invocations and the archaic and often incomprehensible Latin hymns to be chanted. All this—as Bouquet relates—had been “handed down unchanged from remote antiquity,” through “correct recitation,” which was “held to be extremely efficacious in obtaining the desired result.”[293] Of comparable interest is the very ancient Uruk instruction (in Akkadian) for the ritual procession of a statue of the god Anu, which details the precise words the priests must use (and also how often this must be done and where exactly) in the hymns and incantations they had to recite, beginning with the blessing “Anu rabū šamē u ersetu likrubūka” [Great Anu, may heaven and earth bless you!].[294]

Oral ritual, and its precise description, in the service of correct pronunciation and the exact and unchanged repetition of a mantra, necessary to ensure its efficacy, would seem to be of basic importance here, and a good key into the study of oral lingua franca. The study of the sound structure of ritual utterances may reveal complex phonological patterns which we find more widely in oral traditions—as Williams[295] and Thompson[296] have demonstrated—such as we find in glossolalia, the language of the angels, and in shamanic spirit language. Another basic aspect involves the apparent meaninglessness of many mantras, which may be due to their endless chanting repetition. The philosopher Frits Staal has gone much further here, claiming that both the lack of meaning and the incomprehensibility of mantras are “pre-linguistic, akin to music, and in structure more similar to the syntax of bird-song than to the syntax of human language.”[297]

Thus, along this dimension of orality, we can study the specific properties of sound and voice (sound quality, phonological patterns, repetition, correct pronunciation, sound symbolism) which are characteristic of oral rituals and which are put to use and channeled into the varieties of oral lingua sacras. Similarly, along the social dimension we see religious language as an in-group phenomenon, marked by specific, religious social uses of language and the conventions surrounding this. And along the pragmatic-discourse speech act dimension, lingua sacra turned out not to be a particular language as a whole, but rather a collection of performative speech acts within it.

As we see, all three soundings above produce useful insights into important dimensions of sacred language, which demonstrate the value of sociolinguistics, speech act theory and orality studies for the investigation of lingua sacra. The challenge here is to go beyond these three and find out more about other kinds of oral sacred performance and their intrinsic symbolic force, as for example in prophecy, glossolalia, revelations, hymns, incantations, spells and curses, which are all part of oral lingua sacra too.

We need all three approaches; each on its own is necessary, but not sufficient; only the combination will do; that is why we have argued that they need to be brought together into an integrated Jakobsonian functional-structural analysis.

(5) On the linguistic properties of lingua sacra In conclusion, we now come to the same questions we faced earlier with respect to lingua franca. What can we say about the characteristic properties of lingua sacra? In what way is lingua sacra different from language in general? What features of language behavior, usage, form and structure are distinctively associated with lingua sacra? What linguistic consequences follow from this lingua sacra-function for the forms of language?

A crucial opening point: just like lingua franca, lingua sacra is not a particular language in history, but a generic concept defining a role or function of a language. Thus, lingua sacra is a vehicle serving a religious purpose, while lingua franca serves the purpose of bridging a gap or barrier in a contact situation in which speakers of different languages need to communicate with each other. In addition, lingua sacra and lingua franca each have a range of characteristic properties associated with them, so it seems useful to proceed here by way of comparative and contrastive clarification. This way, we can establish the following significant differences:

First, whereas lingua franca is born of necessity and is needed as a bridge in language contact with strangers, lingua sacra is an in-group language within a community of fellow believers, exclusively used and shared with other initiates. While lingua franca is an occasional and disposable no man’s language with very low status, lingua sacra has traditionally always been invested with great symbolic, cultural capital or power.

Secondly, lingua franca is above all an instrument of occasional spoken communication where, as Schuchardt noted, all is fluid and in flux. The first priority here is practical and effective communication, overriding all niceties of form, rules and regulation. What matters here is what Gulliver did: try out anything and use whatever works to overcome the language barrier. In contrast, lingua sacra is firmly set apart by its solemn register and delivery. Here, what matters is perfect realization: everything has to be correct or else it would be invalid, ineffective, or worse, counterproductive. The emphasis therefore is on keeping the language unchangingly the same, and to this end a wide range of prescriptive practices is used, of power, discipline and control, of canonization, symbolism and sanctions on incorrectness, of rituals and rules governing their enactment, the roles and behavior of participants at the appropriate time and place, in the right context, and so on.

Thirdly, as we noted earlier for lingua franca: the simpler the better. As we can see in the example of Mi andar—what works here is a pidgin form, the use of reduced and broken language, made up as the need arises. In contrast to this, what matters in lingua sacra is the exact execution of the proper forms of language; precise repetition and pronunciation according to a fixed norm, which allows no change or variation; not one tittle or one jot. As a consequence, lingua sacra begins to diverge from the spoken language and quickly becomes dated; fixed formulas and archaisms begin to flourish; and the religious language becomes intransparent and incomprehensible—though this may only improve its niche-position as a lingua sacra.

Fourthly, each of the two is linked to a very different channel of transmission: lingua franca to a free-for-all-in the streets, the harbors and the markets versus lingua sacra as the language of worship within a religious or otherwise restricted environment, such as the church, the congregation, or the school.

Finally, in lingua franca, as we saw earlier, there is often a close connection between its communicative function and its free, uncanonical and adaptable linguistic forms. Likewise, in lingua sacra we find a strong connection between its “sacred” function and the solemn rituals and fixed formulas used to serve this purpose.

All in all, the contrast with the properties we noted at the end of section 1.2 for lingua franca could not be greater: the two are almost polar opposites.

1.4 The Dynamics of Lingua Franca and Lingua Sacra in History: Analyses and Perspective

This final section comes in four parts. First, we will be taking a look at what can happen in the contact between lingua franca and lingua sacra. Secondly, to get a grip on the dynamics of their interaction, I will outline two distinct historic scenarios, one concerning lingua sacra, the other for lingua franca. Thirdly, in this context, as a special case that merits attention, we will consider the Dutch colonial empire in South East Asia (1602–1949) and the complex historical interaction of its languages. And finally, looking forward, we will see how our findings may serve as a springboard into the Ancient world.

(1) Lingua franca and lingua sacra in contact The first thing to note here is that our explorations confirm that the social history of languages is rather more complex than De Saussure envisaged, with his suggestion concerning the esprit de clocher versus the esprit d’intercourse from which we started. In this respect, the development of contact linguistics since Schuchardt and of functional-structural linguistics since Jakobson have been instrumental.

As a result, today we know much more about multilingualism, language contact, lingua franca and lingua sacra than De Saussure. The least we can say here is that it is too simple to think that everything can be derived from the binary opposition of lingua franca and lingua sacra as two elemental forces and their bifurcation in the history of languages. There is more to it than just these two; they are in complex interaction, not only with each other, but also with other dynamic forces in language history, such as religion and power.

A second point, no less crucial, is that lingua franca and lingua sacra are two different roles or functions of language, tendencies which, if taken to their extreme, can become polar opposites. Quite often though, a particular language functions simultaneously as lingua franca and as lingua sacra, in which case the two roles will complement each other. An interesting example is Occaneechi. As the historian Robert Beverley Jr. reported, in his History and Present State of Virginia, this language, no longer used in daily life, was cultivated for religious and ceremonial purposes by Native Americans. As he wrote, the “priests and conjurers” of the Virginia Indian Tribes “perform their adorations and conjurations” in the Occaneechi language, much “as the Catholics of all nations do their Mass in the Latin.” He also stated that the language was widely used as a lingua franca, “understood by the chief men of many nations, as Latin is in many parts of Europe”—even though, as he says, the Occaneechis “have been but a small nation, ever since those parts were known to the English.”[298]

The same confluence of the roles of lingua franca and lingua sacra can be seen in the adoption, by St. Jerome and St. Augustine in the fifth century CE, of lingua franca Vulgar Latin as the lingua sacra of Christianity. In the eighteenth century, similarly, Hebrew was presented by Levi as the Lingua Sacra of Judaism,[299] while at the same time, according to Eliakim ben Abram alias Jacob Hart, it was also the lingua franca of the international Jewish community in diaspora.[300] A rather more secular example comes from the nineteenth century, with the adoption of the vernaculars as the official languages of the nation states of Europe.[301] In each of these cases, the same language is functioning simultaneously as lingua franca and as lingua sacra. Such a confluence of roles will do much to enhance the power of monolingualism.

In contrast, when the roles of lingua sacra and lingua franca are fulfilled by different languages, this may lead to tensions, perhaps even mutual exclusion. Here we may think of Koranic Arabic or Latin (until the Vatican Council), both functioning as the lingua sacra of their respective religions, and both quite different from and in opposition to the surrounding lingua franca vernacular. In this constellation, when the lingua sacra is maintained with strong exclusion of the vernacular lingua franca, one consequence could be that the vernacular ends up completely neglected, in flux, without any stability or standard; while, conversely, it could be the lingua sacra which ends up fossilized and incomprehensible (though no less sacred) to its believers; in between these two extremes, the outcome could also be a dynamic balance of lingua sacra and lingua franca in a situation of unequal but more or less stable diglossia.

Such was the case for the Frisian language for most of the past five hundred years. From the fifteenth until the twentieth century, the Frisians spoke their own language within their own rural community, alongside Dutch which was the language of the law, the church, the school, learning, the media, the towns and social advancement.[302] During those centuries the Frisian vernacular held out and did well as the common language in its own oral domain, where it was a marker of cultural and ethnic identity. At the same time, Frisian did not function as lingua sacra, the Bible was not translated into Frisian until the middle of the twentieth century, and even today it is still not easy for the Frisian vernacular to become accepted in the religious domain with its long-established frontiers of diglossia.[303]

As we can see, lingua franca and lingua sacra as roles or functions of language and as forces in history are by no means always mutually exclusive: they may be the same language, or they may be two different languages; the two roles may co-occur and co-exist in diglossia; they may overlap to varying degrees, or they may be in competition and conflict.

But in all these various cases—and this is our third point here—, what we have before us is a situation where lingua franca and lingua sacra are in contact with each other, along a scale of language contact which runs from total exclusion, through various degrees of co-existence and overlap to the complete confluence of the two roles.

(2) Two scenarios When we now proceed to look at the role of lingua sacra and lingua franca in the historical dynamics of languages, we note, to begin with, that empires do not have to be linguistically homogeneous. Indeed, they usually are quite diverse in their linguistic make-up. The more diverse they are linguistically, the greater the need for and pressure towards lingua franca, as a common vehicle for communication between the various linguistic and cultural communities within that empire. That is to say, empires need a lingua franca for their day-to-day functioning and for their survival. A lingua franca, on the other hand, merely requires a language contact situation in a multilingual context. They thrive on trade, contact and exchange—which is also how the historic Lingua Franca has spread far and wide around the world. But they do not depend on an Empire for their survival. The reverse is not the case, however: there are no empires without a lingua franca, and no empire can function or survive without a lingua franca.

The same asymmetry appears to hold for religion, which always needs a lingua sacra, and always comes with one. But here too, the reverse is not the case—a lingua sacra may well survive long after the corresponding religion has vanished.

The point is that when lingua franca and lingua sacra interact, they do so not only with each other, but also with power and religion. So, when we explore the dynamics of lingua franca and lingua sacra, we will need to factor in the role of those other two major forces in history, as well as the asymmetries just noted. This is not a matter of either-or, as is clear from the scale of language contact we envisaged above. If we now add to this the factors of power and religion, this will necessitate a multi-factor analysis, plus, of course, further careful historical case studies, since in actual history, many other motives than sacredness and necessity, power and religion (such as convenience, practicality, politics, the missionary impulse, or simply the power of numbers) may play a role as well in language contact.

Here, as a first step, we will restrict ourselves to what happens when the two different roles of lingua franca and lingua sacra are distributed differently in history. Our findings on the dynamics of their interaction in history can be grouped under two distinct scenarios, one for lingua sacra, the other for lingua franca.

(2.1) Scenario 1: the hegemonic expansion of one’s lingua sacra This first scenario occurs when the lingua sacra of a particular religion is imposed and disseminated in the belief of its sacredness or its divine origin. The same goes for empires when they, as part of their mission civilisatrice, impose and disseminate their core language as the single, unifying, official language for all their subjects and activities.

The paradigm case here is that of Classical Arabic and Islam. From the Arabic Conquest onwards, Islam was disseminated using Classical Arabic as its lingua sacra. Through expansion and contact Arabic subsequently became the lingua franca in the many countries that make up the Islamic world. This development was reinforced by the fact that Arabic was not only the language of the mosque but also the lingua franca of science and scholarship.[304]

The same hegemonic scenario holds for Latin and its expansion throughout the Roman empire (and later also via the Church); Sanskrit in India; koinè Greek as Alexander’s linguistic heritage in the Hellenistic world; as well as for the French, English, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese languages of the European empires of the modern world. In these various cases an existing lingua sacra (or language of power) eventually became the lingua franca, and stayed on as the lasting legacy of the relevant empire or religion.

Sooner or later, though, once that lingua sacra has become established as the lingua franca, it will (like any other vernacular) go into a further process of change, in the case of Koranic Arabic diversifying into the different varieties of Arabic (Egyptian, Moroccan, Iraqi), just as Latin diversified into the Romance vernaculars, and Sanskrit mutatis mutandis the same. This diversification may be accompanied by further processes of pidginization and creolization.

Even then, however, this is not an either-or situation, since very often the varieties of language involved—the unchanging lingua sacra and the ever changing lingua franca—may well continue to be used alongside each other.

(2.2) Scenario 2: adopting an existing lingua franca The second scenario concerns the adoption of a pre-existing and widespread lingua franca, either as the lingua sacra of a religion, or as the official language of an empire—even if the ruling elite or priesthood is itself of a different linguistic background. As a consequence, the language in question will undergo a process of status upgrade, regulation and standardization, and may well become a written language, with the rituals, canonization, institutional support and sanctions attendant upon this.

The paradigm case here is the adoption, for missionary purposes, of the Vulgar Latin lingua franca, the common language of the ordinary people throughout the Roman Empire, as lingua sacra by St. Jerome and St. Augustine, in an attempt to reach the masses of the population.

In the Ancient world, similarly, Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Jews before it became the lingua sacra of the Talmud,[305] and at the time of Darius, the Aramaic language, with its widespread trading networks and its efficient writing culture, was chosen as the lingua franca of his Persian empire.[306] As further examples we may think of England after the Norman Conquest, when the French-speaking ruling elite had to accept Anglo-Saxon as the common language of contact; and in China during the Mongol era, when the Mandarin language continued to be the lingua franca throughout the Chinese empire.

In the western Christian tradition, St. Augustine’s missionary adoption of the vulgar tongue has had a long-lasting influence. In essence, his point was taken up in Dante’s vernacular revolution, and the Bible translations this stimulated in German, Dutch, English and so many other vernacular languages. The same scenario was followed too in contacts with peoples and cultures in the new worlds discovered outside Europe. When the Portuguese arrived in Brazil in the sixteenth century, they adopted the widespread Tupí language for contact with the native Indians. A Tupí grammar was produced by the Jesuit José de Anchieta in 1595, and eventually Tupí became the basis for the lingua franca of eastern Brazil, the lingúa geral.[307] St. Augustine’s command also applied to the Dutch seaborne empire in South East Asia. When the Dutch arrived in the Indonesian archipelago around 1600, they found both Portuguese and Malay firmly established as lingua francas, and adopted these for contact and trade. They also—like the Portuguese did with Tupí—proceeded to translate the Bible into these two lingua francas.

(3) An exceptional case? The Dutch colonial empire and its languages For the further development of the two scenarios above, the case of the colonial Dutch East Indies (1602–1949) and its languages merits a closer look, as it has been so very different from the standard European pattern of imperial language policy, where Spain, France, Portugal, Russia, Germany and Great Britain have all imposed the language of their own metropolis on their overseas colonies.[308] Indeed, such an imposition, in line with the expansionist scenario 1, would almost seem to be the default option of imperialism, witness also the fierce criticism by Bousquet of what he, after extensive investigation, saw as the fundamental error in Dutch colonial policy: the absence of a mission civilisatrice for its own language in its colonial possessions.[309]

The Dutch clearly—and intriguingly—handled this matter very differently from the other European empires, and did not follow scenario 1. So, what did they do instead—and why?

When they arrived in the Malay archipelago, they found both Malay and Portuguese already well established there as lingua francas. As for Portuguese, this was used in the contact of Dutch traders during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with Mestizos and non-Indonesian Asians, with slaves, and in Batavia also in the church, with fellow Christians.[310] In addition, the Dutch had the Bible translated into Portuguese, first in parts by Joao Ferreira d’Almeida and printed in Amsterdam in 1681, then again, much improved, in 1693 in Batavia (present-day Jakarta), and finally, completed and printed in two volumes, in Batavia in 1748–1753. This Portuguese translation was still reprinted in 1959, even though the Portuguese language in the Dutch East Indies had been on the wane from around 1800.[311]

The other lingua franca was indigenous Malay. In use all around the archipelago, without an empire of its own, but widespread and extremely useful as a language of contact everywhere, it was adopted by the Europeans who came to Indonesia for trade—first the Portuguese and Spanish in the sixteenth century, followed a century later by the Dutch and the English. Malay was the lingua franca for traders and sailors in all the harbors of the archipelago, and widely used between the VOC and its Indonesian and Chinese trading partners.[312] This language too was used by the Dutch for Bible translation—beginning with the gospel of Matthew printed in Enkhuizen in 1629; followed in 1668 by the New Testament in Bazar Malay, the spoken lingua franca of the archipelago. The first complete Malay Bible, translated by Melchior Leijdecker and revised by Werndly, but this time in the High Malay written language and not in Bazar Malay, was printed in Latin script in Amsterdam in 1733, followed by one in Malay-Arabic script in 1758.[313] But note that the acceptance of Malay by the Dutch for Bible translation did not turn Malay into lingua sacra (except perhaps for the small numbers of Indonesians converted to Christianity). Throughout the entire colonial period Malay, which was spoken in contact situations everywhere and by everyone, always remained the lingua franca with the widest benefits across the archipelago. In that extremely multilingual area, Malay simply outcompeted its rivals by adapting, incorporating and assimilating what other languages might offer, as we can see in the very significant borrowed elements from Portuguese, Sanskrit, Dutch, Arabic and other languages detailed in the Indonesian etymological dictionary by Jones.[314]

Alongside Portuguese and Maly, as a third language, there was Dutch, which—as the language of the VOC, the first multinational company in the world—gave access to a vast trading network spanning the oceans from New York and Dutch Brazil to Amsterdam, and from the Baltic and the Mediterranean all the way along the coasts of Africa, Arabia, Persia and India to the Malay Archipelago, the Spice Islands, and beyond to China and Japan.[315] Throughout the colonial era, Dutch remained the language of power and the official language of the colonial rulers. But the Dutch always remained a small minority, amidst very many other peoples and cultures; moreover, they kept the Dutch language for themselves and for the native elites they worked with; and they did not invest in Dutch language education for the Indonesian people, as this was judged to be too expensive, too difficult and too dangerous. Thus, Dutch never became the lingua franca of the archipelago.[316]

In this language constellation, the general lingua franca was and remained Malay, for which, given the multiplicity of multilingual contact situations, there always was a strong demand. Here lies the difference with Tupí in Brazil, which after its adoption by the Portuguese was also used and standardized for Bible translation, and also widely used as lingua franca. But where Malay continued to rise, Tupí or lingúa geral began to decline under the impact of Portuguese settlement in the early nineteenth century, when the Portuguese court and the aristocratic elite of its landowners went into exile under Napoleon and transplanted their society from Portugal to Brazil. Speaking their own language, they no longer adapted to the indigenous lingua franca, and brought an infusion of modernity and Europeanness that was closely associated with Portuguese. At the expense of the existing lingúa geral, Brazil thus switched to Portuguese under the expansionist scenario 1.

For Malay, in contrast, it was scenario 2 that kicked in, when this lingua franca was chosen in the 1860s by the Dutch to serve their endeavor to unify and modernize the vast Indonesian archipelago as part of the Dutch colonial empire. In the process, Malay was standardized by the Dutch, with a standard grammar and dictionary, and its spelling regulated using the Roman alphabet (and not Arabic script). Widely used in the army and the administration, the schools and the media, the usefulness of Malay as lingua franca continued to increase, while in contrast, the Dutch language of the ruling elite became the symbol of colonialism, much as Afrikaans in the 1960s became the symbol of Apartheid. From 1928 the Indonesian nationalists united behind Malay, and in the end, at the time of Indonesian independence in 1945, Dutch was abolished, and Malay, as Bahasa Indonesia, adopted as the national language of the Indonesian Republic.

(4) Venturing into the Ancient World Looking back, what we have done in this contribution is to bring together, from contact linguistics and the history of language and religion, contemporary knowledge and information on lingua franca, lingua sacra and their characteristic properties. In the process, on the basis of a variety of historic cases, we have scrutinized and refined the conceptual and methodic toolkit which we use to study lingua sacra and lingua franca. We have also identified two distinct historic scenarios for lingua franca and lingua sacra and their interaction and dynamics within empires.

Now, looking forward, this contemporary basis provides us with a springboard into the past, whether it is as a heuristic or to test these findings against situations of multilingualism in other times and places than we have discussed so far.

In this respect, my contribution has proceeded in the same spirit and with the same strategy as envisaged by Gwendolyn Leick in her groundbreaking volume on The Babylonian World. As she spells it out:

We can only experience the remote past in a tentative and fragmentary way and through the lens of our contemporary patterns of thought. How we think about history always reflects our contemporary preoccupations. The Babylonian world seen through the eyes of the leading specialists in the field at the beginning of the third millennium AD brings into focus areas of concern typical for our time: ecology, productivity, power relations, economics, epistemology, scientific paradigms, complexity.[317]

Notwithstanding Piggott’s caveat that “the Mediterranean from the fifth century BCE to the early centuries CE was emphatically not our own world”,[318] I agree with Leick that we inevitably see the world of the past through a modern lens or prism. It is our contemporary interests that have shaped the various domains of expertise and scholarship which are dealt with in her book: land use, agriculture and urban development; material culture, architecture, the textile industry and the import of exotic raw materials; economy, society and politics, power, environment and gender issues; palace and temple; religion, gods and goddesses, witchcraft, divination and incantations; intellectual life, writing, letters, mathematics, astronomy, lexicography and literature; and international relations between Babylonia and Egypt, the Levant, Jerusalem, the Hittites, the Persians and the Assyrians.

But, remarkably, in her book we do not find a discussion of that most Babylonian of them all: language. Whereas precisely language is, and has always been, the key to any knowledge and understanding we may have of the lives, culture, ideas, beliefs and practices of those ancient Babylonians.[319] And also, they themselves have produced interesting linguistic analyses of their language.[320]

But when—à la Leick—we pursue our own very contemporary interest in multilingualism and language contact in the Babylonian world, our starting point cannot be the ancient preconceptions and myths, long since abandoned, about language as a divine gift at the creation, a sacred force in history and with multilingualism as a punishment from on high. We do not see better if we put on those ancient spectacles.

What we really need here are modern insights, from contemporary contact linguistics and the history of language contact, if we are to get to grips with the dynamics of lingua franca and lingua sacra in the empires of the past. That is what I have attempted to assemble here, as a springboard towards studying empires, their language constellations and contact situations, in the Ancient world.

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Footnotes

[1] Wolff (2003, 50).

[2] In the sense of Braudel (1972).

[3] Levi (1785–1787). Cf. Barnett (1935–1939).

[4] De Saussure (1972, 281).

[5] Jakobson (1987). Cf. Salverda (1999, 51–53).

[6] De Saussure (1972).

[7] Kiefer and van Sterkenburg (2013).

[8] Asher and Simpson (1994).

[9] Aronoff and Rees-Miller (2001).

[10] See http://www.ethnologue.com, accessed April 3, 2017. Cf. Calvet (2011).

[11] Janson (2002); Fischer (2005); Breton (2003).

[12] Aronoff and Rees-Miller (2001, 512). Cf. Baker and Jones (1998).

[13] Aronoff and Rees-Miller (2001).

[14] Bhatia and Ritchie (2013).

[15] Edwards (2013).

[16] Cf. Austin (2008); Haarmann (2006); Moseley (2007; 2010); Price (1998).

[17] Crüsemann (2013, 32, 190, 260, 311). Cf. Bienkowski and Millard (2000, 84, 174–175).

[18] Cf. Borst (1995); Phillipson (2003).

[19] García and Fishman (1997).

[20] Salverda (2006).

[21] Haskins Gonthier and Sandrier (2007).

[22] Burke (2004); Peersman (2014).

[23] Richter (1994); Smith (2005); Wolff (2003).

[24] Adams (2003); Sawyer (1999).

[25] Schrijver (2013); Rankin (1987).

[26] Walbank (1992); Ascherson (1996); Harrison (1998); Munson (2005).

[27] Frye (1963, 48).

[28] Fontana and le Maux (2007); Garbini (1988); Ruiz Darasse and Luján (2011).

[29] Soden (2006); Aruz (2008).

[30] Beckwith (2009).

[31] Rankin (1987, 9).

[32] Fischer (2005, 84).

[33] Cf. Janson (2002).

[34] Cf. Fischer (2005).

[35] Janson (2002, 4).

[36] Fischer (2005, 56).

[37] Cf. Aarsleff (1988, xix).

[38] Matras (2009).

[39] Hickey (2010).

[40] Jakobson and Waugh (1979, 178). Cf. Spitzer (1922); Meijer and Muysken (1977); Gilbert (1980).

[41] Weinreich (1953).

[42] Cf. Weinreich (2013 [1957]; 1968).

[43] Goebl (1996–1997).

[44] Thomason and Kaufman (1988).

[45] Nelde (1997).

[46] Oksaar (1996, 2).

[47] Trask (2000, 183). Cf. Weinreich (2013 [1957]).

[48] Calvet (1981). Cited in Coulmas (2001, 574).

[49] Edwards (2013, 5).

[50] Bhatia and Ritchie (2013).

[51] Cf. Salverda (2003).

[52] Goebl (1996–1997, 972).

[53] Bodrogi (2008).

[54] Bodrogi (2008).

[55] Goebl (1996–1997).

[56] Matras (2009); Hickey (2010).

[57] Price (1998).

[58] Johnston (2007).

[59] Darquennes and VandenBussche (2011).

[60] Crystal (1956).

[61] Goad (1958); Ostler (2005); Haarmann (2006).

[62] Abulafia (2011, 211).

[63] Adams (2003).

[64] Raven (1993, 229).

[65] Thomason and Elgibali (1986).

[66] Cf. Smith (2005).

[67] Richter (1995a, 132).

[68] Cf. Piggott (1968, 13).

[69] Trask (2000, 315). Cf. Trudgill (2010); Bergs (2014); Peersman (2014); Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (2014).

[70] Richter (1995b).

[71] Burke (2004).

[72] Certeau (2002 [1975]).

[73] Frijhoff (2010).

[74] Oksaar (1996).

[75] Burke (2004).

[76] Frijhoff (2010).

[77] Cf. Auvray (1960); Sawyer (1999).

[78] Anderson (1991 [1983]).

[79] Olender (1992).

[80] Herder (1772).

[81] Levi (1785–1787).

[82] Milroy (2014).

[83] Pollock (2006; 2013).

[84] Pollock (2006, 542).

[85] Cf. also Ostler (2007, ch. 11).

[86] Pollock (2006, 452).

[87] Pollock (2006, 452).

[88] Cf. Curtius (1953).

[89] Cf. Michael (1970).

[90] Kraus and Ottomeyer (2007, 289–290, 461).

[91] Swellengrebel (1974–1978).

[92] Gramsci (1971, 333, 416; 1985, 164–165). Cf. Pollock (2006, 520–521).

[93] Grafton (1992, 136). Cf. Salverda (2004, 77).

[94] Pagden (2002, 158–159).

[95] Chaudhuri (1991 [1951], 2).

[96] Pollock (2013).

[97] Cooper (2013, 286–287).

[98] Cf. Crystal (2000a); McArthur (1998); Phillipson (2003).

[99] Rankin (1987, 114–129); Cunliffe (1988, 123–124).

[100] Chaudhuri (1991 [1951]).

[101] Cf. Renn (2014); Sarasin ( 2011).

[102] Cf. Pope (1975); Robinson (2009).

[103] Drijvers (1976, 26–27).

[104] Moyn and Sartori (2013).

[105] Smith (2013, 86, 98).

[106] Borges (1998).

[107] Cf. Woodcock and Saoud (2007); Al-Khalili (2010).

[108] Cf. Báez (2008); Canfora (1989).

[109] In the sense of Raymond Williams (1979, 176–177).

[110] Cf. Salverda (1996, 51–52).

[111] Crystal (2000b); Harrison (2007); Moseley (2007; 2010); Skuttnab-Kangas (2000).

[112] Stuurman (2013).

[113] Crystal (2000a); Jenkins (2014); Kachru (1996); Meierkord (2006); Ostler (2010); Phillipson (2003); Seidlhofer (2009).

[114] De Swaan (2001); Salverda (2002).

[115] García and Fishman (1997).

[116] Salverda (2006).

[117] Crystal (2000a).

[118] Monde (2012, 112); McArthur (1998).

[119] Adams (2003).

[120] Cf. Yule and Burnell (1996 [1886]).

[121] White (1986 [1950], 29). Cf. Whiteley (1938, 246–248, 267).

[122] Siegel (2013, 518–519).

[123] Cremona (1998, 303).

[124] Lockwood (1972, 142).

[125] Swift (1970, 26).

[126] Cremona (1998, 302–303).

[127] Hancock (1971, 516).

[128] Perego (1968, 598).

[129] Trask (2000, 196).

[130] Cf. also Whinnom (1977).

[131] Siegel (1985).

[132] Siegel (1985, 357).

[133] Cf. also Cifoletti (2004, 15).

[134] Manucci (1986).

[135] Lanly (1970, 52).

[136] Ostler (2005, 407).

[137] Smith (2005, 190); Chaliand and Rageau (2010, 203).

[138] Smith (2005, 27, 209).

[139] Baumont (2011).

[140] Hutterer (1999, 304–316).

[141] Cf. Wallace-Hadrill (1985).

[142] Thorpe (1974, 38–41).

[143] Wolff (2003, 80).

[144] Lanly (1970, 330–331). Cf. Richter (1995a, 105, 118); Smith (2005, 24–27, 37).

[145] Cf. Richter (1995a, 108).

[146] Trask (2000).

[147] Toso (2008).

[148] Hancock (1984); Baker (2002).

[149] Cf. Cifoletti (2004, 18).

[150] Abulafia (2011, 487).

[151] Yule and Burnell (1996 [1886]).

[152] Dakhlia (2008).

[153] Cf. Posner (1966, 245).

[154] Richter (1995a).

[155] Dakhlia (2008).

[156] Hancock (1977, 512).

[157] Dakhlia (2008).

[158] Dakhlia (2004).

[159] Cf. also Labov (1971).

[160] See Schuchardt (1909).

[161] Edwards (2013).

[162] Calvet (1981).

[163] Abulafia (2011).

[164] Perego (1968, 599).

[165] Cf. Hancock (1984).

[166] Schuchardt (1980, 66).

[167] Wolff (2003, 50).

[168] Lanly (1970, 328–332).

[169] Braudel (1972).

[170] Matras (2009, 284).

[171] Arends (1999, 203).

[172] Cf. Ascherson (1996).

[173] Gilbert (1969, 21–22). Cf. Chambers (2008, 35–36). See Halbertsma (2002) for the early arrival of Christians and Muslims in Tang China.

[174] Which, incidentally, also gave us the term linguist. Cf. Yule and Burnell (1996 [1886], 517–518).

[175] Cf. Perego (1968, 600).

[176] Cremona (1998, 303).

[177] Trask (2000, 196).

[178] Matras (2009, 275).

[179] Cf. Ostler (2005, 604–605). Also Samarin (1968); Hancock (1971; 1977); Foley (1988); and Michaelis (2013).

[180] Perego (1968, 597).

[181] Cf. Rowland (1974, 21).

[182] Mühlhausler (1997).

[183] Calvet (2002 [1974]; 1981; 2011).

[184] Thomason and Kaufman (1988, 212).

[185] Hagège (1990).

[186] Bickerton (2009; 2014).

[187] Cf. the pejorative use of “Fatma’s” as a disdainful term for Islamic women (Lanly 1970, 42).

[188] Dabydeen (1990, 9).

[189] Dabydeen (1990, 4).

[190] Weinreich (2013 [1957]).

[191] Labov (1971).

[192] Dakhlia (2008).

[193] Foley (1988).

[194] Matras (2009, 277).

[195] Matras (2009, 275).

[196] Trask (2000).

[197] Trask (2000).

[198] Trask (2000, 214–215).

[199] Matras (2009, 276).

[200] Cf. Walbank (1992).

[201] Price (1998, 358).

[202] Matras (2009, 277).

[203] Matras (2009, 278–280).

[204] Matras (2009, 281).

[205] Price (1998, 358).

[206] Todd (1990, 2–3), cited in Price (1998, 105–106).

[207] Matras (2009, 276).

[208] Cf. Trask (2000).

[209] Cf. Thomason and Kaufman (1988, 212–213).

[210] Salverda (2013).

[211] Cf. Morton (2000).

[212] Cf. Crüsemann et al. (2013).

[213] Johnston (2007, 101–102).

[214] Green (1983).

[215] Scheid (2007, 112, 116).

[216] Salverda (2006).

[217] Cf. Salverda (2006).

[218] Cf. Wikipedia s.v. “Sacred Language”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_language, accessed July 7, 2017.

[219] Salverda (2006).

[220] Baumann (1996, 123–126).

[221] Bouquet (1954, 139); Trask (2000, 244).

[222] Trask (2000, 144).

[223] Trask (2000, 75).

[224] Cf. http://www.ethnologue.com, accessed April 3, 2017.

[225] Cf. Auvray (1960); Sawyer (1999).

[226] Adelung (1806–1817).

[227] Cf. Willemyns (2012, 88, 93).

[228] Cf. Kelly (1978, 18).

[229] Cf. also Garbini (1988, 102).

[230] Cf. Borst (1995).

[231] Cf. the gospel of John XIX, 19–10; Auvray (1960); Richter (1995a, 67).

[232] New Testament: Acts 2. Cf. Williams (1981, 72).

[233] Levi (1785–1787).

[234] Crystal (1956).

[235] Jakobson (1963).

[236] Wikipedia s.v. “Sacred Language”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_language, accessed July 7, 2017.

[237] Cf. Eliade (1957, 9). But note Piggott’s caveat: in ancient times “they did not see things divided into sacred and profane” (Piggott 1968, 15).

[238] Eliade (1997 [1958], 8).

[239] Cf. Steiner (2001).

[240] Crystal (1956).

[241] Trask (2000, 200). Cf. Trask (2000, 25, 80, 148).

[242] Mencken (1958, 143–147).

[243] Cf. Terpstra (1972).

[244] Thomas (1971).

[245] Cf. Reuter and Scholz (2004).

[246] Williams (1981, 204).

[247] Bouquet (1954, 106).

[248] Cf. Williams (1981, 204).

[249] Williams (1981, 204).

[250] Pollock (2006).

[251] Cf. Wikipedia s.v. “Sacred Language”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_language, accessed July 7, 2017.

[252] Lévi-Strauss (1955).

[253] Beard (2007, 137).

[254] Crystal (1956, 13).

[255] Spolsky (2009, 37).

[256] Bouquet (1954, 20–26).

[257] Cf. Kramer (1959).

[258] Bouquet (1954, 21).

[259] Bouquet (1954, 1).

[260] Bouquet (1954, 21). Cf. Haarmann (2007, 22).

[261] Bouquet (1954, 22).

[262] Bouquet (1954, 22). Cf. also the written materials in Reuter and Scholz (2004).

[263] Bourdieu (2001).

[264] Piggott (1968, 12–13).

[265] Williams (1981, 204).

[266] Williams (1981, 204).

[267] Williams (1981, 205).

[268] Williams (1981, 225–226).

[269] Williams (1981, 169, eqs.).

[270] Williams (1981, 204).

[271] Thompson (1997, 589).

[272] Tambiah (1968, 176).

[273] Cf. Williams (1981, 203).

[274] Thompson (1997, 590).

[275] Williams (1981, 206, 209).

[276] Williams (1981, 205).

[277] Cf. Eliade (1997 [1958], 123–124).

[278] Govinda, in Williams (1981, 205).

[279] Williams (1981, 203).

[280] Jakobson (1987).

[281] Cf. Darquennes and VandenBussche (2011); Spolsky (2009).

[282] Zondag (1987), see further below in section 1.4, subsection (1).

[283] Cf. Bodrogi (2008).

[284] Cf. Spolsky (2009, 31).

[285] Trask (2000).

[286] Cf. Bourdieu (2001).

[287] Austin (1962).

[288] Crystal (1956).

[289] Thompson (1997, 576).

[290] Chaudhuri (1974, 145, 262–263).

[291] Chaudhuri (1974, 146–147).

[292] Malmberg (1991, 38–39).

[293] Bouquet (1954, 33).

[294] Bouquet (1954, 40–41).

[295] Williams (1981).

[296] Thompson (1997).

[297] Staal (1989, 279).

[298] Beverley (1947 [1705]).

[299] Levi (1785–1787).

[300] Barnett (1935–1939).

[301] Anderson (1991 [1983]); Olender (1992).

[302] Cf. Salverda (1998).

[303] Cf. Zondag (1987).

[304] Cf. Al-Khalili (2010); Pagden (2002, 55); Spolsky (2009, 45).

[305] Cf. Gianto (1999).

[306] Daniels (1996).

[307] Cf. Kraus and Ottomeyer (2007, 289–290, 461).

[308] Groeneboer (2013); Sneddon (2003); Salverda (2004; 2008; 2013).

[309] Bousquet (1939).

[310] Cf. Taylor (1983).

[311] Swellengrebel (1974–1978, 10–11).

[312] Swellengrebel (1974–1978, 8).

[313] Swellengrebel (1974–1978, 11).

[314] Jones (2007).

[315] Cf. De Groot (2005).

[316] Cf. Salverda (2013).

[317] Leick (2007, 3).

[318] Piggott (1968, 14).

[319] Bienkowski and Millard (2000, 89). Cf. Pope (1975, 85–122).

[320] Gragg (1995); Jacobsen (1974).

2. Dependent Languages

Jens Braarvig

The diffusion of knowledge is intimately connected with a given lingua franca in the way that the language of empires and concentrations of power (which require a lingua franca) absorb the knowledge resources within their dominions in a periphery-center movement. A lingua franca disperses formalized knowledge systems by way of translation into the languages of associated and nearby cultures by an opposite center-periphery movement. Thus, a written and spoken lingua franca influences other languages and produces multilingual cultures.

In the relative stability of an empire, and with necessary material resources, knowledge production thrives within the medium of the lingua franca for purposes of government, trade, science, religion, and indeed military expertise, to expand and keep surrounding peoples appeased within stable borders. Thus knowledge spreads throughout history by conquest and war, as well as by trade and immigration, including that of soldiers and craftsmen. Diplomatic as well as religious missions also have a long history of communication on a high level and are conducive to cooperation. The diffusion of knowledge always involves the creation of equivalent systems of words in spoken or written language, as well as symbol systems such as numbers and more elementary symbols for communication. Transfer and translation of knowledge also involves, for pragmatic or aesthetic reasons, objects that carry with them the technology that created them. Thus they represent the knowledge behind their production.

Documents and written records (religious, scientific, political or commercial) are the vehicles for the dissemination of knowledge. They are the natural objects of study for understanding problems connected with the creation of new concepts in a receiving language, and the concomitant diffusion of knowledge. A lingua franca can assimilate into a “local” language through translation, as well as the converse, that is, a text from a “local” language being translated into a lingua franca, or, thirdly, written knowledge can be transferred from one lingua franca to another. All these situations involve multilingualism, since a given lingua franca is employed to bridge the various languages dependent on it, in order to communicate between languages within the areas dominated by a regime or empire, often from where the lingua franca originated. Many of the most important literary works are legitimized through a lingua franca, while being translated into non-lingua franca languages.

Before the advent of modern printing technologies, producing books was a costly undertaking. There was no market for selling books, and the production of complex written materials remained the concern of government and religious institutions. However, certain kinds of less complicated texts, such as personal letters and simple economical documents (including trade agreements and accounts), were produced by individuals at low cost. Translations were mostly undertaken by means of institutional organizations. In this way, it is only after the Renaissance that book production could rely on a market, where books were bought, though mostly by the wealthy, and it is only in the last two centuries that mass diffusion of translated books has increased greatly, and the globalization of knowledge was enhanced and made possible through the many new routes of communication by sea. Trade and the exchange of goods produced new lingua francas, originally national languages of the nations developing their domain. This in turn gave impetus to translation activities, to accommodate the knowledge resources of the center as well as in the periphery. The most important post-Renaissance examples of new lingua francas were Turkish and Persian, Venetian, Portuguese and Spanish, French and English, and more recently Russian, although German could also qualify as a lingua franca of science in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century.

The processes of knowledge diffusion before the Renaissance are simpler to describe due to the relative paucity of written materials as well as the smaller number of languages qualifying as a lingua franca. The most influential pre-Renaissance examples of lingua francas are surprisingly few; in historical order, Sumerian, Akkadian, Phoenician (to a limited extent), Aramaic, Syriac, Greek, Latin, and finally Arabic in the Near East and Mediterranean, as well as Sanskrit and Chinese in the Far East. We see that those mentioned first have a certain historical continuity and a dependency on those that preceded them. A second grouping consists of Sanskrit and its dependent languages, which form a discrete cluster, including the languages of South and Southeast Asia (see Figure 2.1). However, Sanskrit also influenced Chinese through the translation of Buddhist literature into Chinese, and in this way, one lingua franca influenced another. However, Chinese, with its influence on the dependent languages of Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese, is also a lingua franca in its own right and constitutes its own third tradition of the pre-Renaissance lingua francas. As a fourth such tradition, or group, the pre-Columbian languages should be mentioned, where the Maya, Inca, and Aztec languages act out their respective roles as lingua francas.[1]

To explain the idea of “dependence,” we would like to refer to the relationships between states and their neighbors as reflected in linguistic realia. In the same way that vassal states depend upon a central power, the languages of dependent states are often dependent on the language of the dominant state and its culture, political systems, religion, science, and general language use. In linguistic terms, a dependent language is one that borrows a basic system of concepts, either from a prior lingua franca or from a current dominant one. These borrowings include writing systems (e.g. iconographic, logographic, phonetic, rebus writing, and so forth), as well as loanwords, loan translations (or calques), and loan concepts. A dominant cultural language, or a lingua franca, in the sense of being the common medium of communication on all levels in a given geographical area, usually has a number of dependent translation languages that it semantically bridges.

Ideally, African languages should also be considered within our proposed groups, but the difficulty is that almost nothing is known of pre-Renaissance African languages because of the lack of any historical writing system. However, Arabic as a lingua franca greatly influenced African languages, among them Swahili, which became an African lingua franca in its own right, but unfortunately remained undocumented until modern times. An exception is classical Egyptian, which devised its writing system roughly at the same time as Sumerian, but never acquired the status of lingua franca. The later development of classical Egyptian into Coptic as an important lingua sacra will be discussed below.

Fig. 2.1: Chart of the four main lingua franca traditions, I. Near East/Europe, II. India, III. China, and IV. America, and their dependent secondary languages. The lingua francas are underlined, and the line before (a synchronic situation) or above (a diachronic situation) a language means it depends on the lingua franca, or dominant language, mentioned before it. The list is approximately chronological when it concerns a lingua franca, and the time scale at the left refers to when the mentioned language came into existence as such. The dependent languages may be later than the time scale shows, as the influx of concepts into them usually happen some time into the period of the lingua franca on which it depends. The languages in a direct historical line with a dominant language are not noted, like Hindi, which descends from Sanskrit and has a great number of loanwords from Sanskrit. The listing of dependent languages given is not complete.

Even though many historical languages may be considered dominant, cultural languages, or lingua francas, emphasis will be put on the languages within the four traditions delineated above, namely, 1) the Near East and Europe, 2) India, 3) China, and 4) America.[2] However, the study of pre-Renaissance spread of knowledge through translation only provides a limited picture, not only because of the lack of documentation but also because the spoken forms of these languages are lost to us, even though some of them have been transformed into the present spoken languages. This hampers our ability to assess how phonologically similar and hence accessible spoken languages may have been to each other.

Pre-Renaissance production of manuscripts, books, and documents (before the age of Gutenberg-printing) needed substantial funding, necessitating the intellectual resources of writers, scribes, and translators, as well as patrons to commission and support writing and book production. Indeed, an initiative to make intellectual property or political guidelines known across borders presupposes the will to act on a greater scale. When there is a wish or necessity to make it possible, to appropriate knowledge systems outside its language of origin, translation becomes a necesssity. Thus the translators become among the oldest officials we find, known as eme.bal in Sumerian of the third millennium BCE, also inherent in the Akkadian word targumannu (from the Semitic root rgm- “declare, shout, speak”), which became a common loanword, Arabic tarjaman, Turkish (and English!) dragoman, and so forth. The dragoman, with his multilingual skills, made himself indispensable for oral and written communication between states and peoples, whether for diplomatic, commercial or religious purposes.[3]

The points in history when translations take place are important periods because great resources are allocated to such activities by political and religious authorities. It is often the case that key cultural texts are not only written but also translated during processes of establishing nations and even empires. Empires have a need for a common standardized medium: an imperial language of communication between the centralized state administration and the many languages existing within the empire. This is usually—but not always—the language of the conquering people. It can also be the language of a previous empire in the same region, as was the case when China was conquered by Mongols and Manchus, or the case in the first Persian Empire where the widely spoken trading language of Aramaic was chosen as lingua franca. Under more usual circumstances, however, important textual corpora are written in a language that is, or later becomes, an imperial language or even an international language. The reason for this is that empires usually prefer to promote their own political, religious, and scientific canons within their area of dominion, to secure their imperial control. Moreover, states on the margins of empires—or even competing state formations—may wish, for a variety of reasons, to share the imperial knowledge systems and knowledge regimes. When the center of political power changes, the imperial language lingers on and often displays a stability superior to that of the empire itself—something that characterizes most of the lingua francas mentioned.

However, the term “lingua franca” originated from usage that was not imperial. We find its origin in the macaronic trade language of the Mediterranean, spoken already before the Renaissance and containing many common words and idioms of commerce and shipping from mostly Italian, French, Turkish, or Arabic seafarers. This lingua franca, sensu strictu, was called the language of the “Farangi” by the Arabs, with the word “farangi” originally being the term by which Arabs referred to Europeans (or the Francae), but acquiring the meaning “foreign”; the term “farangi” was widely employed, even as a loanword in Thai. That original lingua franca became the basic vehicle of trade and commerce and the more elementary exchanges of commodities and know-how, while Latin in the West and Greek and Arabic in the Eastern Mediterranean remained the languages of more complex knowledge systems, even though these great cultural languages were also employed in more simple forms of communication.[4] Moreover, a function of this mixed language was to communicate concepts across ethnic or national borders. As such, the Mediterranean lingua franca has similarities with Akkadian in the Persian Empire, which remained a commercial lingua franca even in the period when Aramaic was the official language of the empire (Reichs-aramäisch). Essential for our definition of a lingua franca is its function of facilitating communication between diverse ethnic and linguistic groups on all levels of communication, and that it is different from the mother tongue of those who employ it for speech and writing, apart from the users who belong to the ethnicity from which the language originated.

It is universally accepted that dependent or smaller languages of the periphery take over the concepts of the center, that, is the great concentrations of power, and that they adopt some of the imperial grandeur by emulating their concepts and systems of knowledge through loanwords, loan translations, and loan concepts. The dependent languages may be forced to adopt such systems while being subjected to imperial rule, but it is also a matter of peoples not necessarily under the sway of central dominance taking over the efficient, even fashionable concepts and behavior of the center. As an opposing process, the center may also wish to exploit the resources and skills of the periphery, and thus words and concepts accompanying commodities, crafts, technologies, and knowledge resources are absorbed into the imperial lingua franca. This may take place by means of loanwords, but systems of knowledge are also accommodated into a lingua franca by loan translations. A loan translation is most frequently a learned construction, and is often created when a dependent language wishes to take over a system of concepts from a lingua franca—in the way that German scholars of the late Middle Ages would construct loan translations from Latin to absorb the Classical traditions; few would recognize Zufall in German from Latin accidentia (in its turn from Greek ἐπιπίπτειν!) Wirklichkeit from actualitas, or eigentlich from proprie. On the other hand, French and English would employ loanwords from Latin for this very purpose. The same is true for Tibetan, which employed loan translations for every key concept of Buddhism, while Buddhist Chinese language employed loanwords to some extent, but mostly learned loan translations, which are easily identifiable. While loanwords are easy to connect with the source language, loan translations tend to be unrecognizable without a certain knowledge of linguistic history and of the original language from which it generated. On the other hand, a loan translation tends to be more easily integrated into not only the learned register but with time also into the vernacular of the receiving language. In fact, loan translations were often preferred to loanwords because they were more effective in appropriating and integrating a foreign set of concepts into a receiving language and culture. Good examples of such translations are Armenian translations of Greek literature, as well as Old Church Slavonic translations of the Bible (while domesticating Christianity in a Slavonic context).

A loan concept is always concomitant with a loanword and a loan translation, as a concept taken over from one language to another. But a concept can also be taken over by a language when it is “moved” onto a particular word originally not connected with the receiving language. As an example we could mention the word God—translated from Latin deus and Greek theos, employing an older Germanic word for an insignificant group of heathen gods, originally in neuter, but with the translation changed into masculine. This concept diffused globally, but often indigenous words in receiving languages have been employed to denote it, and thus the concept diffuses by being joined with words and expressions in receiving languages not originally having this conceptual content. In this case, the concept is loaned but not the word, and is now denoted by a word originally found in the receiving language which originally had another meaning, as is also the case with the pre-Christian Germanic God, Slavic Bog, ultimately related to Sanskrit Bhaga (“lot,” god of Fate and Luck), and so forth. There are many other examples of this phenomenon across language families, such as Akkadian apsû (from Sumerian abzu), ‘the subterranean sweet waters’ which not only gave rise to Greek “abyss” but to Hebrew efes “zero,” particularly in its biblical idiomatic usage, afsê areṣ, “ends of the earth” (which is where the original Apsû was to be found). Another famous example is the English expression “holy ghost,” derived from the German “der heilige Geist”, “holy spirit.” Further, as in the case of the Greek concepts of “soul,” and so forth, we can see that the reception of terminologies from antiquity into later European tradition is a blend of l) loan concepts, where already existing words are employed to denote the loaned concept, of 2) loan translations, where new words are constructed, often element by element, to denote the foreign concept, and 3) loanwords, where the word denoting the concept in the original language is taken over with minor (or often, with time, major) modifications.

The relation between loanword, loan translation (or “calque,” as it is sometimes called), and loan concept can be very complex, as is illustrated by the Greek word νοῦς, “thinking,” “experience,” “das Aufleben,” or “intelligence”; and ψυχῆ, “life power,” “soul”; and then πνεῦμα, “spirit,” are translated throughout European History in fairly regular ways, with fixed equivalents. Νοῦς comes from the verb νοέω, “to notice,” “perceive,” then developed into the idea of the “intelligence,” or highest principle in the individual. Sanskrit ātman, in much the same way, denotes the absolute self, while prāṇa denotes “breath,” “life force,” or “soul.” In the period around 600 BCE and after, it seems that several intellectual cultures developed various mental entities on the basis of wind- and breath-metaphors, ψυχῆ being related to ψυχέω, “to blow,” ātman ultimately related to German atmen, which then ended up as a general term for self and as a reflective pronoun. The same metaphorization and abstraction can be traced in Semitic languages, from Akkadian napishtu and ruah, Arabic nafs—both a word for soul and self, as well as a reflective pronoun—and ruah, with meanings of “wind,” “spirit,” πνεῦμα, as used in “The Holy Ghost,” and so on. It also has a similar double meaning, namely that of “wind,” “air,” as well as spiritus, being the equivalent in Latin, and “Geist” (German) and then “ghost.” The ψυχῆ is represented by animus in Latin, also a wind metaphor as in Greek ἄνεμος, being a word only for wind in Greek. Animus is made equivalent to the Gothic sáiwala, which defies etymology, but is in fact the ancestor of the German “Seele” and English “Soul,” all of which were made into expressions for the Greek concept belonging to ψυχῆ. However, in Old French we find courage as the loan concept equivalent animus, parallel with the Old High German equivalent Mut. The concept of νοῦς, and its derivatives, are moved onto the Latin intellego with it derivatives, being, however, rather an epistemological term from the beginning, and not a wind/breath metaphor, intellego, and so on. It was evidently well established as an equivalent of the loaned Greek concept at the time of Cicero, when he translated the Timaeus. Later we find intellectus, “intellect,” and so on, as a loanword into Old French and English, but we also find understonde as a loan translation of intellego in Chaucer (fourteenth century), the prefix unter-, under- in old Germanic languages, approaching also the meaning of Latin inter-. In the Old French translation of Boethius’ De consolatione of Jean de Main (late twelfth century), whom Chaucer might often emulate in his translation of the same, we find another Latin descendent used to denote the loaned concept of intellego, namely entens, from the Latin intendo. In works translated from Latin by the Old High German translator, Notker (around 1000 CE), we find bechénno as a loan concept and denotational equivalent of intellego. Later we find verstan in Middle High German (Old Norse fyrirstanda), constructed as a loan translation in a similar way as understonde in English, as well as vernunft for intellectus. All of these terms were important throughout European traditions. The learned loan translation of intellectus is also reflected in Old Norse as undirstanda. Another instructive, and related, loan translation of Old Norse from Latin is samblása for conspirare, and inblása for inspirare.

Every lingua franca was a local language in origin, like Latin, Arabic, and so on, but grew in influence, often within a military context that employed the given language. Being initially a spoken and living language, with conquest and increasing cultural influence it becomes a lingua franca, while at the same time undergoing a process of formalization; the lingua franca would gradually differ from the spoken languages in its proximity, but as a carrier of political, religious, and scientific knowledge, it would influence the dependent languages by the processes described above. Thus we see that an historical lingua franca can end up as a dead language (i.e. written but no longer spoken), sometimes quite far removed from the spoken languages in its linguistic family, but still being the main medium of communication for various knowledge systems. Thus the lingua franca, dead in various degrees, becomes the formalized medium of the governing ideologies and political culture of the elite, including religion; the lingua franca now takes on the roles of being a lingua sacra, a lingua deorum (or dei!) as well as a lingua poetica. Adopted by the bureaucracies and the governing bodies it becomes the lingua administrativa, and military forces develop concepts for various levels of command through a lingua militaris. Indeed it is remarkable that enemies by convention share the same military terminology for rank, strategy, and weaponry, the systems of concepts being denoted by loan translations or loanwords of an original lingua franca which they share. However, as in the case of the lingua franca proper, that of the farangi, most lingua francas retain their use as a lingua mercantilis, communicating a rich field of common words for commodities, foods items, and crafts, as well as trade and naval terminologies, be they civil or military, thus integrating the standards and symbol systems of crafts, trade, and commerce. This aspect of the lingua franca often borders on the standardizations of science of the lingua scientiarum, even the lingua mathematica as they are developed into a universal language of symbols.

In his contribution, Reinier Salverda takes another view of the relation between the lingua franca and the lingua sacra, which he treats as a category distinct from the lingua franca. For him the term lingua franca mostly denotes the spoken language, as a tool of the more basic kind of communication needed by trade and travel, in particular exemplified by the Mediterranean mixing of languages being the origin of the term. However, in our efforts to understand the diffusion of knowledge, we also include in our definition of lingua franca its more general use, namely, a standardized language, most often having its origin in the language used by powerful states and empires as an instrument to rule great states, and thus encompassing what we loosely might term the “cultural languages.” Expressions and concepts stemming from religion often enter into the dependent languages and are used in general without conscious religious connotations for the users. Religion throughout history has been a great force in the diffusion of knowledge and plays a major role in diffusing loanwords and loan translations. With literatures being translated from the various lingua francas into dependent languages, a great number of neologisms, and loan translations are created in the dependent languages. Such words can often be identified as being created at certain moments and by certain authors and translators, usually representing the elite classes. In many cases these new expressions quickly become part of ordinary oral terminology, since lower social classes often emulate the higher, also in matters of language, and are sometimes also being forced to adopt both religious and administrative terminology from the conquering and then ruling classes.

In effect, the formalized languages of the ruling powers and classes have a great impact on the dependent languages through religion and administration, since subjects need to relate to the authorities. In any case, religious teaching and preaching is a fundamental way for lingua franca terminologies to find their way into the general spoken language. Thus lingua sacra and lingua administrativa, as aspects of the lingua franca, are vital components of the global history of languages, both written and spoken. A lingua franca, then, may be typologized also in the following way:

The purely spoken lingua franca, used only for pragmatic and arbitrary communication, mostly in trade, often called a macaronic language;

The spoken language, a mix of several languages and grammars, employed as a means of communication for groups of peoples, often diasporas, but still stable enough to compose literature. An example of such a lingua franca is Yiddish, a mix of Slavonic and German words and grammars, a kind of macaronic language, but with a long history, also of producing belles lettres;

A lingua franca, originating as a national language and becoming formalized first as an imperial language and then as a language of international diffusion of concepts and knowledge, with its literature being widely translated.

A lingua franca is thus a carrier of knowledge systems that can move from a lingua franca to a dependent language, or from a lingua franca to another lingua franca. Knowledge systems, however, can transcend ordinary written and spoken languages, as in mathematics, which employs a widely accepted notation system and gives meaning to Galileo’s saying, “La lingua mathematica è la lingua della natura,” an idea taken up by Leibnitz in his attempts to create a consistent universal language. The mathematical systems of knowledge are communicated by symbolic expressions that become standardized universally, at least in more recent history. Such standardization of systems of knowledge sometimes transcend ordinary languages and even lingua francas, as is the case with symbols for weight, length, and other measures. One example of the universalization of this kind is Euclid’s mathematical works, which have been spread by translations of the prose in this text of Euclid, but also through the symbolic drawings accompanying the text. As for religious symbols being universalized, every religion has a rich symbolic representation of the spiritual world and transcendent entities, but these remain more arbitrary in their interpretation and less tangible, and certainly less precise in comparison with the figures of Euclid’s Elements. The term scriptura franca may thus denote two related meanings:

A writing system that is constructed and employed in accordance with shared conventions. These consist of iconographic or logographic signs that can be understood by speakers of quite unrelated spoken languages. Examples are Euclid’s figures and such logographic writing systems as Chinese and early Sumerian.

A writing system following the adoption of the conceptual regimes of a dominant lingua franca into a dependent language, which is modified to lesser or greater extent.

There is only one alphabet sensu strictu; all other forms are simply variants of the same system of 22–30 characters, originating in the second half of the second millennium BCE. The alphabet—like other writing systems—became useful as notations for trade or bureaucratic purposes. It served the need for state administrations to communicate efficiently and for standardizing rules and laws that implemented power and policies, but also for religion and literature. Some forms of the alphabet remain national or ethnic, like that of Armenia, where an alphabet was devised to help attain independence and gain autonomy, with the function of keeping the Armenian people together, even today. This is the case also with the creation of the Tibetan writing system, constructed on the Indian Brāhmī system, as a means of importing the Buddhist religion, culture, and knowledge systems based on the Indian, also with a view to cultural autonomy. One historically important scriptura franca was the Phoenician alphabet, which was transformed into Greek and Latin writing systems in the West, and all their dependent systems, and into the Cyrillic alphabet in East Europe, becoming there a scriptura franca, after initially being a scriptura sacra. Several of the scriptura francas were also in their origins scriptura sacras, since the adoption of alphabets and writing systems often involved religious aspects, besides other political or cultural intentions.

Aramaic is a further diagnostic example of a highly influential lingua franca and adopted as the lingua franca of the Persian empire. With its moderately efficient but very simple alphabetic writing system, the particular alphabet used for Aramaic also served as a scriptura franca, replacing older writing systems of the Middle East and Persia such as cuneiform, since it was perceived as being more efficient both in respect to its few characters and the materials upon which it was written, that is, papyrus and other light materials rather than clay, which was heavy to transport and even store (although clay had the advantage of being cheap). The script of high authority and culture, however, was still cuneiform, which was the old scriptura franca and also remained as the scriptura sacra. But Aramaic scriptura franca still had enormous historical influence as it fostered the Kharoshthi and Brāhmī alphabets, the first Indian writing systems created after c. 300 BCE. All the other alphabets descended from these systems in the whole of South and South East Asia as well as Tibet, also even the sacred writing of Buddhism in East Asia and further Sogdian, Uighur, and classical Mongolian syllabic writing.

The creation of various writing systems often mirrors translation events, such as the translation of the Bible into a host of languages (beginning with Greek, Aramaic / Syriac, and Latin), or the translation of Buddhist scriptures from the lingua franca of Sanskrit into other languages for the diffusion of the Buddhist religion. In general, when the literature of a lingua franca is translated, the scriptura franca is often taken over in some form, modified to greater or lesser extent. We see then, that historically, a lingua franca becomes a lingua sacra, lingua poetica, lingua administrativa, lingua legalis, lingua nobilitatis, lingua commercialis, bringing with them the scriptura franca and scriptura sacra, literatura franca, and other forms of standardization. Thus great religious, scientific, and poetical works diffused into dependent regions and once translated, created common experiences and concepts, all in multilingual situations where the lingua franca was the common denominator, influencing dependent languages in their semantics, syntax, and grammar by means of loanwords, loan translations, and loan concepts.

As touched upon above and in Figure 2.1, a lingua franca can be classified within four main groupings with its dependent, secondary languages, namely, 1) the Middle East/European tradition, 2) the Indian tradition, 3) the Chinese tradition, and 4) the American tradition. The three first mentioned traditions are not completely sealed off from the other traditions, as in the mentioned examples of writing and religion, as well as trade and indeed military confrontations—until the Renaissance, which is our chosen period—but the American examples of lingua franca, the most important of which are the Maya and Aztec, with their knowledge systems, scriptura franca, literatura franca, and so on, are completely isolated from the three other traditions. Still, they display the same characteristics and processes as any other lingua franca.

Sumerian is historically the first language fulfilling our criteria of a lingua franca, having all the characteristics mentioned. It is also the first written language, used originally for economic notation and standardization, but with the centuries it developed from an administrative language into a literary one, and devised a writing system that would last for more than three millennia, employed by a number of dependent languages. Sumerian produced standardized lists of equivalents with other dependent languages, producing lexical resources and means to communicate formally with dependent languages. Sargon (c. 2300 BCE) and his empire introduced the next lingua franca in the region, namely Akkadian, as an official bureaucratic language, though his daughter, the priestess Enheduanna, the first ever named poet, would produce religious poems in the “high” or sacred language of Sumerian. With the demise of the classical Sumerian period around 2000 BCE, Akkadian would dominate as the lingua franca, blossoming during the reign of King Hammurabi, but retaining all the conceptual systems of Sumerian culture, with its earlier writing systems and the regimes of knowledge. Over time, Sumerian literature and religious documents were integrated into the new lingua franca of Akkadian, while Sumerian was retained as the formalized medium of technical terms and standardization. Poetic traditions (e.g. connected with Gilgamesh or with Inanna) were reformulated in Akkadian but retained vestiges of the Sumerian conceptual world, while the Sumerian law code of Urnammu from the twenty-first century BCE influenced the laws of Hammurabi from the eighteenth century, and Sumerian school curricula were adapted to the new situation where Akkadian was the lingua franca that ensured the continuity of knowledge regimes.

Mesopotamian systems of knowledge would enter into the whole of the Middle East through the translation of texts and oral communication, and in this way also became the cultura franca over a very long period of time. It remains puzzling that ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and associated systems of knowledge entered into the common and mainstream Middle Eastern cultures to a much lesser degree. Sumerian/Akkadian tradition, with their religion, sciences, legal systems, writing systems, and so on, penetrated Hittite Anatolia and Hurrian, and later diffused into the Aramaic culture and language; cuneiform writing was adopted for Persian. Greek religion has been shown to have been influenced by Hittite, which itself was related to Hurrian and ultimately influenced by the Sumerian and Akkadian tradition, while the Greek alphabet, as already noted, was borrowed by the Greeks from the Phoenicians. Greek culture was later absorbed by the Near East, and the Greek language became a lingua franca from the time of Alexander the Great, even before Greek language and culture had influenced the Romans, who provided the new lingua franca in the West, Latin, and translated the knowledge systems from Latin into a large number of European languages. Arabic, the successor lingua franca in the East, resulted from the Arab Conquests, also integrating the heritage of Greek and Latin science, which would eventually be re-translated back into Greek and Latin during the Renaissance. However, in matters of religion and politics, the influence of Arab terminologies is enormous, in all the areas that came under the influence of this powerful lingua franca, from Africa to China, India, and South Asia, and of course, the Middle East and Central Asia.

Clearly, then, we may treat the traditions with their historical origin Sumer as one tradition of lingua franca, with all its expressions and corollaries. To a much smaller extent, then, would Mesopotamia influence cultures in the East, namely Indian and Chinese traditions, which we also have treated as two distinct traditions. Ultimately, the Indian tradition of lingua franca would have a common origin with European languages, and as such also have cultural traits in common with old European cultures in terms of religion, mythology, and many expressions of language. The Sanskrit of India would develop into a lingua franca with all the cultural traits belonging to it, and would provide technical terms in all fields of knowledge to dialects, which originally grew out of Sanskrit and dialects with other origins, like Tamil, but Sanskrit also provided terminologies, concepts, and systems of knowledge to areas outside of India, to the whole of South and South East Asia. Coming with the Sanskrit language, Hindu and Buddhist religions would spread in a number of waves throughout history, transforming Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, and Burma into states diffused by Indian culture, religion and political systems, and even today the Thai language has about 20% loanwords from Sanskrit, all from ordinary words to technical terms. After the Tibetan king decided that Tibet should adopt Buddhist religion, translation activities for several centuries also transformed Tibetan language, as well as culture, by a well-ordered administration of this change. The various writing systems of all these areas were based on the Indian Brāhmī syllabic writing, ultimately derived from the Aramaic alphabet.

But Indian systems of knowledge would also influence China, in particular through the translation of Buddhist concepts into the Han language from the end of the second century CE onwards, for a period of about thousand years—the initial contact between Indian Buddhists being traditionally 49 CE when a mission of Buddhist monks visited the Han imperial court. In this way Buddhism, a system of knowledge generated with Sanskrit terminology, had a profound influence on Chinese thinking and language, as well as religion and even science—such as Indian logic. However, Chinese is in itself a lingual franca, diffusing into many other languages with its writing systems, with its associated social policies based on Confucius and the Chinese form of Buddhism. Culturally, there has been a virtual border between Vietnam and Cambodia throughout history; west of this border Indian culture was most influential while the east was primarily influenced by Chinese ways of thinking, writing, and producing technical terms. This does not necessarily mean that Chinese influence west of this cultural border was entirely negligible, but it is insignificant compared to the impact Chinese systems of knowledge has exerted on Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

It is clear, however, that the borders between the various types of lingua francas are not absolutely fixed borders, excepting the American tradition. The Arab lingua franca carried its concepts far into the areas allotted to the Indian tradition, and the Indian tradition influenced the Chinese. But before the Renaissance the traditions are distinct enough to treat them as carrying with them separate systems of concepts, terminologies, regimes of knowledge. After the Renaissance, the situation changes radically with new emerging empires and global powers. Spanish, Portuguese, Persian, Turkish, French and English all function as a lingua franca within its dominion, influencing every aspect of culture profoundly.

So far we have treated the lingua francas mostly as functions of empires influencing dependent languages and creating multilingual situations through translation conventions, loans translations, and loanwords. However, such processes may not necessarily be coincident with imperial power. We have mentioned above how mathematical concepts have diffused universally by translation as a fairly stable system of knowledge. Thus, systems of scientific knowledge have diffused across the lingua franca boundaries. A similar situation is the case with religion, which may diffuse globally by translation, independent of imperial power, and by believers, to some extent independent of political interests. This is the case with the three world religions of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, which have spread globally and greatly transformed the languages as well as the ways of thinking dominant in the areas into which they have diffused. An interesting example is the Manichean religion, originally created in Mesopotamia by Mani in the third century CE with its original writings in Syriac and Aramaic, a lingua franca and in this case also a lingua sacra. However, as a fairly closed system of knowledge, Mani’s teachings were translated into a great number of dependent languages, Greek, Coptic, and Latin in the West and Persian, Parthian, Sogdian, Uighur, and Chinese in the East, employing even the Buddhist style of Chinese as its medium. Thus Manichaeism, often described as competing with Christianity, became a globalized system of religious knowledge without imperial backing, since Manichaeism was universally persecuted by political as well as religious authorities, evidently surviving only through religious zeal. Manicheism may thus be said to represent a system of knowledge expressed in a number of languages, much in the same way as a system of knowledge embedded in a lingua franca like Latin, which diffuses into many dependent languages.

The great multilingual works, and the most influential literary works in history, like the Bible, the Quran, the tripiṭaka of Buddhism, as well as the more secular and scientific works, like Aristotle, Galen, and Euclid, mostly diffused within one of the four lingua franca traditions. Confucius stayed within the East Asian tradition and was not translated, since its reception into other language areas in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam could be realized through the Chinese logographic signs, so that classical Chinese is in this sense a truly written lingua franca or scriptura franca. The medical sciences of India, as kept in the work Aṣṭāṅgahṛdya, would spread into Tibet, and from there into Mongolia. In this way these language areas became dependent on Sanskrit terminology and knowledge (but this important text for the Indian tradition of medicine never spread elsewhere, though ultimately may have been inspired by Galen’s work.). Also the Laws of Manu—describing how society should be ordered into classes, how those belonging to classes should perform their duties, and how the King should rule his subjects—were used as a manual of rule exclusively in South and South East Asia, written in the lingua franca of Sanskrit, also the lingua nobilitatis, and so on, in these areas. Thus the uses of lingua franca can also limit themselves within borders, notwithstanding the fact that these borders are not completely closed. In the case of America, with Maya and Aztec as the main lingua franca, the borders are closed, for geographic reasons.

Footnotes

[1] See the contribution of Lars Pharo to this volume.

[2] One might argue that the old languages of the Middle East, like Sumerian and Akkadian and their descendants, are a tradition in their own right. However, the cultural continuity of Mesopotamian culture and knowledge regimes within general Mediterranean culture, as acknowledged in more recent historical research, vouches for continuities also into the early history of European culture. This is the reason why we treat the Near East and Europe as one tradition. There may be an argument to be made that the old Mesopotamian traditions also diffused into Far Eastern traditions, but more research, and indeed historical material, is needed to substantiate this.

[3] For an example of the diplomatic lingua franca use of Akkadian, see the contribution of Lutz Edzard to the present volume, showing the importance of Akkadian as a lingua diplomatica.

[4] See the contribution of Reinier Salverda to this volume.

Part II: Europe

3. Lehnübersetzung und Lehnbedeutung vs. Lehnwort: Zu den Entlehnungen aus dem Lateinischen und Französischen in das mittelalterliche Deutsch

Kurt Gärtner

Der Wortschatz einer Sprache wird immer wieder durch außersprachliche Faktoren, d. h. konkrete historische Ereignisse beeinflusst, die bekanntlich zu beträchtlichen Veränderungen des lexikalischen Systems führen können. Wer mit der Geschichte der englischen Sprache auch nur etwas vertraut ist, kennt die Wirkung der normannischen Eroberung Englands 1066 auf die Sprache der Eroberten. Dieses historische Ereignis führte für mehrere Jahrhunderte zu einer Zweisprachigkeit und veränderte das lexikalische System des Englischen tiefgreifend durch den Zuwachs an neuen Wörtern.

Die germanischsprachigen Völker kamen im Verlauf ihrer Geschichte immer wieder in engen Kontakt mit anderssprachigen Völkern und Kulturen und haben von diesen Wörter zusammen mit den damit bezeichneten Sachen und Verhaltensweisen übernommen. Zu den frühesten nachweisbaren Entlehnungen gehören die Wörter Amt, Reich und Geisel aus dem Keltischen, die im Wortschatz von einigen germanischen Sprachen fest verankert blieben und reiche Wortfamilien ausgebildet haben. Die Geschichte des Deutschen wie der anderen germanischen Sprachen ist geprägt durch solche Kontakte, die in der Wortgeschichte ihre vorübergehenden oder bleibenden Spuren hinterlassen haben. Im Folgenden werde ich zunächst anhand von Beispielen die verschiedenen Arten von Entlehnungen skizzieren und dann auf die Entlehnungen aus dem Lateinischen und Französischen in das mittelalterliche Deutsch ausführlich eingehen.

3.1 Gliederung des Lehnwortschatzes nach Werner Betz

Am folgenreichsten für den Wortschatz der von Haus aus schriftlosen Germanen war der Kontakt mit der antiken Schriftkultur des Mittelmeerraums und mit dem Christentum, einer Buchreligion. Die verschiedenen Entlehnungsvorgänge hat Werner Betz[1] in einer grundlegenden Studie dargestellt und systematisiert. Seine Gliederung,[2] die von anderen Forschern zum Teil modifiziert wurde,[3] umfasst zwei Hauptgruppen:

Fig. 3.1: Entlehnungsvorgänge nach Betz (1974, 137).

1. Lehnwort
Fremdwort | assimiliertes Lehnwort
Palais | Pfalz, mhd. palas, Palast
2. Lehnbildung mit Beispielen von Lehnübersetzungen
paen-insula |    Halb-insel
con-scient-ia |    ahd. ga-wizzan-i
3. Lehnbedeutung
got. daupjan | 1. *eintauchen (vgl. engl. to dip)
| 2. *taufen       gr.-lat. βαπτίξειν / baptizare
ahd. touffan | *taufen

3.1 Die drei zentralen Termini, die den drei wichtigsten Formen der Entlehnungen entsprechen, sind hier mit Beispielen wiedergegeben.

Es sind also im Wesentlichen drei Möglichkeiten, die für die Lehnvorgänge eine Rolle spielen. Zunächst das Lehnwort, das für die Entlehnungen aus dem Bereich der Sachkultur wichtig ist; mit der fremden Sache werden die fremden Bezeichnungen übernommen, mit der Sache also zugleich auch das Wort dafür. Bleibt die fremde Lautgestalt bei der Übernahme erhalten, dann spricht man von einem Fremdwort, dessen Aussprache, Flexion und Betonung meist ein gewisses Maß an Bildung voraussetzt, um der Gefahr eines Malapropismus im Gebrauch des Wortes zu entgehen (z. B. eine Verkaufsbude ein Fiasko zu nennen statt Kiosk oder eine Sisyphosarbeit als Syphilisarbeit zu bezeichnen).

Das entlehnte Wort kann aber auch phonetisch und morphologisch dem System der entlehnenden Sprache assimiliert werden und dadurch alle seine fremden Merkmale einbüßen. Ein assimiliertes Lehnwort unterliegt dann auch allen Lautwandelvorgängen. Sind diese zeitlich befristet, kann auch ungefähr der Zeitraum der Übernahme bestimmt werden. So kann z. B. das Wort Pfalz nur vor dem Ende der althochdeutschen Lautverschiebung im 8. Jahrhundert aus dem spätlateinischen palantia ins Althochdeutsche übernommen worden sein, denn es hat die Verschiebung von p- zu pf- und von -t- zu -tz- mitgemacht und erscheint im Althochdeutschen als pfalanza. Die mittelhochdeutsche Form pálas ist eine assimilierte Entlehnung des französischen palais, erscheint aber auch mit der fremden Betonung palás, die später mit epithetischem -t versehen wird und als Palást im Neuhochdeutschen erscheint und wie pfalenze, Pfalz eine reiche Wortfamilie begründet. Im 17. Jahrhundert kommt es dann zu einer erneuten Entlehnung von palais, das aber seine fremde Form beibehält.

Eine zweite Hauptart von Entlehnungsvorgängen bezeichnet Betz als Lehnprägung, die er wiederum unterscheidet in Lehnbildung und Lehnbedeutung. Die Lehnbildung differenziert er in Lehnübersetzung und die etwas freiere Lehnübertragung. Anders als bei den direkten Übernahmen von Wort und Sache aus einer fremden in die heimische Sprache und Kultur werden bei den Lehnbildungen die fremden Wörter Glied für Glied mit semantisch entsprechenden Morphemen der heimischen Sprache nachgebildet. Dieser Transfer setzt linguistische Kompetenz in der Geber- und Nehmersprache voraus, also die Zweisprachigkeit, und ist damit in der Regel eine gelehrte Angelegenheit. Vor allem für den Einfluss des Lateinischen auf die germanischen Sprachen, nachdem diese Buchsprachen geworden waren, war dieser Transfer von nicht zu unterschätzender Wirkung. Doch schon für das Lateinische hat diese Art des Transfers bei den Übernahmen aus dem Griechischen eine wesentliche Rolle gespielt,[4] denn vor allem die Abstrakta, mit denen die Vorstellungen der neuen Religion, aber auch der Philosophie, Wissenschaft und Technik ausgedrückt wurden, sind griechischen Mustern nachgebildet. Die Lehnprägungen nach klassischen, antiken Vorbildern finden sich in allen europäischen Sprachen. So ist das in dem Beispiel genannte lat. con-scient-ia dem neutestamentlichen, in den Briefen des Paulus mehrfach belegten Abstraktum συν-είδη-σις[5] nachgebildet und hat Nachkommen in Form von Lehnübersetzungen nicht nur im ahd./nhd. ga-wizzan-i/Gewissen,[6] und ähnlich in niederld. geweten, sondern auch im Mittelniederdeutschen sam-witt-ic-heit und in den nordgermanischen Sprachen, nur dass in diesen dem ahd. ga- *zusammen das Präfix sam- entspricht: dän. samvittighed, schwed. samvete; isld. samviska. Ein Lehnwort aus dem Lateinischen ist frz. und engl. conscience.

Eine dritte Art von Entlehnungsvorgängen, die zum Bereich der Lehnbildungen gehört, kann man als Bedeutungsentlehnung bezeichnen. Es wird dann nur die Bedeutung eines fremden Wortes übernommen und als Lehnbedeutung dem Bedeutungsspektrum des heimischen Wortes hinzugefügt. In dem Beispiel werden für das gotische Verbum daupjan zwei Hauptbedeutungen genannt, die auch das griech. βαπτίξειν[7] aufweist, nämlich 1. *eintauchen und 2. *taufen. Die zweite Bedeutung erhält das Wort aber erst durch seine Verwendung im Neuen Testament, in dem es im Aktiv und Medium belegt ist (βαπτίξειν *taufen und βαπτίξεθαι *sich taufen lassen).[8] Es ist ein Schlüsselwort des Christentums, das Wulfila (311–383), der Übersetzer des griechischen Bibeltextes ins Gotische, mit daupjan wiedergab und das sich im 5. Jahrhundert donauaufwärts ins Bairische und von da aus ins Kontinentalgermanische verbreitete.[9]

3.2 Entlehnungen aus dem Lateinischen in das Alt- und Mittelhochdeutsche

3.2.1 Erste Welle von Entlehnungen 1. bis 5./6. Jahrhundert

Die Kontakte zwischen den Römern auf der einen Seite und den Germanen auf der anderen Seite, aber auch die Kontakte zwischen Griechen und Goten, führten in den ersten vier Jahrhunderten nach Christi Geburt zu einer ersten Welle von Wortentlehnungen aus dem Lateinischen und—vermittelt durch die Goten, wie das Beispiel βαπτίξειν / baptizare > daupjan gezeigt hat—auch aus dem Griechischen ins Deutsche. Es sind mehrere Hundert Lehnwörter, bei denen das Wort zusammen mit der Sache, der Ausdruck mit dem Inhalt übernommen wurde. Für diese Übernahme- und Aneignungsvorgänge ist keine wirkliche Zweisprachigkeit der Bevölkerung in der Kontaktzone erforderlich.

Das wahrscheinlich älteste deutsche Lehnwort aus dem Lateinischen ist Kaiser. Das Wort geht auf den Familiennamen Caesar bzw. seinen berühmtesten Träger Gaius Iulius Caesar (100–44 vor Chr.) zurück und wurde unter den nachfolgenden Herrschern als Titel verwendet. Das Wort gelangte zunächst ins Germanische und dann weiter ins Deutsche. Das ahd. keisur (auch -or, -ar) wird wohl auch noch als Titel, aber zugleich auch schon als De-onomastikon, als ein vom Namen abgeleitetes Appellativum mit der Bedeutung *Herrscher gebraucht. Ähnlich haben unter dem Eindruck eines übermächtigen Herrschers die Slaven später den Namen Karls des Großen, also ahd. Karal / Karl, entlehnt und als Herrscherbezeichnung gebraucht (russ. король, tschech. král, poln. król usw. für *König). Aber auch dem russ. царь *Zar liegt Caesar zugrunde, es ist eine Entlehnung aus got. kaisar, das über griech. καῖσαρ auf Caesar zurückgeht. Die Lautgesetze erlauben hier eine ungefähre Datierung der Entlehnung von Caesar ins Germanische: Sie konnte nicht später als im 2. Jahrhundert erfolgen, weil bis dahin der Diphthong ae in Caesar noch gesprochen wurde, der auch in ahd. keisur bzw. got. kaisar erscheint; ebenso war auch noch die k-Aussprache im Anlaut von Caesar erhalten, erst im 6./7. Jahrhundert wurde k- palatalisiert, also als [ts] gesprochen.

Von den mehreren Hundert Wörtern, die in den ersten vier Jahrhunderten nach Chr. zu den Germanen und in den althochdeutschen Wortschatz gelangten, ist ein großer Teil noch heute erhalten. Die Entlehnungswege von der Romania in die Germania hat Theodor Frings erforscht.[10] Aufgrund der Verteilung bestimmter Bezeichnungen wie z. B. der verschiedenen lateinischen Wörter für *Kelter in den heutigen Mundarten[11] hat er auf die Kontaktzonen zwischen den Römern und Germanen geschlossen und in diesen Kontaktzonen die über Gallien und Oberitalien führenden Aufmarschstraßen der Romania—so die militärische Terminologie von Frings[12]—lokalisiert. Eine dieser Aufmarschstraßen aus dem römischen Gallien führte über das Mosel- und Maasgebiet; der Mittelpunkt dieses Kontaktraums war die Stadt Trier, die in der Spätantike ein großes römisches Zentrum war und für einige Zeit sogar die Hauptstadt des römischen Imperiums bildete.

Die lateinischen Lehnwörter der ersten Welle sind überwiegend Bezeichnungen, die mit den neuen, den Germanen bisher unbekannten Sachgütern und Gegenständen übernommen wurden. Mit den neuen Sachen kamen also die neuen Wörter, die im Althochdeutschen wie in den benachbarten germanischen Sprachen, dem Altenglischen und Altnordischen zum großen Teil auch bezeugt sind. Dazu einige Beispiele: Die Germanen kannten nur die Holzbauweise. In den Sagas findet sich die vollständige Terminologie für das Haus und seine Teile in der Holzbauweise. Die Fachwerkbauten sind im Grunde die Fortsetzung der altererbten Bauweise. Von den Römern lernten die Germanen dann die Steinbauweise kennen; mit den dafür nötigen neuen Baustoffen und Bauformen wurden auch die neuen Fachausdrücke importiert. Die meisten davon sind bis heute erhalten geblieben. Oft steht die alte germanische oder althochdeutsche Bezeichnung für einen Hausteil neben der entlehnten römischen, so steht z. B. ahd. wand, nhd. Wand für das aus Flechtwerk gewundene und mit Erde verschmierte Hausteil neben der neuen Bezeichnung ahd. mūra (aengl. mūr), nhd. Mauer aus lat. mūrus, die Steinmauer eben. Abweichend vom Lateinischen, aber analog zu wand ist das neue Wort ein Femininum.

Die heutigen Umgangssprachen spiegeln mit ihren Synonymen für verschiedene Hausteile die alten Entlehnungs- und Importwege wider. Ein Beispiel ist die Bezeichnung für den Dachboden, den obersten Raum des Hauses unter dem Dach. Die ererbten Wörter sind Boden, das heute im Norden und Osten benutzt wird, und Bühne, auch Beune, das die Schwaben für Dachboden gebrauchen. In den Kontaktzonen zur Romania kommt als Bezeichnung für den Dachboden wie für den Fußboden das Wort Estrich aus dem lat. astracum, astricum (< griech. ὄστρακον *Tonziegel, Scherbe) der römischen Siedler zu den Germanen: Einmal kommt Estrich über Oberitalien und das Alpengebiet ins Alemannische, wo es bis heute im Schweizerdeutschen den Dachboden bezeichnet; ein andermal kommt Estrich über die Moselstraße ins Rheinland, wo es in einigen Gegenden die Zimmerdecke bezeichnet.[13] Ein anderes Wort für Dachboden ist Söller aus lat. solārium *Sonnenraum; das Wort bezeichnet ein flaches Dach oder eine Terasse und gelangt ebenfalls mit dem römischen Geschossbau ins Deutsche, es bleibt bis zur Gegenwart am Niederrhein und im Mitteldeutschen erhalten, wo es heute als Söller den Dachboden bezeichnet, in der Schweiz dagegen den Fußboden.[14] Die Bezeichnung für Dachboden in der römisch-germanischen Kontaktzone am Mittelrhein bis hin zur romanischen Sprachgrenze im Westen ist das Wort Speicher aus spätlat. spīcarium.[15]

Weitere Wörter, die mit dem römischen Bauwesen ins Althochdeutsche gekommen sind und im heutigen Deutsch überregional gebraucht werden, sind: Ziegel (ahd. ziagala < lat. tēgula), Kalk (ahd. kalc < lat. calx), Mörtel (ahd. mortāri < lat. mortārium *Mörser und metonymisch für den Inhalt des Mörsers *Mörtel), Pfeiler *Stütze, Säule (ahd. phīlāri, mhd. phîlære < vulgärlat. *pīlāre, eine Ableitung von lat. pīla *Pfeiler), Pfahl (ahd. mhd. phâl < lat. pālus), Pfosten *Stützpfeiler (ahd. phosto, mhd. phost[e] < lat. postis *Türpfosten), Keller (ahd. kellāri, mhd. keller < lat. cellārium *Vorratskammer), Kamin *offene Feuerstelle mit Rauchfang; Schornstein (mhd. kámîn, kémîn < lat. camīnus *Feuerstätte, Schmelzofen [< griech. κάμινος]), Kammer (ahd. kamara, mhd. kamer[e] < lat. camara), Küche (ahd. kuhhina, mhd. küche[n] < vulgärlat. cucīna, cocīna).

Bei Wörtern wie Pfeiler, Pfahl, Pfosten zeigt die anlautende Affrikata pf-, dass sie vor der Zweiten oder althochdeutschen Lautverschiebung übernommen worden sind, obwohl sie zum Teil erst spät belegt sind; ebenso bei Ziegel aus lat. tēgulum. Diese Wörter waren schon im voralthochdeutschen Wortschatz vorhanden und wurden seit dem 6./7. Jahrhundert mit den Affrikaten gesprochen, als vermutlich zuerst die Alemannen die neuen Aussprachegewohnheiten praktizierten, also /p-/ als /pf-/ und /t-/ als /ts-/ realisierten, die wir als Zweite oder Althochdeutsche Lautverschiebung bezeichnen.[16] Auch Wörter wie Keller, Kamin, Kammer, Küche mit k- im Anlaut wurden schon früh, noch zur Zeit der k-Aussprache des anlautenden c- in cellārium usw. mit den andern Wörtern des römischen Steinbaus entlehnt.

Auch das Wort Fenster ist bereits im 8. Jahrhundert als ahd. finestra und um 1000 als fenstar belegt, es ist aus lat. fenestra *Öffnung in einer Wand oder Mauer, Fenster entlehnt. Daneben gab es in den germanischen Sprachen aber auch altererbte Wörter für Fenster: got. auga-dauro,[17] altengl. eaȝ-duru und eagh-þyrl[18] ahd. auga-tora,[19] *Tür in Form eines Auges oder wie umgangssprachlich *Guck-loch, dagegen altnord. vind-auga *Wind-auge bzw. *Wind-öffnung, das ins Englische (window) entlehnt wird und die alten Bezeichnungen ersetzt.

Die aus dem Lateinischen entlehnten Wörter wurden, wie bereits bemerkt, von den Germanen mit germanischen Artikulationsgewohnheiten ausgesprochen, und die vor der Zweiten Lautverschiebung ins Voralthochdeutsche gelangten Lexeme unterlagen dem historischen Lautwandel. Die Lehnwörter wurden auf der ersten Silbe betont und sind im 8./9. Jahrhundert dem morphologischen System des Althochdeutschen angepasst. Sie sind also völlig assimiliert, sind keine Fremdwörter mehr; sie werden von allen sozialen Schichten gebraucht, auch von denjenigen, die des Lateinischen nicht mächtig sind.

Mit der ersten lateinischen Welle von Lehnwörtern kamen zusammen mit den Sachen noch zahlreiche neue Wörter für weitere Bereiche, so für den Gemüse- und Gartenbau, den Obst- und Weinbau, für Kochkunst und Küche. Die Weinbauterminologie stammt fast gänzlich aus dem Lateinischen. Es wurden auch Wörter entlehnt, die für die Zeiteinteilung und den Handel mit seinen Termingeschäften wichtig waren. Überwiegend handelte es sich aber um Konkreta.

3.2.2 Zweite Welle von Entlehnungen 8. bis 11. Jh.

Ganz anderer Art sind die Entlehnungsvorgänge, die eine zweite Welle des lateinischen Einflusses auf das Althochdeutsche bestimmen, als mit dem Christentum und der lateinischen Schriftkultur Phänomene und Verhaltensweisen bezeichnet werden mussten, die innere Vorgänge betrafen, Gefühle, Einstellungen oder das Seelenheil und alles was zur Transzendenz, dem Jenseits, gehört. Mit solchen Fragen hatten die christlichen Missionare zu tun, die vom 6. Jahrhundert an den Franken, dann den Alemannen und Baiern den christlichen Glauben vermitteln wollten. Die neue Lehre konnte nicht mit Fremdwörtern verkündigt werden, denn sie sollte ja von allen, auch von den des Lateinischen nicht Kundigen, verstanden werden, weil sie jeden betraf, nicht nur die Winzer oder Maurer oder Gemüsehändler, die sich mit ihrem aus dem Lateinischen entlehnten Fachwortschatz verständigten, der fast ausnahmslos Konkreta umfasste. Es mussten daher neue Wörter gebildet werden, die den Inhalt der lateinisch gefassten Lehren des Christentums, einer Buchreligion, übermitteln konnten.

Die Prägung neuer Ausdrücke für die neuen Inhalte erforderte von den Missionaren eine hinreichende Kompetenz im Lateinischen, der Sprache also, in der die neue Lehre abgefasst war, und zugleich im Deutschen, der Sprache der zu Missionierenden. Nicht nur die christliche Lehre hatten die Missionare zu verkündigen, auch die mit einer Buchreligion wie dem Christentum verbundenen Kulturtechniken wie Schreiben und Lesen und andere für das Medium Buch wichtige Bezeichnungen.

Die altnord. Bezeichnung für das Lesen von Runen lautet: rúnar ráða *Runen raten; ráða hat dabei durchaus die Bedeutung *raten, und rúnar ráða heißt: *die durch die Runen verborgenen Geheimnisse erraten. Altnord. ráða und die altengl. Entsprechung rædan wurden dann aber auch benutzt zur Bezeichnung der neuen Kulturtechnik des Lesens. Wie im Altnordischen hat auch im Altenglischen das Verbum mehrere Bedeutungen, darunter *raten und die aus ihr sich entwickelnde neue Bedeutung *lesen (read), die unter dem Einfluss von lat. legere entsteht. Diese Lehnbedeutung wird im Laufe der Zeit die Hauptbedeutung. Ähnlich verhält es sich mit der Bezeichnung für *Schreiben im Altenglischen: Die Runen schrieb man nicht mit der Feder, sondern man ritzte sie in Holz oder Stein; mit altengl. wrítan, dem das ahd. rîȥan *ritzen (mit Verschiebung von germ. -t- > ahd. -ȥ-, nhd. reißen) entspricht,[20] bezeichneten die Angelsachsen dann auch die neue Kulturtechnik des Schreibens. Heute ist die Hauptbedeutung von to write nicht mehr *ritzen, sondern die nach lat. scribere geprägte Lehnbedeutung.

Anders werden aber im Althochdeutschen die beiden neuen Kulturtechniken bezeichnet: lat. legere wird wiedergegeben mit lësan, das unter dem Einfluss von lat. legere die neue Bedeutung *mit den Augen auflesen erhält, die zu der alten *mit den Händen auflesen, aufsammeln hinzukommt (z. B. Kartoffeln lesen u. ä.). Scribere dagegen wird mit der Bedeutung *schreiben entlehnt und dem morphologischen System des Althochdeutschen angepasst als starkes Verbum (scrīban, screip, scribun, giscriban), es gehört also zusammen mit einigen anderen Wörtern der Kirchen- und Klostersprache wie dihtōn (dictāre) bei Otfried *erdenken, erdichten; verfassen, trahtōn (tractāre) *sich gedanklich mit etwas befassen, bedenken, erwägen, predigōn (< praedicāre) *die christliche Lehre verkündigen und auslegen, ordinōn (ordināre) *(an)ordnen, einreihen; ordnungsgemäß erfüllen, zu den wenigen althochdeutschen Lehnwörtern aus dem Lateinischen.[21] Was wir aber hier bei altengl. rædan und wrítan sowie bei ahd. lësan beobachtet haben, ist die neue Gebrauchsweise eines vorhandenen Wortes. Ein vorhandener Ausdruck wird mit einem neuen Inhalt verwendet. Die neue Kulturtechnik konnte man auf diese Weise ganz oder—wie im Althochdeutschen—zumindest zum Teil mit vorhandenen Wörtern bezeichnen.

Wie am Beispiel von got. daupjan, ahd. touffan gezeigt wurde, wird dann nur die Bedeutung eines fremden Wortes übernommen und als Lehnbedeutung dem Bedeutungsspektrum des heimischen Wortes hinzugefügt. Ganz anders als im Gotischen und Althochdeutschen wird die Taufhandlung im Altenglischen und Altnordischen bezeichnet. Hier werden andere Wörter unter dem Einfluss von lat. baptizare mit der Lehnbedeutung *taufen versehen, nämlich altengl. fulwian, eigentlich *voll-weihen, und altnord. skíra *reinigen.

Die neue Religion und die spezifischen Inhalte ihrer Lehre wurden ebenso wie die neuen Kulturtechniken vor allem durch Lehnprägungen (Lehnbedeutungen und Lehnbildungen) vermittelt. Der religiöse Wortschatz zweier althochdeutscher Werke, die den Inhalt der Evangelien in Prosa bzw. Versen erzählen, nämlich die Übersetzung der Evangelienharmonie des Tatian (2. Viertel 9. Jh. im Kloster Fulda) und Otfrieds von Weißenburg Evangelienbuch (zwischen 863 und 871 entstanden), besteht zu 60 bzw. 80% aus Wörtern, die mit neuen Lehnbedeutungen gebraucht werden.[22] Otfried und die andern um die Vermittlung der lateinischen Welt bemühten Gelehrten standen immer wieder vor der Frage, welches vorhandene althochdeutsche Wort sich am besten eigne, um einen neuen, mit dem lateinischen Ausdruck verbundenen christlichen Inhalt aufzunehmen. Die benediktinischen Mönche hatten oft die Qual der Wahl, und wir können ihr Wählen und Probieren anhand der Überlieferung beobachten. Wir können verfolgen, wie sie nach geeigneten althochdeutschen Wörtern suchten, die für eine Bedeutungserweiterung brauchbar waren und die Inhalte zentraler christlicher Begriffe wie *Glaube, Gott, Christus, Heiliger Geist, Hoffnung, Liebe, Himmel, Hölle, Auferstehung, Taufe, Beichte, Opfer, Buße, Reue, Gnade und Erlösung übermitteln konnten. Für diese Übermittlung spielte die Lehnbedeutung eine zentrale Rolle.

Bisweilen versuchten sie es zunächst mit einem Lehnwort, dann aber auch mit einem Erbwort, mit dem eine Lehnbedeutung verbunden wurde und das im Laufe der Zeit das fremde, dem des Lateinischen nicht Kundigen unvertraute oder *schwere Wort ablöste. *Schwer sind die Fremdwörter zunächst immer deshalb, weil sie isoliert und nicht in eine Wortfamilie eingebettet sind und gleichsam asozial dastehen.[23] Für lat. apostolus, einem Lehnwort aus griech. ἀπόστολος zur Bezeichnung der Jünger Jesu mit Einschluss des Paulus, wird in der Ende des 8. Jahrhundert entstandenen Übersetzung einer Predigt Augustins, die in den sog. Monseer Fragmenten erhalten ist, das ins Althochdeutsche entlehnte und assimilierte Wort apostol gebraucht; im 9. Jahrhundert gebrauchte man jedoch fast nur noch das Erbwort boto *Bote (mhd. zwelfboto) mit der neuen entlehnten Bedeutung, die sich auf die christlichen Apostel bezog.

Aber auch die Erbwörter, die mit den Lehnbedeutungen aufgeladen werden konnten, standen in Konkurrenz miteinander. Die Mönche hatten —wie gesagt—die Wahl unter vielen Wörtern, die sich eigneten für den Gebrauch mit der neuen christlichen Bedeutung. So wird z. B. der Inhalt von lat. gratia, einem Zentralbegriff des christlichen Glaubens, mit ganz verschiedenen, meist teilsynonymen althochdeutschen Ausdrücken verknüpft. Die christliche Bedeutung *Barmherzigkeit Gottes, Sündenvergebung, die heute am besten noch in der Zwillingsformel Gnade und Barmherzigkeit (Gottes) erhalten ist, wird mit ganz verschiedenen Wörtern im Althochdeutschen wiedergegeben,[24] die im Bedeutungsspektrum des Lateinischen Wortes gratia (*Annehmlichkeit, Gunst, Dank, Wohlwollen usw.) Parallelen haben (Tab. 3.2):

Ahd. | 1. anst stF. *Gunst (wie got. ansts für griech. χάρις *Gnade)
| 2. geba stF. *Gabe (wie altengl. gifu *(Gnaden-)Gabe)
| 3. huldî stF. *Zuneigung, Geneigtheit
| 4. trôst stM. *Zuversicht, Hilfe
| 5. gimuati stN. *Wohlwollen
| 6. ginâda stF. *Geneigtheit, Ruhe und Glück

3.2

Von diesen sechs Äquivalenten setzt sich ginâda zum Mittelhochdeutschen hin durch. Ahd. ginâda ist zunächst ebenso wenig wie seine Konkurrenten ein Wort des religiösen Wortschatzes, sondern hat eine weltliche Bedeutung, die auch im Mittelhochdeutschen noch lebendig ist in einem Satz wie spätmhd.: die sonne czu gnaden ging,[25] *die Sonne begab sich zur Ruhe, ging unter.

Es gibt zahlreiche weitere Beispiele, anhand derer wir das Wählen und Probieren, das Experimentieren der benediktinischen Gelehrten gut beobachten können anhand der überlieferten Texte, die wir der neuen Buchkultur verdanken. Die lexikalisch fruchtbare Periode des Experimentierens mit Lehnbedeutungen ist im 10./11. Jahrhundert im Wesentlichen abgeschlossen, alle zentralen Begriffe des Christentums und der antiken Kultur sind eingedeutscht, und im Mittelhochdeutschen erfolgt dann eine terminologische Fixierung auf einen Ausdruck.

Die Vermittlung der christlichen Zentralbegriffe, wie sie im Credo und im Neuen Testament vorkommen, erfolgte über die Lehnbedeutung, dies war für die nicht lateinkundigen Laien der gegebene Weg, um den Inhalt eines neu gebrauchten Ausdrucks zu erfassen. Eine Zweisprachigkeit war daher in den Kreisen, denen das Credo oder Paternoster verständlich gemacht werden sollte, nicht erforderlich. Die Vermittlung theologischer oder philosophischer Fachausdrücke hatte dagegen ein ganz anderes Publikum als Otfrieds Evangelienbuch, das dem fränkische König Ludwig dem Deutschen (843–876) gewidmet war und mit dem der Dichter das Fränkische zur lingua sacra machen wollte.

Die Übersetzung der Benediktinerregel ins Althochdeutsche[26] war dagegen für das Kloster bestimmt, für einen kleinen exklusiven Kreis von Lehrern und Schülern. Obwohl die Lehrer im benediktinischen Kloster mit einer Zweisprachigkeit, die ja auch das Ziel der Schüler war, rechnen konnten, haben sie nur wenige Wörter aus dem Lateinischen entlehnt. Ähnlich wie später die dominikanischen und franziskanischen Theologen im 13. Jahrhundert schaffen sie eine allgemein verständliche Terminologie ohne Rückgriff auf Fremdwörter. Sie nutzen vor allem die Möglichkeiten der Wortbildung. Die Bildung neuer Wörter aus dem vorhandenen Schatz an Wortstämmen, Präfixen und Suffixen, die den entsprechenden lateinischen Äquivalenten nachgebildet werden, war die gegebene Möglichkeit, für all das einen leicht verständlichen Ausdruck zu finden, was durch Lehnwörter und Erbwörter mit Lehnbedeutungen nicht ohne weiteres verständlich gemacht werden konnte. Dies betrifft vor allem die zahlreichen Verbalabstrakta, die von Verben abgeleiteten Substantive zur Bezeichnung von Vorgängen, Handlungen und Zuständen. Die mit den Möglichkeiten der Wortbildung operierende Lehnbildung war also der Schlüssel zu dem fremden theologischen und philosophischen Wortschatz.

3.2.3 Dritte Welle von Entlehnungen im Hochmittelalter

Bereits in der Zeit des Althochdeutschen beginnt im Bereich des von der Zweisprachigkeit geprägten klösterlichen Schulbetriebs mit den Lehnbildungen ein Prozess, der die Latinisierungsbewegung des Hochmittelalters bestimmt und für die Geschichte des deutschen Wortschatzes folgenreich wird. Vor allem in der reichen Glossenüberlieferung ist das zu beobachten. Glossen machen rund zwei Drittel des überlieferten althochdeutschen Wortschatzes von rund 35 000 Wörter insgesamt aus.[27]

Wie bei den Lehnbedeutungen ist auch bei den Lehnbildungen ein Experimentieren zu beobachten. Dabei werden in den einzelnen Zentren der Glossierung für die Nachbildung oder Kontrafaktur eines lateinischen Wortes in den Glied-für-Glied-Übersetzungen unabhängig voneinander verschiedene Lösungen gefunden. Für resurrēctio, einem der Zentralwörter des christlichen Glaubens aus dem Credo und dem Neuen Testament, sind im Althochdeutschen insgesamt 13 Versuche überliefert[28] und im Mittelhochdeutschen noch acht, von denen sich schließlich eine einzige im Neuhochdeutschen fest etabliert (siehe Abbildung 3.2). Lat. resurrēctio *Wiederauferstehung selbst ist bereits eine Lehnübersetzung des neutestamentlichen ἀνάστασις; der Transfer des Wortes vom Lateinischen ins Deutsche hat also eine analoge Vorgeschichte im Transfer vom Griechischen ins Lateinische.

Fig. 3.2: Konkurrierende Lehnübersetzungen im Alt- und Mittelhochdeutschen.

Letzten Endes hat sich unter den konkurrierenden Bildungen diejenige durchgesetzt, die dem lateinischen Wort am genauesten nachgebildet ist, und zwar Sibe für Silbe: re-sur-rēct-io = Auf-er-steh-ung, obwohl die etymologische Vorstufe von lat. surgo im Präsensstamm verdunkelt und auch im Stamm des Partizip Perfekt Passivi nicht mehr deutlich erkennbar ist, mit dem das Verbalabstraktum gebildet ist.[29]

Im Althochdeutschen zeigen sich die bekannten Übersetzer mit ihren Vorlieben für bestimmte Bildungsweisen ihrer Lehnübersetzungen von resurrectio. Das Team, das den Tatian in Fulda übersetzte, gebraucht 10 x urrestî und 1 x arstantnessî, Otfried von Weißenburg nur irstantnissi; aber Notker von St. Gallen († 1022) gebraucht neben urstenti (23 x) und urstentida (12 x) noch urstentî (4 x), urstant (1 x) und schließlich noch den substantivierten Infinitiv thaz ûfstân.[30] Im Mittelhochdeutschen ist die mit Abstand am häufigsten überlieferte Bildung das seit dem Anfang des 12. Jahrhundert belegte urstende (< ahd. urstentî); ûferstentnisse (seit 13. Jh. bis ca. 1700) ist bis ins Frühneuhochdeutsche bezeugt, aber der Spätling ûferstêunge > Auferstehung, seit Ende des 14. Jahrhundert nachgewiesen, dominiert vom 16. Jahrhundert an und hat dann keine Konkurrenten mehr.[31]

Für die Geschichte der deutschen Wortbildung aufschlussreich ist das bereits von den Glossatoren in althochdeutscher Zeit gebrauchte Suffix -unga für die Ableitung von Verbalabstrakta, das die im Tatian und von Otfried und Notker gebrauchten Konkurrenten ablöst und eine immer stärkere Rolle spielt. Die Wörter auf -unga/-unge sind im Alt- wie im Mittelhochdeutschen eine gelehrte Angelegenheit. Sie sind charakteristische schöpfungen der unter dem banne des lateins arbeitenden übersetzer; fast alle sind sie mechanische copien lateinischer substantive auf -(at)io.[32] Zugleich ist mit ihnen aber auch viel deutlicher die Tätigkeitsvorstellung verbunden als bei den konkurrierenden Suffixen, mit denen sowohl Nomina acti als auch Nomina actionis unterschiedslos gebildet wurden. Unter dem Einfluss des Lateinischen ist der Siegeszug des -unga/-unge-Suffixes zur Bildung von Nomina actionis nicht mehr aufzuhalten, die deutschen Wörter auf -unga/-unge werden wie die lateinischen Bildungen auf -io im 13./14. Jahrhundert in der Sprache der deutschen Scholastik und Mystik zu Modewörtern schlechthin. Im Neuhochdeutschen werden Verbalabstrakta so gut wie ausschließlich mit -ung von den Verben abgeleitet. Ähnlich verhält es sich mit den Adjektivabstrakta auf lat. -tas (griech. -της) und dem deutschen Äquivalent -heit bei der Bildung von Nomina qualitatis.

Gleichzeitig mit der durch die Lehnbildungen bestimmten dritten Welle des lateinischen Einflusses auf das Deutsche des Mittelalters zeigt sich aber auch, wie in der klassischen mittelhochdeutschen Literatur die Dichter um 1200 die Möglichkeiten des Deutschen als Wortbildungssprache nutzen. In der heroischen Dichtung wie dem Nibelungenlied ist ein großer Teil des alten Wortschatzes aus heimischer Tradition bewahrt, die höfischen Dichter dagegen gebrauchen mit Vorliebe neumodische Lehnwörter aus dem Französischen, die in der Sprechsprache der feudalen Oberschicht bereits im Umlauf waren (s. u. unter IV). Die höfischen Dichter erfinden zugleich aber auch eine höchst differenzierte Sprache, mit der sie beschreiben, was im Innern ihrer Figuren vor sich geht; sie können Gedanken, Gefühle und Einstellungen genau analysieren und ausdrücken, was die Figuren im Innern bewegt. Dazu brauchen sie einen differenzierten Wortschatz, den sie sich vor allem dadurch schaffen, dass sie die Möglichkeiten der Wortbildung nutzen.

Von den Möglichkeiten des Deutschen als einer ausgesprochenen Wortbildungssprache machen in den beiden Jahrzehnten nach 1200 Wolfram von Eschenbach und Gottfried von Straßburg am intensivsten Gebrauch. Sie zeigen, welche Möglichkeiten das Deutsche als Wortbildungssprache bietet im Unterschied zu den romanischen Sprachen, die keine ausgesprochenen Wortbildungssprachen sind, sondern Vergleichbares nur mit den Möglichkeiten der Syntax wiedergeben.

Es gibt kühne Neubildungen bei Wolfram, Zusammensetzungen und Ableitungen, darunter viele ad-hoc-Bildungen, die nicht lexikalisiert sind. Dazu einige Beispiele:[33] Es gibt substantivische Komposita wie ûz-gesinde *Ausgesinde, eine Analogiebildung zu in-gesinde; valken-sehe *Falken-blick; valschheit-swant *der die Falschheit (Untreue) zum Verschwinden bringt; Adjektive wie ougest-heiz *august-heiß, freuden-flühtic *die Freude fliehend, walt-müede *von der Reise durch den Wald erschöpft; Partizipialadjektive wie be-kerzet *mit Kerzen versehen, ge-naset *mit einer Hundenase ausgestattet, ge-îsert *mit Eisen (Rüstung) versehen, gerüstet, ge-orset *mit einem ors = Pferd ausgestattet, beritten.

Gottfried von Straßburg verspottet in seinem *Tristan[34] Wolframs Wortbildungskunststücke mit einem berühmten Satz, dass sich sein Dichterrivale in der Gemeinschaft hakenschlagender Hasen auf der Wortheide hochsprüngig und weitweidend mit zusammengewürfelten Wörtern herumtolle: swer nû des hasen geselle sî / und ûf der wortheide / hôchsprünge und wîtweide / mit bickelworten welle sîn, dem—so meint Gottfried—gebühre nicht der Dichterlorbeer. Seine Kritik formuliert Gottfried mit vier spottenden Neubildungen à la Wolfram, nämlich wortheide, hôchsprünge, wîtweide und bickelwort.[35] Aber auch Gottfried schüttelt die Neubildungen nur so aus dem Ärmel. Allein die Wortfamilie von herze z. B. bereichert er durch viele neue Komposita und Ableitungen, die bei ihm zum ersten Male belegt sind, so die Substantive: herze-galle *Bitternis im Herzen, herze-gir, herze-ger, herze-lust, herze-niftel *allerliebste Nichte, herze-quâle, herze-schade, herze-sorge, herze-tohter; Adjektive: un-herze-haft *verzagt, ge-herzet *beherzt; Verben: ent-herzen (nach dem Muster von ent-lîben) *des Herzens berauben. Ebenso wird die Wortfamilie von senen *sehn- und leidsüchtig einander lieben bereichert: senen ist der Hauptzeitvertreib von Tristan und Isolde, die senedære *Liebesleidsüchtige genannt werden, der Roman von ihnen ist ein sene-mære, eine *Geschichte von Liebesleid, von sene-gluot *heißer Liebessehnsucht und sene-viuwer *Liebesfeuer, sene-bürde *Liebeslast; Tristan ist Isoldes sene-genôz *Freund im Liebesleid. Wenn Wolfram ein Partizipialadjektiv wie ge-hundet *von einem Hund begleitet bildete, dann war Gottfried noch kühner und bildete analog dazu ein Partizipialadjektiv mit dem Namen Îsôt: ge-îsôtet *von Isolde verzaubert.

Die Neuerungen in der Wortbildung und die Aktivierung der deutschen Wortbildungsmöglichkeiten gehören zu den sprachgeschichtlich bemerkenswerten Leistungen der höfischen Dichter. Nicht nur weltliche Stoffe bearbeiten sie, sondern auch geistliche wie die Legenden von Gregorius oder die apokryphen Stoffe von der Kindheit Jesu und des Marienlebens. Vielfach ist Weltliches und Geistliches gar nicht rein zu scheiden: Die Thematik des *Parzival verbindet z. B. das weltliche Artusthema mit dem geistlichen Gralsthema.

Das Neue an den volkssprachigen Werken, die seit dem 12. Jahrhundert auf das Pergament kommen, ist aber vor allem, dass sie weitgehend unabhängig von der lateinischen Schriftkultur entstehen und eine eigene Schriftkultur begründen. Der höfische Roman ist sowohl buchgeschichtlich als auch kulturgeschichtlich etwas Neues. Die größtenteils analphabetische laikale Oberschicht, ihre männlichen Angehörigen jedenfalls, bekommt erstmals ein Verhältnis zum Buch. Ein zwiespältiges allerdings. Ein Autor wie Wolfram von Eschenbach sagt z. B. ganz deutlich, dass er mit der lateinischen Buchgelehrsamkeit nichts zu tun haben will: ine kann decheinen buochstap /[36] [...] disiu âventiure / vert âne der buoche stiu-re[37] *Ich kann nicht schreiben und lesen [...] Diese Geschichte hat mit Buchgelehrsamkeit nichts zu tun. Sein älterer Dichterkollege Hartmann von Aue dagegen stellt sich so vor: Ein ritter der gelêret was / daz er an den buochen las / swaz er dar an geschriben vant / der was Hartman genant.[38]

Während das Althochdeutsche der Glossen und der Übersetzungen immer abhängig vom Latein und damit von der Buchgelehrsamkeit ist, ist das Mittelhochdeutsche der höfischen Dichter um 1200 eine literarisch offene Sprache, wie das Wortbildung und Syntax besonders deutlich zeigen. Doch die Tradition der lateinischen Schriftkultur wirkt auch im Hochmittelalter weiter auf bestimmte volkssprachige Werke, die zur gleichen Zeit wie der höfische Roman und der Minnesang entstehen. Und alles Neue auf dem Gebiet der lateinischen Gelehrsamkeit wird wie in der Zeit des Althochdeutschen zum Teil auch an die des Lateinischen nicht Kundigen vermittelt. Insbesondere die Vermittlung der lateinisch verfassten christlichen Lehre über den rechten Weg zum Heil ist ein besonderes Anliegen auch in der Zeit, in der die höfischen Dichter versuchen, den Konflikt zwischen dem Einzelnen und Gott oder der Gesellschaft zu gestalten, wie wir das bei Parzival oder Tristan und Isolde sehen. Die Ausleger der Bibel versuchen ebenso, die Beziehung der Einzelseele zu Gott zum Thema ihrer Predigten zu machen. Das Private ist die große Entdeckung des 12. Jahrhunderts, dazu gehören die Liebe ebenso wie das Heilsstreben des Einzelnen, der für sich auf Gnade und Erlösung hofft.

Die dritte Welle des lateinischen Einflusses wird nun wieder getragen von den zweisprachigen Gelehrten der neuen Orden, zu deren Hauptaufgaben die Seelsorge gehörte. Die neuen Orden, die zu Beginn des 13. Jahrhunderts entstehen, versuchen, das in den Ketzerbewegungen offenbar gewordene Heilsstreben großer Laiengruppen auf die Wege der Kirche zurückzulenken. Die neuen Orden sind die Franziskaner und die Dominikaner; sie heißen Bettelorden wegen ihrer Herkunft aus der Armutsbewegung, für deren Anhänger die Armut Christi und seiner Apostel das große Vorbild war. Armut ist aber eigentlich nur attraktiv für die Reichen. Franz von Assisi (*1181/82–1226) war der Sohn eines reichen Kaufmanns. Er gab alles auf, er wollte arm sein und leben wie die Vögel unter dem Himmel, die für morgen nicht zu sorgen brauchen. Die in seinem Sonnengesang gepriesene Schöpfung lieferte alles, man musste sie nur bewahren.

Mit der Aufgabe der Seelsorge war für die Bettelorden zugleich die Predigt verbunden, mit der sie in den neuen großen gotischen Kirchen die Massen erreichen konnten. Zur Predigtvorbereitung gehörte ein gründliches theologisches Wissen, das Studium spielte daher eine zentrale Rolle für die Ausbildung der Ordensangehörigen, des Predigerordens, so hießen die Dominikaner, und der Minoriten oder Minderen Brüder, so nannten sich im Hinblick auf das biblische Armutsideal die Franziskaner. Die Angehörigen der Bettelorden lebten und wirkten in den Städten, sie gehörten nicht für immer einem bestimmten Kloster an und waren nicht der stabilitas loci verpflichtet, sondern dem Orden als ganzem und konnten daher von einem Konvent zum andern versetzt werden. In den großen Städten wie Köln, Magdeburg, Erfurt befanden sich die Ausbildungszentren der neuen Orden mit ihren universitären Strukturen.

Aus den beiden neuen Orden gehen die Hauptvertreter der Scholastik hervor, aber auch die Hauptvertreter der mittelalterlichen Mystik. Diese Tatsache hatte die germanistische Forschung lange Zeit nicht gesehen, und sie hatte einen Gegensatz zwischen deutscher Mystik und lateinischer Scholastik konstruiert.[39] Man kannte zunächst auch nur das autobiographische Werk *Das fließende Licht der Gottheit der Mechthild von Magdeburg (* um 1207, † 1282 im Kloster Helfta), die Werke der Dominikaner Meister Eckhart (* um 1260, † 1328 in Avignon), Johannes Tauler (* um 1300, † 1361 in Straßburg) und Heinrich Seuse (* um 1295/97, † 1366 in Ulm) und der Franziskaner Berthold von Regensburg (* um 1210, † 1272 in Regensburg) und David von Augsburg (* um 1200, † 1272 in Augsburg).[40]

In den Werken Mechthilds und der Bettelordenstheologen stehen mystische Erfahrung und scholastische Lehre in einem vielfältigen Zusammenhang. Die Mystik wird von dem großen Franziskanertheologen Bonaventura (* 1221, † 1274) bestimmt als cognitio Dei experimentalis, als *Erkenntnis Gottes durch Erfahrung, in der Exstase oder Schauung; die scholastische Lehre dagegen ist sacra doctrina, *heilige Lehre, die als Lehre auf die Sauberkeit der Begriffe achtet.[41] Indem jedoch die mystische Erfahrung zur Literatur wird, wird sie auch Gegenstand der Lehre und kann als solche durch die Sprache der Scholastik expliziert werden. Meister Eckharts deutsche Werke mit ihren zahlreichen neu gebildeten Wörtern kann man nur im Zusammenhang mit der Sprache seiner lateinischen Werke sehen und verstehen.

Das scholastische Latein ist geprägt durch die enormen Bereicherungen, die es durch die Rezeption der antiken Philosophie erfuhr, insbesondere der Werke des Aristoteles. Mit den lateinischen Übersetzungen der griechischen Philosophen und Kirchenväter werden auch die Wortbildungsmuster des Griechischen ins scholastische Latein übernommen und bei der volkssprachigen Vermittlung scholastischer Lehren dann die lateinischen Muster ins Deutsche. Die beherrschende Rolle in den deutschen Scholastikerübertragungen spielt die Lehnübersetzung, sie bietet sich als nie versagendes Mittel an, fremde Wortprägungen mit eigenen Sprachmitteln nachzuformen.[42] In der möglicherweise schon um 1300 entstandenen deutschen Teilübersetzung der *Summa theologica des Thomas von Aquin (* um 1225, † 1274) kann der Transfer der philosophischen und theologischen Schlüsseltermini von Griechenland über Rom in die Germania beobachtet werden; er erfolgt wie bereits im Althochdeutschen über Lehnbildungen, insbesondere Lehnübersetzungen: εὐ-λογ-ία = bene-dict-io = wola-sprech-unge; ἔμ-πνευ-σις = in-spirat-io = în-blas-unge, συμ-πάϑε-ια = com-pass-io = mite-lid-unge, ὑπόστασις = sub-stant-ia = under-stand-unge.[43] Wie im Althochdeutschen sind viele dieser Kontrafakturen bloße Versuche und gehen wieder unter. Zahlreich sind jedoch viele Lehnbildungen, die von den Schreibenden und Sprechenden übernommen werden und im deutschen Wortschatz fest verankert sind wie z. B. An-fecht-ung < ane-vecht-unge = im-pugnat-io, Ewig-keit < êwic-heit =aeterni-tas, Genug-tu-ung < genuoc-tuow-unge = satis-fact-io, Da-sein < dâ-sîn = ad-esse, un-aus-sprech-lich < un-ûz-spreche-lich = in-e-fa-bilis, Unter-scheid-ung < under-schîd-unge = di-vis-io usw.

Im scholastischen Latein werden massenhaft neue Verbalabstrakta auf -io und Adjektivabstrakta auf -tas gebildet, die in den entsprechenden Lehnbildungen der deutschen Übertragungen mit -unge und -heit nachgebildet werden und sich dann unabhängig vom Latein zu den produktivsten Ableitungssuffixen im System der deutschen Wortbildung etablieren.

Schwieriger zu fassen ist in den Texten der deutschen Mystik die Rolle der Lehnbedeutungen. Ein Wort wie mhd. milte, das die Pflicht eines Feudalherren zur Gewährung des Unterhalts der von ihm Abhängigen bezeichnet, erhält über die Bedeutung *Freigebigkeit unter dem Einfluss der Bezeichnungen für die Gaben des Hl. Geistes die christliche Bedeutung *Barmherzigkeit, Gnade.

Lehnbildungen, insbesondere Lehnübersetzungen, spielen wie gesagt die Hauptrolle in der dritten Welle des lateinischen Spracheinflusses auf das Deutsche. Lehnwörter spielen in der Rezeption der lateinischen Scholastik eine durchaus untergeordnete Rolle.[44] Es sind immer wieder dieselben wenigen Lexeme, die häufiger gebraucht werden, darunter z. B. conscienzje und gracie, für die es bereits die etablierten Äquivalente gewizzen(e) und genâde gibt. Häufiger dagegen sind substanzje und davon abgeleitet substanzlich, beide bei Eckhart, Tauler, Seuse und in der Teilübersetzung der *Summa theologica belegt, und subtîl mit subtîl(ec)heit, die ebenfalls von den Mystikern gebraucht werden.

Im Bereich der Derivation im Wortbildungssystem des hochmittelalterlichen Deutsch ist der lateinische Einfluss am deutlichsten zu fassen. Im Bereich der Komposition sind aber ebenfalls Neubildungen zu beobachten, die wohl vom Inhalt der lateinischen Quelle inspiriert sind, aber in der Form an die Wortbildungskünste der höfischen Dichter erinnern, wenn z. B. die geistliche Trunkenheit in inebriare mit himeltrunken werden übersetzt wird oder—anknüpfend an die Stelle im Evangelium Lukas 24,32 Nonne cor nostrum ardens erat ...?—das Kompositum herz-brennung gebildet wird.[45]

Die mystische Prosa der Predigten und Traktate ist keine Übersetzungsliteratur wie die Übertragung der *Summa theologica oder anderer scholastischer Texte, es handelt sich vielmehr um genuin deutsche Schöpfungen, und sie weisen auch eine weit größere Varianz in der Wortbildung auf als die aus dem Lateinischen übersetzten Texte. Sie nutzen wohl die Wortbildungsmöglichkeiten des scholastischen Lateins und machen sie für das Deutsche fruchtbar, doch sie knüpfen auch an die höfischen Dichter an, die ebenso große Wortbildungskünstler waren wie die Dominikanerprediger.

3.2.4 Entlehnungen aus dem Französischen in das mittelalterliche Deutsch

Die seit dem 11. Jahrhundert nachweisbaren Lehnbeziehungen zwischen dem Französischen und dem Deutschen unterscheiden sich von denen zwischen dem Lateinischen und Deutschen der zweiten und dritten Welle grundsätzlich, sind aber wieder teilweise vergleichbar mit den unter beschriebenen Entlehnungen der ersten lateinischen Welle, denn aus dem Französischen werden ebenfalls erstmals in großem Umfang Wörter direkt entlehnt und nicht nur durch Wortbildungsmöglichkeiten neu geschaffen, wie das für den unter und beschriebenen lateinisch-deutschen Sprachkontakt im Mittelalter charakteristisch war. In den Quellen für den deutschen Wortschatz des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts sind zahlreiche französische Lehnwörter belegt. Zum größten Teil bezeichnen diese Entlehnungen Dinge, Tätigkeiten und Verhaltensweisen der höfischen Kultur, wie sie seit dem 11. Jahrhundert an den französisch sprechenden Höfen in Mode kamen und von dort aus z. T. mit ihren französischen Bezeichnungen in Europa verbreitet wurden.

Die französischen Entlehnungen im Mittelhochdeutschen haben finnische Germanisten seit der Jahrhundertwende systematisch erforscht, gesammelt und in umfassenden Inventaren publiziert.[46] In den Verzeichnissen von Hugo Palander (1902), der später den fennisierten Namen Suolahti annahm, sind für das 12. Jahrhundert etwa 230 Lehnwörter aus dem Französischen gesammelt, für das 13. Jahrhundert sind es über 700.[47] Der Höhepunkt der Entlehnungen aus dem Französischen liegt in den Jahren um 1200, in denen die großen höfischen Romane nach französischen Quellen verfasst wurden. Diese Werke spiegeln den zunehmenden Einfluss des Französischen auf den Wortschatz der deutschen Autoren.

Aus Suolahtis Verzeichnissen ergibt sich für Heinrich von Veldeke (Eneit) und die bereits oben genannten Autoren um 1200, nämlich Hartmann von Aue (Erec und Iwein), Wolfram von Eschenbach (Parzival und Willehalm) und Gottfried von Straßburg die folgenden Zahlen für die französischen Lehnwörter in ihren Werken (Tab. 3.3):

Eneit (um 1170–74/85) | 70
Erec (um 1180) | 71
Iwein (um 1190/1200) | 35
Parzival (um 1200/10) | 385
Willehalm (um 1210/20) | 294
Tristan (um 1210) | 220

3.3

Suolahti teilt die Entlehnungen in drei Kategorien, von denen nur die erste mit ihren Belegzahlen in dem Überblick berücksichtigt ist. Diese erste Kategorie umfasst alle Lehnwörter, sowohl die eigentlichen Fremdwörter, d. h. die lautlich nicht oder nur teilweise assimilierten, als auch die nicht so zahlreichen Lehnwörter im engeren Sinne, d. h. die lautlich vollständig assimilierten Wortentlehnungen, deren Ausdrucksseite nichts Fremdes mehr aufweist.

Charakteristisch für die ausdrucksseitig nicht mehr fremden Lehnwörter ist, dass sie früh übernommen wurden und in vielen Texten zahlreich belegt sind und dass schon eigene Wortfamilien um sie existieren. Dies gilt z. B. für prîs und prîsen nach frz. pris und priser. Das deutsche Verb lautet nicht prisieren, ist also nicht mit dem neuen, unter dem Einfluss des entlehnten frz. Nomen agentis-Suffixes -ier (aus lat. -arius) erst gegen Ende des 12. Jahrhunderts entstandenen deutsche Verbalsuffix -ieren[48] gebildet wie tjostieren nach frz. joster. Das gilt auch nicht für prüeven, das mit frz. prover in Verbindung gebracht wird, aber nicht als probieren oder provieren im Mittelhochdeutschen erscheint. vælen = nhd. fehlen aus frz. faillir erscheint ebenfalls in der älteren Form und nicht in der neuen mit -ieren gebildeten Form als failieren, die bei Wolfram zuerst belegt ist. Man kann also auch das relative Alter einiger Entlehnungen bestimmen und eine frühe Schicht mit vollständiger Assimilierung unterscheiden von einer späteren, die teilassimiliert ist. Das Verbalsuffix -ieren gehört ähnlich wie die Suffixe -unge und -heit zu den folgenreichsten Neuerungen der deutschen Wortbildungssystems; -ieren ist heute das produktivste Suffix zur Ableitung von Verben mit fremdsprachiger Basis.

In der Übersicht sind nur die in Suolahtis erster Kategorie gesammelten eigentlichen Wortentlehnungen, assimilierte wie nichtassimilierte, erfasst, also auch die Belege für prîs, prîsen und prüeven mit ihren Zusammensetzungen und Ableitungen. Die Entlehnungen, die Suolahti in der zweiten Kategorie erfasst, nämlich die recht häufigen französischen Floskeln, Formeln und Titel, sind ebenso wenig berücksichtigt wie die Belege seiner weniger häufig belegten dritten Kategorie mit den Lehnprägungen, d. h. den semantischen Entlehnungen (Lehnbildungen und Lehnbedeutungen).

Der höfische Roman ist nach Theodor Frings breites Einfallstor für französisch-höfisches Wortgut aus dem Bereich des höfisch-ritterlichen Lebens.[49] Unter den höfischen Romanen ist der *Erec Hartmanns von Aue der erste deutsche Artusroman; er geht zurück auf den um 1170 entstandene französische Roman von *Erec et Enide des Chrétien de Troyes. In dem einschlägigen Handbuchartikel über den deutschen Wortschatz der höfischen Blütezeit heißt es unter der Zwischenüberschrift Überfremdung mit französischem Sprachgut vom *Erec: Diese Dichtung schwelgt in Fremdwörtern wie keine zuvor und liefert für viele, die sich später behaupteten, die ersten Belege in unseren Wörterbüchern.[50]

Woher kennt Hartmann nun die von ihm benutzten französischen Wörter? Die zunächst naheliegende Antwort auf diese Frage aus der Schreibtischperspektive des Forschers wäre, dass Hartmann diese französischen Fremdwörter aus seiner französischen Quelle übernommen hat. Emil Öhmann charakterisierte die Entlehnungsvorgänge aber nicht als rein literarisch, sondern als mündlich-literarisch oder halbschriftlich.[51] Theodor Frings bettete die Entlehnungswege in die *Kulturströmungen von West nach Ost ein. Danach scheinen die Entlehnungsprozesse nicht von den Dichtern gesteuert und rein literarischer bzw. buchsprachlicher Natur gewesen zu sein; mündliche Entlehnung über Wege, die durch die Kontaktzonen von Romania und Germania führen, dürften für die Entlehnungen um 1200 die Regel gewesen sein. Pragmatische Überlegungen, wie sie vor allem Theodor Frings[52] anstellte, machen es von vornherein unwahrscheinlich, dass bloß von den Dichtern neu eingeführte Wörter ohne weiteres von einem nicht zweisprachigen Hofpublikum, den Erstrezipienten also, verstanden werden konnten. Es handelt sich also keineswegs nur um literarische Einflüsse von Pergament zu Pergament, von Buch zu Buch, sondern teilweise sicher um persönlichen Verkehr, dessen Einfluß [von Frankreich aus, K. G.] immer weiter ostwärts vordrang.[53]

Unter den Entlehnungen aus dem Französischen im *Erec bilden die zahlreichen Ausdrücke des Turnierwesens die umfangreichste Gruppe:[54] baneken, baniere, bûhurt und bûhurdieren, buckel, enschumphieren, harnasch, tjost und tjostieren, kastelân, kovertiure, panel, panzier usw. Aber auch Bezeichnungen für Stoffe, Schmuck, Speisen usw. sind darunter: kulter, rubîn, samît, safervar, schapel, sigelât, vâsân usw. Die Liebenden in den höfischen Romanen werden nicht mehr nur vriunt und vriundinne genannt, sondern auch auf Französisch amîs und amîe. Fast all diesen Entlehnungen ist gemeinsam, dass sie mit der Hofkultur zu tun haben und zur Hofsprache gehören, zur Sprechweise der feinen Gesellschaft also. Dies lässt sich sogar beweisen, wenn man Hartmanns *Erec mit Chrétiens *Erec et Enide, seiner französischen Quelle, vergleicht: Der weit überwiegende Teil der französischen Lehnwörter im *Erec kommt in der französischen Quelle überhaupt nicht vor. Das ist besonders deutlich in den Turnierschilderungen, die bei Hartmann sehr viel ausführlicher sind als bei Chrétien,[55] und nur selten Berührungspunkte mit dem französischen Text aufweisen.[56]

Die Forscher der finnischen Schule, die sich mit den mittelhochdeutschen Entlehnungen aus dem Französischen beschäftigt haben, haben zwischen literarischer Entlehnung und mündlicher Entlehnung unterschieden. Literarische Entlehnungen sind 1. französische Wörter, die der deutsche Autor aus seiner französischen Vorlage direkt übernimmt, und 2. französische Wörter des deutschen Autors, der das Französische zwar beherrscht, es aber nur durch die schriftlich verbreitete Literatur kennt. Für die Zeit der höfischen Klassik um 1200 spielt die literarische Entlehnung—wie schon bemerkt—noch kaum ein Rolle.

Auf mündliche Entlehnung zurückführen kann man besonders all jene Wörter, die ihrer lautlichen Form nach aus den an das deutsche Sprachgebiet angrenzenden Mundarten des Französischen stammen und durch Sprachkontakte im Grenzgebiet vermittelt wurden. Sie haben also alle zunächst einmal zum Wortschatz der gesprochenen Sprache gehört, bevor sie auch in die Buchsprache, d. h. die Sprache der höfischen Romane, Eingang fanden. Die Entlehnungswege für mündliche Entlehnungen hat Emil Öhmann in den an das Lothringische und Pikardische angrenzenden deutschen bzw. niederländischen Gebieten lokalisiert. Ein großer Teil der französischen Lehnwörter, vor allem der frühen, waren also mündliche Entlehnungen aus dem Pikardischen, die über das Niederländische ins Mittelhochdeutsche gelangten.

Zur Veranschaulichung dieses Sachverhaltes ein Beispiel: mhd. kolze schw. Mask. *Fuß- und Beinbekleidung des Ritters entspricht altfrz. chauce (< lat. calceus); das mittelhochdeutsche Wort muss wegen des anlautenden k- aus dem Pikardischen oder Wallonischen stammen. Nach Öhmann[57] wurde vermutlich pik. *cautse (> chauche) als *coutse ins Mittelniederländische übernommen und von dort ins Deutsche entlehnt. Im *Erec V. 2330 erscheint es im Kompositum îser-kouse statt des heimischen îser-hose *Beinrüstung aus Eisenblech.

Die französischen Lehnwörter gehörten nach Öhmann also zunächst einmal der Sprechsprache der höfischen Oberschicht im Grenzgebiet von Romania und Germania an, bevor sie über die Wege durch das Grenzgebiet zu den höfischen Dichtern gelangten und von ihnen für ihre Buchepen benutzt wurden und danach auch als Buchwörter weiterwirken konnten. Direkte Entlehnungen aus den französischen Vorlagen lassen sich kaum nachweisen.[58] Da trotzdem die literarischen Beziehungen für die nachweisbare Geschichte der Entlehnungen eine Rolle gespielt haben müssen, spricht Öhmann[59] von mündlich-literarischer Entlehnung; eine Kompromissformel also, welche nicht ausschließlich für mündlich entlehnte und dann in die Literatursprache aufgenommene Wörter gilt.

Anders als in der ersten Welle des lateinischen Einflusses sind auch Lehnprägungen nach altfranzösischem Vorbild in größerem Umfang ins Deutsche gekommen.[60] Ein Teil von ihnen wurde bereits im Mittelniederländischen gebildet und über das Gebiet zwischen Maas und Rhein ins Mittelhochdeutsche übernommen. Einige von diesen Übernahmen wie etwa dörper kommt aus dem mittelnld. dorpere *Bauer mit der pejorativen Bedeutung *roher, nicht höfisch gebildeter Mensch, einer Lehnbedeutung aus dem altfrz. vilain; nur in dieser Bedeutung wird dörper zugleich mit seiner mittelniederländischen Lautgestalt ins Mittelhochdeutsche übernommen und bleibt bis heute erhalten, allerdings in der dissimilierten Form Tölpel.[61] Das mit einem dörper verbundene Verhalten wird als dörperheit bezeichnet, das Gegenwort dazu ist höveschheit *gebildetes, dem Hofe gemäßes Verhalten und Wesen, ein Adjektivabstraktum, abgeleitet von hövesch (hüb(e)sch), das mit seiner entsprechenden Lehnbedeutung über mittelnld. hovesch aus altfrz. cortois übernommen wurde; dieses wiederum kursiert auch als Lehnwort kurtois mit dem fremden Diphthong oi und etwas mehr assimiliert als kurteis in den Werken der mittelhochdeutschen Klassiker. Ein Zentralwort zur Kennzeichnung höfischen Verhaltens ist die mâze, ein Femininum, das eigentlich auf gemessene Größen aller Art bezogen ist, aber mit der neuen Bedeutung *Maßhalten und Mäßigung in allen Dingen über mittelnld. māte nach altfrz. mesure aufgeladen wird.

Die Lehnbeziehungen zwischen dem mittelalterlichen Deutsch und dem Altfranzösischen setzen in der zweiten Hälfte des 12. Jahrhunderts ein und erreichen im 13. Jahrhundert einen Höhepunkt. Zu den Hunderten von Lehnwörtern, die in dieser Zeit übernommen werden, kommen zahlreiche Französische Redensarten, wie Suolahti sie nennt, z. B. Grußformeln und Anreden wie *Parzival 76,11 bien sei venûz, bêâs sir und selbstständig aus französischen Bestandteilen gebildete Neuwörter wie *Parzival 50,5 und 68,8 in einer Wappenbeschreibung sarapandratest *Schlangenkopf = serpent a teste *Schlange mit dem Kopf. Nach deutschen Wortbildungsregeln formt Wolfram *Parzival 52,15 in Analogie zu burc-grâve einen Titel wie schahtelakunt = conte del chastel.[62] Wolframs Romane, der *Parzival und der *Willehalm, sind die wirkungsmächtigsten deutschen Werke des Mittelalters, keines der andere großen Versepen hat eine vergleichbare Überlieferung und einen entsprechenden Einfluss auf die Dichter, die ihn als Meister verehren und seinen Lehnwortgebrauch nachahmen. Durch ihn werden daher zahlreiche französische Lehnwörter und Lehnprägungen im Deutschen fester etabliert und bilden Wortfamilien aus; vieles aber geht auch unter, insbesondere seine ad hoc-Bildungen wie die eben beschriebenen.

Mit diesem sehr verkürzten Blick auf die Entlehnungen aus dem Französischen in das mittelalterliche Deutsch wollte ich zeigen, wie verschieden die Lehnbeziehungen des Deutschen zum Lateinischen und zum Französischen waren. Die Lehnbeziehungen zum Lateinischen der zweiten und dritten Welle waren getragen von Buchgelehrten und in beiden Sprachen in der Regel hochkompetenten Klerikern, die zum Französischen wurzeln dagegen im mündlichen Austausch; in diesem wird der modische Jargon der Ritterkultur gepflegt und auf vielfältige Weise von den Dichtern aufgegriffen, Lehnwörter und Lehnprägungen lösen nicht mehr einander ab, sondern in allen Bereichen der Lehnbeziehungen sind die mittelhochdeutschen Dichter produktiv.

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Eichhoff, J. (1977). Wortatlas Der Deutschen Umgangssprachen. Bern, München: Francke.

Feist, S. (1908). Etymologisches Wörterbuch Der Gotischen Sprache. Halle: Niemeyer.

Foerster, W, ed. (1890). Erec Und Enide von Christian von Troyes. Halle: Niemeyer.

Frings, T. (1957). Grundlegung Einer Geschichte Der Deutschen Sprache. Halle: VEB Niemeyer.

——— (1966). Germania Romana. Vol. 2 vols. Halle: Niemeyer.

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Gärtner, K. (1991). “Stammen Die Französischen Lehnwörter in Hartmanns ‚Erec‘ Aus Chrétiens ‚Erec et Enide‘?” Zeitschrift Für Literaturwissenschaft Und Linguistik 21 (83): 76–88.

Grimm, J., and W. Grimm (2007). Deutsches Wörterbuch. Neubearbeitung. Hrsg. von der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. 3. Band. Stuttgart: S. Hirzel.

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Heusinger, K. von, and S. von Heusinger (1999). “Aus Der Lateinischen Fachsprache Zur Deutschen Mystik: Der Lange Weg Der Suffixe -Ung Und -Heit.” In Wissenschaftssprache Und Umgangssprache, edited by K. Adamzik and J. Niederhauser, 59–79. Germanistische Arbeiten Zu Sprachen Und Kulturgeschichte 38. Frankfurt: Lang.

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Marold, K., ed. (1969 [1906]). Gottfried von Straßburg. Tristan. 3. Abdruck mit einem durch F. Rankes Kollation erw. u. verb. Apparat und mit einem Nachwort versehen von W. Schröder. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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——— (1970). “Suffixstudien Vi: Das Deutsche Verbalsuffix -Ieren.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 71: 337–57.

——— (1974). “Der Romanische Einfluß Auf Das Deutsche Bis Zum Ausgang Des Mittelalters.” In Deutsche Wortgeschichte, edited by F. Maurer and H. Rupp, 3. neubearb. Aufl. Band I, 323–96. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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——— (1986). “Überlegungen Und Beobachtungen Zur Sprache Der Mystik.” In Brüder-Grimm-Symposion Zur Historischen Wortforschung: Beiträge Zur Marburger Tagung Vom Juni 1985, edited by R. Hildebrandt and U. Knoop, 24–39. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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——— (1996). Die Mystik Des Predigerordens Und Ihre Grundlegung Durch Die Hochscholastik. Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik 3. München: C.H. Beck.

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——— (1971). “Germanistische Scholastikforschung. Ein Bericht. Teil 2.” Theologie Und Philosophie 46: 195–222.

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Fußnoten

[1] Betz (1949).

[2] Betz (1974, 137).

[3] Oksaar (2004, 3166).

[4] Vgl. Lindqvist (1936, 39–41).

[5] *Bewußtsein, als *Mitwissen zusammen mit anderen, ein aus σύν-οιδα *mitwissen abgeleitetes Substantiv; got. miþ-wiss-ei Fem. ist eine Lehnübersetzung von συν-είδη-σις.

[6] Über die Wortgeschichte von Gewissen vgl. Störmer-Caysa (1998, 8ff).

[7] βαπτίξειν, *wiederholt ein-, untertauchen, eine Erweiterung von griech. βάπτειν *untertauchen.

[8] Abgeleitet davon βαπτισμός und βάπτισμα *Taufe, βαπτιστής *Täufer (der Beiname des Johannes), die als Lehnwörter baptismus und baptista ins Lateinische übernommen werden.

[9] Pfeifer (1989 [1813]).

[10] Frings (1957, 1966); Müller und Frings (1968).

[11] Frings (1957, 25 und Karte 21).

[12] Frings (1966, 66–80).

[13] Vgl. Frings (1957, 109); Müller und Frings (1968, 101–103).

[14] Müller und Frings (1968, 463–466).

[15] Zur Verteilung der Wörter für Dachboden in den heutigen Umgangssprachen des Deutschen vgl. Eichhoff (1977, 26f. und Karte 24).

[16] Zur Datierung der Zweiten oder Althochdeutschen Lautverschiebung vgl. Braune (2004, §§ 83ff., 82ff).

[17] Der got. Beleg in der Übersetzung von θυρίς *Fenster(öffnung), 2. Korinther 11,33.

[18] Die Form eaȝduru nach Feist (1908, 35a). Im OED3 (online) ist diese Form nicht nachgewiesen, sondern nur die Form eagh-þyrl (ca. 890) *an eye-hole, a window s. v. eyethurl.

[19] Ahd. augatora im *Vocabularius S. Galli, Ende 8. Jh. (St. Gallen, Cod. 913, S. 183), einem Sachglossar, das unter den Bezeichnungen für die einzelnen Teile des Steinhauses die heimischen Wörter überliefert.

[20] Die alte Bedeutung von rîȥan ist noch in Riß, Grundriß, Aufriß, Reißbrett erhalten.

[21] Betz (1974, 161).

[22] Betz (1974, 146, 150).

[23] Vgl. Leisi (1969, 58) zu den *hard words im Englischen.

[24] Vgl. Lindqvist (1936, 21f.).

[25] von der Hagen (1808, V. 3568).

[26] Daab (1959). Die althochdeutsche Übersetzung der Regula Benedicti, enstanden Anfang des 9. Jh. in St. Gallen, ist eine Interlinearversion, eine Form-für-Form Übersetzung des lat. Textes. Die Lehnprägungen spielen dabei eine zentrale Rolle.

[27] Schätzungen bei Splett (2000, 1196f).

[28] Vgl. Lindqvist (1936, 11).

[29] surgo aus *subs-rego, vgl. Walde (1954, 635).

[30] Für die aktuelle Zusammenstellung der althochdeutschen Belege danke ich Brigitte Bulitta von der Akademie-Arbeitsstelle des Althochdeutschen Wörterbuchs in Leipzig.

[31] Vgl. Grimm und Grimm (2007, 468–470).

[32] Lindqvist (1936, 127f.).

[33] Die im Folgenden genannten Beispiele aus den Dichtungen Wolframs von Eschenbach und Gottfrieds von Straßburg sind alle mit Belegstellen nachgewiesen in den mittelhochdeutschen Wörterbüchern von Lexer und Benecke/Müller/Zarncke, die auf CD und im Netz zugänglich sind, s. Burch, Fournier und Gärtner (2002) und http://woerterbuchnetz.de, (27 April 2017).

[34] Marold und Schröder (1969 [1906], V. 4636–39).

[35] Vgl. Wiesner und Burger (1974, 226).

[36] Die Deutung der Stelle ist umstritten, ist aber wohl nicht wörtlich aufzufassen. Wolfram hat kaum am Schreibtisch gedichtet, aber verfügte über ein detailliertes Fachwissen, das ihm nur durch lateinische Quellen vermittelt sein konnte. Verglichen wird in der Forschung eine Parallele aus dem Psalm 70,15 non cognovi litteraturam; litteratura kann sowohl die Schrift als auch metonymisch das in der Schrift niedergelegte und durch die Schrift vermittelte Wissen über die Regeln der Rhetorik und Poetik bedeuten, von dem sich Wolfram distanzieren könnte. Vermutlich handelt es sich um eine polemische Übertreibung, die gegen Hartmann von Aue gerichtet ist, der seine Buchgelehrsamkeit nachdrücklich hervorhebt.

[37] Lachmann (1965 [1833], V. 115, 27–30).

[38] Paul und Gaertner (2010 [1882], V. 1–4).

[39] Vgl. den Forschungsbericht von Georg Steer (1970, 1971, 1973); grundlegend Ruh (1956, 78–90, 1986); K. und S. Heusinger (1999).

[40] Zu Mechthild von Magdeburg und zur franziskanischen Theologie und Mystik vgl. Ruh (1993, 526–540); zu den drei Dominikanern Ruh (1996).

[41] Ruh (1956, 39f.).

[42] Ruh (1956, 83).

[43] Beispiele bei Ruh (1956, 83).

[44] Ruh (1956, 81).

[45] Siehe die Beispiele bei Ruh (1956, 90).

[46] Vgl. die Literaturübersicht bei Öhmann (1974, 323–325).

[47] Öhmann (1974, 333).

[48] Vgl. Öhrnann (1970, 337–339).

[49] Frings und Schieb (1950, 58).

[50] Wiesner und Burger (1974, 207).

[51] Öhmann (1918, 151).

[52] Frings und Schieb (1950, 52 und 58f.)

[53] Kluge (1925, 282).

[54] Zur Bedeutung und den altfrz. Formen vgl. Suolahti (1929).

[55] Die Schilderung des Turniers von Prurin ist das fremdwörterreichste Stück in Hartmanns Werken, es umfasst im *Erec, Leitzmann und Gärtner (2006 [1939], V. 2135–2292) 600 Verse, bei Chrétien, Foerster (1890, V. 2135–2292) dagegen nur gut 150 Verse. Bis auf wenige Ausnahmen sind die knapp 100 Stellen mit frz. Lehnwörtern ohne jedes direkte Vorbild in der Quelle.

[56] Gärtner (1991, 85–87).

[57] Öhmann (1974, 337).

[58] Öhmann (1918, 23, 1974, 345).

[59] Öhmann (1918, 151).

[60] Öhmann (1974, 331ff.).

[61] Pfeifer (1989 [1813]); Öhmann (1974, 331).

[62] Suohahti (1929, 220, 225).

4. Konrad of Megenberg: German Terminologies and Expressions as Created on Latin Models

Kathrin Chlench-Priber

Konrad of Megenberg or Conradus de Montepuellarum was born in 1309 into the lower nobility at Mäbenberg, a district of Schwabach in middle Franconia. Presumably he had already learned to read and write before he went to Erfurt at the age of approximately 13 or 14 years, where he went to school. He stayed there until 1330/31, thus for about 8 years, studied intensely, and made his living by working as a tutor.[1] It was in fact possible to study at Erfurt and acquire the knowledge of a master, magister artium, but the Erfurt schools did not have the privileges of a university, which meant that they could not confer academic degrees. We do not exactly know which lectures Konrad attended but from the statutes of the later university of Erfurt dated 1412 as well as from the transmitted manuscripts, it is possible to reconstruct the fields of knowledge with which Konrad came into contact.[2]

Undoubtedly, Konrad had to take the standard subjects grammatica, logica, philosophia naturalis, philosophia moralis and mathematica. In this context, he certainly came across Sphera mundi of John of Holywood (Johannes de Sacrobosco) for the first time, a text he later translated from Latin into German. However, his engagement with grammar can be considered more formative than with the other standard subjects mentioned above.

Erfurt was a stronghold of modistic grammar, which is a special kind of realistic language theory. Thomas of Erfurt wrote his main work Tractatus de modo significandi, also known as Grammatica speculativa, between 1300 and 1310.[3] Following Aristoteles, he distinguishes between entities, the mental concept of entities, and its verbal expressions. Just as entities and the ability of cognition are considered as universal, the semantic and grammatical principles of all languages are the same, only the voces or signifiants—to use a nearly equivalent modern term—differ. After having understood (modus intelligendi) the different properties of the given entities (modus essendi), the two mentioned aspects of an object can be connected by the modus significandi with expressions (voces). The result of this process is a linguistic sign which is congruent with reality regarding its lexical and grammatical signification (Figure 4.1).[4]

Fig. 4.1: Modistic Grammar Theory.

It is not intended here to explain the modistic concept in detail, but we have to consider that Konrad of Megenberg became first a realist and then a convinced modist from the time of his studies in Erfurt. Throughout his life, he concerned himself with questions of philosophy of language. Still, in his Yconomica[5] and De mortalitate in Alamannia,[6] both written in the mid-fourteenth century, he dealt with this subject and assails the position of the nominalists, in particular of William Ockham (1285–1347).[7]

1330 Konrad relocated to the Sorbonne in Paris where he soon finished his studies in philosophy and obtained the degree of magister actu regens not later than 1343. He was therefore obliged to lecture at the artistic faculty for two years but went on to teach there for eight years and at the same time studied theology.[8] In 1343, he became schoolmaster of St. Stefan’s school in Vienna, which is closely involved with the origins of the later prominent university. Five years later, in 1348, he changed to Regensburg and was appointed canon; he also worked as priest at the cathedral of St. Ulrich from 1359 up to 1363. In Regensburg, where he died in 1374, Konrad finished or produced most of his approximately 25 works. The subjects are diverse: theology, canon law, moral philosophy, political science, hagiography, and natural science. Nearly all of them were written in Latin, which was the language of scholars in the Middle Ages, but Konrad also translated two scientific works from Latin into German.[9]

The first of these is Die deutsche Sphaera based on John of Sacrobosco’s Sphera mundi, translated between 1347 and 1350. It is an astronomical text, describing the composition of cosmos and the movements of planets according to Ptolemy. The second work is Das Buch von den Naturleichen Dingen, often also called The Book of Nature, which is predicated on the third redaction of Thomas of Cantimpré’s (1201–1270/72) Liber de natura rerum. It was begun in 1348 and finished in 1350. Konrad divided his text into eight books dealing, for example, with herbs, birds, humans, planets, or jewels. Every single book is composed of many articles, so that the work as a whole has an encyclopedic character. Therefore The Book of Nature was often alleged to be the first encyclopedia written in German, even if this term is anachronistic and does not cover the fact that Konrad’s main intention was to make nature understandable, for nature refers back to God’s devices and finally to God himself.

To recapitulate: Konrad had already been working as a tutor or teacher for almost 25 years when he began his translations. This means that he was conversant both with the Latin language and with the subject matter of his sources. Presumably, he began his translations for an elite who was not educated enough to understand Latin texts.[10]

Concerning language, Konrad had a highly reflected point of view which was ingrained in modistic language theory. The interesting point for us is how he translated texts into German—a language in which, at that time, neither technical nor scientific terms existed. In the following, I shall exemplify Konrad’s translation strategies using his two German texts: Die deutsche Sphaera and Das Buch von den Naturleichen Dingen.

Die deutsche Sphaera is based on a Latin astronomical text which every student of the liberal arts was required to study. The text is not too demanding—there are much more complicated astronomical texts from the same period— but it gives a firm groundwork in cosmological and astronomical questions. Quite naturally, the Latin text contains the typical terminology of this subject. How else would it be possible to explain, for example, the position of climate zones on earth or the movements of the planets?

While the Latin terminology was already well developed, there was none in German that Konrad could use in his translations. This means that Konrad had to decide how to transfer the Latin, especially the termini technici, into German.

The method verbum e verbo,[11] which follows the Latin text very closely, often rebuilds the syntax of the Latin source and uses the foreign words as technical terms. The method sensum de sensu transfers the patterns of foreign grammar completely into the target language and creates new termini technici in German. Translations by the first method are in the worst case unintelligible, but the technical terms are more or less definite, even if they remain foreign. The second method yields readable texts and offers more comprehensible terms in vernacular, but it also produces polysemy and homonymy (Figure 4.2).

Fig. 4.2: Comparison between the two translation methods.

Scientific language in medieval translations based on Latin could be described as a “funciolect” of vernacular, which has its own vocabulary and style but does not differ completely from vernacular. Depending on whether the texts are very close to Latin or not, their language could be described as a “diasystem” between those two extremes.[12] Konrad chose the second way because intelligibility was most important for him. Relating to his technical terms, it means that he tried to develop a new comprehensible terminology.

To give some examples: Konrad called the sun’s orbit (ecliptic) scheinprecher, “shine destroyer,” because an eclipse of sun or moon can only happen if the moon crosses this line.[13] He named the equator ebennechter, “equinoxer,” because the sun touches this circle twice, when day and night are equally long.[14] The horizon he termed as augenender, “eye ender,” because it limits the view.[15]

Often Konrad offered two or more German terms for one Latin word to clarify an issue, such as halphimel or halpwerld, “half sky” or “half world,” for hemisphere. And the other way around, he used one German word for different Latin terms, such as gesiht, for sensus visus (visual sense) and aspectus (angle of planets in the ecliptic). Even certain vernacular words obtain a new meaning, such as festerlîn, little window, which also can name components of an astrolabe;[16] or dick, thickness, which is used to denote the diameter of a circle.[17] Whereas those two examples are very easy to comprehend, the next one is more sophisticated. Konrad pointed out that drachen (dragon) is the vernacular word to describe the flaming tail of a comet; other than the mentioned term he used wispaum, which means long rigid bar, to denominate the form of the celestial phenomenon. Even if we do not know if Konrad invented this new meaning, he provided the first documentation of this application, which can still be found in sources of the nineteenth century.[18]

We can assert that Konrad’s terms are really suggestive but his terminology is still quite far from what we expect of scientific terminology from a modern point of view: it is not precisely defined, which would otherwise enable brief and accurate communication. But this is not what Konrad aimed for; he simply wanted to render the text in understandable German.

Let us compare Konrad’s expressions with other cosmological and astrological texts. John of Sacrobosco’s text has been translated four times into German.[19] The anonymous Puechlein von der Spera was the second attempt to convey John’s knowledge into German. It was, however, completely uninfluenced by Konrad’s work. Even Konrad Heinfogel, who contributed the second translation after Konrad, did his work independently, although it is certain that Heinfogel used his namesake’s translation.

Even after having compared Konrad’s terminology with those of randomly chosen astronomical codices of the fifteenth century, such as Codex Vindobonensis 3055, we can ascertain no influence of Konrad’s translations. By examining German astronomical texts, we can discover that the technical terms vary from text to text, which means that in general translations were developed independently of one another. So the reason why Konrad’s terms remained almost without effect in German astronomical terminology is not the lack of quality of his translations. The main reason is in fact that the German translations of astronomical texts were isolated; they were not spread widely and not well circulated. Astronomy was confined within the walls of the universities where the prevalent language was Latin. With more than 200 editions, the Sphere of John Holywood was much more successful than Konrad’s translation, which is only transmitted in 11 manuscripts. This could be explained by the fact that John’s text was part of the corpus astronomicum and had to be read by all who studied at the art faculty. Furthermore, everyone who wanted to deal with astronomy earnestly did so in Latin and not in German.[20]

Let us now take a closer look at The Book of Nature: In the rhymed prologue of Das Buch von den Naturleichen Dingen Konrad informed us about the motives and justification for his translation.

Ein wirdig weibes chron,

in welhem claid man die anſicht

so ſint ir tugendleichev werch an chainem end verhandelt.

[...]

Sam tuͤ div edel chunſt:

in welher ſprach man sei durch chift,

doch iſt ſi unverhawen an ir ſelben mit den zungen.

[...]

div red ſchol vnuerſchetet ſein, mit clarheit ſchon vmbſchlungen.

Konrad claimed to be entirely in accordance with the modistic grammar theory, according to which all languages are suitable for describing scientific facts. More decisive than the choice of language is the applied style, which means that the speech should be clear and without “shadows” that “becloud” the intention. In order to clarify relations, Konrad even approved the use of metaphors or allegories. This shows again that Konrad did not translate literally, but loosely. In this way, he addressed a wider audience because literal translations were often only written for use in schools. This attests the large number of manuscripts of The Book of Nature: 69 texts contain the whole work and there are more extant fragments. This fact is certainly connected with the interest in the content and with Konrad’s translation skills.

An explanation could be provided by taking a closer look at Konrad’s manner of working, using the example of nomia rerum with which almost every article in The Book of Nature begins. Two cases can be distinguished: the name of an entity either exists in vernacular or it does not.

In the first case, Konrad’s endeavor is to find the correct German equivalent to identify the treated object. To give a basic example: Thaurus haizzt ochſ (Taurus means ochſ, bull).[21] Often he used a signal formula like haizzt ze daͤutſch... (that means in German) (III.A.32), which has the function to mark the beginning of a translation of nomina propria.[22] We have to consider that in the fourteenth century, standardized German had not yet been developed. Konrad, who was born in Franconia and lived in Erfurt, Vienna, and Regensburg, became familiar with different German dialects. He was aware of this variety and used it by designating the entities partly with multiple names from different German dialects: Locuſta haizt ein hæſchreck oder ein haberſchrek (Locusta, locust, is called ein hæſchreck or haberſchrek), (KvM, III.F.16). Sometimes he even comments the alternatives:

Der ſchaur haizzt in anderr daͤutſch der hagel. (KvM, II.20)

“ſchaur,” the hail, is called “hagel” in a different dialect.

Der chranwitpaum haizt in meinr muͤterleichen dæutſch ein wechalter. (IV.A.20)

“chranwitpaum,” the juniper, is called “wechalter” in my mother tongue.

Ich Megenbergær waͤn, daz deu wurtz, die etzſwa merretich haizt vnd anderſwa chren, radix haizzet ze latein. (V.68)

I, Megenbergær, guess, that the root, which is called somewhere “merretich,” horseradish, and elsewhere “chren,” is named “radix” in Latin.

By giving such alternatives, Konrad enabled his translation to be spread more widely than in just an area where a certain German variety with special nomina propria was used. We can ascertain that manuscripts of The Book of Nature that were written in the eastern upper German area often keep all variants in the text, whereas in those written in other regions frequently only one variant is chosen or even replaced by a name of the own variety.[23] This kind of adaption was necessary both to make the text understandable for users and to market it in different areas.

In the second case, there are no existing nomina propria in German for the entities. Konrad reflected this situation:

Nv moͤhſtu ſprechen zuͦ mir: Du nenneſt mir vil tier mit chriechiſchen worten, die ſchoͤlſt du mir zuͦ dauͤtſch nennen oder du bringſt daz lateiniſch puͤch niht reht ze dauͤtſch. Dez antwuͤrt ich dir vnd ſprich, daz div tier vnd andriv dinch, die in dauͤtſchen landen niht ſind, niht dauͤtscher namen habent. Darvmb tuͤſt du mir vnreht. (III.A.19)

Now you will say: You call many animals with Greek or Latin words; you should use German terms, otherwise your translation from the Latin book is not acceptable. I answer to this, that animals and other things, which do not exist in German countries, have no German names. So you wrong me.

Konrad was determined to bring the Latin or Greek terms into German. If he could not find a suitable German word, he adapted the foreign one carefully into German, which means that he created a loanword.[24] Mostly, Konrad left the endings and theme-elements out and applied the weak declension.[25]

Von dem killen. Kylion oder killon [...] daz mag ein kill haizzen. (III.C.13)

About kill. Kylion or killon, a fabulous marine animal, can be called “kill.”

In the next example, he did the same but added the German name for easier identification:

Tortuca haizt ein tortuk [...] vnd haizzend ez etlich dæutſch læut ein ſchiltchroten. (III.E.33)

Tortuca means “toruk” [...] and many Germans call it “ſchiltchroten,” turtle.

The next example given seems to be of the same type:

Tarans haizt ein tarant. (III.E.34)

Tarans, tarantula, is called “tarant.”

However, tarant was not created by Konrad of Megenberg. The word had already been documented in Partonopier und Meliur by Konrad of Würzburg, who died in 1287, or in Hugo of Langensteins’s Martina from about 1300. This shows that we have to examine carefully which words were actually introduced for the first time by Konrad.[26] Another method he often used was to create loan translations by transferring morpheme by morpheme.[27]

Onocratulus mag ze dauͤtſch ein anchraͤtel gehaizzen. (III.B.54)

Onocratulus, the white pelican, can be called “anchraͤtel” in German.

Pellicanus haizt nach der aigenchait der latein grabhauͤtel. (III.B.55)

Pellicanus is called according to his properties in Latin “grabhauͤtel,” grey skinned/skinny.

Implicitly, Konrad dissected the Latin pellicanus into pellis (skin) and canus (grey) to form an etymologically correct translation. Accessorily, he added the diminutive suffix -el, which seems to be one of his favorite affixes. The output is grabhauͤtel, but this word was only understandable in connection with Latin and was thus never established in German.

In other cases, he tried to create new words, which were accurately related to the properties of an entity that was being described:

Concha oder coclea haiſt ein ſnek vnd iſt ze dæutſch als vil gesprochen als ein flæchlink oder ein eytlink, wan ſo der mon ab nimt, ſo werdent ir ſchaln flach hol vnd eytel.

Concha or coclea is called ſnek and it means in German something like “flæchlink,” plainling, or “eytlink,” vainling, because if the moon wanes, its scallops become plain, hollow, and vain.

Another example is the name of the animal denckfuezz (III.C.5) (leftfoot), which has a small right and a big left foot. In these cases, Konrad tried to combine German words in a new way to clarify the foreign name. We call this method loan creation.[28]

We see a different but related type, when Konrad used the common German word merjuncfrawe (III.C.18), mermaid, for a marine animal Scilla, because they both have fabulous properties and live in water. The established word has obtained a new meaning; therefore this kind of type is called loan meaning.[29]

Konrad’s ambition to create new nomina propria in cases of missing German terms could be explained by the fact that in the Latin text etymologic explications are often already given. Behind all this, the realistic conception can be discerned that one can truly understand an entity by explaining its name. Isidor of Sevilla (ca. 560–636) wrote the Etymologiae in 623, a work which was inter alia a predecessor of Konrad’s main source.

There are many articles in The Book of Nature that contain such explanations for the Latin words. To render this in German, Konrad had to give German translations for those Latin words that may have inspired him in his own creations, for example, when he said:

Gladiolus haizzet ſlaten chraut vnd haizzt aigenleichen nach der latein swertlinch oder swertchravt darvmb, daz es an ſiner geſtalt iſt ſam ein ſwertes chling. (V.42)

Gladiolus is called “ſlaten chraut” and is actually named according to Latin “swertlinch” or “swertchravt,” “swordling” or “sword herb,” because it is formed like a blade of a sword.

Whereas the astronomical terms in are not necessarily definite, Konrad wanted to give every entity mentioned in The Book of Nature a distinct name. It can be demonstrated by the following example. In Konrad’s source, there are two different chapters, both dealing with the nightingale. One of those chapters is entitled “De philomena,” the other “De lucinia.” Konrad translates “Phylomena haizt ein nahtigal” (III.B.62, Philomena is called nightingale.) With this short phrase, the German term is assigned and this is the reason why Konrad did not want to use it again for lucinia. He trusted his source, which seems to describe two different birds, although Latin-German glossaries from as early as Old High German times translate both philomena and lucinia with nahtgala.[30] And we can assume that Konrad used such glossaries for his translations. The German name he offered for lucinia is leutz, a term that he created himself. The relation between the Latin and the German name could be explained by conditioned and spontaneous sound change.[31] We can say that he probably imitated by analogy what he observed with other older German loanwords adapted from Latin.

From all this examples, we see that Konrad tried to find adequate German words to denominate and characterize the entities given in The Book of Nature. If no nomina propria existed, he used, as in Die deutsche Sphaera, certain word forming patterns that are still used today. We know them from as early as Old High German times, when Latin clerical vocabulary was transferred into German. Unlike the theological words that had been in common use and were accepted gradually into German, Konrad’s loan coinage did not become established in vernacular. Even if The Book of Nature was widely spread, it was not influential enough to install the nomina propria in vernacular, presumably because they were not even needed. Scientists who were seriously occupied with botany, zoology, astronomy, or medicine did it as a matter of course in Latin and used the Latin terms. Konrad’s translations could explain to them at best the etymology or meaning of terms.

References

Bartelink, G. J. M., ed. (1980). Hieronymus—Liber de Optimo Genere Interpretandi (Epistula 57): Ein Kommentar. Mnemosyne, Bibliotheca Classica Batava, Supplementum 61. Leiden: Brill.

Berend, N. (1999). “Konrad von Megenbergs ‘Buch Der Natur’ (1350): Schriftsprachliche Varianten Im Deutsch Des 14. Jahrhunderts Als Ausdruck Für Regionales Sprachbewußtsein Und Dessen Reflexion.” In Das Frühneuhochdeutsche Als Sprachgeschichtliche Epoche: Werner Besch Zum 70. Geburtstag, edited by W. Hoffmann, J. Macha, K. J. Mattheier, H.-J. Solms, and K. Wegera. Frankfurt a. M.: Lang.

Betz, W. (1944). “Die Lehnbildungen Und Der Abendländische Sprachausgleich.” Beiträge Zur Geschichte Der Deutschen Sprache Und Literatur 67: 275–302.

Brendel, B., R. Frisch, S. Moser, and N. R. Wolf, eds. (1997). Wort- Und Begriffsbildung in Frühneuhochdeutscher Wissensliteratur. Substantivische Affixbildung. Wissensliteratur Im Mittelalter 26. Wiesbaden: Reichert.

Deschler, J.-P. (1977). Die Astronomische Terminologie Konrads von Megenberg. Ein Beitrag Zur Mittelalterlichen Fachprosa. Bern; Frankfurt a. M.: Lang.

Gardt, A. (1999). Geschichte Der Sprachwissenschaft in Deutschland: Vom Mittelalter Bis Ins 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Gottschall, D. (2004). Konrad von Megenbergs Buch von Den Natürlichen Dingen. Ein Dokument Deutschsprachiger Albertus-Magnus-Rezeption Im 14. Jahrhundert. Studien Und Texte Zur Geschichte Des Mittelalters 83. Boston: Leiden.

Heinfogel, K. (1981). Sphaera Materialis. Text Und Kommentar. Edited by F. B. Brévart. Göppinger Arbeiten Zur Germanistik 325. Göppingen: Kümmerle.

Konrad von Megenberg (2003). Das “Buch Der Natur”, Ii: Kritischer Text Nach Den Handschriften. Edited by R. Luff and G. Steer. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

——— (1973–1984). Werke: Ökonomik. Edited by S. Krüger. Monumenta Germaniae Historica 3. Staatsschriften Des Späteren Mittelalters 5, 1–3. Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann.

Koopmann, C. (2016). Konrad von Megenberg (1309–1374): Weltbild Und Naturwissenschaftlicher Wortschatz Im Buch Der Natur. Göppinger Arbeiten Zur Germanistik 785. Göppingen: Kümmerle.

Köbler, G. (1993). Wörterbuch Des Althochdeutschen Sprachschatzes. Edited by 4. Paderborn; München: Schöningh.

Krüger, S. (1971–1973). “Krise Der Zeit Als Ursache Der Pest? Der Traktat de Mortalitate in Alamannia Des Konrad von Megenberg.” In Festschrift Für Hermann Heimpel Zum 70. Geburtstag Am 19. September 1971, edited by Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte, 839–83. 36. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Lorenz, S. (1989). Studium Generale Erfordense: Zum Erfurter Schulleben Im 13. Und 14. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Hiersemann.

Nischik, T.-M. (1989).“.. Und Haizt Ze Däutsch ... : Zur übertragung Lateinischer Nomina Rerum Im ‘Buch Der Natur’ Des Konrad von Megenberg.” In Festschrift Für Herbert Kolb Zu Seinem 65. Geburtstag., edited by K. Matzel and H.-G. Roloff unter Mitarbeit von B. Haupt und H. Weddige, 494–511. Bern u.a.: Lang.

Scholz, M. G. (1992). “Quellenkritik Und Sprachkompetenz Im ‘Buch Der Natur’ Des Konrad von Megenberg.” In Festschrift Walter Haug Und Burghart Wachinger, edited by J. Janota, P. Sappler, and F. Schanze, 925–41. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Schuler, H. (1982). Lehnprägungen in Konrads von Megenberg Traktat “von Der Sel”: Untersuchunges Zum Mittelhochdeutschen Theologischen Und Philosophischen Wortschatz. Münchner Germanistische Beiträge 29. München: Wilhelm Fink.

Thomas von Erfurt (1972). Grammatica Speculative. Edited by G. L. Bursill-Hall. London: Longman.

Wolf, K. (2011). “Astronomie Für Laien? Neue überlegungen Zu Den Primärrezipienten Der ‘Deutschen Sphaera’ Konrads von Megenberg.” In Konrad von Megenberg (1309–1374): Ein Spätmittelalterlicher “Enzyklopädist” Im Europäischen Kontext, edited by E. Feistner, 313–25. Jahrbuch Der Oswald von Wolkenstein-Gesellschaft 18 (2010/2011). Wiesbaden: Reichert.

Wolf, N. R. (1987). “Wortbildungen in Wissenschaftlichen Texten.” Zeitschrift Für Deutsche Philologie 106: 137–49.

Footnotes

[1] See Gottschall (2004, 25–31).

[2] See Lorenz 1989.

[3] Thomas von Erfurt (1972).

[4] See Gardt (1999, 25–38).

[5] Konrad von Megenberg (1973–1984).

[6] Konrad von Megenberg (1971–1973)

[7] See Gottschall (2004, 36–37).

[8] See Gottschall (2004, 75–76).

[9] The third text often ascribed to Konrad is the tractatus Von der sel, written in 1359. It is a translation of chapters 2–7 of Batholomäus Anglicus’ (ca. 1190–ca. 1250) De proprietatibus rerum. The text can only be found in the second version of Buch der Natur. It is arguable whether Konrad was the redactor and even translator of this text, therefore I will not treat Von der sel. Dagmar Gottschall (2004, 21–22) gives convincing arguments concerning the style of translation which cast Konrad’s authorship into doubt. See further Schuler (1982).

[10] See Wolf (2011, 313–318). See further Koopmann (2016, 9–15).

[11] The division of those two methods was already reflected in the ancient world; the Church Father Hieronymus also made this determination in De optimo genere interpretandi, which was written in 415 CE. See Hieronymus (1980).

[12] See Wolf (1987).

[13] See Deschler (1977, 105).

[14] See Deschler (1977, 101).

[15] See Deschler (1977, 143).

[16] See Deschler (1977, 53).

[17] See Deschler (1977, 35).

[18] See Deschler (1977, 305). See also Das Deutsche Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm, sub voce “Wiesebaum”: http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/, accessed May 22, 2017.

[19] See Heinfogel (1981, I).

[20] See Deschler (1977, 324).

[21] Konrad von Megenberg (2003, III.A.63), in the follow quoted/cited with roman numbers.

[22] See Nischik (1989).

[23] See Berend (1999, 51–53).

[24] Referring to Werner Betz’s (1944) terminology, this kind of transfer is called “Lehnwort.”

[25] See Nischik (1989, 503).

[26] An examination of affix-based word formations in The Book of Nature is contained in Brendel et al. (1997).

[27] Referring to Werner Betz’s terminology, this kind of transfer is called “Lehnübersetzung.”

[28] In Betz’s terminology “Lehnschöpfung.”

[29] According to Betz’s terminology it is called “Lehnbedeutung.” For further examples for all those mentioned types, see Scholz (1992, 931).

[30] See Köbler (1993): sub voce nahtgala.

[31] It seems that Konrad rebuilt the i-umlaut, which changed the long u into the long ü before i, and whose process was already terminated in Old High German times. Besides, he used diphthongization, which changes the long ü to eu in the early New High German period. The ending of the Latin word was left out. This way of adaption is quite remarkable because Konrad used a phonologic pattern with the i-umlaut that was no longer active in his time. See Nischik (1989, 504).

5. What Language Does God Speak?

Florentina Badalanova Geller

на майка ми, за чийто рожден ден не можах да си дойда тази година

5.1 Lingua Sacra Equated

The statement that for Jews, Christians and Muslims “the language of God” is conventionally identified with their respective lingua sacra—that is, with the language of their own Holy Scriptures—is a commonplace one.[1] However, if we take into consideration the vernacular interpretations of either the Biblical or the Quranic narratives, which have been circulating among Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities within and/or outside the “Holy Land(s)” of the Abrahamic faiths, the picture is entirely different. Storytellers often identify the “divine proto-language,” the language of their Holy Book(s), with their native tongue, which is then implicitly recognized as sacred.

The empirical data registered during anthropological, ethnographic and folklore field research, conducted over the last two centuries among traditional societies in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere, is indicative of this connection. Its analysis reveals a fascinating phenomenon. The unlettered “people of the Book,” who could not read the scriptural text, nevertheless sung and recounted what they imagined to be the “Bible.”[2] Unlike its canonical counterpart, this unwritten Holy Writ was as intangible as it was incorporeal. Its oral versions were perpetually reassembled at each new performance. In fact, it was the Bible ever imagined, but never held. Rather than as a book, it was perceived as a collective intellectual construct existing only as a virtual scriptural corpus. At vernacular level the Folk Bible routinely operated as a metaphorical device achieving stability and harmony in both the macrocosm and the microcosm. It was envisaged as the ultimate customary codex of rules for public and private life. In folklore tradition, Biblical patriarchs and matriarchs were habitually perceived as almighty ancestors, shielding those invoking them from all kinds of natural disasters, social calamities, personal misadventures, health problems and misfortunes. The use of the Biblical onomasticon in traditional spells, incantations and charms accompanying protective rituals, healing customs, and related practices is particularly significant. In all of these, the names of Biblical figures serve as verbal amulets providing the ultimate antidote against hardships and turbulences, regardless of the nature of their etiology.[3]

A similar stance towards the Quranic corpus was attested among some Muslim communities—both Sunni and Shia—in the Balkans[4] and elsewhere.[5] Thus, in the early 1950’s, while describing certain idiosyncratic features of the Alevi (Bektaş and Kizilbaş)[6] folk customs and oral tradition, the ethnographers V. Marinov, Z. Dimitrov and Iv. Koev, who conducted field research at the time in the village of Sevar (North–Eastern Bulgaria), emphasized in their report (published in the celebrated Transactions of the Ethnographic Institute and Museum in Sofia) that a specific cluster of songs—which the local people designated as the “Quran”—was sung at various types of social gatherings observed by the community.[7] It was further noted that each household in this Muslim village had a musical instrument, whilst at least one member of the family—regardless of whether they were male or female—was trained to play it. Particular attention was paid to the description of the content of some of the so-called “Quran” chants, as well as the means of their oral transmission. Thus, after reporting that the local Aliani (that is, Alevi) Kizilbaş singer of tales had learned the rhymes from his grandfather, Ibish Murtazov, the ethnographers offered a summary of one such poem, sung during the mohabed [мохабед] social gatherings:

The singer also sung one wise song of Tarikat, in which it was said that man was created from four components: earth, fire, air, and water.[8] Four books speak about what is known about air, earth, Şeriat, Tarikat, righteousness and truth. Tarikat is a burning fire, and wealth in material goods was given by Adam to mankind, whereas reasoning was given by Allah. When one goes towards truth, one makes sacrifices. At the end of the song, a question was asked about what is known regarding the destiny of each human being.[9]

Певецът изпя и една мъдра песен за тарикат, в която се казва, че човек е създаден от четири неща: пръст, огън, въздух и вода. Четири книги отговарят какво знаят за въздуха, земята, за шариаха, за тариката, за правдата и истината. Тарикат е горящ огън, имането—материалните блага били дадени от Адам на човека, съзнанието—от Аллаха. Когато се отива към правдата, дават се жертви. На края в песента се запитва какво се знае за съдбата на всеки човек.[10]

Тhis kind of sacred vocal music was traditionally performed by either male or female members of the Aliani Kizilbaş community, as there were no gender restrictions imposed upon those singing the “wise chants of Tarikat”;[11] significantly, the above information was given by no one else but the local Head of the Village Council [Председател на Селсъвета], Hyusein Merdanov.[12] Most remarkably, it was also comrade Merdanov who testified that “these songs are called by our people Quran” [тези песни нашите ги наричат Kуран].[13] Obviously, in the above phrase this term did not refer to the Muslim Holy Book but rather to Islamic folk poetry, and in particular to religious songs on spiritual themes. Needless to say, no one in the local villages actually possessed a copy of the Quran, just like their Christian counterparts had no Bibles, and both terms “Quran” and “Bible” in these contexts refer to the idea of the book rather than to the book per se. These imagined “scriptures” were orally performed rather than being held and read, with their libretti imprinted in the collective memory of the community. Not only did they co-exist intertwined at a popular level, but they also produced a certain overarching hypertext—multilingual and polyphonic—reflecting the intangible folklore traditions of the three Abrahamic faiths. Those recounting them believed firmly that their verbally transmitted stories, inherited from ancestors, stem straight from their respective Holy Book(s)—be it the Bible or the Quran. Indeed, the vocal “folk scriptures” were considered by illiterate believers to be the ultimate source-compendium revealing the divine truth about the origins of the Universe and mankind, and the wisdom behind the interdependent existence of the macrocosm and the microcosm. Elsewhere I have argued that some types of vernacular counterparts of Holy Writ show cognizance of the logistics involved in the unfolding of the proto-Biblical oral hypertext from which the canonical corpus eventually sprang;[14] I have further argued that vestiges of this oral Vorlage can be traced in the rabbinic tradition (Midrash), in Jewish and/or Christian apocryphal literature (e.g. The Book of Jubilees, The Life of Adam and Eve, The Apocalypse of Enoch, The Apocalypse of Abraham, The Apocalypse of Elijah, etc.) and historiographical works (e.g. Flavius Josephus’ Judean Antiquities, Byzantine Universal Chronicles, etc.), and last but not least, in Islamic exegetical writings (e.g. Tafsir, Qisas al-Anbiya, etc.).

The academic discourse dominant today is that there are no surviving vernacular parallels to the ancient proto-Biblical oral corpus; yet, at the same time, it is taken for granted that certain literary parabiblical compositions (such as The Book of Jubilees, The Apocalypse of Enoch, The Life of Adam and Eve, Judean Antiquities, etc.) represent important source material for understanding, for instance, the socio-cultural context of the Dead Sea scrolls and, respectively, significant aspects of the proto-Biblical oral traditions. And here we encounter an acute epistemological paradox. Although a vast number of recently recorded folklore accounts provide strikingly close parallels to some of the above-mentioned apocryphal compositions and chronographic works, oral sources are regarded as less reliable than written ones. While it is considered to be methodologically sound to approach parascriptural written compositions as prestigious and trustworthy compendia of ancient oral legends representative of the no-longer extant nascent Biblical proto-corpus, oral sources are excluded from the scope of matter-of-fact textual evidence.

Then again, the analysis of a parabiblical oral corpus (which has been registered by folklorists, ethnographers and anthropologists during the last two centuries) shows that verbal counterparts of Holy Writ may still preserve the collective memory of the earliest stages of its pre-literary existence; furthermore vernacular attestations of Biblical narrative tradition suggest that the canonical scriptural text has coexisted for centuries with its clandestine, constantly evolving multilingual twin, the Folk Bible; and since this oral Writ was rendered by storytellers in their vernacular indigenous tongue, the latter was respectively considered to be the language spoken by God. Indeed, God and his people are imagined to have been speaking the same language.

Thus among Orthodox Russian peasants it was maintained that God speaks Russian; accordingly, it was believed that the language spoken in Eden was also Russian; hence by extension, the first people, Adam and Eve, became Russians. This concept was implied in a number of traditional religious tales and songs.[15] According to one of the most popular folklore spiritual stanzas [духовные стихи],[16] The Rhyme of the Book of the Dove [Стих о Голубиной книге],[17] a firm statement is made that the peasants of Holy Russia are direct descendants of Adam and Eve:

От того колена от Адамова, | From the very knee/loin of Adam himself,
От того ребра от Евина, | From the very rib of Eve herself,
Пошли христиане православные, | Sprang Orthodox Christians,
По всей земли Святорусския.i | Around all the land of Holy Russia.ii

5.1 iSee Danilov (1938, 274).iiSee Badalanova (2008, 183) and Russell (2009, 178).

The motif of Adam and Eve as the ultimate ancestors of Orthodox Christianity,[18] and indeed of Holy Russia,[19] is likewise attested in other versions of the The Rhyme of the Book of the Dove; in one of them an elaborate statement explaining the genesis of social institutions and class stratification is presented:

Оттого у нас в земле цари пошли | This is how the Tsars of our land sprang
От святой главы от Адамовой; | From the holy head of Adam;
Оттого зачадились князья-бояры | This is how noble princes came to be
От святых мощей от Адамовых; | From the holy relics of Adam;
Оттого крестьяны православные | While the Orthodox peasants [sprang]
От свята колена от Адамова.i | From the very knee/loin of Adam.ii

5.2 iMochul’skiĭ (1887, (17:1): 178).iiAuthor’s translation.

Significantly, a strong phonetic similarity exists between the Russian words denoting “peasant” [крестьянин] and “Christian” [христиaнин].[20] Indigenous folk etymology conventionally interprets this resemblance in a symbolic way; according to this type of vernacular axiology, it is only the peasantry [крестьянство] who should be considered the genuine, true receptacle of Christian faith [христиaнство]. Hence the language of the Orthodox peasantry is regarded as the ultimate speech of both Adam and Christ, “the New Adam.” A similar belief anchors anthropogonic accounts recounted in other Slavonic vernaculars. According to this type of the Folk Genesis stories, after having crafted man in his own image and likeness and appointed him to be the master of the Universe and the sovereign of “every living creature that moves on the ground”,[21] the Creator blows the breath of life not into Adam’s nostrils,[22] but into his mouth, thus vivifying him, and transforming him not just into a “human being” originating from the dust of the ground (= Latin humus), but into a “speaking creature.” In this way Slavonic anthropogonies define Adam’s tongue as a divine product originating from the Holy Spirit; as such it claimed to have emanated directly from the lips of the Creator.[23] Indicative in this connection is the fact that, according to vernacular Slavonic etymology, the ethnonym “Slavs” (Proto-Slavonic *Slověninъ / *Slověne) derives from the lexeme “word / speech”; that is to say, Slavs are the people “who have the ability to speak.” And, of course, there are also those who do not posses this skill. They are “the Other.” This concept was further developed into a powerful messianic idea—that Slavs are a “People of the Word (of God),” whose destiny is marked by the divine protection of Christ the Logos.[24] At the same time, as indigenous historical sources indicate, foreigners were considered to be “dumb / mute / tongue-tied” (Proto-Slavonic *němъ; Church Slavonic нѣмъ; Bulgarian ням; Serbo-Croatian нем; Russian немой; Ukrainian німий; Polish niemy, etc.); indeed, the Slavonic ethnonym applied to designate the German-speaking people (Proto-Slavonic *němьсь) stems from the same semantic cluster.[25]

Then again, a similar—but much more extreme and hostile—axiological model in designating “the Other” is employed by Procopius of Caesarea (500 CE–c. 560 CE) in his History of the Wars (7–8), where the word used to denote the Slavonic tribes—the then restless pagan neighbors of Byzantium—was identical with that used to denote “slaves” [= Σκλάβοι, Σκλαβηνοί, Σκλαυηνοί, Σθλαβηνοί, Σκλαβῖνοι]. Hence a powerful ethnic stereotype was coined. Slavs are slaves. Nomen est omen. What remains is “history” which has to fulfil this “prophecy.”

The latter case—which is far from unique—not only shows how ethnonyms may be employed as a powerful ideological weapon; it also demonstrates how ethnicity may be further harnessed as a means of multilingual socio-political propaganda. Indeed, ethno-etymologies provide virtually limitless possibilities in this direction.

A similar phenomenon is observed in medieval European vernaculars; thus the expletive “bugger,” which is conventionally used to denote sodomy, is in fact a derivate from Anglo-Norman bougre, which, in turn, comes from the Latin Bulgarus,[26] a name given to the members of the Bulgarian dualistic (Gnostic) heretical movement of the Bogomilism[27] (whose followers in Italy and France are known as Cathars, Albigensians, Patharens); they were accused of performing illicit practices, both religious and sexual. Thus the semantic coverage of the otherwise neutral ethnonym “Bulgarian” was not only radically altered (and, apparently, irretrievably adapted by popular culture, as modern lexicographic data indicates), but also ultimately transformed into a derogatory, stigmatizing term with acutely negative connotations. The troubled history of the Bulgarus (that is, the Bulgarian) heresy of Bogomilism, most fiercely refuted by Church authorities in medieval Europe, is compressed within its multilingual social memory; its adepts were callously persecuted and, when caught, mercilessly tortured and executed. The core of their teaching was shaped by the idea that only the celestial—spiritual and intangible—realm belongs to God, while the terrestrial—tangible and carnal world, along with ecclesiastical and state institutions, belongs to God’s adversary, the Devil. It is therefore understandable why, from the point of view of both the Church clergy or government officials, the public humiliation and moral disgracing of the Bogomils appears to have been even more important than their physical extermination. What was at stake, of course, was the very reputation of their religious teaching and the contagious principles of their anti-ecclesiastical and anti-state ideology; and this is when and where the sophisticated modus operandi of discrediting their ethics and moral values was set into motion, both on behalf of the Church and the State. The designation of what the authorities stigmatized as religious deviation was transformed into a label of abominable sexual aberration. The Bogomils are not only portrayed as a sacrilegious sect performing blasphemous religious rituals, but also as individuals of bestial carnal conduct and a demonic social profile.

As far as the actual heresiological term Bogomil is concerned, it is, in fact, an eponym associated with the legendary tenth century leader of the aforementioned Bulgarian dualistic movement who, according to the contemporary historiographical sources, was called Bogomil / Bogumil (Medieval Bulgarian Богоумилъ).[28] The latter is a Slavonic calque of the Greek / Byzantine Theophilus (Θεόφιλος), deriving from the lexemes θεός (“God”) and φιλία (“love”). As such, it appears to be a theophoric appellation, the meaning of which may be rendered simply as the “Love of God,” or “Loved by God.” Needless to say, this particular meaning of the (most probably assumed) name of the charismatic heresiarch Bogomil / Bogumil was transparently clear to his contemporaries, regardless of whether adherents or adversaries. It was an ethnohermeneutical weapon used in his struggle against both the Orthodox Church and the State establishment; the actual name of the Priest, Bogomil / Bogumil, further implied that the creed preached by him was endorsed by God Himself.

It was exactly this reading of the name of the immanent heresiarch which was targeted by the medieval Bulgarian writer Cosmas the Presbyter in his famous treatise Sermon Against the Newly-Appeared Bogomil Heresy.[29] While addressing his audience, whom he endeavored to convince that the Bogomil doctrine was nothing else but an evil heretical teaching, he thought it important to point out that the name of its founder, Bogomil, should not be interpreted as “the one loved by God (Богѹмилъ),” but rather as someone “who, in fact, is not loved by God” [а по истинѣ рещи богунемилъ]. The might of scholastic rhetoric utilized by Cosmas the Presbyter as an antidote to the mythopoeic mechanisms of vernacular Christianity, and the very code of its dualistic ethnohermeneutics, was harnessed in this propaganda machine run by the Orthodox Church.

As pointed out above, in the West the term Bogomil was substituted by the ethnonym Bulgarus, due to common knowledge that the heresy designated by it had the land of Bulgarians as its birthplace. The subsequent semantic transformations of this word, and especially the adoption of its negative connotations and turning it into an expletive, show how ethnic and religious stereotypes coined in the Middle Ages survive in the multilingual collective memory of modern Europe.

5.2 Claiming Lingua Sacra in Vernacular Traditions

The analysis of the vernacular thesaurus employed in parabiblical oral heritage provides fascinating results. Of particular importance is the corpus of the Folk Genesis, as attested among peasant Christian communities in Europe and elsewhere. Those storytelling the Bible consider themselves to be “a chosen people,” while their native tongue is distinguished as the language of Holy Scriptures; accordingly, their native landscapes are identified as the Holy Land.

Indicative in this respect are some folklore counterparts of the Biblical account about the creation of woman,[30] as recorded among Bulgarians. Thus, after naming all the animals brought before him, Adam took a nap; it was then, during this slumber that the Matriarch was fashioned by God; the first man called upon her as soon as he woke up. The words he uttered while approaching her were, “Come, come here, as you are dear to my heart!” [Ела! Ела! Че си ми скъпа на сърцето!]; then again, in Bulgarian the articulation/vocalization of the imperative form of the verb “to come”—“ela!” [eлa!]—phonetically resembles the name of the first woman; in the local dialect, it is pronounced as “Eva” [Ева]. Thus the name of Eve is bound to the exclamation “come!”; respectively, the name of the first woman is perceived as a vernacular anthroponymic reference to the language of Creation,[31] imagined to be identical with that of the storyteller.

A similar rendition of the legend about the origin of the name of the “mother of all living,” Eve, was registered among other Slavonic communities. According to one such an account,[32] God conceives the idea of giving the lonely Adam a companion by taking the ninth rib from the sleeping man, forming from it woman and putting her next to him. When Adam awakens, he exclaims: “Lo and behold! What is the meaning of all this? I was one when falling asleep, and now there are two of us!” [Е-во! Што такоя значить? Лех я адин а таперь ужу двоя!]. In the local dialect the expression “Lo and behold” is pronounced as “E-vo!”: hence the name “Eva” (Eve). Having heard Adam’s exclamation, God decides to name the woman after it [Гаспоть и ни пиримяниу названия Адамавый жаны—так и засталась ина Ева].[33] As pointed out by Vladimir Dal’ in his Interpretative Dictionary of Vernacular Russian [Толковый словарь живого великорусского языка], “e-va” [е-ва] is a typical Russian vernacular expression used either as an interjection, or as a demonstrative pronoun.[34] Obviously, according to the above quoted legend, the name of the first woman is believed to have originated from the exclamation which the Russian-speaking Adam utters when he sees her for the first time.

A similar example of ethnohermeneutical decoding of the name of Eve is attested among the Ukrainians. According to one such anthropogonic legend, man was created from earth, whereas woman was made from the willow tree, which in the narrator’s mother tongue is called “iva” [ива]; hence the name of the first woman, Eva (Eва) is imagined as a derivate from the name of the willow [ива] tree from which her flesh was believed to have originated.[35] Then again, the storyteller of this legend imagined the language of Creation to be identical with his local dialect.

A similar idea is represented in some Slavonic legends about the origins of the dog. According to these texts, dogs are believed to have sprung from Cain’s dead body—hence the phonetic similarity between their “language” and the name of the Biblical character from whose flesh they originated. While “speaking,” they are believed to be calling his name. Thus the sounds of dog’s barking (rendered by the storytellers as “Kaine! Kaine!”) are perceived as a vocative form of the name of Cain [Каин] (pronounced as “Kain”).[36]

Another example of deciphering the “language” of animals through parabiblical oral tradition is presented by the cluster of legends about Jesus’ crucifixion and “frog speech.” Thus, according to one such account, when Christ was about to be put on the cross, a helpful frog hatched a plan to prevent it from happening and tried to save the Saviour; it stole the nails needed for the Crucifixion and dropped them into a nearby river. When asked where they were hidden, the frog replied, saying: “The cr-r-r-rab took them!” And although the brave frog managed only to postpone the sufferings of Jesus but not prevent them, it was in fact the only creature trying to impede the Crucifixion. This is why, legend maintains, the frog is blessed to dwell in water forever and to enjoy divine protection: whoever harms it is cursed by the Lord, and as for those who dare kill a frog, they are severely punished and their mothers would suffer sudden death.[37]

Furthermore, even Aetiological legends about the local landscape are considered to be stories coming straight from Holy Scripture; vernacular legends about the Flood were among the most popular of folk narratives. During research trips in the villages of Eastern Europe over the last 30 years, I recorded different variations of this particular theme. According to one such story, Noah the cooper was told by God to build a barrel and not an Ark, where he, his family and all the animals were to live while the Flood covered the Earth for years and not for days. Significantly, an ancient predecessor of this concept is attested in a Babylonian tablet from c. 1800 BCE, as recently published by Irving Finkel,[38] according to which the Flood hero saved mankind in a “coracle,”[39] a barrel-shaped vessel, rather than the conventional three-level boat image of the Ark, as described in Genesis.

Over the many years of my field research I kept encountering the same type of narrative over and over again in different villages. As a rule, the storytellers insisted that the Flood had taken place in their own vicinity; some even showed me the place where Noah’s Ark was believed to have landed.[40] (A similar case is represented by legends binding the story of the wife of Lot, who was turned into a pillar of salt within the local landscape). To return to the Flood story, as attested in the Balkans, in some cases the Biblical Patriarch was given a typical local (Bulgarian, Serbian, etc.) name, thus becoming an honorary ancestor of the village in which the Flood story was narrated. In the account of another storyteller, a peasant woman Zonka Ivanova Mikhova (born in 1909 in North-Western Bulgaria), the Biblical legend of Noah and the Flood becomes an etiological story that explains the origins of Bulgarians. In her version, once on land Noah planted a shoot which a bird from the Ark had brought back to him, and grapes started to grow from it:

And the grapevine had grapes but they were still green, not yet ripe. He ate from it and said: “No, you can’t eat that!” And when they were ripe, he pressed them and drank wine from them. And he drank and drank, and had more than enough, and got drunk and lay down to sleep. He had taken his clothes off as well. And one of his sons came, and said: “Look! My father is naked!” And the other said: “Forget about him! It’s well deserved—he was so greedy he drank himself to death!” And he woke up and said that he who said that his father should sleep, he will be blessed. Wherever he goes, he will be happy. He who said that his father was naked, he will roam and roam, and never find peace to settle! He will have nothing! [...] And the one who obeyed his father, he was the forefather of the Bulgarians.[41]

The above quoted oral tale also shows how the Folk BibleFolk Bible accommodated indigenous ethnohistory. In this way, Genesis (or rather the verbal icon of Genesis) is built into the real life of a village community and the legends concerning Old Testament characters become indigenous aetiological texts. In this regard, the vernacular renditions of the saga of Abraham are indicative (see below).

5.3 Domesticating the Bible and Quran Through the Meta-Language of Ritual: The Theologeme of the Filial Sacrifice in Abrahamic Religions

The narrative about the (interrupted) filial sacrifice, as found in the Bible[42] and the Quran[43] is considered to be the kernel of the most fundamental ritual celebrations, shared by all three Abrahamic religions.[44] Christians recall the filial sacrifice at the Eucharist, Jews remember the Aqedah (or, the “tying of the sacrificial lamb”) at Rosh Hashonah, and Muslims refer to the same account at the feast of Id al-Kabir (known as Kurban Bayram). Furthermore, the vernacular oral redactions of the Abraham Saga can be looked upon as “living antiquities,” or fossil texts reconciling the three faiths; in other words, these types of folklore textual clusters do not merely represent theological divergences between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but also exemplify their common origins. Thus, among Jews and Christians it is maintained that the chosen son was Isaac, whereas among Muslims the opposite belief prevailed, that it was Ismail. Therefore, Christian and Jewish communities identify themselves with the offspring of Isaac, whereas Muslim communities—with the descendants of Ismail, respectively. Correspondingly, the question regarding the language in which God spoke to Abraham also becomes a hot topic; the answer varies according to the native tongue of the storyteller. On the other hand, in the Balkans (where the present author conducted field-research) Christians and Muslims employ the same term—Kurban—to indicate the ritual sacrifice of a lamb (or other animals) during their most important annual religious festivals.

Thus in Christian folklore, as registered among the Southern Slavs, the songs of “Abraham’s sacrifice” [“Жертва Аврамова”] anchor the traditional Kurban ritual setting.[45] On this day, the oldest man of each family in the village where the celebration takes place presents an offering to God, thus allegorically re-establishing the bond between his home and the household of the Biblical patriarch. Vernacular exegesis transforms the scriptural narrative into a ritual scenario; significantly, the culmination of the Abraham Saga—the filial sacrifice “freeze frame”—is conventionally depicted in the local churches—either on the altarpiece (as an icon or plinth-panel), or in the nave (as a fresco) (see Figures 5.1 and 5.2). It is believed that those who are symbolically partaking in the scenario of the Old Testament drama by performing the sacred ritual of Kurban sacrifice would be blessed—like Abraham—with “descendants beyond number, like the stars in the sky and the sand of the seashore.”[46]

Fig. 5.1: Abraham’s sacrifice. Fresco from the Dragalevtsy Monastery of the Dormition of the Mother of God, Bulgaria (1476). Photo FBG.

Fig. 5.2: Abraham’s sacrifice. Painted panel of the iconostasis of the Church of Saint Athanasius in the Village of Gorna Ribnitsa, South-Western Bulgaria (1860). Photo FBG.

Then again, the vernacular Slavonic and Balkan terminology related to the Kurban[47] ritual—also called in some areas оброк / обрек[48] (‘offering,’ ‘oblation,’ ‘sacrifice’), запис[49] (‘covenant’), черква / църквa [50] (‘church’), храм[51] (‘temple’), кръст[52] (‘cross,’ ‘crucifix’), молитва[53] (‘prayer,’ ‘devotion,’ ‘invocation,’ but also ‘litany’ and ‘communion’), служба[54] (‘service,’ ‘ceremony,’ ‘observance,’ ‘worship’), and even литургия[55] (‘liturgy,’ ‘sacrament’)—suggests that this custom is perceived as a functional counterpart of the Eucharist. In this, the lamb is understood to be a divine substitute for Isaac, whereas the image of Isaac becomes a proto-icon of Christ, the “Lamb of God.” The fact that in Slavonic languages an unequivocal similarity exists between the word denoting “lamb” [aгне] (which is related to the Church Slavonic агнѧ, агньць), [56] and the liturgical formula “Lamb of God” [Агнец Божий], is indicative.[57] This similarity, from the point of view of ethnohermeneutics, is quite significant. It illuminates the vernacular postulation that the Agnus Dei [Агнец Божий] is indeed the sacrificial lamb [aгне], and vice versa, each lamb presented as a Kurban [Курбан] offering by the paterfamilias is seen as an earthly embodiment of the “Lamb of God.” In other words, God the Son is thought to take on the appearance of a lamb and be sacrificed by the Father. In this way, it is held that Christ touches the realm of men. His blood is thus dropping onto the earth, flowing out from the body of the slaughtered lamb, and those who partake in the mystery of his sacrifice will be redeemed. This is how, to the horror of the local priests, folklore exegesis revealed the mystery of the Eucharist and connected it, in a matter-of-fact way, to the ritual of the Kurban feast. Strikingly, it is regarded by those participating in it as a sacred undertaking embedded in the Biblical paradigm of righteous behaviour as established by Abraham. The folklore interpretations of this saga reveal the implicit mechanisms of interconnection between the high ecclesiastical canons and the low system of popular faith, and indeed the idea that “God speaks our language.”

Thus, the life of Abraham and his offspring is shared by the village community; the sacrifice of Isaac appears to be re-experienced each time, bringing to life the commitment to the Biblical event and the destiny of Abraham who becomes a “relative,” and, of course, “ours” by nationality. The substitution in some songs of the name of the Biblical patriarch with Slavonic names is significant: Stoian, Lazar, Ivan, etc. In this way the Biblical narrative is transformed into folk-memory. Genesis is built into the real life of the village community and Old Testament legend becomes folkloric aetiological text.

Fig. 5.3: Ibrahim’s Sacrifice. Persian, provenance unknown. Photo FBG.

As for Islamic vernacular legends about the ritual of the Great Sacrifice, both narrators and audience alike regard them as oral counterparts of the Quran, with the storytellers considered to be transmitters of Prophetic revelation. It is worth noting that the actual term “Quran” refers to the concept of “recitation,” while Allah is considered to be the “Speaker.” Furthermore the traditional Muslim folklore corpus contains numerous renditions of legends which have parallel attestations in some Islamic exegetical writings, such as The History of Prophets and Kings (Tarīkh al-rusul wa'l-mulūk) by Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad ibn Jarīr Al-Ṭabarī (839-923 AD), The Lives of the Prophets (Arā’is Al-Majālis Fī Quiṣaṣ Al-Anbiyā’) by Abū Ishāq Ahmad Ibn Muḥammad Ibn Ibrāhīm Al-Tha̔labī (died 1036 AD), the Stories of the Prophets (Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyā’) by Nosiruddin Burhonuddin Al-Rabghūzī (thirteenth–fourteenth century), and others. Although it is possible that manuscripts containing (fragments from) the above mentioned compositions were in circulation in the Balkans during the Ottoman period, it would be more plausible to consider that these types of narratives drew upon common sources of parascriptural traditions orally transmitted by generations of storytellers over a wide geographical landscape, of which the Balkans were just a part. This kind of data will be analyzed elsewhere.

As for the functional parameters of folklore counterparts of the Quranic account of the filial sacrifice, they remained constant.[58] Whatever way it is narrated, the story of Abraham (whose name now changes to Ibrahim) validates the main custom of Muslim communities—the annual ritual slaying of the lamb or ram at the end of the Ramadan fast, on the feast day traditionally called Kurban-Bayram (see Figure 5.3).[59] In fact, it is believed that it was at the end of the month of Ramadan when the Quran was revealed to Mohammad. To sum up, vernacular renditions of the Bible and the Quran clearly spell out the crucial concept that, the comprehension of the “Word of God” does not necessarily require reading or writing skills, and literacy is not a pre-condition for its transmission.

It is significant for our line of argument that some peculiar motifs in the filial sacrifice story (but surprisingly absent from the canonical narrative), which feature prominently and systematically in parabiblical Jewish writings from the Hellenistic period, are also attested in medieval Slavonic apocryphal writings and in contemporary Slavonic and Balkan Christian and Muslim folklore. One such detail concerns Isaac’s request to be bound by his father before being slaughtered on the altar as a sacrificial offering to God.

The earliest attestation of this motif can be traced back to the Dead Sea scrolls texts; it is found in the so-called Pseudo-Jubilees account from Qumran, Cave 4, 4Q225, Fragment 2 (4QPs-Juba 2 column i [7–14], column ii [1–14], dated to the second century BCE:

col. i |  |
| 7 | And [Abraham]
| 8 | be[lieved] God, and righteousness was reckoned to him. A son was born af[ter] this
| 9 | [to Abraha]m, and he named him Isaac. But the prince Ma[s]temah came
| 10 | [to G]od, and he lodged a complaint against Abraham about Isaac. [G]od said
| 11 | [to Abra]ham, ‘Take your son Isaac, [your] only one, [whom]
| 12 | [you lo]ve, and offer him to me as a burnt offering on one of the [hig]h mountains,
| 13 | [which I shall point out] to you.’ He aro[se and w]en[t] from the wells up to Mo[unt Moriah].

| 14 | [ ] And Ab[raham] raised
col. ii |  |
| 1 | [his ey]es, [and there was a] fire; and he pu[t the wood on his son Isaac, and they went together.]
| 2 | Isaac said to Abraham, [his father, ‘Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb]
| 3 | for the burnt offering?’ Abraham said to [his son Isaac, ‘God himself will provide the lamb.’]
| 4 | Isaac said to his father, ‘B[ind me fast’]i
| 5 | Holy angels were standing, weeping over the [altar]
| 6 | his sons from the earth. The angels of Mas[temah]
| 7 | rejoicing and saying, ‘Now he will perish.’ And [in all this the Prince Mastemah was testing whether]
| 8 | he would be found feeble, or whether A[braham] would be found unfaithful [to God. He cried out,]
| 9 | ‘Abraham, Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Yes?’ So He said, ‘N[ow I know that]
| 10 | he will not be loving.’ The Lord God blessed Is[aac all the days of his life. He became the father of]
| 11 | Jacob, and Jacob became the father of Levi, [a third] gene[ration.]ii

5.3 iThis hypothetical restoration of the text (with a reference to the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan) is explained in Fitzmyer (2002, 218); the “plausibility of this reconstruction,” however, is challenged by Kugel who provides arguments against it and offers an alternative reading (Kugel 2006, 86–91, 97). See also VanderKam (1997, 241–261).iiSee Fitzmyer (2002, 216–217). See also the discussion in Fitzmyer (2002, 218–222, 225, 228–229).

As shown above, the motif of “Isaac as a willing victim” plays a significant role in the Pseudo-Jubilees account of the Aqedah; in this way the act of the filial sacrifice acquires important new overtones. The emphasis shifts from father to the son; Isaac is not just a passive victim, but becomes the active protagonist of the Abraham Saga; the role of the son in the trial intensifies and becomes equal to that of his father; Isaac’s character becomes even more dramatic than that of Abraham; in fact, the story about the filial sacrifice is converted into a story about a self-sacrifice, with Isaac being transformed into the main focus of the drama. The narrative reaches its climax when the weeping of “the holy angels,” who stand next to the altar on which the father is about to slaughter his son, is interrupted by the voice of God, ordering Abraham to halt the sacrifice of Isaac.

A similar line of argument is observed in some midrashic sources (such as Pirque de Rabbi Eliezer, dated to the eighth-ninth century), in which Isaac asks his father Abraham the following:

“O my father! Bind for me my two hands, and my two feet, so that I do not curse thee; for instance, a word may issue from the mouth because of the violence and dread of death, and I shall be found to have slighted the precept, ‘Honour thy father’ (Ex.20:12.)” He bound his two hands and his two feet, and bound him upon the top of the altar, and he strengthened his two arms and his two knees upon him and put the fire and wood in order, and he stretched forth his hand and took the knife [...][60]

A similar scenario is revealed in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan (on Genesis 22). Having arranged the setting for the burnt offering, Abraham places Isaac on the altar, on top of the wood. Yet when the patriarch puts forth his hand and takes the knife to slaughter his son, Isaac speaks up and, as in the midrashic account of Pirque de Rabbi Eliezer, asks his father to tie him firmly, so that he does not struggle, thus causing a blemish in his offering:

“Tie me well lest I struggle because of the anguish of my soul, with the result that a blemish will be found in your offering and I will be thrust into the pit of destruction.” The eyes of Abraham were looking at the eyes of Isaac and the eyes of Isaac were looking at the angels on high [...][61]

Almost identical wording is employed in Targum Neofiti to render the story of the filial sacrifice:

And Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son Isaac. Isaac answered and said to his father Abraham: “Father, tie me well lest I kick you and your offering be rendered unfit and we be thrust down into the pit of destruction in the world to come.”[62]

It is rather astonishing that the motif of Isaac’s request to be bound by his father before the sacrifice, first attested in Qumran, appears in Christian oral ritual songs and Muslim legendary narratives, performed some 20 centuries later. This suggests that the stream of traditions, which characterises parabiblical texts not found in the canonical corpus itself, is surprisingly durable and stable, crossing linguistic, cultural and religious boundaries over lengthy periods of time. Multilingualism acts as a mechanism of the transmission of knowledge within the three Abrahamic faiths, thus forming a common environment for such subtle transfers.

5.4 Onomastica Biblica as Ethnobotanical Taxonomy

The vernacular ethnobotanical thesaurus contains a rich corpus of herbal designations related to the name of the first man, Adam; obviously, the belief in their healing properties stems from the implicit association with him. One such phytonym, “Adam’s Tree” [Адамово дерево][63] denotes the evergreen Myrtus, considered to be a powerful source of revitalization in Slavonic ethnomedicine and ethnopharmacology. There is also “Adam’s Beard” [Адамова борода],[64] a renowned herb with roots believed to have originated from the beard of the Biblical patriarch. Incidentally, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus called it Asclepias, after the name of the Greek god of healing, due to its folk-medicinal uses. It is hardly a coincidence that among Russians, the ultimate aphrodisiac, Mandrake-root, is known as “Adam’s head” [Адамова голова / глава], [65] suggesting potency which comes from being the father of mankind and having the entire world as progeny. This plant, also administered to ease childbirth, was believed to be responsible for reversing sterility caused by evil spells. Moreover, the plant was used for healing various kinds of wounds. According to the nineteenth century Russian ethnographer M. Zabylin, the wondrous “Adam’s head” (along with other medicinal plants believed to have the power to counteract malevolent forces) was still in demand among his contemporaries; it was possible to acquire it easily at a number of street-markets in Moscow:

Against witchcraft some herbs may be used, such as wormwood, nettle and the plakun–grass; these, together with “Adam’s head” and “Peter’s cross” may be purchased in [the markets in] the area of the Moskvoretsky Bridge and the Glagol [neighborhood] at a good price.

Против колдунов и ведьм употребляли траву чернобыльник, крапиву и плакун-траву, которая и сейчас в Москве имеется, вместе с Адамовой головою и Петровым крестом у Москворецких ворот и на Глаголе продается за хорошую цену.[66]

A brief survey of internet sources indicates an abundant corpus of rather curious popular manuals describing the properties of “Adam’s head,” along with the necessary rituals accompanying its proper harvesting and usage. One such source is Andrey Romanovsky’s booklet entitled, “Magic properties of herbs: Unique rituals for love, health, wealth and success, attributed to some great psychics, wizards, healers and Kremlin doctors” [Магические свойства трав. Уникальные ритуалы для любви, здоровья, богатства и успеха от великих экстрасенсов, знахарей, целителей и кремлевских врачей], even available on a special website.[67] In this curious herbal manual the reader is advised that

practically all the components of magical recipes may be acquired in the shops or in the market; if one cannot find them there, they will be available in specialized shops. One should also remember the internet-shops, in which anything imaginable can be ordered.

Практически все из компонентов магических рецептов можно приобрести в магазине или на рынке, в крайнем случае, в специализированном магазине. Кстати, нельзя сбрасывать со счетов и интернет-магазины, в которых можно заказать все что угодно.[68]

Incidentally, the first item in his list of recommended herbs is, of course, “Adam’s head,” which is supposed to “guarantee omnipotence and invincibility” [дарующая всемогущество]. The elaborate instructions for both root-cutters and users are likewise presented. These types of online sources could be considered as samples of contemporary urban folklore, which so far has been neglected by those studying popular culture of post-Soviet Russia.

As advised by yet another website,[69] an additional “Adamic herb” called “Adam’s root” [Адамов корень] is recommended as a remedy against paralysis, epilepsy, impotence, cardio-vascular and infectious diseases, eye problems, a virtual panacea for all kinds of ailments; the potential buyers are further instructed that it can be purchased online; “the price for 55 milliliters is only 250 RUB.”

Phytonyms such as “Adam’s rib” [Ukrainian Адамово ребро],[70] “Theotokos’ plant / flower” [Bulgarian Богородиче, Богородичен бурен, Богородична трева, Богородично биле, Богородигино цвете; Russian Богородичная трава; Serbian Богородичина трава],[71] “Theotokos’ hand” [Bulgarian Богородична ръка / ръчичка; Russian Богородицына ручка; Serbian Богородичина рука],[72] “John the Baptist’s flower” [Serbian Ивањско цвеҕе],[73] “Saint Peter’s Cross” [Russian Петров крест; Serbian Петров крст),[74] to mention just a few among many, represent but a fraction of the vast thesaurus of Bible-related ethnobotanical taxonomy; widely attested in Slavonic ethnomedicine and ethnopharmacology, these vernacular terms denote plants which are believed to possess healing and protective powers stemming straight from the Word of God. These types of ethnobotanical thesauri may be considered as a Rosetta stone for decoding the modi operandi of the transmission of esoteric knowledge in the Mediterranian region—the cradle of the Abrahamic faiths—and elsewhere. In this type of traditional cultural milieu, vernacular folk etymologies function as hermeneutical devices. This kind of data will be analyzed elsewhere.

5.5 Biblical Ancestors as Agents in Magic Spells

Then again, both Adam and Eve are mentioned in traditional folklore magical love-attraction spells, probably based on them being the first couple and thus initiating marriage and sexual union. In one such special spell[75] recited over the food and drink to be consumed by the female object of desire, mention is made of the male client’s wish to acquire “Adam’s covenant” [Адамов закон] and “Eve’s love” [Еввина любовь], while the match-maker is an anonymous old woman authorized by the Lord and the Virgin Mary to act as a facilitator of the supplicant’s request; she is spinning (like the ancient Greek Moirae) in a cave, sitting on a golden chair between three gates. She prays to Jesus and the Virgin Mary on the client’s behalf, so that the heart and soul of the lusted-after woman would boil and burn after him, like a spring in summer boiling beneath the earth. Just as it is impossible to live without bread, salt, and clothing, it should be equally impossible for her (the object) to exist without him (the client). Just as it is impossible for a fish to live on dry land without cold water, so it should be unbearable for her to live without him. Just as it is difficult for an infant to live without his mother and the mother without the infant, so should it be difficult for her (the love-object) to live without him (the client). Just as a bull jumps on a cow and the cow raises her head with her tail up, so may she (the love-object) run and search for him (the client), without fear of God or shame before people, so that she may kiss his mouth and embrace him and indulge in copulation with him.[76] Just as beer-hops wind around the rod under the sun, so should she be wound around him. Just as the morning dew longs for the sun to come through the mountains, she should be longing for him, every day and every hour. The love spell ends with the formulaic expression “both now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages, amen” [ныне и присно и во веки веков, аминь] which is traditionally used in Eucharist prayers to terminate the Gloria Patri doxology.[77]

On the other hand, recent surveys of Russian magic folklore[78] point out that there is a cluster of incantations related to ethnomedical practices, in which Adam is perceived as the ultimate healer, able to cure various kinds of ailments such as bleeding wounds, scarlet fever, alcoholism, tooth-ache, and hernia.[79] In the latter case, the practitioner is supposed to invoke as allies the “faithful martyr” Saint Antipas and the twin brother-physician-saints Cosmas and Damian, so that they may act on behalf of the client and facilitate his healing; they, in turn, call upon the dead Adam, whose body is resting in a holy church located on a divine island in the Blue Sea. The text maintains that Adam neither hears the ringing of the church bells nor the singing of the church choir, and, most importantly, does not suffer from either hernia or any other disease.[80] At this point, Adam’s virtual relics [мощи] confirm that he is free of any ailments—be it in the head, in the veins, in the stomach, in the joints, in the ears, in the eyes, in the teeth; then, finally, the practitioner promises that from now on the body of the client should recuperate, and no longer suffer from hernia:

May in the same way the servant of God (say the name) did not feel in himself, in his white body, hernia, from now until forever, for all ages.

Так же раб божий (имя рек) не слышал бы в себе в белом теле ходячей грыжи, отныне и до века, век по веку веков.[81]

The concept of the pain-free body of the dead ancestor, who continues to protect his progeny and take care of their health problems, is likewise attested in traditional Russian spells against toothache. As pointed out by Yudin, the role of the “heavenly dentist” may be attributed not only to the forefather Adam, but also to Noah [Ной], who is invoked when one suffers from “tooth niggle” [зубы ноют].[82] Other Biblical Patriarchs (such as Abraham,[83] Isaac[84] and Jacob,[85] as well as the “righteous sufferer” Job[86]) may also function as protectors against dental problems. Surprisingly enough, the role of tooth-healers is often attributed to Cain and Abel,[87] who are believed to be located on the moon; and although in folk narratives[88] and apocryphal tradition the spots on the moon are traditionally perceived as an astral icon of the fratricide murder-episode, this detail is totally omitted in incantation texts. Instead, a simple statement is made about two brothers on the moon who do not suffer from dental problems. Accordingly, a specially recommended incantation is to be chanted three times towards the moon by those in need, while putting a finger on the tooth in pain and praying as follows: “I look at the moon, and in this moon there are the two brothers, Cain and Abel. Just as they don’t suffer from toothache, so may I not suffer from toothache.” For a complete recovery it is strongly advised that the ritual be performed when the new moon appears.[89]

Then again, a survey of traditional Russian medical incantations points to the distribution of healing specializations among various Biblical prophets, patriarchs and kings; thus Abraham and Elijah (along with the Virgin Mary and the apostle Simon the Zealot) are responsible for a good harvest of curative herbs and other medicinal plants [При собирания целебных трав].[90] Those suffering from evil eye invoke the Prophet Elijah[91] and King David,[92] while spells against the child-stealing witch (without any implicit reference to the name of Lilith, however) include the names of Elijah and David, occasionally accompanied by the Christian saint Sisinius.[93] David heals snake-bites and helps when children suffer from insomnia.[94] As for the 12 (or 77) fevers [трясовицы][95] considered by folklore legends to be the offspring of either Cain or Herod, these can be chased away by the Archangel Michael, or “the handsome Joseph,”[96] or King David,[97] or the Prophet Elijah, or Saint Sisinius;[98] the latter is among their preferred protagonists in iconographic tradition. Recently discovered birch bark texts from the fourteenth century provide one of the earliest written attestations of this type of text in Russian apocryphal prayers.[99] In charge of bleeding wounds are Jacob, Solomon[100] and Elijah,[101] along with King Ahab, Elijah’s adversary, who himself died from injuries sustained during the battle at Ramoth Gilead.[102] The latter case is of particular importance for the current discussion, since it shows how the Folk BibleFolk Bible domesticates the scriptural narrative and transforms it according to its own agenda.

Finally, there are prophets and kings who are believed to be able to deal with all kinds of ailments; thus Enoch annihilates all diseases by simply shooting them,[103] and Solomon by subduing them; the latter motif most probably stems from Solomon’s portrayal as master of the demons,[104] which is attested in the Babylonian Talmud as well as in the Palaeic cycle concerning Solomon and Kitovras [Соломон и Китоврас].[105]

On the other hand, the scope of protective functions attributed to some Biblical figures goes far beyond healing rituals. Thus the prophet and the wonder-worker Elijah is petitioned in collective litanies and rain-making ceremonies (implicitly referring to the Biblical narrative of his having stopped and/or obtained rain in 3 Kings 17 and 18). He also features in incantations against fire, due to his reputation as someone who may call down blazes from heaven, as in 3 Kings 18: 36–39 (see also Figures 5.4 and 5.5).[106]

King David was to be invoked by herders and shepherds while encountering difficulties in managing their livestock; praying to him helps to calm down cows or sheep which refuse to be milked. This belief is probably based on the image of the young David as a harpist who was able to soothe his flock through his music.[107] Intriguingly, David’s help is also sought when a bull has problems in mating with a cow.[108] The latter motif could have reflected David’s reputation as a renowned lover who knew how to tame the object of his desire, namely the beautiful Bathsheba, who had to be won over despite being married to another man.[109] This type of incantation combines specific vernacular interpretations of various characterizations of David in the Bible, thus shaping a verbal icon of the ideal ruler, whose exuberant masculinity guarantees the prosperity of his kingdom. His son Solomon, on the other hand, helps in treasure hunting;[110] this popular belief is most probably based on the tradition of his command of esoteric knowledge and dominion over demonic forces.[111] Unsurprisingly, Solomon is also invoked in incantations on behalf of anyone going to a court of law, a practice most probably based on his reputation as a wise and fair judge.[112]

Fig. 5.4: The Holy Prophet Elijah in his fiery chariot ascending to heaven. Miniature from the illuminated Ms copied and illustrated by the Bulgarian priest Puncho (Поп Пунчо). The Ms is kept in the Bulgarian National Library under record № 693 (1796). Publication courtesy of the Bulgarian National Library. Photo FBG.

Fig. 5.5: The Holy Prophet Elijah in his fiery chariot ascending to heaven. Fresco from the open gallery of the Rila Monastery, South-Western Bulgaria (1847). Photo FBG.

As noted by Viktor Zhivov,[113] this kind of practices reflect the existence of a certain “Russian jurisprudential dualism” [русский юридический дуализм], which may be regarded as a civic counterpart to religious and cultural dualism. In this kind of context, law courts in general may be perceived as personifications of demonic powers. Thus, in juridical vernacular incantations, magistrates appear to be symbolically equated with diseases or evil spirits;[114] accordingly, the antidote against them is similar to that used in healing spells. According to Zhivov, the folklore “incantations protecting against judges” [заговоры против судей][115] indicate that in medieval Russia, the very procedures of the law court were “perceived as demonic activity” [суд рассматривается как бесовское действо]. Unsurprisingly, the absolute lawful protector on which the defendant could rely upon was believed to be the righteous King Solomon, who can occasionally be replaced by the Biblical Patriarch and trickster, Jacob.

On the other hand, those embarking on a journey may pray either to Jacob or to Joseph (who was sold by his brothers as a slave and taken away from his homeland); this kind of incantation most probably reflects not only Jacob’s own travels from Canaan to Padan-Aram, after having defrauded his twin brother Esau of his birthright, or Joseph’s forced exile to Egypt, but also, and most importantly, the motif that the journey was safely accomplished. In fact, the incantations associated with “going to a law court” and/or “embarking on a journey” have a rather similar structure; this is also the case with apocryphal tradition. As pointed out by Yatsimirskiĭ in his seminal work, On the History of False Prayers in South-Slavonic Literature, this type of “false prayer” is mentioned in various Indices of Prohibited Books under the rubric The Book of the Traveller [Книга путник];[116] among the names most often quoted in apocryphal writings, apart from Jacob or Joseph, are those of Jesus, Joseph and Mary (due to the association with the Gospel narrative about their flight to Egypt). Occasionally, however, Abraham and Sara may be invoked, due to their adventures in Egypt.[117] As for versions marked by the name of Jacob (and Joseph), Yatsimirskiĭ just briefly mentions that this particular type of “prayers for those setting off in a journey” [молитвы в путь идущим] is also attested in the Greek apocryphal tradition. The Slavonic redactions, on the other hand, start with the formulaic invocation, “The Lord, our God, true and living, help Jacob in his journey!” [Господи, Боже наш, истинный и живый, спутешествовавый угоднику своему Иакову!]; when written down as an amulet, this kind of prayer may be worn during the journey as a protection against misfortunes.

Last but not least, there are special incantations intended to blunt the weapons of one’s opponents, and in these the name of the Jacob features prominently once more, perhaps because of his successful wrestling with an angel and at the same time averting the anger of his threatening brother Esau when returning to his homeland. One final point: a survey of Slavonic vernacular incantations indicates that Biblical matriarchs are hardly ever invoked; “the mother of all living” Eve is usually mentioned in connection with Adam, while “the mother of a multitude of nations,” Sarah, only appears in association with Abraham. This phenomenon, in turn, reflects some specific features of the patriarchal model of social organization.

In general, however, the perception of Biblical figures in all aspects of healing and magic rituals, including the characterization of evil spirits, the identification of benevolent powers against demons, and even the names of materia medica, shows just one example of the penetration of Biblical nomina sacra into the culture of the Byzantine commonwealth.

5.6 Imagining the Voice of God

Following the template of Biblical cosmology, according to which thunder and lightning may be identified as God’s attributes,[118] parabiblical vernacular traditions recycle a similar pattern; thus in Slavonic and Balkan apocryphal writings and folk legends the voice of God is metaphorically described as thunder harnessed in a fiery chariot.[119] This type of description is commonly attested in erotapokritic compositions; one such case is presented in The Discussion Between the Three Saints (Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian and John Chrysostom):

[Saint] John said, “From what are thunder and lightning created?”—[Saint] Basil said, “The voice of God is embedded in a fiery chariot and thundering angels are fixed to it.”

І[оаннъ] р[ече]: Отъ чего громъ и молнія сотворена бысть?—В[асилій] р[ече]: Гласъ Господень въ колесницѣ огненной утверженъ и ангела гр(ом)ная приставлена.[120]

In Slavia orthodoxa (and especially in Russian tradition), the metaphorical identification of thunder as the Word of God yields powerful acoustic imagery, which is rather palpable in sacred vocal performances, where the lowest possible register of the male voice (basso profondo) is considered to be the most powerful and beautiful. The specific aesthetics of Russian Orthodox liturgical music are manifested through this aural hallmark. The lower the voice of the singer, for instance, the closer it is to the (imagined) voice of God. This is also perhaps why the Russian Orthodox liturgical chant is bound to the lower registers, in contrast to Western Church music (e.g. Gregorian chant), in which the singing of the choir is supposed to be angelic-like, with a distinctive high-pitched voice.[121]

5.7 God’s Speech Depicted

Visual counterparts of Holy Scriptures represent yet another code of transmission of the “Word of God”—the non-verbal one. These show how Old and New Testament narratives were to be “read” and construed by both the icon-painters and illiterate believers. As pointed out by St. Gregory the Great (d. 604 CE) “the pictorial representations had been made for the edification of an unlearned people in order that, though ignorant of letters, they might by turning their eyes to the story itself learn what had been done”:

For to adore a picture is one thing, but to learn through the story of a picture what is to be adored is another. For what writing presents to readers, this a picture presents to the unlearned who behold, since in it even the ignorant see what they ought to follow; in it the illiterate read. Hence, and chiefly to the nations, a picture is instead of reading.[122]

Indeed, the rustic Homo legens lacked scribal eloquence yet could “read” the “sentences” of icon-painting, not envisaged as an act based upon the knowledge of letters. Without being familiar with the alphabet, believers were able to “read” the Bible by gazing at the icons and frescoes, which were in fact perceived as depicted Scriptures. Images “painted in venerable places” were likened to silent storytellers revealing the Word of God to all those ignorant of letters. Furthermore, this type of visual narrative was regarded as a sacred text laid open on the walls of the churches, chapels, shrines and monasteries, thus inviting the illiterate to learn through the story of a picture. Accordingly, an icon was thought to be a written—i.e. verbal—text composed in an ideographic manner. As such, religious artefacts are perceived as tangible impressions of both the “voice” of God and the “image” of God. At the same time, the iconographic language of indigenous painters absorbs the idiosyncratic features of local traditions; thus most of the Old and New Testament characters—from the ploughing Adam and spinning Eve, to the shepherds venerating the Infant Jesus, and the lamenting women next to the Crucifixion—are dressed as local peasants. Furthermore, Jesus is often depicted against the habitual landscape, with neighboring valleys and mountains in the background, familiar to both the indigenous icon-painters and storytellers. In fact, in many remote villages of Bulgaria, local Christians could see one typical scene in the frescoes of their small churches—“Jesus sleeping in the Balkans” [Исус спи на Балкана] (see Figure 5.6). Indeed, “our” birthplace becomes the homeland of God, born among us, as one of us. What other language could He possibly speak if not “ours”?

Fig. 5.6: Jesus asleep in the Balkan Mountains. Fresco from the Church of The Holy Prophet Elijah in the village of Bogoroditsa, South-Western Bulgaria (1884). Photo FBG.

Appendix

The text below follows the following conventions: [ ] indicate conjectural additions in the English translation.

Part 1: Biblical Onomasticon in Oral Incantations, Charms and Spells

Text № 1: Love-attraction spell (charm to dry one up; erotic enchantment)

To be recited over food or drink which is to be given [secretly] to the woman/maiden to be behexed, or over her footprints.

O Lord God, Christ—bless!

I, the servant of God, So-and-so, after my having blessed myself, will set off, and having crossed myself, I will go from the dwelling through the doors, and then through the courtyards and gates, into the pure fields. In the pure fields, in the green bushes, in the seashore there is a cave; in this cave, an elderly woman is sitting on a golden chair between three gates. I, the servant of God, So-and-so, pray to her:

“O you elderly, senior woman, you are endorsed by the Lord and the Most Holy Virgin, to enlighten me, the servant of God, So-and-so, about Adam’s Covenant; put into the desired heart of the [female] servant of God, So-and-so, the love of Eve towards me, the servant of God, So-and-so.”

And then the old senior woman, merciful, sweet-hearted, the gold-footed one,[123] is dropping the silk yarn and silver spindle and begins to pray to Christ, Heavenly King, and to the Virgin, the Queen Mother, so that she may insert desire into the heart of the servant of God, So-and-so.

As the white spring is boiling under the earth ceaselessly in the Summer, so may the heart and soul of [the female] God’s servant, So-and-so, boil and burn after me, the servant of God, So-and-so.

As no man can live without bread, without salt, without garments, without sustenance, so in the same way may the [female] servant of God, So-and-so, not be able to live without me, the servant of God, So-and-so.

As it is hard for fish to live on dry banks without cold water, so may it be for the [female] servant of God, So-and-so, without me, the servant of God, So-and-so.

As it is hard for an infant to live without his mother and for the mother without her child, may it be equally hard for the [female] servant of God, So-and-so, to live without me, the servant of God, So-and-so.

As bulls jump on the cow or as the cow raises her head on the Feast Day of St. Peter and curls her tail, so may it be in the same way that the [female] servant of God, So-and-so, run and search for me, the servant of God, So-and-so, without fear of God or shame of people. May she kiss me in the mouth, embracing me with her arms and make love.

As hops are twisting around the stick according to the sun, so in the same way may the [female] servant of God, So-and so, twist around me, the servant of God, So-and-so.

As the morning dew blossoms, longing for the red sun to come from the high mountains, may also the [female] servant of God, So-and-so, in the same way long for me, the servant of God, So-and-so, every day and every hour, now and always, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Приворотный заговор (присушка, любжа)

Наговаривается на пищу или питье, которые дают привораживаемой, или на след ее.

Господи Боже, благослови Христос!

Стaну я, раб божий (имя рек) благословясь, пойду перекрестясь, из избы дверьми, со двора в ворота, в чистое поле. В чистом поле, в зеленых кустах, в поморье стоит вертеп; в том вертепе сидит матерая жена на золотом стуле между трeх дверей. Молюся я, раб Божий (имя рек) до ней:

“Ты старая матерая жена, тебе дано от Господа и от Пресвятыя Богородицы ведати меня раба Божия (имя рек) Адамов закон, Еввину любовь, вложи желанное сердце рабе Божией (имя рек) по мне, по рабе Божием (имя рек).”

И тут старая матерая жена милостивая, милосердная, золота ступа, покидает шелковый кужелек, веретенце серебрянное, молится Христу Царю Небесному, Богородице, Матери Царице, вкладывает желанное сердце рабе Божией (имя рек).

Как кипит под землею летом беспрестанно белой ключь, так бы кипело, горело сердце и душа у рабы Божией (имя рек) по мне, по рабе Божием (имя рек).

Как всякой человек не может жить без хлеба, без соли, без платья, без ежи, так бы не можно жить рабе Божией (имя рек) без меня, раба Божия (имя рек).

Коль тошно рыбе жить на сухом берегу, без воды студенныя, так бы тошно было рабе Божией (имя рек) без меня, раба Божия (имя рек).

Коль тошно младенцу без матери своей, а матери без дитяти, толь тошно рабе Божией (имя рек) без меня, раба Божия (имя рек).

Как быки скачут на корову, или как корова в Петровки голову закинет, хвост залупя, так бы раба Божия (имя рек) бегала и искала меня, раба Божия (имя рек), Бога бы не боялась, людей бы не стыдилась, во уста бы целовала, руками обнимала, блуд сотворила.

И как хмель вьется около кола по солнцу, так бы вилась, обнималась около меня, раба Божия (имя рек).

Как цвела утренная роса, дожидаясь краснова солнца из-за гор из-за высоких, так бы дожидалась раба Божия (имя рек) меня, раба Божия (имя рек), на всякий день и на всякий час, всегда, ныне и присно и во веки веков, аминь.[124]

Text № 2: [Spell] for hernia (“white” hernia, or “collar” / “harness”)

To be recited three times; each time after the recitation [the healer] should spit three times.

Having blessed myself, I, the servant of God, will set off, and having made the sign of a cross, will go from the dwelling through the door, and from the courtyard through the gates, to the pure field, via the road along the blue sea.

In the blue sea, there is a holy island of God. On this holy island of God is a holy Church of God. In this holy Church of God there is the Lord’s throne. On this throne of the Lord’s sits the Holy Martyr of Christ Antipas,[125] who is a healer of dental pain, along with saints of Christ, the unmercenary [physicians] Cosmas and Damian [see Figure 5.7].[126]

[Hereby I pray:] “Please heal the suffering and [illness of] tooth pain, and ‘white’ hernia.” And then the Most Holy Martyr of Christ Antipas said, “In this Church of God is Adam’s corpse. Adam’s corpse does not hear the chiming of the bells or church-singing; nor does this, his white corpse, sense ‘walking’ hernia.”

The dead corpse of Adam answers, “I don’t hear the chiming of the bells or church-singing, neither do I sense the ‘walking’ hernia in my white body, either in my nape, or in my sinews, or in my belly, or in my joints, or in my bones, or under my skin, or in my ears, in my eyes, or in my teeth.” So in the same way may the servant of God, So-and-so, not sense in his white body the ‘walking’ hernia, now and forever and to the ages of ages. Amen.

От грыжи: белой грыжи или хомута

Произносится трижды и за каждым разом трижды сплевывается

Стану я, раб Божий, благословясь, пойду, перекрестясь из избы дверьми, из двора воротами, во чистом поле путем дорогою, по край синя моря.

В синем море есть святой Божий остров; на святом Божьем острове святая Божья церковь; в той святой Божьей церкви есть престол Господень, на том престоле Господне есть священномученик Христов Антипа, исцелитель зубной, и безсребренники Христовы Козьма и Дамиан.

“Исцелите скорбь и болезнь зубную и грыжу белую.” И речет священномученик Христов Антипа: “Есть в той Божьей Церкви Адамово тело, не слышит Адамово тело звону колокольнева, пения церковнаго, в белом теле ходячей грыжи.”

И отвещает мертвое тело Адамово: “Я не слышу звона колокольнева, пенья церковнаго, в белом теле ходячей грыжи, тильной, жильной, пуповой, суставной, становой, подкожной, ушной, глазной, зубной.” Так же раб Божий (имя рек) не слышал бы в себе в белом теле ходячей грыжи, отныне и до века, век по веку веков. Аминь.[127]

Fig. 5.7: The twin brother-physician-saints Cosmas and Damian. Fresco from the Church of St. George in the city of Kyustendil, South-Western Bulgaria (1878–1882). Photo FBG.

Text № 3: [Spell] against toothache

I, the Servant of God, So-and-so, having blessed myself, shall set off and, having made the sign of a cross, shall exit from the dwelling through the doors and from the courtyard through the gates. I will go out to the wide street and will look and stare at the bright new moon.

In this new moon are two brothers, Kavel’,[128] and Avel’.[129] Just like they don’t feel pain and stinging in their teeth, so may my teeth, of the servant of God, So-and-so, feel neither pain nor stinging.

От зубной боли

Стану я, раб Божий (имя рек) благословясь, выйду перекрестясь, из избы дверьми, из двора воротами. Выйду я на широкую улицу, посмотрю и погляжу на млад светел месяц.

В том младу месяцу два брата родные: Кавель да Авель. Как у них зубы не болят и не щипят, так бы у меня, раба Божия (имя рек), не болели и не щипели.[130]

Text № 4: [To be recited] when collecting healing herbs

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,[131] amen. O Lord and the Mother of God, the Most Holy Virgin Theotokos, and the Holy righteous Father Abraham, bless me. I came to you to ask for permission to pick herbs for whatever benefit against all kinds of sickness, for all Orthodox Christians.

The Holy righteous Father Abraham was ploughing the fields, Simon the Zealot [see Figure 5.8][132] was sowing it. [The Holy Prophet] Elijah was watering it. And the Lord was helping. The sky is father while the earth is mother. Please O Lord, bless this herb, to be collected for all kinds of benefits, for all Orthodox Christians. Amen, amen, amen.

When you go to collect these herbs, you must make six prostrations at home and six prostrations in front of the herb.

При собирания целебных трав

Во имя Отца и Сына и Святаго Духа, аминь. Благослови, Господи, Мать Божия, Пресвятая Дева Богородица и святой отец праведный Абрам, я пришел к вам испросить у вас дозволение мне трав сорвать на всякую пользу и от всякой болезни всем православным христианам.

Святой праведный отец Абрам все поле орал, Симеон Зилот садил, Илья поливал, Господь помогал. Небо—отец, а земля—мать. Благослови, Господи, эту траву рвать на всякую пользу всем православным христианам. Аминь (трижды).

Когда идешь траву рвать, нужно сделать шесть поклонов дома и шесть при самой траве.[133]

Fig. 5.8: Simon the Zealot (Zelotes). Fresco from the Church of St. George in the city of Kyustendil, South-Western Bulgaria (1878–1882). Photo FBG.

Text № 5: [To be recited] while searching for treasure

On the seven hills of Zion stands a stone stele; and on this stone stele there is a sealed book, fixed with an iron padlock, locked with a golden key. On these seven hills of Zion, on this stone stele, the most wise King Solomon himself put a sealed book, fixed with an iron padlock and locked with a golden key.

I will bow before the most wise King, having armed myself with God’s word, and with this book will I find my way to treasure hidden in the earth, and with God’s blessing I will go excavating. Grant me—So-and-so—O Lord, to be rid of evil adversaries and to extract gold from the earth for good deeds, to please little orphans, to build God’s temples, to distribute [it] among poor brethren, and for me, So-and-so, for honest business and trade.

При отыскивании кладов

На семи горах на Сионских стоит великий столб каменный; на тем столбе каменном лежит книга запечатана, железным замком заперта, золотым ключем замкнута. На семи горах на Сионских, на столб тот каменный положил книгу запечатану, железным замком заперту, золотыим ключем замкнуту сам премудрый царь Соломон.

Я премудрому царю поклонюся, Божиим словом воорожуся, в книге той о поклажах земных справляюся, с благословением на рытву отправлюся. Подаждь, Боже, мне (имя рек) приставников злых от поклажи отогнати, злата из земли на добрыя дела взяти, сиротам малым на утешение, Божиих храмов на построение, всей нищей братии на разделение, а мне (имя рек) на честну торговлю купецкую.[134]

Text № 6: [To be recited] when one goes to those in power or to pacify judges

I, the servant of God, will set off towards judges and officials; may their tongue be like an ox’s, their heart be like King David’s, may Solomon, the hand of the Saviour, be our judge.

As a dead person lies in the damp earth without moving his legs, without speaking with this tongue, and without causing evil with his heart, may, in the same way, judges, officials, enemies and foes not speak with their tongues, may they not create trouble with their hearts, may their legs not move, may their hands not rise, may their mouths not open, may instead their blood coagulate, may their eyes blur and be covered with darkness, and may their heads fall off their shoulders.

На подход ко властям или на умилостивление судей

Пойду я, раб Божий, к судьям и начальникам; будь их язык воловий, сердце царя Давида, разсудит нас царь Соломон, Спасова рука.

Как мертвый человек в сырой земле лежит, ногами не движет, языком не говорит, сердцем зла не творит,—так бы судьи, начальники, враги и супостаты языком не говорили, сердцем зла не творили, ноги бы их не подвигалися, руки не подымалися, уста бы не отверзалися, а кровью бы они запекалися, очи бы у них помутилися, темнотою покрылися, с плеч буйна голова свалилася.[135]

Part 2: Aqedah in folklore tradition

Text № 1: The young fellow Abraham

[1]The young fellow Avram [Abraham] is walking round the courtyard

Wringing his icy hands,

Shedding tears like rain,

And praying to God:

[5]“Oh, God, oh, dear God!

You have given me everything, God,

There is only one thing you haven’t given me—

A male offspring from my heart,

To walk around the courtyard,

[10]To say ‘Mother!,’ and ‘Father!,’

To go then to the field,

To go to the field and plough it,

To fetch a cartful of firewood,

Of firewood, and of flour!

[15]Give me, My Lord, give me

An offspring from my heart,

To walk around the courtyard,

To say ‘Mother!,’ and ‘Father!,’

To go then to the field,

[20]To go to the field and plough it,

To fetch a cartful of firewood,

Of firewood, and of flour!

I vow to slaughter him as a kurban sacrifice

To the Lord God and to Saint Georgy [George]!”

[25]God stood there listening,

And they had an offspring from the heart,

And christened him, and named him after Saint Georgy.

Georgy grew, and grew up,

And became a fifteen-year old.

[30]And they sent him to the field,

To the field, to plough it,

To fetch a cartful of firewood,

Of firewood and of flour.

When he came back home,

[35]His mother was baking loaves,

Baking them and weeping.

His father was whetting knives,

Whetting them and weeping.

Georgy said to his mother:

[40]“Mother, my dearest mother!

Why are you baking white loaves,

Baking them, mother, and weeping?

Why is father whetting knives,

Whetting them and weeping?

[45]Tomorrow is the good day of Saint Georgy,

Everybody is joyful,

Why are you so woebegone?”

His mother said to Georgy:

“Don’t ask me Georgy, don’t ask me,

[50]But go and ask your father!”

Georgy approached his father

And said to him, asking him:

“Father, my dearest father!

Why are you whetting those knives,

[55]Whetting them and weeping,

Instead of whetting them and singing?

Why is mother baking loaves,

Baking them and weeping,

Instead of baking and singing?

[60]Tomorrow is the good day of Saint Georgy,

Everybody is joyful,

And why are you so woebegone?”

“Georgy, my one and only!

How could I whet them and sing,

[65]Since your father has vowed

To slaughter you as a kurban sacrifice

To Our Lord, to Saint Georgy?”

“Father, my dearest father,

Tie my hands securely,

[70]My hands, father, and my legs—

Lest I could reach anything with my hands,

Lest I could move my legs!”

His father tied his hands,

His hands, as well as his legs,

[75]And when he reached for his head,

God descended from Heaven,

God—Saint Georgy himself,

And He held out his hand

And said to him:

[80]“Stop, Avram—what have you done?

A man is not to be slaughtered

As a kurban sacrifice to God, to Saint Georgy!

A lamb is to be slaughtered instead!”

The father untied his child’s hands,

[85]His child’s hands, as well as his child’s legs,

And went and caught the best ram,

The ram with nine bells,

And slaughtered him as a kurban sacrifice,

And his kith and kin got together,

[90]And they ate and drank for three days,

[91]Praising the Lord God and Saint Georgy!

That is why the feast day of Saint Georgy is celebrated, that’s why a lamb is slaughtered as a kurban sacrifice to God and for good health and a rich harvest.

Mлад Аврам

[1]По двори ходи млад Аврам

И кърши ръки като лед

И рони сълзи като дъжд,

Па се на Бога молеше:

[5]“Бре Боже, бре мили Боже!

Всичко ми, Боже, отдаде,

Само ми едно не даде,

От сърце мъжка рожбица,

По двори да ми походи,

[10]‘Мамо!’ и ‘Татко!’ да рече,

Че на нива да иде,

На нива оран да оре,

Кола дърва да докара,

Кола дърва и кола брашно!

[15]Отдай ми, Боже, отдай ми,

От сърце рожба да видя,

По двори да ми походи,

‘Мамо!’ и ‘Татко!’ да рече,

На нивата да отиде,

[20]На нива оран да оре,

Кола дърва да докара,

Кола дърва и кола брашно!

Курбан ще да го заколя,

На Бога, на свети Георги!”

[25]Де стоял Господ, та слушал,

От сърце рожба родиха,

На свети Гьорги кръстиха.

Расъл ми Георги, порасъл,

По на петнайсе години.

[30]Че го на нива пратиха,

На нива оран да оре,

Кола дърва да докара,

Кола дърва и кола брашно.

Кога си у дома дойде,

[35]Майка му пече хлябове,

Хем ги пече, хем плаче.

Тейко му остри ножове,

Хем остри, тейно, хем плаче.

Георги си майци думаше:

[40]“Мамо льо, мила мамо!

Що печеш бели лябове,

Хем ги печеш, мале, хем плачеш?

Що тейно остри ножове?

Ем остри тейно, ем плаче?

[45]Утре е личен Гергьовден,

Сичките ора—радостни,

Пък вие жалби жалите?”

Мама си Георги продума:

“Немой ме пита, Георги ле,

[50]Иди попитай тяйна си!”

Георги при тейно отиде

И си на тейно продума:

“Тейне ле, милинкин тейне!

Що остриш тия ножове,

[55]Хем остриш тейне, хем плачеш,

Та ги не остриш да пяеш?

Що мама пече лябове,

Ем ги пече, ем плаче,

Та ги не пече да пяе?

[60]Утре е личен Гергьовден,

Сичките хора—радостни,

Пък вие жалби жалите?”

“Георги, един на татко!

Как да ги остря и пяя,

[65]Тейно те беше обрекъл

Курбан да си те заколи

На Бога, на свети Георги!”

“Тейне ле, милинкин тейне,

Хубаво ми вързи ръките,

[70]Ръките, тейне, ногите,

Със ръки да не пофана,

Със ноги да не помръдна!”

Тяйно му вързал ръките,

Ръките, още ногите,

[75]Таман му глава закърши,

Спусна се Господ от небо,

Господ—сам си свети Георги

И му ръката пофана,

И му е дума продумал:

[80]“Бре стой, Авраме, що стори!

Човек се курбан не коли

На Бога, на свети Георги,

Ами се коли агънце!”

Тейно му ръки отвърза,

[85]Ръките, още ногите,

Па фанал най баш овена,

Овена с девет звънеца,

Та си го курбан заколил,

Че си е родата посъбрал,

[90]Три дена яли и пили

[91]За Бога, за свети Георги!

Затуй се тачи Гергьовден! Затуй се коли агънце—курбан на Бога, за здраве и берекет.[136]

Abbreviations

AEH | Acta Ethnographica Hungarica. Magyar Tudományos Akadémia (Budapest), Akademiai Kiado, Vol. 1–, 1950 –.
BF | Български фолклор. Институт за фолклор при БАН, София, Кн.1–, 1975–.
Le Muséon | Le Muséon: Revue d’Études Orientales. Louvain-la-Neuve, T. 1–, 1881–.
SbNU | Сборникъ за народни умотворения, наука и книжнина, Кн. 1–27, 1889–1913; Сборник за народни умотворения и народопис, Кн. 28 –, 1914–.
SMS | Studia mythologica Slavica. The Institute of Slovenian Ethnology at ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana, and the Department of Linguistics of the University in Pisa, T. 1–, 1998– ; from 1999 onwards it is published in cooperation with the University of Udine.

References

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Footnotes

[1] This article incorporates results of the author’s earlier publications on the topic of vernacular renditions of some Biblical and Quranic narratives; see Badalanova (1994; 1997–1998; 2001; 2002a,b; 2003; 2008) and Badalanova Geller (2008; 2010).

[2] See in this connection the discussion in Mochul’skiĭ (1886; 1887); Gaster (1887; 1900; 1915); Dähnhardt (1907; 1909); Utley (1945); Tolstaya (1998); Nagy (1986–1988; 2006; 2007). For a typological analysis of multilingual transmissions of Bible-related narratives in non-European traditional societies (with special emphasis on indigenous mythologies and folklore of Western American Indians, after their conversion to Christianity), see Ramsey (1977). On similar processes characterizing the domestication of Islamic textual traditions among the indigenous Gayo communities in highland Sumatra (Indonesia), see Bowen (1992, 495–516).

[3] See below (section 5.4 and section 5.5); see also Part 1 of the Appendix (p. 153ff.).

[4] See Georgieva (1991); Lozanova (2000; 2002; 2003; 2006); Mikov (2005; 2007); Stoyanov (2001; 2004). See also the discussion in Utley (1968); Schwarzbaum (1982); Calder (1988); Bowen (1992); Dundes (2003).

[5] On the “narrators for the common folk” (quṣṣāṣ al-ʿāmm) as “popular theologians” consult the discussion in the Introduction to the English translation (by W. M. Thackston) of the eleventh century collection of the Tales of the Prophets attributed to Muhammad ibn Abd Allah al-Kisai (Thackston 1997, xvii–xxiv, xxviii). See also Schwarzbaum (1982, 9, 11–12, 62–75).

[6] On Alevi communities and their social organization see Georgieva (1991); Shankland (2003; 2006, 19–26, 67–129, 134–146, 185–206) and Gramatikova (2011). See also Olsson, Özdalga, Raudvere (eds.) (1998) and Dressler (2013). Further on Islamic heterodox traditions see Birge 1937; Melikoff (1992; 1998); Mikov (2005; 2007) and Norris (2006); on Alevi poetry see Dressler (2003).

[7] Excerpts of the Sevar Quran spiritual stanzas are published in the present volume; see Chapter 6. Similar vernacular usage of the term “Quran” among the Kizilbaş communities in the Rhodope mountains, South-Eastern Bulgaria, was noted by Frederick de Jong (1993, 206–208).

[8] According to the Alevi anthropogonic scheme, “the four basic cosmic elements, water [Şeriat], air [Tarikat], fire [Marifet] and earth [Hakikat]” are related “to the four levels of being [ervâh] in Man: mineral [ruh-i cismani], vegetable [ruh-i nebati], animal [ruh-i haywani] and human [ruh-i insani]. When all four ervâh are annihilated and replaced by the ruh-i safi (the pure spirit) the stage of the Perfect Man [insan-ı kâmil] has been reached” (Jong 1989, 9). Further on the “four doors of enlightment” (Şeriat, Tarikat, Marifet and Hakikat) in Alevi tradition, see Shankland (2003, 85–86,187). See also the discussion in Crone (2012, 483–484).

[9] The author’s translation.

[10] See Marinov et al. (1955, 111) and Badalanova Geller (2008, 3).

[11] For a thorough analysis of the semantic coverage of the term Tarikat (frequently used in conjunction with the term Şeriat) among the Alevis see Shankland (2003, 84–89, 99, 112–113, 116–118, 121, 139–140).

[12] In Bulgaria, during the Soviet period, this top-rung position in the local government was usually assigned to a Communist Party member.

[13] Cf. Marinov et al. (1955, 112).

[14] See earlier discussion in Badalanova (2008) and Badalanova Geller (2008). On orality and Biblical textuality see Kelber (1983); Aune (1991); Andersen (1991); Ruger (1991); Elman and Gershoni (2000); Kawashima (2004); Bauckham (2006); Grafton and Williams (2006); Hasan-Rokem (2009, 29–55); Sabar (2009, 135–169) and Yassif (2009, 61–73). On traces of oral traditions in parabiblical writings see Mochul’skiĭ (1894); Flusser (1971) and Adler (1986–1987; 2013). On Biblical folklore see Niditch (1985; 1993; 1996; 2000); see also Kirkpatrick (1988), as well as Brewer (1979) and Rose (1938). Dundes (1999), on the other hand, suggests that Holy Writ is, in fact, oral literature and advocates that the Biblical corpus should be considered “as folklore”; a similar approach is employed by him in the analysis of the Quranic text; see Dundes (2003).

[15] They were performed by a particular social subclass of wandering blind minstrels [калеки перехожие].

[16] The term used in vernacular genre taxonomy to designate this type of religious poem/song is “psalm” [пса́льма]; see Sumtsov (1888, 36); Speranskiĭ (1899, 7–9, note 5) and Fedotov (1991, 36). Significantly, “the Russian Tsar” David Eseevich / Avseevich [Давид Есеевич / Асеевич] (that is, “David, the son of Jesse,” to whom the authorship of the Psalter is traditionally attributed) features in many such chants as the “key-interpreter” of divine wisdom encapsulated in the allegorical language of the texts; see Mochul’skiĭ (1886, (16: 4): 216); Bezsonov (1861, 269–278) (texts № 76, 77). On the other hand, among Slavonic scribes the Psalter was often referred to as “Glubina” [Глубина], that is, “depth”; see Mochul’skiĭ (1887, (17:1): 138–139). Furthermore the same term was likewise employed to label The Discussion Between the Three Saints and The Apocalypse of John apocryphal writings. The use of similar genre taxonomy in relation to the Psalter on the one hand and Slavonic parabiblical literature [апокрифическая Библия] and oral spiritual stanzas [духовные стихи] on the other suggests that the latter were perceived as vernacular counterparts of Scriptures; see Mochul’skiĭ (1887, (17:1): 131–132, 136, 138–139; 1887, (18:3): 90–91). See also the following note.

[17] The formulaic phrase Голубиная книгa may be rendered in some versions of the poem as Глубинная книгa; considering the specific semantic diapason of the Russian form for “depth” [глубь], meaning both “profundity” and “wisdom” (see the discussion above), the connotation of the term Глубинная книгa may be thus construed accordingly as “the Deep / Innate / Profound / Unfathomable / Impenetrable / Incomprehensible / Secret Book”; indeed, the spiritual poems marked by this title contain elaborate cosmogonies and anthropogonies relating profound “holy secrets” of Creation of the Universe and Man. They are written in a mysteriously sealed divine Book which descends from Heaven to Earth. Then again, as pointed out by James Russell, the form “dove” [голубь], “referring presumably to the Holy Spirit, may have been a narratio facilior for an original ‘depth’ [глубь]”; see Russell (2009, 142). Following this line of argument, it may be suggested that the stock phrase Голубиная книгa may also be interpreted as “The Book of the Holy Spirit.” Therefore, in the current text I am tempted to interpret the concept of “deep” (as applied to knowledge) as “spiritual wisdom.” See also the discussion in Rozhdestvenskaya (2000, 394). On the other hand, Istrin had argued that the Slavonic “глубина” was most probably a domesticated version of the Greek term Μαργαρίται, which was conventionally used to designate either the cycle of John Chrysostom’s homiles, Adversus Judaeos (the first translations of which appeared among the Balkan Slavs no later than the fourteenth century), or other related exegetical compilations. Indeed, in Slavonic tradition the term глубина was part of a specific terminological cluster within the corpus, used interchangeably with titles such as Маргарит, Жемчуг, Маргаритъ Златоустовъ, Жемчюгъ Златоустовъ, Жемчюжная Матица, Златая Матица, etc.; see Istrin (1898, 478–489). Further on the content of The Rhyme of the Book of the Dove see Mochul’skiĭ (1886; 1887); Lincoln (1986, 3–12, 21–25, 32, 144–145).

[18] See also in this connection the discussion in Turilov and Chernetsov (2002, 47).

[19] Further on the conceptualization of Russia as a “Holy Land” see Uspenskiĭ (1996, 386–392).

[20] Cf. Fasmer (1986–1987, (2), 374–375) and Uspenskiĭ (1996, 387).

[21] Cf. Gen 1: 26–28.

[22] As in Gen 2:7.

[23] A similar approach to the origin of human speech—from the breath of God blown into the human mouth—is attested in the apocryphal Apocalypse of Enoch (1 Enoch 14: 2–3).

[24] Together with the interpretation of the autonym “Slavs” as the “People of the Word/Logos,” in many Slavonic sources (and especially those composed during the Romanticism) there circulated another ethnocentric etymological construct based on the phonetic similarity between the ethnonym Slověninъ (var. Slavěninъ) / Slověne (var. Slavěne) and the lexeme denoting “glory” (slava). Hence the ethnonym “Slavs” was interpreted as the “Glorious People”; see Ivanov and Toporov (2000, 418). It was employed as a powerful rhetorical device in home-spun publicist writings and political pamphlets concerned with issues related to independence movements, especially among the Balkan Slavs in the period of their National Revival.

[25] See also the discussion in Ivanov and Toporov (2000, 417–418).

[26] See Partridge (1966, 66).

[27] See Radchenko (1910); Ivanov (1925); Obolensky (1948); Turdeanu (1950); Dimitrova-Marinova (1998); Stoyanov (2000); Szwat-Gyłybowa (2010); Tsibranska-Kostova and Raykova (2008) and Bozhilov, Totomanova and Biliarski (2012, 23–49).

[28] See Davidov (1976, 39).

[29] See Kiselkov (1942 [1921]) and Popruzhenko (1936, 1–80).

[30] Gen 2: 18–24.

[31] See SbNU 8 (1892, 180–181), text № 2 (Адам дава име на сички божи творения) and Tsepenkov (2006 (4), 19–20), text № 9. See also Badalanova Geller (2010, 40–42).

[32] Recorded by Dobrovol’skiĭ in the second half of the nineteenth century in the former Smolensk Gubernia of the Russian Empire; see also the next note.

[33] See Dobrovol’skiĭ (1891, 235).

[34] See Dal’ (1880 (1), 513): воскилицание изумленья, а иногда и указания: вот где, погляди-ка: напр. Ева где лежит во.

[35] See Tolstaya (1998, 32).

[36] See Shapkarev (1973, 267) (Пак за кучиньа-та и за Каиньа).

[37] See Badalanova (1994, 18–19) (text № 35).

[38] See the discussion in Finkel (2014).

[39] Coracles were still being used in Iraq until the 1930s.

[40] Related accounts are published by some Russian folklorists; see for instance the legend recorded in the village of Knyazhevo [Княжево] in the Tambov region of the Russian Federation by S. Dubrovina (2002, 3) from the local storyteller Sergey Fedorovich Mazaev [Сергей Федорович Мазаев] (born 1915) and his wife Evdokiya Yakovlevna Mazaeva [Евдокия Яковлевна Мазаева] (born 1916).

[41] The original Bulgarian text was published by the author; see Badalanova (1993, 147).

[42] Gen 22: 1–19.

[43] Surah 37:99–110.

[44] See Calder (1988); Firestone (1989; 2001); Popova (1995); Badalanova (2001; 2002a; 2002b); Noort and Tigchelaar (2002) and Kessler (2004).

[45] See SbNU 1 (1889: 27), text № 4; SbNU 2 (1890: 22–25), texts № 1, 2, 3, 4; SbNU 3 (1890: 38); SbNU 10 (1894: 11–12), text № 3; SbNU 27 (1913: 302), text № 211. See also Miladinovtsi (1861), text № 29; Bezsonov (1864, 12–31), texts № 531, 532; Zhivkov and Boyadzhieva (1993 (1), 364–373), texts № 484–494; see also Part 2 of the Appendix (p. 160).

[46] See Gen 22: 17.

[47] See Gerov (1897, (2), 433); Andreychin et al. (1963, 355); Marinov (1981, 84, 145, 344–352, 367–368, 605–616, 713, 721–722; 1984, 566–579).

[48] See Gerov (1899, (3), 308); Andreychin et al. (1963, 507) and Marinov (1981, 84, 85, 348–352, 720–723; 1984, 571–579).

[49] See Čajkanović and Đurić (1985, 317–318).

[50] See Gerov (1904, (5), 527–528); Andreychin et al. (1963, 993) and Marinov (1981, 145–147, 344–345, 350–351).

[51] See Marinov (1981, 347–349).

[52] See Gerov (1897, (2), 424).

[53] See Gerov (1899, (3), 78).

[54] See Gerov (1904, (5), 194); Andreychin et al. (1963, 846) and Marinov (1981, 344–345, 713–720; 1984, 85–86, 553–565).

[55] See Gerov (1899, (3), 15).

[56] See Georgiev et al. (1971, 3–4).

[57] See Bonchev (2002, (1), 22) and Fasmer (1986–1987, (1), 61).

[58] Cf. Badalanova Geller (2008, 30–78).

[59] See in this connection the discussion in Delaney (1991, 298–303).

[60] The fragment quoted above follows the English translation of the original, as presented in the third part of the Appendix in Manns (1995, 200–201).

[61] Translation by M. Mahler; see Manns (1995, 186).

[62] The above fragment is quoted after McNamara’s translation of the original Aramaic text into English, as published in the first chapter of the Appendix in Manns (1995, 188).

[63] See Dal’ (1880–1882, (1), 5).

[64] See Dal’ (1880–1882, (1), 5) and Hrinchenko (1927, 4).

[65] See Dal’ (1880–1882, (1), 5); Ryan (1999, 176, 271); Ippolitova (2002b, 425–426; 2002a, 446) and Chasovnikova (2003).

[66] See Zabylin (1880, 241).

[67] See http://fictionbook.ru/author/andreyi_romanovskiyi/magicheskie_svoyistva_trav_unikalnyie_ri/read_online.html, accessed April 7, 2017.

[68] See footnote 67.

[69] http://lechattravy.ru/lekarstvennye-travy/lechattravy-ru-adamov-koren-tamus-50g-458, accessed April 7, 2017.

[70] See Hrinchenko (1927, 4).

[71] See Georgiev et al. (1971, 60–61); Gerov (1895, (1), 54); Dal’ (1880 (1), 105); Čajkanović and Đurić (1985, 35–36, 259) and Ippolitova (2002b, 428; 2002a, 448).

[72] See Sumtsov (1888, 151, 158–159); Gerov (1895, (1), 54); Marinov (1981, 618); Dal’ (1880 (1), 105) and Čajkanović and Đurić (1985, 301).

[73] See Čajkanović and Đurić (1985, 104–105).

[74] See Ippolitova (2002a, 443) and Čajkanović and Đurić (1985, 191).

[75] Recorded in the Novgorod Gubernia of the Russian Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century by N. Chernyshev and published by L. N. Maykov in his famous collection of Russian spells (Maykov 1869, 13–14) (see text № 1 in Part 1 of the Appendix, p. 153ff.).

[76] Cf. Faraone (1999, 168) on Greek magic spells which cause a woman to lose her sense of shame.

[77] For similar oral love-inducing spells (заговоры приворотные, присушки и любжи) see Maykov (1869, 7–24) (texts № 1–33). See also the discussion in Toporkov (2005, 28–45, 110–141, 153–182).

[78] Consult the monographs of A. Yudin (1997), V. Klyaus (1997) and others.

[79] See Yudin (1997, 69–70).

[80] Adam’s name is habitually mentioned in a similar context in other healing incantations against hernia and toothache.

[81] See Maykov (1869, 54) (text № 123).

[82] Due to the folk etymology of Noah’s name, which is considered to be related to the verb “ныть,” which in Russian means “to ache”; see Yudin (1997, 71).

[83] See Yudin (1997, 68–69).

[84] See Yudin (1997, 71).

[85] See Yudin (1997, 68).

[86] See Yudin (1997, 72).

[87] See Yudin (1997, 220–221) and Klyaus (1997, 133).

[88] For Bulgarian tradition see SbNU 11 (1894: 83) (text № 3); for Ukrainian tradition see Bushkevich (2002, 11–12); for Polish tradition see Bartmiński and Niebrzegowska (1996, 162, 166).

[89] See Maykov (1869, 38) (text № 79).

[90] See Maykov (1869, 103) (text № 253) and Yudin (1997, 69).

[91] See Maykov (1869, 82) (text № 209) and Yudin (1997, 72–73).

[92] See Yudin (1997, 137–138).

[93] As shown by M. Gaster (1900), J. Spier (1993) and others, similar attestations of this type of incantation can be found in Jewish magic texts, as well as in Aramaic magic bowls. See also the discussion in Detelić (2001) and Badalanova Geller (2015).

[94] See Yudin (1997, 137–138).

[95] See Ryan (2006).

[96] See Yudin (1997, 140).

[97] See Yudin (1997, 138).

[98] See Veselovskiĭ (1886) and Smilyanskaya (2002, 154–155) (texts № 1748–7, 1748–8).

[99] See Gippius (2005).

[100] See Yudin (1997, 138–139).

[101] See Yudin (1997, 72–73).

[102] Cf. 3 Kings 22: 34-36: But someone drew his bow at random and hit the king of Israel between the sections of his armor. The king told his chariot driver, “Wheel around and get me out of the fighting. I’ve been wounded.” All day long the battle raged, and the king was propped up in his chariot facing the Arameans. The blood from his wound ran onto the floor of the chariot, and that evening he died. As the sun was setting, a cry spread through the army: “Every man to his town. Every man to his land!”

[103] See Yudin (1997, 71).

[104] On Solomon’s wondrous exploits and his image as magus, conjurer and esoteric king see Torijano (2002).

[105] See Tikhonravov (1863 (1), 254–258).

[106] Significantly, the folk image of the Prophet Elijah as “the master of celestial fire” is further enhanced by numerous vernacular renditions of the canonical narrative maintaining that he was taken up in a whirlwind to heaven, in a fiery chariot to which horses of flames are harnessed (4 Kings 2: 11). The motif is also attested in iconography.

[107] In Slavonic apocryphal writings and oral tradition (legends, incantations and spells) David also comes to be regarded as an exorcist, perhaps because of his ability to expel evil spirits by his music (cf. 1 Samuel 16: 14–23); see also Speranskiĭ (1899, 13).

[108] See Yudin (1997, 137).

[109] Cf. 2 Samuel 11.

[110] See Maykov (1869, 106–107) (text № 265) and Yudin (1997, 138).

[111] For similar patterns in other traditions see Meyer and Smith (1999, 45–46) (text № 21).

[112] See Maykov (1869, 149–150) (text № 342).

[113] See his seminal article “History of Russian Law as a linguistic and semiotic problem” (Zhivov 1988).

[114] A similar typology of “magistrate” demons (gallû) are known from Mesopotamia; see Geller (2011).

[115] See Zhivov (1988, 116, note 83).

[116] See Yatsimirskiĭ (1913, 76–92).

[117] As cited in Gen 12:10–20.

[118] Cf. Exodus 19: 19; Psalm 104: 7; Job 36: 32; 37: 2, etc.

[119] Parallel traditions exist, according to which thunder is produced by the wheels of the chariot of the Prophet Elijah rolling in the heavenly firmament, whilst lightning originates from his whip. These will be analyzed elsewhere.

[120] See Pypin (1862, 169).

[121] I am indebted to Boris Uspenskiĭ for this idea; on the aesthetics of the low bass (basso profondo) voice in Russian musical culture see Uspenskiĭ (2001, 292–293). It should be pointed out in this connection that in classical Russian opera, the role of the male protagonist is usually designated by the lowest vocal range within the modal register (bass), and that of the male antagonist—by the highest male voice within the modal register (tenor). This type of voice designation is totally opposite to Western opera, where the roles of the protagonists tend to be played by tenor singers whilst those of the antagonists by bass singers.

[122] Cf. Dialogues of Saint Gregory, Book 11, Epistle 13.

[123] Lit. golden-mortar one; most probably, the Russian noun стопа (= “foot”) is misspelled and rendered as ступа (= “mortar”), due to the phonetic resemblance of the latter with the verb ступать / ступить (= “to step”), derived from Church Slavonic стѫпити. The latter is also related to Greek forms στέμβω (“step on,” “walk over”) and ἀστεμφής (“invincible”).

[124] Recorded in the Novgorod Gubernia of the Russian Empire by N. Chernyshev and published by L. N. Maykov (1869, 13–14) (text № 11).

[125] Saint Antipas of Pergamum / Pergamon was martyred during the reign of Domitian (in c. CE 92). As pointed out by Hastings (1898, 107), “according to one form of his Acts (quoted by the Bollandists from a Synoxarion), he prayed that those suffering from toothache might be relieved at his tomb.” Saint Antipas is commemorated April 11th.

[126] Saints Cosmas and Damian were twin brothers and physicians, who did not accept payment for their services. In the Orthodox tradition there are three different sets of saints by the same names: Cosmas and Damian of Cilicia, Arabia (feast day October 17); Cosmas and Damian of Asia Minor (feast day November 1); Cosmas and Damian of Rome (feast day July 1). They are conventionally depicted holding medicinal boxes and cross-shaped spoons for dispensing remedies.

[127] Recorded in the Olonetsk Gubernia of the Russian Empire by E. Barsov and published by L. N. Maykov (1869, 54) (text № 123).

[128] That is, Cain. The name of the firstborn of Adam and Eve is transformed into the fictitious anthroponym Kavel’ [Кавель] which is phonetically linked to the name of the name of the second son Abel (pronounced in Russian as Avel’ [Авель]).

[129] That is, Abel; see the previous note.

[130] Recorded in the Arkhangel’sk Gubernia of the Russian Empire by P. Efimenko and published by L. N. Maykov (1869, 38) (text № 79).

[131] Used in the incipit of this spell is the Trinitarian formula (referring to the three persons of the Christian Trinity); cf. Matthew 28:19 (“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”).

[132] Simon the Zealot (Zelotes) was one of the twelve apostles of Jesus; cf. Luke 6:15, Acts 1: 13.

[133] Recorded in Voronezh County of the Russian Empire by M. Popov; published by L. N. Maykov (1869, 103), (text № 253).

[134] Recorded in Simbirsk County of the Russian Empire and published by L. N. Maykov (1869, 106–107) (text № 265).

[135] Recorded in Simbirsk County of the Russian Empire by V. Yurlov and published by L. N. Maykov (1869, 149–150) (text № 342).

[136] The text was recorded by the author in July 1977 in the village of Glavan, Stara Zagora region (Bulgaria). The account was given by Stana Bozhkova Vlaeva, a peasant farmer with no formal education who was born in 1915 in the same village.

6. Islamic Mystical Poetry and Alevi Rhapsodes From the Village of Sevar, Bulgaria

Florentina Badalanova Geller

For Lyubomir Mikov

The texts transcribed and translated below were recorded in the Alevi (heterodox Muslim) village of Sevar, Razgrad District, North-Eastern Bulgaria, in the mid-twentieth century by Khasan Karakhiuseinov [Хасан Карахюсеинов], who donated the manuscript of his anthology of folk poems to the archival collection of the Ethnographic Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia. It is currently kept under record № AEIM 845, “Ethnographic materials in Turkish from the village of Sevar, Razgrad district” [Етнографски материали на турски от с. Севар, Разградско].[1] The material was found by the author in 2006 while working on the British Academy research project “Folk Religion in the Balkans.” A preliminary translation of excerpts from Karakhiuseinov’s anthology was prepared by Orhan Elmaz in 2010; the Turkish verses were digitalised and the translation revised and corrected in 2016 by Ekin Kilic (with the assistance of Atilla Erden).[2] The author extends sincere gratitude to Elmaz, Kilic and Erden. This preliminary translation represents work in progress, but a fuller study of these rhymes is necessary. Orthography and punctuation follow those of the original Turkish manuscript, as prepared by Khasan Karakhiuseinov. His transcriptions offer phonetic notations for a cluster of Turkish popular poems (the authorship of some of which can be attributed to various “revered ozans” who were celebrated among the Alevis), as if following the dictation of the local rhapsodes. Apparently, the latter did not always understand the exact meaning of some of the words of their songs but nevertheless struggled to convey—to the best of their knowledge—an accurate (even somewhat hypercorrected) imagined “original,” which was regarded as sacred and which they aimed to keep unalterable and untouchable. Clearly, from the perspective of the indigenous ethnohermeneutics, these types of verses were considered by folk exegetes to be “canonical.” Then again, sacred texts do not have to be comprehensible and intelligible to those performing them, but are to be kept free of alterations, corrections, adaptations and amendments, and not necessarily understood. On the other hand, in the particular case of the songs (nefes and ilahis/ilayhis) translated in the present article, the “scribe” Khasan Karakhiuseinov attempted to preserve the “pristine” acoustic corpora of the lyrics as he heard them; he was trying to domesticate the poems according to the rules of the local dialect, coining ad hoc idiosyncratic guidelines of a simple homegrown grammar (albeit sometimes at the expense of the original semantics of the texts rendered by him). The texts below are but an example of this type of mechanisms of transmission of (religious) knowledge, serving as remarkable models for multilingualism, reflecting linguistic and textual allusions to para-Quranic traditions based on a mixture of Turkish, Arabic, and Persian substrata. Although not a Turkologist, the present author has decided to publish this textual corpus with the help of native speakers, in order to rescue it from the obscurity of languishing in an archive from which it was not likely to emerge in the foreseeable future. The main relevance of these mystical Muslim poems for the current volume is that they were designated as “Quran”[3] by local Alevi (Bektaş and Kizilbaş) communities,[4] for whom the sacred character of the wording was beyond doubt.

Text № 1 When the Quran was being written down at the Throne of the Merciful

[1]When the Quran was being written down at the Throne[5] of the Merciful,

I was in the hands of the Inscriber of Strength/Power.[6]

When the Candelabrum was being hung up on the divine light’s tebar,[7]

I was a nightingale on the rosebud.

[5]At the first greeting of Gabriel, the Holy Ones...

I was on the...[8] [of the] stylus of the Forty’s,[9]

In the secret speech of Muhammad Ali,[10]

I was on his tongue, at every utterance.

The Forty set up a cem[11] on the top of the Throne,

[10]The muhabbet[12] came to an end and they continued with the dem;[13]

The Lord kneaded Adam from clay;[14]

At that time I was in Adam’s loins.

I have found my seyran,[15]...is that place,

To those who don’t know his fate, I won’t give even a penny,[16]

[15]To one bird the meal is of eighty thousand cities,

As the food was given, I was by him.

While my forefather Yunus[17] entered the fish-throat,

While he stayed there for forty days and forty nights,

As Ali[18] was hitting [with] the Zülfiqar,[19]

[20]At that time, I was in his arms.[20]

Text № 1 Kuran yazilirkan arsi rahmanda

[1]Kuran yazilirkan arsi rahmanda

Kudiret katibinin elinde idim

Kandil asilirken nur tebarinda

Bülbül idim konca gülündeidim.

[5]Erenler cebrayilin ilk selaminda

Kirklarin leckeri asin kaleminde

Muhamet Alinin sir kelaminda

Her söylerken dilinde idim.

Kirklar ars üstüne kurdular cemi

[10]Muhabet eristi sürdüler demi

Balciktan yuvurdu mevla Ademi

Ovakit ben Ademin belinde idim.

Seyranim bulmusam asik orasi

Kaderin bilmeyene vermem yarisi

[15]Bir kusa seksen bin sehrin darisi

Taham[21] verilerken yaninda idim.

Yonuz dedem balik kursana girdigi zaman

Kirk gün rageci durdugu zaman

Alinin zülfikari caldigi zaman

[20]ol vakit ben onun kolunda idim.

Text № 2 We are among those who say, “Haqq–Muhammad–Ali”

[1]Angel, why are you asking about his[22] religious order?

We are among those who say, “[Haqq–]Muhammad–Ali.”

For the eyes of the beholders[23] nothing is hidden,

We are of those who say, “Haqq–Muhammad–Ali.”[24]

[5]Muhammad Ali is the Leader of the Forty,

The one who calls upon them will not be disregarded,

Let’s throw to Yezît[25] the merhane [26]-stone,

We are of those who say, “Haqq–Muhammad–Ali.”

We wear red on our foreheads,

[10]In our way of hâl,[27] we also sense meaning,

As for Predestination, we hold to what Imam Ja‘far said,[28]

We are of those who say, “Haqq–Muhammad–Ali.”

In the spring, our roses blossom,

And our ways lead to the Haqq,

[15]Our tongues read the names of the Twelve Imams,[29]

We are of those who say, “Haqq–Muhammad–Ali.”

My Pīr Sultan says,[30] Muhammad Ali,

He has set up the rules and the path,

The first is Muhammad, the last is Ali,

[20]We are of those who say, “Haqq–Muhammad–Ali.”[31]

Text № 2 Hak Muhamet Ali deyenlerdeniz

Version A

[1]Melek mesebini nesini sorarsin

Biz muhamet Ali deyenlerdeniz

Gözlüye gizli olmaz sen ne ararsin

Hak[32] muhamet Ali deyenlerdeniz

[5]Muhamet Alidir ki˹r˺klarin basi

Mahrum kalmaz anlere cagiran kisi

Atalim yezide merhane tasi

Hak muhamet Ali deyenlerdeniz

Egnimize kirmizilar giyeriz

[10]Halimizce her manada diyariz

Katerde imam Cafere uyariz

Hak muhamet Ali deyenlerdeniz

Bahar aylarinda acili[33] gülümüz

Haka dogru gider bizim yolumuz

[15]On iki imam ismi okur dilimiz

Hak muhamet Ali deyenlerdeniz

Pir Sultanim heyder muhamet Ali

Onlarda kurmustur erkani yolu

Eveli muhamet ahiri Ali

[20]Hak muhamet Ali deyenlerdeniz

Version B

[1]Melek meshebini nesini sorarsın

Biz Muhammet Ali deyenlerdeniz

Gözlüye gizli olmaz sen ne ararsın

Hak Muhammet Ali Diyenlerdeniz

[5]Muhammet Alidir kırkların bası

Mahrum kalmaz anlere caĝıran kisi

Atalım Yezide merhana tası

Biz Muhammet Ali deyenlerdeniz

Eĝnimize kırmızılar giyeriz

[10]Halimizce her manâda duyarız

Katerde imam Cafere uyarız

Hak Muhammet Ali diyenlerdeniz

Bahar aylarında acar gülümüz

Haka doĝru gider bizim yolumuz

[15]On iki imam ismi okur dilimiz

Biz Muhammet Ali diyenlerdeniz

Pir Sultanım eyder Muhammet Ali

Onlardir kuranlar erkânı yolu

Evveli Muhammet ahırı Ali

[20]Hak Muhammet Ali diyenlerdeniz.

Text № 3 The Dervishes, who come saying, “Hû”

[1]The Dervishes, who come saying, “Hû,”[34]

Go dare ask them why they came.

They have set up a place[35] on the heaven above,

This devrân[36] is ours, saying repeatedly “Hû.”

[5]We always say “Hû,” my God,

In the mouths there is a taste of pleasure,

The believer and the one who has submitted [= Muslim] took this path.

This devrân is ours, saying repeatedly “Hû,”

The angels sat down to eat and drink,

[10]From Paradise above they choose [those who were elected],

Saying “Hû,” they expiate their sins.

This devrân is ours, saying repeatedly “Hû.”

In the daybreak the nightingales sing,

Some recite the salat/h[37] [by heart], the others read [it out],

[15]Thankfully, I have become part of Muhammad’s community,

This devrân is ours, saying repeatedly “Hû.”

In the daybreak come the imams and beg,

Some say the salat/h, the others listen,

The angels listen to the ...[38] of this believer,

[20]This devrân is ours, saying repeatedly “Hû.”

Yunus Emre [39]—this is the name of the believer—says

The frost within me [is] the taste, [and] the pleasure,

When saying “Hû,” God’s name is praised.[40]

[24]This devrân is ours, saying repeatedly “Hû.”

Text № 3 Hü deye deye gelen dervisler

[1]Hü deye deye gelen dervisler

Varin sorun onlar niye gelmisler

Caneti[41] alaya bir gök kurmuslar

Bu devran bizimdir hüdüyi dize[42]

[5]Hü deriz biz dayim hallahim

Agizlar icinde lezet dadi

Mümün müslüm bu yolu koydu

Bu devran bizimdir hüdayi diye

Oturmus melekler yiyup icerler

[10]Caneti aladan müskül secerler

Hüdiyince günahlarindan gecerler

Bu devran bizimdir hü deye deye

Sabahin sehirinde[43] bülbüler sakir

Kimi sela verir kimisi okur

[15]Muhamet ümeti oldum cok sükür

Bu derman bizimdir hüdiye diye

Sabahin seyrinde imamlar beyler

Kimi sela verir kimisi dinler

Bu mümün edarini[44] melekler dinler

[20]Bu devran bizimdir hü deye diye

Yonuz emre eyder bu mümün adi

Ayazlar icimde lezeti dadi

Hü deyince süvenir tanrinin ati

[24]Bu devran bizimdir hü diye diye

Text № 4 For the sake of the Seven and the Forty

[1]I went up to the Ilgır[45] meadow,

And I called for the Three Ones,[46] for His sake,

I smeared my face on the ground,

For the sake of the Seven[47] and the Forty.[48]

[5]Let Muhammad come, let him come,

To take in his hands those who have fallen,

My heart shall be the Kurban-sacrifice

For the sake of the One, who created us.

This world is a constituted Haqq:[49]

[10]Nothing can be said against the believers,

God is one and Muhammad is the Haqq

For the sake of the Twelve Imams.[50]

Come, let us leave behind the worldly / mundane matters,[51]

And pick out white from black,

[15]To drink from water of Zem-zem[52]

For the sake of recited Quran.

My Şah Hatayî,[53] let us [go and] get there,

To see [our] sins there,

To sacrifice ourselves with joy,[54]

[20]For the sake of the One who created us.[55]

Text № 4 Yediler kirklar askina

Version A

[1]Ciktim ilgir yaylasina[56]

Cardim ücler askina[57]

Yüzümü yerlere sürdüm

Yediler kirklar askina[58]

[5]Gelsin Muhamedin gelsin

Düsmüsleri eline alsin[59]

Canim vakka[60] kurban olsun[61]

Bizi yaradan askina[62]

Bu dünya kurulu haktir[63]

[10]Mümünlere hic söz yoktur[64]

Allah bir muhamed haktir[65]

On iki imamlar askina[66]

Gelin su haktan gecelim[67]

Aki kareden secslim[68]

[15]Eabu zem zemden icelim[69]

Okunan kuran askina[70]

Sahatayim gel varalim[71]

Ande günahlar görelim[72]

Hosca canimiz virelim[73]

[20] Bizi yaradan askina[74]

Version B

[1]Cıktım ilgar yaylâsına

Caĝırdım ücler askına

Yüüzmü yerlere sürüdm

Yedilervkırklar askına.

[5]Gelsin Muhammedim gelsin

Düsmüsleri eline alsın

Canim hakka kurban olsun

Bizi yaradan askına

Su dünya kurulu faktır

[10]Mümünlere hic söz yoktur

Allah bir Muhammet haktır

On iki imamlar askına

Gelin su faktan gecelim

Akı karadan secelim

[15]Ebu zemzemden icelim

Okuan kuran askına

Sahatayi gel varalım

Ande günahlar görelim

Hosca canımz verelim

[20]Bizi yaradan askına

Text № 5 In your meydan, Shah Seyyid Ali

[1]In my eye I have faith,

In your meydan, Shah Seyyid[75] Ali,[76]

Let him search for the secret, there is no doubt[77] in you,

In your dergâh [= tekke],[78] Shah Kızıl Deli.[79]

[5]The Holy Prophet has reported,

The Prophet is still beside the ...[80]

Including you and the Muslims,

The meydan is yours, Shah Kızıl Deli.

..., the Forty are beloved,[81]

[10]The unbelievers of Rumelia depend on your grace,

Those, who smeared their faces and came [to you], have [all] found cure,

The meydan is yours, Shah Kızıl Deli.

The faith of Muhammad granted [its] gift,

From your might should the mountains tremble,

[15]They gave ikrar to the followers[82] of Dervish,

The meydan is yours, Shah Kızıl Deli.

My Yusuf Dede says, the will has always been fulfilled,

My God showed me the secret of the Truth,

Questions to everyone [about][83] the Twelve Imams,

[20]This is your dergâh [= tekke], Shah Kızıl Deli.

Text № 5 Meydanina senin, Shah Seyyid Ali

[1]Gözümden vardir inanim

Meydanina senin sah seyid Ali

Harasin[84] sirri sence yoktur gümanin

Gergahina[85] senin sah kizil deli

[5]Revayet etmistir azreti rasul

Midarin yaninda ala hep Rasül

Seni vuis lümanlar[86] ile sen dehul

Meydan senindir sah kizil deli

OL yezidin dedi kirklar sertac

[10]Rum elin küfasi[87] Litfine[88] muhtac

Yüz sürüp gelenler buldular ilac

meydan senindir sah kizildeli

Dini muhamet eyledi isan[89]

Heyetinden[90] dayler[91] titiresin birden

[15]Dervis muhib lerine verdiler ikrar[92]

Meydan senindir sah kizil deli

Yusuf dedem heyder Hep oldu meram

Siri hakikati gösterdi hüdam

Sorular erkese on iki imam

[20]Dergahin bu senin sah kizil deli

Text № 6 The one I praise to you is Kızıl Deli

[1]Again, it appeared from the Imam’s lineage,

One stayed in Elmalı, the other one here,

Your little sibling took Rumelia,

The one whom I praise to you is Kızıl Deli.[93]

[5]With one measure of sand,[94] he divided the sea,

He did not leave anyone to say, “enough”; he crashed the non-believers,

The rum[95] begs,[96] they came from behind,

The one whom I praise to you is Kızıl Deli.

The one who settled in the Kuru plain,[97]

[10]The one who pitched the tent ...,

To the seven areas [and] the four corners, he built[98] foundations,

The one whom I praise to you is Kızıl Deli.

The one who came and settled saying, “This is my home,”

The one who cultivated mulberries from a dried out stick,

[15]The one who brought Otman Baba[99] by [means of] clouds in the sky,

The one whom I praise to you is Kızıl Deli.

You made ...to the spring of Bali

If you would just see what Yezît[100] made to us,

My Pīr Sultan[101] told me as such,

[20]The one whom I praise to you is Kızıl Deli.[102]

Text № 6 Sana met ettigim Kizildelidir

[1]Gene iman neslinden zuhura geldi[103]

Biri elmalida kaldi biri burada[104]

Kücük kardesin rumelini aldi[105]

Sana met ettigim kizildelidir[106]

[5]Bir etek kum ile deryayi böldü

Hic aman vermedi kufari kirdi[107]

Gel rum beyleri geriden geldi[108]

Sana met ittigim kizil delidir[109]

Kuru yaylasina meskan tutan[110]

[10]Mutfagin yerini cedarin kiran[111]

Yedi iklim dört köseye temel yörütü[112]

Sana met etigim kizil deliyi[113]

Gelip Meskanim diye cöküp oturan[114]

Kuru sis ile dut agacin bitiren[115]

[15]Gök buludu ile otman bobayi getiren[116]

Sana met etigim kizildeliyi[117]

Bali binarina demyat eyledin[118]

Görsen yezit bize ne itti eyledi[119]

Pir Sultanim bunu böyle söyledi[120]

[20]Sana metetigim kizildeliyi[121]

Text № 7 The whole world shall be yours

[1]The whole world shall be yours,

One soulmate, one post[122] is enough for me.

Silk clothing shall be yours,

One soulmate, one post is enough for me.

[5]The beys[123] come down from their thrones,

They mount horses without [walking on their own] feet/legs,[124]

They return, having buried [?] in the earth,[125]

One soulmate, one post is enough for me.

Do you know what should happen?

[10]Do you think that you should ...?

If I should live for one thousand years,

One soulmate, one post is enough for me.

[Even] if they gave me plenty of the possessions of this world,

[Even] if they made me Sultan,

[15][Even] if they were servants of Adam,[126]

One soulmate, one post is enough for me.

I have found the infinite Kingdom,

The Death/End came and found you,

Seyyid Seyfi[127] found the vow,

[20]One soulmate, one post is enough for me.[128]

Text № 7 Bütün dünya sizin olsun

[1]Bütün dünya sizin olsun[129]

Bir dos[130] bir pos[131] yeter bana

hatlaz libaz[132] sizin olsun

bir dos bir pos yeter bana

[5]Beyler tahtindan inerler

ayaksiz ata pi˹nerler˺[133]

topraga gömüp dönerler

bir dos bir pos yeter bana

Bilirmisin ne olsa˹n?˺[134] gerek

[10]sanirmisin kaksa˹n?˺[135] gerek

bin yil yasar olsam gerek

bir dos bir pos ˹yeter bana˺

Dünyanin malini verilerse

beni sultan iderlerse

[15]adem kulu olurlarsa

bir dos bir pos yeter bana

Sonu yok devlet buldum

hecal[136] gelip seni buldu

Seyidi Seyfi iemin[137] buldu

[20]bir dos bir pos yeter bana

Text № 8 Carry on again, my Pīr Sultan

[1]Come on, [my] heart / soul, come on, let’s pass this selfhood,

Let’s endow our essence to the Haqq[138]

In [this] deceitful world which made...[139]

They set a sofra[140] in the meydan saying: “Eat!”

[5]As Muhammad stretched out his hand,[141]

Those [who pledged allegiance to] Yazīd wail when Ali comes;

When a tâlip[142] has found his deficiency,

They give him to the hands of the Master, saying: “Bath [him]!”

Mansûr[143] was hung on the gibbet for the Haqq,

[10]The heart awaits in moan,[144]

The Twelve Imams are kept in that place,[145]

And Imam Husein[146] cries repeatedly: “Water!”[147]

Come on, let’s go to my hazel-eyed dede,[148]

Let’s prostrate before my Master,[149] whose face shines with divine radiance,

[15]When they give way, when they ask [about] Adam,

Come and answer your Master, saying: “This!”

Carry on laughing in this world, instead of crying,

In each of your steps, carry on finding your “self,”

Carry on again, my Pīr Sultan,[150] carry on being a human,

[20]The one, who is not a human, they drive him [away], saying “Hoy!”[151]

[a missing page]

Text № 8 Gel gene Pir Sultanim insan ola gel

[1]Gel gönül gel su benlikten gecelim[152]

Özümüzü haka[153] teslim edelim

Desti past eylemis yalan dünyaya[154]

Meydana sofra yaydilar yideyu[155]

[5]Muhamedin hondan eli alinca[156]

Inlesir yezitler Ali gelince[157]

Bir talibin mevsan yerin bulunca[158]

Veriler ustad eline yu deyu[159]

Mensur berdar olmus hak icin dara[160]

[10]Gönül irtiftar eder ah iyle zara[161]

Oniki imam tutsan oldayiyere[162]

Cagrisir imam Üseyin[163] su deye deye[164]

Gel varalim hela[165] gözlü dedeme

Yüz sürelim ol yüzü nurlu hüdama

[15]Yol verince sorarlarsa Ademi[166]

Gel pirini sen cevap ver su deyu[167]

Su dünyada aglamayib güle gel[168]

Her makaminda sen kendini bula gel[169]

Gel gene pir Sultanim insan ola gel[170]

[20]Insan olmayani sürerler hoy diye[171]

[a missing page][172]

Text № 9 What Muhammad Ali made utmost

[1]What Muhammad Ali made utmost

It’s not the meydan of “the absent,” but the meydan of “the existent.”

Muhammad entreated the Forties,

It’s not the meydan of “the shame,” but the meydan of “the bravery.”

[5]The Forty gathered their essence,

They washed his body without water,

“Did you see trouble?”—they said: “Yes!”

Cover up yourself,[173] it’s the meydan of “the secret.”

The places where you go, seek so that you can find,

[10]You shall be welcome in the places where you travel,

Hide your secret, so that you shall become righteous,

Be in control of yourself, it’s the meydan of “the achievement.”

What shall I say about the pillars/prescriptions of the Quran?

They boo the lies in this meydan,

[15]To the one who knows the 360 stairs,

It’s not the meydan of “the blind,” it’s the the meydan of “those who see.”

If Abdul Musa Sultan[174] is one reputable man,

If the devotees of Ali are the adherents, who are followers,

If he says “Let me reach the intent of the Haqq!”

[20]His rope will be on his neck in the meydan[175] of gibbet.[176]

Text № 9 Muhammet Alinin kildigi dava

[1]Muhammet Alinin kildigi dava

Yok meydani degil var meydanidir

Muhammet kirklara niyaz eyledi

Ar meydani degil er meydanidir.

[5]Kirklar özün bir araya kodular

Anler cenazesin susuz yurdular

Deryi gördünmü gördüm dediler[177]

Ört elin etegin sir meydanidir

Vardigin yerlerde ara bulasin[178]

[10]Gezdigin yerlerde makbul olasin

Sakla sirrini kim softa olasin[179]

Cek cevir kendini kâr meydanidir

Ne deyeyim su erkâni kurana

Yuf cekerler bu meydanda yalana

[15]Ücyüzaltmis merdiveni bilene

kör meydani degil gör meydanidir

Abdal Musa sultan gerci erise[180]

Aliyi sevenler muhip yâr ise

Hakkin maksûduna erem derise

[20]Urgani boynunda dar meydaninda

Text № 10 At the end of this world the young Mahdī (Redeemer) will come

[1]At the end of this world

The Young Mahdī[181] will come.

Don’t trust the deceitful world,

All who come will die.

[5]Don’t trust Iblīs’[182] word,

Don’t consume the Truth forbad,[183]

Don’t go into bad ways,

Come to repentance, O heedless, repentance.

In the forest (?) flies the heart’s bird,

[10][And] watches the mountains and the rocks,

In Hell, three people

Will never come out but will burn.

One is a fornicator,[184] another one is a drunkard,

The [third] one is a beheader.[185]

[15]Come to repentance, O heedless, repentance.

The one who prays [for those] in Hell,[186]

Staying in the Garden of heavens [=Paradise],

Before the divan of the Truth,[187]

Will dwell [there] for one thousand years.

[20]One cannot recite the salat/h[188] in the mosques,[189]

The real meaning of the poor[190] Quran is not known,

I fear that the daybreak and the sundown will not come any more,

[23]Come to repentance, O heedless, repentance.

Text № 10 Su dünyanin ˹a˺hirinda Mehti sabi gelecek˹tir˺

[1]Su dünyanin ˹a˺hirinda

Mehti sabi gelecek˹tir˺

Inanmayan yalan dünya

Hep gelenler ölecektir

[5]Ibliz sözü˹ne˺ u˹yma˺

Hakkin haramini ˹y˺ime

Kötü yollara git˹me˺

Töbeye gel ey [Gaf]il töbeye

Evalarda gönül ˹kusu˺

[10]Seyir eder gagi tasi[191]

Cehenemde üc kisi

Ic cikmayip yanacaklar

Biri zina biri icimar

Biri celat olacaktir

[15]Töbe gel ey Gafil töbe

Cehenemde kilan nemaz

Durur cennet baginda

Bir yil hakin divaninda

Ayak üzre duracaktır.

[20] Camilerde namaz kilin˹maz˺

Garip kuranin hikmeti bilinmez

Korakarim ki ey gün dogup dolanmaz

Töbe gel ey ˹g˺afil töbe.

Text № 11 I became a man, I got into Adam

[1]I became a man, I got into Adam,[192]

It doesn’t fall to one’s share inside[193] various souls,

While passing by from blood to blood, after becoming the Zebur,[194]

I dropped by one “blood,” within the “blood.”

[1][Oh] Brother come to the [right] rudiments, these rudiments are not right,

Don’t let your horse hop, this is not the [right] square,

The one winding from Suleiman isn’t Suleiman,

There exists a Suleiman within/inside Suleiman.

From the counsel of insight [knowledge?] I became insightful,

[10]I became coral from Bâli Bedahşan,

I gave one life/soul and I took one life/soul.

This life/soul, I am hiding within the life/soul.

Grant my Hatayî Sultan’s[195] harangue right,

Examine yourself to find what your wishes are,

[15]Examine tightly your sheikh for fraud,

Inside the[196] veins, the bone marrow [and] the blood.

Text № 11 Adem olup geldim ey adem icine

[1]Adem olup geldim ey adem icine

Nasip olmaz dürlü candan iceru

Zenbur[197] olup kandan kana gecerken

Bir kana ooradum[198] kandan iceru

[5]Kardes gel erkâna bu erkân degil

Oynatma atini bu meydan degil

Süleymandan esen Süleyman degil

Süleyman var süleymandan iceru

Irfan meclisinden irfan olmusam

[10]Bâli Bedehsamdan mercan olmusam

Bir canu veruben bir can almisam

Ol cani saklaram candan iceru

Hatayim sultanin nutkunu hakla

Ne dilegin varsa kendinde yokla

[15]Yürsüdün fendini iyice yokla

Damardan ilikten kandan iceru

Text № 12 One is Muhammad, the other one is Ali

[1]Hey! The Holy Ones, the Ones I set my heart on,[199]

One is Muhammad, [the other] one is Ali.[200]

This hour is the one, in which I will sacrifice myself for you,

One is Muhammad, [the other] one is Ali.

[5]Khidr[201] and his horse drank life,

Zülfikar[202] is more crucial to Yezît[203] than poison,

Does one man’s wonder ever resemble the other man’s,

One is Muhammad, [the other] one is Ali.

The one, who is bringing the wave [and] letting the seas elate/dilate,

[10]The one, who has the Zem-zem[204] water passed through the throats,

The one, who reunites a companion with his companion,

One is Muhammad, [the other] one is Ali.

The soul’s nightingale doesn’t stop, singing continuously in the cage,

Hide Ali’s secret in the breath,

[15]The one, who sat on the pelt before the earth was created,

One is Muhammad, [the other] one is Ali.

Şah Hatayî[205] says, the one who is righteous to his essence,

The one, who hides Ali’s secret in the breath,

The one, who keeps guard for the order at As-sirāt,[206]

[20]One is Muhammad, [the other] one is Ali.[207]

Text № 12 Birisi Muhammet birisi Ali

[1]Hey erenler size mehil verdiĝim

Birisi Muhammet birisi Ali (nakarat)[208]

O dem benim sana kurban olduĝum

Birisi Muhammet birisi Ali

[5]Hızır ile atı icti hayatı

Zülfikâr yezite zehirden katii

Erin ere uyarmı hic mücizatı

Birisi Muhammet birisi Ali

Dalga gelib deryalara cosuran

[10]Ebu zemzemi boazlardan[209] asıran

Dostu dostuna kavusturan

Birisi Muhammet birisi Ali

Can bülbülü durmaz öter kafeste

Alinin sırrını sakla nefeste

[15]Dünya kurulmadan oturan posta

Birisi Muhammet birisi Ali

Sahatayı eyder özün haklayan

Alinin sırrını nefeste saklayan

Sürat köprüsünde nizam bekleyen

[20]Birisi Muhammet birisi Ali

Text № 13 From the side of the Qibla, there rose a star

[1]From the side of the Qibla[210] there rose a star,

Its light fell on 18,000 worlds,[211]

On Yezît [and] on believer it stopped,

My Hodja,[212] your pen should write down what is auspicious.

[5]The drums are played, the maces are hammered,

The banners are ready,[213] the [horse tail hairs for the] tughs[214] are prepared.

Saying that Mahdī[215] will come, Bilâl [?] calls,

How happy is the one who knows his master.

My Şah[216] went out looking around, to his left and to his right,

[10]All the angels dread his rage,

“Allah, Allah!”—the Ism-i Azâm[217] is recited,

There are two rounds in salah/t,[218] if you perform it.

Şah Hatayî[219] says: “You say, let me get there!”

“Let me get there and become a hadji!”

[15]“You say, let me discover the essence of this secret!”

Go and look around your Şah’s doorstep.

Text № 13 Kıble tarafından bir yıldız dovdu

[1]Kıble tarafından bir yıldız dovdu[220]

Savgısı[221] onsekiz bin âleme urdu[222]

Yezitte mümünün üstüne durdu

Hocam hayırlısını yazsın kalemin

[5]Defiller calınır gürsler dövülür

Bayraklar paralanır turlar[223] yolunur

Mehti gelecek deyib bilâl caĝırır

Ne mutlu efendisini bilene

Sahım cıkmıs saĝına soluna bakınır

[10]Hep melekler ısmıından[224] sakınır

Allah allah ismi azem okunur

Iki rekât namaz vardır kılana

Sahatayi eyder varayım dersin

Varayımda acı olayım dersin

[15]Ben bu sırrın aslına ereyim dersin

Dolasıver mürsüdünün esigini.

Text № 14 Ah Husein, woe Husein, Imam Hasan Shah Husein!

[1]Husein[225] says to Yezît,[226]

“Give us one sip of water,

My blood may thus be religiously permissible to you.”[227]

Ah Husein, woe Husein, Imam Hasan Shah Husein![228]

[5]Husein fell off his horse,

Yet Yezît besieged him,

Düldül[229] went off to Kabah,[230]

Ah Husein, woe Husein, Imam Hasan Shah Husein!

Husein’s arms are bound,

[10]He is grieving deeply from thirst,[231]

The younger son of Mother Fatma![232]

Ah Husein, woe Husein, Imam Hasan Shah Husein!

In Karbala,[233] burning furiously,

On his black hair, there glows divine light,

[15]His hands are smeared with red blood,

Ah Husein, woe Husein, Imam Hasan Shah Husein!

[At?] the holy stone of Karbala,

His cut off head recites Quran,

Husein, the brother of Hasan,

[20]Ah Husein, woe Husein, Imam Hasan Shah Husein!

[According to] the writings of Karbala,

The fighters of Islam died as martyrs,

The boys of Mother Fatma,[234]

Ah Husein, woe Husein, Imam Hasan Shah Husein!

[25] My Ali Dede speaks thus,

The essence of my eyes burn,

Muhammad’s daughter cries,

Ah Husein, woe Husein, Imam Hasan Shah Husein!

Text № 14 Ah Hüseyın vah Hüseyın Imam Hasan sah Hüseyin!

[1]Huseyin eyder Yezide

Bir yudum su verin bize

Kanım helâl olsun size

Ah Hüseyın vah Hüseyın Imam Hasan sah Hüseyin (nakarat)

[5]Hüseyin atından düstü

Yezitler basına üstü

Düldülü kâbeye kactı

Ah Hüseyın vah Hüseyın Imam Hasan sah Hüseyin

Hüseynin kolleri baĝlı

[10]Susuzluktan ciger daĝlı

Fatma ananın kücük oĝlu

Ah Hüseyın vah Hüseyın Imam Hasan sah Hüseyin

Kerbelâda cayr icinde

Nur yanar siyah sacında

[15]Elleri al kan icinde

Ah Hüseyın vah Hüseyın Imam Hasan sah Hüseyin

Kerbelânın ulu tası

kuran okur kesik bası

Huseyn Hasanın kardası

[20]Ah Hüseyın vah Hüseyın Imam Hasan sah Hüseyin

Kerbelânın yazıları

Sehit düstü gazileri

Fatma ananın kuzuları

Ah Hüseyın vah Hüseyın Imam Hasan sah Hüseyin

[25] Ali dedem söyler sözü

Yanıyor didemin özü

Aĝlar Muhammedin kızı

Ah Hüseyın vah Hüseyın Imam Hasan sah Hüseyin

Text № 15 O Muhammad, O Ali!

[1]I have been loving God, deep from my heart,

With [the guidance] of fidelity I came along his way,

The lovers come always along this way,

O Muhammad, O Ali!

[5]You are the Master in the heavens and on the earth,

You are the divine light in the oil lamp,

In both worlds, [earth and heaven], you are...,

O Muhammad, O Ali!

It is covered with divine light and zin.[235]

[10]The imams of significant rank,

They are also friends of God,

O Muhammad, O Ali!

The end of time will come,

It will be ...

[15]The one, who searches for you, will find [you] in blood,

O Muhammad, O Ali!

Hatice,[236] Zühre[237]Fatma,[238]

Avoid ways, of which one lacks knowledge.

Do not deprive Pīr Sultan,[239]

[20] O Muhammad, O Ali!

Text № 15 Ya Muhammet ya Ali!

[1]Ben hakkı sevdim gönülden

Sıtk ile geldim yolundan

Sevenler hep gelir bu doĝru yoldan

Ya Muhammet ya Ali

[5]Yerde pirsin gökte pirsin

Kandil icindeki nursun

Iki cihan serverisin

Ya Muhammet ya Ali

Nur ile zin dolmus üstü

[10]Imamların kemerin bastı[240]

Onlarda tanrının dostu

Ya Muhammet ya Ali

Ahır zeman gelecek

Sam dolu divan olacak

[15]Seni arayan kande bulacak

Ya Muhammet ya Ali

Atice Zühre Fatme

Bilmediĝin yola gitme

Pir sultanı mahrum etme

[20]Ya Muhammet ya Ali.

Text № 16 Ali [will be] the one who unfurls the flag

[The beginning of the poem is missing.]

[15] Thirty thousand aspects [is what] the state of ingenuity [is],[241]

For the Truth Imam Husain [and] Ali.

Ever since Idris[242] was speaking in this word,

Calling down for the Twelve Imams,

After the emergence of the Mahdī,[243]

[20]Ali [will be] the one who unfurls the flag.

Text № 16 Önünce sancaĝın ceken ya Ali

[The beginning of the poem is missing.]

[15] Otuzbin suret marifet hali

Hakikata imam Hüseyin Ali

İdriz dahi bu kelâmı deyince

Oniki imamlara niyaz kılınca

Maĝaradan Mehti zuhur olunca

[20]Önünce sancaĝın ceken ya Ali.

Text № 17 The crowns in red and green should be put up

[1]What I was searching for in the secret, I’ve found in the evident.

How graceful it is to visit the companion.

I saluted[244] him [and] became supplicant,

How graceful it is to visit the companion.

[5]Oh how it befits the Quran, the word of truth,

[S]he has bound his/her sidelock, his/her face resembles a full moon,

You brought us to God like Zibha,[245]

How graceful it is to visit the companion.

Yusuf from Canaan [is] in the hands of Egypt,

[10]Does the one who believes and falls for [Him] continue to be mournful,

Reflecting light while spinning above the house of God?[246]

How graceful it is to visit the companion.

For the divine light of “the Source of Pride of the World”[247]

  [in] the house of God,

The crowns in red and green should be put up!

[15]Our ways came across to the place of hiylân,[248]

How graceful it is to visit the companion.

O Ismail, direct your invocation to the east,

It will inform you about the Sunna and the religious duty.

To his eye[s]—the longing, to his heart—the offer,

[20]How graceful it is to visit the companion.[249]

Text № 17 Al yesil tacları kırmızı örüne

[1]Sırrında arakın ayanda gördüm

Ne keremdir dostu ziyaret etmek

Temennâ eyledim niyazmeth oldum

Ne keremdir dostu ziyaret etmek

[5]Kurana yakısır gerceĝin sözü

Zülfünü kement almıs mehtaptır yüzü

Zibha[250] gibi hakka yetirdin bizi

Ne keremdir dostu ziyaret etmek

Mısır ellerinden yusufukenˋan

[10]Mahzun kalırmı ol inanıp kanan

Beytullah üstünde cerha urup dönen

Ne keremdir dostu ziyaret etmek

Beytullah fahri âlân nuruna

Al yesil tacları kırmızı örüne

[15]Yolumuz oĝradı hiylân yerine

Ne keremdir dostu ziyaret etmek

Ey Ismail doĝuya eyle ustazı

Yine o bildirir süneti farzı

Gözzüne[251] hızret gönlüne harzı

Ne keremdir dostu ziyaret etmek.

Text № 18 The ones who love Muhammad [and] Ali

[1]The ones who love Muhammad [and] Ali,

Hopefully/Inshallah, they don’t get tired and stranded,

The ones who see the face of Imam Hasan,

Hopefully/Inshallah, they are not deprived from the face of Husain.

[5]The one who drinks from Imam Zayn al-Abidin[252] a full sip,

The one who surges up and boils from Imam Baqir,

The one who reaches with his justness Imam Ja’far.

[...][253]

Text № 18 Muhammetle Aliyi candan sevenler

[1]Muhammetle Aliyi candan sevenler

Yorulupta yolda kalmaz insallah

Imam Hasanın yüzzünü görenler

Hüseyinden mahrum olmaz isallah.

[5]Imam Zeynelden bir dolu icen

Imam Bakırdan kaynayıp cosan

Sıtkiyle imam Cafere ulasan

Bundan özge yola sapmaz isallah

[...]

Acknowledgements

This paper was prepared with the assistance of Ekin Kilic, Orhan Elmaz and Atilla Erden.

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Footnotes

[1] In his transcription Khasan Karakhiuseinov uses i instead of ı, s instead of ş, c instead of ç, g instead of ğ. Unless otherwise specified, the alternative readings of problematic transcriptions in the present edition of the texts are recommended by Ekin Kilic.

[2] The edition of the texts below follows the following conventions: [ ] indicate conjectural additions in the English translation; ˹ ˺ indicate suggested reconstructions in the transcription of the text.

[3] See the discussion in this volume, Chapter 5. Similar cases have recently been registered in the author’s field research conducted in North-Eastern Bulgaria (Silistra region) with Prof. David Shankland, under the auspices of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London.

[4] On social structure, ritual system and folklore tradition of Alevi (Bektaş and Kizilbaş) communities in the Balkans and elsewhere see Birge (1937), Dressler (2003, 109–154; 2013), Gramatikova (2011; 2015, 7–43), Melikoff (1992; 1998), Mikov (2005; 2007), Norris (1993; 1996, 297–309; 2006), Norton (2001, 168–200), Shankland (2003; 2006), Zheliazkova and Nilsen (2001).

[5] The lexeme arş denotes “the Heavenly / Divine Throne / Footstool,” which is imagined to be residing beyond the highest (traditionally Seventh or Ninth) celestial level. The term al-ʿarsh is attested in Suras al-Aʻrāf [7: 54], at-Tawba [9: 129], Yunus [10:3], etc.; see Netton (1997, 40).

[6] That is, God. Orhan Elmaz suggests: “I was in the hands of the Decreer.”

[7] Unclear.

[8] Unclear.

[9] Reference to the “Assembly of the Forty” (that is, the “Cem of the Forty”), as related in the Buyruk; see Shankland (2003, 80–84).

[10] As pointed out by Dressler, “in the religious worldview of the Alevis and Bektashis, Ali and Muhammad are regarded as complementary symbols representing different aspects of the Truth. While Muhammad represents the ‘outer,’ ‘visible’ (zahiri) and Ali the ‘inner,’ ‘hidden’ (batıni) truth, both are divine manifestations” (Dressler 2003, 131). See also in this connection the discussion in Norris (1993, 96–98, 113) and Gramatikova (2011, 167–169).

[11] Cem—the focal religious ceremony of the members of the Alevi community. See Shankland (2003, 24, 79, 80–81, 85, 97, 121–128, 146–147, 187; 2006, 20, 67–68), Dressler (2003, 116–117); see also Ayni-cem in Norris (1993, xiv).

[12] Muhabbet—among the most important Tarikat rituals; this term may denote an ‘informal drinking gathering’ and ‘collective celebration’ (or ‘collective worship’), but also in colloquial discourse it implies ‘traditional oral communication / interaction.’ In this particular context muhabbet is referring to the verbal interaction between the members of Alevi communities during the (cem) ceremonies, which include drinking and singing nefes, along with performing the semah (var. sema, samah, samāhane, related to the Arabic samā‘) ritual dancing, “which celebrates the passing of the mystical secrets to the Alevis from God through Ali”; see Shankland (2006, 67). Further on the semantic coverage of the term muhabbet see Shankland (2003, 120, 134–135, 140–144; 2006, 119); on samāhane / sema see Norris (1993, xix), Shankland (2003, 79, 128, 142, 143, 158; 2006, 67–68).

[13] Dem—(alcoholic) beverage.

[14] O. Elmaz suggests: “The Lord kneaded Adam from a piece of honey” (since balçık means ‘clay,’ while balcık—‘honey’).

[15] Seyran—‘walk,’ or ‘pious voyage’; see also in this connection seyr [etmek]—‘to stroll, to journey in the spiritual world.’

[16] Literally: “the half of something.”

[17] That is, Jonah.

[18] Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib (601–661)—the cousin of the Prophet Muhammad and husband of his daughter Fāṭimah; the father of Ḥasan ibn ‘Ali ibn Abī Ṭālib (624–670) and Ḥusayn ibn ‘Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib (626–680). According to Shia doctrine, Alī is venerated as the divinely-designated first imam and as such is placed next to God and Muhammad. See Norris (1993, 86, 96–99, 169–171); Esposito (2003, 15); Asani (2001, 62–63); Crone (2012, 212, 464–465). See also footnotes 10 and 12 above.

[19] Zülfiqar (var. Dhū‘l-Faqār)—the name of the famous sword believed to have been owned by Muhammad and then inherited from him by Ali. There also exists a parallel tradition, according to which the sword descended from heaven. See Zwemer (1939, 28–33); Netton (1997, 71); Dressler (2003, 122, 143, note 56).

[20] The authorship of this poem is attributed to Pīr Sulṭān Abdāl (ca. 1480–1560); praised by the adherents of Alevism / Bektashism as one of “the Seven Revered Ozans” (minstrels), he was a typical representative of the spiritual tradition descending from the tenth-century Sufi intellectual, mystic and martyr Mansur al-Hallaj; see Schimmel (1975, 338), Akbatur (2015, 57–60). Accused by the Ottoman authorities of alleged treasonous relations with the Persian Safawids, Pīr Sulṭān was executed in the city of Sivas, Anatolia. His verses (composed in Turkish) continued to be transmitted orally by generations of minstrels and thus became vital components of Alevi and Bektashi folklore heritage; they were sung accompanied by the saz (bağlama) string musical instrument (conventionally referred to as the “Quran with strings”). The present text represents one such case. A video recording of an authentic performance of this song by an anonymous Alevi singer from the Deliorman area of Bulgaria was made in 2005 by İsmail Engin. It can be found on http://alkislarlayasiyorum.com/m/content/146980/kuran-yazilirken-ars-i-rahmanda-deliorman-alevileri-bulgaristan; see also http://ismail-engin.blogspot.de/2013/09/kuran-yazlrken-ars-rahmanda-ceraglar.html, both accessed April 7, 2017.

[21] Suggested reading: taam (= “food”).

[22] Although in the original transcription of the poem this word means “his,” perhaps the correct reading should be altered to “my.”

[23] Literally “for those with eyes” (courtesy E. Kilic).

[24] “Haqq–Muhammad–Ali”—in Alevi theological tradition, this formulaic exclamation refers to the triune entity that involves: Haqq (= “Divine Truth,” one of the names of Allah as the only One to be worshipped), Muhammad as the messenger, and Ali as the first among the Twelve Imams. As pointed out by a number of scholars, the “idea of Ali and Muhammad being one and identical with God is hidden in the numerical value of the letters forming these names: their sum is 202, a number which is equal to the sum of the letters rā' and bā' forming the word rabb, i.e. Lord, i.e. God” (Jong 1989, 8–9). See also in this connection the discussion in Norris (1993, 94–99); Crone (2012, 473–477).

[25] Yezît —a reference to Yazid I, the Umayyad caliph Yazīd ibn Mu‘āwiya ibn Abī Sufyān (647–683), by whose order Ḥusayn ibn ‘Alī ibn Abī Tālib (626–680), the son of Fāṭimah, the youngest daughter of Muhammad was killed (along with other members of the household of the Prophet) at the Battle of Karbala (680). The latter event is considered “a cornerstone of the Shiite founding myth” (Dressler 2003, 121) and as such is being recalled by the Alevi and Bektashi folk singers at their performances during ritual ceremonies of their respective communities. Oral history discretely encapsulates confessional and political dimensions of the Karbala martyrdom narrative and further transforms them into markers not only of ethnic identity but also of political ideology, thus attaining “a trans-historical meaning.” See Dressler (2003, 126–129). Further on the identification of Yazid as the Devil / Satan incarnate see Norris (1993, 99).

[26] Unclear.

[27] Hâl—“bad, poor condition / state.”

[28] E. Kilic suggests: “In ..., we follow Imam Ja‘far.”

[29] Further on the Twelve Imams, see Norris (1993, 169). On the religious movement of the Twelvers (Ithnā ‘Asharīs, Ithnā ‘Ashariyya) see Gibb, Kramers (1961, 188–189); Netton (1997); Peters (1994, 135–142); Rippin (2005, 124–128).

[30] That is, Pīr Sulṭān Abdāl; see footnote 20 above.

[31] Presented below are two folklorised versions of a poem/song, the authorship of which is attributed to Pīr Sulṭān Abdāl; for other versions, see http://pirsultanabdalsiirleri.blogspot.de/2008/05/sofu-mezhebimi-neden-sorarsin.html, accessed April 7, 2017. The translation in the current edition of the poem is based on version A.

[32] That is, Haqq (or Ḥaḳḳ)—“the Divine Truth” / “the Divine Essence” (referring to Allah); see Gibb, Kramers (1961, 126–127).

[33] Suggested reading: acilir.

[34] In the original Turkish manuscript (see below), the form Hü is used for Hû/Hū, which is “the personal pronoun of the third person, singular masculine, HE, i.e. God, or He is. It occurs in the Quran in this sense, for example Surah 3:1. [...] The word is often used by Sufis in this form [...] ‘O He (who is), O He (who is), O He whom no one knows what He Himself is but Himself.’ Some commentators have supposed the word Hū to stand for the exalted name of God, which [...] is only known to God.” See Hughes (1994, 181).

[35] Literally ‘sky.’

[36] Devrân—‘world’ or ‘time, age’; related to devr, Arabic for ‘spinning,’ ‘circuit.’

[37] Ṣalāt / Ṣalāh— ritual prayer, worship; divine service. The prayers required of Muslims five times daily are considered to be the second pillar of Islam; see Gibb, Kramers (1961, 491–499).

[38] See footnote 44 below.

[39] Yūnus Emre (1238–1320)—a renowned Anatolian Turkish poet and Sufi mystic, venerated as a saint. Reportedly, he was a spiritual seeker who was initiated by Haci Bektaş Veli from whom he received his blessing, signified by the breath of the saint; see Soileau (2009, 150–165), Norris (1993, 90).

[40] There are different suggestions about the meaning of this line, and I have adopted O. Elmaz’s translation.

[41] Caneti is the local dialectal form of the standard Turkish word Cennet which is related to the Arabic al-Janna (lit. the Garden), and Jannatu ‘Adn (i.e. Garden of Eden). The form al-Janna “is the most common name by which Paradise is referred to in the Qur’ān” (Netton 1997: 134).

[42] Suggested reading: diye.

[43] Suggested reading: seher.

[44] Unclear; suggested reading: edasını.

[45] Unidentifiable toponym.

[46] That is, “Haqq–Muhammad–Ali.”

[47] Most probably a reference to “the Seven Prophets” (Adam, Idris, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad) who, according to the Sufi doctrine, designate each and every stage of the sevenfold mystical way towards the Divine. This path consists of seven hierarchically designated phases marking the progress of the human soul; each of these seven strata is associated with its equivalent Prophet, who is also linked with his respective Planet-sphere (falak): the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. See the discussion in Norris (1996, 302–303). Significantly, there are also “Seven Revered Ozans” (minstrels) in the Alevi musical tradition: ‘Imad al-Din al-Nasīmī/Nesimi (also known as Seyyid/Seyit İmadeddin/Imadettin Nesîmî/Nesimi) (1369–1417), Şah Hatayi (Shāh Ismāʿil) (1487–1524), Virani Baba (the tomb keeper at the shrine of Ali in Najaf) (sixteenth cent.), Yemini (fifteenth–sixteenth cent.), Fużūlī (Muhammad bin Suleyman) (c. 1494–1556), Pīr Sulṭān Abdāl (sixteenth cent.), and Kul Himmet (sixteenth cent.); see also footnote 20 above.

[48] That is, the “Assembly of the Forty” (= the “Cem of the Forty”); see footnote 9 above.

[49] See footnote 24 above.

[50] See also footnote 29 above.

[51] O. Elmaz suggests: “Come on, let’s pass this Truth/reality.”

[52] Compare this to the Turkish idiomatic expression Zem-zem suyundan (lit. meaning “from the waters of Zem-zem”). The term is obviously referring to the holy well situated within the precincts of the Great Mosque of Mecca (known also as the Well of Zam-zam / Zem-zem). The appellation Zam-zam / Zem-zem (which functions as a toponym designating this most sacred of all Muslim sites) is onomatopoeic, as “the name of the Well in Arabic represents the sound of the water as it rushed out when it was discovered”; see Netton (1997, 263–264). According to some Islamic exegetical narratives, the spring was revealed by Gabriel to Hagar so that Ishmael could be saved, after their expulsion from the household of Abraham / Ibrahim (as in Gen 21: 16–19); see in this connection al-Tabarī’s History of Prophets and Kings (fol. 279) (trans. Brinner 1987, 73–74). In the same source (fols. 282–283) it was further maintained that there existed also an alternative tradition, according to which the wondrous spring was revealed directly to Ishmael, not to his mother:

When Ishmael grew thirsty, he began to scuff at the ground with his heel. Hagar climbed the mountain of al-Safā. At that time the valley was lākh, that is to say, deep, so when she climbed al-Safā and looked down to see whether she could see anything, she saw nothing. So she came down and ran along the valley until she came to al-Marwah. She climbed it but could not see anything from there either. She did that seven times and then came down from al-Marwah to Ishmael, and she found him scuffing the ground with his heel. The spring Zamzam had begun to flow, and she began scraping the ground away from the water with her hand. Wherever some water collected on the ground she scooped it up with her cup and poured it into her waterskin. The Prophet said, “May God have mercy on her! Had she left it be, it would have remained a flowing spring until the Day of Resurrection.” (trans. Brinner 1987, 76–77)

Further on Muslim folk etiological legends concerning the origins of Zem-zem see Gibb, Kramers (1961, 657); Hughes (1994, 701); Badalanova Geller (2008, 28–30, 123–124, notes 131–136).

[53] Şah Hatayi (also spelled as Khatā'ī, which means “sinner” in Persian) is the pen name of Shāh Ismāʿil, or Ismail I (1487–1524), the founder of Safavid Dynasty and an eminent religious leader. He played a significant role in the rise of the Twelver Islam; see Crone (2012, 474–475), as well as Mikov (2005, 17). Among the members of the Alevi / Bektashi community Şah Hatayi was considered one of “the Seven Revered Ozans”; see also footnotes 20 and 47 above.

[54] O. Elmaz suggests: “In order to sacrifice our souls with joy.”

[55] The authorship of this poem (entitled in some sources as “Aşkına”) is attributed to Pīr Sulṭān Abdāl; for other versions see Kaya (2008). Compare also to the version B below.

[56] In other versions: Çıktım kırklar yaylasına; see Kaya (2008).

[57] In other versions: Çağırdım üçler aşkına; see Kaya (2008).

[58] In other versions: Yediler kırklar aşkına; see Kaya (2008).

[59] In other versions: Müminlerin elin alsın; see Kaya (2008).

[60] Vakka is probably a typo; version B (see below) renders this word as hakka.

[61] In other versions: Canım Şah’a kurban olsun; see Kaya (2008).

[62] In other versions: Bizi Yaradan aşkına; see Kaya (2008).

[63] In other versions: Bu dünya kurulu faktır; see Kaya (2008).

[64] In other versions: Bilenlere sözüm yoktur; see Kaya (2008).

[65] In other versions: Allah bir Muhammed Hak’tır; see Kaya (2008).

[66] In other versions: Hû dedik pirler aşkına; see Kaya (2008).

[67] In other versions: Gelin faktan geçelim; see Kaya (2008).

[68] In other versions: Akı karayı seçelim; see Kaya (2008).

[69] In other versions: Ab-ı kevserden içelim; see Kaya (2008).

[70] In other versions: On iki İmam aşkına; see Kaya (2008).

[71] In other versions: Pir Sultan’ım der varalım; see Kaya (2008).

[72] In other versions: Gülistanda gül derelim; see Kaya (2008).

[73] In other versions: Koşa koşa can verelim; see Kaya (2008).

[74] In other versions: Muhammed Ali aşkına; see Kaya (2008).

[75] Sayyid (Seyd / Syed / Sayed / Sayyed / Saiyid / Seyed / Said / Seyyed)—a honorific title bestowed upon the patrilineal descendants of the sons of Muhammad’s daughter Fāṭimah and his son-in-law Ali.

[76] Seyyid Ali Sultan (died c. 1402), also known as Şah Kızıl Deli, or Kızıl Deli Sultan—a dervish / ghazi warrior, a contemporary of Beyazid I, who took part in the conquest of Rumelia (Thrace); see line 10 in this text. His tekke and türbe are situated near Dimetoka (Didymoteicho), and are venerated as holy Alevi and Bektashi sites; see Aver’ianov (2010, 26; 2011, 311–312; 2014, 105–115); Gramatikova (2011, 491–507).

[77] Var. “I have no doubt...”

[78] Tekke—the dervish lodge; see Norris (1993, xx; 2006, 128). Among the members of Alevi and Bektashi communities—“place of worship of a brotherhood, often centered on the grave of a holy man”; see Shankland (2003, 191), Gramatikova (2015, 7–40).

[79] Literally: “red hero.”

[80] Meaning unclear.

[81] Literally: “are the crown on the head.”

[82] Literary: “the ones who love.”

[83] Meaning unclear.

[84] Unclear.

[85] Suggested reading: dergâh.

[86] Suggested reading: müslümanlar (courtesy Atilla Erdens).

[87] Suggested reading: küfa as küffar (courtesy Atilla Erdens).

[88] Suggested reading: Lütfüne.

[89] Suggested reading: ihsan.

[90] Suggested reading: heybet instead of heyet.

[91] Suggested reading: dağlar (courtesy Atilla Erdens).

[92] Ikrar vermek: to declare verbally, to accept; the asseveration given before entering the religious order.

[93] See also the previous poem.

[94] Literally “one hemline full of sand.”

[95] The inhabitants of Rumelia?

[96] Unclear.

[97] A toponym; perhaps referring to the present-day Kuru plain in Northern Turkey, in the Black Sea Region, in the vicinity of the city of Kastamonu.

[98] Literally “brought.”

[99] Otman Baba (c. 1378–1478)—one of the most popular saints venerated among the Muslim heterodox communities in the Balkans. His türbe (tomb) in the present-day Bulgarian village of Teketo has become a pilgrimage site. Further on the vernacular hagiography and folk cult of Otman Baba sее Aleksiev (2005, 69–92, 181–183); Mikov (2005, 39–46; 2007, 41–48); Aver’ianov (2010, 27–28, 30–33, 50; 2011, 310–311); Gramatikova (2011, 417–419, 423, 431, 437–444, 470–471, 526, 534, 537–543).

[100] See footnote 25.

[101] In other versions reference is made to Otman Baba, but not Pīr Sulṭān Abdāl.

[102] For other versions of the poem/song consult the following online publication: Kökel (2004).

[103] In other versions: Gene imam nesli zuhura geldi; see Kökel (2004).

[104] In other versions: Biri Elmalı’da, biri Bursa’da kaldı; see Kökel (2004).

[105] In other versions: En küçük kardeşi Urumu aldı; see Kökel (2004).

[106] In other versions the refrain contains one more line: Sana meth ettiğim Kızıldeli’dir, Dillerde söylenen Seyyid Ali’dir; see Kökel (2004).

[107] In other versions: Hiç aman vermedi Yezidi kırdı; see Kökel (2004).

[108] In other versions: Gazevnenin beyleri erişti, geldi; see Kökel (2004).

[109] In other versions: Sana meth ettiğim Kızıldeli’dir. Then again, the second part of the refrain (Dillerde söylenen Seyyid Ali’dir) is missing; see Kökel (2004).

[110] In other versions: Koru Yaylasına çadırı kuran; see Kökel (2004).

[111] In other versions: Çadırın altına mutfağı kuran; see Kökel (2004).

[112] In other versions: Yedi köşeye temelin kuran; see Kökel (2004).

[113] In other versions: Sana meth ettiğim Kızıldeli’dir. As above, the second part of the refrain (Dillerde söylenen Seyyid Ali’dir) is missing; see Kökel (2004).

[114] In other versions: Meskânım meskânım deyip outran; see Kökel (2004).

[115] In other versions: Kuru şişten dut ağacını bitiren; see Kökel (2004).

[116] In other versions: Otman Baba esip, bulut getiren; Kökel (2004).

[117] In other versions: Sana meth ettiğim Kızıldeli’dir. As above, the second part of the refrain (Dillerde söylenen Seyyid Ali’dir) is missing; see Kökel (2004).

[118] In other versions: Baba Pınarını bünyad eyledi; see Kökel (2004).

[119] In other versions: Gidi Yezid, bize ne etti, ne eyledi; see Kökel (2004).

[120] In other versions: Şahım İbrahim bunu böyle söyledi; see Kökel (2004).

[121] In other versions: Sana meth ettiğim Kızıldeli’dir. As above, the second part of the refrain (Dillerde söylenen Seyyid Ali’dir) is missing; see Kökel (2004).

[122] The term post (lit. “sheep skin”) is related to a specific Dervish designation of “authority.” As noted by Birge, “it is commonly supposed that there are in the Bektashi meydan twelve posts, each standing symbolically for some great figure in Bektashi history.” See Birge (1937, 178).

[123] For the semantics of the title bay (= a god, or a son of god) and the appellative baga- (divine) in relation to the concept of the divine kingship see Crone (2012, 327–329). The term bay is reflected in the Turskish honorific bey (= rich man, master).

[124] Meaning unclear.

[125] Meaning unclear.

[126] Meaning unclear.

[127] See the discussion below, footnote 128.

[128] For other versions of this poem, see: https://eksisozluk.com/bir-dost-bir-post-yeter-bana--1353028; http://www.letssingit.com/seyit-nizamoglu-lyrics-bir-dost-bir-post-yeter-bana-r64h3jv, both accessed April 7, 2017. Its authorship is attributed to the celebrated Alevi poet Seyyid Seyfi (= Seyyid Seyfullah), also known as Seyit Nizamoğlu (1520–1601) who was deeply influenced by the charismatic Hurufi / Sufi mystic poet ‘Imad al-Din al-Nasīmī/Nesimi (1369–1417); in fact, the latter is frequently confused with the former. As pointed out by Norris, it was through the poetry of Nesimi (who wrote in Persian, Arabic, and Azeri / Azerbaijani Turkish) “that Hurufi beliefs have spread far and wide among the Muslim communities of Eastern Europe and especially so in the Balkans” (Norris 2006, 37–38). Scholars are inclined to interpret his pen-name as derived from nasīm (= zephyr, breath of wind). Condemned for heresy, he was skinned alive in Aleppo; further on Nesimi’s ideas, poetry and martyrdom see Norris (2006, 32–34, 37–38, 118–121). Actually, a vast corpus of the Alevi / Bektashi poetry is (erroneously) attributed to Nesimi; he was furthermore revered as a spiritual guide by Shāh Ismāʿil Khatai, Pīr Sulṭān Abdāl and others. See in this connection Norris (1993, 200–201, 266–267).

[129] In other versions: butun dunya senin olsun.

[130] Suggested reading: dost (= friend, companion, soulmate); see Shankland (2003, 187). The term is “synonymous with lover of God, or God Himself as Beloved”; see Renard (2009, 379).

[131] Suggested reading: post.

[132] Suggested reading: atlas libas.

[133] Suggested reading: binerler.

[134] Unclear. Suggested reading: -m or –n.

[135] Unclear. Suggested reading: -m or –n.

[136] Suggested reading: ecel.

[137] Suggested reading: yemin.

[138] Haqq—“the Divine Truth” / “the Divine Essence”; see above, footnote 24.

[139] Meaning unclear.

[140] That is, table.

[141] Meaning unclear.

[142] Tâlip: pupil, follower, neophyte, “often of a specific lineage of holy men (especially Alevi)”; see Shankland (2003, 79, 191).

[143] Mansur El-Hallaj (c. 858–922) was a famous Persian poet, Sufi mystic and martyr; having reportedly proclaimed, Anā al-ḥaqq (meaning “I am the Haqq,” that is, “I am the Truth”), he was accused of blasphemy (for claiming divinity) and was subsequently hung on a gibbet. Further on Mansur El-Hallaj’s ideas see Peters (1994, 339–342); Rippin (2005, 142–143); Crone (2012, 467, 469).

[144] In other version rendered as intizar instead of intiftar; the meaning is unclear.

[145] Meaning unclear.

[146] Al-Ḥusayn (Husain, Hussain or Hussein) ibn ‘Alī ibn Abī Tālib (626–680)—the son of Fāṭimah (and thus the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad); the third Imam of Shia Islam. His martyrdom at Karbala is commemorated by the mourning ritual observance of Ashura (the tenth day of the Muslim month of Muharram); further on his sainthood as an emblematic module of Shia identity see Knappert (1985, Vol. 2, 336–344). See also Gibb, Kramers (1961, 142); Norris (1993, 98–99, 169–184, 192); Esposito (2003, 120); Crone (2012, 212, 271, 274, 476, 484). See also footnote 25 above.

[147] According to Shia tradition (see also the text of the poem “Ah Husein, woe Husein, Imam Hasan Shah Husein!” [“Ah Hüseyın vah Hüseyın Imam Hasan sah Hüseyin!”] below), Yazīd denied water to his victim (Ḥusayn); see also Norris (1993, 175); Crone (2012, 484).

[148] Dede—lit. grandfather, ancestor; among the members of the Alevi communities the term is used as a title of respect. It indicates someone’s descendance from a holy lineage. As such, he is regarded as an intercessor between God and man; see Norris (1993, 99). Accordingly, the dede is considered to be “both leader and teacher of Alevi religious tradition and mediator in disputes”; see Shankland (2003, 187).

[149] Not clear—the dede or God?

[150] See footnote 20 above.

[151] For other versions of this poem, see http://www.hbvdergisi.gazi.edu.tr/index.php/TKHBVD/article/view/1136/1125, accessed April 7, 2017.

[152] In other versions: Gel deli gönül benlikten gecelim; see Engin (2010, 417).

[153] That is, Hakka; see Engin (2010, 417).

[154] Other versions render it as Deste post eylemiş yalan dünyayı; see Engin (2010, 417).

[155] Var.: Meydana sofra koydular ye diye; see Engin (2010, 417).

[156] Var.: Muhammed hakkın nurundan olunca; see Engin (2010, 417).

[157] Var.: İnleşir Yezitler Ali’m gelince; see Engin (2010, 417).

[158] Var.: Bir talibin noksan yerini bulunca; see Engin (2010, 417).

[159] Var.: Verirler üstat ellerine yuğ diye; see Engin (2010, 417).

[160] Var.: Mansur perde olmuş hak icin darda; see Engin (2010, 417).

[161] Var.: Gönül intizar ah ile zorda; see Engin (2010, 417).

[162] Var.: On iki İmam tutsak olmuş şol yerde; see Engin (2010, 417).

[163] Local dialect rendition of the name Hüseyin.

[164] Var.: Hasan Hüseyin de cağırsa su diye; see Engin (2010, 417).

[165] Suggested reading: ela.

[166] Var.: Yol varınca sorarlarsa âdeme; see Engin (2010, 417).

[167] Var.: Gel pirime sen cevap eyle şu diye; see Engin (2010, 417).

[168] Var.: Şu dünyada ağlayıp güle gel; see Engin (2010, 417).

[169] Var.: Erler makamında kendini bula gel; see Engin (2010, 417).

[170] Var.: Pir Sultanim insan olda yola gel; see Engin (2010, 417).

[171] Var.: İnsan olmayana söylerler ol diye; see Engin (2010, 417).

[172] In other versions the final line reads: Gel Âdem olmayan sürerler hoy diye; see Engin (2010, 417).

[173] Lit.: “hand and skirt.”

[174] Abdal Musa Sultan—one of the prominent Alevis of the thirteenth–fourteenth century.

[175] On the other hand, the phrase “Dar meydanı” denotes the place where the disciples declare in front of their leader that they will be in command of their “hands, tongues and loins” (courtesy Atilla Erden).

[176] For other versions, see: https://ismailhakkialtuntas.com/2018/04/12/abdal-musa-sultan-ve-velayetnamesi/; http://www.bachibouzouck.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=825:muhammed-ali-nin-kıldığı-dava, both accessed April 19, 2018.

[177] In other versions (see footnote 176 above): Deveyi gördün mü gördüm dediler.

[178] In other versions (see footnote 176 above): Varlığın yerde ara bulasın.

[179] In other versions (see footnote 176 above): Sakla sırrını kim settar olasın.

[180] In other versions (see footnote 176 above): Abdal Musa Sultan gerçek er ise.

[181] Mahdī (literally, “the One who is Rightly / Divinely Guided”)—a title used in Islamic eschatology to designate the prophesied redeemer whose coming will herald the termination of the material world and inaugurate the end of time; see Gibb, Kramers (1961, 310–313); Peters (1994, 135–140, 389–392); Netton (1997, 156); Rippin (2005, 126–128, 134–135). See also the discussion in Crone (2012, 20, 63–64, 88–91, 126–138, 221–224, 230–232, 326–342, 465) and Gramatikova (2011, 170). On the concept of the Mahdī as a “Knowing Boy” and the idea of Saviour as a child or youth see Crone (2012, 341–342). Unlike the portraits of the other eleven Imams, his face is either not depicted or is blurred, since it is believed that he did not die but is still present invisibly among the people and monitors the spiritual life of the community.

[182] Iblīs—in Islamic theology this term denotes the Devil (Shayṭān); see Gibb, Kramers (1961, 145–146).

[183] Literally: “Don’t eat haram of the Haqq”; the term harām denotes the category of “prohibited, forbidden,” opposite to ḥalāl (“lawful”).

[184] That is, the one who broke one of the basic rules of conduct: “Be in control of your loins.”

[185] Perhaps a reference to Yazid I, under whose orders Ḥusayn ibn ‘Alī ibn Abī Tālib (Muhammad’s grandson) was beheaded at the Battle of Karbala (680); see also footnote 25 above.

[186] Literally: “The one who does salah/t in Hell.”

[187] Literally: “For one year in front of the divan of the Haqq.”

[188] See footnote 37 above.

[189] Literally: “Nobody does salah/t in the mosques.”

[190] Var.: neglected.

[191] Suggested reading: dağı taşı.

[192] Var.: “I became a man [and] I joined mankind.” The lexeme adem (= man, but also the name of the first human being, Adam/Adem), may likewise be used to denote “mankind.”

[193] Var.: between.

[194] The Zebur—the Book of Psalms. According to the Surah 17: 55 (Surat Al Isra / The Night Journey), the Zebur was given to David by God: “And your Lord is most knowing of whoever is in the heavens and the earth. And We have made some of the prophets exceed others [in various ways], and to David We gave the Zabur [Psalms].”

[195] See footnote 53 above.

[196] Var.: his.

[197] Suggested reading: Zebur (courtesy Atilla Erden).

[198] Suggested reading: uğradım.

[199] The phrase mehil vermek (“to grant an extension”) does not seem logical. Compare some other versions, in which the line reads: Şu dünyada benim gönül verdiğim. On the other hand, there exists an expression (meyil vermek), the meaning of which is synonymous with gönül vermek (= “to set one’s heart on”).

[200] Refrain.

[201] Al-Khiḍr (also spelled as al Khadir, Khader/Khadr, Khidr, Khizr, Khyzer, Qeezr, Qhezr, Qhizyer, Qhezar, Khizar, Xızır, Hızır), or “the green man”—a mysterious wise guide who escorts Moses and his servant during their long journey and interprets to them the hidden logic behind his otherwise strange actions; see Surah 18: 65–82. Further on Oriental traditions regarding al-Khiḍr (with extensive bibliography) see Gibb, Kramers (1961, 232–235).

[202] See footnote 19.

[203] See footnote 25.

[204] See footnote 52.

[205] See also footnote 53.

[206] The hair-narrow bridge (known in Turkish vernacular tradition as Sirat Köprüsü) between this world and the Beyond which every person must pass on the Day of Judgment to enter Paradise; see also Badalanova Geller (2008, 59, 134 note 211).

[207] Cf. another version: http://www.zohreanaforum.com/deyis-ve-nefesler/36818-hz-ali-nefes-duvaz-deyisleri.html, accessed April 7, 2017.

[208] Refrain.

[209] Compare to the form boğaz.

[210] Qibla (Ḳibla)—the direction of prayer towards the Kaʿba in Mecca; see Gibb, Kramers (1961, 260), Netton (1997, 205).

[211] According to some Sufi (Hurufi) concepts, the Universe contains a total of “18,000 worlds”; they are symbolically associated with the 18 opening letters of the first Sura of the Quran (Sūrat al-Fātiḥah, also known as ‘the Mother of the Book’). As noted by Norris, it was through the poetry of Nesimi that the esoteric numerological and apocalyptic concepts of Hurufism—“enshrined, Cabbalistically, within the ‘hidden libretto’ of the Quran”—were “humanized and sensualized” among the popular poets in the Balkans (2006, 34). Thus it is held that “Man’s nature is the very Book of God, hence also is Man’s habitat; his home, his homeland. Man’s face is the Fatiha, the opening Sura of the Quran. Seven signs, which have been inherited from Eve, the ‘Mother of the Book’ are mirrored in the ‘Seven of the Repetition’ (Sab’ al-Mathani), in Holy Writ. The Fatiha opens with 18 letters, which correspond to 18,000 worlds, which are reduced, in their number, to 14 letters, when God, Himself, is substracted from this total” (Norris 2006, 37).

[212] Hodja (Tur. hoca)—from the Persian Khwāja or Khoja (= “master”); initially used as a title of the descendants of the celebrated Sufi teacher Ahmad Kasani (1461–1542).

[213] Literally: the flags have been tailored; that is, the pieces of cloth, from which the banners are to be made, are already cut off from the fabric.

[214] In Turkic traditions tuğ is a pole with circularly arranged horse tail hairs at the top, which is used as a standard. The black-haired banner was a wartime emblem.

[215] See also footnote 181 above.

[216] Şah Hatayî?

[217] The formulaic expression Ism-i Azâm (= “the most tremendous name”) functions as one of the traditional divine appellations (although it is not listed among the 99 Names of God known as ʾAsmāʾu l-Lāhi l-Ḥusnā). The formulaic expression Ism-i Azâm may also be chanted as a prayer, as implied in this line.

[218] See footnote 37 above.

[219] See also footnote 53 above.

[220] Suggested reading: doğdu.

[221] Suggested reading: şavkı.

[222] Suggested reading: vurdu.

[223] Suggested reading: tuğ (courtesy Atilla Erden).

[224] Two suggested readings: hışmından (courtesy Ekin Kilic), or isminden (courtesy Atilla Erden).

[225] Ḥusayn ibn ‘Alī ibn Abī Tālib (Ali’s son, Muhammad’s grandson); see also footnotes 25, 146.

[226] See footnote 25.

[227] Meaning “you may kill me in allowance.”

[228] Refrain.

[229] Düldül was the name of the grey mule of Muhammad, given by him to Ali; see Netton (1997, 76). Among the Shia Muslims it is held that Ali rode upon her at the Battle of the Camel (656).

[230] That is, Kaʿba (Kaaba)—the most sacred Muslim site; see Gibb, Kramers (1961, 191–198), Rippin (2005, 46–47, 57, 67, 114–116). On the symbolism of Kaʿba (Kaaba) in Islamic mystical traditions see Crone (2012, 474–475, 479).

[231] Literally: “his liver is branded.”

[232] That is, Fāṭimah (c. 605/615–632)—the youngest daughter of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad, the wife of Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib (601–661), whom Shias regard as the first Imam after Muhammad (see footnote 18 above); she was the mother of Ḥasan ibn ‘Ali ibn Abī Ṭālib (624–670) and Ḥusayn ibn ‘Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib (626–680). For a survey of sources concerning the image of Fāṭimah in Shia tradition as “the embodiment of all that is divine in womanhood” see Gibb, Kramers (1961, 101–102). On Fāṭimah as the “mistress of sorrows” in Muslim Shia sacred history see also Stowasser (1994, 59–60).

[233] On Karbala as a sacred chronotope encapsulating the foundation myth of the Shia Islam, see Norris (1993, 170–188). See also footnotes 25, 146 and 185 above.

[234] Literally: “lambs of Mother Fatma.”

[235] Unclear meaning.

[236] Perhaps a reference to Hatice bint Hüveylid (Khadijah / Khadīja bint Khuwaylid), or Hatice the Great (Khadīja al-Kubra) (c. 555–620), the first wife of Muhammad and the mother of Fāṭimah; she is regarded by Muslims as the “Mother of the Believers.” Hatice and Fāṭimah are believed to be “the two ruling females in heaven”; see Stowasser (1994, 59).

[237] Zühre—that is, al-Zahrā (= “The Lady of Light” / “The Shining One”); one of the veneration titles given to Fāṭimah (the youngest daughter of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad, the wife of Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib and the mother of Hasan and Hussein); among the Shias, she is commonly referred to (and honored) as Fatimah Zahra. See also the previous note.

[238] Fatma is a popular Muslim name; it is a domesticated version of the name of Fāṭimah bint Muḥammad.

[239] See footnotes 20, 31, 47 and 55 above.

[240] Suggested reading: kemer best (courtesy Atilla Erden).

[241] In Sufism the phraseological expression marifet hali refers to “knowledge which can be acquired only through spiritiual experience.”

[242] According to the Quranic text (Surah 19: 56–57; 21: 85–86), Idris was a prophet; some Muslim exegetes (such as al-Tabarī) traditionally identify him with Enoch. See Gibb, Kramers (1961, 158–159); Knappert (1985, Vol. 1, 56–59).

[243] See footnote 181 above.

[244] The term temenna designates a specific salute, which involves first bending and then getting up, while putting the hand on the head or forehead; this is a specific gesture of traditional greeting between members of some Muslim communities in the Balkans.

[245] Some other versions give Yusuf-Zeliha (an obvious reference to the story of Yūsuf and Zulaykhā); see the twelfth Surah (Sūrat Yūsuf). On the image of Zulaykha in Muslim sacred history (with reference to Islamic exegesis) see Stowasser (1994, 50–56). On vernacular counterparts of the Quranic narrative in the Balkans see Badalanova Geller (2008, 81).

[246] That is, Kaʿba (Kaaba); see also footnote 230.

[247] Formulaic appellation traditionally applied to Muhammad.

[248] Unclear; in other versions—hûplar pirine (also unclear).

[249] Another version of this text can be found on: http://alevi-deyisleri-nefesler.tr.gg/Seyit-Suleyman.htm, accessed April 7, 2017.

[250] Instead of Zibha Atilla Erden suggests Zeliha.

[251] Suggested reading: gözüne.

[252] Ali ibn al-Husayn (c. 659–713), known as Zayn al-Abidin (lit. “the adornment of the worshippers”), was the great-grandson of Muhammad and the son of Husayun. He was the fourth Shia imam; see Esposito (2003, 347).

[253] The text presented here is a folklorised version of a poem / song, the authorship of which is attributed to Şah Hatayi, or Ismail I (1487–1524); see also footnote 53 above. For other versions of the text (occasionally circulating under the title Muhammed Ali'yi Candan Sevenler Yorulup Yollarda Kalmaz İnşallah), see the following internet sites: https://www.antoloji.com/muhammed-ali-yi-candan-sevenler-2-siiri/; http://sarkisozu.kahkaha.gen.tr/vahide-aksoy/muhammet-aliyi-candan-sevenler/sarkisozleri/; https://www.izlesene.com/video/asik-ereni-muhammed-aliyi-candan-sevenler/5709311, accessed May 10, 2017.

7. Learning Arabic and Learned Bilingualism in Early Modern England: The Case of John Pell

Daniel Andersson

Q. At the confusion of Babell, into how many languages was the world divided?

A. Epiphanius and others doe write into 72. as many as there were workemen at the building. Others thinke 72. as many as there were Nations in the world, which Moses recites to be 72.

Q. What preheminence have our best Linguists aboue others?

A. The Hebrewes, that they drinke at the fountaines. The Grecians at the rivers. The Latines at the brookes. English, and some others at the Lakes. (Basse 1619, sigs. H2r-v)

More than a hint of useless learning is attached to the polyglot in early modern England, as with the Jackdaw in a mid-century anonymous anti-courtier fable who could “spesk Latin, Greeke, Hebrew, French, Italian as easily as my mother tongue, but indeede few can understand me.”[1] One stereotype flowed from once-fashionable works concerning the education of the courtier (Barnes 1606, sig. G3v). A second more learned tradition emphasized the notion, attested to by William Basse, that Hebrew lay behind all other tongues. It is presumably part of the joke against Jackdaw that he lists Hebrew as one of his “courtly” (and presumptively, oral) accomplishments. Yet Jackdaw is perhaps not so foolish. For despite the supremacy of Latin, other ways of thinking about non-Indo-European languages, and above all, may well have been useful for Arabic, the utility of which was as much practical as scholarly.

Interest in Arabic and Islam in sixteenth-century Europe has often focused on the ideological or polemical aspects of the relationship between Eastern and Western cultures.[2] There has been slightly less attention paid to the philological aspects of this interface.[3] One explanation for this lacuna has been the fact that following the “second revelation” of Averroes in the West through the famous Giunta brothers edition in the sixteenth century, there was less need to learn Arabic to engage with the texts in the original languages that had earlier been deemed so essential for the scientific disciplines.[4] Although this picture needs some revision in the sixteenth century (since diplomatic connection with the Ottoman empire—and even North Africa—formed an increasingly important conduit for knowledge transfer), it was in the seventeenth century that a renewed attention to the Arabic language, especially in Holland, and then England, became readily discernible.[5] A number of figures from England could be used to illustrate the growing competence in Arabic, but one of the most intellectually interesting, and certainly sui generis, is John Pell, the English mathematician.[6] The current chapter shows how Pell’s notes allow us to see in practice the kind of benefits, and hindrances, that the study of another non-indo-European language offered the tyro in Arabic. It also argues for the often ignored intellectual interest in the question of the choice of transliteration system. More generally, early modern England is often described as a multilingual culture with respect to individual learners and translators of texts (especially literary texts), but usually to discuss this with such terms from linguistics as diglossia or alloglottography has seemed inappropriate.[7] This chapter questions that distinction. A solitary learner’s—perhaps idiosyncratic—attempts to view one language through the lens of another (here Arabic through Hebrew), is surely as part and parcel of a multilingual culture as innumerable traders slipping between one language and another for their transactions in millet or silk.

The difficulties awaiting the student of Arabic in the earlier part of the seventeenth century were considerable. In the first place, there was considerable suspicion attaching to the study of Islam in general in early modern Europe, with the Quran itself having been placed on the Indexes at various points in the sixteenth century.[8] The lack, furthermore, of an appropriate typographical technology severely hampered the progress of Oriental studies throughout Europe.[9] The paucity of teachers was another major stumbling block, with Julius Justus Scaliger’s biting comment about people setting themselves up as teachers of Arabic who themselves knew barely the rudiments themselves often repeated; the intrinsic difficulty of the language did not help matters.[10] The language’s difficulty, however, was often paraded as one of the best reason’s to study it, along with its utility for theological studies.

England, at least in the sixteenth century, was rather a backwater with respect to the study of the Semitic languages, despite several distinguished medieval arabists.[11] The story of England’s increasing capacity in this field is much clearer since the work of Gerald Toomer.[12] More detail, however, about the Oxford career of the Dutch Orientalist Johannes Van den Driesch in the 1570s is needed (who dedicated his vast work on the Book of Ruth to Archbishop Whitgift in 1584, and the dedicatory epistle tells us that Drusius was at Lambeth Palace at this point).[13] The precise scope of a mooted intellectual support grouping around Lancelot Andrewes may yet, with further manuscript discoveries, be convincingly proved. There are, moreover, a number of manuscripts that have not yet been taken account of, such as the prayer book and Koran in the Cotton collection and the seemingly seventeenth-century English compilation of semitic grammatical material in the Lansdowne manuscript collection.[14] Without any institutional pedagogy, however, these could only ever be rare exceptions.[15] The sudden departure of Philippus Ferdinandus in Cambridge put paid to the chance to place the study of Arabic there on a securer institutional footing.[16] Whatever the large claims made for the study of Arabic in Matthias Pasor’s 1626 Oratio pro linguae Arabicae (his inaugural lecture in Oxford), there is no evidence of Pasor (a refugee from the Thirty Years War via Leiden) having pursued Arabic studies at Oxford (and indeed he supplemented his income with lectures in Hebrew at St Mary Hall, and in any case in 1629 he was back in the Low Countries).[17] The market therefore for such works as Thomas Erpenius’s grammars, which soon eclipsed all other comparable works, and Agostino Giustiniani’s Psalter is all the more understandable.[18] Erpenius’ Rudimenta, for example, went through three editions, and it was one of these editions, it seems, that found its way into the hands of John Pell, and from which he took careful notes. These notes form the basis of the current chapter. How he learnt Arabic tells us as much about the powerfully synthesizing mind of Pell than it does about Erpenius.

The physical format of the notes in which John Pell’s attempts to learn Arabic were recorded deserves a word, since it complicates considerably the broader argument being made here.[19] The trickiest issue is chronology. Pell regularly used little octavo pages for his notetaking activities. The handwriting itself is a model of clarity; what makes the forensic task difficult is the ordering of these notes since they do not always contain a date (in Pell’s own unusual dating system), and the pages have been stuck, sometimes seemingly in no clear order, onto the folios of their current manuscript, British Library Additional 4377. Since the argument presented in the current chapter turns, to some extent, on the issue of chronology, where relevant, these difficulties will be explicitly mentioned.[20] The sheer volume and ambition of his projects must bear some of the blame for the often fragmentary and unfinished nature of his output, of which these physical traces are an apposite index. Pell may not have come up with the plan for the first department store, like Leibniz (a figure with whom he has otherwise much affinity), but there was little in the intellectual life of the time which he did not, for however a brief a time, attempt to become involved with. Although his manner of working seems to have been fairly ordered, the variety of his projects took its toll on the publication of the results of his research: many of his papers were either lost or disordered.[21] As mentioned already, the notes, as currently preserved, are not in strict chronological order: for example, f. 27 (a series of observations on how to remember the different letters of the alphabet) must date from earlier on than the vocabulary lists of f.14.

As far as the current state of the papers allows us to say, it was toward the end of the 1630s that Pell began to learn Arabic.[22] In 1629, he had been teaching at Collyer’s School (a Henrician grammar school) in Horsham. Pell had just begun (perhaps in October 1629) to be acquainted with Samuel Hartlib, whose interests extended from mathematics to, most famously, universal language schemes. Hartlib is probably the most influential figure in Pell’s intellectual trajectory throughout the 1630s.[23] He was a figure whose mental world was closely tied to the consequences of ideas, chiefly of the Utopian variety. Originally from Poland, Hartlib was in England from September 1628 onwards. The cause of the Palatinate was in particular close to his heart (as has been tirelessly recorded in the secondary literature), as were the possibilities for the overcoming of doctrinal differences through appropriate pedagogic (or, as we might say, “cognitive”) training.[24] (It is this second part of Hartlib inheritance that is relevant to the interpretation adopted of Pell’s Arabic learning here.) These ideas soon found a practical home. By 1630, Pell was teaching in the Chichester Academy that Hartlib had founded in the same year. Even though the Chichester Academy came to grief, and Hartlib returned to London, he remained actively involved with pedagogy throughout the 1630s. Pell was already note-taking in 1631 from Helvicus’s work on universal grammar.[25] The difficulty in getting away from the political aspects of the “universal reformation” requiring those involved with the Principality of Transylvania to deal with the Ottomans is underscored by Pell’s inclusion of a copy of a letter (translated into English) containing “[t]he greate Turke’s oathe to Bethlem Gaber, sente to the prince of Transylvania 1620 Jan.3.”[26]

Naturally Pell, given his mathematical interests, was interested in the scientific works that a knowledge of Arabic would allow him to access. In this vein, can one read Pell’s comment on the role of Arabic as a preserver of ancient learning:

When Greeke had been quite left out of Italy 900 years Emanuel Chrysoloras about 1399 (obtaining no help for his Greeks for which he was sent thither) stayed there & revived ye knowledge of yt language.

But about 830 about 200 years after Mahomets death the Arabians fell a studying yt language and translated a multitude of these books into their language which though they be in things erroneous yet some way they are usefull because they are translations of books not now extant or imperfectly understood or corrupt.

By these Arabians we may supply the 2 former defects & many times the latter preserving by their blundering what was in their coppies.[27]

Such a translation of intellectual empire had already been hymned in Pell’s chief source, Erpenius, who includes an “Oration on the Arabic Language” which praises the tongue in precisely these terms. Pell’s Arabic notes, however, are more prone (as one would expect) to comment on more technical issues of the relation of script, sense and sound. But quite how much understanding of the Arabic script did Pell posses?

Certainly, he had access also to examples of it in manuscript, for there are four leaves of a Koran (ff. 27–30), though since the paper is unwatermarked we cannot say whether these pages were imported from the East. Pell’s own attempts to write in uninterrupted Arabic script (f. 31r-v) are commendable though notably less fluent, with much clearer breaks and wider spaces between words than in the majority of early modern Arabic manuscripts, as would one expect. The passage of the Quran that he writes out is the third sura (although he stops at verse 8, out of 200). This is certainly more fluent than the presumably earlier attempt to write in Arabic (f. 24), predictably, the opening sura of the Koran, with the spaces between words even more heavily marked. Erpenius’s Rudimenta contained a section on the different scripts which was sufficiently detailed to enable Pell to make the following comment: “This manuscript of 9 crooked lines is written in Arabicke letters but not in their Sacred hand called by them [MS not quite legible here] which is best knowen to the students of Arabicke hear in Christendome. But it is the Court Hand called Diwan used by the Turkes in their ordinary affairs & law-business.”[28]

As mentioned earlier, Pell’s main guide in learning Arabic in the 1630s was the Rudimenta of Thomas Erpenius.[29] Pell follows his source closely but not slavishly, sometimes making notable improvements in phraseology or precision. For example, his notes on the first page of the Quran were inspired by the similar exercise of the German Kirstenius, an earlier and much less influential grammar than that of Erpenius.[30] On the question of the root (and its status), Pell seems simply to follow Erpenius—his interest is here practical and not theoretical (wanting, in other words, to know how to discover it, rather than to understand its elusive grammatical quality).[31] He is a careful lover of grammatical minutiae and matters of orthography. He comments on the printing conventions for dealing with quiescent consonants, for example.[32] Pell’s training in, or at least familiarity with, the emendatory techniques of humanist classical scholarship is responsible for a breathtaking piece of intellectual self-confidence in the notes. Using Erpenius’s grammatical instruction, he manages to correct Kirstenius, who had translated al-fatiha (the name of the opening sura) as “caput apertionis.” Noting that the form is in fact a verbal adjective, he suggests rather the translation “caput apertivum.” Pell’s humanistic instincts cannot, however, resist suggesting to him that this was in fact a corruption “per incuriam,” leading him to say: “lego igitur SoWRaToLiΦאTiΠaTo.” Emendation of the holy word of Allah would remain, however, a minority pursuit.

An early comment suggests that Pell had a strong sense that the “reality” that lay behind the various grammatical paradigms of Arabic was sound-based:

To read single Arabic words, as in Grammaticall Paradigms, we must know the sound of the letters [...] “b t θ 3 כ ח {} d t z s שׁ s d t d y G F k כּ L m n w h y.change of יה into ח”

place of the accent [...] never in ultima, therefore in penultima in all disyllables as onsur, never higher than the antepenult, and there always in polysyllables as nasara, nasarta unlwaaw [y]e penult be made long by quiescent by אוי as tansoranias tansoriיna tansoraיna.[33]

There is a practical reason why such a reality would be evident to the seventeenth-century student of Arabic. The grammatical inflections and conjugations of both Latin and Greek obviously involve some changes to the sound of the endings (from e.g. ambulo to ambulat), but if one ignored the auditory elements of such endings, one would not be seriously hampered in one’s linguistic progress. Furthermore, accent in Greek does not function as a marker of grammatical difference within a particular verb or noun; rather accentuation is a way of choosing between homographs, such as the two meanings of βιος.[34] A glance at grammars of Latin and Greek from the sixteenth century make hardly any reference to the constitutive value of sound at all.[35] The development of the discipline of phonology (usually associated with Harvey’s teacher, Fabricius da Aquadepente) may have contributed to the early seventeenth-century sense among the empirically minded of the “reality” of the sound beneath the grammatical structures.[36] This seemingly novel style of physiological thinking about linguistic practice was in turn prepared for by the immensely popular work by Scaliger on Poetics, where the basic phonetic capacities of man were conceived as matter on which the form of grammatical structure was placed.[37] To return to Pell, the other auditory problem that is faced by the student of Arabic revolves around what transliteration system to adopt. Questions of transliteration had even received some attention for English, as the (lugubriously black-letter) attempt of London printer William Bullokar to produce a reformed orthography in the 1580s makes clear.[38] With languages, however, written in other scripts, the problem was naturally more pressing.[39] Since many of the sounds of Arabic do not have exact equivalents in Latin, Greek or English, and even Hebrew does not provide an exact analogue, considerable thought had to attend the question of transliteration.

There was no universally agreed transliteration system for Arabic in early modern Europe. The encounter with the gutturals produced a number of scholarly attempts to clear the lexicographical throat. The unwieldy Lexicon Arabico-Latinum of Franciscus Raphelengius, posthumously published in 1613, completed by his sons and by Erpenius, allowed one such system the oxygen of print.[40] That transliteration system differs slightly from the adopted in the Lexicon Pentaglotton from which Pell took notes.[41] A third system still is in place in Pell’s notes from the Tabula Cebetis. Although there is no date superscription for the Tabula notes, the slightly uncomfortable and awkward script suggests it is early on. Furthermore, the transliteration system that Pell uses for the Arabic words also suggests that these notes date from early on. It is, however, different again from the transliteration system of 1982. For example, Pell uses Hebrew letters first to refer to Plato (rather than the Arabic script of the book from which he is taking notes): אטנאפל first becomes אאPLTN.[42] Finally, at one point (perhaps very early in his career, since it uses only Roman alphabet characters) Pell transcribes another piece of Arabic, using, it would seem, a system that distinguishes, for example, between ح and ه by using both capital and minuscule versions of the letter h: AllaHo La ilaha illa Howa: wayala-illahi FalYataWaCCaLi.[43] It is an open question whether he really understood the Arabic behind this phrase. Whilst no very definite conclusions can be made about dating, given the above-mentioned difficulties, what is worth underscoring here is that Pell remains interested in the question of transliteration throughout his engagement with Arabic and that he attempts a system that is his own (in the sense of being a hybrid of other systems). Transliteration does not appear to have been simply a learner’s crib for Pell, to be kicked away as soon as he could read without it (as surely he could have done after only a few weeks of instruction, let alone several months). It was an interesting intellectual problem in itself.

There is, furthermore, an interesting intellectual hinterland to this fact, and that revolves around Pell’s curiosity (and that of those around him) about theories of a universal language or writing system that were so marked a feature of mid-seventeenth-century life in the respublica literarum. As if to underscore this interest, the very same manuscript volume in which the notes on Arabic are found is also the home to cut out leaves from works on Universal Character, as well as some notes on shorthand. At the top of one paradigm for the passive of KWL, Pell writes two Greek adverbs: ανομαλως and αναλογικως.[44] Since neither Kirstenius’Arabicae nor Erpenius’s Rudimenta mentions either words, we can be fairly sure that they are Pell’s own frame of reference for understanding his material. Although it was not the major focus of grammatical research in the Renaissance, the Alexandrian debate over anomaly versus analogy (as played out by the Stoics in the later Roman period) nonetheless was available to scholars and did become the object of some discussion. Varro’s De lingua latina contained a detailed account of both of these terms and was widely disseminated throughout Europe.[45] What is at issue in the anomaly/analogy controversy may be stated, broadly, as the extent of uniformity, and hence describability of a system, at the expense of its variability. Behind this in turn lies the issue, familiar from medieval discussions, of whether or not grammar counted as a science, since, by Aristotelian lights, no science worthy of the name could consist in the recounting of linguistic particulars.[46] We have already seen the intense interest in numbering and schematization that afflicts Pell. How could he fail to see the issue of the status of a grammatical system? Book X of De Lingua Latina contains a mathematical mode for four schemata of grammatical inflection. The notion of analogy is illustrated in the Renaissance editions with a mathematical table. The issue, we may say, of the analogy and anomaly distinction may thus be better described as a more general problem of Renaissance linguistics. At another point, Pell writes down a table (Table 7.1)—he transliterates the paradigm for the verb غزو (which he glosses with “oppugnavit” using the third person perfect, as being the simplest form in Arabic). We see him writing the term “αναλογικως” over the third.[47]

In the light of this, the issue of Pell’s particularly careful transliteration system for Arabic becomes relevant. At one level, the transliteration system is explained by the (possible) early date of these pages of the manuscript. And yet, learning the Arabic alphabet is not so hard that Pell’s attachment to his system is not capable of alternative explanation. If the parallels with Greek linguistic usage are to be taken seriously (and are not simply aides-memoire or causa illustrationis), then we must consider that the transliteration system was another of the attempts at a universal character.

GaZaWa oppugnavit | Active | Αναλογικως
GZWT | GZWT | GZW
| GZWT | GZWT
| GZWTMא | GZWא GZWTא
GZWNא | GZWTM GZWTN | GZWWא GZWN

7.1

A second issue, and one which connects Pell’s notes less to an ideal language than to a real one, was the proximity or otherwise of Hebrew to Arabic, and whether or not, one was in fact just a dialect of the other. Latin, after all, had since the time of Plutarch (often with political coloring) been thought of as a mere dialect of Greek and this theory resurfaced from time to elsewhere in early modern Europe.[48] Scaliger (as already pointed out in the secondary literature) rejected the similarity of Hebrew to Arabic, arguing that this simply impeded the proper acquisition of each language.[49] Certainly, however, Hebrew is present at every stage of Pell’s learning of the language (this, then, is the “learned bilingualism” of the current chapter’s title). Throughout Pell’s early vocabulary lists, there is nearly always a Hebrew word for every Arabic one. Much of the detail of the analogy between Hebrew and Arabic turns on phonetic qualities. Take, for example, the following comment:

On day 10982

_allwayes in [th]e very end of a word after the last consonant

for the most part after קעעטטצצהה therefore one is called Kaf [th]e other Kef

& before ym if no vowel come next after as when they are shevated as קב Bak else בק Beka

And for [y]s reason a is used in the names of Hha, Cha, Sad, Dad, Ta, da, yain, Gain, Kaf, left out of all [y]e rest save dal Dal Lam Waw.

The curious expression “shevated” may cause the uninitiated to pause. It derives from Hebrew grammar and has no place in Arabic. The “sheva” (in today’s terminology a “schwa”) is a symbol placed under a Hebrew letter to indicate the absence of a vowel (unless the letter is a final consonant). The parallels, grammatical and lexical and phonological, with Hebrew are a marked feature of Pell having learned this second Semitic language.

Jackdaw thought that his polyglot abilities, comprehensible or no, qualified him to take the place of the Eagle, in the little Reynard the Fox-inspired political allegory with which we began:

However, I hope you will consider my worthinesse, and place me as your substitute, during the time that your Eagleship shall be absent in the Desart of Arabia. And so ends Iackdaw, praying for your long life, and to give you a taste of my Languages.[50]

With the Eagle in Arabia, Jackdaw need not have his knowledge of how to learn Arabic tested (or tasted). Perhaps like Pell, he would have started with a productive if unstable medley of Hebrew, Latin and Greek.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Arne Böge for a pleasant afternoon in Dresden back in 2006 spent in a bookshop where I picked up a copy of Johann Fück’s seminal Die Arabischen Studien in Europa. Noel Malcolm and Sam Wilder commented with their characteristic acuity and generosity. This is for Peter Chadwick, who shared my enthusiasm for finding other beginners in Arabic, and who has always supported my work.

References

Ax, W. (2000). “Sprache Als Gegenstand Der Alexandrinischen Und Pergamanischen Philologie.” In Logos Und Lexis, edited by W. Ax and F. Grewing, 91–115. Stuttgart: Steiner.

Balagna-Coustod, J. (1989). Arabe et Humanisme Dans Le Temps Des Valois. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose.

Barnes, B. (1606). Foure Bookes of Offices. London: T. Adams; C. Burbie.

Basse, W. (1619). A Helpe to Discourse, or a Miscelany of Merriment. London: Becket.

Beurle, A. (2010). Sprachdenken Im Mittelalter: Ein Vergleich Mit Der Moderne. Studia Linguistica Germanica 99. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Bisaha, N. (2007). Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanism and the Ottoman Turks. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Boutcher, W. (2000). “‘Who Taught Thee Rhetoricke to Deceive a Maid?’: Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Juan Boscán’s Leandro, and Renaissance Vernacular Humanism.” Comparative Literature 52 (1): 11–52.

Brown, V. (1980). “Varro, Marcus Terentius.” In Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries: Annotated Lists and GuidesVol. 5, edited by F. E. Cranz and P. O. Kristeller, 451–500. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press.

Bullokar, W. (1580). Booke at Large for the Amendment of Orthographie for Englishe Speech. London: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Burman, T. E. (2007). Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom, 1140–1560. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Burnett, C. (1999). The Introduction of Arabic Learning into England. London: British Library.

Cupaiuolo, T. (1925). La Teoria Della Derivazaione Della Lingua Latina Dall’ Eolico. Palermo: Boccone del povero.

de Nave, F., ed. (1986). Philologia Arabica: Arabische Studiën En Drukken in de Nederlanden in de 16de En 17de Eeuw. Antwerpen: Museum Plantin-Moretus.

Dickey, E. (2007). Ancient Greek Scholarship. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Drusius, J. (1632). Historia Ruth Ex Ebraeo Latine Conversa, & Commentario Explicata. Amsterdam: Jansson.

Feingold, M. (2006). “Parallel Lives: The Mathematical Careers of John Pell and John Wallis.” Huntington Library Quarterly, 451–68.

Feingold, Mordechai (2017). “Learning Arabic in Early-Modern England.” In The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in Early Modern Europe, edited by Jan Loop, Alastair Hamilton, and Charles Burnett. Leiden: Brill.

Fuks, L., ed. (1984). Hebrew Typography in the Northern Netherlands 1585–1815. Leiden: Brill.

Fück, J. (1955). Die Arabischen Studien in Europa von 12. Bis Den Anfang Des 20. Jahrhunderts. Leipzig: Harrassowitz Verlag.

Gabba, E. (1963). “Il Latino Come Dialetto Greco.” Miscellanea Di Studi Alessandrini Rostagni, 188–94.

Haijji, M. (1976). L’activité Intellectuelle Au Maroc a L’epoque Sa’dide. Vol. 2 vols. Rabat: Dar El Magrehes.

Hamilton, A. (2001). “The Study of Islam in Early Modern Europe.” Archiv Für Religionsgeschichte, 169–82.

——— (2009). “Isaac Casaubon the Arabist: Video Longum Esse Iter.” JWCI, 35–54.

Holt, P. M. (1972). A Seventeenth-Century Defender of Islam: Henry Stubbe (1632–1676) and His Book. London: Dr Williams Trust.

Jones, J. R. (1991). “Learning Arabic in Renaissance Europe.” PhD thesis, London: University of London.

Jones, R. (1981). “The Arabic and Persian Studies of Giovan Battista Raimondi (c. 1536–1614).” PhD thesis, London: The Warburg Institute.

Keul, I. (2009). Early Modern Religious Communities in East Central Europe. Leiden: Brill.

Lallot, J. (1998). La Grammaire de Denys Le Thrace: Trdauite et Annotée. 2nd ed. Paris: CNRS Éd.

Lewis, R. (2007). Language, Mind and Logic: Artifical Language Schemes from Bacon to Locke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Loop, Jan (2013). Johann Heinrich Hottinger: Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Loop, Jan, Alastair Hamilton, and Charles Burnett, eds. (2017). The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in Early Modern Europe. Leiden: Brill.

Malcolm, N., and J. Stedall, eds. (2005). John Pell (1611–1685) and His Correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish: The Mental World of an Early Modern Mathematician. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Matar, N. I. (1998). Islam in Britain, 1558–1685. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Meserve, M. (2008). Empires of Islam. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Ramus, P. (1578). Rudimenta Grammaticae Latinae. Frankfurt: Wechel.

Rousseau, J. (1984). “La Racine Arabe et Son Traitement Par Les Grammariens Europeens.” Bulletin de La Societé Linguistique de Paris, 285–321.

Segesvary, J. (1985). Islam et La Reforme. Paris: Éditions L’Age d’homme cop.

Smitskamp, R. (1992). Philologia Orientalis: A Description of Books Illustrating the Study and Printing of Oriental Languages in 16th- and 17th-Century Europe. Leiden: Brill.

The Pleasant History of Cawwood the Rooke or, the Assembly of Birds (1640). London.

Toomer, G. J. (1996). Eastern Wisedome and Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wilkinson, J. (2007). “Tremellius: 1569 Edition of the Syriac New Testamanet.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 9–25.

Wolfson, H. A. (1961). “The Twice-Revealed Averroes.” Speculum, 373–92.

Woolfson, J. (1999). Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy 1485–1603. Basingstoke: University of Toronto Press.

ΜΕΓΑ ετυμολογικον. Etymologicum Magnum. Magnum Etymologicum Graecae Linguae, Nunc Recens Summa Adhibita Diligentia Excusum, & Innumerabilibus Pene Dictionibus Locupletatum (1549). Venice: Federicus Tarrisanus.

Footnotes

[1] Pleasant History of Cawwood the Rooke (The Pleasant History of Cawwood the Rooke or, the Assembly of Birds 1640, sig. B4v).

[2] See the otherwise excellent studies of Segesvary (1985); Bisaha (2007); Meserve (2008); Holt (1972). See also Balagna-Coustod (1989), esp. pp. 31 (on Nicholas Clenard’s now lost sixteenth-century Arabic grammar, which he wrote when in Salamanca, which was the only place by 1639 where Hebrew was taught anymore, following the closure of the Spanish mind) and 69–70 (on grammar, and the figures Arnoult de l’Isle, Etienne Hubert and Pierre-Victor Calma Cayet).

[3] Honorable exceptions include Burman (2007), though some will find the style of this work rather plodding; Jones (1991). We now benefit from Loop, Hamilton and Burnett (2017) and Loop (2013), though these appeared far too late for me to take proper account of.

[4] The phrase quotes, with due piety, Wolfson (1961, 373–392).

[5] Some of these connections are illuminated in the sprawling work of Haijji (1976).

[6] See now ODNB, sub nomine, for a recent sketch, to be supplemented by Malcolm and Stedall (2005).

[7] See, e.g., Boutcher (2000). The traditional explanation that diglossia functions between two varieties of the same language whereas bilingualism refers to two separate languages already presupposes issues and definitions that require historicization.

[8] See Hamilton (2001, 169, n. 3).

[9] There is as yet no study for Arabic typography in Europe to set beside the magisterial Hebrew Typography in the Northern Nethelands, 1585–1815, Fuks (1984). See now also for another semitic language, Wilkinson (2007). The first book to contain Arabic characters was Breidenbach’s Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam, though it was a lone outlier. The influence of the famous late Medici press of the 1590s must not be accorded undue influence given that its output was for the Ottoman market, and not a domestic European one. See Jones (1981). A better step change date is 1585, when Plantin’s son-in-law, Raphelengius, had Arabic types cut. For Holland, see de Nave (1986), for a lucid summary of the sixteenth-century material. Postel’s considerable library of Syriac and Arabic mss was left in the hands of the librarian (Franciscus Junius) of the Elector Palatine in Heidelberg.

[10] See now Hamilton (2009).

[11] See Burnett (1999).

[12] Toomer (1996).

[13] Drusius (1632, sig. A3r). The issue for further research to determine is quite how much time Drusius spent in the 1570s at Oxford and how much at Lambeth (see also A2r: “Accessit ad haec mala perigrinatio, quae animum meum a libris sic abalienavit, ut vix cum iis in gratiam redire potuerim”).

[14] British Library, London, Cotton MS, Galba IX and X; and British Library, London, Lansdowne MS 694.

[15] It would be good to know who was teaching Sir Kenelm Digby (according to a scrap of evidence from Hartlib in 1634) was a great student of Arabic, which would place him at just the right time and place. See Matar (1998, 83–4).

[16] See Feingold (2017). Feingold’s story is one, strictly speaking, of the history of universities, to which Pell stands in some way oblique.

[17] See ODNB sub nomine “Matthias Pasor.” I have found little evidence of Arabic philology in his Groningen archive papers.

[18] See Fück (1955, 59–71). We await a full study of Erpenius.

[19] British Library, London, Additional MS 4377.

[20] Noel Malcolm suggests that, given how studious a person Pell was, it would be unwise to assume too much from this chronology.

[21] On the relationship between publication and reputation, see the acute comments of Feingold (2006, 451–468).

[22] These notes allow us to nuance Toomer’s statement (1996, 198) that we do not know how much Arabic Pell knew.

[23] For Hartlib’s career(s), see Malcolm and Stedall’s judicious summary of the evidence (2005, 26–28, esp. n. 8), where Malcolm makes references to Polish secondary literature that I cannot read.

[24] For the Utopian (or pre-lapsarian) character of much of the universal language schemes, see now Lewis (2007). For the importance of Transylvania as a confessional buffer state, see now Keul (2009).

[25] Additional MS, 4377, f.147 (dated 14 May 1631).

[26] Additional MS, 4377, f.25.

[27] Additional MS 4377, f.19.

[28] British Library, London, Additional MS 4377, f.15xx.

[29] The edition that he was using was that of 1628.

[30] On Kirstenius, see Smitskamp (1992, 118–21) (thanks to Noel Malcolm for this reference).

[31] So f.7: “Arabicarum vocum analysis sive Radicis arabicae investigatio. Abjice initio quarumlibet praefixas.” For a survey of the different ways in which the root was analyzed in premodern grammars, see Rousseau (1984).

[32] The relevant passages are Erpenius, Rudimenta, 1628, sigs. B5v–B6r and, in Pell, f.24.

[33] Additional MS 4377, f.1r.

[34] See, e.g., ΜΕΓΑ ΕΤΥΜΟΛΟΓΙΚΟΝ. Etymologicum magnum..., ΜΕΓΑ ετυμολογικον. Etymologicum Magnum. Magnum Etymologicum Graecae Linguae, Nunc Recens Summa Adhibita Diligentia Excusum, & Innumerabilibus Pene Dictionibus Locupletatum 1549, sub verbo “βιος.” We shall know more about the diffusion of this kind of exercise when Paul Botley finishes his work on learning Greek in Renaissance Europe.

[35] See, e.g., Ramus (1578, sigs. A2v–sA3r), where the brief discussion of sound is never linked to any syntactic features, but rather provides simple definitions of terms such as liquid and vowel (e.g.: “D[iscipulus]: Quid est syllaba unius literae? P[raeceptor ] est vocalis quaelibet; ut a e i o u y.”

[36] The works that are regularly cited are the De voce, the De loquela brutorum and the De locutione et eius instrumentis. On the reception of Paduan medical ideas in England, see now Woolfson (1999, 73–102). To Woolfson, add the early seventeenth-century notes in an English hand found in the margins of the De visione, voce, auditu...at British Library, London, shelfmark, 536 m4.

[37] Stemming from Aristotle, Poetics, II.1.

[38] Bullokar (1580). On Bullokar (c. 1531–1609), see now ODNB sub nomine.

[39] For sixteenth-century knowledge of non-European languages and scripts, see Gesner’s Mithridates (1555), consisting of a range of Lord’s Prayers.

[40] On this, see now Alistair Hamilton, “Nam Tirones Sumus.” The work was based on a manuscript that had once been in the hands of Raphelengius’s teachers, Guillaume Postel (so Hamilton).

[41] At f.19x he copies out the transliteration system adopted by the Lexicon Pentaglotton, Hebraicum, Chaldaicum, Syriacum, Thalmudico-Rabbinicum & Arabicum. In quo omnes voces Hebreae [...] opus novum nunc post Authoris obitum.

[42] Additional MS, 4377, f.4r.

[43] Additional MS, 4377, f.18x.

[44] For “analogia” in Greek in the sense of grammatical regularity, see now Lallot (1998, 80–81). For the so-called dispute between the followers of “analogy” (those of Aristarchus the grammarian) and those of “anomaly” (those of Crates), see now the sources marshalled in Dickey (2007, 6 n. 15). As to the reality of the debate, the jury is out, but for an up-to-date summary of the positions adopted in the secondary literature, see Ax (2000).

[45] See the entry for Varro in Brown (1980). Varro’s work on the De lingua latina had been edited by Antonio Agostin, but had achieved a raised scholarly profile following the emendatory activity of Scaliger (whose coniectanea were in later editions often bound with the original text of Agostin), and then, in 1605, Gaspar Schoppe produced a new edition.

[46] See now Beurle (2010, 105ff).

[47] I register here Sam Wilder’s perceptively baffled comment: “Of che parsing of semitic root patterns does cut rather to the quick of that enticing area of language systems theory and controversy that gets debated along those lines. They really do: one is confronted with a promise of an almost pristine semantic calculus unimaginable in our chaotic Indo-European ‘accidental’ linguistic universe of borrowings and etymological bastardry. This is where Pell seems to be so interestingly stewing. Yet then, when he has analogikos at the top of a column in a verb-parsing table, I am a bit confused.”

[48] See the discussion in Gabba (1963). For the marshaling of the ancient sources, see Cupaiuolo (1925).

[49] Epistulae, 1627, 197 and 203.

[50] The Pleasant History of Cawwood the Rooke The Pleasant History of Cawwood the Rooke or, the Assembly of Birds 1640, sig. B4v).

Part III: Ancient Near East

8. Sumerian in the Middle Assyrian Period

Klaus Wagensonner

8.1 Introduction

Sumerologists are in the fortunate position that their research is based on a huge and long-lasting corpus of royal or votive inscriptions, lexical, literary, liturgical, legal, and administrative texts, to name just a few of the main textual categories. If we take the archaic tablets from Uruk into account, for which a Sumerian background is not more than an unsubstantiated hypothesis, we are facing roughly three millennia of Sumerian scribal lore.[1] Given this enormous timespan, which includes periods of actively compiling texts in Sumerian as well as ones in which older scribal lore was copied and transmitted, it is imperative to consider that there are not just “as many Sumerian languages as there are Sumerologists,”[2] but indeed there are as many Sumerian grammars, or grammatical nuances, as there are periods or places where Sumerian was transmitted. Maybe this view is too exaggerated considering that the basics of Sumerian language remained more or less the same. However, over such a vast amount of time no language stays untouched or is resistant to modifications and changes in its structure, syntax, or lexicon, let alone to influences from other languages.[3] And, of course, there is the texts’ orthography that frequently may conceal grammatical details and, hence, obstructs our perception of Sumerian grammar.[4] Often, peculiar spellings were coined “errors” or “mistakes,” but this notion should be widely abandoned. Language contact is one, but not the exclusive, motivator for such changes.[5] In this respect, let us consider K. David Harrison’s view, when he states:

Languages are highly complex, self-organizing systems in constant flux. [...] We all participate in constant change, but no individual speaker controls the speed, trajectory, or character of change. A process of emerging complexity—not yet well understood—gives a language its constantly changing and characteristic shape.[6]

This does certainly not mean that Mesopotamian scribes, and young ones, in particular, made no mistakes; scribal errors do exist, quite frequently at times, but every peculiar spelling must be treated with utmost care.[7] Stefan Maul argued that the scribes working on bilingual texts during the first millennium BCE were not necessarily unable to comprehend the Sumerian, but that the interpreter or commentator instead wanted to introduce a new text layer, which subsequently led to discrepancies between the Sumerian and Akkadian versions.[8]

From a grammatical point of view, the Sumerian language and its written lore are frequently treated in relative homogeneity, almost concealing the fact that grammar and lexicon may show important differences between sites and periods. Grammarians often deal with linguistic phenomena in texts that cover either long periods of time or whose manuscripts originate from various places or even different scribal milieus.[9] Such a treatment is certainly reasonable when dealing with a language overview as, for instance, in Marie-Louise Thomsen’s Sumerian Language[10] or Brahm Jagersma’s A descriptive grammar of Sumerian,[11] or within a greater linguistic framework.[12] There are, nonetheless, important studies as, for example, Jeremy Black’s Sumerian Grammar in Babylonian Theory,[13] which provides a more close-up view of the Sumerian language with a focus on a specific period on the one hand and on a specific kind of dataset, namely the rather artificial framework provided by the so-called Old Babylonian Grammatical Texts (short OBGT), on the other.[14]

The Old Babylonian period, which is often perceived as a pristine example for the study of scribal education and transmission of knowledge, does not present a coherent treatment of the Sumerian language either. Grammatical lists, such as the Old Babylonian Grammatical Texts published in the fourth volume of the Materialien zum Sumerischen Lexikon are mere glimpses and simply treatments of single verbs or morphological elements. All in all, they do not provide a full-fledged paradigm that can be exploited in order to deal, for instance, with narratives or even the syntax of a sentence.[15] Recently Paul Delnero discussed the variation in a rather coherent group of Sumerian literary texts, which was copied in the Old Babylonian period at various places.[16]

This paper deals with a period in which copying Sumerian scribal lore was still at its peak. Scholarly texts deriving from various sites in Babylonia reached its northern periphery. Unfortunately, exactly how texts are transmitted is often unclear. Colophons of the time offer a few clues, but it is clear that sources reached the north under very different circumstances. The title of this paper might imply a comprehensive treatment of Sumerian grammar in the Middle Assyrian period in an area north of the Mesopotamian core and therefore at its periphery. But this is certainly not attempted here because of exactly the reason stated above. Furthermore, the Sumerian found in these texts is usually the Sumerian of the sources. An exception are texts that were compiled in Assyria proper, such as a few texts praising the Assyrian king.[17] The main objective of this paper, however, is to pinpoint some observations on Sumero-Akkadian bilingual texts and subsequently the relationship between the late tradition of a Sumerian source text and its Akkadian translation. The Middle Assyrian period contributes significantly to our understanding of the ancient scribal lore, which is often insufficiently preserved in the areas a majority of the compositions were imported from. The reasons for this temporal—and also geographical—limitation are mostly based on our meagre knowledge about the transmission of lexical and literary texts in the late second millennium BCE on the one hand, and the extraordinary good state of preservation of the Middle Assyrian scholarly texts on the other.

8.2 Translating Sumerian

In order to deal appropriately with translations from the late second millennium, let us first provide some general remarks on the physical appearance of bilingual texts. By the Middle Assyrian period, bilingualism fully infiltrated scholarly texts. Among the many Sumero-Akkadian texts dating to this period there are large numbers of lexical lists, which are already more or less parallel to the tradition of the respective lists in the first millennium BCE. On the other hand, we are dealing with a slightly smaller corpus of bilingual literary compositions.[18] Except for lexical texts, which distribute the Sumerian and Akkadian versions in columns, bilingual texts in the Middle Assyrian period conventionally use an interlinear distribution, which means that each Sumerian line is followed by its Akkadian equivalent.[19]

As has been attested previously,[20] and in particular during the first millennium BCE, indented lines for the Akkadian equivalents are a widely absent feature in the Middle Assyrian period. In those instances in which the Sumerian version retains a rather short form, the scribes frequently saved space by putting both versions on one single line and separating Sumerian and Akkadian by a so-called Glossenkeil (e.g., Too late, Too late, Too late).[21] The famous tablet of the “Astrolabe” B in its Middle Assyrian version KAV 218 represents a subtype of interlinear translations. Due to the tablet’s layout and the division into three columns, the scribe had to break each version several times. In order to keep the Sumerian and Akkadian versions apart, all lines except for the first are indented.[22] This subtype, however, still belongs to the category of interlinear translations. Similar to lexical texts, some bilingual compositions distribute the Sumerian and Akkadian versions into separate columns with the Sumerian text on the left and its Akkadian equivalent to the right.[23] It is difficult to decide whether this kind of layout derived from the source used by the copyist, or whether it was restricted to certain genres of scholarly texts. In any case, this type of layout is rather scarce in the Middle Assyrian period outside the genre of lexical texts.

In quite a few instances, both versions demonstrate a tendency towards segmentation into smaller (syntactical) units. The separation of a line into two halves is well attested in literary sources of the first millennium BCE, but is relatively uncommon in the Middle Assyrian period. In the subsequent example attested on VAT 9710 (Lugale IX–XII, line 421), the following segmentation can be observed:

O | ii | 07 | nam-ug₅-ga-mu | mu-un-ku₅-da-[gin₇]
|  | 08 | a-na na-ri-ia | ki-i ta-at-ta-˹ma˺-[an-ni]

More common are segmentations in even smaller units such as in line 9 of Nin-Isina’s Journey to Nippur :[24]

O | 17 | dudug-sa₆-ga | a-a d+en-lil₂-la₂ | zi-da-na | mu-un-du
| 18 | dudug.sa₆.ga | a-bi d+en.lil₂ | im-nu-ša | il-˹lak˺

A similar kind of segmentation can, of course, occur in the aforementioned column-based bilingual texts as well. The following example comes from tablet VI of the lexical series Ana ittišu:[25]

O | i | 12 | min₃-na-ne-ne | ki-lal-lu-šu-nu
|  | 13 | 3(diš)-a-ne-ne | ša-la-aš₂-ti-šu-nu
|  | 14 | u₃ ku₃-babbar 4(diš)-kam₂-ma-ta | u₃ i+na ku₃.babbar er-bit-ti-šu-nu
|  | 15 | kaskal-še₃ i₃-su₈-ge-eš | a-na har-ra-ni il-li-˹ku˺

Sometimes a text became too long to fit one line. In such a case the scribe needed to abandon any kind of segmentation. Another noteworthy feature concerns the so-called “firing holes.” This frequently attested feature of late library texts, which is produced by punching deep holes into the clay body using a round stylus or pin, requires an in-depth study. Whereas it is perfectly feasible to interpret such holes on large tablets to reduce the strain on the tablet during the firing process, their purpose to do so on smaller or medium-sized clay tablets appears to be negligible and further explanations are possible. Very occasionally the placement of these holes appears to take the syntax of the text into account.[26]

The relationship between the Sumerian and the Akkadian versions of a composition quite often pose a certain amount of difficulties, which was pointed out by Markham J. Geller:

Like any good translation, Akkadian translations of Sumerian literature had to be cast in idiomatic Akkadian, which often makes it difficult to match the Akkadian and Sumerian texts grammatically.[27]

Elsewhere Geller challenges the necessity of our separate treatment of the Sumerian and Akkadian versions of a literary composition, in order not to judge the ability of the ancient translator to understand the Sumerian source correctly:

On the other hand, it is questionable whether one must translate each version of a bilingual text independently, which assumes a priori that the ancient translator has failed to grasp the sense or even spirit of the original text.[28]

The Middle Assyrian scribes had all the necessary tools, such as lexical texts, specialized vocabularies,[29] and even paleographical lists[30] at their disposal. These reference works play a pivotal role in the transmission of scholarly texts, but whether they were used as tools for an interpreter is difficult to judge based on the textual record.[31]

In terms of their transmission in the last third of the second millennium BCE both versions should be considered as one unit.[32] The Middle Assyrian scribes were mostly not concerned with translating the Sumerian of older compositions into Akkadian; they had already copied a bilingual text. However, the advantages of stand-alone translations of either the Sumerian or the Akkadian version are not always self-evident.[33] Henri Limet summarises these issues as follows:

La traduction est l’art de presenter [...] dans une langue un texte qui a été écrit ou prononcé dans une autre. On passé donc d’une langue A, dite “de depart,” le sumérien, à une langue B, dite “d’arrivée,” appelée aussi “langue cible,” l’accadien. La difficulté vient, non seulement de ce que les deux langues A et B different dans leur vocabulaire et leur grammaire, mais aussi de ce que le texte à traduire a été conçu dans une culture qui n’est pas celle de la langue cible.[34]

Some bilingual compositions of this late stage appear to have been compiled from an Akkadian perspective. The Sumerian of such texts frequently demonstrates a great variety of unusual spellings, which frequently seem impenetrable and almost of arcane and cryptographic nature. Fluent translations of such texts seem to be impossible without the Akkadian equivalent. However, the Sumerian language received the status of a pseudo-original by placing it first.[35]

The textual record of the Middle Assyrian period remains rather silent about the means of transmitting scholarly texts. Any information about the origin of a source can be gleaned from the colophons.[36] The so-called “Astrolabe” B with its sophisticated astronomical menology of the month names is available in its full form thanks to the Middle Assyrian tablet VAT 9416. Most other text witnesses and parallels date to a significantly later date and are much more fragmentary.[37] A textual analysis of the Middle Assyrian tablet clearly favors an earlier date. Some of its verbal forms show features of Middle Babylonian texts. As we will see further down, the Sumerian of this composition shows an array of peculiar or at least arcane spellings.[38]

The colophons on Middle Assyrian tablets, as far as they are preserved, may provide information on the origin of a source text or the family background of the copy’s scribe,[39] but colophons never include information on the responsible translator of a Sumerian composition. This is mainly due to the fact that the translated source in its bilingual setting was considered as one inseparable entity.[40] A rather different case presents itself through two copies of the lexical series Ea. The colophons on Ass. 523 as well as VAT 10172 both refer to the source as being an “old A.A series” (Ass. 523: a.ameš-tu libir.rameš-tu and VAT 10172: geš.gar3 a.ameš libir.rameš). Indeed, both tablets contain archaizing sign forms. One can contrast this kind of lexical tradition with another tablet dated from the Middle Assyrian period which also contains a copy of the first tablet of Ea lacking any older sign forms.[41] Note that both the paleographical sign list AfO 4, plates III–IV written by a certain Marduk-kābit-ahhēšu as well as the Middle Assyrian copy of the creation myth KAR 4 (see section 8.3.6) go back to “old sources.”

Some information can be gained through textual analysis, which might provide clues as to the origin of the source text used by the copyists.[42] However, even such analyses provide mere glimpses, but fail to give the whole picture and thus many issues persist. An unfortunate fact is the lack of information regarding both the translators of Sumerian texts as well as the exact circumstances of the process of translating these texts.[43] The colophons are generally ignorant about these highly intriguing aspects and limit themselves to the scribes, who already had a bilingual copy at their disposal.[44] Nonetheless, it can be taken for granted that the Middle Assyrian scribes were not the translators of Sumerian compositions, neither lexical nor literary.[45]

In Emar, whose texts date slightly earlier than the Middle Assyrian texts from Assur, the colophons on copies of scholarly tablets are separated by a double ruling from the actual “base text” as well. Over the double ruling the sequence be man be is written in smaller script. Yoram Cohen notes that besides Mesopotamia and Emar this notation is also known from Ugarit and Hattusa. At least for Mesopotamia or Assyria, in particular, it seems rather plausible to see in be a notation that stands for Sumerian til. This is somewhat verified by the parallel al.til also written over the double ruling on VAT 8876. man, on the other hand, still poses some problems. An interpretation of be for bēlu, “lord,” and man for šarru, “king,” appears too far-fetched. Cohen emphasizes that in the Western periphery, this notation may have lost any semantic affiliation and kept only a symbolic value.[46]

A few redactional remarks such as hepi, “it is broken,” not only show that the Middle Assyrian scribes attempted to produce a faithful copy of their sources, but moreover that they did not have to bother with translating or interpreting Sumerian compositions.[47] If such remarks also occur in the Akkadian version, it is quite clear that the Middle Assyrian scribes already copied from a bilingual source. Such a source text quite certainly can be traced in a center of learning such as Nippur of the slightly earlier Middle Babylonian period. Amid the scarcity of Middle Babylonian literary sources, N 6286 is a comparatively well-preserved bilingual source of “Ninurta’s Return to Nippur,” whose layout puts the Sumerian and Akkadian versions into columns.[48] Another issue is the fact that we know almost nothing about scribal education in the Middle Assyrian period. There should have existed some means of transmitting the know-how of writing and dealing with “old” scribal lore, either affiliated to an institution[49] or within the private sphere of skilled scribes or officials in the city’s administration. Compared to the richness of sources for the Old Babylonian period[50] and the later evidence from first millennium BCE Babylonia,[51] we search in vain for any meaningful information regarding this issue. There are neither archaeological traces nor any valuable hints in the texts that may help in identifying the Middle Assyrian bīt ṭuppāte as locus operandi for the education of young scribes.[52] For the time being, any reconstruction of teaching methods must remain speculative.[53] Additionally, the copies of the Middle Assyrian scribes appear not to resemble school texts.[54]

Yet another issue defying any easy approach is the choice of texts that have been copied in Assur. The composition “Nin-Isina’s Journey to Nippur,” for instance, is otherwise known only from a small fragment originating from Old Babylonian Nippur.[55] Was it mere coincidence that this composition found its way to Assur? In his recent overview of the lexical tradition in Mesopotamia, Niek Veldhuis noted that the Middle Assyrian corpus of lexical texts contained, besides regular school texts, also “rare archaic compilations, such as the phrasebook Ki-ulutinbiše (also known as ana ittišu), which originated in Old Babylonian Nippur.”[56]

Given all those circumstances and the complex history of text transmission, which is shrouded from view by a lack of information, it is an arduous task to treat the “quality” of a language in such a late stage. When exactly the Sumerian language ceased to be used as vernacular is a cause of much debate and might have happened in various stages after the downfall of the Ur III Empire at the end of the third millennium BCE. All written scribal lore that has been compiled in the two millennia that followed may show deficiencies or peculiarities of any kind.[57] The decline of Sumerian is due further to the ever-increasing infiltration of Akkadian into the economic and daily life. However, a great share of the textual material used for grammatical observations and setting up an artificial paradigm belong to some extent to the Old Babylonian school milieu.[58] The variation between copies belonging to the same composition often allows for the identification of scribal errors, Hörfehler, and other deficiencies in copying source texts.[59]

Frequently, secondary literature texts dating after the Old Babylonian period are deemed to contain mistakes or errors by the respective scribe. Just a few attempts were undertaken to interpret unusual spellings as evidence for linguistic change or variations in virtue of regional customs.[60] But one has to bear in mind that the Old Babylonian texts are, strictly speaking, not a product of speakers of the Sumerian language. Bilingual sources from the Old Babylonian scholarly sphere are relatively scarce. Bilingualism infiltrated royal inscriptions and lexical texts faster than narrative compositions. Complete interlinear translations are practically absent from the Old Babylonian text corpus. Partial Akkadian translations are usually added to Sumerian texts as annotations or glosses.[61]

Jerrold S. Cooper states about bilingualism and bilingual texts in the first half of the second millennium BCE:[62]

But unlike the period after 1600 BCE, when Sumerian texts were as a rule accompanied by an Akkadian translation, in this earlier period, translations were quite rare, often from outlying areas, and by their appearance and quality betray themselves as the work of inferior scribes, either students who needed a ‘pony’ to learn Sumerian, or scribes who never learned Sumerian well enough in the first place. The rarity of these early bilinguals, compared to the thousands of unilingual Sumerian tablets of the same period, is eloquent testimony to the strength of Sumerian tradition in the Old Babylonian (2000–1600 BCE) academy.[63]

The variation and use of local orthographical as well as grammatical features allows local traditions or even only the preference of a single scribe to be highlighted. Even while comparing the wide array of text witnesses to a given Sumerian literary text in the Old Babylonian period, the variants between the respective manuscripts may be astonishing.[64]

Copies of lexical and literary texts, which came down to us from the Middle Assyrian period, offer important insights, such as possible evidence for dictation. A proper investigation of many of these features, however, is still a desideratum. There is ample evidence that Sumerian at the end of the second millennium BCE was not just widely used in the scholarly tradition, but was given a pivotal role in the scribal sphere as well. The physical appearance of the (bilingual) texts themselves provide enough hints, let alone the fact that in bilingual texts the Sumerian version generally appears first—both in interlinear as well as column-based bilingual texts—, and is followed by the Akkadian translation.[65] This feature for bilingual narrative texts might have completely derived from the lexical tradition.[66]

Amid the fact that we have only small glimpses of the original textual record at our disposal, the extant texts suffice in order to get a good perception of the scribal lore that was transferred to Assur and copied there. The prominence of compositions such as “Ninurta’s Exploits” or “Ninurta’s Return to Nippur” is noteworthy. Together with the two manuscripts of “Nin-Isina’s Journey to Nippur,” it is astonishing to note that most of the Sumerian literary texts associated with the Middle Assyrian period in Assur deal (at least to some extent) with the topic of the divine journey. Whether this fact has any relevance for a kind of “program” in acquiring cuneiform sources, must remain speculative.

8.3 Text Basis

In the Middle Assyrian period, the elite[67] of Assur came into contact with a huge amount of literary and lexical texts, which originated in Babylonia. It is almost impossible to reconstruct the transmission paths of these scholarly texts. Following one possible, and not unlikely, hypothesis Babylonian scribes brought their text collections with them when moving to the Assyrian realm.[68]

With the Middle Assyrian period, we enter an age of diplomacy and international relations.[69] The Assyrian “state” was increasing its power and political hold in the Fertile Crescent. According to a fragmentary passage in the “Epic of Tukultī-Ninurta I,” the Assyrian king plundered Babylonian libraries and brought their contents to Assyria.[70] There are a couple of Middle Babylonian scholarly texts among the tablets found at Assur, and those might very well have come to Assur on such an occasion.[71]

By looking at all the extraordinarily well-preserved Middle Assyrian manuscripts, one might wonder what happened to the sources, the Vorlagen. It is unlikely that all bilingual texts were transmitted orally. This is confirmed, on the one hand, by the great stability in compositions such as “Ninurta’s Exploits,” but also by internal remarks that imply copying from a physical source. Such remarks might occur within the copy itself.[72] Some of the tablets add til or al.til before the colophon, thus indicating that the copy is “complete.” Also, the Sumerogram gaba.ri quite certainly refers to a physical tablet, which was used as a source text for the copyist. It is, however, not always clear whether every scribe copied from such a tablet, or whether sometimes text witnesses also went back to other forms of transmission, such as dictation. The texts themselves are usually not very explicit, but give nevertheless some small clues. The colophon of the aforementioned text witnesses for “Nin-Isina’s Journey to Nippur” refer to the source as being written ana pî ṭuppi šaṭāri, “according to the wording of the written tablet.” Amid the well-preserved corpus of Middle Assyrian copies at our disposal, the sources are gone. Were they sent back? Were the sources first copied onto perishable material or on tablets, which were then recycled? All these questions unfortunately cannot be answered. One can, however, entertain such a possibility and compare the situation in Assyria in the last third of the second millennium BCE with medieval scriptoria, where manuscripts were copied before being returned to their home institutions.[73]

The majority of Middle Assyrian scholarly texts discussed in this study was assigned to a possible institutional library with the preliminary designation “Reconstructed Library M 2” by Olof Pedersén. The reconstructed state of this library or manuscript collection is owed to the find conditions at Assur, for the texts assigned to it were found spread over a relatively large area at the site of Assur, more precisely between the Aššur temple precinct and the temple of the gods Anu and Adad.[74] This Middle Assyrian collection is often referred to as a royal library supposedly established in the reign of Tiglath-pileser I.[75] The studies by Claudio Saporetti and Helmut Freydank about Middle Assyrian eponyms showed that an affiliation of these texts to the reign of Tiglath-pileser I appears to be unlikely.[76] Whether the tablets belonging to this reconstructed group were part of an institutional library or part of smaller manuscript collections stored in the houses of various Middle Assyrian officials can no longer be verified.[77] Be that as it may, by the Neo-Assyrian period specific tablets were selected and moved to the royal libraries in Nineveh, which were assembled by either Esarhaddon or Ashurbanipal.[78] It is, however, rather unclear why certain tablets were chosen and others not. It is therefore rather surprising that either Esarhaddon’s or Ashurbanipal’s officials chose BM 122625+ containing a copy of sections XIII–XVI of “Ninurta’s Exploits”,[79] because this copy attests to several deficiencies compared to the tradition of this literary text. The tablet’s scribe Marduk-balāssu-ēreš presumably copied the complete composition onto four large tablets, of which three exemplars survived.[80] Another example is a god list published as CT 24, 20–46 written by a certain Kidin-Sîn son of Suti’u. This god list is an exceptional case within the Middle Assyrian evidence because Kidin-Sîn copied the text “according to the wording of an old ‘big tablet’” (rev. vi, 8’: a-na pi-i dub.gal-le libir.ra).[81] The same scribe also copied the creation myth KAR 4, which has not been transferred to Nineveh. However, there are copies known of this composition at Kuyunjik. Thus one can entertain the possibility that this composition was copied on clay or wax before being transferred to the capital.

The Middle Babylonian and Middle Assyrian “library” texts from Assur are often considered to be part of a royal collection established by Tiglath-pileser I.[82] But, as was emphasized by Niek Veldhuis recently, the archaeological and textual evidence speaks against assigning this group of texts to the reign of Tiglath-pileser I.[83] According to Pedersén, three libraries date to the Middle Assyrian period. Besides the small library in the Old Palace (M 1) and an even smaller collection of a couple of school tablets found near the Ištar temple (M 3), the largest group of Middle Assyrian library texts has been reconstructed by Pedersén due to the “findspots and external appearance of the tablets” (M 2).[84] The archaeological context poses many difficulties. It is, for instance, not possible to affiliate the group M 2 with the Aššur temple. As indicated above, it is not entirely certain whether the texts of this group were part of an official collection or belong to several private manuscript collections.[85] The many findspots of Middle Assyrian material found together with Neo-Assyrian scholarly texts in the southwest of the Aššur temple seem to indicate that the earlier tablets were incorporated into a later (temple) library (N 1).[86]

A brief survey of the manuscript collection M 2 with its affiliations to the later Neo-Assyrian group N 1 shows that it contained a large variety of scholarly texts.[87] Apart from the literary texts, the most important part comprises copies of lexical lists. An intriguing group are texts dealing with hippology. For this study, the bilingual sources are of particular interest.

The Middle Assyrian period offers one of the most pristine sources for the transmission of bilingual texts in Mesopotamia, much of which is owed to the good state of preservation of most of the tablets. Amid the creation of various Assyrian scholarly texts, the prime focus of the Assyrian kings was the south, and it is this period that presents most of the major compositions in a form that is rather reminiscent of the “standardized” editions in the first millennium BCE.[88] The elite living and working in Assur or Assyria in this period drew an enormous amount of knowledge from the south, from Babylonia.[89] Despite the propagandistic and possibly ahistorical view presented in the Tukulti-Ninurta Epic, most sources of scholarly texts might not have been brought to Assyria as war booty, but might have accompanied scribal families of Babylonian descent who settled in Assyria and brought their manuscript collections with them.

The most homogenous group of colophons can be found among the aforementioned array of tablets originating from the collection M 2 at Assur with stray finds that had been identified as belonging to the group N 1. Currently (at least) 23 tablets can be assigned to the three sons of the royal scribe Ninurta-uballissu.[90] Amid the relative abundance of sources, there is no information available on this family, which goes beyond the names, occupations, and family relations of these scribes. Ninurta-uballissu’s title “royal scribe” suggests that he held a high position within the Middle Assyrian state administration. However, there are no legal or administrative documents known so far that shed any light onto this individual. Such a lack of information regarding this family in everyday documentation is quite intriguing, but might simply be due to the incomplete dataset that is at our disposal. All the information on the individual careers of the royal scribe’s sons is also only known from the colophons of scholarly tablets. Unless all these gaps in our documentation are merely coincidence, these comparatively productive scribes certainly did not share the same destiny as the (Babylonian) scribe Marduk-nādin-ahhē, whose tempus operandi falls into the reign of the fourteenth century king Aššur-uballiṭ. This scribe, whose Babylonian origin is evident,[91] moved to Assur probably shortly after the new Marduk temple was inaugurated and built a house ina ṣilli bīt Marduk.[92] In contrast to him, the societal backgrounds of our scribes Marduk-balāssu-ēreš, Bēl-aha-iddina, and Sîn-šuma-iddina lie in the shades of time. Judging from the layout of the extant colophons, it seems likely that the last-mentioned scribe learned his skills from a different tutor.[93]

The texts selected for this study are by no means numerous. This is due to the fact that observations aim at focusing on bilingual text sources going beyond single word-to-word equivalents. Hence, lexical lists such as Ea or Ura will not feature here.[94] Consequently, this survey deals with bilingual literary compositions and those lexical texts that contain phrases and expressions. Among the texts discussed in the subsequent sections are one lexical and four literary texts as well as a text that might be called astronomical or “technical literature.”[95] The most important lexical text for this brief survey is certainly the series Ana ittišu which was well known in the Middle Assyrian period.

Amid the rather problematic connotations of this term, the Middle Assyrian texts discussed below can be considered, in general, “canonical” compositions in the sense that their contents can sufficiently be compared to later first-millennium BCE successors in terms of lexicon, grammar, and sequence of entries or lines.[96] In this study, this term is used in quite a superficial sense; it ought not to be taken literally. In Mesopotamia, this term was frequently used for compositions, which were standardized to a high degree within the stream of tradition. This process of standardizing a composition does not necessarily imply any rigid copying of texts sign by sign. This terminology is usually applied to witnesses of compositions, which preserve the same wording. Variants are frequently attested and a relative flux in the textual integrity may be quite evident.[97] The grammatical analysis of the Sumerian language in this late stage of its transmission cannot limit itself to the dataset provided by lexical texts alone. They usually—Ana ittišu is an exception—provide not enough context for a given lexeme. Hence, bilingual narrative compositions offer crucial insights into both the use and the understanding of Sumerian grammar. One of the most important sources for such an analysis is the long composition “Ninurta’s Exploits,” also known by its incipit as Lugal-e. This literary text offers the opportunity to trace the modifications in the text from the first half of the second until the second half of the first millennia BCE. Several text witnesses dating to the Middle Assyrian period are known from finds at Assur and Nineveh. Also the much shorter composition “Ninurta’s Return to Nippur” is preserved through manuscripts from these two places. It should be noted that the text witnesses from Nineveh were moved there from Assur in the Neo-Assyrian period. An intriguing case represents the account on the divine journey of the goddess Nin-Isina to Nippur. We have here a hardly known composition, which by chance entered the scribal repertoire of two Middle Assyrian scribes. All these three compositions show some relation to the topic of Sumerian divine journeys. Whether this is a coincidence or the texts were chosen on purpose, can no longer be verified due to the gaps in the documentation. Due to the shattered archaeological context the texts were found in, the question of either private or institutional libraries arises. According to Dominique Charpin, the term “library” is frequently used inadequately, since the contents of libraries are categorised and scholarly works usually derive from purpose-driven collecting. In constrast to libraries are archives, which contain the written sources pertaining to either an individual, a group of people or an institution.[98] Charpin states that the intentional firing of a tablet in ancient times can be a criterion for a library, although this feature is not ultimate proof of its existence.[99] For the Middle Assyrian texts, which will be studied in the subsequent sections, the term manuscript collections is preferred.[100]

There are many further texts that might awaken our curiosity and be worth studying in much greater detail. In order to keep this study within reasonable limits, only a small selection of examples has been chosen.

8.3.1 The Lexical Series Ana ittišu

The lexical series usually referred to by its Akkadian incipit Ana ittišu (henceforth Ai) or, less frequently, by its Sumerian equivalent ki-ulutin-bi-še₃[101] is unusual compared to other members of this genre. The composition has more in common with grammatical texts, since many passages resemble paradigmatic features.[102] The composition was edited by Benno Landsberger in the first volume of the Materialien zum Sumerischen Lexikon (abbrev. MSL). Landsberger only included the later sources from Assyria and was not aware of any earlier versions, such as the forerunners from Nippur dating to the Old Babylonian period (so-called Proto-Ai).[103] The Middle Assyrian scribes possibly imported the complete series from Babylonia. The colophons on VAT 9552 (= Ai III) and VAT 8875 (= Ai VI) refer to sources from Nippur. So far no traces of this list can be found among the Kassite or Middle Babylonian lexical tradition.[104]

The Middle Assyrian text witnesses are extraordinary because of their excellent state of preservation compared to many of the later sources and can therefore be considered one of the major sources for the reconstruction of this lexical series. The subsequent discussion is based on the following two manuscripts in particular:[105]

VAT 9552 is the upper half of a copy of Ai III (ur₄ : hamāmu) written by Bēl-aha-iddina of the Ninurta-uballissu family.[106]

VAT 8875 is an almost completely preserved text witness of Ai VI (sib₂-ta : elātu). The tablet was written by Marduk-balāssu-ēreš and checked by his brother, the aforementioned Bēl-aha-iddina.[107]

It is rather probable that the Middle Assyrian scribes of Assur imported the whole series of Ana ittišu.[108] Unfortunately, the colophon does not mention any scribe’s name. All other text witnesses containing copies of Ai originate from the context of the sons of the royal scribe Ninurta-uballissu.

A full discussion of grammatical features between the Sumerian and the Akkadian versions is not attempted here. The subsequent paragraphs only contain a few glimpses.

Example 1: Ai III (VAT 9552) obv. i, 10

buru₁₄[109] nu-ub-da-me-a

: la-a-am e-bu-ri

This example contains one of the rare attestations for a Sumerian equivalent to the Akkadian preposition lāma, “before.” Later grammatical texts such as NBGT I, 423 offer the entry nu-da : la-ma.[110] A morphologically rather close parallel can be found in NBGT IV, 19: nu-ub-dam : la-ma.[111] The sample taken from the grammatical text, however, conceals the presence of the verbal base me, “to be,” as is clearly shown by the line in Ai. Example 2 deals with a very similar verbal chain.

Example 2: Ai III (VAT 9552) obv. i, 11

buru₁₄ nu-ub-da-g̃enkin-a

: min(la-a-am e-bu-ri) il-˹la˺-kam₂

In this instance, the preposition lāma is not attested in its usual prepositional use (e.g., lām ebūri; Ai III obv. i, 10), but as the conjunction “before.” Thanks to the pronunciation gloss kin, the Sumerian version clearly uses a hamṭu base. Examples 1 and 2 show that the prefix chain nu-ub-da-° alone renders the Akkadian conjunction lāma.

Example 3: Ai III (VAT 9552) obv. i, 22

[ur₃-r]a-˹ta˺ ka ba-ab-še₃

: iš-tu u₂-ri ana[112] ˹pi ap˺-ti

This entry on the Middle Assyrian tablet might contain an orthographic error. Against the usual equivalent ab for the Akkadian word aptu, “window,” this copy of Ai reads ba-ab. Since the genitive is not marked, the Sumerian version should be understood as ka-ab:ba-še₃ instead. It is noteworthy that Bēl-aha-iddina uses the same spelling in the subsequent entry: [ur₃-ra-t]a igi ba-ab-še₃ : ki.min a-na pa-ni ˹ap-ti˺. One might even entertain the possibility that the scribe confused Akkadian aptu with the close semantic term bābu, “door,” and transposed the latter onto the Sumerian version.

Example 4a: Ai III (VAT 9552) obv. ii, 38–39 // Ai VI (VAT 8875) obv. i, 26–29

a₂-tuku a-na i₃-g̃al₂-la[113] / teš₂-a se₃-ga-bi in-ba-eš

: min(ni-me-lu) ma-la ib-ba-šu-u₂ / mit-ha-riš i-zu-zu

a₂-˹tuku a˺-na i₃-g̃a₂-g̃a₂-a / igi-dutu-še₃ / teš₂-a se₃-ga-bi / in-ba-e-ne

: ni-me-la ma-la ib-ba-aš₂-šu-u₂ / i+na ma-har dutu / mi-it-ha-ri-iš / i-zu-uz-zu[114]

Example 4b: Ai III (VAT 9552), obv. ii, 40–41 // Ai VI (VAT 8875) obv. i, 30–33

˹a₂˺-tuku a-na i₃-g̃al₂-la / [te]š₂-a se₃-ga-bi in-ba-e-ne

: eš₅(ni-me-lu) ma-la ib-ba-šu-u₂ / mit-ha-riš i-zu-zu

a₂-tuku a-na i₃-g̃al₂-la / igi-dutu-ka / teš₂-a se₃-ga-bi / in-ba-eš

: ni-me-la ma-la i-ba-šu-u₂ / i+na ma-har dutu / mi-it-ha-ri-iš / i-zu-zu.

The respective Akkadian versions do not differentiate the Sumerian verbal chains in terms of aspect. Both hamṭu in-ba-eš and marû in-ba-e-ne are rendered i-zu-zu. Whereas the former should be analyzed izūzū, the last-mentioned should be a present form izuzzū. As quoted above Ai VI contains a parallel to these entries with a couple of variants. Whereas Ai III renders Sumerian i₃-g̃al₂-la in both entries as ibbašû, Ai VI differentiates between ibbaššû for i₃-g̃a₂-g̃a₂-a and i-ba-šu-u₂ for i₃-g̃al₂-la. Noteworthy is also the inconsistency between igi-dutu-še₃ and igi-dutu-ka, which are both rendered ina mahar Šamaš.

More interesting is the Sumerian equivalent to the Akkadian adverb mithāriš, “each one.” All instances of Ai attest to the form teš₂-a se₃-ga-bi.[115] Line 490 of “Ninurta’s Exploits” has the form teš₂-a-ra-ke₄.[116] This form appears to be rather close to teš₂-ba ri-a-g̃a₂ in the Old Babylonian text. Another bilingual source dating to the Neo-Assyrian period (ms. j₁) renders teš₂-a si-ga for mithāriš instead. The Sumerian form is already attested in the Middle Assyrian period within the tradition of Ai.[117] The form teš₂-a si-ga clearly goes back to Old Babylonian teš₂-a se₃-ga as attested in royal inscriptions.[118]

Example 5: Ai III (VAT 9552) obv. ii, 5–7

ku₃-im-ba | : bu-tuq-qu-˹u₂˺
ku₃-im-ba ag-a | : ba-ta-˹qu˺
ku₃-im-ba ba-an-ag | : ib-ta-ta-˹aq˺

The third tablet of Ai provides two Akkadian equivalents for the Sumerian expression ku₃-im-ba: (1) butuqqû, and the loanword (2) ibissû (< i-bi₂-za), “deficiency, loss.”[119]

It is noteworthy to look on the greater context of these lines in Ai III and compare the overall sequence of entries with other text genres. The Sumerian literary composition Inana C incorporates some of these terms in line 123:

Ai III, | ku₃-dun (ii, 2) →\rightarrow ku₃ a₂-tuku (ii:4) →\rightarrow ku₃-im-ba (ii, 5. 22) →\rightarrow i-bi₂-za (ii, 23)
Inana C, 123 | ku₃-dun ku₃ a₂-tuku i-bi₂-za ku₃-im-ba dinana za-a-kam
Ms. Oa (Tell Ḥarmal) | [ta]-ak-ši-tum ne-me-lum i-bi-su-u₂ / bi-ti-iq-tum ku-ma eštar
| Business, great winning, financial loss, deficit are yours, Inana.i

8.1 iSee Sjöberg (1975, 190–191).

It is extraordinary that the literary text, which was rather popular in the Old Babylonian period and survived through many copies, presents these terms widely in the same sequence. Precursors of the list Ai were already known in Nippur in the first half of the second millennium.

The tablet’s scribe Bēl-aha-iddina used some peculiar sign forms on his copy of Ai III, such as KU₃ (Too late; VAT 9552 obv. ii, 20). It appears that the same sign form occurs in this scribe’s copy of “Nin-Isina’s Journey to Nippur” (VAT 9308 [text B] obv. 25).[120]

Example 6: Ai VI (VAT 8875) obv. ii, 18–25

inim g̃a₂-g̃a₂ | : ba-qa-ru
inim g̃a₂-g̃a₂ | : ra-ga-mu
inim-ma in-g̃a₂-g̃a₂ | : ib-ta-qar
inim-ma in-g̃a₂-g̃a₂ | : ir-ta-gum₂
inim-ma in-g̃a₂-g̃a₂-a | : a-na ba-qa-ri₃
inim-ma in-g̃a₂-g̃a₂-a | : a-na ra-ga-me
inim-ma nu-un-g̃a₂-g̃a₂-a | : a-na la-a ba-qa-ri₃
inim-ma nu-un-g̃a₂-g̃a₂-a | : a-na la-a ra-ga-me

Similar to grammatical lists, this lexical series includes a couple of paradigms as well. In this example, each Sumerian entry is duplicated and translated with a form of either the verb baqāru or ragāmu. In the first pair of entries, the Sumerian form inim g̃a₂-g̃a₂, which appears to contain a reduplicated form of the verb g̃ar, is rendered by the Akkadian infinitives. In the remaining entries, the Sumerian word inim is followed by a locative postposition. The second group renders the finite verbal form either as a I/2 stem preterite or a I stem perfect. The sequence is progressing afterwards. The third group adds a nominalising morpheme °-a and the last group negates the finite verbal chain. Instead of *ša (lā) ibtaqru or *ša (lā) irtagmu, these lines render the Sumerian expressions as infinitive constructions.

Example 7: Ai VI (VAT 8875) obv. ii, 33–34

eg̃ir-ra-ni in-gug₄-e | : ki.min(arkassu)u₂-pa-ra-as
eg̃ir-ra-ni nu(-)in-gug₄-e | : ki.min ul u₂-pa-ra-as

In this example the negative morpheme *nu- is added paradigmatically without influencing the subsequent syllable. This phenomenon is not completely unknown. The second tablet of Ura contains many Sumerian verbal forms. Entry 70 contains the form in-na-an-sum followed by nu-in-na-an-sum in the subsequent entry.[121] Whether or not this particular orthography is influenced by the separate negative particle in the Akkadian equivalents remains uncertain. Examples such as Ai VI (VAT 8875) obv. i, 47—gugu₃ li-bi₂-in-sum : ul iš-ru-ur—show that the phonetic adaptation of the negative modal prefixe in the Sumerian verbal chain was known.[122]

Example 8: Ai VI (VAT 8875) obv. iv, 23–27

tabtab₂-e-da bi₂-in-e-eš | : ṣa-ra-pa iq-bu-u₂
ur₅ in-nu-bi / in-na-an-eš | : la-ka-šu / iq-bu-u₂
na4kišib-a-ni ib₂-ta-an-ze₂-er / bi₂-in-e-eš | : ka-nik-šu pu-su-sa / iq-bu-u₂

In this example, the Sumerian version contains the plural base of the verb du₁₁, which renders, as expected, the Akkadian verbal form iqbû, “they said.” Nonetheless, the different orthographies bi₂-in-e-eš and in-na-an-eš are noteworthy. The latter can be compared to in-na-an-ne-eš attested in lines 275 and 278 of “Inana’s Descent”[123] as well as in lines 241 and 243 of the “Nippur Lament.”[124]

8.3.2 “Nin-Isina’s Journey to Nippur” (abbrev. NJN)

According to the colophon on the Middle Assyrian copy VAT 9304, this composition had 49 lines of text.[125] This short šir₃-nam-šub was already known through a small fragment dating to the Old Babylonian period. An almost perfectly preserved manuscript of the Sumerian text also dating to the Old Babylonian period in a London private collection has now been published.[126] The only information so far about the subsequent history of this composition comes from the aforementioned colophons on the two parallel Middle Assyrian text witnesses, which were written by the two brothers Marduk-balāssu-ēreš and Bēl-aha-iddina. Both brothers also checked each other’s copy (igi.kar₂). These colophons are comparatively precise as to the source’s provenience, which is stated to originate in a tablet in the possession of a certain Iqīša-Ninkarrak.[127] The few observations that follow are based on a composite text derived from both Middle Assyrian manuscripts.

Example 9: NJN, line 3

e₂-ta hul₂-la-ni nam-ta-e₃ u₄-g̃a₂-nun-na-g[in₇]

: iš-tu e₂ la-li-ša i+na ku-um-mi-ša it-ta-ṣa-a

The syntax in both the Sumerian and Akkadian versions differs quite significantly. Whereas in the Sumerian text the “joy of the goddess” comes forth of the temple, it is the goddess herself who leaves the “house of her joy” in the Akkadian interlinear translation. The Akkadian form la-li-ša cannot be used as subject here. Hence, the translation renders Sumerian *e₂-hul₂-la-ni-ta.[128] Another irregularity in this line is the verbal form nam-ta-e₃ with its rendering ittaṣâ in the Akkadian version. Here, it is appropriate to have a comparative look at a couple of further examples of na-preformatives in the respective text corpus:

Lugal-e | 379 | na-ba-nig̃in | : la-a u₂-sa-hi-ra-ma
| 491 | nam-ba-ra-be₂ | : e ta-na-še-er
| 567 | na-ab-tar-[re] | : ia ip-pa-r[is]
| 568 | nam-[DI] | : a-a iq-qa-[bi]
Angim | 68 | nam-mi-in-[us₂] | : i-rad-[di-šu]

This line allows a comparison to Gudea Cyl. A viii, 1: gu₃-de₂-a eš₃ e₂-ninnu-ta zalag-ga nam-ta-e₃, “indeed Gudea came out again from the shrine Eninnu with a radiant face.”[129] The Akkadian rendering ittaṣâ is to be understood as separative I/2 stem, although one rather expects *luttaṣâ, “she indeed came out.” The Akkadian directional phrase ina kummiša, “in/from her cella,” renders Sumerian u₄-g̃a₂-nun-na-gin₇, “like day(light) of the/her cella.”

Example 10: NJN, line 5

sila-dag̃al-uru-na-ke₄ mi-ni-in-dib-be₂ uru-ne₂ mu-un-da-sa₂

: re-bit uru-ša a-na ba-’-i uru-ša i-ša-an-na-an

The translation of this line (possibly dating to the Middle Babylonian period) renders the Sumerian finite verbal chains quite differently. While the first one corresponds to an infinitive construction (ana bâ’i), the second one is given as durative (išannan). In contrast to lexical (word-to-word) attestations, this different treatment is due to the fact that the verbal forms appear in a context.[130] Finite verbal chains of the Sumerian verb dib, “to pass, to walk along,” often contain a dimensional locative or directive infix. In Akkadian, however, the verb bâ’u is transitive.[131] The verb dib occurs also on VAT 8884[132] rev. 8–9: ˹e₂˺-šu-me-ša₄ pa-e₃ dib-dib-be₂-ke₄ : ana e₂.šu.me.ša₄ šu-pi-iš i+na ba-’-ka.[133]

Example 11: NJN, line 6

g̃idlam-a-ni ur-sag̃ dpa-bil₂-sag̃ hi-li-a mu-un-du

: hi-rat qar-ra-di dpa.bil₂.sag i+na ri-ša-ti il-lak

This line is part of a lengthy description of a divine procession of the goddess Nin-Isina to the quay in Isin. While g̃idlam-a-ni, “his/her spouse,” clearly refers to the goddess’ spouse Pabilsag̃, the Akkadian translation misinterprets this detail by providing the genitive construction hīrat qarrādi, the “warrior’s wife.” Thus, according to the Akkadian, the goddess herself is still subject. In this context, however, we expect her spouse to be part of the procession.

8.3.3 “Ninurta’s Exploits” (lugal-e ud-me-lam₂-bi nir-g̃al₂; Lugal-e)

The composition nowadays referred to as Lugal-e is one of the most frequently copied texts in the Old Babylonian period. Far more than a hundred manuscripts are known for this period alone.[134] Manuscripts were found among the school tablets in “House F” at Nippur. In the Old Babylonian period, the texts or parts of it belonged to the curriculum of apprentice scribes. “Ninurta’s Exploits” is among fourteen literary texts that were copied by advanced scribes.[135] The attestation of “Ninurta’s Exploits” for the early second millennium is comparable to the Standard Babylonian “Gilgamesh Epic” in the first millennium BCE.

In his edition, Jan Dijk discussed the various tablet types through which the composition is preserved. The Old Babylonian period attests to a few Type I tablets, which contained the whole text of approximately 730 lines in twelve columns. Most text witness, however, encompass much shorter sections, either half or a quarter, or even a sixteenth.[136]

Whereas all Old Babylonian sources of this composition were only transmitted in Sumerian, it can be assumed that the Akkadian translation goes back to the Middle Babylonian period, although secure bilingual text witnesses dating to this period are missing so far.[137]

The Middle Assyrian period offers the best evidence for the bilingual text before the first millennium BCE. By this time, the composition was divided into sixteen sections, which go back to the Old Babylonian format of the im.gid₂da-tablets. The extant colophons locate the sources in Nippur. It is quite certain that the Middle Assyrian apprentice scribe Marduk-balāssu-ēreš of the Ninurta-uballissu family produced a copy of the whole composition, which was inscribed onto four large tablets. He wrote the well-preserved four-column tablet VAT 9710,[138] with sections IX–XII. He was also responsible for BM 122625+[139] containing sections XIII–XVI. This copy was selected and transferred to Nineveh in the Neo-Assyrian period. Last but not least VAT 9306[140] is a fragment of a four-column tablet comparable to the aforementioned two texts. Due to its paleography and the placement of sub-colophons between the sections, it is beyond any doubt that this fragment with sections I–IV was written by the same scribe as well.

The list above represents extraordinary sources for the composition “Ninurta’s Exploits.” It is not certain whether its scribe Marduk-balāssu-ēreš decided himself to combine four sections on each tablet or whether this arrangement was already present on his source. Be that as it may, the Middle Assyrian texts from Assur also attest to several tablets, which only contain one section of the text.

VAT 10565[141] is the damaged upper half of a one-column tablet, which contains the third section of “Ninurta’s Exploits.”[142] Its colophon is comparable to the one on VAT 9441 + VAT 10648 + VAT 11216, an extract tablet of “Ninurta’s Return to Nippur.” Unfortunately, this type of colophon does not contain any information on the responsible scribe.[143]

VAT 10628[144] is the badly damaged lower part of a possibly one-column tablet.[145] The preserved lines can be assigned to section XII.

VAT 10643[146] is just a small fragment. It probably contains the same recension as BM 122625+[147] cited above, because it also inserts lines 524–530 between 568 and 569. This could either mean that Marduk-balāssu-ēreš did not intentionally forget the respective lines on KAR 14, but that this discrepancy was already present already in the source he used, or BM 122625+ used VAT 10643 as its source or vice versa. Based on the distribution of text on obverse and reverse, the fragment should have contained just sections XII and XIII. It could be argued whether Bēl-aha-iddina wrote VAT 10643. If so, this case is comparable to “Nin-Isina’s Journey to Nippur.”[148]

In his study, Stefano Seminara thoroughly discussed the bilingual version of “Ninurta’s Exploits.” Therefore, I will only highlight specific peculiarities that occur in the Middle Assyrian text witnesses.

Example 12: Lugal-e, line 97 (tablet III) (VAT 10565 obv. 15–16)

OB | lu₂-im₂-ma-bi kur-ra/re im-ra uru(ki)-bi/ba bu-du/tu-ug im-za
MA | [lu₂-i]m₂-ma-bi kur-ra ˹im˺-[r]a-ah uru-bi bu-[u]g-tu ˹za˺
| : [la-si-m]u-šu ina kur-i ˹i-du˺-uk-ma˹uru˺-šu ˹u₂-nap*?˺-[pil(?)]

The Akkadian verb rendering the Sumerian compound bu-ug-tu—za, “to destroy, to kill,” is badly damaged.[149] Dijk[150] reads u₂-[a]b-[bit(?)]. Based on the sign remains the identification of the sign ab is rather questionable. CAD L, 106 s.v. lāsimu favors a reading u₂-ṣa[b-bit]. The sign form erin₂ appears to be much closer to what is still visible on the tablet. However, there is also a third possibility: nab. The lexical text Nabnītu E (= VII = VAT 8755)[151] reads on rev. i, 44 bu-du-ug : 6(diš) ša mim₃-ma in a section starting with patāqu. In contrast to the manuscript of “Ninurta’s Exploits,” the lexical text preserves the older form bu-du-ug instead of bu-ug-tu. Interpreting the sign remains as nab may lead to a potential verbal form unappil, which derives from the verb napālu, “to tear down, to demolish,” and in stem II, “to turn upside down.”

Example 13: Lugal-e, line 378 (tablet IX) (VAT 9710 obv. i, 7–9)

OB | mu-ud-(da-)na in-ši-tu-ud ba-an-uš₂/uš hur nu-mu-da-(ab/an-)g̃ar-ra
MA | mu-ud-na mu-ši-tu-ud ba-an-ta hur nu-mu-da-an-g̃ar-re-eši
| : ša a-na ha-i-ri-ia ul-du-šu u₂-rab-bu-šu u₂-ri la-a iš-šak-na-ma
NA | mu-ud-na mu-ši-e-tu-ud [b]a-an-tu-ud! hu-ur nu-mu-da-[a]n-nen-g̃a₂-g̃a₂
| : a-na ha-‘-i-ri-ia ul-du-šu₂ u₂-rab-bu-šu₂ hu-ru la iš-šak-nam-ma

8.2 iThe construction hur + negation was discussed in Cavigneaux and Al-Rawi (2000, 37), where the authors refer to the first lines of the Sumerian composition “Bilgames’ Death” based on manuscript M1 from Me-Turan (hur nu-mu-un-da-an-zi-zi: “A cause du calque (?) akk., nous transcrivons dans ce cas hur; pour l’hésitation entre ur₅ et mur [...]. L’akk. hur(ru), s’ils’agit d’un dérivé de √’hr ‘être en arrière’ (dans d’autres langues sémitiques des dérivés de cette racine portent aussi le sans ‘autre’) donne à penser que l’étymologie du mot est sémitique” (Cavigneaux and Al-Rawi 2000, 37, note 73). The reading of this lemma must be deduced from the Neo-Assyrian version: hu-ur. See also Falkenstein (1938, 19–20 s.v. line 7).

The greatest discrepancy between the various manuscripts is the verbal form ba-an-ta.[152] The Akkadian version has urabbûšu, for which the Neo-Assyrian manuscript e₁ provides the expected verbal base tu-ud. The extant Old Babylonian text witnesses have either til (ms. O₁) or us₂ (mss. L₄ and X₄), which should be interpreted as phonetic variants (based on the readings uš₂ and uš). The Middle Assyrian base, however, defies any suitable explanation.[153]

Example 14: Lugal-e, line 380 (tablet IX) (VAT 9710 obv. i, 12–3)

OB | šul-zi munus-zi-da/de₃ ba-an-du₁₁
MA | šul-zi nu-nus-zi-de₃ ba-an-tu-ud
| : eṭ-lu ki-nu ša sin-niš-tu kit-tu ul-du-šu
NA | šul-zi munus-zi-da ba-an-tu-ud
| : eṭ-lu₄ ki-i-nu ša sin-niš-tu₄ kit-tu₄ ul-du-šu₂

The Middle Assyrian text is the only text witness that provides the spelling nu-nus for munus, “woman.”[154] The Old Babylonian as well as first millennium sources read munus instead.[155] Another noteworthy variation is the verbal base tu-ud in post-Old Babylonian manuscripts. All extant text witnesses from the first half of the second millennium read du₁₁ instead. The co-occurrence of the verbal bases tu-ud and du₁₁ is attested in the “Tale about the šumunda-Grass” as well. Lines 10–13 contain the following parallelismus membrorum: an in-du₁₁ {x} ki in-tu-ud / u₂.du₆&du₆.še.sar in-ga-an-tu-u[d] / ki in-tu-ud an in-du₁₁ / u₂.du₆&du₆.še.sar in-ga-an-tu-u[d].[156]

Example 15: Lugal-e, line 383 (tablet IX) (VAT 9710 obv. i, 18–9)

OB | ga-ša-an-g̃en dili-mu-ne ga-an-ši-g̃en en-(da-)gi₁₆-sa-še₃
MA | [ga]šan g̃a₂-e dili-ša₄.ab da-ši-in-g̃en en-da-gi₁₆-sa-a-še₃
| : [be]-le₂-ku e-diš-ši-ia lu-ul-lik a-na be-li₂ da-ri-i
NAi | umun-g̃en dili-mu-ne da-an-ši-g̃en en-da-gi₁₆-s[a...]
| : be-le₂-ku e-diš-ši-ia lul-lik-šu₂ a-na be-li₂ da-[...]

8.3 iThe composite transliteration derived from manuscripts e₁ and a₂; see Dijk (1983, II, 110).

The first millennium version appears to be closer again to the Old Babylonian text than to the Middle Assyrian recension. While both the text of the early second millennium as well as the late recension use the Emesal form of the enclitic copula °-g̃en as in ga-ša-an-g̃en, “I am the lady,”[157] the Middle Assyrian text contains the independent pronoun g̃a₂-e. In light of the Akkadian stative bēlēku, a copula would be more suitable.[158] It is not unlikely that the interpreter had issues with the spelling °-g̃en for the Emesal enclitic copula of the first and second persons.[159] While the use of the independent personal pronoun in place of the commonly used enclitic copula is surprising, but not inexplicable, the subsequent form dili-ša₄.ab is difficult to interpret in light of the other versions. Both the Old Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian texts read dili-mu-ne instead, which fits quite well with the Akkadian equivalent ēdiššīya, “I alone,” offered by the Middle Assyrian recension onwards. Although a satisfactory solution of this form might escape us, one can pinpoint lines 3 and 5 in “Bilgames’ Death” according to manuscript M1: ša₃-aš-ša₄.[160] Also the bilingual letter from Mari published by Dominique Charpin reads in obv., 22: [lugal (ša₃) aš-š]a₄ [...], whose Akkadian offers a-na lugal gi-it-ma-lim [...].[161] The Akkadian adjective gitmālum is known as gloss and thus equivalent to aš-ša₄ in Proto-Izi I, 174. There it is preceded by dili-ni accompanied by the gloss we-di-iš-ši-šu.[162] The lexical series Izi was copied by the Middle Assyrian scribes and even by a member of the Ninurta-uballissu family.[163] The close proximity of these two lexemes in a lexical text already known from the Old Babylonian period onwards might be no coincidence for the problematic form attested in the Middle Assyrian text. This, however, does not solve the sign ab. BM 122625+[164] obv. ii, 40–41 equates dili-a with e-diš-ši-šu.[165] Ana ittišu should also not be unmentioned in this respect. Its sixth tablet (VAT 8875) equates dili-ni-ni with i-di-iš-ši-šu.[166]

Finally, da-gi₁₆-sa deserves a brief discussion. This form is already attested in the Old Babylonian manuscript L₄ and represents most likely a hybrid spelling.[167] It is a mixture of da-ri₂ derived from Akkadian dārû, and gi₁₆-sa, the Sumerian term for “eternal.”[168]

Example 16: Lugal-e, line 419 (tablet X) (VAT 9710 obv. ii, 3–4)

OB | [n]a4u₂ kur-ra ma-an-zi-ge-en-na-gin₇
MA | na4u₂ kur-ra ba-an-zi-ga-[en-na-gin₇]
| : šam-mu i-na kur-i ki-i te-e[t-bi-a?-am]

Frequently, Sumerian verbal chains attested in later periods contain a hiatus as, for instance, in the given example between ga and en.[169] A similar phenomenon occurs in line 4 of the creation myth KAR 4: [...] mu-un-gi-na-eš-a-ba or in Ai VI rev. ii, 33–34, which reads na₄-kišib mu-sar-ra-ne-ne ib₂-ra-ra-eš. Stefano Seminara correctly points out that “[q]ueste grafie denunciano la natura artificiale della lingua sumerica della recensione bilingue” and “presenta un’insolita grafia franta, forse esito di un eccesso di scrittura analitica”.[170]

Example 17: Lugal-e, line 420 (tablet X) (VAT 9710 obv. ii, 5–6)

OB | šu-se₃-ke-mu-še₃ mu-e-dab₅/gib-ba-gin₇
MA | šu-siki-mu-še₃ mu-e-dib-ba-[gin₇]
| : a-na ka-mi-ia ki-i tak-mi-[in-ni]

The Sumerian expression šu-siki-mu-še₃ is only clear by checking the Old Babylonian text witnesses, which have šu-se₃-ke-mu-še₃ instead.[171] Thus šu-siki, “hairy hand,” is certainly a phonetic variant. Whether such a variant was caused by either a memory error or by dictation is difficult to answer.[172] The Middle Assyrian recension of “Ninurta’s Exploits” does not offer an abundance of such phonetic variants, but the rather technical text of the “Astrolabe” B does offer quite a few.[173]

Example 18: Lugal-e, line 424 (tablet X) (VAT 9710 obv. ii, 13–14)

OB | ug₂-gal / pirig̃-banda? usu-bi-ta nir-g̃al₂-la-am₃ he₂-me-zi-ir-zi-re-de₃ / he₂-me-ze₂-er-ze₂-re-de₃
MA | u₄-gal a₂-kal-ga-bi-še₃ nir-g̃al₂-e he₂-en-zi-re-de₃
| : u₄-mu gal-u₂ ša a-na e-mu-qi₂-šu dan-na-ti tak-lu li-pa-sis-ka

As was pointed out by Seminara, there is a lexical variation between ug₂-gal (O₁) or pirig̃-banda (S₁) in the Old Babylonian period and u₄-gal in the Middle Assyrian text.[174] The Akkadian interpreter understood u₄-gal literally and rendered it ūmu rabû, “the great storm.” The same phenomenon occurs in the subsequent expression a₂-kal-ga-bi-še₃, which re-interprets the Old Babylonian form usu(a₂.kal)-bi-ta. This does not mean that the elements of the sign group a₂.kal are always treated individually in the Akkadian translation. Already in the subsequent line usu is rendered with Akkadian emūqu. Splitting Diri compounds into their elements and interpreting them is not uncommon in cuneiform sources. It is a particular feature of late commentaries and can be compared to the hermeneutic method of etymography.[175]

Example 19: Lugal-e, line 506 (tablet XI) (VAT 9710 rev. i, 33’)

OB | mar-za-dutu me-zu he₂-a
MA | g̃arza-dutu g̃arza he-a
| : pa-ra-aṣ dutu lu par₂-ṣu-ka
NA | g̃arza-dutu g̃arza he₂-a
| : pa-ra-aṣ dutu lu-u par₂-ṣu-ka

The Old Babylonian text differentiates in all available manuscripts between the Emesal form mar-za, “rites,” and me-zu, “your me (cult ordinances).” Both concepts are merged together in all later recensions of this line. Instead of the Emesal form, both occurrences use g̃arza. It is quite likely that in the second instance g̃arza can be considered a phonetic misinterpretation of me-zu, since the signs me and bar are paleographically quite similar.[176] This discrepancy is indicated by the Akkadian equivalent lū parṣūka, “they may be your rites,” which is not substantiated by the Sumerian version.

Example 20: Lugal-e, line 541 (tablet XII) (VAT 10628 obv. 2–3)

OB | pu-uh₂-ru-um-ma šagina mu-e-ni-g̃ar-ra-gin₇i
MA | [x x]xii -ma ˹gu₂* mi*?-ni*-ib₂*˺-[g̃ar(?)-ra(?)-gin₇(?)]iii
| : [ki-m]aiv ša ina pu-˹uh-ri tak₂˺-nu-[šu(?) ...]

8.4 i Ms. H₂ has šagina-me-en instead and reads afterwards gu₃-g̃ar-ra-gin₇; for the score, see Dijk (1983, II, 147).iiAccording to van Dijk (1983, II, 147), there are remains of the sign bu at the beginning of the line. However, there is not enough space for p[u-uh₂-ru-u]m-ma. Even for a shorter spelling (compare the Old Babylonian pu-uh-ru₂ in ms. H₂) space is limited. The lexical list Proto-Izi II, 142 has me-lam₂ with the gloss pu-uh₂-ru; see Civil et al. (1971, 45). The available space in VAT 10628 would be enough for [me-la]m₂-ma, but this is not a common equivalent of Akkadian puhru. Compare for this sign sequence, though in another context, also the hymn Šulgi D, line 388: ni₂ me-lam₂-ma gu₂ hu-mu-ni-us₂, “May you lift (your) head with a terrifying splendour” Klein (1981, 88–89).iii There doesn’t appear to be enough space to fit a second person °-g̃ar-re-en-na-gin₇ as expected by the Akkadian translation.iv See for this reconstruction the Neo-Assyrian manuscript z₁ and compare lines 419–422 of “Ninurta’s Exploits”; see the score in van Dijk (1983, II, 119–120). Line 422 equates im-hu-luh-ha-en-na-gin₇ with ki-i tu-gal-li-ta-ni.

The Middle Assyrian version (collated from the original) offers a couple of variants. The title šagina(gir₃.nita) appears to be missing. Instead, it is plausible to assume that the Sumerian line attests to the compound verb gu₂—g̃ar, “to submit.”[177] Thus a reconstruction of the Akkadian verb kanāšu, “to submit,” a known equivalent of the aforementioned compound verb,[178] appears to be suitable.

Example 21: Lugal-e, line 545 (tablet XII) (VAT 10628 rev. 1–2)

OB | kur-kur-re/ra giri₁₇ ki-šu₂-šu₂-zui giri₁₇ šu ha-ra-ab-tag-ge
MA | kur-kur-ra ki-[a]g̃₂ su-up-pa-ni giri₁₇ šu ha-ra-˹ab*˺-tag-ge
| : kur.kurmeš ina šu-ke-ni ap-pa li-il-[b]i-na-ku-x-[...]

8.5 i This part of the line differs in every single manuscript. The quoted version is attested in manuscript H₂. J₂ has ki-šu₂-[u]b-e, which is more revealing in light of the Middle Assyrian text; A₄ has ki-šu₂-šu₂-da.

Unfortunately, the only sufficiently preserved later version does not provide any clues toward an understanding of the modifications that took place in the late second millennium BCE.[179] Line 161 of “Ninurta’s Return to Nippur” is similar in content but does not show significant variation between its Old Babylonian and Middle Assyrian recensions.[180] In this line, the verbal compound giri₁₇ ki-su-ub ha-ma-ab-ak-ke₄-e-ne is translated as liš-ki-nu-u₂-ni, “they may prostrate themselves,” in its Akkadian version. The quoted line from “Ninurta’s Exploits” uses the Akkadian verb šukênu as well, but deviates greatly in the Sumerian line. The enigmatic ki-ag̃₂ (badly damaged but visible) appears to have somehow slipped into this line. It is noteworthy as well that the scribe wrote su-up-pa-ni instead of su-ub-ba-ni.

Example 22: Lugal-e, line 675 (tablet XV) (BM 122625+ rev. i, 6’-7’)

OB | en-ra ma₂-sagx(iti.gunû)-a mu-un-na-b[e₂-ne?]
MA | ˹en-e ma₂-sag̃-g̃a₂˺ mu-un-˹na˺-ni-ib₂-e₃-n[e?*]
| : ˹en i+na mah-rat˺ gešma₂ i-ta-mu-u₂

Based on the verbal base e₃ in the Middle Assyrian recension, the Akkadian should have some form of the verb (w)aṣû, “to come out (etc.).” The interpreter, however, translates the Sumerian verbal form with itammû, “they utter.”[181] The use of this particular verbal base might have been caused by the preceding line, which renders he₂-en-na-˹e₃˺ with Akkadian liš-ta-p[i-šu(?)]. There, the verbal base fits the context.

Example 23: Lugal-e, line 724 (tablet XVI) (BM 122625+ rev. ii, 13’-4’)

OB | [nin-s]ag̃-gi₆-ga en₃-tar-tar ug̃₃-e inim si-sa₂
MA | nin-sag̃-gi₆-ga en₃-tar-tar-re ug̃₃-e si ba-ab-si
| : ˹be˺-let ṣal-mat sag.du muš-tal-tu muš-te-ši-rat kurmeš

In this final example, the unusual spelling si—si for the compound verb si—sa₂ should be highlighted. Although this phenomenon has been discussed elsewhere,[182] it should be emphasized here again that the same spelling occurs in another text copied by the same scribe. This text, “Nin-Isina’s Journey to Nippur,” renders si mi-ni-ib₂-si with the Akkadian verbal form uš-te-šir₃.

8.3.4 “Ninurta’s Return to Nippur” (an-gin₇ dim₂-ma; Angim)

The composition known as “Ninurta’s Return to Nippur” was the second major Sumerian literary text about the deeds of the warrior god. Unfortunately its state of preservation in the Middle Assyrian period is poor compared to “Ninurta’s Exploits.” So far, it is available through three text witnesses:[183]

BM 122652 + BM 98745 (Th 1905-4-9, 251 = Cooper 1978, ms. aA) was written by the “young scribe” Marduk-balāssu-ēreš and originally contained the complete text on a four-column tablet. It is the only surviving copy from Assur that contains the whole composition. It seems quite likely that this scribe had at his disposal several extract tablets belonging to “Ninurta’s Exploits” and “Ninurta’s Return to Nippur,” which he assembled onto larger tablets. As his copy of tablets XII(I)-XVI of Lugal-e, this manuscript also found its way to Nineveh.[184] It is rather likely that this fragment belonged to a tablet of similar size and shape as his copies of Lugal-e.[185] Unfortunately, just small portions of the tablet are well enough preserved.

VAT 9441 + VAT 10648 + VAT 11216 (= Cooper 1978, ms. bB)[186] was an extract tablet. Whereas the colophon does not preserve a scribe’s name, it resembles the colophon of VAT 10565, an extract tablet of “Ninurta’s Exploits.” Thanks to the join, several more lines can now be read. Therefore a complete transliteration is given:

O | 01’ | [° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° : ° ° ° ° ° °] ˹in?˺x
| 02’ | [° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° °] [mu-n]a-an-˹du˺
| 03’ | [° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ina ma]h-˹ra˺ il-la-a[k]
| 04’ | [° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° °] eg̃ir-a-ni nam-mi-in-[us₂]
| 05’ | [° ° ° ° ° ° °]-˹tume˺ ti ar-ka i-rad-[di-šu]
| 06’ | [° ° ° ° ° ° : °]xina a[p]-si-i ana par-ṣi ez-zu-te šu.[ti-u₂]
| 07’ | [° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° °] ˹mu˺-un-na-˹rig₇˺
| 08’ | [° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° °] ˹an˺-e ˹ana˺ ši-rik₂-te iš-˹ru-ka˺-[šu]
| 09’ | [° ° ° ° ° ° nu-mu-ni-i]b₂-g̃a₂-g̃a₂ : da-nun-na-ku dingir˹meš˺ [g]alme[š ...]
| 10’ | [° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° °] : ˹en˺ a-bu-˹ba˺-ni-iš i-ba-˹’˺
| 11’ | [° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° °] a-˹ma₂˺-ru an-ur₃-˹ru˺-da
| 12’ | [° ° ° ° ° ° ° nu-k]ur₂-˹ti a˺-bu-˹ba˺-niš i-ba-’
| 13’ | [u₄-gi]n₇ a[n-ur₂-ra dum-dam mu-ni-i]b₂-za ˹: ki˺-ma u₄-me ina i-šid an-e ut-ta-[az-za-am]
| 14’ | ˹du˺-ni [inim d+en-lil₂-la₂-t]a (x) ˹e₂-kur˺-ra g̃a₂-g̃a₂-d[e₃?]
| 15’ | a-lak-šu ina? ˹x ub?˺ [d+en.l]il₂ [a-na] ˹e₂˺.kur it-ta-aš₂-[kan]
| 16’ | ur-˹sag̃˺-dig̃ir-e-˹ne˺ [...-s]u₃-su₃ : ˹ur˺.sag dingirmeš na-as₂-pa-nu ˹kalam x˺[...]
| 17’ | nibruki-˹še₃?˺ an-ba[d ° ° ° ° ° ]-a-ta : ˹a˺-na ni-pu-ru ni-siš la-a t[e₄-he-e]
| 18’ | dnuska [sukk]al-˹mah˺-d+en-lil₂-la₂-˹ke₄˺ e₂-kur-ra gaba im-mi-in-[ri]
| 19’ | dnusk[a ]˹x x˺ ṣ]i-ru ša d+[en.li]l₂ i+na e₂.kur uš-tam-hi-ir-[šu]
| 20’ | en d˹nin˺-urta-ra silim-ma mu-˹un-na˺-a[b-d]u₁₁ : ana en dnin.urta šul-ma i-qa[b-bi]
| 21’ | lugal-g̃u₁₀ ˹ur-sag̃˺ šu-˹du₇˺-me-en ˹ni₂˺ -zu-še₃ g̃eštu₂ [...]

| 22’ | en qar-ra-˹du šuk-lu˺-lat a-na ra-[m]a-ni-ka u₂-zu-un-[...]
| 23’ | ˹d˺nin-urta ur-˹sag̃˺ šu-du₇-me-en ni₂-zu-še₃ g̃eštu₂ [...]
| 24’ | ˹d˺nin.urta ˹qar˺-ra-˹du˺ šuk-lu-lat a-˹na ra˺-[m]a-ni-ka u₂-zu-[un-...]
| 25’ | [n]i₂ me-˹lam₂˺-zu eš₃ d+en-lil₂-la₂-ke₄ [tu]g₂-gin₇ bi₂-i[n-dul]
| 26’ | [p]u-˹luh˺-ti me-lam-me-˹ka˺ e₂ d+en.lil₂ [ki-ma ṣ]u-ba-ti ik-[tum]
| 27’ | [° °]x gu₃-du₁₀ ur₅-ša₄-zu : gešgigir-ka[° ° ° °] ˹x x x˺ [...]
| 28’ | [° ° °] ˹x x x x : i+˺na ra-ka-b[i-ka ...]
| 29’ | [° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° °] ˹x˺ [...]
|  | remainder broken
R | 01’ | [° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ] ˹x˺
| 02’ | [° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° °] u₂-x[° ° ° ° ° °]
| 03’ | [° ° ° ° °] ˹dab₅-dab₅-x x šu-su₃ nun? [...]˺
| 04’ | [° ° ° ° °] ša ik-mu-u₂ sum-ma-x [...]
| 05’ | ˹uru lah₄*-lah₄˺-e-ne [...]
| 06’ | ˹uru˺meš x ša iš-lu-l[u ...]
| 07’ | ˹d˺a-nun-˹na-ke₄-e-ne x˺ [...]
| 08’ | ˹d˺a-nun-na-˹ki i+na˺ qu-l[a-ti ...]
| 09’ | kur-gal d+en-lil₂-la₂ [...]
| 10’ | ˹kur˺.gal d+en.lil₂ ˹x˺ [...]
| 11’ | dili-im₂-babbar-˹ra x˺ [...]
| 12’ | nam-ra-ṣi-it [...]
|  | (double ruling)
| 13’ | [ama(?)]-˹gal? d?nin?˺- [lil₂(?)-le(?) ša₃(?) ki(?)-ur₃(?)]-a-ni-t[a]
|  | blank space
| 14’ | [dub(?).2(diš)(?).kam(?).ma(?) an(?)-gi]n₇? 5(u)? 3(diš) mu.bi.i[m]

VAT 8884 (= KAR 18 = Cooper 1978, text cC)[187] is a quite well-preserved extract tablet. It was written by a certain Nabû-nādin-šumī, who is hitherto not known from any other texts. Like the second manuscript, the tablet contains just an extract of the composition.

It is not unreasonable to assume that the last-mentioned two tablets were used by Marduk-balāssu-ēreš to produce his copy of the complete text.[188] Unfortunately, the poor state of preservation of his copy does not allow for clear answers. The last lines, however, run parallel on both text witnesses including the omission of line 202 compared to the Old Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian evidence.

Jerrold S. Cooper collected the “errors” or variants in the transmission of this text. His classification includes (1) perceptual errors, (2) unmotivated alteration, and (3) motivated alteration.[189] The Akkadian interlinear translation was affected by variants as well.[190]

Example 24: Angim, line 162 (VAT 8884 obv. 18–19)

OB | šu-mah sag̃ pirig̃-g̃a₂ den-lil₂-la₂ ne₃-ni-še₃ tu-da-me-e[n]
MA | usu-mah sag̃ ug-ga den-lil₂-le UG.UG-ta tu-ud-da-me-en
| : e-mu-qa-an ṣi-ra-ti zi-im la-a-be ša den.lil₂ ina e-mu-qi₂-šu ul-du-šu ana-ku
NA | [u]su-mah sag̃ pirig̃-g̃a₂ den-lil₂-la₂ šu u₃-tu-ud-d[a-me-en]
| : ˹e˺-mu-qan ṣi-ra-a-te zi-im la-bi ša₂ dmin ina e-mu-qi₂-šu ul-d[u-šu₂ ana-ku]

This is one of the few lines of Angim that allows for a diachronic overview of the Old Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian text layers. The example clearly shows that the Middle Assyrian recension of this line is a kind of mixture between the Old Babylonian sources and the later tradition that followed in the first millennium BCE. The Sumerian expression ug.ug-ta is rendered with ina emūqīšu, “in his strength.” Whereas ug is used for lābu, “lion,” in this line as well, both the Old Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian versions have pirig̃ instead. Sumerian ug for Akkadian emūqu is found again in line 164.[191] According to Jerrold S. Cooper, the orthography ug.ug is erroneous and was caused by the similar paleography of the signs pirig and ug in Babylonia.[192] It is noteworthy to find the same phenomenon in line 4 of the composition, which is preserved in Assur through manuscript aA copied by Marduk-balāssu-ēreš. This material might be taken as a hint that either all Middle Assyrian manuscripts of “Ninurta’s Return to Nippur” derive from the same source text(s) or one version was copied from an already existent copy in Assur.

Example 25: Angim, line 83 (VAT 9441+ obv. 27’)

OB | g̃ešgigir-za gu₃-du₁₀ ur₅-ša₄-bi
MA | [...]xgu₃-du₁₀ ur₅-ša₄-zu
| : gešgigir-ka [° ° ° °] ˹x x x˺ [...]
NA | g̃ešgigir-zu gu₃-de₂ ur₅-ša₄-bi
| : nar-kab-ta-ka ana ri-gim ra-me-me-ša₂

The sign remains at the beginning of this line are inconclusive, but the given space does not necessarily support either [g̃ešgigir-z]u or [[...]-z]a. It seems that the possessive suffix has been moved toward the end of the line in the Middle Assyrian version.

The joined tablet VAT 9441+ allows for a diachronic examination of this line. The Middle Assyrian version appears to be closer to the Old Babylonian. The Neo-Assyrian text re-interprets gu₃-du₁₀, “pleasant voice,” and replaces it by gu₃-de₂, “call” (Akk. rigmu). Unfortunately, the Akkadian version on the Middle Assyrian text is almost completely broken off. In line 428 of “Ninurta’s Exploits,” the Middle Assyrian version renders gu₃-de₂-zu as ši-si-it-ka (= VAT 9710 obv. ii, 21–22). Nevertheless, there are a couple of other possibilities for the Middle Assyrian text. VAT 8884[193] rev. 17’) reads gu₃-du₁₀ or inim-du₁₀ in line 200. Since the score in Cooper[194] is misleading, it is given here again without incorporating the different variants in the Old Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian manuscripts:

OB | inim-du₁₀ lugal-la sud-ra₂-še₃ mu-un-na-ab-be₂
MA | inim-du₁₀ nam-lugal-la su₃-ud-ra₂-še₃ du₁₁-mu-un-na-ab
| : ṭe₂-em ša[r-ru-ti ana ru ¯\bar{u}qeti(?) qi-bi-ši]
NA | inim-du₁₀ ˹lugal u₄˺-sud-˹da˺-še₃ mu-un-na-ab-be₂
| : a-ma-˹tu₂ ṭa˺-ab-tu₂ ša₂ šar-ri ana ru-qe₂-e-ti iq-bi-ši

In contrast to line 83 cited above, the Neo-Assyrian recension stands much closer to the Old Babylonian text and it is the Middle Assyrian version that deviates quite substantially. Here, the Middle Babylonian editor probably took the imperative du₁₁-[mu-un-na-ab] already present in line 188 of the Old Babylonian text. The first millennium BCE version, however, has a finite verbal form in the Sumerian line (mu-un-na-ab-be₂), which is translated as preterite (iq₂-bi-ši) both in the Middle Assyrian and first millennium sources. The beginning of this line, again, offers intriguing variation, which pertains to the Akkadian interpretation. Whereas the Middle Assyrian line renders the logogram group ka.hi as ṭēmu,[195] the Neo-Assyrian version translates its constituents separately: amātu ṭābtu.[196]

8.3.5 “Astrolabe” B

The Middle Assyrian scribes of Assur did not indulge in the mere copying of the Sumerian literature that was passed down to them from Babylonia. Among the texts that came to Assur from Babylonian sites was also quite technical literature, such as the so-called “Astrolabe B.” As was pointed out elsewhere, this designation is of course a misnomer, since the relevant texts do not represent measuring tools for the rising of stars.[197] Apart from the two known examples of circular Astrolabe-texts, this kind of scholarly literature is usually treated in lists or tables.[198] The text of Middle Assyrian “Astrolabe B” has forerunners and several successors in the first millennium BCE. Although the origins of this text might reach far back, it appears that the various parts of this text were put to writing not earlier than the Middle Babylonian period. The Kassite dynasty in Babylonia was the driving force for many aspects of scholasticism, and scientific thought such as it appears in texts like “Astrolabe B” demonstrate this quite well. The Middle Assyrian copy was written by Marduk-balāssu-ēreš and checked by his brother Bēl-aha-iddina, both members of the Ninurta-uballissu family.[199] As was pointed out by Wayne Horowitz, who recently collected all related material and presented it in a thorough study, the Middle Babylonian tablet containing a short version of the Sumerian text represents one of the precursors of this tradition.[200]

Since this composition is now available in an up-to-date study by Horowitz, this short treatment will limit itself to a few passages.[201] KAV 218 contains a couple of forms that are clearly Middle Babylonian. It is quite likely that Marduk-balāssu-ēreš had already a bilingual source at his disposal, which also included the other parts as the star catalogue.

Among its four sections only the first part is of interest here. It contains a bilingual menology for the twelve month names of the Babylonian calendar. The relationship between the Sumerian and the Akkadian shows many peculiarities that should be highlighted here in greater detail. As was discussed in section 8.2 above, due to its tabular format, the “Astrolabe” can be considered a sub-type of interlinear translations. Regarding its Sumerian version, the main phenomenon we will encounter in this text is the case that finite verbal forms in the Akkadian “translation” are frequently represented by bare verbal bases or infinite verbal constructions in the Sumerian version. Another phenomenon, orthographical in nature, quite frequently uses rarely attested readings in the Sumerian text, which could either be interpreted as auditory or memory errors, or erudite or arcane ways of writing Sumerian. The following observations concentrate on the better preserved menologies in the first two columns of the tablet. In order to properly discuss the text, each menology is fully transliterated with indication of the respective line number on KAV 218. Variants in other manuscripts are given in the discussion. The versions are provided, against the original, in columns.

Nisannu (I)

O | i | 01 | [1(diš) iti bara₂] mul 1(aš) gana₂ bara₂-an-na | (07) | [it]i bara₂ i-ku-u₂ šu-bat da-nim
|  | 02 | [ba]ra₂ il₂-˹la˺ bara₂ g̃ar-ra | (08) | lugal in-na-aš₂-ši lugal gar-ani
|  | 03 | [s]ur*-ra-an sig₅-ga | (09) | šur-ru-u₂ sig₅ ša da-˹nim˺
|  | 04 | ˹an˺-na d+en-lil₂-la₂-ke₄ | (10) | ˹u₃˺ d+en.lil₂ iti d+en.zu
|  | 05 | ˹iti˺ dnanna dumu-sag̃
|  | 06 | ˹d+en-lil₂-la₂˺-ke₄ | (11) | [d]umu sag-ti-i ˹ša˺ d+en.lil₂

8.6 i Note that in line 43 the scribe wrote the verbal form syllabically (iš-ša-ka-an) instead of using the mixed orthography (gar-an (line i, 8). The parallel in Sm 755 reads iš-šak-kan.

In the treatment of the first month, the Akkadian compiler interpreted Sumerian bara₂ in two ways: In the first instance it is translated with Akkadian šubtu, “dwelling.” The other occurrence offers the equivalent šarru, “king.” Although none of these equivalents take the primary semantic meaning of bara₂, “dais,” into account, the expression bara₂ il₂-la bara₂ g̃ar-ra could easily be understood literally.[202] There are a few instances in Sumerian literature that support the meaning “ruler,” therefore taking the dais as symbol for the king.[203]

After collation the first sign in the subsequent line is certainly sur instead of gar. Thus, Akkadian šurrû appears to be a loanword of the Sumerian form sur-ra-an.[204] The whole expression this term appears in is omitted both in the earlier version VS 24, 120 as well as in later related texts. It is, however, included in the Neo-Assyrian copy Sm 755.[205] But it is safe to say that this entry was already available in the source Marduk-balāssu-ēreš used for his copy. Was the inclusion of this entry triggered by the phonetic similarity between vsarru and šurrû?

Ayyaru (II)

O | i | 12 | ˹1(diš) iti˺ gu₄ mul-mul dimin-bi | (19) | iti gu₄ za-ap-pu dimin.bi dingirmeš galmeš
|  | 13 | dig̃ir-gal-gal-e-ne
|  | 14 | ki-pad-ra₂ gu₄ si-sa₂-e-ne | (20) | pe-tu-u₂ er-ṣe-ti
|  |  |  | (21) | gu₄meš ul-te-eš-še-ru₃
|  | 15 | ki-dur₅ gal tak₄-tak₄ | (22) | ru-ṭu-ub-tu up-ta-ta
|  | 16 | g̃ešapin dur-dur-˹ru˺-ke₄ | (23) | gešapinmeš ir-ra-ah-ha-ṣu
|  | 17 | iti dnin-g̃ir₂-su | (24) | iti dnin.gir₂.su qar-ra-di
|  | 18 | ur-sag̃ ensi₂-gal d+en-lil₂-la₂-ke₄ | (25) | iš-ša₂-ak-kigal-i ˹ša˺ d+en.lil₂

The Sumerian phrase gu₄ si-sa₂-e-ne is rendered by the Akkadian alpū ulteššerū, which is one of the few characteristic Middle Babylonian forms in this text. Compare this to line 11 of “Nin-Isina’s Journey to Nippur,” which equates si mi-ni-ib₂-si with Akkadian ušteššer.[206] The subsequent phrase in the Sumerian version is ki-dur₅ gal tak₄-tak₄, which is rendered ruṭubtu uptattâ in the Akkadian version. Lexical attestations of ruṭubtu, “wet land,” are practically non-existent. This lexeme may be connected to ruṭibtu, “flooded ground,” whose equation after the lexical series Igiduh I, 295 is ki-dur₅.[207] Sumerian gal clearly is a phonetic variant of g̃al₂ and thus belongs to the Sumerian compound verb g̃al₂—tak₄, “to open.” On the Middle Babylonian fragment VS 24, 120 we read in obv. 3 [...] ki-dur₅ ˹g̃al₂ tak₄˺-tak₄.[208] The final difficult phrase is the Sumerian g̃ešapin dur-dur-ru-ke₄, which is equated in the Akkadian text with epinnū irrahhaṣū, “the ploughs are devastated.” It should be noted that “Astrolabe” B is the only lexical occurrence for dur = rahāṣu, so far. Nevertheless, the lexical series Antag̃al attests to the equation dur₂-dur₂-ru : min(rahāṣu) ša ašābi.[209] The third tablet of the lexical series šarru[210] has on CT 18, plate 29–30 (K.2054)[211] from the Kuyunjik collection the equation usan₂+kak (Too late) : rahāṣ ūme (rev. ii, 20). A glance onto the ligature in this list from Ashurbanipal’s library reveals that the latter part equals the sign dur (Too late). Horowitz assumes a semantic link between the two verbs rahāṣu A, “to trample, to destroy,” and rahāṣu B, “to wash, to bathe,” since the cause of destructions of the former is the weather god Adad.[212]

Simānu (III)

O | i | 26 | 1(diš) iti sig₄ mul gu₃-an-na aga-an-na-ke₄ | (32) | ˹iti˺ sig₄ is-le-e a-ge da-nim
|  | 27 | mul-bi kaxne ba!-an-sa₂ | (33) | [mu]l.˹bi d˺gi:bil ša-nin
|  | 28 | iti u₃-šub lugal-ke₄ | (34) | [it]i na-al-˹ba˺-anlugal
|  | 29 | lugal u₃-šub sig₄-ke₄ | (35) | [lu]gal na-al-ba-na i-la-˹bi˺-in
|  | 30 | kur-kur e₂-ne-ne mu-un-du₃-a | (36) | [k]urmeš e₂meš-ši-na ip-pu-˹šu₂˺
|  | 31 | iti gul-la kalam-ma-ke₄ | (37) | iti gul.la ša ma-a-ti₃

In the menology of the third month, the phrase lugal u₂-šub sig₄-ke₄ is difficult to interpret. The Akkadian version has šarru nalbāna ilabbin. Usually, sig₄ alone should not mean “to make bricks.” We would expect here additionally the base du₈, which is well attested in lexical texts.[213] Syntactically this phrase runs parallel to the preceding one: iti u₂-šub-lugal-ke₄. For a lexical attestation see, for instance, Proto-Izi I, 263: sig₄-du₈la-ba-a-nu.[214]

Du’ūzu (IV)

O | i | 38 | [1(diš) i]ti šu mul sipa-zi-an-na | (45) | iti šu ši-ta-ad-da-lu dpap.sukkal
|  | 39 | dnin-šubur sukkal-mah | (46) | sukkal ṣi-i-ru ša da-nim
|  | 40 | an-na dinana-bi-id-da-ke₄ | (47) | u deš₁₈-tar₂ iti numun ša₂-pa-ku
|  | 41 | iti numun dub-bu-ni numun | (48) | numun-ni har-pi šu-ṣi-i
|  | 42 | nim-ta-e₃-de₃
|  | 43 | kid₂-kid₂ iti dnin-ru-ru-gu₂ | (49) | ši-si-itdnin.ru.ru.gu₂
|  | 44 | sipa ddumu-zi ba-dab₅-dab₅-˹ba˺ | (50) | iti sipa ddumu.zi ik-ka-mu-u₂

In this menology, one can highlight a couple of intriguing orthographical spellings. The conjunction °-bi-da is written °-bi-id-da in line i, 40.[215] In line 43, the scribe uses kid₂-kid₂ to render Akkadian šisītu, “cry.” The sign kid₂ or tak₄ cannot be traced per se in lexical lists neither as equivalent for šisītu nor the infinitive šasû. Nonetheless, the lexical series Diri attests in I, 231 to a logogram group gada.tak₄.si with the equivalent šisītu.[216] It might not be too far-fetched to propose that kid₂ is actually a phonetic reflection on Sumerian gu₃-de₂, the common equivalent to šasû and its derivatives.[217] In this line, the Akkadian interpreter did not take iti into account. Was is forgotten in virtue of the phonetic similarity to it in ši-si-it?

Abu (V)

O | ii | 01 | ˹1(diš)˺ [iti ne mulkak-si-s]a₂ dnin-urta-˹ra˺ | (08) | iti ne šu-ku-du dnin.urta ki.izimeš
|  | 02 | [ki-izi bar₇(?)-ba]r₇*-re-de₃i | (09) | ut-tap-pa-ha di-pa-ru a-na da.nun.na.ke₄
|  | 03 | g[i*-izi-la₂ gur₃(?)-ru(?)-de₃(?)]ii da-nun-na-ke₄-ne
|  | 04 | dkaxne am-ta-e₁₁-de₃ ki-dutu-ra | (10) | in-na-aš₂-šidgi:bil
|  | 05 | tum₄(NIM)-tum₄-mu-de₃ g̃uruš gešbu₂ | (11) | iš-tu an-e ur-ra-dam-ma
|  |  | lirum-ma | (12) | it-ti dutu i-ša-na-an
|  | 06 | iti dbil₃-ga-mes ka₂-ne-ne | (13) | iti dgeš.gin₂.maš tu-šu-u’-u₂
|  | 07 | u₄-9xiii-kam₂ a-da-min₃ | (14) |
|  |  |  | (15) | u₄-mi eṭ-lu-tu ina ka₂meš-šu₂-nu
|  |  |  | (16) | u₂-ma-aš₂ u₂-ba-ri ul-te-ṣu-u₂

8.7 i Wayne Horowitz reads [ki-ne sar-sa]r-re-ne; see Horwitz (2014, 68).ii Both the reconstruction of the verbal form as well as the verb base itself are uncertain. For a bilingual attestation of gi-izi-la₂—gur₃, “to carry a torch,” see R IV p. 26, no. 3, 41–42: [gi]-izi-la₂ gur₃-ru gi₆-gi₆-ga zalag₂-ga-ab : [nāš] di-pa-r[i] mu-nam-mir ek-le-ti; cited after CAD D, 156 s.v. dipāru. Alternatively, we could also expect the verbal base il₂ and possibly a form il₂-la-de₃. Wayne Horowitz reads only the nominal part; see Horowitz (2014, 68).iii Although there is plenty of space available in this line, the scribe wrote (or copied) just three wedges over each other in order to indicate the numeral “9.” This is a common administrative practice. Its Akkadian representative tušu’û is one of the rare syllabic spellings of this numeral.

The month name Abu contains a passage that is quite clear in its Akkadian version, but less so in the Sumerian “source.” The Akkadian has Girra ištu samê urradam-ma itti Šamaš išannan, “Girra descends from heaven and rivals Šamaš.” In the Sumerian version, this passage goes as follows: dkaxne am-ta-e₁₁-de₃ / ki-dutu-ra nim-nim-mu-de₃. For the Akkadian verb šanānu, we would expect a form containing the base sa₂ in the Sumerian text.[218] In line i:27 is rendered as stative šanin in its translation.[219]

The base nim is problematic. This logogram is also attested in the fourth month (line i, 42), where it is equated with Akkadian harpu, “early” (line i, 48). An alternative reading in the menology of the month Abu could be tum₄. This reading may solve the vowel harmony: tum₄-tum₄-mu-de₃. Also compare it to line 143 of “Ninurta’s Return to Nippur,” which has in its Old Babylonian text the following: e₂ ki-bal tum₄-tum₄ gešbu(geš.ru) kušguru₂₁(e.ib₂.ur₃)-g̃u₁₀ mu-da-an-g̃al₂-[la-am₃], “I bear those which carry off the temples of rebellious lands, my throwing stick and shield.”[220]

Tešrītu (VII)

O | ii | 22 | 1(diš) iti du₆ mul mudul(mu.bu)i-keš₂-da | (30) | iti du₆ ni-i-ru d+en.[l]il₂
|  | 23 | d+en-lil₂-le PA šu-nir-ne-{x}-ne | (31) | šu-pa₂-a-tuii u₂-tal₂-la-[l]a
|  | 24 | ku₃-ku₃-mu nam-lu₂+u₁₈-lu umun in-dadag | (32) | ni-šu u ru-bu-u₂ u₂-tab-[b]a-bu
|  | 25 | ˹ne˺-sag̃ mu ku₃-ga kur-kur-ra | (33) | ni-iq šat-ti el-lu šakur˹meš˺-ti₃
|  | 26 | da-nun-na-ke₄-e-ne mu-un-na ka₂ | (34) | a-na da.nun.na.ke₄ in-na-˹qi˺
|  | 27 | abzu ta-e₃ ki-se₃-˹ga˺ | (35) | ba-˹ab ap˺-si-i ip-pat-[t]e
|  | 28 | lugal-ddu₆-ku₃-ga d+en-ki dnin-˹ki˺ | (36) | ki-is-˹pu a-na lugal˺.du₆.k[u₃.g]a
|  | 29 | iti pap-bil₂-ga d+en-lil₂-la₂-˹ke₄˺ | (37) | d+en-ki u dn[in.ki [...]] ˹KA?˺ [...]
|  |  |  | (38) | iti a-bi a-bi [ša d+en.lil₂]

8.8 i See, for instance, Diri Nippur ix, 18: [x-d]u-ul : mu.bu : ni-ru-um; see Civil, Farber and Kennedy (2004, 32).ii The sign ba should indeed be read here with unvoiced consonant. The manuscript Sm 755+ (Çağirgan (1985, text B); see the photo in the CDLI database, no. P426447) reads in obv. ii, 15: šu-pa-tu. Unfortunately, its Sumerian pendant is not preserved.

The Akkadian construction šu-pa₂-a-tu is problematic. In the previous edition of the text by G. Çağirgan, the signs after the divine name in the Sumerian line are read gup₂(li)-pa šu-nir-ne-ne, which led to the translation “shrines are purified.”[221] The sign li certainly needs to be connected with the divine name Enlil.[222] The Neo-Assyrian manuscript Sm 755+[223] has in obv. ii, 10 [...mul mu.b]u-keš₂-˹da˺ d+en-lil₂-la₂. The remaining part could be read pa/g̃idri[224] šu-nir-ne-ne, “sceptre (and) emblems.” In light of the Neo-Assyrian version Sm 755+ (šu-pa-tu), it is not unlikely to interpret it as stem III of (w)apû, “to make visible.”[225] This interpretation would not literally translate the Sumerian term, but provide a descriptive equivalent: “the visible ones.”[226] For favoring šubtu, “dwelling, shrine,” one should look at the ṣâtu commentary CT 41, 42 (CCP 3.4.9.M) line 3, which reads: šub-tu₄ šu.nir : šu.nir : kak-ku : min : mun-dah-ṣ[u].[227] Horowitz refers the lexical list Antag̃al, where the equation šu.nir = šurinnu occurs within a group of designations for shrines.[228]

The Akkadian verbs ūtallalā and ūtabbabū are parallel. The first Sumerian equivalent ku₃-ku₃-mu seems to have its conjugation prefix in suffix position, which normally indicates an imperative or a defective writing for a “pronominal conjugation.”[229]

Last but not least the Sumerian phrase ka₂ abzu(-)ta(-)e₃ is worth a remark.[230] This solution is closer to the Middle Assyrian text, which has kispu in the Akkadian translation. The Akkadian interpreter approached this expression and translated bāb apsî ippattê,[231] “the gate of the Apsû is opened.” The Sumerian base e₃ is not a common equivalent of Akkadian petû.[232] A similar case is found in the menology of the fourth month. There, the Sumerian phrase numun nim ta-e₃-de₃ is translated numun-ni har-pi šu-ṣi-i. The base e₃ appears to be merged with the dimensional marker.

Arahsamnu (VIII)

O | ii | 37 | 1(diš) iti apin g̃išal-la₂-bi g̃eš˹apin-na˺ [edin-na] | (41) | iti apin pa-ṭar₃i gešapin!(T: MAH) gešal-˹la˺
|  | 38 | a-da-min₃ di₅-di₅-˹de₃˺ | (42) | u₃ gešapin a-na edin ul-te-ṣu-u₂
|  | 39 | a-ki-tu ur g̃ar-ra iti d˹iškur˺ | (43) | a-ki-it e-re-ši iš-ša-ka-an
|  | 40 | gu₂-gal an-ki-a | (44) | iti dim gu₂.gal an-e u₃ ki-ti₃

8.9 i The use of the relatively complex sign dar₃ instead of simple tar is noteworthy. Sm 755+ has indeed pa-ṭar in obv. ii, 22.

In line 41 the scribe deliberately wrote gešmah (Too late) instead of the expected gešapin (Too late). Both signs share a couple of graphical similarities but, one wonders whether the sign mah was mistakenly copied for *apin.na (see line 37) or the scribe considered the reading /al₆/ of the sign mah and therefore anticipated the subsequent gešal-la.

Quite intriguing is the Sumerian phrase a-da-min₃ di₅(ri)-di₅-de₃, which was interpreted in the Akkadian version as ultēṣû, a Middle Babylonian form of šutēṣû, “to quarrel.” According to the lexical attestation in Nabnītu M (= XXVII), line 269 the Sumerian should be a-da-min₃ di instead.[233] This orthography is not uncommon. See, for instance, the initial line of the Old Babylonian “Tale about the šumunda-Grass”: ab-ba na mu-un-de. The verbal form clearly needs to be connected with na de₅, “to instruct.”[234]

Finally, Sumerian ur (line 39) represents in light of its Akkadian equivalent erēšu, “to cultivate” in line 43 certainly a peculiar writing. Similar to di₅ for di it appears to be another phonetic variant, in this case for uru₄(apin).[235]

8.3.6 The Creation Myth KAR 4

This text was last discussed and edited together with the Old Babylonian unilingual fragment IB 591[236] by Wilfred Lambert.[237] Most of this composition is known thanks to the Middle Assyrian tablet, which itself already constituted a copy of an imported source. The text received much attention in the past, not to mention its side-by-side presentation with the Silbenalphabet A.[238] The textual record shows that this list of syllables goes beyond being a conventional learning tool and lexical text. The Kuyunjik text refers to the combined copy of the Silbenalphabet and the creation myth as “second tablet” (dub 2(diš).kam₂.ma) of a series, whose incipit is given as me me [kur₂]-˹kur₂˺ i-li. In the colophon, this information is preceded by a catch-line referring to the Atra-hasis epic.[239] The serialization of this creation myth in a larger context might have been a first millennium invention. Lambert sees the Silbenalphabet as the first composition in the series and the creation myth as the second, since the former is also attested in its own accord. But the Kuyunjik tablet clearly puts the Silbenalphabet and the creation myth side by side, as does the Middle Assyrian text. Be that as it may, KAR 4 represents an intriguing text within the corpus of the Middle Assyrian scribal lore. It was copied by a young scribe called Kidin-Sîn, son of Suti’u. There is only one other text known from this scribe, a copy of the god list AN : Anu on a large tablet with twelve columns text, which found its way into the royal libraries of Nineveh.[240]

It remains uncertain whether at this occasion also the text of the creation myth was copied from the Middle Assyrian source and brought to Nineveh. Instead of the broken areas designated as such on the Middle Assyrian tablet, the Kuyunjik has, besides the entries of the Silbenalphabet, unintelligible traces of the Sumerian and Akkadian versions.[241] Unfortunately, Kidin-Sîn’s colophons do not insert a date, as is known from a couple of other scribes in library M 2 such as the aforementioned Marduk-balāssu-ēreš and Bēl-aha-iddina from the Ninurta-uballissu-family. Therefore, his copies cannot be placed within a chronological framework. Whereas on KAR 4, Kidin-Sîn serves in the rank of lu2dub.sar tur (Akkadian ṭupšarru ṣehru), “young scribe,” he is a.ba on the copy of the god list. This writing is a comparatively rare Sumerogram for ṭupšarru in the Middle Assyrian period.[242] Based on this difference in the given occupations, the god list should date later when Kidin-Sîn was farther advanced in his career.[243]

The colophon categorises this composition as “secret lore” (ad.hal, pirištu) followed by the expression mūdû mūdâ lukallim, “may the knowledgeable show (it) to the knowledgeable.” In the Middle Assyrian textual record this expression is rather unique. Possibly its scribe Kidin-Sîn took this expression over from the tablet he copied from, which probably originated from Middle Babylonian Nippur. The well-preserved tablet CBS 6060 containing an interesting collection of correspondences between objects such as trees, plants, or animals and deities[244] bears a colophon, which includes the same formula as well: zu-u₂ {A} zu-a li-˹kal˺-lim.[245] This expression is followed by the wish that “the ignorant must not see (it)” (nu zu-u₂ nu igi-mar).[246]

However, it is less the implications of secret lore or esoteric knowledge that shall be highlighted here, but rather the bilingual tradition of this text. Karl Hecker notes that “der Text war schon in der Antike stark verderbt überliefert und ist daher nicht überall sicher verständlich.”[247] Among the instances of bilingual texts in the Middle Assyrian period KAR 4 is one of the rare cases in which the Sumerian and Akkadian versions are written in separate columns.[248] Whether this arrangement was caused by the presence of the Silbenalphabet A is uncertain.[249] A new hand copy of KAR 4 is presented on p. , below.

Example 26: KAR 4 obv. 10–11

bara₂-mah ni₂-te mu-un-ki-ku-mu₂-a | : ina bara₂ ṣi-r[i...]
ni₂-te-a-ni šu mi-ni-ib₂-gi₄-gi₄ | : u₂-ši-bu-ma i+na r[a-ma-ni-šu₂-nu...]

The Akkadian translation can partly be reconstructed from the Kuyunjik tablet. Although this text offers the reading du₅-ru for the sign ku in the Middle Assyrian copy, KAR 4 seems to use the noun ki-tuš(ku) here as the verbal base. This becomes clear from the equivalent ūšibū, “they sat down,” in the subsequent line.[250] On rev. 18 of KAR 4 we read as follows:

g̃ešhur-gal-gal mu-un ni₂-zu* hur-hur-re
: i+na ra-ma-ni-šu₂-nu u₂-ṣu-˹ra-te˺ r[a-ab-ba-te uṣ-ṣi]-˹ru!˺

Similar to ki-tuš above, the reflexive pronoun ni₂-zu is inserted within the verbal chain. The translation however contains the suitable—though without a corresponding personal suffix—expression ina ramānīšunu.

Example 27: KAR 4 obv. 16–17 and 19–20

a-na-am₃ he₂-en-bal-en-ze₂-en | : mi-na-a i ni-pu-uš
a-na-am₃ he₂-en-dim₂-en-ze₂-en | : mi-na-a i ni-te-pu-uš (line 20: i ni-ib-ni)

In both instances, the Sumerian and Akkadian versions show a clear discrepancy between the verbal forms. Whereas the Sumerian text uses the suffix for the second person plural, the Akkadian translation indicates a first person plural: i nīpuš and i nītepuš or i nibni. The Kuyunjik text differs quite substantially from the Middle Assyrian recension. In lines 16–17 it uses the verbal prefix ga-ab-° for the cohortative while keeping the °-en-ze₂-en as suffix. The verbal base bal with a corresponding Akkadian verb epēšu in the Middle Assyrian version is noteworthy. The Neo-Assyrian text, however, uses the verbal base du₃ in line 16 instead, but keeps bal in line 19. The interlinear translation of this later recension, nonetheless, has the expected i nuš<bal>kit. Also line 20 differs quite substantially from the Middle Assyrian text. Here, the Sumerian verbal form reads mu-un-me-e-e-ze₂-en. Its scribe clearly interpreted the verbal base as du₁₁ with its marû stem e, “to speak.” This explains why instead of i nibni the Akkadian translation in the Neo-Assyrian text has i nibbi.[251] Similar discrepancies of the distribution of suffixes occur in this composition elsewhere. In line 25 of KAR 4, for instance, the Sumerian verbal chain im-ma-an-tag-en-ze₂-en is equated with i ni-iṭ-bu-ha in the corresponding Akkadian text.[252]

Example 28: KAR 4 obv. 21

dig̃ir-gal-gal-e-ne mu-un-sur-re-eš-a
: dingirmeš galmeš šu-ut iz-zi-zu

Here, the Middle Assyrian text clearly uses the base sur for the Akkadian verb izuzzu. Jan Lisman interprets this spelling as an unorthographic writing.[253] The later Neo-Assyrian text uses (correctly) the base su₈ in the infinite form su₈-ge-eš. Omitting the initial wedge of the sign sur would lead to g̃ar, which is semantically much closer to the Akkadian verb i/uzuzzu.[254]

Example 29: KAR 4 obv. 26

uš₂-uš₂-e-ne nam-lu₂+u₁₈-lu mu₂-mu₂-e-de₃
: i+na da-me-šu-nu i ni-ib-na-a a-mi-lu-ta

The infinite verbal form mu₂-mu₂-e-de₃ corresponds to the cohortative i nibnâ.[255] Both previous and subsequent Sumerian lines contain the second person plural, which is rendered with the first person plural in the respective Akkadian translation. It cannot be ruled out completely that the suffix –e-de₃ is a defective spelling for –en-de₃-en.[256] For a possible Old Babylonian example, see Sîn-iddinam A (text B = Wagensonner 2007, 545–546), line 21’: se₃-ga-de₃-en; see the commentary (Wagensonner 2007, 554). The suffix °-e-de₃ is frequently translated by an infinitive construction as well.[257] One example is, for instance, obv. 29: gi-de₃ : a-na ku-un-ni.[258]

Example 30: KAR 4 obv. 27

a₂-g̃eš-g̃ar-ra-dig̃ir-e-ne eš₂-gar₃-ne he₂-a
: iš-kar dingirmeš lu iš-kar-ši-na

Similar to Example 19 above the Akkadian translation uses the same equivalent for two (seemingly) different terms in the Sumerian text: (1) a₂-g̃eš-g̃ar-ra and (2) eš₂-gar₃.[259] In all likelihood, it seems that the former is an erudite spelling for the latter, both imitating the Akkadian lexeme.

Example 31: KAR 4 obv. 32–33

e₂-dig̃ir-gal-gal-e-ne | : šub-tugal-tu ša dingirmeš
bara₂-mah-a tum₂-ma | : ša a-na pa-rak-ki ṣi-ri šu-˹lu-kat₂?˺

In this example, the adjective gal referring to the gods in the Sumerian text, was re-interpreted and assigned to denote a quality of the house or abode. A similar case can be found in line 41 of “Nin-Isina’s Journey to Nippur”:

bara₂-gal-mah-ba sisic mi-ni-in-g̃ar-re-eš [...]

: i+na pa-rak-ki ṣi-ri ra-biš uš-bu-˹ma˺ [...]

While the Sumerian line qualifies bara₂ with both adjectives gal and mah, the interpreter understood gal as adverb and used rabîš.

Example 32: KAR 4 rev. 13–14 (= line 54)

gu₄ udu maš₂-anše ku₆ mušen-ne-ta-a | : gu₄ udu bu-la ku₆meš u₃ mušenmeš
he₂-g̃al₂-kalam-ma zil(nun)-zil-e-de₃ | : he₂.gal₂ i+na kur a-na du-še-e

The Sumerian verb zil is usually not equated with dešû, “to be abundant.”[260]. Already line 7 on the reverse corresponds to line 14 cited above. Instead of duššû, the interpreter uses the verb rubbû, “to enlarge.”[261] The Middle Assyrian scribes in Assur knew the base zil, but apart from KAR 4 it appears to have never been used to render a form of Akkadian dešû. VAT 9541, which contains a Middle Assyrian excerpt from Ea V, equates this verbal base with ša₂-la-tu, “to split off” (obv. i’, 13’).[262] In line 48 of “Nin-Isina’s Journey to Nippur”[263] the Akkadian form u₂-da-aš₂-ša-ši renders Sumerian mu-un-na-ab-šar₂-re. The base šar₂ is a common equivalent for Akkadian dešû.

A last remark shall be made on the ending °-NE-ta-a in line 13 of the example cited above. The Sumerian conjunction °-bi-da appears in various readings. The “Astrolabe” B renders it °-bi-id-da. It is therefore likely to see in our line another way of spelling this conjunction: mušen-bi₂-ta-a.

8.3.7 Varia

Jerrold S. Cooper published an overview of the bilingual texts found at Assur (and Nineveh), which date to the period in question.[264] No attempt is made in this brief section to provide any exhaustive treatment of additional texts.

In 1976, Wilfred G. Lambert edited a fragment, which he believed to date to the reign of the Assyrian king Tukultī-Ninurta I based on linguistic parallels to KAR 128 and 129.[265] Based on a paleographical analysis between the text published by Lambert and texts written by Marduk-balāssu-ēreš, Markham J. Geller concluded that all these texts might have been copied by the same scribe and that “a Tukulti-Ninurta prayer, albeit containing statements by the king himself in the first person, could have been composed in the reign of Tiglath-Pileser I, during a period when the Assur scribal schools were thriving and productive.”[266] Lambert deemed the Sumerian of BM 98496 as “obscure in the extreme.”[267] The layout of the Sumerian and Akkadian versions is column-based. Unfortunately, most of the Akkadian text is gone, leaving the Sumerian text with many peculiar spellings intact: Examples are the obvious adverb zi-ne₂-eš in obv. i, 10 as a variant to more common zi-de₃(ne)-eš or the two consecutive verbal chains mu-un-dir-dir-re nam-bal-la₂-e (obv. i, 8), which probably need to be understood as non-orthographic renderings of *mu-un-dir-diri-ge nam-ba-la₂-e.[268]

Another example dating to this period is a “bilingual hymn to Ninurta” edited by Wilfred G. Lambert in his Babylonian Wisdom Literature.[269] This bilingual text follows the usual interlinear layout. Unfortunately, the tablet does not preserve a colophon. It differs, however, quite substantially from the previous text. Its Sumerian version is to a great extent well understood, as demonstrated by the following example:

Example 33: VAT 10610 rev. 16–17

sila-dag̃al abul u₂-zug sil₆-la₂ g̃al₂-la dib-be₂-da-zu-[ne]

: ina re-bit a-bu-ul u₂-suk-ki ša₂ ri-ša₂-ti ma-la-a-at ina ba-i-k[a]

This line allows for a comparative analysis to the composition “Nin-Isina’s Journey to Nippur” discussed above. Line 5 contains both sila-dag̃al (: rebītu) and the verbal base dib (: bâ’u).[270] Noteworthy is also Sumerian g̃al₂ for Akkadian malû. Line 43 of NJN contains the intriguing syllabic spelling g̃a₂-la-ni in order to render malât.

The Middle Assyrian scribes from Assur copied collections of incantations as well. A case in point is the fragment VAT 9833 (= KAR 24), which belongs to the series Utukkū lemnūtu.[271] As was pointed out by Andrew R. George, this fragment is part of the “same tablet as BM 130660” edited by Markham J. Geller.[272] A reconstruction favors a six-column tablet (see p. 288 below). As was noted by Geller, two of the Neo-Assyrian text witnesses from the Kuyunjik collection contained six-column tablets as well.[273] Since VAT 9833 comes from an archaeological context, it is not entirely clear how BM 130660 happened to enter the collection of the British Museum. It is known that twenty boxes with finds from Assur were taken to London in the early 1920s, before Walter Andrae could tend to their shipment to Berlin, and that some objects were extracted from them.[274] Geller notices about this text that “[a]lthough the script is indicative of a library hand, the errors in the text attest to the scribe’s carelessness or ignorance.”[275] Its scribe Marduk-kābit-ahhēšu is known from at least one other scholarly text. He copied the paleographical list AfO 4, plates III–IV.[276]

Geller discussed the variants in the Middle Assyrian copy compared to versions dating to the first millennium BCE. Besides orthographical variants, lexical or semantic differences are particularly revealing. As Geller pointed out, the Middle Assyrian text uses quite frequently rare equivalents when rendering the Sumerian.[277] We get a similar perspective by looking on other texts used in this study.

Example 34: BM 130660 obv. ii, 24–25 (= Tablet 13–15, 106)

e₂-a mu-lal₂ g̃iri₃-ni ha-ba-an-gi

: ša₂ ina e₂ it-te-ne₂-’e-lu-u giri₃-šu lip-pa-ri-is

Lexical texts provide two Sumerian equivalents for the Akkadian verb e’ēlu, “to hang up”: šu-ur-g̃ar and ri. Stem I/3 seems to be triggered by the reduplication of the grapheme la₂. Noteworthy is also the verbal base gi, which is rendered here by stem IV of the Akkadian verb parāsu. The Neo-Assyrian text K.111+[278] reads ha-ba-an-tar at the end of the line (rev. ii, 8) and renders it li-ip-ru-us in the subsequent Akkadian translation. Although the verbal base tar is usually equated with parāsu elsewhere in the Middle Assyrian evidence,[279] there are a few hints for the usage of gi : parāsu in the Middle Assyrian version of Utukkū lemnūtu. The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary cites a Late Babylonian bilingual litany, which was published by Wilfred G. Lambert.[280] This text reads in obv. 11 as follows: an-ra a mu-ni-ib₂-gi₄-a-ni : e-liš mi-la ip-ru-su.[281] The Neo-Assyrian fragment K.5255 (= CDLI P395959) offers in rev. 8–9 the Akkadian equivalent še-pi ip-ru-su for g̃iri₃ mu-un-se₃-ki-ta. Hence, the verbal form in Utukkū lemnūtu cited above should rather be read ha-ba-an-sig₁₇.[282]

8.4 Conclusions

Although the main focus of this study is to pinpoint a selection of orthographical and morphological peculiarities, it is clear from the previous pages that many obstacles remain while dealing with Sumerian texts of a late period. Even if all these texts had been copied at the same place and date within a rather narrow time frame, many issues persist. On the one hand, the data is obscured by the sometimes rather complex ways and methods of textual transmission. In the case of Assur in the Middle Assyrian period, in general, and the group of the M 2 texts, in particular, there are many uncertainties regarding text acquisition and distribution of source texts. This is mainly due to the fact that the archaeological context was already disturbed in antiquity and the boundaries between the Middle Assyrian texts in this group and texts that had been assigned to the later temple library N 1 are not always clear. A place for copying tablets in this period, as for instance a scriptorium, has never been found. In the Old Babylonian period, the transmission of Sumerian literary texts was mainly triggered by the scribal education in the “schools,” the e₂-dub-ba-a. But there is no evidence for such an institution in the last third of the second millennium BCE. While we are in the lucky position that there is even archaeological evidence for such institutions in the first centuries of the second millennium and also to some extent for the first millennium BCE, we know astonishingly little about textual transmission in the latter part of the second millennium.

On the other hand, variations between different texts often hamper our understanding of specific grammatical problems. Furthermore, just a minor part of the extant texts give us data about the provenances of the sources. This information is mostly general in a way that allows no further investigation. Textual or linguistic analysis of the Akkadian translations may sometimes give clues, especially in light of particular Middle Babylonian forms,[283] but here too we have no knowledge of the degree of redaction undertaken by the Middle Assyrian copyists. As long as we do not have more extensive sources for the Middle Babylonian tradition of Sumerian compositions, we have no way of knowing for sure whether these young scribes blindly copied sources or did redaction work themselves.

The Sumerian may contain peculiarities as well. Phonetic variants appear to be quite common.[284] Even if they pose problems for the modern reader, the Akkadian translations frequently solve a great deal of issues. In this paper, it was deliberately decided not to speak about Sumerian in the Middle Assyrian period in terms of quality. We are not deemed to judge the Sumerian of this period. There are a great deal of peculiar writings, either phonetic variants or widely abbreviated verbal forms. One might even substantiate the claim that the former originates either from dictation or from minor hiccups in the scribe’s memory.[285]

Recently, Eckart Frahm argued that the Kassite rulers “initiated some of the earliest editorial projects that led to the emergence of the new corpus of ‘canonical’ texts that remained in use until the end of cuneiform civilization.” A clue to such an editorial endeavor is provided by a scribal note on the later hemerological tablet KAR 177, according to which scholars copied and selected from seven tablets originating from places such as Sippar, Nippur, Babylon, and so forth, and gave (the new edited compendium) to the Kassite king Nazi-maruttaš.[286]

As I have tried to show throughout this short study,[287] the Akkadian versions of the Sumerian compositions discussed above should not be considered a secondary layer of text.[288] Originally derived from glosses and annotations, they eventually became part of the stream of tradition. Both Sumerian and Akkadian versions of a given line were treated as one unit.

The Sumerian language and its scribal lore were able to preserve its status and importance long after its demise as spoken language at the end of the third millennium or slightly later. Whereas the Akkadian language infiltrated and soon dominated the socio-economic life, many areas of the religious and cultural sphere still thrived from the presence of Sumerian texts. Lexical texts, both those dealing with the shapes and readings of signs as well as thematic word lists, were the essential tools for dealing with Sumerian semantics. But word lists present the Sumerian out of context. Bilingual texts that put whole Sumerian phrases and their Akkadian equivalents side by side can be seen in this light as well. They extend the lexical corpus by providing context. In doing so, they kept the Sumerian language alive and removed it from the artificial environment of lexical lists.

Highly learned literature, such as the treatment of the various month names of the year in the “Astrolabe” text presented above, are often considered erroneous due to the fact that their Sumerian appears to reveal deficiencies on a morphological basis or orthographical details that seem peculiar compared to more classical Sumerian literature of the early second millennium BCE. But these texts and their compilation need to be located in the arcane realm of the scribal art. When the scribe of the “Astrolabe” uses the sign dur for the Akkadian verb rahāṣu instead of dur₂, it must not necessarily be an error or misinterpretation. In a recent article about the various text layers that remain hidden within the orthography of a word, Stefan Maul argues that the Akkadian versions on late bilingual texts should be considered more as comments than simple transpositions into Akkadian.[289] This view has many merits, in particular, in light of annotations on text witnesses of Sumerian literature dating to the early second millennium BCE.

Acknowledgements

This contribution benefitted from the involvement in the project part “Episteme als Konfigurationsprozess: Philologie und Linguistik im ‘Listenwissen’ des Alten Orient” (under direction of E. Cancik-Kirschbaum and J. Klinger) within the framework of SFB 980 “Episteme in Bewegung.” I would like to thank the organizing committee of the conference “Crossing Boundaries: Multilingualism, Lingua Franca and Lingua Sacra” (Berlin, 8–10 November 2010) for inviting me to publish this work. This study originates in an unpublished master thesis on Sumerian divine journeys.[290] In this thesis, the various Sumerian compositions were discussed and re-edited. Among the known texts were two bilingual tablets of a composition now known as “Nin-Isina’s Journey to Nippur” dating to the Middle Assyrian period.[291] The new edition led to an investigation of the responsible scribes and their wider familial and occupational background during several research stays at the Vorderasiatische Museum in Berlin and the British Museum in London. Previous studies focused primarily on the information gleaned from the respective colophons.[292] For abbreviations, see the list provided by cdli:wiki.[293] Lexical and literary compositions are referred to by their incipits or by the subsequent abbreviations (in alphabetical order): (1) Lexical: Ai = ki-ulutin-bi-še₃ : Ana ittišu; Aa = a : a₂ : nâqu; Antag̃al = an.ta.g̃al₂ : šaqû; Diri = diri : si.a : (w)atru; Ea = ea : a : nâqu; Erimhuš = erim.huš : anantu; Ura = har-ra : hubullu; Igiduh = igi.duh : tāmartu; Izi = izi : išātu; Kagal = ka₂.gal : abullu; Lu = lu₂ : ša; Nabnītu = sig₇.alan : nabnītu; Sa/Sb = Silbenalphabet A/B; (2) Literary: Lugal-e = “Ninurta’s Expoits”; Angim = “Ninurta’s Return to Nippur”; NJN = “Nin-Isina’s Return to Nippur.” Corresponding entries in the CDLI database[294] are given by the respective P-no.

8.5 Appendix

Fig. 8.1: VAT 10498 (= KAV 8)

Fig. 8.2: VAT 10565 (= KAR 17 = 1983 text q)

Fig. 8.3: VAT 10628 (= KAR 363 = 1983 text o₁)

Fig. 8.4: VAT 10643 (= KAR 370a = 1983 text m₁)

Fig. 8.5: VAT 9441 + 10648 + 11216 (= 1978 text bB), obverse

Fig. 8.6: VAT 9441 + 10648 + 11216 (= 1978 text bB), reverse

Fig. 8.7: VAT 8884 (= KAR 18 = 1978 text cC)

Fig. 8.8: VAT 9307 (= KAR 4), obverse

Fig. 8.9: VAT 9307 (= KAR 4), reverse

Fig. 8.10: VAT 9833 (= KAR 24)

Fig. 8.11: Reconstruction of VAT 9833 (+) BM 130660, obverse

Fig. 8.12: Reconstruction of VAT 9833 (+) BM 130660, reverse

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Footnotes

[1] See Thomsen (1984, 26–33) and Michalowski (2004) for a brief chronological overview of the attestation of Sumerian.

[2] For this saying of linguist and Sumerologist Igor M. Diakonoff, see Diakonoff (1976, 99).

[3] This is of course quite apparent dealing with compositions that were copied and transmitted throughout a long period of time and at different places, as well as by scribes who were at different stages in their career. The best case in point is the composition “Ninurta’s Exploits” or Lugal-e; see section 8.3.3 below. For linguistic change, see with previous literature, for example, Brisch (2007, 91–94).

[4] See Edzard (2003–2005) and Edzard (2003–2005, 132): “‘Rechtschreibung’ ist ein für jedes Schriftsystem unabdingbares Prinzip, das der Summe der Benutzer ein gemeinsames Verständnis ermöglicht.”

[5] Language contact is already recognizable in texts dating to the first half of the third millennium. For the latest study about loanwords and their origin, see Civil (2007).

[6] See Harrison (2007, 207).

[7] Since a majority of literary and lexical texts came down to us through school exercises, there are plenty of cases of apparent scribal errors and erasures. Nonetheless, each supposed error need to be evaluated individually.

[8] See Maul (1997, 266—267).

[9] Almost all major Sumerian literary compositions originate from rather diverse findspots. Dealing with the often rather variant orthographies in single witness texts and the sometimes painstaking task of providing scores instead of composite transliterations is a first step in understanding the complex stream of tradition. I will not attempt in this study to discuss the question of textual criticism regarding Sumerian literary compositions. A study about the variation in compositions dating to the early second millennium was recently undertaken by Paul Delnero (2012b).

[10] Thomsen (1984).

[11] Jagersma (2010).

[12] See, e.g., Michalowski (2004).

[13] See Black (1991 [1984]).

[14] The major text source for Black’s study is the Old Babylonian Grammatical Texts (abbrev. OBGT) that comprise a rather important source for the Old Babylonian linguistic view of Sumerian grammar. In the review of Seminara’s treatment of the Akkadian version of “Ninurta’s Exploits” Markham J. Geller tries to compare the verbal forms in OBGT with those of the literary text and concludes his comparative approach as follows: “[W]hile bilingual texts represent translation of Sumerian into idiomatic Akkadian, and that use of an appropriate Akkadian verbal form was determined by context and meaning, rather than by any mechanical or fixed correspondence between a Sumerian and an Akkadian verbal form. The paradigms, on the other hand, have no context with which to determine the Akkadian translation, and the patterns are often unusual or exaggerated, which might suggest that the grammatical paradigms are functionally unusable for deciphering Sumerian texts. However, the paradigms cannot be altogether discounted, since they were intended to establish the form rather than the meaning of Sumerian verbal forms” (Geller 2005, 124–125). See also Veldhuis (2005) and Huber (2007). For this notion, see also Krispijn (1982, 145): “In der rezenten Forschung misst man dem sonstigen Korpus der zweisprachigen Inschriften aus dieser Periode, der sogenannten OBGT und ihrer späteren analytischen Überlieferung NBGT, ziemlich viel Bedeutung bei. Die Schwierigkeit ist, dass die in diesen Texten vorkommenden Verbalformen ohne Kontext sind, uns also nichts näheres über die Syntax übermitteln, und dass obendrein viele Formen nur hier belegt sind.” Niek Veldhuis subdivides the grammatical lists into “Verbal Paradigms” and “Grammatical Vocabularies”; see Veldhuis (2014, 194–199).

[15] See Vanstiphout (1979, 119–120) and Civil (2010, 246).

[16] See Delnero (2012b; 2012a).

[17] One among these is briefly discussed on page 274 below.

[18] For the latter, see the list in Cooper (1971, 1–2, note 2).

[19] On interlinear translations in Mesopotamia, see the keyword “Interlinearbilinguen” in the Reallexikon der Assyriologie (Krecher 1976–1980) and Cooper (1993, 80).

[20] See the rare example MS 2624 dating to the Old Babylonian period and compare footnote 61. Although full translations already exist from the first half of the second millennium BCE, they are relatively scarce compared to the overwhelming majority of monolingual Sumerian compositions. Quite frequently, Sumerian texts of this period contain glosses, which annotate certain signs, words, or expressions. Besides providing semantic variants or indicating the syllabic reading of a (difficult) sign, these annotations usually contain Akkadian equivalents in a certain idiomatic use. A good example is UET 6, 175, containing both pronunciation glosses as well as Akkadian equivalents. UET 6, 176 comes from the same scribal context, but omits these glosses, despite adding a partial translation to the colophon; for a discussion of this text and exegetical literature, see now Civil (2009, 67–68). Glosses are quite rare in the Middle Assyrian texts discussed here and limit themselves to phonetic indicators, such as in copies of lexical texts; see, for instance, VAT 8875 obv. i, 10: dili i₃i-ni-ma₆ma-a : i-di-iš-ši-˹šu˺-ma. For a gloss in a copy of a literary composition, see VAT 10565 obv. 13: [...] imim₂ [...].

[21] In the examples of bilingual texts given below, Akkadian equivalents are separated by “ : ” from their Sumerian version, irrespective of the presence of a Glossenkeil.

[22] The tablet’s scribe Marduk-balāssu-ēreš marked these indentations with additional vertical ruling on the tablet; see the hand copy of VAT 9416 in Wagensonner (2014b, 474–475). Similar subdivisions by ruling can be found in copies of lexical texts, such as VAT 9713, on which the scribe inserted an additional ruling in order to separate the classifier GIŠ. One can compare this layout to lexical texts from Ugarit. In a version of Ura XXI (RSO 7, 57), for instance, the scribe subdivided the Sumerian column into three subcolumns. This part of Ura contains place names. The place names are classified by preceding uru and following ki, which are separated from the lexeme by the aforementioned dividing lines. Is uru omitted the scribe, nevertheless, starts in the first subcolumn.

[23] Examples are KAR 4 with an additional preceding column containing the so-called Silbenalphabet A (see section 8.3.6 below), or VAT 9833 (+) BM 130660 where the same layout can be observed.

[24] The transliteration follows manuscript A; for a new hand copy, see Wagensonner (2008, 292).

[25] For a new hand copy of VAT 8875, see Wagensonner (2014b, 470–471). For current images of the tablet, see the Digitale Keilschrift Bibliothek (see footnote 105). The modern line count represents the physical appearance on the tablet. Every ten entries—not lines—are marked by a Winkelhaken.

[26] This can be observed, for instance, on the copies of Nin-Isina’s Journey to Nippur, and is discussed in Wagensonner (2008, 278).

[27] Geller (2010, 98).

[28] Geller (2005, 122).

[29] See, for instance, the Emesal vocabularies found in Assur. One of these vocabularies was copied by Sin-šuma-iddina of the Ninurta-uballissu family (Ass.2001.D-586); see Frahm (2002, 60–61). The tablet can be added as 3.1.3 to the inventory given in Wagensonner (2014b, 460). Its colophon is intriguing because it is the only hitherto known text written by this young scribe to add an eponym. It shows that Sîn-šuma-iddina copied this tablet contemporary to his brothers. In the same eponymy, his brother Marduk-balāssu-ēreš copied the third tablet of Aa and the sixth tablet of Ai. Bēl-aha-iddina copied the second tablet of Diri in the same year. The other known colophons on tablets written by Sîn-šuma-iddina do not add a date and differ from the customs used by his two other brothers. Whether this fact indicates that he received his education from another individual remains unanswered.

[30] We may refer here to the paleographical sign list written by Marduk-kābit-ahhēšu, which collects significantly older sign forms; see the photos in Meissner (1927, plates III–IV). The entries in this list follow the sequence of the Silbenalphabet A. The scribe added to each entry the contemporary equivalent in smaller script. For its colophon, however, he clearly used archaizing sign forms, maybe as additional practice. The same scribe was also responsible for copying VAT 9833 (= KAR 24) containing incantations from Utukkū lemnūtu. This tablet is said to be part of BM 130660 edited in Geller (1980); see section 8.3.7 below.

[31] In late commentary literature of the first millennium BCE, lexical texts were occasionally cited or quoted, but there is no evidence for this practice in the Middle Assyrian period.

[32] Jerrold S. Cooper states that after the Old Babylonian period the “Akk. translation gradually became a standard and standardized accompaniment to all Sum. texts” (Cooper 1978, 46).

[33] For such an approach see, for instance, Wagensonner (2008, 284–286).

[34] Limet (2000, 607).

[35] Wilfred G. Lambert, for instance, in discussing BM 98496 hypothesized: “The difficulty of this piece, and no doubt the reason for its neglect hitherto, arises from the loss of most of the Akkadian. Where it is preserved the sense is clear, but the Sumerian, which is what mostly remains, is obscure in the extreme. The author obviously thought and wrote first in Akkadian, and then produced a totally artificial rendering” (Lambert 1976, 86). For an Old Babylonian example, see footnote 61.

[36] Frauke Weiershäuser recently investigated the dependence of lexical texts found in Assur and possible ways of their transmission; see Weiershäuser (2008).

[37] See Çağirgan (1985). In the meantime new text witnesses became known, one among them dates to the Middle Babylonian period. For a new edition of this text together with duplicates and parallels, see now Horowitz (2014).

[38] Despite the addition of an Akkadian translation, this composition might go back to a significantly earlier date; see section 8.3.5 below.

[39] It should be noted that the level of data provided by colophons varies from scribe to scribe and might even be related to the respective scribe’s education. Very often a colophon does not go beyond identifying the copied text. For the exceptional case of the family of the royal scribe Ninurta-uballissu, see now Wagensonner (2011; 2014b).

[40] An intriguing case is provided by the composition “Nin-Isina’s Journey to Nippur” preserved now through four manuscripts, among which two were written by Middle Assyrian scribes. A fragment of the Sumerian text dates to the Old Babylonian period and originates from Nippur. Another manuscript dating to the Old Babylonian period has now come to light in the London private collection. It contains the complete Sumerian text (see Cohen 2017). There is no direct evidence for the transmission of this text in the centuries between the Old Babylonian and Middle Assyrian periods. When was it translated? Who was its translator? The scribes were not concerned with these matters. But the colophons on the Middle Assyrian copies at least provide some clues to a previous scribe or owner of the source; see footnote 44 below.

[41] See Wagensonner (2011, 662, 1.1.1; 676–677, 3.1.1); for a new hand copy of VAT 10172, see Wagensonner (2014b, 476–477) and a photo is found at the Digitale Keilschrift Bibliothek (see footnote 105). For a new hand copy of BM 108862 (= CT 35, plates 1–8), see Wagensonner (2014b, 478–479).

[42] See footnote 8.3.5 for some Middle Babylonian characteristics.

[43] We have seen above that the Old Babylonian period and to some extent the Middle Babylonian period attest to a rich corpus of glosses added to Sumerian texts. Though partial in nature, such annotations can be considered as early attempts to provide interlinear translations.

[44] One intriguing exception are the colophons on KAR 15 and KAR 16, both containing the bilingual version of “Nin-Isina’s Journey to Nippur.” Its colophon deviates from the usual array of data provided and adds the following information on the source tablet’s provenience: “According to the wording of the written tablet of Iqīša-Ninkarrak, son of Ninurta-bāni, it is written” (KAR 16, rev. 29–30). However, it remains uncertain whether this Iqīša-Ninkarrak, whose name contains the Akkadian form of the goddess Nin-Isina, was the translator of the Sumerian version or had this tablet only at his disposal. For the latest edition of this composition, see Wagensonner (2008) and for further remarks on the colophons of the Ninurta-uballissu family, see Wagensonner (2011; 2014b). Frequently the double ruling that separates the colophon from the body of the text contains the remark til or sometimes even al.til, that is, a Sumerian expression for Akkadian qati, “(the source) is complete/finished.”

[45] For discussing the possibility that the Assur scribes “composed and redacted Mesopotamian literary texts, and thus actively contributed to the process of canonization,” see Geller (1990, 210 and passim).

[46] See Cohen (2009, 59–60).

[47] See for this remark Worthington (2012, 25–27). This remark is attested, for instance, on KAR 4 and appears there in three consecutive lines almost at the top of the tablet’s reverse in both the Sumerian as well as Akkadian columns. This might indicate that Kidin-Sîn’s source text from which he copied had significant damage at the upper part of the reverse or even a broken bottom edge.

[48] For a photo of this tablet, see Cooper (1978, plate XIV, text Aa) and see http://cdli.ucla.edu/P280051, accessed April 7, 2017. The Middle Assyrian copy of KAR 4 (see footnote 47) follows the same pattern.

[49] For the “tablet house” bīt ṭuppāte, see Jakob (2002, 255–256), who concludes: “Es muß angesichts der vorgestellten Belege letztlich offen bleiben, ob im mA bīt ṭuppāte Schreiber nicht nur beschäftigt sind, sondern auch ausgebildet wurden. Andererseits ist relativ unwahrscheinlich, daß die assyrische Verwaltung die Ausbildung von Schreibern, die doch das Rückgrat der Bürokratie bilden, nicht in eigener Regie durchführt und den ‘Lehrplan’ von Anfang an bestimmt” (Jakob 2002, 256). See further the overview in Waetzoldt and Cavigneaux (2009, 305–306).

[50] See, for example, Charpin (1986, 420–425) and Robson (2001).

[51] See Gesche (2001, passim).

[52] Jakob (2002, 255) and see footnote 49 above.

[53] For this problematic situation, see the introductory remarks in Wagensonner (2011).

[54] See Veldhuis (2014, 336).

[55] For a hand copy of CBS 15132, see Wagensonner (2008, 294, text C).

[56] See Veldhuis (2014, 318).

[57] Markham J. Geller states about the late tradition of Sumerian compositions as follows: “Late bilingual texts often differ considerably from earlier duplicates, especially in the prefixes, infixes and suffixes of their verbal forms, and nor can these forms be easily explained by the Akkadian translations. The suspicion is that those who translated the Sumerian in late periods had no real understanding of Sumerian grammar, or simply chose to ignore it” (Geller 2010, 98).

[58] See, for instance, George (2005, 128) and Veldhuis (2005). A rather important case study is the evidence from “House F” in Nippur, which yielded a staggering amount of school texts allowing for an analysis of an Old Babylonian school curriculum; see Robson (2001, 45–50).

[59] See, for this aspect, the recent study by Paul Delnero, who based his analyses on the orthographical variation between text witnesses of a group of Sumerian literary compositions known as the “Decad”; see Delnero (2012b; 2012a).

[60] For a recent treatment of linguistic change in the Sumerian language with a focus on the songs of praise of the Larsa dynasty, see Brisch (2007, 91–113) and also some remarks in Wagensonner (2012, 17–18). A good example is a composition known as “Ur-Namma, the canal digger.” Steve Tinney treated the various sources originating from Nippur and Ur separately; see Tinney (1999).

[61] See, for instance, UET 6, 175 and Civil (2009, 67–68). The most compelling example for a complete interlinear version is the recently published tablet MS 2624; see George (2009, 78–112, plates 38–43). Its editor Andrew George pointed out that it represents “an exercise in arcane learning” (George 2009, 78). In terms of the tablet layout the Sumerian version of the text appears to be prior to the Akkadian, for the Akkadian lines are intended. The Sumerian text, however, is highly artificial and uses “rare and obscure words culled from academic lists, and a frequently morphemic presentation of Sumerian words that is alien to the grammar of that language” (George 2009, 78).

[62] For bilinguals in the Old Babylonian period and their sentence structure, see also Sullivan (1979).

[63] Cooper (1993, 79).

[64] Only recently Paul Delnero in his PhD thesis studied the variation between texts belonging to the so-called Decad, a group of ten Sumerian literary compositions, which were copied in an early stage of the scribal training in the Old Babylonian period; see Delnero (2006). Examples such as “Ninurta’s Exploits” demonstrate the huge discrepancies that occur over the long and complex stream of tradition. For the Old Babylonian period, the same author studied the importance of memory errors in the transmission of texts; see Delnero (2012a).

[65] The term “translation” is frequently inappropriate or not precise. The supplemental sign syllabary Diri provides a good case in point. Some of the designations for stones contained in it have Akkadian equivalents that go beyond pure translation. These also provide information on certain characteristics of the respective stones. Thus, lapis lazuli is not only translated by the Akkadian term uqnû or by the loan form zaginnu, but adds the characteristics ellu, “pure,” ebbu, “bright,” and namru, “shiny”; see now Wagensonner (forthcoming). Niek Veldhuis summarised the various types of translating Sumerian in this lexical text and categorises them as “multiple translations,” “qualified translations,” “translations of partially represented entries,” “Emesal entries,” “transferred meaning,” and “archaizing and rare entries”; see Veldhuis (2014, 183–187).

[66] For the physical appearances of bilingual texts after 1600 BCE, see Cooper (1993, 80–83). See also Krecher (1976–1980), who states: “Die sum. Fassung ist in jedem Fall, auch wenn aus der akk. übersetzt, wie die (angeblich) primäre und wichtigerer aufgezeichnet, d. h. links von der akk. oder über ihr. Beabsichtigt ist offenbar in der Regel die ‘wörtliche’ Entsprechung beider Fassungen. Ist die sum. Fassung in sich unverständlich und ist aus ihr auch unter Annahme von korrupter Tradition kein in sich verständlicher Wortlaut rekonstruierbar, so ist unabhängig vom Vorhandensein irgendwelcher einsprachiger Duplikate die akk. Fassung als die primäre zu vermuten” (Krecher 1976–1980, 125).

[67] This term can certainly be considered an apt designation for the Middle Assyrian scribal sphere. It is, however, important to differentiate between common administrative scribes and such scribes, who mastered the copies of large lexical series and literary texts, all of which we consider nowadays as library texts, leaving aside the issues relating to this term; see Charpin (2008, 193–194; 2010, 178–179) and see also Cancik-Kirschbaum and Kahl (2017, 35–99).

[68] See, for example, Geller (1990, 210, note 8): “One might even entertain the possibility that Marduk-balassu-eriš belonged to a Babylonian scribal family living in Assur. Babylonian tablets were, in any case, found in the Assur libraries.” Compare the case of the Babylonian scribe Marduk-nādin-ahhē settling at Assur, which was studied by Frans Wiggermann; see Wiggermann (2008).

[69] See Veldhuis (2014, 226).

[70] For the pertinent passage see, for instance, Fincke (2003–2004, 123–124, note 108). See also Cooper (1978, 50–51): “Ten or more years after Nebuchadnezzar’s death, Tiglathpileser I invaded Babylonia and sacked Babylon, and our MA mss., which date to his reign, may very well be copies of texts brought back by him as booty. In any case, it was under this ruler that Assyrian scribes first began copying Babylonian texts on a large scale, and we may suppose that the Babylonian model for our MA mss. dates to this period or slightly earlier.” See further Wiggermann (2008, 215).

[71] See, for instance, KAR 19, which has been collated at a research stay in the Vorderasiatische Museum, Berlin, in September 2009. For the Middle Babylonian tablets, see also Fincke (2003–2004, 138–139).

[72] One such remark is hepi, “it is broken,” found in some of the texts. See page 232 above.

[73] See also Fincke (2003–2004, 141).

[74] For a summary, see Pedersén (1998, 83–84): stating that “[i]t is not clear whether all the tablets diverted in Neo-Assyrian times had, during the Middle Assyrian period, belonged to one, single library or whether they may have been divided into a few separate libraries” (Pedersén 1998, 84). A superficial survey of the texts catalogued by Pedersén provides the following text genres: literary (MB), 1; literary (MA), 4; lexical (Ea, Aa, Diri, Kagal), 7; lexical (Ai), 1; lexical (Nabnītu), 1; lexical (Ura), 1; texts concerning hippology, 20; omens, extispicy, 5; prescription, recipe, 6; law, 5; palace or harem regulations, 1; list of booty, 1; map, 1; royal, 2; letter, 1. The Middle Babylonian and Middle Assyrian tablets incorporated into the Neo-Assyrian library N 1 at the Aššur temple represent a substantial increase in the texts of that group; see Pedersén (1986, 17–18).

[75] See Weidner (1952–1953).

[76] See, in particular, Freydank (1991). For dating the Middle Assyrian lexical texts from Assur, see Weiershäuser (2008, 351–352, note 3).

[77] Jeanette Fincke states that “[t]here is no proof for the existence of a Middle Assyrian library in Aššur that had been assembled by a king, nor that these tablets had been acquired for the palace” (Fincke 2003–2004, 138). See further Freydank (1991, 94–97).

[78] For the claimed literacy or scholarship of the Neo-Assyrian king Ashurbanipal and his predecessor Esarhaddon, see now Frame and George (2005); see further Fincke (2003–2004, 122–124).

[79] I.e., Van Dijk (1983, text n1).

[80] KAR 14 is his copy of sections IX–XII and there is sufficient reason to suggest that this scribe also copied KAR 13, which contains sections I–IV; see Wagensonner (2011, 666–667).

[81] Such dubgallu-tablets are known in rare instances; for the discussion of a first millennium BCE fragment of a “big tablet,” originally containing the whole composition Maqlû see Abusch and Schwemer (2009) and the tablet reconstruction (Abusch and Schwemer 2009, 55, Fig. 1). The colophon on CT 24, 20–46 (K. 4349) is preceded by a particularly intriguing statement, which to some extent refers to “editing” work by the scribe: qaq-qu-ru im-ti-˹id?˺-[ma(?)] / ˹il˺-te-niš al-tar?˺-, “The surface is enough, (therefore) I wrote(?) (them) together” (see Hunger 1968, No. 51). As a marginal note, the Akkadian word qaqquru for qaqqaru raises suspicion as to the date of the tablet, since attestations are usually Neo-Assyrian and not Middle Assyrian. Quite surprisingly, the same scribe wrote a second version of this god-list, an unprovenanced tablet which was used by Richard Litke in his reconstruction of the god-list An : Anum (ms. B). As the Kuyuncik-text its “chapters” are followed by a short colophon containing the number of entries (and in the case of YBC 2401 also the location within the series), which are separated by double rulings from the main text. However, the colophon of YBC 2401 differs. It states that the tablet was written and collated (in.sar igi.kar2) “according to the wording of old tablets” (ana pi-i ṭup-pimeš libir.rameš). Both on KAR 4 and the god-list CT 24, 20–46 Kidin-Sîn’s profession and the profession of his father Suti’u are written with the logogram A.BA. Only YBC 2401 has dub.sar tur and dub.sar lugal respectively. It seems not implausible to interpret the Kuyuncik-tablet as a later copy—despite variants and Middle Assyrian sign forms—produced for Ashurbanipal’s library with YBC 2401 as its source. The latter could very well be the dubgallu referred to in the colophon of the Kuyuncik-tablet. Paul-Alain Beaulieu, in a footnote, raises the possibility of a Neo-Assyrian date as well, Beaulieu (1992, note 19); see further the remarks in Beaulieu (1992, 71, note 13) and Litke (1998, 16–18 (ms. A).

[82] See, for instance, Geller (1990, 211–212).

[83] See Veldhuis (2014, 323).

[84] See Pedersén (1985, 31). Jeanette Fincke summarizes their physical appearance as follows: “However, many of the Middle Assyrian tablets of the Aššur temple that were fired in antiquity have a distinct appearance—a red core with an ivory-colored outer surface—which can also be observed on Middle Assyrian tablets from the Anu-Adad temple in Aššur and from the area between these temples” (Fincke 2003–2004, 138). See further the remarks on the firing process with focus on the Middle Assyrian library texts in Lambert (1965, 283).

[85] See also Fincke (2003–2004, 138), who states that “[t]here is no proof for the existence of a Middle Assyrian library in Aššur that had been assembled by a king, nor that these tablets had been acquired for the palace.”

[86] See Pedersén (1986, 13–19; 1998, 132). The term “library” is used here cautiously; see also Cancik-Kirschbaum and Kahl (2017, 123–139).

[87] See footnote 74.

[88] See Weiershäuser (2008, 353–357).

[89] Although often omitting such important information, some colophons give at least rudimentary proveniences of their sources. According to this data, most texts came from Babylon and Nippur, the latter being one of the major centres for scholarly tradition in the Old Babylonian period.

[90] For an inventory as well as style and content of the known tablets belonging to this corpus, see now Wagensonner (2011, 658–678; 2014b, 460). A paleographical analysis might reveal even further examples. This is possible to some extent using the excellent photos provided by the Digitale Keilschrift Bibliothek, which focuses on the lexical texts from Assur (see footnote 105). See Geller (1990), who compared the scribal hand on BM 98496 (= Lambert 1976, 93) with texts that have been copied by Marduk-balāssu-ēreš with the conclusion that “it is probable that Marduk-balassu-eriš copied all [...] [these] tablets, since the ductus is identical” (Lambert 1976, 212).

[91] See Wiggermann (2008, 205–206).

[92] BM 96947, edited in Wiggermann (2008, 219–222, line 5).

[93] Only four texts can be assigned to Sîn-šuma-iddina so far. These are VAT 10172, a copy of the first tablet of the lexical series Ea (for a hand copy, see Wagensonner (2014b, 476–477); JON 38, a well-preserved manuscript of the “twelth tablet” of the series Izi (see Civil 2010, 45–51); and BM 121117, a tiny fragment of a possible literary composition (for a hand copy, see Wagensonner (2011, 701, 3.2.1). The Emesal vocabulary Ass.2001.D-586 copied by this scribe shows that this scribe copied texts at the same time as his two other brothers. But due to the differences in the colophons’ layout, it must remain open whether he was indeed instructed by a different master scribe.

[94] For the transmission of lexical texts in Middle Assyrian Assur, see Weiershäuser (2008) and now Veldhuis (2014, 317–353).

[95] For this designation, see Cooper (1971, 1–2, note 2).

[96] Francesca Rochberg-Halton states that “[t]here is in any case no evidence in the cuneiform scholarly tradition that suggests that standardization became a rigorous law applied to a text’s particular form and content” (Rochberg-Halton 1984, 128). Recently, Frauke Weiershäuser pointed out that the Middle Assyrian recensions of lexical lists from Assur contain a good number of variation compared to later versions. Variations concern, in particular, entries that became obsolete later on and the sequence of entries. On the other hand, parts of the Middle Assyrian recensions may be completely parallel to versions of the first millennium BCE; see Weiershäuser (2008, 356).

[97] See, for example, the diachronic comparison of a section from Ura in Weiershäuser (2008, 361–364).

[98] See Charpin (2008, 193).

[99] See Charpin (2008, 193).

[100] See Charpin (2010, 201).

[101] For this reading, see canonical Diri IV, 267: u₂-lu-tin : ki.kal : ittu; see Civil, Farber and Kennedy (2004, 160).

[102] See Veldhuis (2014, 329).

[103] See Landsberger (1937, I).

[104] See the summary in Veldhuis (2014, 229–269), and see further Veldhuis (1996, 20; 2005, 237, note 26).

[105] The lexical texts found by the German excavations in Assur are now available within the framework of the project Digitale Keilschrift Bibliothek: Digitale Keilschriftbibliothek Lexikalischer Listen aus Assur (University of Göttingen), http://keil.uni-goettingen.de/, accessed April 7, 2017). All discussed texts have been collated. Ai VII is kept in the İstanbul Arkeoloji Müzeleri; see also footnote 108.

[106] See Wagensonner (2011, 672, text 2.1.3); for a hand copy of this tablet, see Wagensonner (2011, 696–699). An edition is presented in Landsberger (1937, 33–50).

[107] See Wagensonner (2011, 664, text 1.1.4). For a new hand copy of the tablet, see now Wagensonner (2014b, 470–471).

[108] Another tablet copied by Marduk-balāssu-ēreš is Const. 4523; see Wagensonner (2011, 664–665, text 1.1.5). Since this text needs collation, it is not included here. Among the Middle Assyrian text finds from Assur is also VAT 10498 (= KAV 8), whose colophon identifies this copy as the twenty-third extract tablet (im.˹gid₂.da˺ 23.kam₂.ma) of the series. Since according to the colophon this copy contained 35 lines of text, it can indeed be considered an extract. For a new hand copy, see p.  below.

[109] This copy of Ai contains a couple of peculiar sign forms. buru₁₄ appears to be such an instance: Too late (obv. i, 9).

[110] See Hallock and Landsberger (1956, 146). The preceding entry reads nu : la-a.

[111] See Hallock and Landsberger (1956, 164). The Old Babylonian Forerunner of Izi provides a direct parallel. While in II, 198–200 the entries follow the sequence nu-še—nu-ub-dam—nu-ub-diri (see Civil et al. (1971, 46), NBGT IV, 18–20 has nu-un-še—nu-ub-dam—nu-ub-diri (see Hallock and Landsberger 1956, 164).

[112] The use of the sign diš (vs. a-na in the subsequent entry) for the Akkadian preposition ana is rarely attested in Middle Assyrian texts, but might have been caused by the limited space in this line. Compare VAT 8884 obv. 18 (ana-ku) and VAT 10565 (= KAR 17) rev. 6 (ana ta-ha-zi).

[113] Add an initial horizontal wedge in the hand copy in Wagensonner (2011, 697) to the sign form LA (as in the subsequent line).

[114] Due to the parallel passages in Ai III and Ai VI, both versions are presented here together.

[115] For an interpretation, see Seminara (2001, 339 s.v. “Linea 490”) and Prang (1976, 35) with attestations from Middle Babylonian legal texts.

[116] This reading is based on the text witness VAT 9710 (= KAR 14 / van Dijk 1983, ms. d1), rev. i, 6; for a new hand copy, see Wagensonner (2011, 688–691). Line 52 of the Old Babylonian text reads teš₂-ga-ru-še₃, which is equated with mit-[ha-riš] in the Neo-Assyrian manuscript i; see Dijk (1983, II, 45) and the discussion in Geller (2010, 97 s.v. line 52).

[117] The Middle Assyrian manuscript of “Ninurta’s Exploits” cited here offers several other intriguing “unorthographic” spellings, which shall be briefly discussed in section 8.3.3 below.

[118] For the expression gu₃ teš₂-a se₃-ga/ge/ke see, for instance, RIME 4.3.6.9, line 7, and RIME 4.2.14.2, line 25. For finite verbal constructions, see RIME 4.2.14.15, line 53 (gu₃ teš₂-a u₃-bi₂-se₃-ke) and RIME 4.3.7.8, line 6 (teš₂-a bi₂-in-se₃-ga).

[119] The equation ku₃-im-ba : ibissû is, however, separated from the other entries and concludes the section on expressions containing ku₃, “silver” (obv. ii, 22). Against CAD B, 356 s.v. butuqqû, the Sumerian expression in fact reads ku₃-im-g̃eš, which may be interpreted as a scribal error. It is directly followed by the section on i-bi₂-za (obv. ii, 23–25).

[120] See the hand copy of VAT 9308 (= KAR 15) in Wagensonner (2008, 294).

[121] See Landsberger (1957, 56). In addition to the prefix chain nu-in-°, there are also attestations for nu-i₃-° and nu-im-°.

[122] Compare Gudea Statue B vii, 49–53: alan-e / u₃ ku₃-nu za-gin₃ nu-ga-am₃ / u₃ urudu-nu u₃ an-na-nu / zabar-nu / kig̃₂-g̃a₂ lu₂ nu-ba-g̃a₂-g̃a₂, “For this statue nobody was supposed to use silver or lapis lazuli, neither should copper or tin or bronze be a working (material)” (Edzard 1997, 36); for the use of the particle nu alone in negated copular clauses, see now Zólyomi (2014, 24–25); for an example outside royal inscriptions or literary compositions, see Wagensonner (2015, line 3).

[123] See Sladek (1974, 137).

[124] In all manuscripts, this form is followed by the enclitic copula -am₃; for the matrix, see Tinney (1996, 236).

[125] This amount of lines only makes sense if the Sumerian and Akkadian versions are taken as one unit each. Compare manuscripts of “Ninurta’s Exploits” and “Ninurta’s Return to Nippur” in the same corpus; see Wagensonner (2008, 290).

[126] Cohen (2017).

[127] This personal name implies that this individual was quite probably related to a temple or shrine of the goddess Nin-isina or Ninkarrak. See above, footnote 44.

[128] Usually, the noun hul₂ is used only as an adjective. Hence, a reconstruction *e₂-hul₂-la-na-ta, though suiting the Akkadian version better, is improbable. See, for instance, a royal inscription by Warad-Sîn, RIME 4.2.13.21, line 31: sag̃-ki-zalag-ša₃-hul₂-la-ni-ta, “with shining face and joyous heart” Frayne (1990, 242 ).

[129] See Edzard (1997, 74).

[130] OBGT VI, 130 equates the Sumerian verbal form mu-un-da-g̃ar with iškunšu; see Hallock and Landsberger (1956, 83). See Geller (2010, 98), who discusses a Late Babylonian text witness of “Ninurta’s Exploits” and the fact that its translation was “cast in idiomatic Akkadian.”

[131] Instead of ribīt ālīša ana bâ’i, one expects the construction **ana ribīt ālīša bâ’i. For further bilingual attestations, see CAD B, 178–179 and line 13 of “Nin-Isina’s Journey to Nippur”: e-sir sila-dag̃al mu-un-na-ab-sikil-e uru mu-un-na-ab-ku₃-ge : su-qu u₃ ri-bi-tu ul-lu-lu-ši uru u₂-lal-ši. In the Sumerian version, both verbal chains are identical except for the base. Nonetheless, the Akkadian renders the first form as a stative (ullulūši) and the second one as a durative (ullalši).

[132] VAT 8884 =  Cooper (1978, text cC).

[133] For a full score of this line, see Cooper (1978, 96, 98). The Old Babylonian version reads dib-dib-be₂-da-ni. The Neo-Assyrian text is much closer to the early second millennium sources than to the Middle Assyrian text. This discrepancy might have been caused by the form pa-e₃-a-ke₄ in the preceding line (pa-e₃ ak-e in the Old Babylonian version).

[134] See the list of sources with majuscule sigla in Dijk (1983, II, 13–19).

[135] For a reconstruction of this curricular setting, see Robson (2001, 54, table 6). Another group of advanced-level teaching was the so-called Decad. Robson states that the fourteen compositions “held a similar curricular status to the members of the Decad,” although it was “not as strong or as pervasive as the Decad’s” (Robson 2001, 55).

[136] For a diachronic overview of the extant manuscripts and their textual reconstruction, see Dijk (1983, II, 1–12).

[137] Compare, however, the bilingual ms. Aa of “Ninurta’s Return to Nippur,” which presents the Sumerian and Akkadian versions of the text in columns; see Cooper (1978).

[138] VAT 9710 =  KAR 14 =  Dijk (1983, text d1). For a new hand copy of this tablet, see Wagensonner (2011, 688–691, 1.2.1).

[139] BM 122625+ =  Dijk (1983, text n1). For a new hand copy of this tablet, see Wagensonner (2014b, 472–473).

[140] VAT 9306 =  KAR 13 =  Dijk (1983, text h). See Wagensonner (2011, 692).

[141] VAT 10565 = KAR 17 =  Dijk (1983, text q). The museum number “VAT 10567” in Dijk (1983, II, 20) needs to be corrected accordingly.

[142] See the hand copy on p. .

[143] It is not unlikely that both tablets stem from the hand of the same scribe.

[144] VAT 10628 = KAR 363 =  Dijk (1983, text o1).

[145] For a hand copy, see p. .

[146] VAT 10643 = KAR 370a+b+c =  Dijk (1983, text m1). For a hand copy of KAR 370a, see below, p. .

[147] BM 122625+ =  Dijk (1983, text n1).

[148] See above, section 8.3.2. In this case, both Marduk-balāssu-ēreš and Bēl-aha-iddina copied the whole composition and checked each other’s copy.

[149] For this loanword, see Civil (2007, 30 s.v. 207. putuk).

[150] Dijk (1983, II, 59).

[151] The tablet has been collated during a research stay in Berlin in March 2011. For a photo, see the website of the Digitale Keilschrift Bibliothek (see footnote 105).

[152] See the score in Dijk (1983, II, 108).

[153] Note, however, the possible verbal base ta in the form im-ma-ni-ta in ms. Ma of “Bilgames and the Bull of Heaven” from Me-Turan, line i, 39. See Cavigneaux and Al-Rawi (1993, 105). Line 45 of the composition reads (= ms. Ma, line i, 34) presumably im-ma-ni-[ta?] again, while manuscript No from Nippur reads me-e[n-de₃-en]; see George (2010, 109).

[154] See Schretter (1990, 246–247 s.v. nunus), whose reading “nús” should be corrected to “nus.”

[155] The later sources appear to be closer to the Old Babylonian version than to the Middle Assyrian text. In his discussion of “Ninurta’s Return to Nippur,” Jerrold S. Cooper states that “[t]he presence of an Akkadian translation, and the absence of the standardized translation format, supports the assumptions previously made from evidence of the Bogh[azköi] texts alone, that the addition of Akkadian translations occurred early in the formation of the canon, while the standardization of translation formats occurred later [...]” (Cooper 1978, 50).

[156] See Wagensonner (2009, 359). For the line in “Ninurta’s Exploits,” see the comments given in Seminara (2001, 307 s.v. line 380): “Lo sviluppo du₁₁ > tu-ud dalla recensione monolingue a quella bilingue è giustificato dal consueto espediente dell’omofonia.”

[157] The later version (text e₁) has umun-g̃en, “I am lord.”

[158] The use of the independent pronoun g̃a₂-e instead of °-g̃en could have been triggered by the presence of the independent pronoun in the subsequent line of the Middle Assyrian recension: [a₂]-še g̃a₂-e mu-un-na-ni-in-du₈ : [lu-m]a-an a-na-ku am-ma-ra-aš₂-šu. Compare the following occurrences of the enclitic copula: line 422 (= VAT 9710 obv. ii, 9–10): en dnin-urta-me-en [...] : en dnin.urta a-na-ku [...] [see also line 617 (= BM 122625+ obv. i, 9–10)]; line 428 (= VAT 9710 obv. ii, 21–2) g̃uruš-me-en [...] : eṭlu at-ta [...]; line 432 (= VAT 9710 obv. ii, 27–28): en-me-en [...] : be-le₂-ku [...]; line 489 (= VAT 9710 rev. i, 4–5): [...] du₁₄-me-en [...] : [...] mu-uṣ-ṣa-lu at-ta [...].

[159] See footnote 158 for further examples of the copula written in normal orthography °-me-en.

[160] See Cavigneaux and Al-Rawi (2000, 25 and 37–38 s.v. lines 3 and 5). The authors refer to legend of an Old Babylonian cylinder seal reading aš-ša; see Collon (1986, 107, no. 177).

[161] See Charpin (1992, 11).

[162] See Civil et al. (1971, 23).

[163] See a text kept in a private collection; Civil (2010, 45–51).

[164] BM 122625+ =  Dijk (van Dijk 1983 text n₁).

[165] See Dijk (1983, II, 158 s.v. line 584) for the full score.

[166] See also footnote 20 above.

[167] But see Seminara (2001, 308–309).

[168] Compare the semantic sequence in the lexical entries in Proto-Izi II, 359/360–361: gi₁₆-sa, da-ri₂; see Civil et al. (1971, 51).

[169] See also Lugal-e X, line 422: im-hu-luh-ha-en-na-g[in₇] compared to the Old Babylonian form ba-e-hu-luh-en-na-gin₇ (texts S1 and W1).

[170] Seminara (2001, 321). Compare Example 7 above.

[171] There is no separate discussion of this phenomenon in Seminara’s treatment.

[172] For variants in (Old Babylonian) Sumerian literary texts caused by memory errors, see now Delnero (2012a).

[173] See section 8.3.5.

[174] See Seminara (2001, 323).

[175] See Frahm (2011, 70–76).

[176] See also Seminara (2001, 346).

[177] See examples in Karahashi (2000, 97–98).

[178] See the lexical attestations in CAD K, 144.

[179] See text k₁ in the score in Dijk (1983, II, 148). It reads giri₁₇ ki-s[u ...] : ina š[u-...].

[180] But note that the Neo-Assyrian version of this line deviates from all its predecessors; for a score, see Cooper (1978, 86).

[181] See also Seminara (2001, 367).

[182] See Wagensonner (2011, 653–656) with further attestations. To these can be added line 259 of the composition and furthermore a manuscript of “Inana and Ebih” (UET 6, 17), which reads in obv. 13: [igi-za er₂]-ra [si] ba-ni-in-si.

[183] For some general notes on the Middle Assyrian manuscripts of “Ninurta’s Return to Nippur,” see Cooper (1978, 32–36).

[184] For a photo, see Cooper (1978, pl. XV (text aA)). A hand copy is published in Wagensonner (2011, 693, 1.2.3).

[185] For a reconstruction based on VAT 9710, see Wagensonner (2011, 667).

[186] For a photo of the loose join VAT 9441(+)VAT 10648, see Cooper (1978, plates XVI–XVII [text bB]). The tablet has been studied at a research stay in the Vorderasiatische Museum, Berlin, in March 2011. A hand copy of the joined tablet is now provided on p. .

[187] For a hand copy of the respective tablet, see below, p. .

[188] The composition would have been divided into four parts; see Cooper (1978, 38). This is substantiated by the amount of lines mentioned in the colophon of manuscript bB: 53.

[189] See Cooper (1978, 45–46) and compare both the table 6 on pp. 40–42 dealing with lexical variants between the Old Babylonian text and later recensions.

[190] See Cooper (1978, 48–49 with table 10).

[191] VAT 8884 reads in obv. 20: [an-n]e₂ ug gal-a-ni-še₃ pa₃-da-me-en : [ša₂ da-nu i+]na e-mu-qi₂-šu ra-ba-a-ti u₂-tu-u₂-šu a-na-ku. Both the Old Babylonian and the Neo-Assyrian versions have a₂ instead; for a score transliteration, see Cooper (1978, 88).

[192] See also the commentary in Cooper (1978, 105–106 s.v. line 4).

[193] VAT 8884 =  Cooper (1978, text cC) = KAR 18.

[194] Cooper (1978, 98).

[195] See, for instance, Igiduh 1, 200: kadi-im-mahi : ṭe-[e-mu]. For further lexical and bilingual attestations, see CAD Ṭ, 85 s.v. ṭēmu.

[196] See the late commentary SpTU 1, 49 (= CCP 4.2.E) on a therapeutic text, which aims at explaining the ailment called “Hand-of-a-Ghost” (šu.gidim.ma). Via the otherwise not attested orthography of the Akkadian word for “ghost” written e-˹ṭem˺-me (rev., 14) the commentator seeks to establish an “etymological” link between the syllables e and ṭem by correctly taking the Sumerian e in the meaning of Akkadian qabû, “to speak” and relating the syllable ṭem to ṭēmu (fully quoted as ˹ka˺[de-]˹em4˺-ma.hi; rev., 15). Therefore, ghosts are “those who give orders” (qābû ṭēmi); for a discussion of this explanation, see Finkel (2014, 309–311).

[197] See, for instance, Horowitz (1998, 154).

[198] For this distinction and the various sources, see now Horowitz (2014, 2–3).

[199] Horowitz (2014, 3) and passim reads “Ninurta-bullissu,” but the latter element cannot be corroborated by the evidence in the colophons, since quite frequently and also on the Astrolabe-text the spelling u2ti.la-su clarifies its interpretation. See the remarks to this tablet and its colophon in Wagensoner (2011, 670–671, 1.2.5). A new copy of the VAT 9416 is presented in Wagensonner (2014b, 474–475); see further Horowitz (2014, Plates I–IV).

[200] Horowitz states that “VS 24, 120 would appear to give witness to one of the sources for the Alb [i.e., KAV 218] menology to which other materials, particularly the Akkadian translation and a set of month-stars, were later added to complete the text as we know it from Alb B I. Exactly how, where, and when this happened is unknown, but it may have occurred proximate to the time of the composition of Alb B itself” (Horowitz 2014, 48). See also Horowitz (1998, 159) and Sassmannshausen (2008, 269). Horowitz argues that the Middle Babylonian sources themselves may derive from earlier Old Babylonian traditions. Another Middle Babylonian tablet from Nippur (HS 1897) can be interpreted as forerunner to the 30-star catalogue, which then was incorporated into the composition of the “Astrolabe B”; for an edition and discussion of this text witness, see Oelsner and Horowitz (1997–1998).

[201] See Horowitz (2014, 33–46) with commentary thereafter. For an older edition, see Çağirgan (1985).

[202] See Aa I/2, 353–364 (Civil, Green, and Lambert 1979, 218), which equates bara₂ with [šar]-risic, šub-tu₄, ni-me-du, pa-rak-ku, mu-ša₂-bu, a-ša₂-bu, ba-ša₂-mu, and [ša]b-su-u₂.

[203] See, for instance, the composition Enlil A, lines 81–82: en-en-e bara₂-bara₂-ge₂-ne / nidba-ku₃-ga si mu-ni-in-sa₂-eš, “Lords and sovereigns prepared lofty regular offerings there” (composite text based on the score given in Delnero 2006, 2145–2146). See also Example 29 below, which provides the Akkadian equivalent iškaru for two different spellings in the Sumerian version.

[204] See also Horowitz (2014, 54).

[205] See Horowitz (2014, 54–55).

[206] See also Example 23 above.

[207] See CAD R, 437 and Sjöberg (1988, 172, note 5).

[208] See the comments in Horowitz (2014, 58).

[209] See Antag̃al F, 250 (Cavigneaux, Güterbock, and Roth 1985, 219). The verbal base dur₂ is confirmed by an Old Babylonian grammatical text published in Civil (1994, 205–206). Line ii, 5 reads: a-ša₃ gu₄ dur₂-ru-na : i-na a.ša₃ gu₄ ra-ha-ṣu hup-p[u-x].

[210] For general remarks on this series, see Cavigneaux (1969, 638).

[211] For an image of the respective tablet, see entry P346055 in the CDLI database.

[212] See Horowitz (2014, 58).

[213] See also Horowitz (2014, 62).

[214] See Civil et al. (1971, 26).

[215] In the creation myth KAR 4, we find the possible spelling °-bi₂-ta-a; see the discussion of Example 30 below.

[216] This logogram group is read ak-kil; see Civil, Farber and Kennedy (2004, 112). As a marginal note on intertextuality, one has to pinpoint the fact that in Diri two entries farther down the same logogram is equated with bīt Ninšubur, a deity that is dealt with in the menology of the fourth month; for Ninšubur/Papsukkal, see Wiggermann (1998–2001).

[217] Horowitz (2014, 65) refers to Ea VIII: 13, which equates kad₅.kad₅ with šisītu.

[218] See, for instance, “Nin-Isina’s Journey to Nippur,” line 5: [...] uru-ne₂ mu-un-da-sa₂ : [...] uru-ša i-ša-an-na-an; see Wagensonner (2008, 280). But see also KAV 218 where the verb in the Sumerian phrase mul-bi kaxne ba-an-sa₂

[219] See the discussion on the menology of the month Simānu above.

[220] For score and translation, see Cooper (1978, 82–83) and compare his comments (1978, 127–128). The reading tum₄ instead of nim is confirmed by tun-tun in the Neo-Assyrian manuscript.

[221] See Çağirgan (1985, 411) and compare Horowitz (2014, 77), who differentiates between “divine-emblems” in the Sumerian and “shrines” in the Akkadian translations.

[222] For this solution, see also CAD Š/III, 179 s.v. šubtu A 3 b.

[223] Sm 755+ =  Cagirgan (1985, text B).

[224] The sign is clearly pa and not geš.

[225] See either CAD A/II, 203 s.v. apû A 5 or CAD Š/III, 328–329 s.v. šūpû.

[226] For similar attestations in stone names in the lexical series Diri, see Wagensonner (forthcoming) and footnote 65 above.

[227] See Labat (1933, 116) and Frahm (2011, 185).

[228] See Horowitz (2014, 77).

[229] The Neo-Assyrian version Sm 755+ has in obv. ii, 11 [...ku₃?]-ku₃-ga.

[230] The Neo-Assyrian recension Sm 755+ possibly reads [k]a₂ abzu a-sa₆-ga. Horowitz (2014, 78) offers the reading ki!-se₃!-ga instead.

[231] Horowitz (2014, 77) reads ip-pata[t?-t]e, but there does not appear to be any pronunciation gloss in this line.

[232] As noted by Wayne Horowitz, the lexical list Antag̃al offers an equivalent petû ša bābi. See the bilingual attestations given in CAD P, 341–342. The dictionary proposes that the scribe of KAV 218 has forgotten a second sign ab after zu.ab in order to indicate the beginning of a verbal chain (CAD P, 342); see also Horowitz (2014, 78).

[233] See Finkel (1982, 237). Pascal Attinger discussed the compound verb a-da-min₃ du₁₁/e/di; see Attinger (1993, 417–422, §§ 226–234).

[234] For the different spellings of this compound verb, see Sefati et al. (2005, 233).

[235] So the other known manuscripts. Horowitz (2014, 82) reads uru₁₃.

[236] This fragment from Isin was first mentioned in Edzard and Wilcke (1977, 86), but remained unpublished.

[237] See Lambert (2013, 350–360). For another recent edition, see Lisman (2013, 330–346). Lambert does not include the rather thorough treatment of this text in Pettinato (1971, 74–81). Whereas Lisman uses siglum A for the Middle Assyrian text discussed here, Lambert designates the tablet simply as “Main text.” The joined fragments from the Kuyunjik collection are designated “K” by Lambert, but taken as separate sigla by Lisman (B–D). The small fragment A 17634 is text “A” in Lambert’s edition (but given A 17643) and “E” in the one by Lisman. Since this study will limit itself to just a few brief remarks, there is no need to reference the additional text witnesses extensively. See further the discussion in Viano (2016, 97–99).

[238] This feature is already present in the Old Babylonian version from Isin. See also the discussion in Cavigneaux and Jaques (2010).

[239] Joan Goodnick Westenholz interprets these texts as “secret lore”; see Westenholz (1998, 456).

[240] This text was published as CT 24, 20–46; see also Geller (1990, 212, note 17). Its colophon reads as follows: ˹a˺-na pi-i dub.gal-le libir.ra / [m]ki-din-d30 a.ba / dumu su-ti-e a.ba man / in.sar igi.kar₂, “According to the wording of the old inventory, Kidin-Sîn scribe, son of Suti’u royal scribe, it is written and checked” (CT 24, pl. 46, col. xii:8–11); see also Hunger (1968, 32, no. 51).

[241] See Lambert (2013, 356). It should be noted that in contrast to the Middle Assyrian text the Sumerian and Akkadian versions in the Kuyunjik manuscript are written in interlinear format. The entries of the Silbenalphabet are written, however, in two subcolumns.

[242] For its attestation in the textual record, see Jakob (2002, 237). It is also attested in the legend of the impressive seal of the Middle Assyrian scribe Aššur-šumī-aṣbat, son of Rībāte, which was thoroughly discussed in Deller (1982). There too, the father’s occupation is given as a.ba man, which equals dub.sar lugal and therefore ṭupšar šarre. Deller (1982, 151–152) highlights the possibility that there might be functional differences between an a.ba-scribe and the more commonly attested dub.sar. Nonetheless, we find both designations among the texts of Ninurta-uballissu’s sons: Bēl-aha-iddina is attested in the function as a.ba on VAT 9487, a text that dates later than all others known to derive from this family. a.ba therefore might indicate a certain stage in the career of a scribe, but writings such as a.ba man seem to favor just an orthographical variant; for VAT 9487, see now Wagensonner (2011, 675–676, 2.1.6, hand-copy on p. 700) and an improved hand-copy of the reverse in Wagensonner (2014a).

[243] For a parallel, see the case of Bēl-aha-iddina, who checked a tablet written by a certain Nabû-šuma-iddina, son of Badû in the function as a.ba. Unfortunately the end of the line is broken. It therefore must remain open whether he actually left the status as a.ba tur or dub.sar tur at this stage; for attestations of the writing a.ba tur see, for instance, VAT 5744, a copy of the third tablet of the lexical series Erimhuš, where Marduk-šuma-izkur is a.ba tur and son of a royal incantation-priest named Hambizi.

[244] See Livingstone (1986, 175–188) and Lenzi (2008, 188–189).

[245] See also Hunger (1968, no. 40).

[246] Both phrases are part of a tripartite secrecy formula in later periods; see Beaulieu (1992, 98) and for a list attestations Borger (1957–1971). Laurie Pearce discusses the phrase mūdû lā mūdâ likallim (not in the list of Borger 1957–1971) and translates it “The knowledgeable should keep (the tablet) from the unknowledgeable”; see Pearce (2006, 12). This translation appears to take likallim as form of the verb kullu, “to hold back,” instead of the expected kullumu, “to show.” Further notes on these “secrecy formulae” are available at Frahm (2011, 344) and, in particular, Lenzi (2008, 186–203) with an updated list of attestations. Paul-Alain Beaulieu adds: “Since the colophon of that manuscript [i.e., KAR 4] specifically labels the text as esoteric knowledge [...], it seems reasonable to posit the existence, within the Mesopotamian scribal tradition, of a subsystem of esoteric speculations based on the Silbenalphabet” (Beaulieu 1995, 11).

[247] See Hecker (1994, 606).

[248] The Kuyunjik manuscript uses the interlinear layout.

[249] See Beaulieu (1995).

[250] A rather similar example is attested in the royal inscription RIME 4.4.6.2 dating to the reign of the Urukean king Anam (lines 17–19): ki-tuš-ša₃-hul₂-la-na / la-la-bi-še₃ tum₂-ma / mu-un-ki-g̃ar, “I founded there his/her abode of rejoicing, suitable for her delight” (see Frayne 1990, 472–473).

[251] Lambert (2013, 354) erroneously has “i ni-ib-ni.” See also Seminara 2001, 408–409.

[252] But compare line 26 where i ni-ib-na-a corresponds to mu₂-mu₂-e-de₃ in the Sumerian text.

[253] See Lisman (2013, 341).

[254] See CAD U/W, 373–374 s.v. uzuzzu.

[255] Compare rev. 29 (= line 70) in this text, which reads ki nam-lu₂-u₁₈-lu ba-ni-in-dim₂-eš : a-šar a-mi-˹lu˺-tu ib-ba-nu-u₂.

[256] For a recent discussion of the so-called “pronominal conjugation,” see Edzard (2003, 137–142, ch. 12.14.4), who gives no examples for the first and second plural forms; see further Jagersma (2010, 672–674, ch. 28.6).

[257] For a discussion, see Edzard (2003, 134–137, ch. 12.14.3). The later evidence for our line has he₂-mu₂-mu₂ in the Sumerian version. Line obv. 37 on KAR 4 has in its Sumerian version the phrase eg₂ si-sa₂-e-de₃-ze₂-en, which is rendered i-ka a-na šu-t[e-šu-ri-ku-nu] in its Akkadian equivalent. The latter form fits the syntax for the “pronominal conjugation.”

[258] See also obv. 36: gi-na-e-de₃ : a-na ku-u[n-ni].

[259] The former is also attested in canonical Lu, Excerpt II, line 95; see MSL 12, 107. The editors of CAD I/J state that “[i]n Sum. lit. texts éš.gàr occurs beside á.giš.gar.ra, while the Ur III econ. texts use only the latter, whereas in those of the Akkad period éš.gàr alone is found. In bil. texts and vocabularies both Sum. words appear and are rendered by iškaru. In Akk. contexts, however, we normally have éš.GÀR and rarely a late logogram giš.gàr” (MSL 12, 249 s.v. iškaru A). For a₂-g̃eš-g̃ar-ra used in Ur III economic texts, see Sigrist (1992, 91–92), who translates this term “prestation impose.”

[260] See CAD D, 129–130 s.v. dešû v.

[261] See, for instance, the vocabulary Sb II, line 127: nu-un : nun : ra-bu-u (Hallock et al. 1955, 139). A closer parallel is attested in Reciprocal Ea, tablet A, “section” B, line 6: nu-un : nun : ru-bu-u (Civil, Green, and Lambert 1979, 530).

[262] See Civil, Green and Lambert (1979, 404). For a photo as well as a new edition, see the website of the Digitale Keilschrift Bibliothek (see footnote 105). Unfortunately the colophon is broken on this tablet. The scribal hand appears not to be related to Kidin-Sîn or a member of the Ninurta-uballissu family. The scribe of VAT 9541, for instance, writes the sign gar with four wedges instead of the common three.

[263] Text A = KAR 16; text B = KAR 15; for a new edition of this composition, see Wagensonner (2008).

[264] See Cooper (1971, 1–2, note 2).

[265] See Lambert (1976, 85 [referring to KAR 118 and 119]).

[266] See Geller (1990, 212).

[267] See Lambert (1976, 86).

[268] Compare the parallel in Ai I, 72 (= K.4350 rev. ii, 29’ = CDLI P395509): he₂-diri-ga nam-ba-la₂-e : li-tir a-a ˹im˺-ṭi₂.

[269] See Lambert (1996 [1960], 118–120) with a new copy of KAR 119, ibid.: plate 32 (VAT 10610).

[270] See the full discussion of this line in Example 10 above.

[271] For a new hand copy of this fragment, see below, page 288 and now also Geller (2016, plates 116–117).

[272] See George (2003, I, 493, note 169) and Geller (1990, 211, note 15 [“a non-contiguous join”]). For an edition of the British Museum text, see Geller (1980, hand copy on pages 43–44). Mauricio Viano briefly treated this VAT 9833; see Viano (2008–2009, 115–117). Both fragments contain paleographic features (for instance, the Glossenkeil with four slanted wedges or the size of the so-called firing holes), which make this hypothesis very plausible. See now also Geller (2016, 6), where it is edited as ms. R.

[273] See Geller (1980, 26). To these belong K 4905+, which similar to the Middle Assyrian text contains tablets 13–15 of the series.

[274] See Crüsemann (2003, 60). This, however, happened too early. According to the museum catalogue, BM 130660 was donated by Edmund Clough on 3 November 1948.

[275] See Geller (1980, 26).

[276] See Meissner (1927); see also Geller (2016, 498, note to line 271).

[277] See Geller (1980, 23).

[278] K.111+ =  Geller (1980, text i) = CDLI P237782 =  Geller (2016, 434, text b).

[279] See, for instance, Ai VI (VAT 8875) obv. ii, 37: en₃-bi bi₂-in-tar : ar-ka-su par₂-sa-at.

[280] See CAD P, 166 s.v. parāsu.

[281] See Lambert (1971, 340).

[282] Compare line 505 of “Ninurta’s Exploits,” which reads according to rev. i, 32’ in the Middle Assyrian text witness VAT 9710 ug̃₃-za g̃iri₃!(T: ab₂)-za ba-ab-sig₃-ge-da rendering it a-na še-ep ni-še-ka ta-taš-pak.

[283] Compare Sassmannshausen (2008, 265), who states that one urgently needs a descriptive linguistic study of late Old Babylonian texts in order to discern the grade of phenomena that have previously been treated as typical Middle Babylonian and which may have already existed earlier.

[284] See, in particular, the discussion of “Astrolabe” B in section 8.3.5 above.

[285] For the latter, see the recent study by Paul Delnero, who investigated variations between literary manuscripts belonging to the so-called Decad, which might be interpreted as memory errors; see Delnero (2012b).

[286] See Frahm (2011, 323).

[287] See footnote 20.

[288] For some of the texts discussed above, the Middle Babylonian period already provides fully developed interlinear translations. For a rare Sumerian text still adding Akkadian glosses one can refer to the Middle Babylonian text witness of the “Instructions of Ur-Ninurta” (MM 487b). The annotations on this fragment can be compared to similar glossing in Old Babylonian literary texts. They do not provide full translations, but merely select single verbs or idioms and add the Akkadian translation in smaller script in the centre of the line; see the latest treatment of this text witness in Rowe (2012).

[289] See Maul (1999, 13).

[290] Wagensonner (2005).

[291] Wagensonner (2008, texts A and B).

[292] See Wagensonner (2011; 2014b).

[293] http://cdli.ox.ac.uk/wiki/, accessed April 7, 2017.

[294] http://www.cdli.ucla.edu/, accessed April 7, 2017.

9. The Concept of the Semitic Root in Akkadian Lexicography

Markham J. Geller

The influence of script in a multilingual environment has not yet been fully explored, although it may be self-evident that script and language have no immutable bonds. The relationship of lingua franca and scriptura franca is an intimate one, since the mechanics of writing systems can affect how a lingua franca is received and adopted by dependent languages. It is not only the transparency and facility of a writing system that is relevant, but also whether any ordering principles are in-built which can contribute to the functionality of written records. The specific case of the alphabet as an example of scriptura franca is an interesting one because of its advantages and disadvantages. The utility of the alphabet was based primarily upon its fixed ordered sequence of characters and its usefulness as a numbering system, which could even be used hermeneutically in the form of gematria, in which words with the same the numerical value could replace each other. The assumed advantage of the alphabet as a simplistic writing system in relation to a syllabary is over-stated, because the lack of vowel characters makes reading of any foreign language more difficult. In any case, the writing of Semitic languages in alphabetic characters made the existence of Semitic roots far more visible to anyone analyzing the languages and their structures, and this was another distinct advantage.

Scripts can be used universally to write any number of languages, and any relation between script and language is formally one of convention, not necessity. For this reason, the alphabet has been adapted to numerous languages, without regard to the fact that it was first invented for recording the phonology of a Semitic language. In principle, the same could be said for cuneiform script, which was used for writing languages extending over several language families (Sumerian, Semitic, Indo-European, etc.). Moreover, within the Ancient Near East, one had to choose between a syllabary and alphabet, with virtually no other choice being available (such as the Chinese writing system); even the pictographic writing of Egyptian hieroglyphs was essentially a syllabary. By convention, therefore, cuneiform script was invented for writing on clay with a stylus, as was the earliest form of the alphabet (i.e. in Ugarit), but alphabet scripts were soon adapted to ink on leather or papyrus or clay, and usually written with a brush rather than a stylus.[1]

One of the chief advantages of an alphabet over a syllabary was the ability to organize data simply and effectively. Not only do the alphabetic characters always appear in a standard sequence, but each letter is associated with a numeral reflecting this order.[2] There is no equivalent to such within a cuneiform syllabary, which means that other principles had to be adapted to organize data. One of the most interesting examples of how this might work within a cuneiform list occurs in the lexical list Nabnitu, the earliest examples of which are from the latter part of the second millennium BCE.[3] Irving Finkel’s comprehensive and instructive introduction to Nabnitu explains in detail how the basic structure of this lexical text reflects a loosely associated de capite ad calcem arrangement, with entries being associated with body parts within the early “tablets” (or chapters) of Nabnitu.[4] According to Finkel’s analysis, the thematic order of Nabnitu is based primarily upon the opening lines of each tablet, which are known either from surviving manuscripts or from a catalogue of Nabnitu incipits, and from subsequent entries within tablets. In the specific case of the first seven tablets of Nabnitu, a head-to-foot arrangement[5] of entries appears among tablet-incipits as well as with associated nouns within tablets, all corresponding to descriptions of the human body, such as “bodily-form” (nabnītu), “head” (rēšu, qaqqadu), “forehead” (pūtu), “face” (zīmu, pānu), “eye” (īnu), “nose” (appu), “mouth” (pû), “hand” (qātu), “arm” (kittabru, ahu), “fist” (upnu), “forearm” (ammatu). Verbs related to the use of functions of these body parts were also listed through semantic associations, and all Akkadian entries were combined with their Sumerian counterparts.

From this point on in Nabnitu, beginning with the eighth tablet, no body parts are specifically mentioned and the head-to-foot pattern is less clear, although now explained by Finkel as verbs that could be associated with the “mouth” (ie. manû to recite, zamāru to sing, akālu to eat) or the “hand” (e.g. šaṭāru to write, edēlu to bolt, etc.). Finkel sees the next division of tablets as reflecting the “feet,”[6] with incipits having verbs such as to “coil” (kanānu), to “flatten” (sapānu), to “pass by” (etēqu), or to “jump” (šahāṭu). After Tablet 30, this order appears to break down entirely. Nevertheless, the patterns are clear enough to consider that certain ordering principles are in place, even though the precise head-to-foot arrangement found in Finkel’s introduction to MSL 16 may need to be reconsidered. The nouns indicating parts of the body from the head to arms are clear enough, but one cannot help wondering why this structure was not continued for later tablets, simply by inserting words for hand or leg or foot or other synonyms for these body parts. A different ordering principle could be proposed, beginning with the terms šaṭāru to write, edēlu to lock out, sapānu to “smooth out” (barley), mahāru “receive”[7] and nadānu “give” (goods), all of which could have had commercial connections, rather than simply being associated with the “hand.”[8]

Similarly, nasāhu to “uproot,” gullubu to “shear” (or “shave”), mahāṣu to “strike,”[9] kanānu to “coil,”[10] sapānu to “flatten”[11] could reflect the common uses of such terms in hand-working or crafts. By the same token, verbs such as etēqu to “pass by,” šahāṭu to “jump,” arāhu to “hasten,” re’û to “shepherd,” arādu to “descend,” and erēbu to “enter”[12] may have described different paces of walking or moving. The point is that the ordering principles may vary from one section to another, but some sort of order based on semantics is apparent in the text of Nabnitu. The final result was that the Akkadian terms in the right hand column of Nabnitu could be used to identify the Sumerian equivalent of each term in the left-hand column of the lists, which was the point of the exercise.[13]

Within the individual tablets, however, another ordering principle is visible, which Finkel has ingeniously and provocatively identified as the awareness of the root system of Semitic languages,[14] which has been further elaborated by Lutz Edzard.[15] Finkel’s remarks on this subject are worth repeating:

We are obliged to conclude that the processes of lexicography had engendered at least a partial understanding of the root system, since it is, after all, a natural outcome of any classification of Semitic vocabulary. It seems doubtful, on the other hand, that the refined concept of a tri-radical root such as was developed by the Arab grammarians and lexicographers of the ninth century CE can be posited for Mesopotamia of the second millennium BCE.[16]

To substantiate this point, Finkel points out that verbal forms are first listed as G-Stem infinitives often followed by the same verb in its derived forms,[17] or with nominal and adjectival derivatives of a verb.[18] Moreover, homophones are collected into successive lists,[19] and in many other instances roots are listed in sequences which show consistent phonological attraction of entries with similar labial, velar, and dental phonemes,[20] and this analysis has been further analyzed by Lutz Edzard.[21]

The question is whether this ordering of sequence of Akkadian words could only have been accomplished after the invention of the alphabet, which is based primarily upon Semitic roots. Were native speakers of Akkadian in Mesopotamia aware of the root system of their language before alphabetic writing made this so obvious?[22] Certain details in Nabnitu makes one wonder if various associations within this list would have been less obvious without the guidance of a skeletal writing system which mainly records consonants, that is, the alphabet or something similar. The patterns begin already with the opening entries of Nabnitu, which play with roots which would normally in alphabetic scripts be described as “weak” (√bn’ or √bwn) or geminate (√bnn):

1 | [sig₇].alam | nabnītu | (physical) form
2 | alana-lamalam | bunnanû | physiognomy
5 | x igi | būnu | appearance

9.1

and then reverting to a homonym √bn’ “to create” or “to be beautiful,” that is:

13 | kul.kul | banû ša qaqqadu ša SAG.KUL.KUL | be beautiful (referring) to the head and (god) Sagkulkul
14 | mud | banû ša alādi | to create (referring) to giving birth

9.2

The difficulty is whether these associations were purely semantic or influenced by a theory or awareness of Semitic roots. From an etymological viewpoint, only the terms nabnītu “form” and banû “create” are actual cognates, nor can one argue that the remaining entries are homonyms, because of vowel differences and additional syllables. In fact, the argument for Semitic roots is inconclusive, since there were semantic reasons for associating words meaning to “create” and “be beautiful” and “appearance” which could have governed this pattern.

One of the more intriguing examples of word association occurs in Nabn. IV 19–28,[23] in which we find a series of words beginning with an entry for “tongue” (lišanu), but the Sumerian equivalents must also be taken into account. The relevant entries are also discussed by Lutz Edzard:

19 | eme | lišānu | tongue
20 | lú.eme.tuku | ša lišānu | (man) having a tongue (speaker)
22 | lú.eme.nu.tuku | lā išānû | (Sum. one lacking a tongue), unimportanti
23 | lú.sag.du.nu.tuku | MIN | (Sum. one lacking a head), unimportant
24 | si-lasila₁₁ | lâšu | to knead
25 | silig | lîšu | dough
26 | níg.sila₁₁.gá | lîšu | dough
27 | ni.sagmuru₄ | lîšu | dough
28 | mu x x | laššu | there is not
29 | sumunsu-mun-zizi | lušû | grease

9.3 Edzard (2011, 26) ilit. “one who is lacking.”

The pattern here shows variations of various Semitic roots with playful associations between them, and the rulings in Nabnitu show this section to be a discrete unit. The initial entry lišānu “tongue” (corresponding to the root Semitic √lšn) alternatives with a negation of išû, “to have,” followed by the verb lâšu “to knead” and the noun līšu “dough,” but ending with another negation of “to have” (laššu < la išû). These terms have little in common with each other except for the sequence of the /l/ and /š/ phonemes, while vowel length is ignored entirely (e.g. lišānu vs. lā išānû vs. laššu). It is the lack of interest in the vowel quantity which could suggest a focus on “consonants,” similar to what one might expect from an alphabetic orthography, but these entries could easily be explained as homophones (lâšu and laššu) and sequences of similar sounds while ignoring the meanings.

Another example of lexical correspondences not based upon semantics occurs in Nabn. IV A, 206–216:

206 | ku-udkud | dânu | to judge
207 | kud | dayyānu | judge
208 | zag.šáša₄ | dunnu | power
209 | giš.ná.aš.na | dinnûtu | bedstead
210 | níg.sag.íl.la | dinānu | substitute
211 | nígni-igzu | nindanu | measuring pole
212 | níg.da.na | nindanu | measuring pole
213 | u₄.dug₄.ga | adannu | fixed time
214 | an.za.gàr | dimtu | tower
215 | ér (AerIGI) | dimtu | tears
216 | di | dīnu | legal case

9.4 MSL 16, 84–85

The mixture of forms in this list has been set apart by rulings, indicating a discrete unit which only has one thing in common, a sequence of /d/ and /n/ or /m/ phonemes,[24] with little attention paid to vowel quantity, as before. Various permutations of words do not indicate any evidence of the awareness of Semitic roots, however, since no single tri-radical root can be identified to explain this sequence of entries.

This being the case, let us review the best arguments posed by Irving Finkel and Lutz Edzard for detectable Semitic roots in Nabnitu. Finkel[25] gives as best evidence for the concept of the root in Nabnitu the following entries from Nabn. XVI, 1–63:

1 | [šu.te.gá] | [mahāru ša ŠE u KÙ.BABBAR] | to receive (referring) to barley and silver
4 | [šu.gíd] | [MIN (= mahāru) ša] qiš-ti | ditto (referring) to a gift
23 | [...........] | [MIN (= mahāru) šá IGI | ditto (referring) to the eye / face, be pleasing
27 | [ru.gú] | [MIN] ša mahirti | ditto (referring) to upstream
28 | [šen.šen.sag.gi₄.a] | qabal lā mahār | battle not to be faced
29 | [........] | qablu ša lā immahharu | battle which cannot be faced
30 | [........] | mihru ša ÍD | barrier (referring) to a river
33 | [giš.gi₄.gál] | MIN (= mihru) ša zamāri | refrain, (referring) to singing
34 | [dmu.uh.ra] | ŠU | ditto (= divine name)
35 | [.......] | muhra qurribšu | approach! present it!
36 | [......] | mahra | before
37 | [........] | mahirtu | leg bone
38 | [........] | mahīru | market place
39 | [........] | māhiru | rival
40 | [........] | māhiršu | his rival
41–42 | [a.ba ......] | mannu māhiršu | who can rival him?
43 | [........] | galab māhiri | public barber
44 | [........] | mithurtu | conflict
45 | [........] | lišān mithurti | contrasting languages
52 | [........] | mithāru | of equal size
54 | [........] | mithuru | to agree
56 | gišm[á........] | gišMÁ muhra | sail the boat!
57 | gaba.ri [..] x | mihra muhra | face the facts!
58–59 | [sag.í]l | mahrû | foremost
60 | sag.í.[l h]u.tùm | muhrû libilšu | let the foremost fetch it
61 | an.ta.[gi.g]i | mahrû | first (above all)
62 | lugal.ra gaba.ri.[gi].íb | šarra muhur | approach the king!
63 | ur.sag è x [..].íb | qarrada MIN | approach the hero!

9.5 MSL 16, 142, followed by Edzard (2011, 30)

This discrete section of Nabnitu, enclosed by a ruling, certainly shows awareness of cognates related to the infinitive mahāru, to “receive” or “oppose,” with various derived idiomatic expressions referring to “divergent” but “equal” forces meeting each other (such as in a market or in battle or in contrasting languages). So while the list is a remarkable study in semantics, the question remains open as to whether this list shows awareness of a Semitic root √mḫr, rather than simply noting derived stems (Gt, Dt) and grammatical forms (imperatives and participles) of a standard Akkadian verb, mahāru.

Another argument in favor of a tri-radical root in Nabnitu is the appearance of metathesis in certain groups of words, which might suggest conscious manipulation of root radicals. Lutz Edzard gives the following example from Nabn. 17: 295–291:

275 | gaz | kasāpu | break into pieces
277 | kù | kaspu | silver
288 | duh.še.giš.ì | kupsu | bran
289 | hul.gál | kispu | funerary offering (Sum. = “be evil”)
291 | níg.pàd.du | kusāpu | breadcrumbs

9.6 Edzard (2011, 27)

The point of this passage is that Akkadian has homonyms such as kasāpu “to break into pieces” and kasāpu, “to make funerary offerings,” which are the bases for the alternative forms in this group of nouns.[26] In fact, Akkadian kupsu “bran” has an alternative writing kuspu and kisbu in another lexical list,[27] while kispu “funerary offering” also has a variant form kipsu.[28] Furthermore, the Sumerian expression hul.gál (in l. 289) would be a better equivalent for Akkadian kibsu “track, path,”[29] since the word kibsu often denotes the “tracks” of demons or the source of malevolent dust used in sorcery, for which the Sumerian expression hul.gál “being evil” would be more appropriate. In other words, the pattern of metathesis seen in this list of Nabnitu nouns reflects a phenomenon attested elsewhere in Akkadian lexicography, that secondary metathesized forms of these nouns were recognized, which weakens the argument that Nabnitu’s formulations reflect a unique awareness of Semitic verbal roots.

Since there is nothing in the evidence so far considered enabling one to make a prima facie case for the awareness of the Semitic root system in Nabnitu, one other possibility remains, namely that Mesopotamian scholars could have been conscious of the prior invention of the alphabet, which could have influenced the Nabnitu lists by drawing attention to the root system and by extension the consonants as independent from vowels, which cannot be expressed in a syllabary. Even the most trivial indication that the alphabetic writing system was known to composers of Nabnitu would be enough to tip the balance in favor of the Semitic root system having a subliminal role in producing this lexical text. However, one of the key advantages of the alphabet, as mentioned above, was its utility as a tool for ordering data, since the fixed A-B-C (aleph-bet-gimel) sequence was known from the earliest traces of this writing system. Had the alphabet been known to Nabnitu-scholars, there would have been plenty of opportunity to use its powerful ordering capabilities within the seemingly arbitrary listings of Akkadian words. Unfortunately, such is not the case. There does not appear to be a single instance in Nabnitu of words being listed according to an alphabetic order of opening syllables, nor is there even a close approximation of an alphabetic order. This suggests that even if the text of Nabnitu was influenced by awareness of the Semitic root system, the alphabet appears to be ruled out as the heuristic tool which could have effected this awareness.

Conclusion

The original intention of this paper was to substantiate the theory of Irving Finkel and Lutz Edzard that the unusual Sumerian-Akkadian lexical list Nabnitu demonstrated principles of ordering entries that could only be explained by reference to an awareness of the Semitic tri-radical root system. The present author was surprised by the data, since every attempt has proven unsuccessful to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that discrete groupings of entries of Akkadian words (with Sumerian equivalents) in Nabnitu resulted from a cognizance of the Semitic roots of these terms. Each individual grouping of entries could easily be explained by semantic, homophonic, and cognate characteristics of listings of Akkadian verbs and their derived forms. The problem facing ancient scholars of how to order data effectively within a syllabary writing system remains to be solved.

Abbreviations

MSL = Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon

Acknowledgements

This article was made possible through “BabMed – Fragments of Cuneiform Medicine in the Babylonian Talmud: Knowledge Transfer in Late Antiquity.” The BabMed project has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013), ERC Grant agreement no. 323596.

References

Edzard, L. (2011). “Die Sig7.ALAN = Nabnitu-Liste Und Das Konzept Der Semitischen Wurzel.” Zeitschrift Der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 161: 17–39.

Finkel, I. L. (1982). “The Series Sig7.ALAN = Nabnītu.” In Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon Vol. 16. Rome: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum.

Heeßel, N. (2000). Babylonische Diagnostik. Münster: Ugarit Verlag.

Lemaire, A. (2001). Nouvelles Tablettes Araméennes. Geneva: Droz Publisher.

Scurlock, J. (2014). Sourcebook for Ancient Mesopotamian Medicine. Atlanta: SBL Press.

Footnotes

[1] For a relatively brief period, Aramaic letters were incised with a stylus on clay tablets, but this soon became obsolete; see Lemaire (2001).

[2] Even in the case of Arabic, the numerical equivalents remain even after the order of the alphabet was changed.

[3] MSL 16 = Finkel (1982).

[4] Finkel (1982, 23ff).

[5] This kind of head-to-foot arrangement, otherwise known from medically-oriented texts like the Diagnostic Handbook was common to medical literature in general, see Heeßel (2000); Scurlock (2014, 13–271).

[6] See Finkel’s scheme, MSL 16, 27.

[7] The entry is mahāru ša še’i u kaspi, “to receive referring to barley and silver.”

[8] As argued in MSL 16, 25–26.

[9] The entry is mahāṣu ša amēli, “to strike referring to a man,” which could be a kind of manual activity.

[10] The entry is kanānu ša šipri, “to coil referring to work” (not a snake).

[11] MSL 16, 26–27.

[12] MSL 16, 27.

[13] As explained by Finkel, MSL 16, 38.

[14] MSL 16, 36–38.

[15] Edzard (2011).

[16] MSL 16, 38

[17] MSL 16, 29f.

[18] MSL 16, 31.

[19] MSL 16, 33.

[20] MSL 16, 34–35.

[21] Edzard (2011, 28–29).

[22] The assumption is that speakers of Ugaritic or Akkadian in Ugarit would have recognized Semitic roots, once they grew accustomed to alphabetic writing.

[23] MSL 16, 77.

[24] See Edzard (2011, 291).

[25] MSL 16, 36.

[26] It should be noted that line 290, omitted by Edzard, is more consistent with Sumerian lexicography, giving Sumerian ki.sì.ga as corresponding to Akkadian kispu, “funerary offering,” and for which there is also a Sumerian loanword into Akkadian, kisikkû.

[27] See CAD K 555.

[28] CAD K 425.

[29] Which also has an alternative lexical writing kispu, see CAD K 336.

10. Multilingualism in the Elamite Kingdoms and the Achaemenid Empire

Jan Tavernier

To every province in its own script and every people in its own

language (Esther 3,12)

10.1 Introduction

In 1989 Romaine noted that “there are about thirty times as many languages as there are countries.”[1] Having in mind the circumstances in countries such as Belgium (Dutch, French, German), South Africa (no less than eleven official languages) or Switzerland (French, German, Italian and Rhaeto-Romance), this should not surprise us.

This situation was not different in the ancient world, where people speaking different languages also came into contact with each other and had to find ways to communicate with each other. In this contribution, multilingualism in Elam on the one hand and in the Achaemenid Empire on the other hand will be discussed.

Multilingualism can be assessed using different approaches. Among modern linguists, two definitions circulate: a maximalist and a minimalist approach. According to the first definition,[2] someone is multilingual (or bilingual) when that person is as proficient in one language as in one or more other languages. Their level of proficiency is the same for all languages they master. The minimalist definition[3] also considers people as multilingual who know some words and concepts in the other language, but who cannot communicate as fluently as in the first language. Finally, when Mackey[4] described bilingualism as the “alternate use of two or more languages by the same individual,” he launched a definition that does not take position in this discussion and that has been adopted several times by other scholars.[5] It is this approach which will be embraced by this article, for the simple reason that, due to a lack of sources, it is impossible to study the extent to which ancient near Eastern individuals mastered other languages than their mother tongue.

Taking into account another point of view, one can formulate another bipolarity regarding multilingualism. One could argue that multilingualism should be defined as the co-existence of various languages in one community (or political entity, such as a kingdom), whereas others may believe that multilingualism is always situated on the individual level.

The character of the available historical sources divides the current contribution in two chapters: For the Old through Neo-Elamite periods the emphasis will be put on the first definition, that is, the existence of various languages in one territorial entity (the Elamite kingdom). In the second chapter on the discussion of Achaemenid multilingualism, the central theme will be how the administration of the Achaemenid Empire, born in Elam but eventually controlling the entire Ancient Near East, would tackle possible communication problems caused by the existence of multiple languages within its territory. In this sense, the first section uses the first definition of multilingualism, whereas the second part uses both definitions.

10.2 Multilingualism in the Elamite Period

10.2.1 Old Elamite Period (c. 2300–1500 BCE)

Already in ancient times, bi- and multilingualism became very important in human communication, without, however, affecting more than half of the world’s population, as it does in modern times.[6] Contacts between Sumerian, Akkadian and Elamite already existed in the third millennium BCE. These contacts are reflected in (1) the oldest attestations of Elam in Mesopotamian inscriptions (displaying a rather hostile relation between the two regions)[7] and in (2) the presence of Elamite, Akkadian and (few) Sumerian texts in the region around Susa. Nonetheless, during the Old Akkadian and Ur-III periods the Akkadian texts make up the majority. Two reasons may account for this:

Susa and its environment was part of the Akkadian Empire and was completely administered by an Akkadian-speaking governance.

The Mesopotamian inhabitants of Susa were perhaps more creative in writing.

Nevertheless, the oldest Elamite text dates back to the Old Akkadian period, namely, the so-called Naram-Sîn Treaty (c. 2250 BCE), a treaty concluded by the Akkadian king Naram-Sîn and a king of Awan,[8] either Helu or Hita, Helu’s successor. Most likely the Awanite king agreed that Susa was part of the Akkadian Empire, whereas Naram-Sîn promised to respect the independence of Awan.[9] This text is written in Elamite for the sole reason that a treaty between Awan and Akkad is concerned here. Had it been a treaty between Susa and Akkad, it would have been certainly written in Akkadian. In that time Elamite was not yet a lingua scriptura,[10] which explains the fact that the Mesopotamian cuneiform writing system was used to draft the treaty. The only texts[11] written in Elamite in those days (a religious text and a lexical text; both of which are dated to the time of Gudea, i.e. c. 2140 BCE) are probably intellectual games by Akkadian-speaking scribes.[12]

After the fall of the Akkadian Empire, Awan and Susiana were united in the kingdom of Puzur-Inšušinak, the first Elamite to create an Elamite kingdom. Although the new king was eager to give Elamite, his native tongue, a more important position within the kingdom, he did not instigate nationalist reactions against the Semitic component of his state. Instead, he put both languages on the same level and created some bilingual and digraphic inscriptions, whereby the Akkadian texts were written in cuneiform writing and the Elamite texts in a writing system called Linear Elamite, originating from the Iranian plateau.[13] Unfortunately, this writing system is not yet completely deciphered.[14]

Conspicuously, Elamite appears only in inscriptions on statues of deities, whereas the monolingual Akkadian inscriptions appear on foundation cones or may have had a non-religious subject (e.g. his report on the submission of Šimaški). This implies that Elamite was used for religious inscriptions.[15] In this sense, Elamite was a kind of lingua sacra, which is also visible in the Elamite formulas in some Akkadian incantations from Mesopotamia.

With the annexation of Susa by the Ur III-rulers, the Semitic as well as the Sumerian component of Susiana again became predominant. Both royal inscriptions and documentary texts are written in one of the two major Mesopotamian languages. Nevertheless, it is in this period that we encounter the oldest example of bilingualism on the individual level: in one of the Hymns to Šulgi, this king boasts that he knew “Elamite as well as Sumerian.”[16]

This superiority of Sumerian and Akkadian continues well into the following sukkalmaḫ-period (c. 1950–1500 BCE). Only a few royal inscriptions appear in Elamite[17] (now written in Mesopotamian cuneiform) and no documentary texts are recorded in this language. Nonetheless, the presence of both Akkadian and Elamite names shows that both ethnic groups had some interaction, although one should not overestimate the degree of this interaction, as is shown by the link between personal names and professional categories.[18] In any case, this interaction postulates the necessity of bilingual people, who could act as interpreters. Unfortunately these interpreters are not attested as such. Noteworthy is also the existence of an Akkadian-Sumerian bilingual inscription of Idaddu (IRS 6–7).

The context of the four Elamite inscriptions is different. The inscription of Siruktuh is clearly related to the eastern, Elamite context of the sukkalmaḫ-kingdom, since it relates to a military campaign of the king on the Iranian plateau, far away from Mesopotamia.[19] Although they remain difficult to discuss, the three other texts seem to have both religious and political purposes. They are not really attached to any geographical context. As a result of this, one could argue that the Elamite texts were perhaps intended for the kingdom’s Elamite population. This could be corroborated by the relatively monotone character of the Akkadian and Sumerian inscriptions of the Old Elamite rulers. Most of these inscriptions are building inscriptions (e.g. IRS 4,6–8,10–12,14–15,17–18; MDP 28 4–5). Four broken other texts (IRS 5,9,13,16) are most likely also building inscriptions, as they have the same introduction (“For DN, PN”: IRS 5,9,16) or are extremely similar to an existing building inscription (IRS 13 to MDP 28 5). The four Elamite documents are clearly not building inscriptions and are written on other materials (i.e. no bricks): EKI 3 (clay tablet fragments), 67 (blue sandstone vase), 70C (limestone stela), ZA 64 (an alabaster stela).[20] This could suggest that the selection of the inscription’s language could depend on the aim of the inscription: building (Sumerian-Akkadian) or not (Elamite). The building inscriptions are perfectly in line with the Mesopotamian tradition.

A common feature of both Sumero-Akkadian and Elamite texts is the expression “for the life of” (Sumerian nam.ti.la.ni.šè [IRS 4,6,11,14–15,17–18], Akkadian ana balaṭašu [IRS 7], Elamite takkime ...intikka [EKI 3, 67]). Nevertheless, in the Elamite inscriptions the king acts for his life as well as for the life of others (a tradition continued in the Middle Elamite inscriptions), whereas in the Sumero-Akkadian texts he only acts on behalf of himself.

Despite the preponderance of Akkadian in the written tradition, the Elamite component still enjoyed an important status in the sukkalmaḫ-kingdom, as is clearly indicated by the Elamite character of the royal names and the four Elamite inscriptions. It seems, however, that this component was also expressed through images:

In the highlands southeast of Susa royal ideology was transmitted by means of rock reliefs, examples of which are still visible in Naqš-i Rustam, Kurangun and Shah Savar.[21]

The seal of Kuk-Simut, in which Idaddu II presents to him an axe (Elamite symbol). The accompanying inscription, however, is not in Elamite, but in Sumerian.[22] Other examples of axes with inscriptions in Akkadian are two axes from the reign of Attahušu and one from the reign of Šilhak-Inšušinak.[23]

10.2.2 Middle Elamite Period (c. 1500–1000 BCE)

In the beginning of the Middle Elamite period too, Akkadian remained the main lingua scriptura in Elam. The contents, however, became more Elamite, as can be seen in an inscription of Tepti-ahar (IRS 20). This development ends in the renewed production of Elamite royal inscriptions by the king Humpan-umena (fourteenth century BCE), next to the continued production of Akkadian inscriptions. The literary production, however, is purely Akkadian.[24] Remarkably, the re-introduction of Elamite inscriptions was instigated by a person not originating from Susa, but rather from Liyan (near modern Bushehr), an area where Elamite was the most important language.

In particular Untaš-Napiriša (c. 1340–1300 BCE) has left us many inscriptions, some of which are bilingual construction texts. In his texts, the function of Akkadian is limited to the language of curses[25] and to technical language.[26]

In the highlands Mesopotamian influence remained very limited. A late Middle Elamite administrative archive found in Tal-i Malyan (ancient Anshan) contains texts written in Elamite and not in Akkadian.

10.2.3 The Neo-Elamite Period

With regard to the history of multilingualism, the Neo-Elamite period should be divided in two periods, with the destruction of Susa by the Assyrians in 646 BCE as the dividing line.

After the Middle Elamite period, Elam’s history was shrouded in darkness for three centuries until 743 BCE when historical sources again shed light on Elam’s history. Mesopotamian sources report that in that year Humpan-nikaš I, of whom nothing further is known, became king of Elam. His successor, Šutruk-Nahhunte II (717–699 BCE), links himself with the Middle Elamite traditions by commissioning some royal inscriptions (EKI 71–73) recorded in Elamite. In one of these inscriptions, he even refers to some of the late Middle Elamite kings (EKI 72). Under his reign, Elamite thus remains the main language for the transmission of the royal ideology.

After the reign of Šutruk-Nahhunte II the heavy political instability in Elam may be one of the causes for the complete decline of the production of royal inscriptions. For more than half a century neither Elamite nor Elamite texts were written in Elam, which makes it impossible to study the multilingual situation of the region in this period.

Fortunately, after the Assyrian sack of Susa in 646 BCE, the situation changed in two ways:

Royal inscriptions are now without exception recorded in Elamite. Kings such as Hallutaš-Inšušinak (IRS 58; MDP 53 25), Šilhak-Inšušinak II (IRS 78), Tepti-Humpan-Inšušinak (EKI 85; IRS 59–62), Atta-hamiti-Inšušinak (EKI 86) stopped producing Akkadian royal inscriptions. The early Neo-Elamite phenomenon of officials who create their own inscriptions is continued by Hanni (EKI 75–76) and the Persepolis Bronze Tablet.

Elamite is no longer exclusively used for royal inscriptions. Furthermore, various documentary texts (the Acropole Texts from Susa [MDP 9 1–298; MDP 11 309] and some legal texts [MDP 11 301–308]), letters (the so-called Nineveh Letters [BA 4, 168–201]) and two literary texts have been discovered. Especially the latter are interesting for this study, since they show that apparently the Elamites tried to incorporate Mesopotamian wisdom in their own language by translating Mesopotamian works (the only example is an astrological text) or, as can be seen in the Elamite hemerology, by integrating Mesopotamian ideas into their own literary production.[27]

This does not mean that Akkadian simply disappeared from Elam. There are a small number of documentary Akkadian texts,[28] drafted in a completely Babylonian environment (no Elamite names). In Luristan the tradition of inscribing objects in Akkadian continues.[29] In any case, the status of Akkadian in the Western Iranian lands decreased.

In addition, it seems as if the communities, contrary to earlier periods, had little contact with each other. This is made clear by the absence of Elamite names in the Babylonian texts and the absence of Babylonian names in Elamite texts.

Highly important is the appearance of a third ethnic element in the Elamite texts. In the so-called Acropole Texts, an archive of nearly 300 Elamite administrative texts dated to the first half of the sixth century BCE,[30] about 10 % of personal names are Iranian.[31] In the Nineveh Letters and in the archive of seven legal texts, some Iranian names are also attested. This suggests an on-going infiltration and integration of Iranian speaking persons into Elamite society. The integration aspect is not only shown by the interaction in the Acropole Texts, but also by the inscriptions from the Kalmakarra Cave, in which a royal dynasty having members with Elamite as well as with Iranian names is documented.

The contacts between both population groups again postulate people who knew both languages. Unfortunately, we do not have any traces of these interpreters.

10.3 Multilingualism in the Achaemenid Period

When in 331 Darius III faced Alexander in the battle at Gaugamela, one of his greatest fears concerning this battle may very well have come true. Just before the battle, the Achaemenid king “was most concerned lest some confusion should arise in the battle from the numerous people assembled that differed in speech.”[32]

This story is an extremely beautiful example of one of the principal characteristics of the Achaemenid Empire: Due to its large extent, it was a “Vielvölkerstaat.” Already the early Achaemenid kings, such as Darius I (521–486) and Xerxes (486–464) themselves realized this, when they used the expression vispazana- “of all kinds” to describe their realm.[33]

The linguistic problems faced by the Achaemenid kings were indeed not few; they had to keep together and organize a vast empire, where languages such as Egyptian, Lycian, Lydian, Phrygian, Carian, Pisidian, Aramaic, Akkadian, Elamite, Old Persian and various Iranian dialects were spoken. Surely the kings and their elite spoke Old Persian, but how could commands and directives be communicated to all parts of the empire and be made comprehensible for all inhabitants, who did not speak a word Old Persian?

One can assume that multilingualism was a main aspect of Achaemenid rule and that many interpreters were active in various administrative centres. It is therefore interesting to study multilingualism at the individual level.

In contrast to the older periods the Achaemenid source material is more informative concerning this issue. Various administrative formulas at the end of, for example, letter-orders give us some information on the multilingualism of the Achaemenid Empire. These formulas are attested in three languages: Aramaic, Egyptian (as rendered by the Demotic writing system) and Elamite. Naturally, Old Persian also played its role, since it may be safely assumed that the high Persian officials uttered their commands in their vernacular, Old Persian.

Name
Aramaic
Demotic
Elamite

P
(1) PN₁ ydʿ ṭʿm znh
(2) PN₁ bʿl ṭʿm
PN₁ i.rḫ pȝy wȝḥ
(1) hi tupaka PN₁ turnaš
(2) *patigāma PN₁ lišta

D
PN₂ sprʾ
PN₂ pȝr i.ir sš tȝy šʿ.t
tumme PN₂-mar tušta

T
PN₃ ktb (only once)
sš PN₃
PN₃ talliš(ta)

10.1 Achaemenid administrative formulas

Name
Aramaic
Demotic
Elamite

P
(1) PN₁ knows this command
(2) PN₁ is the master of the command
PN₁ knows this command
(1) PN₁ knew about this
(2) PN₁ delivered the command

D
PN₂ is the sēpiru (scribe)
PN₂ is he who wrote this letter
PN₃ received the draft from PN₂

T
PNx wrote (only once)
PN₃ wrote
PN₃ wrote

10.2 Achaemenid administrative formulas (English translation)

The formulas can be found in five archives. The first one, the Fortification Archive,[34] is by far the largest. It consists of the remains of about 15,000–18,000 Elamite documents,[35] remains of about 500–1,000 original Aramaic documents,[36] tablets with no text, but carrying seal impressions (remains of about 5,000–6,000 original documents) and some oddities (one Greek text,[37] one Phrygian text,[38] one Old Persian text[39] and some tablets marked with Greek or Persian coins instead of seals).[40] The text dates range from 509 to 494 BCE, that is, years 13–28 of Darius I. Documents containing such formulas are mainly letter orders (Hallock’s category T) and receipts by officials (Hallock’s category H), but such formulas occur also in other types of texts.[41]

The second archive, called the Persepolis Treasury Archive, is composed of various Elamite texts and one Babylonian text. The documents date from 492–457 BCE, that is, year 30 of Darius I to the seventh year of Artaxerxes I and deal mainly with payments of silver from the Persepolis treasury.

The third one is the so-called Arsames Correspondence, a group of various Aramaic letters dealing with the activities of Arsames, satrap of Egypt in the latter quarter of the fifth century BCE. The archive is dated to approximately 428–408 BCE.[42] They were probably sent from Babylonia to Egypt and cannot be considered as drafts, since they were found in a bag, possibly used for transporting official documents, and were sealed (one with the seal of Arsames himself, as can be read from its legend “Seal of [Arsames], the p[rince].”[43]

The fourth archive is an Aramaic archive from Bactria (48 texts), the documents of which are written on leather or wood and date from 353 to 324, except for one text which should paleographically be dated to the fifth century BCE. Part of the texts studied by Shaked is a group of 8 letters from *Axvamazda-, most likely the satrap of Bactria, to his subordinate *Bagavanta-.[44] It is in these letters that the formulas are attested.

Finally the fifth one is also the smallest one: three letters dealing with the appointment of a new priest in the Chnum-Temple. On the one hand, the correspondents are the priests of this temple and on the other, Pherendates, satrap of Egypt. The archive dates from the 30th year of Darius I, that is, 492 BCE.[45]

It is interesting to note that the formulas are only attested in letters written by the satrapal administration, not in letters directed to this administration. Immediately, however, this reduces the scope of this study, as one can only study multilingualism in an administrative context and only in some regions. Anatolia, for example, or the Eastern Iranian districts have yielded no information at all to study this topic.

In the Elamite texts some variant formulas, clearly equivalents of formula P, are attested: in five Treasury texts the king plays an active role, as is shown by formulas such as *Dārayauš sunkir ap šeraš “the king commanded (it) to them” (PT 4), *Dārayauš šerašta “Darius commanded (it)” (PT 5), sunkir šerašta “The king commanded (it)” (PT 6–8).[46] PT 6–8 mention Dātavahyah- as scribe. PT 4–5 do not name a scribe, but the contextual and structural similarities between both groups of texts (e.g. the role of the unsak “administrator,” the king’s commands) suggest that all texts were written by Dātavahyah-. A second alternative phrase is only attested once (PF 1790: 27–28; Dar 19) and must replace formula P, as the same text also contains formula D:[47] hi tupaka PN turnaš, “PN knew about this.” In addition, this phrase corresponds very well with the formulas attested in Aramaic and Egyptian.

What can be deduced from these formulas?

In the Aramaic texts only two persons are involved,[48] whereas in the Demotic and Elamite texts three persons act as officials in the process of issuing an administrative command. Consequently, the third person only appears when a third language (next to Old Persian and Aramaic) is needed, as is the case in Persepolis and Egypt.

A research of the ethnic affiliation of the names of the officials who are the actors in these formulas has led to interesting results:[49] the people who are in charge of the command nearly all have Old Iranian names. Exceptions are Anani (West-Semitic) in an Aramaic text (TAD A 6.2), Humpanunu (Elamite) and Ribaya (Babylonian) in three Elamite texts (PFNN 0698, 1507 and 2425).

In the Elamite Fortification texts the people mentioned in formula D have Iranian and Semitic names (Babylonian as well as West-Semitic), but the latter are clearly more frequently attested than the former ones (78 vs. 32 times).

Concerning formula D, a shift is visible in the Elamite Treasury texts: there are more Iranian names (6 vs. 2 Babylonian names) and they are attested more frequently (16 vs. 2). Perhaps the Iranian names belong to Babylonians who adopted them in the hope of an administrative career.

The Aramaic texts do not seem to make a distinction between the sēpiru and the actual scribe. A formula PN sprʾ may as well mean “PN is the sēpiru” as “PN is the scribe” and it is possible that one person incorporated both functions, as the final product was written in Aramaic and not, for example, in Elamite. Only in TAD A 6.2 three roles are involved, with Nabû-ʿaqab’s role being the equivalent of Elamite PN talliš.

In the Aramaic texts the names of formula P are predominantly Iranian (*Bagasravā [two times], *Ṛtavahyā [three times], *Ṛtaxaya-). One person with a West-Semitic name (Anani) is also attested in this function. The sēpiru have Old Iranian, West-Semitic or Egyptian names. Three names are attested, but whereas Aḥpepi and Anani/Nabû-ʿaqab are attested once, the Iranian name *Rāšta- is attested in five texts as scribe.

In the Egyptian text the sēpiru bears an Egyptian name, which could point to a knowledge of Egyptian by this person.

The people who actually “wrote” the documents have Iranian and Elamite names in the Elamite documents and an Egyptian name in the Egyptian document.

As formula D is the level where many Semitic names occur in the Elamite documents, it is probable that the contacts between various graphic systems (cuneiform and alphabetic writing systems) are situated at this level. It seems quite certain that they were bigraphianical, that is, that they knew the Aramaic as well as the cuneiform writing system. That puts them in the transition from Aramaic to Elamite. In all likelihood they also translated the Old Persian version into the Aramaic one. That means that they were likely to be multilingual and that, as a consequence, they make up some kind of interpreters bureau.

One can immediately connect this with the Elamite expression teppir, an appellative the bearers of which are described as “(writing) on parchment” or as “Babylonian.”[50]

The other class of scribes, called ṭupšarru in Akkadian and probably *tallir in Elamite, only made use of the cuneiform script. They only made copies of the texts. Reference can be made here to the occurrence of puhu Paršipe tuppime sapi(man)pa “Persian boys who are copying texts” (PF 871: 4–5, 1135: 6–7 and PFNN 1485: 5–6, 1588: 4). The mostly Persian names of these scribes correspond with this.

In the Bactrian Aramaic texts the actions behind formulas P and D are mostly carried out by one person, which is an evolution compared to the earlier Aramaic texts. The formulas themselves, however, are comparable to the earlier ones and this indicates that the administrative linguistic system was really imperially imposed by the Achaemenids on all areas of their realm. They are:

PN sprʾ ydʿ ṭʿmʾ znh “PN the sēpiru is in charge of the command”: A1:12, A3:3–4, A4:6, A5:3, A6:11, A7:2.

PN₁ sprʾ wPN₂ bʿl ṭʿm “PN₁ is the sēpiru and PN₂ is in charge of the command”: A2:7.

ʿl ṭʿm: A5:5.

These formulas are similar to the Aramaic ones attested in Egypt. This really shows the imperial character of this system, which was applied throughout the Empire.

The names of the persons concerned (three scribes, named *Daizaka-, *Hašavaxšu- and *Nurafratara-, and one person, *Āθviya- in charge of the command) are all Iranian,[51] so the ethnicity of the people or the origins of the names does not play a role here. As Vaxšu is the name of a Bactrian deity, the person named *Hašavaxšu is in all likelihood of Bactrian origin.[52]

The administrative pattern corresponds completely with the one discussed above. As there are only two languages involved, one could expect two officials, but in most letters only one name is mentioned. Probably the person in charge of the command was also the sēpiru. Only once (in the letter A2) two persons are mentioned: the sēpiru and the one who is in charge of the command.

In conclusion, two patterns can be distinguished: one where only two languages are involved and one where three languages are involved:

Two languages (Old Persian and Aramaic): An Iranian high official dictates an order (*patigāma-) in Old Persian to PN₁ (bʾl ṭʿm), who is responsible for the correct effectuation of it (“he knows about it”).

PN₁ delivers the order to PN₂ (formula P), a sēpiru/teppir who makes an Aramaic translation, which could be recopied if circumstances required this (e.g. in case of TAD A 6.2, copied by Nabû-ʿaqab).

Three languages (Old Persian, Aramaic, Egyptian/Elamite): An Iranian high official dictates an order (*patigāma-) in Old Persian to PN₁ (bʾl ṭʿm), who is responsible for the correct effectuation of it (“he knows about it”). This corresponds to the formula P.

PN₁ delivers the order to PN₂ (formula P), a sēpiru/teppir who makes an Aramaic version as well as a version in the local vernacular, the draft (tumme) to PN₃. It is this draft that he hands over to a local scribe (formula D).

PN₃, a local scribe who was only familiar with the local cuneiform or Egyptian writing system, writes an Elamite or an Egyptian copy of the tumme (formula T).

10.4 Concluding Remarks

Generally, an evolution can be seen from the pre-Achaemenid period, where multilingualism exists but is somehow uncontrolled and not systematically dealt with, to the Achaemenid period, where an imperial administration attempts to manipulate the existing multitude of languages and turn it into an administrative system.

In the Suso-Elamite state, a dichotomy between Akkadian-speaking people and Elamite-speaking people is clearly visible. This dichotomy was present in the Old, Middle and Neo-Elamite periods, though the position of Akkadian seems to have become weaker in the latter period. Moreover, this period has also witnessed the emergence of Persian as a spoken language in what is now the province of Fārs in Iran.

Elamite as a written language was rather exceptional in the Old Elamite period. But in the second part of the Middle Elamite period, when power came into the hands of Humpan-umena, a king originating from a region less influenced by Mesopotamian culture and language, starts to produce Elamite royal inscriptions anew. From then on, Elamite becomes the major written language in Susa, an evolution continued in the Neo-Elamite period when the sources became even more varied than before.

The arrival of Persian-speaking people and the rise to power of the Achaemenids has modified this situation. It seems that the Achaemenids, due to the extent and the character of their state, were obliged to systematize multilingualism within their administration in order to be able to create and maintain a smooth and agile state apparatus.

In order to tackle this multilingualism and to convert it into an administrative advantage, the Achaemenids put Aramaic on a high administrative level throughout the empire. This situation is comparable to what the Dutch did in Indonesia when they did not use the local Indonesian vernaculars, but instead used Malay to issue their administrative orders.[53]

One should be conscious of the fact that the study conducted here covers only a small part of multilingualism within the Achaemenid Empire, both geographically (only a few regions are studied here) and with respect to the content (multilingualism occurred not only in the administration, but also in other areas of society, e.g. the military). Nevertheless the lack of source material is a heavy burden for this study and new findings may very well modify the ideas presented here.

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Stolper, M. W. (1986). “A Neo–Babylonian Text from the Reign of Halluöu.” In Fragmenta Historiae Elamicae: Mélanges Offerts à M.–J. Steve, edited by L. De Meyer and H. Gasche, 235–46. Paris: Recherche sur les civilisations.

——— (2004). “Elamite.” In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages, edited by R. D. Woodard, 60–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stolper, M. W., and J. Tavernier (2007). “From the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project, 1: An Old Persian Administrative Tablet from the Persepolis Fortification.” ARTA, 1–28.

Tavernier, J. (2004). “Some Thoughts on Neo–Elamite Chronology.” ARTA 3: 1–44.

——— (2008). “Multilingualism in the Fortification and Treasury Archives.” In L’archive Des Fortifications de Persépolis: État Des Questions et Perspectives de Recherches: Actes Du Colloque Organisé Au Collège de France Par La “Chaire d’histoire et Civilisation Du Monde Achéménide et de L’empire d’Alexandre” et Le “Réseau International d’études et de Recherches Achéménides” (Gdr 2538 Cnrs), 3-4 Novembre 2006, edited by W. F. M. Henkelman P. Briant and M. W. Stolper, 59–86. Persika 12. Paris: De Boccard.

——— (2010a). “Iranians in Neo–Elamite Texts.” In Elam and Persia, edited by J. Alvarez–Mon and M. B. Garrison, 191–262. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns.

——— (2010b). “Migrations Des Savoirs Entre L’Élam et La Mésopotamie.” Res Antiquae 7: 199–222.

Vallat, F. (1986). “The Most Ancient Scripts of Iran: The Current Situation.” World Archaeology 17: 335–47.

——— (1990). “Deux Inscriptions Royales En élamite de L’époque Des Epartides (Sukkalmah).” Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brefs et Utilitaires 137.

Van den Berghe, L. (1963). “Les Reliefs élamites de Malamir.” Iranica Antiqua 3: 22–39.

Weinreich, U. (1968). Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems. The Hague: Mouton.

Footnotes

[1] Romaine (1989, 8).

[2] E.g. Bloomfield (1933, 56).

[3] E.g. Haugen (1969, 7); Diebold (1964); Weinreich (1968, 1).

[4] Mackey (1970, 555).

[5] E.g. Hoffmann (1991, 15–16).

[6] Mackey (1967, 11); Grosjean (1982, vii).

[7] The Sumerian King List has three attestations of Elam: (1) ii 35–37: “Enmebaragesi of Kish attacked Elam” (c. 2675 BCE); (2) iv 5–6: “Ur was attacked and its kingship carried to Awan” and (3) iv 17–19: “Awan was attacked and its kingship carried to Kish,” cf. Potts (1999, 87).

[8] Awan is a region to the north of Susiana and underwent less Mesopotamian influence than its southern neighbor.

[9] Lambert (1979, 29).

[10] Not taking into account the problematic so-called Proto-Elamite texts, of which it is not certain that they denote the Elamite language. See, however, Irving Finkel’s contribution in this volume.

[11] Cf. Lambert (1974, 3–14).

[12] Malbran-Labat (1996, 36–37).

[13] Malbran-Labat (1996, 35).

[14] Vallat (1986, 339–345); Salvini (1998, 331); Stolper (2004, 65).

[15] Malbran-Labat (1996, 35).

[16] Castellino (1972, 257 (C122)). Eme nim níg eme-ge-ra-gimx ḫe-en-ga-zu-àm. In another text the king boasts about speaking five languages.

[17] One of Siruktuh (c. 1800 BCE; ZA 64, 74–86), one of Siwe-palar-huhpak (second quarter of the eighteenth century BCE; EKI 3) and two of Temti-Agun (c. 1726–1710 BCE; EKI 67 and 70C; cf. Vallat (1990)).

[18] Shepherds, for example, mostly have Elamite names, Amiet (1992, 75–94).

[19] Farber (1975, 85).

[20] This does not work the other way round: building inscriptions could also be engraved on other materials, such as the edge of a basin (MDP 6 16–19), a lentil-shaped tablet (MDP 28 5) or a clay cylinder (MDP 28 4).

[21] Cf. Van den Berghe (1963, 37) and Seidl (1986).

[22] Lambert (1971, 218–220); Malbran-Labat (1996, 40).

[23] Dossin (1962, 156–157).

[24] Tavernier (2010b, 208–215).

[25] One may wonder why curses appeared in Akkadian. Was this because it was a Mesopotamian issue? Or rather because the enemy to whom the curse was directed was most likely a Mesopotamian? Malbran-Labat (1996, 47–48).

[26] The only monolingual Akkadian texts to deal with the construction of a canal and of a wall. In addition, many architectural expressions have an Akkadian origin, Malbran-Labat (1996, 48–49). Furthermore, the fact that Akkadian is also used for inscriptions on precious objects may be mentioned in this regard. Note also the Akkadian city gate names at Tchogha Zanbil, whereas the gate as temple entrance is indicated by its Elamite name sip.

[27] Tavernier (2010b, 213–215).

[28] Cf. Stolper (1986).

[29] Malbran-Labat (1996, 55).

[30] Tavernier (2004, 30–32).

[31] Hinz (1987, 128); Henkelman 2003, 212); Tavernier (2010a, 241).

[32] Diodorus Siculus 17.53.4; translation by Bradford Welles (1963, 273).

[33] Vispa- “all” (Av. vispa-), followed by zana- “kind; man” (OInd. jána-, Av. zana-). Cf. Kent (1953, 208) and Brandenstein and Mayrhofer (1964, 153).

[34] A good introduction to this archive can be found in Henkelman (2008, 65–179).

[35] Partly published, inter alia in Hallock (1969, 1978). See also Jones and Stolper (2008, 29–33).

[36] Cf. Azzoni (2008).

[37] Cf. Tavernier (2008, 63).

[38] Recently studied by Brixhe (2004, 118–126), who in addition to the already known month name anamaka, recognizes some numbers, two forms of the noun kna- “woman, wife” and a nom. pl. makeres, which he does not translate, but which is considered a proper name by Orel (1997, 442) and which is translated to “workers” (El. kurtaš) by D’jakonov and Neroznak (Phrygian (Anatolian and Caucasian Studies) 1985, 121). In any case, the administrative character of this text is clear.

[39] Cf. Stolper and Tavernier (2007).

[40] The archive also contains a Babylonian text, but the contents of this one are completely different to the contents of the archive, which concern the functioning of a single administrative organization in the region of Persepolis.

[41] Tavernier (2008, 65).

[42] Driver (1965, 9); Porten and Yardeni (1985, 93).

[43] Kahle (949AD, 207).

[44] Shaked (2004, 13–14); Naveh and Shaked (2012).

[45] Hughes (1984).

[46] Cf. Cameron (1948, 91).

[47] Lewis (1977, 10–11, n. 38).

[48] In one text (TAD A 6.2) three persons are involved (Anani in formulas P and D, Nabû-ʿaqab in formula T; Sasobek in a Demotic formula T), but the third person is an Egyptian scribe, who apparently drafted a lost Demotic version of this document, Tavernier (2008, 71).

[49] Tavernier (2008, 67–69).

[50] Tavernier (2008, 64).

[51] Shaked (2004, 23–24).

[52] Shaked (2004, 24).

[53] See the contribution by Salverda to this volume.

11. Diplomatic Multilingualism in the Middle East, Past and Present: Multilingualism, Linguae Francae and the Global History of Religious and Scientific Concepts

Lutz Edzard

11.1 Introduction

This chapter will look at some structural features of some famous ancient Near Eastern diplomatic documents, among them international treaties and correspondence that were drafted in Akkadian (among other languages) and Aramaic. Relevant documents in this context are, for example, the treaty between Ramses II and Ḫattušili III, the vassal treaties of Esarhaddon, the Aramaic state treaties, and the Amarna correspondence. With the aim of highlighting the importance of historical Semitic studies, the question of the degree to which some of these features can still be found in modern corresponding documents will be looked at. As political “case studies,” Article 17 of the Treaty of Wəč̣ale between Italy and Ethiopia, the notorious Security Council Resolution no. 242, and Article 16 from the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) will be addressed. The different (Semitic) language versions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) will also be briefly mentioned.

Treaties and formal diplomatic correspondence make up an important stock in the vast array of ancient Near Eastern documents. Due to time-independent stereotypes in both form and content, many of these documents exhibit a number of formal and stylistic features, some of which may even be found today in modern diplomatic documents. A larger project on diplomatic documents in the modern Semitic languages Arabic, Hebrew, and Amharic[1] would not have been manageable without such inspiring sources as D. McCarthy’s Treaty and Covenant (1981), which takes the Old Testament as its point of departure, John Wansbrough’s Lingua Franca in the Mediterranean (1996), as well as Edward Ullendorff’s and Sven Rubenson’s publications on Amharic diplomatic documents from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[2] These sources in Semitic and other language families indeed constitute an important textual “genre,” as does the vast corpus of ʾinšāʾ literature in Arabic.

Another important issue to be addressed in this context is the phenomenon of diplomatic multilingualism. Just as in private transactions, different language versions of one and the same document can have far-reaching legal consequences. This need not always be the case, though, and we may merely be faced with illuminating cultural diversity. Bilingual, and sometimes even trilingual documents, are among the pearls in the realm of philology, not to mention their crucial historical role for decipherment. The bilingual Assyrian-Aramean inscription on the Tell Faḫrīye statue, which was edited by Ali Abou-Assaf, Pierre Bordreuil, and Alan Millard (1982) is a more recent case in point. “Parallel texts” in a wider sense also include religious core documents where translations must be considered for the sake of edition methodology and textual reconstruction. As far as modern documents are concerned, an important study in this context is Mala Tabory’s Multilingualism in International Law and Institutions (1980).

11.2 Political Treaties

Political treaties constitute an important stock of historical documents, as the large-scale text series Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament and Texte aus der Umwelt des Alten Testaments amply demonstrate. The term “treaty” can be used here to translate the Akkadian term adê, denoting a formal agreement between two parties which are bound together by oaths.[3] Thus, these documents contain lists of witnessing gods, as well as copious sanctions in case the clauses of the treaty should be broken by one of the contracting parties. Relevant documents in this context are, for example, the treaty between Ramses II and Ḫattušili III,[4] the Vassal Treaties of Esarhaddon with various Iranian notables,[5] and the Aramaic state treaties, as partially attested in the Sfire stelas from the eighth century BCE.[6] William Moran (1963) has contributed an important article on the treaty terminology in the Sfire stelas where one finds a hendiadyoin ʿdyʾ w-ṭbtʾ ‘the treaty and the good things,’ reminiscent of Akkadian expressions such as ṭūbtu u šulummû ‘friendship and peace.’ We owe the publication of additional Akkadian treaties of the seventh century BCE to scholars like Kirk Grayson (1987) and Simo Parpola (1987, 1988), among others. Kitchen and Lawrence (2012) constitutes an extremely well-done survey and analysis of the relevant documents. At this point it is useful to consider one extract from the Vassal treaties of Esarhaddon:[7]

(1) Seal and Exposition (narratio) of the Vassal Treaties of Esarhaddon

aban kunukki ili Aššur šarri ilī bēl mātī ša lā šunnê aban kunukki rubê rabê abī ilī ša lā paqāri

1   adê ša Aššur-aḫa-iddina šar kiššati šar māt Aššur

2   mār Sin-aḫḫē-eriba šar kiššati šar māt Aššur-ma

3   itti Ramatayya bēl āli Urakazabanu

4   itti mārī-šu mārī mārī-šu itti āl Urakazabanu

5   gabbu ṣehri rabê mala bašū

6   itti-kunu mārī-kunu mārī mārī-kunu

7   ša arki adê ina ūmī ṣâti ibbaššū

8   ištu napāḫ šamši adi erēb šamši

9   ammar Aššur-aḫa-iddina šar māt Aššur šarrūtu bēlūtu

10 ina muḫḫī-šunu upaššu-ni ša ina muḫḫī Aššur-bāni-apli

11 mār rabû ša bīt rēdūti mār Aššur-aḫa-iddina

12 šar māt Aššur ša ina muḫḫī-šu adê itti-kunu iškun-ni

Seal of the god Ashur, king of the gods, lord of the lands—not to be altered; seal of the great prince, father of the gods—not to be disputed.

1   The treaty which Esarhaddon, king of the world, king of Assyria,

2   son of Sennacherib, likewise king of the world, king of Assyria,

3   with Ramataia, city-ruler of Urakazabanu,

4   with his sons, his grandsons, with all the Urakazabaneans

5   young and old, as many as there may be –

6   with (all of) you, your sons, your grandsons

7   who will exist in days to come after the treaty,

8   from sunrise to sunset.

9   over as many as Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, exercises

10 kingship and lordship– (so) he has made the treaty

11 with you concerning Ashurbanipal, the crown-prince,

12 son of Esarhaddon, king of Assyria.

After this exposition, a list of contractual clauses follows, mostly having to do with the preservation of property, the prevention and sanction of slander and defamation, and extradition procedures. Technically, the individual clauses in their entirety constitute a gigantic protasis, that is, conditional oath sentences without an apodosis.[8] The apodosis proper is then an equally long list of dire consequences should any provisions of the treaty be broken. This syntactic and text-linguistic analysis is not uncontroversial.[9] The treaty closes with a brief statement about when and by whom it was established.

As one can see, already the oldest extant treaties feature most elements of the by now well-established structure of diplomatic documents, which is known by its Latin designations:

narratio:
name and title of the contracting parties;
goal of the treaty;
names and titles of the plenipotentiaries;
confirmation that the credentials of the involved diplomats are in order and that one agrees on the following

dispositio:
definitions;
general and specific content of the treaty;
agreement on the implementation of the content of the treaty

corroboratio:
signature, ratification, start of the treaty, temporal and geographical limitation

testimonium:
sentence with signature and seals under the treaty (in witness whereof, en foi de quoi, ...)

–
time and place of the signatures

–
seals and signatures

Let us now introduce the important issue of diplomatic multilingualism and consider Paragraph 4 in the already-mentioned Egyptian-Hittite treaty between Ramses II and Ḫattušili III from the year 1271 BCE, dealing inter alia with mutual renunciation of aggression:[10]

(2) The Treaty between Ramses II and Ḫattušili III, § 4

Babylonian

§4a:u mRia[mašeš]a mai-damana šarru rabû šar māt Miṣrī lā ugarra <ana> māt Ḫatti ana

laqê mimma ina libbī-š[u] iṣṣâti.

and PN king great king:GEN land:GEN PN NEG shall:attack to land:GEN PN to take

something [from] in heart-its in:the:future

And Ria[mašeš]a mai-amana, the great king, the king of the land of Egypt, shall not

trespass into the Ḫatti land to take anything there-from in the future.

§4b:u mḪattušili šarru rabû šar māt Ḫatti lā ugarra ana māt Miṣri ana laqê [mimm]a ina

libbī-š[u] iṣṣâti.

and PN king great king:GEN land:GEN PN NEG shall:attack to land:GEN PN to take

something [from] in heart-its in:the:future

And Ḫattušili, the great king, the king of the Ḫatti land, shall not trespass into the land

of Egypt to take anything therefrom in the future.

Egyptian

§4a:jw bw jrj <Ḫtsl> p3-wr-ʿ3 n Ḫt thj r p3-t3 n Kmt r nḥḥ r jṯ3 nkt jm.f.

NC-intr. NEG make PN DEF ruler great GEN PN trespass again DEF land GEN PN

for eternity to-take something from-it

without <Ḫattušili>, the great ruler of Ḫatti, attacking at any time the land of Egypt to

take anything therefrom.

§4b:jw bw jrj Wsr-m3ʿt-rʿ stpn-rʿ p3-ḥq3-ʿ3 n Kmt thj r p3-t3 [n Ḫt] [r jṯ3 nkt j]m.f r nḥḥ.

NC-intr. NEG make PN DEF ruler great GEN PN trespass against DEF land GEN PN

to take somehing from-it for eternity

without Wašmuaria šatepnaria, the great king of Egypt, attacking at any time the Ḫatti

land to take anything therefrom.

Interestingly, both the Akkadian and the Egyptian versions constitute translations from the lost original version in the respective other language. What is more, not all parts of the treaty are attested in their entirety. The independent discovery of the two versions, as documented by Langdon and Gardiner (1920), as well as by Edel (1997), is thus of great cultural significance.

The third excerpt of interest for our purposes is a clause of the treaty between KTK and ARPAD,[11] here accompanied by an English translation by Franz Rosenthal (1969, 660). The first sentence is, of course, an active construction in Aramaic.

(3) The Treaty between KTK and ARPAD (lower fragment from stela Sfire I C)

14  —m—

15 y ṣ r w ʾ l h n m n y w -[12]

16 m h w m n b y t h w m n

17 l y ṣ r m l y s f r ʾ z y b n ṣ b ʾ z n h

18 w y ʾ m r ʾ h l d m n m l w -

19 h ʾ w ʾ h p k ṭ b t ʾ w ʾ š m

20 [l] l ḥ y t b y w m z y y ʿ b -

21 [d] k n y h p k w ʾ l h n ʾ š -

22 [ʾ h] ʾ w b y t h w k l z y b -

23 h w y š m w t ḥ t y t h [l -

24 ʿ] l y t h w ʾ l y r t š r -

25 [š] h ʾ š m

May [he who observes the words of this stela] be guarded by the Gods as to his day and as to his house. But whoever does not observe the words of the inscription on this stela but says: I shall efface some of its words, or I shall upset the good things and put down evil ones, on the day he will do so, that man and his house and all that is in it shall be upset by the Gods, and he (his house) be turned upside down, and his line shall not acquire a name!

There are remarkable formal parallels between this and the previously mentioned treaty, even though the latter treaty is not attested in its entirety and the order of the various elements in the treaty is in limbo. The parallels extend, for instance, to the equally fearsome list of sanctions as a response to a possible breach of the treaty, of which item (3) offers a taste.

(3) Diplomatic Correspondence

There is no doubt that the Amarna correspondence[13] can be considered the most famous Near Eastern compilation of texts in this context. In the very first letter of this collection, the Pharaoh complains to the Babylonian king about evidence regarding the fate of the latter’s daughter, inappropriately simple gifts, and other things. The formulaic introduction to this letter in this collection is quite instructive.

(4) Amarna Correspondence, first letter (beginning)

[ana]mKa[da]šman-dEnlil šar kurKaraddun[i]a[š]

aḫī-ya qibi-ma umma mNibmuaria šarru rabû

šar kurMiṣriki aḫu-ka-ma ana maḫrīya šulmu

ana maḫrī-ka lū šulmu ana bītī-ka ana aššātī-ka

ana mārē-ka ana lúrabûtī-ka sisē-ka

gišnarkabātī-ka ana libbi mātātī-ka danniš lū šulmu

ana yâši šulmu ana bītī-ya ana aššātī-ya ana mārē-ya

ana lúrabûtī-ya sisē-ya gišnarkabātī-ya

ṣābē mād šulmu u libbi mātātī-ya danniš šulmu

Say [t]o Kadašman-Enlil, the king of Karadun[i]še,

my brother: Thus Nibmuarea, Great King,

the King of Egypt, your brother. For me all goes well.

For you may all go well. For your household, for your wives,

for your sons, for your magnates, your horses,

your chariots, for your countries, may all go very well.

For me all goes well. For my household, for my wives, for my sons,

for my magnates, my horses, my chariots

and numerous troops, all goes well, and in my countries all goes very well.

Not surprisingly, similar formulae are stylistically imperative in many kinds of modern Middle Eastern correspondence, even correspondence of a private nature.

11.3 Modern Parallels in Form and Content

Let us concentrate in the following on structural parallels found in modern diplomatic documents. These parallels may not be surprising, given the common and timeless logic inherent in such documents, but they are nevertheless noteworthy. As already stated, complex syntactic structures are prevalent in such documents, be it in treaties or formal letters. While the individual clauses in a modern treaty usually constitute independent syntactic units, the preambles to these treaties feature precisely the complex syntactic structure found already in ancient counterparts. While chains of coordinated ʾiḏ-clauses are typical of the Arabic versions, the Hebrew versions are made up of b- + infinitive constructions. Let us consider an excerpt of a preamble, here the final part of the preamble to the peace treaty between Jordan and Israel.[14]

(5) End of the Preamble to the Peace Treaty between Jordan and Israel

English

Bearing in mind that in their Washington Declaration of 25th July, 1994, they declared the termination of the state of belligerency between them;

Deciding to establish peace between them in accordance with this Treaty of Peace;

Have agreed as follows:

Arabic

wa-ʾiḏ taʾḫuḏāni bi-ʿayni l-iʿtibāri ʾanna-humā ʾaʿlanatā ntihāʾa ḥālati l-ʿadāʾi bayna-humā bi-mūǧibi ʾiʿlāni wašinṭūn al-muwaqqaʿi fī 25 tammūz 1994;

wa-ʾiḏ tuqarrirāni ʾiqāmata salāmin bayna-humā bi-mūǧibi muʿāhadati s-salāmi hāḏihī.

fa-qadi ttafaqā ʿalā mā yalī:

Hebrew

be-tet-an daʿat-an le-xax še-be-haṣharat wašington me-yom 25 be-yuli 1994 hen hiṣhiru siyum maṣav ha-milx̱ama bene-hen;

be-hax̱liṭ-an le-konen šalom bene-hen be-hetʾem le-x̱oze šalom ze;

hiskimu ke-di-l-qaman:

In some cases, preambles can be shorter and be reproduced without the optical structure of individual clauses. The following introduction to the “Declaration of Principles” (“Oslo 1 Accord”) provides an example):[15]

(6) Preamble to the “Declaration of Principles” (“Oslo 1”)

Arabic

ʾInna ḥukūmata ʾisrāʾīla wa-farīqa munaẓẓamati t-taḥrīri l-filasṭīnīyati (fī l-wafdi l-ʾurdunnīyi—l-filasṭīnīyi ladā muʾtamari s-salāmi fī š-šarqi l-ʾawsaṭi) (“al-wafdu l-filasṭīnīyu”) yattafiqāni ʾanna l-waqta qad ḥāna li-waḍʿi ḥaddin li-ʿuqūdin mina l-muwāǧahati wa-n-nizāʿi, wa-yaʿtarifāni kullun min-humā bi-l-ḥuqūqi l-mašrūʿati wa-s-sīyāsīyati li-l-ʾāḫari, wa-yasʿayāni ʾilā l-ḥayāti fī taʿāyušin silmīyin wa-karāmatin wa-ʾamnin mutabādalayni, wa-ʾilā taḥqīqi taswiyatin silmīyatin ʿādilatin wa-dāʾimatin wa-šāmilatin, wa-muṣālaḥatin tārīḫīyatin ʿan ṭarīqi l-ʿamalīyati s-sīyāsīyati l-muttafaqi ʿalay-hā.

Wa-bināʾan ʿalay-hi, yattafiqu l-ǧānibāni ʿalā l-mabādiʾi t-tāliya:

Hebrew

Memšelet yisraʾel ve-ha-qvuṣa ha-falesṭinit (be-misgeret ha-mišlax̱at ha-yardenit-falesṭinit le-six̱ot ha-šalom b-a-mizrax̱ ha-tixon) (le-halan “ha-mišlax̱at ha-falesṭinit”), ha-meyaṣeget ha-ʿam ha-falesṭini, maskimot ki higiʿa ha-ʿet le-haviʾ l-ide gemer ʿasarot šanot ʿimut u-li-fʿol ke-xol yaxult-an le-maʿan du-qiyum, kavod, u-vitax̱on hadadim, u-le-hasig hesder šalom kolel, ṣodeq, u-var qyama ve-piyus hisṭori be-misgeret ha-tahalix ha-medini ha-muskam.

ʾE-le-xax maskimim šne ha-ṣedadayim ʿal ha-ʿeqronot ke-di-l-qaman.

English

The Government of the State of Israel and the PLO team (in the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation to the Middle East Peace Conference) (the “Palestinian Delegation”), representing the Palestinian people, agree that it is time to put an end to decades of confrontation and conflict, recognize their mutual legitimate and political rights, and strive to live in peaceful coexistence and mutual dignity and security and achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement and historic reconciliation through the agreed political process.

Accordingly, the two sides agree to the following principles:

Modern diplomatic correspondence, notable the genres “exchange of notes” and “note verbale” are equally characterized by a highly formulaic structure. Just to mention one example: a letter concerning the Lockerbie crisis by the former president of the Arab League, Ahmed Esmat Abdelmeguid, to the former Secretary General of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, features a single oblong preamble-like structure:[16]

(7) Letter by Ahmed Esmat Abdelmeguid to Boutros Boutros-Ghali

Arabic

Fī ʾiṭāri stimrāri ǧāmiʿati d-duwali l-ʿarabīyati fī baḏli ǧuhūdi-hā buġyata ʾīǧādi taswiyatin silmīyatin li-l-ʾazmati l-lībīyati maʿa kullin mina l-wilāyāti l-muttaḥidati wa-barīṭāniyā wa-faransā,

wa-ʾilḥāqan bi-risālat-ī la-kum bi-tārīḫi 3/4/94 bi-ḫuṣūṣi qarāri maǧlisi ǧāmiʿati d-duwali l-ʿarabīyati bi-hāḏā š-šaʾni wa-l-muqtaraḥi llaḏī taḍammana-hā hāḏā l-qarāru ḫāṣṣatan fī-mā yataʿallaqu “bi-ʾiǧrāʾi muḥākamatin ʿādilatin li-l-muštabahi fī-himā min qibali quḍātin iskutlandīyīna wafqa l-qānūni l-iskutlandīyi, wa-fī maqarri maḥkamati ʿadli d-duwalīyati bi-lā hāy, wa-ḥaṯṯa maǧlisi l-ʾamni ʿalā ʾaḫḏi hāḏā l-iqtirāḥi l-ǧāddi wa-l-ǧadīdi bi-ʿayni l-iʿtibāri, li-l-baḥṯi ʿan ḥallin silmīyin manʿan li-ʾayyi taṣʿīdin fī l-mawqifi min šaʾni-hī ziyādatu t-tawatturi fī l-minṭaqa.”

Wa-fī ḍawʾi l-mawqifi l-lībīyi l-multazimi bi-hāḏā l-qarāri wa-mā ʾabdat-hu l-ǧamāhīrīyatu l-lībīyatu min murūnatin wa-ʾīǧābīyatin kabīratin fī t-taʿāmuli maʿa hāḏihī l-ʾazmati buġyata t-tawaṣṣuli ʾilā taswiyatin silmīyatin la-hā.

ʾArǧū min-kumu t-takarruma bi-ʿarḍi hāḏā l-muqtaraḥi l-ʿarabīyi ʿalā maǧlisi l-ʾamni bi-š-šakli llaḏī tartaʾūna-hū wa-kull-ī ṯiqatun ʾanna-kum sa-tuwāṣilūna baḏla l-ǧuhūdi min ʾaǧli t-tawaṣṣuli li-ḥallin silmīyin li-hāḏihī l-ʾazma.

Official English translation

In the context of the continuing efforts of the League of Arab States to seek a peaceful settlement to the crisis between the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and the United States, the United Kingdom and France;

Further to my letter of 3 April 1994 concerning the resolution adopted by the Council of the League on the matter and the proposal made in the resolution, in particular, “that the two suspects should be judged equitably by Scottish judges in conformity with Scottish law, and that their trial should take place at the seat of the International Court of Justice at The Hague, and to urge the Security Council to take this new and constructive proposal into consideration with a view to arriving at a peaceful settlement and avoiding any escalation which might exacerbate tension in the region”;

And in light of Libya’s attitude of compliance with the resolution and of the flexibility and great responsiveness shown by the Libyan Jamahiriya in its handling of the crisis in a desire for a peaceful settlement.

I request you to be so kind as to present this inter-Arab proposal to the Security Council in whatever form you deem appropriate. I am fully confident that you will continue your efforts to reach a peaceful solution to this crisis.

Let us mention two further examples of an opening and a closing formula in diplomatic correspondence, respectively (one in Arabic, one in Amharic), which also shed light on European stylistic influence on such documents:

(8) Arabic Diplomatic Formula

Arabic original

Li-ya š-šarafu ʾan ʾufīda saʿādata-kum bi-stilām-ī li-ḫiṭābi-kumu l-muʾarraḫi fī 4 māyū 1946 al-muwāfiqi 3 ǧumādā ṯ-ṯāniyati 1365 wa-llaḏī naṣṣu-hū ka-mā yalī:

Official English translation

I have the honor to acknowledge receipt of your Excellency’s letter dated May 4, 1946, corresponding to Jamada-al-Thaniya 3, 1365, the text of which is as follows:

(9) Amharic Diplomatic Formula

Amharic original

Yəhən-ən məknəyat bä-madräg lä-kəburənnät-wo y-allä-ññ-ən käf y-allä astäyayät əgälṣallähu.

Official English translation

I avail myself of this opportunity to renew to Your Excellency the assurances of my highest consideration.

Let us now return to the question as to which problems can arise in diplomatic multilingualism. In modern treaties, which ideally have to be drafted in all the languages of the contracting parties, possible misunderstandings between the different versions has to be avoided. Here is an example from the Camp David Peace Accord between Israel and Egypt. At the time, the issue here was the term Gulf of Aqaba:[17]

(10) Article 5 of the Camp David Peace Accord between Israel and Egypt

Hebrew

Ha-ṣedadim roʾim be-meṣar tiran u-ve-mifraṣ ʿaqaba (ʾelat) netive mayim benleʾumiyim ha-ptux̱im le-xol ha-ʾumot le-x̱ofeš šayit ve-tayis bilti mufraʿ u-bilti nitan le-hatlaya. Ha-ṣedadim yixvedu kol ʾex̱ad ʾet zexut zulat-o le-šayit u-le-tayis le-šem giša le-xol ʾax̱at min ha-ʾaraṣot derex meṣar tiran u-mifraṣ ʿaqaba (ʾelat).

Arabic

Yaʿtabiru ṭ-ṭarafāni ʾanna maḍīqa tīrāna wa-ḫalīǧa l-ʿaqabati mina l-mamarrāti l-māʾīyati d-duwalīyati l-maftūḥati li-kāffati d-duwali dūna ʿāʾiqin ʾaw ʾīqāfin li-ḥurrīyati l-milāḥati ʾawi l-ʿubūri l-ǧawwī. Kamā yaḥtarimu ṭ-ṭarafāni ḥaqqa kulli min-humā fī l-milāḥati wa-l-ʿubūri l-ǧawwīyi min wa-ʾilā ʾarāḍī-hi ʿabra maḍīqi tīrāna wa-ḫalīǧi l-ʿaqaba.

English

The Parties consider the Strait of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba to be international waterways open to all nations for unimpeded and non-suspendable freedom of navigation and overflight. The Parties will respect each other’s right to navigation and overflight for access to either country through the Strait of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba.

At the time, the Israeli side wanted the use the geographical term mifraṣ ʾelat, even though the legally neutral English version unequivocally had been Gulf of Aqaba. But as the contracting partners were also checking the language versions of the “opposite” side, the more neutral version mifraṣ ʿaqaba (ʾelat) was agreed upon.

The following example from the nineteenth century, Article 17 of the Treaty of Wəč̣ale (“Uccialli”) between Italy and Ethiopia,[18] was much more virulent, as it involved the attempt to establish a protectorate in the wording of the Italian version (“consente di servirsi” as a euphemism for “factually has the duty to”). In contrast, the Amharic version stipulates political independence on the Ethiopian side (yəččalaččäwall ‘it will be possible to Him,’ that is, the Ethiopian king will have the option to communicate with the Italian king in matters of external political affairs):

(11) Article 17 of the Treaty of Wəč̣ale (“Uccialli”) between Italy and Ethiopia

Italian

Sua Maestà il Re dei Re d’Etiopia consente di servirsi del Governo di Sua Maestà il Re d’Italia per tutte le trattazioni di affari che avesse con altre Potenze o Governi.

Amharic

Yä-ityopp’ əya nəgusä nägäst kä-ewropp’a nägästat lä-mm-ifälləgu-t gudday hullu bä-iṭalya mängəst aggažənnät mällalak yəččalaččäwall.

Contemporary analyses of the issue reflect a high degree of arrogance, as can be seen in the following comment by Despagnet:

La difficulté dont il s’agit aurait été écartée si, comme il arrive souvent dans les traités avec les peuples barbares dont la langue est mal connue et peut prêter à des ambiguïtés dont ces peuples seraient tentés d’abuser, on avait dit que, en cas de divergence, le texte dans la langue de l’Etat civilisé ferait seul foi. (Despagnet 1897)

The most famous (or infamous) example in this context is certainly Security Council Resolution 242 (1967) with significant differences in its wording of the phrase (the) territories. While the French and Spanish versions make use of the definite article, the English version does not—for political, not stylistic reasons, as is by now firmly established.[19] The Russian and Chinese language versions are prima facie opaque in this respect, as definiteness has to be circumscribed by other means in these languages, which have no definite article. Arabic was not yet an official language in the United Nations system at the time; the Arabic version below, curiously based on the English and not the French and Spanish versions, represents an official translation at the time:

(12) Security Council Resolution 242

(i) definite (territories):

French

Retrait des forces armées israéliennes des territoires occupés lors du récent conflit.

Spanish

Retiro de las fuerzas armadas israelís de los territorios que ocuparon durante el reciente conflicto.

(ii) indefinite (territories):

English

Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.

Arabic

Saḥbu l-qūwāti l-musallaḥati l-ʾisrāʾīlīyati min ʾarāḍini ḥtallat-hā fī n-nizāʿi l-ʾaḫīr.

(iii) unmarked (opaque) with respect to definiteness (territories), but definiteness implied:

Chinese

Yisieli jundui cheli qi yu zuijin chongtu suo zhanling zhi lingtu.

Russian

Vyvod izrailskikh voruzhennikh sil s territoriy, okkupirovannykh vo vremya n'edavn'ego konflikta.

Individual terms can have different connotations in different languages and cultures. An example is the term musāwāh ‘equality’ in the context of international law. Consider the “Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.” Article 16 of this convention, which is equally “authentic” in all of the six official UN languages, addresses questions of equality in family law:

(13) CEDAW, Article 16

English

1. States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination against women in all matters relating to marriage and family relations and in particular shall ensure, on a basis of equality of men and women:

(a) The same right to enter into marriage;

(b) The same right freely to choose a spouse and to enter into marriage only with their free and full consent;

(c) The same rights and responsibilities during marriage and at its dissolution;

(d) The same rights and responsibilities as parents, irrespective of their marital status, in matters relating to their children; in all cases the interests of the children shall be paramount;

(e) The same rights to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of their children and to have access to the information, education and means to enable them to exercise these rights;

(f) The same rights and responsibilities with regard to guardianship, wardship, trusteeship, and adoption of children, or similar institutions where these concepts exist in national legislation; in all cases the interests of the children shall be paramount;

(g) The same personal rights as husband and wife, including the right to choose a family name, a profession and an occupation;

(h) The same rights for both spouses in respect of the ownership, acquisition, management, administration, enjoyment and disposition of property, whether free of charge or for a valuable consideration.

2. The betrothal and the marriage of a child shall have no legal effect, and all necessary action, including legislation, shall be taken to specify a minimum age for marriage and to make the registration of marriages in an official registry compulsory.

Arabic

1. Tattaḫiḏu d-duwalu l-ʾaṭrāfu ǧamīʿa t-tadābīri l-munāsibati li-l-qaḍāʾi ʿalā t-tamyīzi ḍidda l-marʾati fī kāffati l-ʾumūri l-mutaʿalliqati bi-z-zawāǧi wa-l-ʿalāqāti l-ʾusrīyati, wa-bi-waǧhin ḫāṣṣin taḍmanu, ʿalā ʾasāsi tasāwī r-raǧuli wa-l-marʾa:

(a) nafsa l-ḥaqqi fī ʿaqdi z-zawāǧ;

(b) nafsa l-ḥaqqi fī ḥurrīyati ḫtiyāri z-zawǧi, wa-fī ʿadami ʿaqdi z-zawāǧi ʾil-lā bi-riḍā-hā l-ḥurri l-kāmil;

(c) nafsa l-ḥuqūqi wa-l-masʾūlīyāti ʾaṯnāʾa z-zawāǧi wa-ʿinda fasḫi-hī;

(d) nafsa l-ḥuqūqi wa-l-masʾūlīyāti ka-wālidatin, bi-ġaḍḍi n-naẓari ʿan ḥālati-hā z-zawǧīyati, fi l-ʾumūri l-mutaʿalliqati bi-ʾaṭfāli-hā; wa-fī ǧamīʿi l-ʾaḥwāli, takūnu maṣāliḥu l-ʾaṭfāli hiya r-rāǧiḥa;

(e) nafsa l-ḥuqūqi fī ʾan tuqarrira bi-ḥurrīyatin wa-bi-šuʿūrin mina l-masʾūlīyāti ʿadada ʾaṭfāli-hā wa-l-fitrata bayna ʾinǧābi ṭiflin wa-ʾāḫara, wa-fī l-ḥuṣūli ʿalā l-maʿlūmāti wa-t-taṯqīfi wa-l-wasāʾili l-kafīlati bi-tamkīni-hā min mumārasati hāḏihī l-ḥuqūq;

(f) nafsa l-ḥuqūqi wa-l-masʾūlīyāti fī-mā yataʿallaqu bi-l-wilāyati wa-l-qiwāmati wa-l-wiṣāyati ʿalā l-ʾaṭfāli wa-tabannī-him ʾaw mā šibhu ḏālika mina l-ʾanẓimati l-muʾassasīyati l-iǧtimāʿīyati, ḥīna tūǧadu hāḏihī l-mafāhīmu fī t-tašrīʿi l-waṭanī; wa-fī ǧamīʿi l-ʾaḥwāli takūnu maṣāliḥu l-ʾaṭfāli hiya r-rāǧiḥa;

(g) nafsa l-ḥuqūqi š-šaḫṣīyati li-z-zawǧi wa-z-zawǧati, bi-mā fī ḏālika l-ḥaqqu fī ḫtiyāri l-laqabi, wa-l-mihnati, wa-l-ʿamal;

(h) nafsa l-ḥuqūqi li-kilā z-zawǧayni fī-mā yataʿallaqu bi-milkīyati wa-ḥiyāzati l-mumtalakati, wa-l-ʾišrāfi ʿalay-hā, wa-ʾidārati-hā, wa-t-tamattuʿi bi-hā, wa-t-taṣarrufi fī-hā, sawāʾan bi-lā muqābilin ʾaw muqābila ʿiwaḍin ḏī qīma.

2. Lā yakūnu li-ḫuṭūbati ṭ-ṭifli ʾaw zawāǧi-hī ʾayyu ʾaṯarin qānūnīyin, wa-tattaḫiḏu ǧamīʿa l-ʾiǧrāʾāti ḍ-ḍarūrīyati, bi-mā fī-hā t-tašrīʿu, li-taḥdīdi sinnin ʾadnā li-z-zawāǧi wa-li-ǧaʿli tasǧīli z-zawāǧi fī siǧillin rasmīyin ʾamran ʾilzāmīyan.

Whereas the English version makes use of gender-neutral terms such as “spouse,” women have to be grammatically “marked” in the Arabic version, meaning that the symmetry in the English version cannot be reproduced as such. Paragraph (b) of Article 16 exhibits special attention to Islamic circumstances in its wording (nafsa l-ḥaqqi fī ḥurrīyati ḫtiyāri z-zawǧi, wa-fī ʿadami ʿaqdi z-zawāǧi ʾil-lā bi-riḍā-hā l-ḥurri l-kāmil), which is entirely absent in the English version.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948. This is one of the documents, which after having been drafted in English has been translated into a maximum of languages, without however being legally “authentic” in all of these. Here is a synopsis of Paragraph 1 in its three Semitic versions (Arabic, Hebrew, and Amharic) and its English original, which show no semantic differences, in spite of small stylistic nuances:

(14) UDHR, § 1

English

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Arabic

Yūladu ǧamīʿu n-nāsi ʾaḥrāran mutasāwīna fī l-karāmati wa-l-ḥuqūq. wa-qad wuhibū ʿaqlan wa-ḍamīran wa-ʿalay-him ʾan yuʿāmila baʿḍu-hum baʿḍan bi-rūḥi l-ʾiḫāʾ.

Hebrew

Kol bne ʾadam noldu bne x̱orin ve-šavim be-ʿerk-am u-vi-zxuyot-am. kull-am x̱onanu bi-tvuna u-ve-maṣpon. le-fi-xax x̱ova ʿale-hem li-nhog ʾiš le-reʿe-hu be-ruax̱ šel ʾax̱ava.

Amharic

Yä-säw ləǧǧ hullu s-iwwälläd näṣa-nna bä-kəbur-ənna bä-mäbt-əm əkkulənnät ya-säw näw. Yä-täfäṭro mastäwal-ənna həllina səlalläw and-u lela-w-ən bä-wändəmmamačənnät mänfäs mämälkät yəggäbbawall.

11.4 Conclusion

In conclusion, it is interesting to tie in the discussion of structural and semantic features in comparable documents of completely different time periods in their linguistic and cultural-political significance, not least because so many problems appear to be of a perennial nature. Even increased efforts to prevent misunderstanding in translation have not been able to prevent a variety of interpretations to arise in various diplomatic contexts. At the same time, diplomatic multilingualism offers a broad spectrum of linguistic and cultural perspectives and may help to engender better understanding of one or several parties’ political, economic, legal, and/or cultural goals. Thus, diplomatic multilingualism can definitely be considered a value in itself.

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Footnotes

[1] Edzard (2006).

[2] Ullendorff and Beckingham (1964); Ullendorff (1967, 1968); Rubenson (1964, 1966, 1969, 1976, 1987, 1994).

[3] Cf. also Weinfeld (1973) and McCarthy (1981, 141f).

[4] Cf. Langdon and Gardiner (1920); Goetze (1969, 201–203); Edel (1983, 135–153, 1997).

[5] Cf. Wiseman (1958); Reiner (1969, 534–541); Borger (1983, 160–176).

[6] Cf. Dupont-Sommer (1958); Donner and Röllig (1962–1964, esp. 222–224); Fitzmyer (1967); Rosenthal (1969, 659–661); Lipiński (1975); Rössler (1983, 179–189).

[7] Cf. Wiseman (1958, 23–30); Kitchen and Lawrence (2012, 963–1002).

[8] Cf. Huehnergard (2005, 438); for “defective” conditional clauses functioning as oath clauses in Arabic, cf. Fischer (2006, 205f).

[9] Cf. Streck (1998, 190): “Daher [...] sind sind die Stipulationen [i.e., the individual paragraphs of the treaty, LE] und die Flüche nicht als Protasen und Apodosen eines Konditionalgefüges, sondern als syntaktisch selbständig und die Stipulationen als Schwüre aufzufassen”; cf. also Edzard (2012) for an analysis of the syntactic issues involved.

[10] Cf. Edel (1997, 26–29); Kitchen and Lawrence (2012, 573–594).

[11] Cf., among others sources, Dupont-Sommer (1958, 87–95, pl. xv, xvi).

[12] The hyphen “-” indicates that a word is continued on the respective next line.

[13] Cf. Winckler and Abel (1889–1890); Bezold and Budge (1892); Knudtzon (1915); Mercer (1939); Moran (1992).

[14] Cf. UN-documents A/50/73, S/1995/83, and United Nations Treaty Series, vol. 2042, pp. 394ff.

[15] Cf. UN-documents A/48/486 and S/26560.

[16] Cf. UN-document S/1994/928.

[17] Cf. United Nations Treaty Series, vol. 1136, pp. 100ff.; cf. also Lapidoth (1983).

[18] Cf. Rubenson (1964).

[19] Cf., for instance, Lord Caradon et al. (1981).

12. Some Observations on Multilingualism in Graeco-Roman Egypt

Alexandra von Lieven

Sometime after 96 BCE, a man called Isidoros composed four hymns to different Egyptian gods which he had inscribed on the door-jambs of the temple of Isis in Narmouthis, today Medinet Madi, a town in the Fayum.[1] In principle, hymns to deities are a typical subject for the decoration of Egyptian temples, particularly from the later periods. Normally, they were composed in the Egyptian language and written in hieroglyphs. They usually lack an indication of authorship, unless it is graffiti of private individuals who are portrayed speaking the hymns.

The hymns of Isidoros, however, are very different from this common pattern. They do give the name of an author, not a speaker, and they are beautiful official carvings rather than graffiti. Moreover, they are not in Egyptian language and script, but in Greek. Nevertheless, the hymns extol the local Egyptian deities Isis-Renenutet (in Greek Isis-Hermouthis), Sokonopis, Anchoes and, under the name of Porramanres, the builder of the first temple in Narmouthis, King Amenemhet III. The fourth hymn, which is entirely dedicated to this king, who himself was long deified,[2] is of particular interest here. Firstly, Isidoros praises the king’s divine qualities, particularly his ability to communicate with birds, and his descent from “Ammon, who at the same time is the Hellenes’ and Asians’ Zeus.” For this he alludes to “those who have read the sacred scriptures,” presumably the priests. Then he asks rhetorically for the king’s name and continues:

The one who raised him, Sesoosis, who went to the east of the sky, he gave him the beautiful name of the glistening sun. Interpreting his name, the Egyptians called him Porramanres the Great, the Immortal. As for me, I heard from others of a remarkable miracle, namely that he drove in the mountains on wheels and with a sail. Securely having been informed by men who impart their knowledge, also after myself having translated all these deeds, I explained to the Greeks the god’s and the ruler’s power, demonstrating that no other mortal held similar power. Isidoros composed these verses.

This text touches on several levels on the question of cultural interaction between Greeks and Egyptians in Egypt, multilingualism being just one of the more obvious issues. For example, the explicit interpretatio graeca of the Egyptian god Amun as Zeus is noteworthy as well.[3]

Apparently, Isidoros consulted sources in Egyptian language on deified Amenemhet or Marres, as he is usually called in the Graeco-Roman period (the element Porra- is nothing but the word “Pharao”). When he states that he translated the deeds to which he refers, it is not entirely clear whether he means that he did an actual translation of an existing story before composing the present poem or whether in fact the poem, which draws its inspiration from the Egyptian stories to which it hints, is itself the supposed “translation.” However, the wording rather seems to indicate the former. Thus we would have to reckon with yet another work of Isidoros. An interesting question is of course also whether Isidoros himself was Egyptian or Greek (see below).

Before returning to these questions, a broader look at the phenomenon of multilingualism in Graeco-Roman Egypt is in order.[4] For most of Egyptian history, obviously, Egyptian in its successive historic-linguistic stages had been the dominant language in this country. Nevertheless, for purposes of diplomatic communication and trade, other languages were already studied in the New Kingdom by a small number of people. At least from the Amarna cuneiform tablets, it can be proven that Egyptians learned Akkadian.[5] For even older periods, one may assume the same situation without actually being able to prove it positively.

It would be interesting to know whether the Libyans and Nubians ruling in Egypt in the Third Intermediate Period[6] used much of their own language within Egypt or whether they were already that much Egyptianized that they only spoke Egyptian. From the evidence—or rather lack thereof—the latter is strongly to be suspected. The same seems to hold true for the Hyksos earlier, although again it is impossible to prove either way.

In the Late Period, which was dominated by the Assyrians and the Persians, for the first time foreign rulers invaded countries that were not previously Egyptianized at all. Especially under the Persians, Aramaic became the language of official documents.[7] There is also evidence for translations of literary works from one language into the other.[8] Apart from translations, also mere transcriptions of Aramaic texts into Demotic writing and vice versa are attested, among them the famous case of pAmherst 63.[9] Unfortunately, these transcripts are notoriously difficult to make sense of today. Occasionally, Aramaic and Egyptian Hieroglyphic inscriptions can also be found on a single commemorative stela, where usually the Egyptian text serves to label the traditional Egyptian deities, while the main text of the stela with the personal details of its owner is in Aramaic.[10] However, the period of Persian rule was rather short and soon Aramaic disappeared again from the cultural mainstream in Egypt, the thriving Jewish community excepted.

Its place was taken by Greek under Alexander and the Ptolemies. Even during the Roman period, Greek remained the dominant language in Egypt, although Latin was also used there.[11] In the beginning, Greek also was only used as the official language of the new rulers, but did not gain too much prominence outside the Greek immigrants’ circles proper. However, this quickly changed, probably not the least due to the fact that those immigrants often married Egyptian women. Thus it is to be expected that already the first generation of offspring from those bicultural marriages also was raised more or less bilingually. For example, documentary texts like the material gathered by Clarysse and Thompson in P. Count. (2006a) show an increase from 8 % mixed marriages in the third century BCE to already 25.5 % by taking the turn from the third to second century into the calculation as well.[12] The more ground Greek gained, the more incitement there will have been to learn Greek also among the purely Egyptian population. This especially holds true for the highest strata of society including the priesthood, as only the knowledge of Greek opened up career possibilities of the highest order.[13] Moreover, getting the status of a “Hellene” meant lower taxes, which should have been enough reason to stomach some Greek lessons. In the lower strata of administration, both Demotic and Greek are found side by side, often even switching in the middle of the same papyrus from one to the other and back again.[14] Only from the level of the Nome administration upwards, Greek was the exclusive language used. However, after the insurgences against the Ptolemies in the mid-second century, control was tightened. Already from 165 onward, the presence of Greek strongly increases in tax documents and from 145 onward, documents needed to have a Greek subscript containing a sort of abstract of the contents to be juridically valid at all. Nevertheless, Demotic documents continue to be used even in the Roman period.[15]

While the eagerness of Egyptians to learn Greek has long been accepted by scholars, only rarely is it admitted that also Greeks might have wished to learn Egyptian in turn. Usually Cleopatra VII is cited as an exceptional example,[16] at the same time implying that her desire to learn Egyptian was an exception to what was otherwise the norm. However, there is reason to be a bit doubtful about such claims. It may very well be true that Cleopatra was the only member of the Ptolemaic royal family who ever learned Egyptian, but as for her subjects a much greater number of cases is to be expected. Of course there is little explicit evidence. But that is not surprising, these people were just living their lives, not expecting scholars two millennia later to puzzle over their language abilities. Thus we have to content ourselves with chance evidence. Such evidence does indeed exist. A clear case is, for example, the Greek letter UPZ I 148[17] written in the second century BCE by a woman to a man, congratulating him on learning Egyptian writing (Αἰγύπτια γράμματα), so he could teach the youths (τα παιδάρια) at an Egyptian physician’s and thus earn money for his old age.

Other such chance evidence is the growing number of cases where Greeks seem to have held priestly titles for Egyptian cults and left statues of themselves inscribed in Hieroglyphs![18] However, such cases can only be pinpointed with relative security in the Early Ptolemaic period, because with the lapse of time, more and more Egyptians also took Greek names, probably to improve their social standing and tax status.[19] Sometimes it is evident that one and the same person had two names, one used in Greek documents, the other in Egyptian documents.[20] Such names can be entirely unrelated to each other, but often they are translations or at least equivalents of each other. Thus a Petese might have called himself Isidoros or a Petehor could have become an Apollodoros. But also purely Greek names without any Egyptian equivalent are attested as second name. A particularly inspired example is certainly the case of the dioiketes Harchebi, son of Pamnevis and Tasheretbastet, whose alternative name Archibios is not only a true Greek name, but almost a phonetic equivalent to his Egyptian name (which would normally have been rendered in Greek as Harchebis).[21] Needless to say, this does not make the task easier to assign a culture of origin to a specific person.[22]

Moreover, after the second or third generation of cultural mixing and intermarriage, it becomes almost futile to grope around in the mud for any differing cultural identities. To know what language or languages a specific person would have spoken is even more difficult. It seems likely that this depended from the situation, with Greek being used for more official situations of communication and Egyptian for more personal ones, as well as for matters of traditional religion.[23]

A fine example is the dioiketes and archisomatophylax Dioskurides known from several Greek documents as a top figure of second-century Ptolemaic administration.[24] Apparently this man had an Egyptian mother and when it came to matters of eternal well-being, he wanted to be buried in an Egyptian sarcophagus with a Hieroglyphic inscription giving his titles and some biographical details hinting at him having been involved in suppressing the Egyptian revolts in 165, a fact that is also suggested by the Greek sources. Interestingly, the Hieroglyphic inscriptions of the sarcophagus are very faulty and in the more conventional parts clearly depend on a model originally produced for a woman (but not the mother!). One wonders whether Dioskurides himself might have tried his best to choose the texts without actually being too fluent in Egyptian…[25]

Another interesting case is the syngenes Platon Junior, son of another Platon, who apparently also was syngenes and moreover strategos of the Thebaid in 88 BCE, and of an Egyptian mother.[26] Again, the Greek documentation for father and son shows them to have exerted political, administrative, and military functions, while the statue the younger Platon had inscribed for himself in Hieroglyphs proves that he not only held a considerable number of Egyptian priestly titles, but even served as a medium for oracles spoken by the god Amun in Thebes. No wonder then that even in the field of Egyptian religion, as the case of the Isidoros hymns shows, Greek could be used on purpose to propagate certain cults more widely.

And indeed, these hymns are not the only case where a text propagating a deity claims to be a translation from the Egyptian. Similar claims can be found in pOxy 1381, a text in praise of Imuthes-Asklepios, that is, the deified Egyptian sage Imhotep.[27] Again the author claims to have translated a story relating to Imhotep, unfortunately the part of the papyrus that would have contained the translated text is mostly lost. It would indeed be interesting to see whether this was really a translation of the story dubbed “The Life of Imhotep” by its prospective editor Kim Ryholt.[28] The latter, also known under the nickname “Djoser and the Assyrians” is a Demotic literary text which deals with the magical exploits of Imhotep, who helps king Djoser fight the Assyrians. The glaring anachronism involved in this notwithstanding, such a text would have served well to explain why Imhotep was a divine being worthy of veneration. Moreover, there is an interesting similarity between this and the Porramanres hymn by Isidoros. Isidoros also gave a reason for the divine nature of Marres, namely his ability to talk to animals as well as the bizarre incident when he sailed on wheels in the mountains. Both sound at least to the present author very strongly like referring to a literary text of the sort attested aplenty in the corpus of preserved Demotic historical romances. As demonstrated by the Tebtynis finds, such narratives were kept in temple libraries and read by priests, thus the claim that this information derived from “sacred scriptures” is fully justified.[29] In fact, there even do exist some remnants of a Demotic narrative on Sesostris and Amenemhet in pCarlsberg 411, which contain animals, although not birds, but at least a laughing dog.[30] The existence of a tradition of Amenemhet talking to birds is however corroborated by Aelian On Animals VI,7,[31] who mentions Amenemhet III alias Mares having talked to a pet crow. This information cannot derive from the hymn in Narmouthis directly as the text does not detail the kind of bird involved. Aelian further says that the tomb of the crow would be shown in Krokodilopolis in the Fayum. Again, this proves that his source must be a different one, not the text by Isidoros.

At any rate, translating Egyptian religious or literary texts can be positively proven by other examples with better documentation for versions both in Egyptian and in Greek.[32] A case in point would be the so-called Myth of the Sun’s Eye,[33] again a Demotic composition containing the dialogue of two deities on all sorts of esoteric matters, interspersed with fables to illustrate important moral points. Fragments of the Greek translation dating to the second half of the second century CE, but unfortunately without provenance, have been known for a long time.[34] On first impression, the Greek version seems to omit the more esoteric parts of the original version, thus making the text more accessible to Greeks. Although this would fit well with the statement by the translator of pOxy 1381 in his verbose preamble that “Throughout the composition I have filled up defects and struck out superfluities, and in telling a rather long tale I have spoken briefly and narrated once for all a complicated story,” it is important to state clearly, as Luigi Prada did recently, that the preservation of the Greek text in comparison to the Egyptian version does not really allow for such far-reaching conclusions.

Another interesting case is the Book of the Temple, which was originally composed in Middle Egyptian, later translated into Demotic and finally into Greek.[35] All three versions are attested from the second century CE, language preference apparently depended from the abilities of the users. While the Hieratic Middle Egyptian and Demotic versions were spread all over Egypt, the Greek fragment comes from a place well-known for its Greek papyri, namely Oxyrhynchus.

While indeed the majority of papyri from Oxyrhynchus are in Greek, there were of course temples of Egyptian deities there, particularly the main temple for Thoeris, and from the library of one such temple, a small number of fragments of several papyri in Egyptian language and scripts are preserved.[36] Some of them even contain supralinear glosses in Greek script. Further study of these fragments is needed. On first inspection, it seems that the glosses just contain a transliteration into Greek for the sake of easier pronunciation. Thus they would be similar to some parts of the famous Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden.[37] Also among the Greek Oxyrhynchos papyri, like the already cited pOxy 1381, several have clear Egyptian contents, usually related to religion. Thus, it is to be assumed that they will also have been translations.

But not only religious texts were translated. Even for a legal manual, the so-called Codex Hermopolis, a translation into Greek can be proven (pOxy XLVI 3285, second cent. CE).[38]

The interesting question is of course whether any translations from Greek into Egyptian can be found. Currently, the present author is aware only of one text explicitly claiming to be a translation from the Greek, namely an unpublished letter in Demotic language, but Hieratic script from Tebtynis.[39] For bilingual administrative texts on the level of private business documents, it is sometimes difficult to know which version is the primary one and which is secondary. For the Greek subscripts of Demotic documents it is generally to be assumed that the Demotic version is the primary one for the very nature of such subscripts.[40] However, in the bilingual papyri from the archive of Zenon, the Greek text is written first and the Demotic one second,[41] so maybe for once there matters were the other way round. This would fit with the fact that in the Zenon archive, Greek generally prevails.

Apart from this, for the trilingual Ptolemaic decrees it has been proposed that their texts were originally composed in Greek and then translated into Demotic and a patchwork language written in Hieroglyphs.[42] This supposition is based on certain grammatical features of the Demotic versions that betray a dependance on Greek.

In fact, the Greek origin of these texts can even help to explain the presence of the Hieroglyphic patchwork version, as it ties in very well with the fascination of Greeks with the different Egyptian types of writing.[43] Apparently, it was then felt that also the linguistic character of the two Egyptian versions needed to be slightly different, a stance that otherwise is never attested in the Egyptian material.[44] Never, with one exception, that is. The exception is the two funerary Rhind papyri.[45] They lack a Greek version, as they were just written for an Egyptian priest and his wife for their personal posthumous well-being. However, it is very likely that they derived their inspiration from the trilingual decrees nevertheless. Maybe their owner was involved in composing such decrees, as apart from his Egyptian priestly titles he also held the Greek title syngenes.[46]

That Demotic-Greek bilingual decrees could also be used below the level of royalty is proven by the decree issued by the priests of Karnak in honour of the strategos Kallimachos.[47] Unfortunately, the Demotic text, which is much shorter than the Greek one, has not yet been published to date.

Probably the most striking bilingual semi-literary text is the stela of Moschion,[48] where possibly the Greek version is to be considered the primary one, in view of the fact that Moschion is also a Greek name. The shakiness of such arguments has already been mentioned. Moreover, however, some ideas in the text like the nine Muses are Greek as well.

Although both versions basically convey the same ideas, written once in Greek and once in Demotic, it is questionable whether one can rightfully claim this as a translation proper. At any rate, this is a stela containing a sort of riddle, with crossword elements and acrostic parts, both in Demotic and in Greek,[49] which was set up to glorify Osiris in fulfillment of a vow. The purpose was “proclaiming it to Greeks and natives (Ἕλλησι καὶ ἐνδαπίοισιν)” as the Greek texts puts it or, in the Demotic version “to the men of Egypt and the Greeks (r nȝ rmt.w-n-Kmy nȝ Wynn)”—note the changed order, by the way! One part in each language is written acrostically, giving the name of the dedicator. In the Greek it is stated that the number of lines corresponds to the number of the muses—and indeed Moschionos just gives nine letters to start the lines with. Unfortunately, in the Demotic, the entity to which the number of lines is equivalent, has been lost due to damage. As is it in fact seven lines, the seven Hathors seem to be a likely choice, but there would be other possibilities. At any rate, the letters Mskyȝn would only have filled six lines. Now, groups of six deities are not easily to be found in Egyptian religion, in contrast to groups of seven, which are rather frequent.[50] So what to do? Of course, in Demotic one could write a name with a person determinative at the end. However, that would not have fitted well into an acrostic. Instead, the scribe who composed the text resorted to a stroke of genius. He wrote not the person determinative, but the animal determinative, which fitted the literal meaning of Moschion “calf.” In fact, somewhere else in the Demotic part,[51] Moschion’s name is apparently translated as Ms, which not only sounds similar to the beginning of the Greek name, but even means “calf.” As for the determinative in the last line of the acrostic, it looks in Demotic exactly like the sign for the male article pȝ—and indeed that is the word, with which the last line pȝ ỉ.ỉri̯ ỉri̯ tȝ ḥbȝy “the one who has made the board [...]” starts.

For literary texts in the narrower sense there is no secure evidence whatsoever that Greek material was translated into Egyptian. Rather, it seems the Egyptian priests put their Greek to good use and read Homer in the original. At any rate, the temple library of Tebtynis, which is a treasure trove for Demotic literature, also contained a manuscript of the Iliad.[52] The only case where a translation of a Greek text into Egyptian might at first be suspected is a fragment of a Demotic papyrus with a description of foreign nations resembling the well-known Greek texts of such kind.[53] Yet, the preserved text does not represent a translation of any known Greek model. Thus, unless it is derived from an otherwise lost Greek ethnography, one has to reckon with an original Demotic composition just inspired by the Greek genre.

In fact, it is very likely that some priests not only translated older Egyptian texts into Greek, but that they even composed new texts in the lingua franca of the period, not unlike a modern German scholar giving a paper at a conference in Germany in English for the sake of international colleagues. A well-known example of this is of course the famous Manetho already in the earlier Ptolemaic period,[54] but it is likely that there were in fact many more such cases. A documented Roman Period example would be Chaeremon, although he is a special case as he lived in Rome at least during a part of his life.[55] Isidoros of Narmouthis, the author of the hymns, might well also have been such a person. Maybe he was in fact a local priest with the Egyptian name Petese—certainly the name would fit since the main local deity had been a form of Isis—even if of course Petese was a very common name.

In the literature, it was questioned whether Isidoros was an Egyptian since he speaks of “the Egyptians” as if he was not one of them.[56] The same holds true of “the Greeks” though. Thus it is really impossible to answer the question and probably also futile. What is instructive, however, is the fact that he links the name Porramanres with the sun. This betrays a clear understanding of the Egyptian name behind the Greek rendition. Porramanres is of course “Pharao Maa-Re,” indeed containing the name of the sun god Re, as is fitting for the king’s throne name.

With Egyptians like Manetho, and others who composed texts in Greek or translated traditional material into Greek, the world of Egyptian thought and culture was in principle open to international dissemination. And indeed this is what happened in many fields. A good example is the recipe for Kyphi, a prized incense mixture used in the Egyptian cult for fumigations.[57] Two versions of this recipe are attested in the temple texts of Edfu, one of them with a parallel in Philae. Manetho is credited with a Greek treatise on its production, which unfortunately is lost. Nevertheless, many other later Greek authors gave such recipes, which are likely ultimately to have derived from Manetho’s account, even if they tend to be embellished and expanded more and more over time, eventually up until the thirteenth century CE. The version in Galen however is still very close to the version in Edfu.

Thus, particularly in the field of the sciences and pseudosciences, we have to reckon with texts in Greek language containing genuine Egyptian concepts. This is especially true in the field of astrology.[58] Thus it is possible to find explanations for some of the iconography on Roman period temple ceilings from Egypt in astrological treatises in Greek language like, for example, Teucer of Babylon—Babylon in Egypt, that is, the Greek name of Old Cairo.

For the modern researcher, this means of course two things. For the Egyptologist, it means that he or she need to take Greek sources (or even sources in other languages like Latin or the like, derived from lost Greek sources) much more seriously. There is no point in ignoring any document because it is supposedly “Greek” rather than “Egyptian,” as is unfortunately still done too often. For the Classicist, on the other hand, it means that claims about supposed Egyptian concepts or even the translation of an Egyptian original also need to be taken much more seriously than is usually the case. It has long been customary to reject such claims by ancient authors as topoi without any reality. However, as more and more hard evidence for that very reality crops up, it seems high time for a change of attitude.

In the later Roman period, Greek dominated more and more in all fields of Egyptian society. In everyday communication, it is likely that even speakers of Egyptian language interspersed a great deal of their sentences with Greek vocabulary.[59] At least this is the impression to be gained from the Narmouthis ostraca.[60] These ostraca come from the vicinity of the temple in Narmouthis and date to the late second and early third century CE. They contain Demotic texts dealing with administrative problems, school exercises, astrological calculations and much more. Some of the later ones show a very peculiar mixture of Demotic and Greek. The Egyptian text is littered with Greek words, but still the different scripts with their different directions of writing are retained for each language.

The next logical step is of course to switch to Greek letters for writing the Egyptian words, adding a few letters for sounds not available in Greek. This is precisely what had been done already for a while in the context of magical spells where the correct pronunciation was vital.[61] Now however, this system was adapted to general use. Thus, what is called Coptic was born.[62] This development was recently analyzed anew by R. Bagnall and J. Quack.[63] Bagnall is certainly right that the development of the Coptic language was much more complex in its details than has often been assumed in the past. Yet, it is no surprise that a text from an ostracon from the third century from Kellis[64] should be more evolved into the direction of “true” Coptic than texts from the second century. This does not at all speak against the development of the roots of Coptic in the pagan milieu, although it is certainly true that this should not be limited to the context of priests and temples exclusively. The Christians just adapted one such system at the time when it was already quite evolved. This is no compelling argument for necessarily postulating a new, independent development to be linked to Christianity as the driving factor for change. Different systems of “Old Coptic” in different places and with different stages of evolution over the decades already within the pagan culture would in fact be a very likely assumption. After all, the same can be seen also within the system of late monumental hieroglyphic orthography, commonly referred to as “Ptolemaic.”[65] While following common principles everywhere,[66] this also exhibits great variations in the details, with certain signs being very common for a certain phoneme in one temple while being rather rare with this value in another.[67]

At any rate, in Coptic, the multilingualism of Egyptian and Greek has given rise to a single new language comprising elements of both its parent languages. While in terms of grammar it retains many structures of Egyptian, the Greek elements are by no means limited to nouns and other such clearcut lexical features. Even within Coptic, the extent of Greek influence is fluid, depending, for example, on the particular dialect or on whether it is an original Coptic composition or a translation of a Greek original, like, for example, the Coptic Bible.[68]

While there is still multilingualism between Coptic and Greek proper,[69] in the Byzantine period there is no more Egyptian language without Greek elements, as Coptic is the Egyptian of the period.

Acknowledgements

This paper was prepared with the support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft during a fellowship at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg of the Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, for which I would like to thank all involved parties very much. I also would like to thank I. S. Moyer, L. Prada and J. F. Quack very much for having sent me unpublished manuscripts relating to several of the texts discussed here.

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——— (2010a). “Egyptian Writing for Non-Egyptian Languages and Vice-Versa: A Short Overview.” In The Idea of Writing: Play and Complexity, edited by A. de Voogt and I. Finkel, 317–25. Leiden: Brill.

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——— (2016a). “The Last Stand? What Remains Egyptian at Oxyrhynchus.” In Problems of Canonicity and Identity Formation in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, edited by K. Ryholt and G. Barjamovic, 105–26. CNI Publications 43. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum.

——— (2016b). “Translating the Realities of Cult: The Case of the Book of the Temple.” In Greco-Egyptian Interactions: Literature, Translation, and Culture, 500 Bc–Ad 300, edited by I. Rutherford, 267–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

——— (2017). “How the Coptic Script Came About.” In Greek Influence on Egyptian-Coptic: Contact-Induced Change in an Ancient African Language. DDGLC Working Papers 1, edited by E. Grossman, P. Dils, T. S. Richter, and W. Schenkel, 27–96. Lingua Aegyptia Studia Monographica 17. Hamburg: Widmaier Verlag.

——— (2007). “Review of Ostraka Demotici E Bilingui Da Narmuthis by a. Menchetti.” Enchoria 30 (2006): 174–81.

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——— (in press). Beiträge Zu Den ägyptischen Dekanen Und Ihrer Rezeption in Der Griechisch-Römischen Welt. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta. Leuven: Peeters.

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——— (2009). “The Multilingual Environment of Persian and Ptolemaic Egypt: Egyptian, Aramaic and Greek Documentation.” In The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology, edited by R. Bagnall, 395–417. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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——— (2007a). Grundriß Des Laufes Der Sterne. Das Sogenannte Nutbuch. The Carlsberg Papyri 8, Carsten Niebuhr Institute Publications 31. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum.

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——— (2013). “Why Should We Date Texts by Historic Linguistic Dating?” In Dating Egyptian Literary Texts, edited by G. Moers, K. Widmaier, A. Giewekemeyer, A. Lümers, and R. Ernst. Lingua Aegyptia Studia Monographica 11. Hamburg: Widmaier.

——— (2016a). “Sounds of Power: The Concept of Sound in Ancient Egyptian Religion.” In Religion Für Die Sinne, edited by P. Reichling and M. Strothmann. Oberhausen: Athena.

——— (2016b). “‘Thy Fragrance Is in All My Limbs’. On the Olfactory Sense in Ancient Egyptian Religion.” In Religion Für Die Sinne, edited by P. Reichling and M. Strothmann. Oberhausen: Athena.

——— (2016c). “Translating Gods, Interpreting Gods: On the Mechanisms Behind the Interpretatio Graeca of Egyptian Gods.” In Greco-Egyptian Interactions: Literature, Translation, and Culture, 500 Bc–Ad 300, edited by I. Rutherford, 61–82. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

——— (in press). “From Crocodile to Dragon: History and Transformations of the Dodekaoros.” In The Transmission and Appropriation of Astral Sciences in Pre-Islamic Times, edited by D. Brown and H. Falk. Vergleichende Studien Zu Antike Und Orient. Bremen: Hempen.

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Footnotes

[1] É. Bernand (1969, 631–652, pl. CV-CVIII (no. 175)); Vanderlip (1972); Moyer (2011, 2016).

[2] See Widmer (2002, 275–279) and von Lieven (2007b), s.v. ʾImn.w-m-ḥȝ.t N.ı͗-Mȝʿ.t-Rʿw.

[3] Colin (2003, 275–279); von Lieven (2016c).

[4] Colin (2003); Thompson (2009); Fournet (2009); Torallas-Tovar (2010); Clarysse (2010).

[5] A good indicator for this are the Egyptian-style red verse points added to two mythological texts among the cuneiform tablets found in Amarna, see Izre’el (1997, 43–61, pl. XIX–XXX).

[6] Vittmann (2003, 2006).

[7] Porten and Yardeni (1986–1999); Vittmann (2003, 84–119).

[8] Vittmann (2003, 104–106); Quack (2002, 2009, 6, 2011a); Lippert (2008, 87).

[9] Vittmann (2003, 115–119); Quack (2010a).

[10] A fine example is given in Vittmann (2003, 106–110, figure 47). Apart from the inscriptions, the stela in question shows other interesting details, particularly the strange tail at the lower end of the winged sun-disk, which makes it look very similar to the winged lower part of the typical representation of the Persian deity Ahuramazda.

[11] Fournet (2009, 421–423).

[12] Clarysse and Thompson (2006b, esp. 326–328).

[13] Thompson (1992).

[14] Thompson (2009, 408–409).

[15] On the coexistence of the two juridical systems, see now in extenso Lippert (2008, 85–189). Despite its modest title, this publication contains the most up-to-date evaluation of the sources.

[16] It was recently explained by Huß (1990) with a possible Egyptian mother, whose existence, however, cannot be proven.

[17] See Wilcken (1927, 635–636 (no. 148)), somewhat differing interpretation by Remondon (1964). While Remondon’s comments on the strictly philological details have some merit, his musings about the cultural background betray more his own prejudices than adding anything to the understanding of the text. For example, his view that the text would testify to the Greeks wanting to maintain an unchanged Egypt, thereby depriving both the Egyptian medicine of the chance to progress via Hellenization as well as restraining the expansion of Greek science in Egypt (p. 144) seems to the present writer a rather desperate craving for negativity not justified by any evidence in the actual document. Apparently, it never occured to Remondon that native Egyptian medicine could indeed have had any real value in itself. Contrast the study by Stephan (2005). The latter, however, sadly only relies on the medical papyri of the older periods (New Kingdom and earlier). For a true review of the question, of course, a comparison with medical treatises composed or at least copied in the Late and Greco-Roman periods would be in order.

[18] Collombert (2000); Coulon (2001); Vittmann (2006, 585–590); Klotz (2009). On the relations between the priests and the Ptolemaic court and administration in general, see now Gorre (2009, esp. 528–543).

[19] Thompson (1992, 326).

[20] Clarysse (1985, 1992); Thompson (2009, 411–412); Quaegebeur (1992).

[21] Klotz (2009, 285).

[22] For a good survey of the problem, see Clarysse and Thompson (2006b, 318–332).

[23] For a long time, it had been assumed that no foreigners were allowed to serve as Egyptian priests. By now, it is clear that this is not true. For a general discussion, see e.g. Vittmann (1998), to which can now be added several more examples, see the following notes and references.

[24] Collombert (2000).

[25] And certainly not classical Middle Egyptian at that!

[26] Coulon (2001).

[27] Grenfell and Hunt (1915).

[28] Ryholt (2009). Quack (2009) to the contrary thinks that the Greek text might have been a translation of the great dialogue between Pharao and Imhotep on the theological interpretation of the temple decoration (unpublished fragments in Florence). The latter he thinks moreover to be possibly related to the text published by Erichsen and Schott (1954). Currently, though, none of these hypotheses can be proven.

[29] There is no need that “sacred scriptures” need to be in Hieratic, let alone Hieroglyphs, as some Egyptologists might object.

[30] Information by email from K. Ryholt, fully discussed in von Lieven (2007b).

[31] Aelian (1971); Grimm (1990).

[32] While for the texts presented below both Greek and Egyptian versions are preserved, for others a similar situation cannot be proven positively, but may still be inferred from philological details of the Greek versions. For two likely cases see Jasnow (1997) and Quack (2003). On the whole question see Quack (2009, 4–6, 32–34).

[33] Cenival (1985, 1988, 1989).

[34] West (1969), Totti (1985, 168–182), and Thissen (2011). For the dating and other important observations see Prada (2012).

[35] Quack (1997, 2016b).

[36] Unpublished, personal observation. A joint publication of this material by J. F. Quack and myself is planned in the series Texts from Excavations. Preliminary presentation in Quack (2016a).

[37] Griffith and Thomson (1904–1909); Dieleman (2005).

[38] Rea (1978, 30–38); Pestman (1985); Lippert (2008, 88).

[39] To be published by J. F. Quack.

[40] Lippert (2008, 136–137, 139, 149).

[41] Pestman (1980).

[42] Simpson (1996, 22–24).

[43] Iverson (1961, 38–56).

[44] For the normal Egyptian way to deal with historic linguistics, see von Lieven (2007a, 223–250; 2013) (the latter particularly focusing on the situation in the Greco-Roman period).

[45] Möller (1913).

[46] Born in 68 BCE, he might very well have been involved in such an enterprise even if up to now there is no trilingual decree attested that late in the Ptolemaic period.

[47] Stela Turin 1764, see Hutmacher (1965), Bernand (1992a, 106–109; 1992b, 109–115), Farid (1995, 289; 1993, 49, pl. 17) and Vleeming (2001, 130, no. 156). Contrary to the claims copied throughout the literature, the stela that was reused for the decree certainly did not date to the New Kingdom originally. For stylistic reasons in relation to the deities remaining from the original design, it must have dated to the Late Period, possibly the twenty-fifth dynasty (as the published photos are rather bad, a better dating is difficult).

[48] É. Bernand (1969, 413–428, pl. LXXV–LXXVII (no. 108)); Vleeming (2001, 199–209 (no. 205)).

[49] Similar stelae in Hieroglyphs have been found several times from New Kingdom and twenty-first to twenty-second dynasty Thebes, see Clère (1938, 35–38), Zandee (1966), Stewart (1971), Troy (1997) and Coulon (2006, 24, pl. VI b).

[50] Rochholz (2002, esp. 36–142).

[51] Text E, see commentary in Vleeming (2001, 202).

[52] Tait (1977, 93–94, pl. 9).

[53] Quack (2011b).

[54] Waddel (1940).

[55] van der Horst (1987).

[56] É. Bernand (1969). Vanderlip (1972, 96, 102) remains rather vague. The best discussion to date is to be found in Moyer (2011, 2016).

[57] For details and a discussion of some of the Greek and Latin sources, see von Lieven (2016b).

[58] On the relationship of Greek astrological treatises with Egyptian temple ceilings, see von Lieven (2000, 150–152). Other striking examples for such transmission phenomena are the so-called dodekaoros, von Lieven (in press), or the decans, Quack (in press).

[59] For the development, see Feder (2004). The problem with such assessments is that for most of the time, one has to rely on either literary texts, which were likely originally to have been composed long before their actual attestation, see e.g. Quack (2002), or with documentary texts, which tend to be very formulaic. Thus, Greek loanwords have little possibility of creeping into the documentation, even with no conscious effort to avoid them, as has been supposed, for example, by Clarysse (1987) and Vandorpe and Clarysse (1998).

[60] Bresciani, Pernigotti and Betrò (1983); Gallo (1997), with review by Quack (1999); Menchetti (2005), with review by Quack (2007).

[61] Compare the famous statement by Iamblichus VII 4–5 (1966, 191–195) and the examples discussed in von Lieven (2016a).

[62] In fact, the texts on some of the later Narmouthis ostraca could linguistically already be called Coptic, just that they retain the Demotic script for the Egyptian words.

[63] Bagnall (2005); Quack (2017).

[64] Gardner (1999).

[65] Quack (2010b).

[66] For those principles, see Kurth (2009, 31–100, esp. 31–39).

[67] A case in point would be Too late with the value m, which is very frequent in Deir Shelouit, Zivie (1982–1986), but not very widely used in other temples. See further Kurth (2009, 14–25).

[68] In fact, there is variation even between the different dialects of Coptic, see Feder (2006).

[69] See e.g. Clackson (2010).

Part IV: India and Central Asia

13. Indo-Iranian Sacred Texts and Sacrificial Practices: Structures of Common Heritage (Speech and Performance in the Veda and Avesta, III)

Velizar Sadovski

I. Introduction

0.1. After the Sixth Melammu Symposium held in 2008 at Sofia as well as a colloquium at the Norwegian Institute in Athens (2009) and two symposia in Vienna (2009, 2010), the Berlin conference of 2010 (selected papers from which are presented in this volume) represents the fourth major meeting of a series of scholars interested in the field of Multilingualism and the History of Knowledge.[1] It was followed by a number of intensive workshops, out of which two volumes edited by representatives of the four institutions involved in the Multilingualism Research Group from the start—the University of Oslo, the Max Planck Institute of History of Knowledge, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the University of Vienna—have been published so far.[2]

0.2. Simultaneously, this first Berlin meeting, together with another congress at the same city in 2011, whose proceedings have been prepared for print by its convenor[3] and two panels of the Deutscher Orientalistentag held in Marburg (2011) and in Münster (2013),[4] has been among the first conventions with a special focus on the archaic form of systematization and classification by means of extensive lists, enumerations and catalogs, as one of the most distinctive features not only of Mesopotamian scholarship (in which the famous [mock]-term “Listenwissenschaft” coined by Wolfram von Soden became popular per nefas and has enjoyed an independent life ever since). This catalogic “form” of ritual poetry nevertheless has remained almost unexplored. Catalogs, however, were fundamentally characteristic of a number of Indo-European ritual and literary traditions too, thus building an important bridge between a series of ancient cultures from a contrastive and comparative viewpoint.

0.3. Based on the investigation of the ritual texts of the Veda and the Avesta, our contribution in the present framework aims at identifying a series of crucial elements of Indo-Iranian ritual poetry and liturgical practice organized in the form of catalogs and lists. Their cognitive value for linguistic and poetological comparisons will be analyzed, along with the reconstruction of the inherited structures of two representatives of the most ancient Indo-European literature that have come down to us.[5]

II. Ritual Taxonomy in Indic, Iranian and Beyond: Litanies and Liturgies as “Hyper-Linked” Catalogs of the Universe

1.0. The cognitive structures underlying the literary genre of catalogs and lists have been recognized early enough for their importance in reconstructing archaic models of thinking and mind-mapping the Universe, even if the Indo-European representatives of this genre—with the exception perhaps of the most obvious examples such as Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days and the main Homeric catalogs[6]—have been largely neglected until being confronted with similar structures in non-IE contexts; this contrastive approach brought to new reflection on the IE traditions themselves.

Among the crucial analytical frameworks triggering this interest are the pioneering studies of the classical French sociological school on “Primitive Classification”[7] as a highly relevant form of cognition and ritual experience. This includes studies on catalog taxonomies and the list form as part of both sacred poetry and other genres of texts with social and anthropological relevance in Sumerian, Assyro-Babylonian, Aramaic and Hebrew traditions, and there specifically the investigation of the lexical lists[8] as evidence for cultural history. Therefore, the interdisciplinary workshops on the topics Multilingualism and History of Knowledge have focused from the beginning on taxonomical structures and forms of systematization from comparative and contrastive points of view in various traditions, especially Indo-European, trying to apply research know-how and enlarge analytical perspectives won in other cultural fields—especially Mesopotamian and Egyptian—on those Indo-European traditions beyond the horizons of the Graeco-Roman world, evidence of which we have long held so close in front of our eyes that we could not see and appreciate the forest of universality behind the single trees of knowledge.

1.1. Since our contribution concentrates on the evidence of the oldest Indo-Iranian ritual poetry and pragmatics, we have arrived at the conclusion that taxonomies, catalogs and poetical enumerations have the character of a fundamental structure of presentation of sacred knowledge in the Vedas and the Avesta.[9] Before going in depth into the analysis of the huge corpora of the Old Indic and Old Iranian oral literatures, I would like to briefly summarize “what has happened so far” in the field of exploration of these structures after the revival of interest in this field of research at the end of the last century.

1.1.1. Cosmological lists and catalogs of macrocosm items have been systematically described for the Avesta and the Veda,[10] with special subtypes such as “Creation Lists”[11] and liturgical “Purification Lists” by means of which, in ritual, the Universe is cleansed, element by element and category by category, by the mere performative speech act of pronouncing or repeating such catalogs.

1.1.2. For genealogical lists as mytho-poetical patterns, and catalogs of divine names in Indo-Iranian, see Panaino,[12] Sadovski and Panaino,[13] and Mahadevan;[14] for lists of clan genealogies with social relevance, including a subgroup of rulers’ lists comparable with Kings Lists of the Mesopotamian type also borrowed by Indo-European adstrate cultures such as the Hittites, cf. Bachvarova;[15] see also Brough on gotra- lists.[16] On lists of names of Vedic authors such as the Sarvānukramaṇī, more recently Mahadevan[17] and Mayrhofer,[18] quoting also older literature.

1.1.3. The genre of explicit enumeration of body-parts as lists (often of notable poetic elaboration) in rituals of (systematic) cursing and blessing is well attested to not only in Greek and Latin (and Near Eastern and Egyptian) sources, described e.g. by Versnel[19] and Gordon,[20] or in Celtic, Italic and Germanic spells of healing or malediction,[21] but also in Indo-Iranian ritual poetry, for which see Sadovski,[22]. A specific representative that unites such human “somatography” with macrocosmic aspects are cosmogonic hymns attested in several Indo-European traditions, such as the Puruṣa-Sūkta of the RV and its Old Norse pendant about the creation of the world from the body parts of a primordial giant, as narrated in the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson.[23]

1.1.4. Theological and ritualist lists of hypostatic appearances (“avatars”) of a deity[24] or of amulets for apotropaic objects and divinatory rites[25] are present in most of the archaic Indic and Iranian traditions, displaying common items and procedures in a form that in several symptomatic cases suggests common heritage.

1.1.5. Meta-lists of “multipartite formulae” and/or of ritual sequences are characteristic both for Vedic and Avestan cultic texts/activities—for the Veda e.g. on rituals dedicated to the 33 gods, see Gonda,[26] on the nivid-s see Minkowski;[27] for complex “suprastructure” lists consisting of several hymns of the kind explored in Sadovski,[28] see Lelli[29] with evidence for intratextual cohesion in Atharvavedic hymns dedicated to sacred kingship from the tradition of the Paippalāda-Saṃhitā; in Avestan: Kellens,[30] Schwartz,[31] and Cantera.[32]

1.1.6. Meta-lists of linguistic relevance which contain coded complex sound patterns, anagrams, word-plays, semantically linked conceptual lists: see Schwartz[33] and Sadovski[34] with literature, esp. on “glotto-logical” catalogs.

1.1.7. The various studies concerned with archaic Greek “catalog poetry”[35] published until now (proportionally not as frequent as the importance of the research area and the popularity of Homer and Hesiod would lead one to suppose) have been working—largely with no or only marginal knowledge of the comparanda of the non-Graeco-Roman Indo-European world—on structurally very similar genres and themes, such as the function of lists and enumerations within narratives,[36] genealogical lists,[37] the cognitive role of catalogs for classification purposes,[38] or as sources of knowledge transmission of more or less scholarly, historiographical pertinence.[39] These also include issues on performative forms and frameworks,[40] discursive forms like invocational catalogs[41] as well as aspects of verbal and exphrastic artistry,[42] esp. visualization and virtual geographical mind-mapping,[43] stylistic figures such as the priamel[44] or the “augmented triad,”[45] or the possibility of applying the concept of hypertext to ancient Greek catalogs using valuable modern cognitive know-how for the analysis of the Homero-Hesiodic poetic forms.[46] A special point of overall interest in the last three decades, beside the catalogs of Muses, Nereids and Oceanids in Hesiod and Homer[47] has been devoted to the Hesiodic catalog of the Heroines.[48]

Among the most important investigations on a meta-level, in this too brief and subjective introductory selection, we should not omit mentioning works of both philological and methodological relevance for the earliest Greek representatives of the genre—Edwards,[49] Stanley,[50] Visser,[51] once again Versnel[52] and Gordon,[53] Minchin,[54] the proceedings of two symposia dedicated to the catalog forms appearing in Kernos 19, 2006, (some of which we already have quoted), as well as Sammons[55] and Faraone.[56]

1.2. These cosmological taxonomies and catalogs evolve from basic to increasingly complex structures of myth and ritual. Thus, the performance of “Creation catalogs” in a ritual-liturgical context represents nothing less than the cultic “re-creation of Universe” hic et nunc:

Y. 37,1 (Yasna Haptaŋhāiti liturgy)
Cf. Narten 1986; Hintze 2007 and Watkins 2005, 681f.

iθā. āt̰. yazamaidē. ahurəm. mazdąm.
yə̄. gąmcā. aṣ̌əmcā. dāt̰.
apascā. dāt̰. uruuarā̊scā. vaŋv vhīš.
raocā̊scā. dāt̰. būmīmcā.
vīspācā. vohū.
And so we worship now the Wise Lord,
who created the Cow and Rightness,
created the Waters and good Plants,
created Light and the Earth,
and all good (things).

DNa 1ff: baga vazạrka Auramazdā
haya imām būmī̆m adā
haya avam asmānam adā
haya martiyam adā
haya šiyātim adā martiyahạyā
A great god is Ahuramazda,
who created this earth [the earth here],
who created yonder heaven [the heaven there],
who created man,
who created happiness for man [...].

1.2.1. The leading principle in such poetical structures is one of poetic concatenation,[57] combining list elements into an intertextual whole, with common nexus both on the formal and semantic level.

1.2.2. The formulaic character of these lists, enumerations or catalogs “is evident and a function of their status as repeated litanies. We may think of them as repeated performances, with unbounded variation, of the same basic “creation catalog” in the context of traditional oral literature.”[58] They exhibit special organizational and stylistic features such as:

Single item enumeration as the original organizing principle—most natural in a list.

Single items can be and are easily expanded to paired dyads like merisms, antitheses, kennings: “earth and heaven,” “light and darkness,” “water and fire” (apāṃ napāt- [“the grandson of Waters”]); single item enumeration also in the Old Persian text of Darius.[59]

1.2.3. We discuss further common lexical, phraseological and compositional topoi regarding the structure and arrangement of such lists in the Festschrift García-Ramón[60] as well as in the Festschrift Rüdiger Schmitt.[61] On relevant forms of textual organization such as anaphoras, epiphoras, “mesophoras,” symplokai, chiasms and parallelismi membrorum cf. Sadovski;[62] DIV 1: 57–66.

III. New Parallels of Multi-Partite Litanies between Veda and Avesta

2.0. Thanks to the recent assessment of numerous Avestan manuscripts containing the so-called “intercalated liturgies” of the Avesta, above all by Alberto Cantera and Jean Kellens,[63] we meanwhile know much more about the structure of Mazdayasnian liturgy as well as about the employment of the extant Avestan texts in the real context of the corresponding ritual activities—and not only in the de-contextualized form of the individual corpora[64] (secondarily) extracted from the liturgical manuscripts. New Indo-Iranian perspectives have been furnished by the discovery of the significance of the comparison between the Avestan “Long Liturgy” and some apocryphal Vedic traditions.[65] Slowly but surely, with the development of our heuristics, various Soma rituals and Haoma liturgies, bloodless and animal sacrifices turn out to show crucial common structures and even common ways of arrangement of the modules involved.

2.1. A great deal of new material comes from the “Long Liturgy” of the Avesta. It is a complex sequence of rituals (litanies and liturgical activities) containing an “innermost” liturgical circle—the liturgical nucleus in Old Avestan language—enlarged by a series of mutually corresponding Young Avestan Yasna texts before and after this Old Avestan core, respectively, which expand in a “bracketing” ritual framework further and further away from the liturgical centre. This structure of Old + Young Avestan Yasna portions can itself then be intercalated with other Young Avestan liturgical texts from the Vīsprad, the Vidēvdād, and the Vīštāsp Yašt, into a variegated meta-liturgy which eventually can consist of at least two and theoretically of up to five liturgical corpora. One of the most characteristic forms of the single litanies is that of a detailed and well-arranged catalog, so that the sequences of such individual litanies themselves build elaborate “catalogs of catalogs.” Figure 13.1 represents the structure of inner and more central strata (in the middle) that expand “from the centre outwards” by including more and more anterior and posterior ritual modules dialectically corresponding to one another:[66]

Fig. 13.1: Structure of the liturgical Avesta—a “Long Liturgy” version of Yasna + Vīsprad intercalations.iOn the concept of Ratu- repeated several times here, see briefly below, § 4.1, p. 367.

2.2. From an “innermost liturgical circle” (Old Avestan liturgical nucleus: Yasna Haptaŋhāiti 34, peaking in the central animal sacrifice) onwards, the ritual framework expands with Young Avestan texts arranged in a symmetrically-spiral manner “forwards and backwards” from this centre. Such a centrifugal textual expansion around an archaic nucleus is typical also for the Old Indic liturgies of the (Yajur-)Veda.[67] Thus, Avestan liturgy appears as a complex series of ritual modules whose relations we briefly summarize (in accord with the list given in Figure 13.1):

2.2.1. The beginning of the Liturgy (and of the table in Figure 13.1) consists of introductory lists (from the Yasna 1–7) of All [Greatest] Ratus (ratauuō vīspe [mazišta]), including Ahura Mazdā. What corresponds to them at the end of the table in Figure 13.1 are the last two chapters of the Yasna (Y. 71–72, last table row) with the concluding lists of All Ratus (ratauuō vīspe), including Ahura Mazdā.

2.2.2. These lists are followed (see the second table row) by praising formulae to the Fire which, in ritual, is styled as Son of Ahura Mazdā. What again corresponds to them at the end is a stanza about the returning of the Fire after the liturgy (Y. 62–72, the last-but-two table row).

2.2.3. The Haoma sacrifice (of the third and the fourth table row) begins with the election of the priests and their sacral investiture during which they leave the earthly dimension and transcend to the divine.[68] Its correspondence in the second part of liturgy is, in Y. 55,1, the returning of the priests from the divine to the earthly dimension (the sixth row from the end of the table).

2.2.4. The trans-substantiation of Fire in the first part of the liturgy, in Y. 17,11 (seventh table row), from the earthly to the divine Fire, has as its pendant in the second part the re-substantiation of the transcendental Fire to the new earthly fire (fifth row from the end of the table).

2.2.5. In the middle of the table we see the actual Old Avestan kernel in the centre of a multiple series of litanies (and marked by four square brackets): it is the (double) animal/meat sacrifice within the Haoma ritual.

2.2.6. The Avestan sacrifice has, consequently, a symmetric and cyclically evolving structure. The central strata expand stronger and stronger by including more and more “anterior” and “posterior” ritual modules.

There are crucial common structures and modules between the expanded Avestan Haoma sacrifice and the various forms of the Vedic Soma sacrifice: namely, Soma pressings with inclusion of an animal sacrifice.[69] The basis of comparison between Indic and Iranian rituals is, in this sense, solid: both major ritual structures and individual ritual modules of the Yasna have Vedic correspondences—in the Khilas of the Rigveda and in old Yajurvedic rituals.

III. A. Ritual Litanies in Indic and Iranian as “Hyper-Linked” Catalogs of the Universe: Interaction between Cosmological and Ritual Lists

3. In this section, we present a more complex series of catalogs and lists as a further archaic layer in the Avestan “Long Liturgy” that shows surprisingly good Vedic parallels.

The Avestan lists appear in a crucial position in the litanies of Yasna 71, at the end of the Liturgy, dedicated to the Waters and the Fire. The relevant stanzas Y. 71,9.20–24 present elaborate catalogs of all spheres of the Universe:

Y. 71,9.20–24:

9. vīspā̊ āpō xā̊ paiti θraotō.stātasca yazamaide:
vīspā̊ uruuarā̊ uruθmīšca paiti varšajīšca yazamaide:
vīspąmca ząm yazamaide:
vīspəmca asmanəm yazamaide:
vīspə̄sca strə̄ušca mā̊ŋhəmca huuarəca yazamaide:
vīspa anaγra raocā̊ yazamaide:
vīspąmca gąm upāpąmca upasmąmca
 fraptərəjātąmca rauuascarātąmca caŋraŋhācasca yazamaide

20. imā̊ apasca zəmasca uruuarā̊sca yazamaide:
imā̊ asā̊sca šōiθrā̊sca
 gaoiiaoitīšca maēθaniiā̊sca auuō.xvarənā̊sca yazamaide:
iməmca šōiθrahe paitīm yazamaide
yim ahurəm mazdąm

21. ratauuō vīspe mazišta yazamaide
aiiara asniia māhiia yāiriia sarəδa

22. aṣ̌āunąm vaŋuhīš sūrā̊ spəṇtā̊ frauuaṣ̌aiiō
 staomi zbaiiemi ufiiemi:
yazamaide
 nmāniiā̊ vīsiiā̊ zaṇtumā̊ dāx́iiumā̊ zaraθuštrōtəmā̊

23. ātrəm ahurahe mazdā̊ puθrəm aṣ̌auuanəm aṣ̌ahe ratūm  yazamaide:
haδa.zaoθrəm haδa.aiβiiā̊ŋhanəm
imat̰ barəsma aṣ̌aiia frastarətəm aṣ̌auuanəm aṣ̌ahe ratūm yazamaide:
apąm naptārəm yazamaide:
nairīm saŋhəm yazamaide:
taxməm dāmōiš upamanəm yazatəm yazamaide:
iristanąm uruuąnō yazamaide:
yā̊ aṣ̌aonąm frauuaṣ̌aiiō

24. ratūm bərəzaṇtəm yazamaide:
yim ahurəm mazdąm
yō aṣ̌ahe apanōtəmō
yō aṣ̌ahe jaγmūštəmō:
vīspa srauuā̊ zaraθuštri yazamaide:

The translation of the quoted passage sounds like this:

9. We worship all Waters, the ones in the springs
 and the ones in the courses of rivers,
we worship all Plants, the ones (that grow) on shoots and roots;
we worship the entire Earth;
we worship the entire Heaven;
and we worship all the Stars and the Moon and the Sun[light];
we worship the entire beginningless Light-Space;
and we worship all the Animals, the ones on/in the Waters
 (the aquatic ones) and the ones on/in the Earth,
 and the flying ones and the ones (living) in liberty,
 and the (animals living) on the pasture.

20. We worship these Waters and Lands and Plants (here);
we worship these Places and Dwelling-Places
 and Pastures and Residences and Watering-Places (here)
and we worship this Lord of the Dwelling-Place (here),
 (him) who (is) Ahura Mazdā.

21. We worship the Ratus, all, the greatest ones: the ones of the
 Days, of the Day-Sections, of the Months, of the Seasons,
 of the Year(s).

22. I praise, call, sing the good, mighty, holy (beneficent) frauuaṣ̌i-
 of the righteous ones;
we worship the ones (= frauuaṣ̌i-), who are related to the house,
 to the settlement, to the clan, to the country, the zaraθuštr-issimi.

23. We worship the Fire, Ahura Mazdā’s son, the righteous one,
 the Ratu of Rightness;
 “together” with the zaoθra-s, “together” with the girdle,
we worship this Barəsman, the one spread in a righteous manner,
 the righteous Ratu of Rightness:
we worship (the) Apąm Napāt
we worship (the) Nairiiō.saŋha
we worship (the) Dāmōiš Upamana
we worship the uruuan-s (souls) of the ones passed away,
 which (are) the frauuaṣ̌i-s of the righteous ones.

24. We worship the High Ratu,
who (is) Ahura Mazdā,
 the most sublime with regard to Rightness,
 the “one who has come furthest” / the most far-reaching one
 with regard to Rightness,
we worship all (“Zoroastrian”) zarathušθrian praisings
 (dóxai/doctrines).

4.0. This list throws a bridge to a bulk of new parallels of multi-partite catalog litanies between the Veda and the Avestan “Long Liturgy,” with a remarkable interaction between cosmological and ritual lists:

Both the Avestan and the Vedic litanies contain cultic links between elements of the macro- and microcosm, ritual articulation of time and space, theological entities, and, on a meta-level, designations for ritual Actions and sacred Words.

They both are also characterized by the re-use of cosmological lists and catalogs in solemn liturgical contexts—and also in “private rites,” even in rituals of white/black magic.

Above all, however, the catalog form substantially determines the characteristic shape of ritual texts and sections of the liturgical Avesta (Yasna, Vīsprad, Āfrīnagān)

4.1. Thus, the Vīsprad liturgy—starting already with its opening chapters, Vr. 1 and 2—contains invocations of the Ratu-s, lit. “articulations,” “regulators,” protectors and exemplary exponents of various spheres of the Universe and the Ritual.

The invocation formula sounds: “I dedicate the sacrifice, I fulfil it (for you,) o, Ratus of X and of Y.”

4.1.1. The series of litanies containing this invocation formula is to pronounce to the following catalog of groups of divine elements from the Avesta, for which the Veda—e.g. BaudhGS 2,8, see § 4.2.2, p. 368 below—delivers strong parallels:

The dimensions of “the Mental and the Material” as fundamental categories of Zoroastrianism—to which in Vedic lists the fundamental Indic categories “Movable and Immovable” correspond.

Aquatic animals, those living in the earth, “the flying ones, the ones living in freedom, the ones living on the pasture”—the Vedic parallel mentions “Aquatic animals and Reptiles.”

The Periods of time (also containing a list of Seasons)—to them, in the Vedic catalog correspond the lists of “Places, Periods of time, Worlds.”

The unity of Ahura Mazdā and Zaraθuštra, as God and his Priest-Prophet / Seer, with the Priests of Avestan ritual—its Vedic pendant is the list item “Gods and R̥ṣis / Seers.”

The parts of the [liturgical!] Avesta, the Sacred Words applied as ritual formulae (esp. the Gāthās)—as their correspondence, the Vedic list ends with Bráhman, the Sacred Word applied as ritual formula (!).

(1) ● the “Mental and Material” (fundamental
 Zoroastrian categories) [Vr. 1,1 & Vr. 2,1]
→ cf. Ved. “Movable and Immovable”: § 4.2.2 (5), p. on input line 282

(2) ● Aquatic animals, those living in the earth, the flying ones,
 the ones living in freedom, the ones living on the pasture
 [Vr. 1,1 & Vr. 2,1]
→ cf. Ved. Aquatic animals and Reptiles: § 4.2.2 (6), p. on input line 284

(3) ● the Periods of time (+ list of Seasons) [Vr. 1,2 & Vr. 2,2]
→ cf. Ved. “Places, Periods of time, Worlds”: § 4.2.2 (7), p. on input line 286

(4) ● Ahura Mazdā & Zaraθuštra, God and Priest-Prophet/Seer
 [Vr. 2,4 & *Vr. 1,4], as well as the Priests of
 Avestan ritual [Vr. 3,1][70]
→ cf. Ved. Gods and R̥ṣis/Seers: § 4.2.2 (8), p. on input line 288

(5) ● the parts of the [ritual!] Avesta, the
 Sacred Words applied as ritual formulae (esp. Gāthās)
 [Vr. 1,4–9 & Vr. 2,5–11]
→ cf. Ved. Bráhman, Sacred Word(s) applied as ritual formula(e): § 4.2.2 (11), p. on input line 295

13.1 Catalogical litanies in the Avestan “Long Liturgy” (Yasna with Vīsprad intercalations.)

4.1.2. This fixed list of multiple litanies is cyclically repeated in the Avestan liturgy—just as in the Vedic ritual. Moreover, the Avestan Yasna liturgy[71] contains the common Indo-Iranian ritual and mythological topos of the “33 divinities,” presented as ratu-s of the Universe.

4.2.1. The structures in the Veda parallel to these Avestan catalogs develop in the archaic traditions of the liturgy of the RV (Khilas) to popular rites with invocations of the r̥tu-s, the “articulations,” “regulators,” sections of the Universe or “seasons” of time. Significantly, this happens for instance in the ritual sequence dedicated to the souls of Ancestors (pitar-s)[72]; compare the rituals dedicated to the Avestan frauuaṣ̌i-s and the Avestan idea of ratu-fri- “the satisfaction of the Ratu-s.”

4.2.2. The Vedic sacrificial mantras addressed to the [33!] Vāstoṣpati, “the Lords of the Dwelling-(Place),” in the domestic ritual of sanctification of a new erected house[73] according to the Baudhāyana-Gr̥hya-Sūtra—the vaiśvadeva- ritual of BaudhGS 2,8— contain the same invocation formulae, distributed as litanies within 25 oblations.

The ritual is accomplished in the middle of the house and pronounced to the same groups of divine entities as in the Avestan list (see § 4.1.1, p. 367 above):

(1) ● Earth, Intermediate Space, Sky

(2) ● Sun, Moon

(3) ● Asterisms/Nakṣatras (cf. TB. 3,4,17,1; TĀ. 1,32,2; 10,4,1)

(4) ● Waters, Plants (Herbs) and Trees (for this triad, e.g.,
 also VS. 17, 1)i

(5) ● the Movable and Immovable (fundamental Vedic categories)

(6) ● Aquatic animals and Reptiles

(7) ● the Places, Periods of time, Worlds

(8) ● the Gods and R̥ṣis

(9) ● the Vasus, Rudras and Ādityas (three classes of gods
 listed together also otherwise)

(10) ● Indra, Br̥haspati, Prajāpatiii

(11) ● and, as culmination, the creative Sacred Word,
 (the) Bráhman.

13.2 Catalogical litanies in the (Yajur-)Vedic Liturgy of House Sanctification.iUp to this part of the complex catalog, cf. the items set in bold case with the lists of elements in the cosmological catalogs quoted above in § 1.1.1, p. 358, and esp. in § 1.2, p. 361. The items 1–4 of the Vedic list correspond to analogous Avestan items in other lists of the Vīsprad and Yasna, too.iiThese deities are coupled also at R̥V. 1,90,9; 8,96,15; 10,103,8, etc.; cf. Gonda (1983, 11, 22, 29); for sequences of names in -pati cf. also KāṭhGS 22,3. For the corresponding Avestan formation cf. above p. 365: šōiθrahe paitīm.

Thus this formulary “begins with the genius of the house and, after addressing important objects and beings that belong to the inanimate and animate world, ends with individual gods the last of which is, by way of climax, the ‘biunity’ Prajāpati and Brahman (Prajāpati is there simply sarvaṃ brahma).”[74]

The parallels between the ritual catalogs and their individual items cannot be greater and follow, moreover, in the same arrangement:

Avestan list
Vedic list

(1) ● the “Mental and Material”
(1) ● the “Movable and Immovable”

(2) ● Aquatic animals, those
 living in the earth, etc.
(2) ● Aquatic animals and reptiles

(3) ● the Periods of time (+ list of Seasons)
(3) ● Places, Periods of time, Worlds

(4) ● Ahura Mazdā & Zaraθuštra, God and Seer; Priests of Avestan ritual
(4) ● the Gods and Seers
(for priests of Vedic ritual
 cf. RV[-Kh]).

(5) ● Gāthās, Sacred Word(s) as ritual formulae
(5) ● Bráhman,  Sacred Word as ritual formula(e)

13.3 Parallels between catalogical litanies in the Avesta and the (Yajur-)Veda.

III. B. Recursive Liturgical Lists in the Fire Cult

5. As we have seen, the Vedic-Avestan catalog parallels consist not only in individual concepts and forms but comprise entire ritual modules and their arrangement.

The Avestan Liturgy opens and closes with lists of the so-called Ratu- (“articulations”), both “regulators” and “spheres of arrangement” of the Right cosmic Order:

5.1.1. One of them is the central liturgical catalog of “All Ratus,” Avestan vīspe ratauuō (> Visprad) and ratauuō vīspe mazišta. The list of the Thirty-Three Deities which it contains structurally corresponds to another list, the one of the Thirty-Three Ratus (“articulations”) of the ritual texts of the Avesta.[75] Here, cosmology and ritualism meet in the numerical expression of (totality and) significance by means of the sacred number 33, typical both of Iranian and (as we have seen in §§ 4.2.1–4.2.2, pp. 368–368) of Indic traditions.

5.1.2. Another remarkable Ratu- catalog is that of the essential sacred constituents of the Fire ritual, shortly: “Fire list,” which appears in crucial positions within the liturgy, i.e. at the beginning and at the end of the Avestan Yasna:

Yasna 71,23–24 / Vīsprad 7,5:
ātrəm ahurahe mazdā̊ puθrəm aṣ̌auuanəm aṣ̌ahe
 ratūm yazamaide:
 haδa.zaoθrəm haδa.aiβiiā̊ŋhanəm
imat̰ barəsma aṣ̌aiia. frastarətəm aṣ̌auuanəm aṣ̌ahe
 ratūm yazamaide:
apąm naptārəm yazamaide:
nairīm saŋhəm yazamaide:
taxməm dāmōiš upamanəm yazatəm yazamaide:
iristanąm uruuąnō yazamaide:
 yā̊ aṣ̌aonąm frauuaṣ̌aiiō

(1) “We worship you, the Fire (Ātar), the righteous,i
 the son of Ahura Mazdā, the Ratu of Rightness,
(2) (as one who is/goes) together with the libations (zaoθra-s),
 (as one who is/goes) together with the girdle (of ritual initiation),
 we worship the sacrificial straw (barəsman-), the one spread out
 in accord with Rightness,
(3) we worship (the) Apąm Napāt (“Grandson of Waters”),
(4) we worship (the) Nairiia- saŋha-
 (“the one who has/gives the praise of men”).
(5) We worship the heroic yazata- Dāmōiš Upamana.
(6) We worship the souls of the ones passed away,
 which (are) the frauuaṣ̌i-s of the righteous ones.”

13.4 The “Fire list” in the Ratu litanies of the Avestan ritual—Yasna and Vīsprad.iFor a systematic use of “rightness” for Avestan aṣ̌a-, Ved. r̥tá-, and of “wrongness” for Avestan druj-, Ved. druh-/drogha-, see the practice of Martin Schwarz (e.g. in Schwartz 2003, 376 ff., 2006 etc.).

5.1.3. Note also that in the context of the Fire veneration at the end of Avesta (see the stanza quoted above, vss. [5]–[6]), the Fire is explicitly linked to the “souls of the ones passed away” of the people from the clan or the major (Mazdāyasnian) community.

5.2. The Vedic text parallel to the Avestan Ratu- catalog of Table 13.4 comes from the RV apocryphs (Khila) and is a “list of lists” itself. The so-called R̥tuyāja-Praiṣādhyaya 1–4 from the RV-Kh. 7(1).[76] contains (a) the list of priests elected and having to explicitly make their choice for their respective functions within the Haoma ritual;[77] (b) the “Fire list”:

5.2.1. The basic catalog corresponds to the Avestan list, both in its items and in their arrangement:

(1) Let the Libator (Hotar)i worship (the) Fire (Agni),
 kindled with fuel, with good fuel, on the navel of the earth,
 at the center of what is agreeable, on the top of heaven,
 on the place of nourishment. Let him partake of the ghee.
 Hotar, worship.

(2) Let the Hotar worship (the) Tanū-napāt
 (“the Grandson of the [own] body [of oneself]”), the child of Aditi,
 the protector of the world. Today let the divine [Tanū-napāt]
with sweet nectar anoint for the gods the paths that the gods follow.
 Let him partake of the ghee. Hotar, worship.

(3) Let the Hotar worship (the) Narā-śaṁsa
 (“the one who has/gives the praise of men”), praised by men, leader
 of men. May [Narā-śaṁsa] be provided with a vapā through [his]
cows, powerful through [his] heroes, the first to arrive through [his]
 chariots, golden through [his] gold. Let him partake of the ghee.
 Hotar, worship.

(4) Let the Hotar worship (the [very first hymn of the RV. starting
 with the words]) “Agnim Īḷe”[78] [≠Minkowski (1991, 200):
 “Let the Hotar worship Agni as the nourishments”]. The
 nourished one [lacking in transl.!], the god, the messenger,
 the wise, the bearer of offerings, being praised, should bring
 the gods here. May the god aid this yajña, this invocation of the
 gods. Let him partake of the ghee. Hotar, worship.

(5) Let the Hotar worship the sacrificial straw (barhis). Let
 [the barhis], forming a good cushion, soft as wool, spread out
 in all directions, a good seat for the gods at this yajña.
 Let the Vasus, Rudras and Ādityas sit down on it today. May it
 be pleasing to Indra. Let [the barhis] partake of the ghee.
 Hotar, worship.

13.5 The “Fire list” in the Veda—core list within the R̥tu-yāja- ritual (RV-Khila).icf. the repeated mention of the zaoθra-s in the Av. text.

5.2.2. This basic catalog occurs in the beginning of a complex “list of lists” in the R̥tu-yāja- litany attested in the RV apocryphs (Khila). In Table 13.6 we see stanzas 1–32 from a total of 72 stanzas of the entire litany:

[Cycle 1 (11 stanzas)]:
[Cycle 3 (further 11 stanzas)]:

(1) Agni

(2) Tanū-napāt

(3) Narā-śaṁsa

(4) Agnim Īḷe

(5) Barhis
(22) Barhis

(6) Heavenly Doors
(23) Heavenly Doors

(7) Dawn-and-Night
(24) Dawn-and-Night
(25) The two Nourishers
   [cf. (Agnim) Īḷe!]
(26) Strength-and-Offering

(8) Hótārau, Pótārau
(27) Hótārau, Pótārau, Neṣṭārau

(9) The Three Goddesses—
   Iḷā, Sarasvatī, Bhāratī
(28) The Three Goddesses—newline    Iḷā, Sarasvatī, Bhāratī

(10) Tvaṣṭar
(29) Narā-śaṁsa

(11) Vanaspati
(30) Vanaspati

[Cycle 2: 11+1 stanzas:]
(12)–(14) Agni [NB: (13):
   svā́ha “hail”]
(31) Barhis

(15) Agni. (16)–(17)
   Agni-and-Soma. (18) Agni.
(19) Agni-and-Soma

(19A) Vanaspati. (20) Vanaspati. (20A) Vanaspati

(21) Agni Sviṣṭakr̥t
(32) Agni Sviṣṭakr̥t.—From 33 on: repetitive litanies.

13.6 “Lists of lists” in the major context of the R̥tu-yāja- litanies (RV-Khila).

Remarkably, the R̥tu-yāja-litany of the RVKh has the same number as the 72 stanzas of the Avestan Yasna liturgy, and a similar name to one of the Avestan Visprad liturgy, R̥tu-yāja meaning “worship of the R̥tu-s”[79]! After the basic list, we observe a series of cyclic item repetitions, very similar to the repetitions of entire lists in the Vīsprad and Yasna ritual quoted above. The core of the crucial “Cycle 1” in the left column of Table 13.6 (no. 1–11) is built, again, by our list (set in bold case): 1. Fire, 2. Tanū-napāt, 3. Narā-śaṁsa, 4. Agnim Īḷe, 5. barhis. Up to no. 11, we have the same catalogs of divine objects of veneration (underlined in the table) as in the 11 litanies of āprī- hymns of the RV+ (see below, § 6, p. 375). Then offerings to Soma and Agni follow that build a “Cycle 2” of further 11+1 stanzas (the additional 1, the so-called “svā́ha” stanza, represents here, as well as in the āprī- hymns, the mystical unit beyond the wholeness of otherwise 11 elements of the closed cycle).[80] From no. 22 onwards previously listed elements are harmonically repeated and form a Cycle 3 of further 11 stanzas, starting with the Barhis and ending with Agni the Maker of good Offering (Sviṣṭakr̥t).

5.3.1. The detailed analysis of the Indian and the Iranian lists allows the following conclusion: The two parallel lists exhibit practically the same divine/cosmic entities and ritual items. Thus the Avestan kernel list consists of: Fire, Sacrificial Straw (Barəsman), the deity Apąm Napāt “Grandson of Waters,” the deity Nairiiō.saŋha “Praise of Men.” The Vedic parallel consists of Fire, the deity Tanū-napāt “Grandchild of the Body,” the deity Narā-śaṁsa “Praise of Men,” and the Sacrificial Straw (Barhis). Beside the essential parallels between the divine, cosmic entities, and ritual items in the R̥tu-/Ratu-litanies, the basic catalogs follow the same basic order, as summarized in Table 13.7 (differing positions are indicated in parentheses after the item):

Avestan list: Vīsprad 7,5 / Yasna 71,23–24 | Vedic list: RV-Kh. 7(,1) / R̥tuyāja-Praiṣādhyaya
(1) Fire (Ātar) | (1) Fire (Agni)
(2) Barəsman | (2) Barhis (4)
(3) Apąm Napāt | (3) Tanū-napāt (2)
(4) Nairiiō.saŋha | (4) Narā-śaṁsa (3)

13.7 Parallels of the basic catalogs in the R̥tu-/Ratu-litanies.

5.3.2. The Fire lists show, however, also one and the same ritual contextualization: In the Vedic Ritual, every sacrifice is opened with a rite concerning the Fire/Agni.[81] Before the main types of sacrifices start, a series of pre-sacrifices—pra-yāja-—take place, dedicated to Fire, to his various aspects as well as to other deities. The numbers vary:[82]

There are 5 pre-sacrifices for the normal sacrificial rituals of the Veda, a number to which in the Avesta the five entities of the fire list correspond, viz. in the list of Y. 71,23 quoted above, since the objects of worship there are five: Fire, the barəsman-, Apąm Napāt-, Nairiiō.saŋha- and Dāmōiš Upamana-,—

alternatively, there are 9 pre-sacrifices for the cāturmāsya- sacrifices,

10 or 11 pre-sacrifices for the animal sacrifice—of the type whose yājya- formulae are called āprī-!,

or 12 pre-sacrifices, in the same framework (Schol. ad KātyŚS 3,2,23,3,6–8)—cf. the case of the r̥tu-yāja-s in which the originally 8 grahas have been increased to 12, in order to correspond to the (later/class.) idea of r̥tú- as “season.”

5.3.3. The order can be decisive for making the difference between the individual clans, especially the second position of the list:

6. The question of which deity is addressed exactly in the second pre-sacrifice is determining for the (self-)identification of the clans and families of the Vedic priests and poets: Thus we arrive at those ancient RV-Texts which contain some of the best (but so far ignored) parallels between the Veda and the Avesta—the Āprī-litanies.

6.0. These highly archaic rituals are attested for every single family of the Family Books RV. II–VIII—but also for all four Vedic Saṃhitās, including the Atharvaveda!

6.1. In the Āprī-litanies in the R̥gveda-Saṃhitā, there appear the same lists of eleven deities (see Table 13.6) which we just have met in the Avesta and the R̥tu-yāja-liturgy of the RV apocryphs: First: Fire, second: the deity Tanū-napāt, third: the deity Narā-śaṁsa, fifth: the Sacrificial Straw (Barhis).

In the right table column I show that the Āprī-litanies are attested in the whole Rigveda, for every single family of the Family Mandalas—and not only this but also in all four Vedic Saṃhitās, including the Atharvaveda. As a twelfth element at the end of the List of the Eleven, we find the final sacred call svāha “hail!”, just like in the 11+1 stanzas of the Cycle 2 in the R̥tu-yāja- litany.

1. Agni (standard order of the list:
 e.g. RV.1,13)
2. Tanū-napāt
3. Narā-śaṁsa (no. 3 or 2,
 cf. e.g. RV. 2,3)
4. Agnim Īḷe (or a formation of a
 root īḍ-)
5. Barhis
6. Heavenly Doors
7. Dawn-and-Night (or in reverse
 cmpd. order)
8. Hótārau (in ellipt. Dual;
 alias Pótārau)
9. The Three Goddesses
 (or, explicitly named:)
 Iḍā, Sarasvatī, Bhāratī
10. Tvaṣṭar
11. Vanas-pati
12. “The final acclaim”: Svāha|newline  call, as the surplus element
 in the “Eleven items list”
● Cf., for what concerns the complete representatives of the genre in the RV-Saṃhitā:
– Maṇḍala I: RV. 1,13; RV. 1,142; RV. 1,188.
– Maṇḍala II: RV. 2,3.
– Maṇḍala III: RV. 3,4.
– Maṇḍala V: RV. 5,5.
– Maṇḍala VII: RV. 7,2.
– Maṇḍala IX: RV. 9,5.
–  Maṇḍala X: RV. 10,70;
   RV. 10,110, this one with a parallel
   sūkta included into AVŚ. as 5,12.
–  Beside these sūktas, there
   are certain āprī-sūkta- “imitations”:
   RV. 9,5.
On AVŚ. 5,27 (with AVP parallel) see below.

13.8 “Eleven items list” (containing the basic catalog) in the Āprī litanies (RV+) as compared with the lists in the R̥tu-yāja- liturgy (and their Avestan pendants)

6.2. Furthermore, the Āprī hymns of the RV, often considered as representatives of alternative and/or older liturgical types, (then) incorporated into the solemn ritual or into “private rites,” occur especially in rites of animal sacrifice and in common liturgical activities within clans of hostile families for the purpose of reconciliation of the clan, with reference to a common ancestor cult:

rites of animal sacrifice (Oldenberg (1967–1993, e.g. 1967: 1, 44.383 etc.); Gonda (1974, 124ff.))

common liturgical activities within clans of hostile families for the purpose of reconciliation of the clan[83] and as representation of the “common seed.”

6.3. For an example of an entire Āprī- hymn, in which the above-mentioned lists can be observed in their context, I would like to refer to the Atharvaveda versions of Āprī-litanies which simultaneously show how such rituals, with certain structural changes, have been further adapted to be used in magical practice—AVŚ. 5,27[84]:

ūrdhuvā́ asya samídho bhavantiy
ūrdhuvā́ śukrā́ śocī́ṣiy agnéḥ |
dyumáttamā suprátīkaḥ sásūnus
tánūnápād ásuro bhū́ripāṇiḥ ||1||
Uplifted becomes his fuel,
 uplifted the bright burnings of
 Agni,
most brilliant; of beautiful aspect, with his son,—
[2.] son of himself (Tánūnápāt),
 ásura, many-handed,—

devó devéṣu deváḥ
pathó anakti mádhvā ghr̥téna ||2||
A god among gods, the god
anoints the roads with honey (mádhu),
 with ghee.

mádhvā yajñám nakṣati praiṇānó
nárāśáṃso agníḥ sukŕ̥d deváḥ
savitā́ viśvávāraḥ ||3||
With honey he attains the sacrifice,
 pleased,
the praised of men (Nárāçáṁsa),
 Agni the well-doing,
the heavenly impeller (Savitár),
 having all choice things.

áchāyám eti śávasā ghr̥tā́ cid
ī́ḍāno váhnir námasā ||4||
4. Here he cometh with might
 (çávas) unto the various ghees,
praising, he the carrier, with
 homage,—

agníḥ srúco adhvaréṣu prayákṣu
sá yakṣad asya mahimā́nam
 agnéḥ ||5||
5 [4c]. Agni, unto the spoons, at
 the sacrifices (adhvará),
 the profferings (prayáj).
[5.] May he sacrifice his greatness,
 Agni’s,—

tarī́ mandrā́su prayákṣu
vásavaś cā́tiṣṭhan vasudhā́taraś
 ca ||6||
6 [5 b]. [He] crossing (?) among
 pleasant profferings;
both the Vasus stood and the
 greater bestower of good (vásu).

dvā́ro devī́r ánuv asya víśve
vratáṃ rakṣanti viśváhā ||7||
7 [6]. The heavenly doors all
defend always after his course
 (vratá)—

uruvyácasāgnér dhā́mnā pátyamāne |
ā́ suṣváyantī yajaté upā́ke
uṣā́sānáktémáṃ yajñám
avatām adhvarám naḥ ||8||
8 [6 c]. Lording it with Agni’s
 domain of wide expansion,
[7.] dripping, worshipful, close,
let dawn and night favor this
 our inviolable (? adhvará)
 sacrifice.

dáivā hótāra ūrdhvám adhvaráṃ no
ʹagnér jihváyābhí gr̥nata
gr̥nátā naḥ suvìṣṭaye |
tisró devī́r barhír édáṃ sadantām
íḍā sárasvatī mahī́
bhā́ratī gr̥ṇānā́ ||9||
9 [8]. O heavenly Hotars, sing ye
 unto our uplifted sacrifice [...]
with Agni’s tongue;
sing in order to our successful
 offering.
[9.] Let the three goddesses sit
 upon this barhís,
Iḍā, Sarasvatī, Bhāratī,
the great, besung.

tán nas turī́pam ádbhutaṃ purukṣú |
déva tvaṣṭā rāyás poṣaṃ
ví ṣya nā́bhim asya ||10||

10. That wonderful seminal fluid
 (turī́pam) of ours, abounding
 in food,
O god Tvashṭar, abundance
 of wealth,
release thou the navel of it.

vánaspaté ʹava sr̥jā
rárāṇaḥ | tmánā devébhiyo
agnír havyáṃ śamitā́
 svadayatu ||11||
11. O forest-tree, let thou loose,
bestowing; let Agni [as] queller
willingly sweeten the oblation
 for the gods.

agne svā́hā kr̥ṇuhi
jātavedaḥ | índrāya yajñáṃ
víśve devā́ havír idáṃ
 juṣantām ||12||
12. O Agni, hail! make thou,
O Jātavedas, the sacrifice for Indra;
let all the gods enjoy this oblation.

7. If we proceed to the comparative perspective, the structure of Āprī-hymns reminds us very strongly of the litanies of the Avesta. Since three different studies in preparation for press are dedicated to various aspects of this comparison,[85] in the present context I have to limit myself to some highlights with relevance to the specific subject of the lists and catalogs. In the Yasna and the Visprad liturgies, four identical elements appear in such lists:

7.1. Remarkably, instead of the Vedic deity Tanū-napāt-[86] in the Avestan context the old Indo-Iranian deity Apąm Napāt- occurs: “We worship the Fire, the Sacrificial Straw, the deity Apąm Napāt, the deity Nairiiō.saŋha. We worship the souls of the ones passed away.” In fact, we see here the same usual suspects as in the Vedic framework:

7.1.1. Who is Apąm Napāt-? Both in Indic and in Iranian it is an aquatic deity, simultaneously hypostasis of Fire (Ved. Agni-, Av. Ātar-) as mystic “Grandson” of Waters.[87]

7.1.2. The “Grandson” of waters has to do with two Indo-Iranian notions: with the Fire’s brilliance, Ved. várcas- / Av. varəcah- “sparkling” (esp. “magic sparkling” [Klingenschmitt]) and with śrī́- / Av. srī- “magnificence, majesty etc.,”[88] in Vedic also with śúci- “glowing, gleaming” and téjas- “sharpness; brilliance.”

7.1.3. Therefore, this deity is deeply connected with the concept of xšat-ra- “(sacred) royalty/kingship” and is called himself xša-riia- “kṣatrī̆ya-.” The concepts of brilliance quoted above have been interpreted as the brilliance of sacred kingship; in the Veda, nevertheless, they primarily belong to the sphere of Agni as Fire-god of ritual, identified with typical forms of sacer-dotium such as the liturgical functions of Hotar, Brahmán and Purohita. Compare the invocation (from the Yasna Introduction, Y. “0,”5): “I invite for worship the high Lord, the one connected with (sacred) kingship, the shining one, Apąm Napāt.” A second parallel is attested to precisely in the Fire stanza at the end of the Avesta which corresponds to the stanza from the Avestan pre-sacrifice (Y. 17,11).[89]

7.1.5. An essential feature of the Avestan Apąm Nápāt- is his presence in the ritual in two crucial places of the r̥tú- composition, in which Fire and Water are in immediate contact, namely:

(a.) at the very beginning, during the liturgical process of the transubstantiation of the common straw, daily fire and waters to ritual Straw, Fire and Waters—to become during the ceremony the Straw of the feast of gods, the Fire, Son of Ahura Mazdā, hosting the gods on this Straw, and the Waters among whom he grows up—just like the Vedic Agni does, and

(b.) at its very end, in the context of the “return back on/to the earth”;[90] as well as

(c.) at the break of the day.

7.2. The Indo-Iranian[91] deity Av. Nairiiō.saŋha- / Ved. Narā-śaṃsa-[92] ← narāṁ śaṁsa- < *Hnarām ćámsa- (also Nr̥-śaṁsa-, Śaṁsa-)—is strongly connected with the cult to the ancestors. Thus, in Vd. 19,32, the souls of righteous Zoroastrians go to Ahura Mazdā and unite with Nairiiō.saŋha-:

Vd. 19,32: xšnūtō aṣ̌aonąm
 uruuānō pāraiieiṇti
auui ahurahe mazdā̊
auui aməṣ̌anam spəṇtanąm
auui gātuuō zaraniiō.kərətō
auui garō nmānəm
   maēθanəm ahurahe mazdā̊
   maēθanəm aməṣ̌anąm spəṇtanąm
   maēθanəm aniiaēšąm aṣ̌aonąm [...]
32. Satisfied, the souls of the ones
 full of Rightness go forth
in the direction of Ahura Mazdā,
in the direction of the
 Aməṣ̌a Spəṇtas’
in the direction of seats made
 of gold,
in the direction of the House of
 the Praise,
   the dwelling-place of
   Ahura Mazdā,
   the dwelling-place of the
   Aməṣ̌a Spəṇtas,
   the dwelling-place of the ones
   full of Rightness.

Vd. 19,34: narō aṣ̌auuanō
 hąm.bauuaiṇti
nairiiō saŋhō hąm.bauuaiti
aštō mazdā̊ ahurahe
mrūiδi nairiiō saŋhō:
xvatō nizbaiiaŋuha zaraθuštra
imat̰ dąma yat̰ ahurahe mazdā̊
34. The men, the ones full of
 Rightness, get together,
Nairiiō.saŋha gets together
 (with them);
the messenger of Mazdā Ahura,
 say (= i.e.), Nairiiō.saŋha:
By yourself call down to you,
 o Zaraθuštra,
this creation, which (is the one)
 of Ahura Mazdā.

7.3. Interestingly, one of the main divergences between the ritual traditions of the individual Vedic clans is the question of who comes in the second position of this cultic list:

7.3.1. Most of the Vedic poets invoke (“call down”) Tanū-napāt- before Narā-śaṁsa-.

7.3.2. The reverse order, Narā-śaṁsa- before Tanū-napāt-, appears only in the collections of the clans of the Vāsiṣṭhas, Śaunakas, Ātreyas.

7.3.3. The Avestan text shows the combination Apąm Napāt- + Nairiiō.saŋha-, a feature that enforces the possibility of grouping the Avesta with Vedic texts of specific clans, in connection with the well-known but still not well explained fact that Zaraθuštra is called āθrauuan- (< *āθauruuan- “the one whi has to do with Atar/Fire”).[93]

For the purposes of our volume, as I hope, this evidence from two of the most ancient and well attested Indo-European traditions can give rich material for brainstorming from a contrastive and typological perspective, taking into consideration similar phenomena e.g. from Mesopotamia and Ancient Asia Minor, where the textual and ritual genres in question are abundantly attested and parallelisms expected: thus, our reciprocally fertilized meta-knowledge of these complex data may locate still more “smoking guns” in more distant traditions and allow to follow them on their hot traces back to multilingual and multicultural vicissitudes and perhaps even to common periods of mutually fertilized knowledge (or at least cultural migration with common “wandering motifs”) in the ancient East—and beyond.

References

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Footnotes

[1] On the working meetings of the Multilingualism Research Group, the volumes published so far and the forthcoming projects, see Geller (2014, 43–44, table 4); Sadovski (2013, 154–156 with fn. 8–14) and further literature.

[2] See Braarvig et al. (2012; 2013).

[3] Cf. Badalanova Geller forthcoming.

[4] The papers of both these conferences are to appear together in Braarvig et al. (forthcoming).

[5] Abbreviations of texts used: IE = Indo-European. (a) Vedic: RV = R̥gveda; unmarked = R̥gveda-Saṃhitā. RVKh = R̥gveda-Khila.—AV = Atharvaveda, esp. AVŚ = Atharvaveda-Saṃhitā (Śaunaka branch); AVP = Atharvaveda-Saṃhitā, Paippal āda branch; Kauś = Kauśika-Sūtra.—YV = Yajurveda, esp.: Black YV: TS = Taittirīya-Saṃhitā. BaudhGS = Baudhāyana-Gr̥hya-Sūtra. White YV: ŚB = Śatapatha-Brāhmaṇa.—SV = Sāmaveda, esp.: JB= Jaminīya-Brāhmaṇa. (b)Avestan: Y = Yasna. GAv. = Gāthic Avestan. YAv = “Young” Avestan, esp.: Yt = Yašt; Vd. = Vidēvdād; Vr. = Vīsprad.

[6] See below, § 1.1.7, p. 360.

[7] See Durkheim and Mauss (1901–1902 [1903]) and the new edition of this work from 1969, with lucid remarks from R. Needham (Durkheim and Mauss 2009 [1969], xxi f.); this line of research into ritual and myth has been continued, if from a different angle, by Lincoln (2014 [1989]; 1999).

[8] Veldhuis (1997, 1–9, 137 ff.); Selz (2007 and esp. 2011).

[9] For some general statistical figures about the presence of catalog structures in individual collections of Vedic and Avestan texts, see Sadovski (2013, 154); these proportions even increase in texts of the period of the acme of the (Yajur-)Vedic and (Young) Avestan ritual poetry and prose in which the detailed, by far non-(only)-linear, and stylistically highly elaborate types of catalog enumeration achieve the status of main structural and compositional forms.

[10] Klaus (1986); Sadovski (2013, 158–173).

[11] Cf. e.g. Watkins (2005), and Toporov (1981).

[12] Panaino (2002).

[13] Sadovski and Panaino (2013, 7ff.), and especially Panaino and Sadovski (2007, 35ff.).

[14] Mahadevan (forthcoming).

[15] Bachvarova (2012).

[16] Brough (1953).

[17] Mahadevan (2011).

[18] Mayrhofer (2003).

[19] Versnel (1998).

[20] Gordon (2000).

[21] More recently Michajlova (2004), cf. Toporov (1993).

[22] Sadovski (2012, 334ff.); DIV 1; cf. also Sadovski in Panaino and Sadovski (2007, 49ff.).

[23] From the flood of literature on this topos in IE languages I will limit myself to quoting three classical summaries of three research periods of the last 80 years, viz. Brown (1931; 1965, 25ff.), West (2007, 357f.) concerning the question of a link to the IE Twin myth, and Jamison and Brereton (2014, 1537ff.), along with commentary and older literature.

[24] Sadovski (2009, 158ff.).

[25] About the Avesta, see Sadovski (2009, 159–166).

[26] Gonda (1983).

[27] Minkowski (1997), and now Proferes (2014).

[28] Sadovski (2013, 165–173).

[29] Lelli (2015).

[30] Kellens (2006; 2007; 2010; 2011; 2015).

[31] Schwartz (2002; 2003; 2006; 2009; 2010).

[32] E.g. Cantera (2009; 2010; 2013; 2014b; 2014a); cf. Cantera (2016a).

[33] Schwartz (1986; 2002; 2006; 2009; 2009 etc.).

[34] Sadovski (2005; 2013, 182–186).

[35] Further representatives of “catalogical poetry” in the Indo-European oikumene such as the Germanic þulur (cf. Vogt 1942 or Gurevič 1992) have regularly been the object of comparative discussions as a part of my class on Indo-European poetry, ritual and mythology that takes place within the Advanced Indo-European Programme of the Leiden University Summer School of Languages and Linguistics—on its most recent edition cf. http://www.hum.leiden.edu/summerschool/programmes-2017/indo-european-programme-ii.html, accessed March 7, 2017. It is a pleasant duty to me to thank our students and the Director of the Summer School, Alexander Lubotsky, for the fruitful atmosphere of active brainstorming and creative discussions which this remarkable scholarly framework has given Lernenden und Lehrenden for the past twelve years.

[36] Beye (1958; 1964, esp. on the battle narratives).

[37] Calame (2006).

[38] Papadopoulou-Belmehdi (2006).

[39] Simpson and Lazenby (1970).

[40] Minchin (1996).

[41] Minton (1962).

[42] Crossett (1969); Webb (2009).

[43] Clay (2011).

[44] Among others, Race (1982).

[45] West (2004).

[46] Bakker (2001); Tsagalis (2010).

[47] See e.g. Deichgräber (1965); Faraone (2013).

[48] Cf. e.g. West (1985), the works collected in Hunter (2008) as well as Rutherford (2000).

[49] Edwards (1980).

[50] Stanley (1993).

[51] Visser (1997).

[52] Versnel (1998).

[53] Gordon (2000).

[54] Minchin (2001).

[55] Sammons (2010).

[56] Faraone (2005; 2008; 2013).

[57] Cf. Schwartz (2002, 53ff. and charts on pp. 58–61; 2006, 461f.).

[58] Watkins (2005, 681f.).

[59] Watkins (2005, 683).

[60] Sadovski (2017).

[61] Sadovski and Stüber (forthcoming).

[62] Sadovski (2005, 526ff.).

[63] Cantera (2009; 2010; 2013; 2014b; 2014a; 2016b; 2016a); Kellens (2006–2011); Redard and Kellens (2013).

[64] E.g. the way they have been constituted in the classical, still indispensable, and commendable critical edition of the Avesta by Karl Friedrich Geldner (1896–1896) against the liturgical manuscripts that show the actual ritual use of the texts.

[65] Cf. Sadovski (forthcoming; forthcoming).

[66] For depictions of such a method of expansion in the form of larger and larger textual auréoles starting from the central Old Avestan strata and adding Young(er) Avestan texts, see e.g. Cantera (2009; 2010); Kellens (2011, 138ff.), and Tremblay (2007, 685ff.), for a common scheme of the Yasna and the Brāhmaṇic ritual.

[67] Cf. the dossier of the “simplest form of Soma offering” in Caland and Henry (1906–1907).

[68] On parallels between the Avestan and Vedic “Priest Lists,” cf. Panaino (forthcoming), Panaino and Sadovski (2013), and Sadovski (forthcoming, §§ 2 and 3).

[69] On the Indic material cf. Hillebrandt (1897); Caland and Henry (1906–1907); Schwab (1886); Oldenberg (1917); Oberlies (2012); Panaino (forthcoming); Sadovski (forthcoming; forthcoming).

[70] See also Sadovski (forthcoming).

[71] Cf. Cantera (2009, 17ff.; 2010, 143ff.) as well as the editions of the texts concerned, Kellens (2006–2011); Redard and Kellens (2013).

[72] See Krick (1982, 40 with n. 88 and more literature).

[73] On the Vedic house-building ritual and its deeply demiurgic aspects that make it parallel to rituals of sanctification and purification of the Universe, see e.g. Hillebrandt (1897); Renou (1939); Bodewitz (1977–1978); Gonda (1980; 1983); Oberlies (2012), as well as Sadovski (2017, 730ff., esp. 736–741) with regard to various catalogs contained therein.

[74] Cf. Gonda (1983, 29, with reference to ŚB. 7,3,1,42).

[75] Cf. in detail Sadovski (forthcoming).

[76] Ed. and transl. Minkowski (1991, esp. 199–232).

[77] Cf. Sadovski (forthcoming).

[78] This cultic mention of the very first words of the first verse of the first stanza of the first maṇḍala of the first and oldest Saṃhitā of the Veda is a good correspondence of the worship of the “textual Ratus” of the older Avesta.

[79] On the concept of Ved. r̥tú-, see Renou (1950); Krick (1982, 40 et passim); Minkowski (1991, esp. 156–159, with literature); on its Indo-Iranian roots and the formal and conceptual relation with Av. ratu- most recently Sadovski (forthcoming) concerning r̥tú- and ratu- both as basic concepts of taxonomy “τάξις; taxonomically relevant (articulation of) order/arrangement/ratio” and in its specific meanings, e.g. related to ritual regularity/calendar “(regular) period,” or “item of various length” (cf. in detail MacDonell and Keith (1912), s.v.), including “[regular] period of ritual cyclicity”; “season” (on number and related metaphors cf. Gonda (1980, 245f., 367f.); Krick (1982, 39–45)); “mensis” both as “month” and “menstrual period” (Slaje 1995), as well as in instrumental (sing./plur.): r̥túnā “according to the order/rank/ordine/ratione” and especially as a taxonomical “section,” “ration,” “(sequential) unit,” both of procedures and of texts of ritual poetry, in comparison with Av. hāiti- “binding; sewing; section”; Ved. párvan- (~párur- / -ṣ-) “joint, articulation.”

[80] This approach of adding a mystical surplus number is very similar to what happens with cycles of 16 sacred elements, to which a 17th is added, said to represent Prajāpati as a mystical, transcendental magnitude that goes beyond the number of completeness. Regarding this and similar expressions of the idea of completeness in numeric form, see Gonda (1965, 115–130 et pass.) and cf. Sadovski in DIV 1: 39, 44, with literature. The same phenomenon we observe in closed/finite lists whose “numerical expression of totality” is blown up by introducing a transcendental element—e.g., lists of the 12 months of the year as Prajāpati, vs. Prajāpati as the thirteenth month: e.g. JB 1,18: “the 12-fold year adds to itself the intercalary month as 13th item.” On the (Brāhmaṇa) material concerning such lists, see Gonda (1984, 23, 78ff.), to which evidence I would like to add now also AVP. (ed. Griffiths 2009) 6,11,5d; 6,12,4b.

[81] Cf. in detail Weber (1865, 321ff. and 1868, 78ff.).

[82] Cf. Weber (1868, 89 with n. 1).

[83] Van den Bosch (1985).

[84] Transl. by Whitney and Lanman (1905, 1,269f.)

[85] Sadovski (forthcoming,(b),(c)).

[86] Relevant studies on Tanū-napāt- are e.g. Weber (1868, 88–95 ; van den Bosch (1985, 95ff., 169ff.); cf. also the literature in Oberlies (2012, 155, 256) showing the link between Tanū-napāt- and the Southern Fire of the classical Vedic ritual, Dakṣiṇāgni-, as “grandson of (Agni’s own) body.” As representation of the Southern Fire, Ved. Tanū-napāt- is connected with the idea of the Dakṣiṇāgni- (Jāta-vedas-) and the Āhavanīya- (Vaiśvā-nara-) fires as descendants-of-the-body of the Home Fire par excellence, the Gārhapatya, from which the substance for the second and the third fire is transferred (thus Agni being considered to beget his own offspring, son and grandson!).

[87] Decisive recent diachronic studies are the ones by Oettinger (2009); Oberlies (2012, 55–58, 125f.), Proferes (2007); for some interesting details also Terrin (2012); most recently: cf. Edholm (2015; = M.A. thesis Univ. of Stockholm, cf. the relevant chapter in Edholm (Edholm 2017).

[88] Cf. esp. Proferes (2007) and af Edholm (2015; 2017): “splendour” both as “brightness, lustre, luminosity” and as “pre-eminence, glory, majesty, beauty”

[89] Detailed evidence and its analysis appears in Sadovski (forthcoming).

[90] There is a very similar compositional situation in the Vedic R̥tuyāja- context: viz. in the main collection, the one of the RV-Khila, as well as in “longer” rituals whose structure is expandable like the one of the Avestan Yasna (as transmitted in the liturgical mss. and described by Cantera (2016b) and Kellens (2006; 2007; 2010; 2011; 2015); cf. Sadovski (forthcoming).

[91] Most relevant historical studies with relevance for Indo-Iranian: Oldenberg (1967–1993, 1,41ff.) in his discussion with Hillebrandt (1899, 2,98ff.); Oberlies (2012, 74; 155f.; 400, n. 272).

[92] His relation to the Fire is well perceivable e.g. in RV. 3,29,11.

[93] See Sadovski (forthcoming).

14. Aspects of Multilingualism in Turfan as Seen in Manichaean Texts

Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst

Fig. 14.1: Graphic representation of the Turfan Collection of texts from Eastern Central Asia.

A particular feature about the German Turfan Collection of texts from Eastern Central Asia is the enormous range of scripts and languages represented in the c. 40,000 fragments brought to Berlin by the four Prussian Turfan expeditions 1902–1914. The impressive number of twenty or even twenty-four scripts and languages has been published and commented upon on various occasions. There have also been various attempts to graphically represent this situation, the most recent ones being the graph and map in the brochure of the Turfan Studies group, or ‘Turfanforschung’ (German 2002 and 2007; English 2007).[1] The main aim of the map is simply to demonstrate the variety of linguistic material available from a particular site and therefore to give an indication of what is present where. Given the scale of the map, the result can only be very general.

The great concentration of material from sites around the modern city Turfan (Tulupan) is immediately obvious but a close look at the languages listed there will show the limits of this kind of presentation. Each language has its own symbol but, since all the symbols have the same size, no indication is given about the quantity of material in a particular language. Toyuq is a case in point. Fragments of texts in the languages Tocharian B, Sanskrit, Chinese, Tocharian A, Old Turkish, Tibetan, Mongolian, (Early) Modern Persian and Bactrian were found there. Some of these languages are represented by quite a number of fragments but Bactrian, for example, occurs in only one fragment in Manichaean script (besides a small number of fragments in Bactrian script) [at Yarkhoto, but not indicated on the map]. Similarly, Greek is represented in Buyalïq at the northern edge of the Turfan Depression by a single line of text on an otherwise Sogdian page from a book used by Christians. This is not to say that the occurrence of Bactrian and Greek in the Turfan area is not highly significant, but it has to be pointed out that the tantalizing information provided by these virtually unique attestations is of quite a different nature to the extensive attestation of many aspects of the other literary languages from the same sites. Nevertheless, it is interesting to look at the significance of the attestations for Greek and Bactrian. The presence of part of a Greek sentence on a Sogdian page is highly significant because, as N. Sims-Williams[2] writes, it suggests the mobility of the person who wrote it and also shows the particular affiliation of the people using the Sogdian text. The content of the Sogdian text is Christian, a translation from the Psalms that may have been done in Sogdiana, the homeland of Sogdian. It may also have been translated much farther to the east, in the vicinity of Turfan where a Christian community using a Syriac liturgy and various texts in Sogdian and Old Turkish established itself, probably in the ninth century. The Greek quotation shows that this community took note of the Greek text of the Psalms and therefore can be said to be Melkite, that is, affiliated to the Byzantine hierarchy. Equally impressive is the Bactrian fragment.[3] It is written in Manichaean script and is therefore the only surviving Bactrian text not written in Greek script. Since Greek script used for Bactrian is defective, for example, in not having a letter for the sound h whereas Manichaean script has a letter h and some other relevant features, the fragment is valuable for its script alone. But its value goes deeper. The fragment consists of a page from a book, folded to a small size, possibly for use in an amulet. It is direct evidence for a Manichaean book and for Manichaean literature in Bactrian and therefore a highly significant link in the chain of missionary endeavors that brought Manichaeism from Mesopotamia, where the religion arose in the third century CE to Turfan where, after the adoption of Manichaeism as the state religion by the Uigur Empire in 762 and the transfer of the centre of this empire to Turfan in 840, Manichaean texts were copied until the beginning of the eleventh century CE.

As a more extensive example of what is represented in the Berlin Turfan Collection let us turn now to the multilingual situation revealed by Manichaean texts in the Turfan Collection. Manichaeism is a religion founded by Mani (216–276 CE) who included missionary activity as a central component of his church and stated that his religious texts were to be translated, a position quite the opposite of that in many other religions. Though we have little direct historical evidence for the activities of Manichaean missionaries we can gather much from the Manichaean texts they and their converts produced in various parts of the world. We know that Manichaean missionaries were active in China in the early eighth century CE because they submitted a Chinese document on Manichaeism to the Chinese court in 731[4] and achieved tolerance for their religion as one practiced by “barbarians” (Sogdians) in 732. Though this was soon revoked, Manichaean missionaries were still around in the early 760s when, according to the early ninth-century account in the inscription in Karabalgasun, the Uigur Khagan Bügü Khan converted to Manichaeism. Though followed by a backlash, the conversion eventually led to the establishment of Manichaeism as the religion of the rulers of the Uigur Empire who, in 840, moved their political centre to the two capital cities Turfan and Bišbaliq. It is hard to say how deep the conversion went because Manichaeism, with its commandment not to kill, was, like Buddhism, not a religion that the leader of an empire could follow easily. Since Manichaeism had a two-tier system of fully conforming “elects” and supporting “hearers” it was possible for the Uigur rulers to become patrons of the religious community as “hearers.”

From the context of the conversion it seems that the Manichaean missionaries were Sogdians working in China. It seems that they, or the Sogdian community they served, were responsible for the “Chinese compendium” of 731 mentioned above. However, it is difficult to say how close the connections between Chinese Manichaeism and the Manichaeans in Turfan were.

Chinese Manichaean texts were found in Dunhuang and, indeed, some fragments of Chinese Manichaean texts have been found in the Turfan Collection[5] and they show a high degree of consistency. On the other hand, there is a certain mismatch between the Chinese Compendium and the non-Chinese Manichaean material found in Turfan. The Chinese Compendium states the titles of Mani’s seven books as:

the Evangelium (with a Greek title),

the Treasure of Life (with an Aramaic title),

the *dēwān, a divan, identified both as a “book of discipline” and also as a “book of healing” (with a Middle Persian title),

the book of mysteries (with an Aramaic title, using a Middle Persian loan-word),

the Pragmateia (a Greek title),

the book of Giants (Middle Persian title),

the blessings (Middle Persian), which use Greek, Aramaic and Middle Persian terms.

This mixture of languages in the titles will, at least for the Greek and Aramaic terms, go back to Mani himself. However, a Middle Persian text attributed to Mani by An-Nadīm, the Šābuhragān, is not mentioned in the Chinese Compendium. This is not very surprising in itself because it is a Middle Persian compilation put together by Mani or at his command but without replacing any of his other works or achieving the status of a canonical work. But the omission is important because pages from this book (in Middle Persian in Manichaean script) were found in Turfan. This discovery was one of the reasons why F. W. K. Müller in 1904 was able to so confidently proclaim that the fragments just arrived in Berlin from Turfan contained original Manichaean literature.[6] Does this indicate that the Manichaean community in Turfan were very different from the community that had the Chinese Compendium made? Or did the Compendium omit to mention the Šābuhragān for the purely technical reason that it was not a canonical book? Similarly, in the Manichaean community in Egypt and further to the west in North Africa, there is no mention of this work. Its presence in Turfan is due to its language, Middle Persian. The Manichaean community in Turfan was composed of speakers of Sogdian and Turkish, but they did not restrict themselves to these languages.

The bi-folio M 172 illustrates this very well.[7] It contains a Middle Persian text with an interspersed Sogdian version and, on the other page, an Old Turkish text. This bi-folio clearly belonged to a book used by speakers of Old Uigur (Old Turkish) and Sogdian but the Sogdian version of the Middle Persian did not replace the Middle Persian text, it only served to make this text accessible. The Middle Persian text is part of Mani’s canonical work, the Gospel/Evangelium, which he wrote in Aramaic but for which he used the Greek designation Evangelion. What we find in M 172 is not the Aramaic text but a Middle Persian translation and this was obviously held in such high regard that a Sogdian version was added to it. The regard held for the Middle Persian text is significant and shows three things: that Mani’s original Aramaic texts were transferred to Middle Persian; that this transferral was done at an early period; and that the subsequent Manichaean communities in the east ultimately derived from such a Middle Persian community. Given the high regard for the Šābuhragān, a work certainly composed in Middle Persian (as An-Nadīm says) and seen as a work by Mani (which does not necessarily mean that he composed, compiled or wrote it in Middle Persian), it seems likely that other Middle Persian texts such as the passage from the beginning of Mani’s Gospel were also attributed the status of deriving from Mani or from Mani’s direct circle and were therefore retained as originals. These originals could not have been comprehensible to Sogdian-speaking Manichaeans, much less so to speakers of Old Uigur, so at some stage of the journey of Manichaeism eastwards a Sogdian version was added.

However, the linguistic composition of Manichaeism is even more complicated. This concerns Aramaic and Parthian. One Aramaic text has survived in the fragments found at Turfan and Aramaic terms and phrases also survive in the Chinese Manichaean texts.[8] Mani was a speaker of Aramaic and composed all of his canonical works in that language. He may have spoken Middle Persian, possibly even Parthian, although Middle Persian and Parthian Manichaean texts are not really evidence for this, but rather for the activities of his entourage and Manichaean missionaries.

All of this gives us a structure which can be graphically represented as follows:

Fig. 14.2: Table of the multilingualism of Manichaean texts as seen from Turfan, combined with chronological and geographical components. Note: A question mark indicates doubt about the production of new texts in a given language in a particular period. However, older texts in the same language were still being passed down. Only in the case of Aramaic and Bactrian texts is it clear that no new texts were added.

The table signals the following: Aramaic—the language of Mani’s texts—is retained in some formulae but is not added to after Mani’s life.

Middle Persian, the language of one text, the Šābuhragān, closely associated with Mani and possibly with others—the extent of the Šābuhragān in the Turfan collection is disputed because it can be defined as texts with the specific headline or texts with a content likely to have been in the Šābuhragān—is not only retained but added to in order to translate Aramaic texts by Mani, surely already in Mani’s lifetime—such as the Middle Persian version of the beginning of Mani’s Gospel, the Middle Persian version of the beginning of the qšwdgʾn ʾfrywn[9] and the Middle Persian version of the canonical books such as Giants and Henoch. All this became the base of the first Middle Persian-speaking Manichaean communities who, during Mani’s life or after it, added to this body of Middle Persian material. How much Middle Persian material was subsequently produced is not clear. Some texts were later modified to accommodate and justify a designation (dēnāwar) adopted by Manichaeans in Central Asia during a schism in the seventh century.[10] It seems likely that, otherwise, Middle Persian material ceased to be produced until the eighth and ninth centuries when some late Middle Persian material was made.[11] One of these texts[12] suggests that the use of the word ṯʾjygʾnyy “Tajik” to characterize the melody of a Middle Persian hymn must point to a late composition. These texts are connected in content with the Uigur support for Manicheaism. Here the boundary between Middle Persian and Early Modern Persian was already being crossed, and some specifically Early Modern Persian texts follow, demonstrating the spread of Modern Persian as a lingua franca over a large area, but also the presence of Modern Persian speakers in the community in Turfan. They bring with them not only Manichean texts but also non-Manichaean poetic works in Manichaean script.

The reason for the gap in the production of Middle Persian texts (at least as reflected in the Turfan collection) is the Manichaean mission to Parthian-speaking areas and subsequently to areas further east. This began during Mani’s lifetime, as the text M 2 tells us.[13] The mission has some remarkable aspects. Parthian is the language of the northern part of Iran and, as the language of the Arsacid dynasty, which the Middle Persian-speaking Sasanian dynasty replaced in 224 CE, it was also a language with high prestige, a fact testified to by the high number of Parthian loanwords in Middle Persian (and Armenian). However, the Parthian Manichaean community seems to have reversed this relationship in the sense that it retained Middle Persian texts. The prestige of these texts seems to essentially derive from their descent from Mani himself, or from his entourage. Since there are apparently no Parthian translations of many of the core Manichaean texts that have survived in Middle Persian in the Turfan Collection, it seems that this was quite deliberate, that a Parthian version of the Šābuhragān and other texts was not deemed necessary or desirable. This may have been in part because the community was bilingual in Middle Persian and Parthian, but it also seems to be the result of reverence for a language closely associated with Mani. The Parthian texts seem to have arisen both as a result of translation from Aramaic and in the adaptation and development of Aramaic models. This resulted in two long Parthian litanies (āfrīwan) in two Parthian hymn-cycles Angad Rošnān and Huyadagmān; in sermon texts, possibly in a confessional text and, as a dominant feature of community life, in a great body of Manichaean hymns. The hymns follow an Aramaic pattern of alphabetically ordered strophes and, despite the damaged state of many of them, clearly represent hundreds of hymns used by the community. This extensive production will have taken some time to complete but may have been restricted to the late third and early fourth century. Evidence for later Parthian literary activity is sparse, but we know of at least one particular endeavor: hymns composed in memory of Mār Šād-Ohrmezd at the beginning of the seventh century[14] Since there are no Parthian texts specifically associated with Uigur leaders (unlike the small number of Middle Persian ones) it seems that Parthian texts ceased to be produced, possibly but not certainly an indication that Parthian was dying out as a spoken language. Since Turfan was never a Parthian-speaking area this point is irrelevant and there is ample evidence for the use of Parthian as a church language by the Manichaean community. This evidence includes transcriptions (essentially transliterations) of Parthian hymns from Manichaean to Sogdian script, which show that the hymns needed to be accessed by people who did not know Manichaean script and probably did not understand Parthian but needed to sing the hymns or at least follow the sung or chanted text. The other piece of evidence is to be seen in Chinese and Old Turkish Manichaean texts that contain traces of Parthian rather than Middle Persian originals. The Old Turkish confession text uses Parthian terms and a recurring Parthian formula; the Chinese texts include translations of texts that otherwise survive in Parthian (and Old Turkish) but not in Middle Persian. One of these texts is the first part of the Huyadagmān; the other is a sermon, the sermon on the light-mind[15] which, like the Parthian hymns, show that Parthian played a dominant role in community life. A further indication of this is that, though the Sogdian and Old Turkish-speaking Manichaean community or communities in Turfan (and a Chinese-speaking community in Dunhuang, but also in Toyuq bei Turfan) made translations of many prose texts and of some verse texts, there is no evidence for a Sogdian Manichaean hymnology but some for an Old Turkish Manichaean hymnology.

Nevertheless there are terminological differences between the Middle Persian and Parthian Manichaean texts which show slightly different routes taken by what are, after all, two different communities. Although the Middle Persian texts were transmitted by a community very much dominated by Parthian, they retain their own traits. Since it is unlikely that every text made by the Middle Persian communities in various parts of the Sasanian empire would have been channeled to the Parthian community as it arose on the basis of the first Manichaean mission to the Parthian-speaking north of the Sasanian empire, it seems more likely that at least some of the Middle Persian literature was transferred to the Parthian community later, through wandering elects from the Middle Persian communities or even through a regrouping of the communities because of persecution and flight to a different area. Mobility, whether missionary activity, the injunction on the elects to be itinerants, or flight from persecution, is a major factor in Manichaean activity.

The Sogdian and Old Turkish Manichaean literature has already been mentioned above in relation to Parthian. There is a definite possibility that the Parthian Manichaean mission soon led to a mission to Sogdiana but it is hard to find evidence for this. Al-Bīrūnī, writing in the tenth century, says that there were Manichaeans in Samarkand a generation previously but does not say from when this community dated. It could be old, but equally it could be quite recent. The question is important because it has consequences for the composition of Manichaean literature in Sogdian. It is surely highly significant that the Manichaean community in Turfan mainly used Parthian hymns as well as some Middle Persian ones. If the Manichaean community in Sogdiana was old, why did it not produce its own hymns? And if it did, why are these Sogdian hymns not present in Turfan? It may be the case that the quality and the quantity of Parthian hymns was such that any Manichaean community in Sogdiana was content to keep them (together with the Middle Persian texts) and be, initially and throughout its existence, a multi-lingual community in the same way that the community (or communities) in Turfan were, except that they added Old Turkish too. There is also the possibility that Sogdian Manichaeism was content to be in the second row, recognizing Middle Persian and Parthian texts as primary or hallowed—despite Mani’s insistence on ongoing translation of his works. Possibly the Manichaeans had an idea of a golden age of their religion in the third and fourth centuries, of which they were the guardians and to the literature of which they could add but not replace the older texts with more recent translations. Indeed, it would have been very difficult to replace the Parthian hymns composed in an intricate alphabetical scheme; perhaps the Sogdian-speaking community never had the resources or size to even contemplate the task. Sundermann’s suggestion that some Manichaean texts reflect local Sogdian features[16] offers an interesting insight into Manichaean activity in Sogdiana but does not establish a date or, indeed, indicate the size of the community. It is equally possible that, through the mobility enjoined on the elect, the eastern Manichaean communities were linked by this mobility to itinerant Middle Persian and Parthian-speaking elects who thereby secured the dominant position of these two languages. There is evidence for speakers of Early Modern Persian in Turfan. There is also evidence for Syrian Manichaeans visiting Turfan, with an indication of a long line of such (consistently problematic) visits.[17] The language of the Syrians is not specified but it may have been Syriac or, more likely, New Persian as suggested by some terms in the text.

The most remarkable fragments are the Bactrian and Tocharian B ones because of the implications that derive from their existence. There is one Bactrian fragment in Manichaean script. Some further Bactrian fragments in Bactrian script (a derivative of Greek cursive script) are also in the Turfan Collection but their damaged state has not allowed any satisfactory interpretation of them and it is not clear if they could be Manichaean. So the Bactrian fragment in Manichaean script is unique.[18] It is a page from a book. It was folded down to a small square, possibly for use as an amulet but it is clear from the text that the page was never complete on its own and that the text contains a discussion (in a sermon or a treatise) on Manichaean themes couched in part in the Buddhist language. This is not unusual for Manichaeism and would of course not be unusual for Bactria, where the book from which this page was taken was probably made. It is unlikely to have been made in Turfan, though we cannot entirely exclude that possibility. The fact that the page is made of parchment supports its more westerly origin, because the Manichaean fragments in Turfan are all written on paper, with the exception of one fragment on parchment and a few on cloth. A parchment page is in keeping with what we expect for a Manichaean book that was not produced in China. The page therefore throws a light on a Manichaean community in Bactria who were using a highly-developed Manichaean literature and Manichaean script. This agrees with a text which tells us about a Manichaean mission to the eastern border.[19] In particular, Bactria occupied a central position on the trade-routes that made up the Silk Road, along which Manichaeism also travelled. However, we do not know the date of the Bactrian page. It could be from the fourth century onwards. For lack of evidence we also do not know what role Manichaean Bactrian may have played in the Manichaean mission eastwards and whether Bactrian-speaking Manichaeans were present in Turfan in any number.

There is only one Tocharian B Manichaean text.[20] It is written, together with an Old Turkish Manichaean text, in a carefully prepared Indian style book. Though there is only one text, part of it is also preserved on two fragments of paper that were either part of a scroll or belonged to a codex book. The date of the text is not clear. Whatever the origin of the known copy, which, accompanied by an Old Turkish version, cannot be from before the late eighth century and is probably later, the question is whether the Tocharian B text is evidence for a Manichaean mission in a Tocharian B-speaking area before or after the establishment of Manichaeism at Turfan. The choice is essentially between a Manichaean mission from Bactria before the sixth century or after the rise of Manichaean texts in Old Turkish. Note that Tocharian B as a language has a special status and is well attested as a language both of Buddhist and of secular texts, monastic accounts etc., whereas Tocharian A, the sister language, is nearly exclusively the language of Buddhist texts. Tocharian B is generally regarded as a spoken language whereas Tocharian A is apparently a literary language. Additionally, texts in Tocharian A were recovered further east than texts in Tocharian B. A Manichaean mission coming from Bactria would have reached the area of Tocharian B first. On the other hand, some significant and extensive Buddhist texts in Old Turkish were translated from versions in Tocharian A, demonstrating the important role placed by Tocharian A in the development of Old Turkish Buddhism and showing that Tocharian A was a prestigious language. It seems possible that the Manichaean text in Tocharian B might have been composed on the basis of the Old Turkish text copied with it with the aim of projecting Manichaeism into the prestigious realm of Tocharian, though, curiously not Tocharian A. The lack of any other text makes it impossible to choose between the two options.

Digital images of the Berlin Turfan Collection of texts from Eastern Central Asia (Turfan and other sites on the northern branch of the Silk Road visited by the four German Turfan-Expeditions between 1902 and 1914) can be found at http://turfan.bbaw.de and there Digital Turfanarchiv I and II. Direct access to the database is also possible at http://idp.bbaw.de for the German version or http://idp.bl.uk for the English version, but the language can be chosen anew in any version of the database.

References

Colditz, I. (1992). “Hymnen an šād-Ohrmezd: Ein Beitrag Zur Frühen Geschichte Der Dīnāwarīya in Transoxanien.” Altorientalische Forschungen 19 (2): 322–41.

Durkin-Meisterernst, D., and E. Morano (2010). Mani’s Psalms: Middle Persian, Parthian and Sogdian Texts in the Turfan Collection. Berliner Turfantexte 27. Turnhout: Brepols.

Durkin-Meisterernst, Desmond (2003). “Late Features in Middle Persian Texts from Turfan.” In Persian Origins: Early Judaeo-Persian and the Emergence of New Persian, edited by Ludwig Paul, 1–13. Iranica 6. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Haloun, G., and W. B. Henning (1952). “The Compendium of the Doctrines and Styles of the Teaching of Mani, the Buddha of Light.” Asia Major N. S. 3: 184–212.

Hitch, D. (1993). “The Kuchean Hymn in Manichean Script.” Tocharian and Indo-European Studies 6: 95–132.

Klimkeit, H.-J. (1993). Gnosis on the Silk Road: Gnostic Texts from Central Asia. San Francisco: Harper.

MacKenzie, D. N. (1994). “‘I, Mani …’.” In Gnosisforschung Und Religionsgeschichte, edited by H. Preißler and H. Seiwert, 183–98. Marburg: diagonal-Verlag.

Mikkelsen, G. B. (2004). “The Fragments of Chinese Manichaean Texts from the Turfan Region.” In Turfan Revisited: The First Century of Research into the Arts and Cultures of the Silk Road, edited by D. Durkin-Meisterernst, Simone-Christiane Raschmann, Jens Wilkens, and Marianne Yaldiz, 213–20. Monographien Zur Indischen Archäologie, Kunst Und Philologie 17. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.

Müller, F. W. K. (1904a). “Handschriften-Reste in Estrangelo-Schrift Aus Turfan, Chinesisch-Turkistan. Teil 1.” Sitzungsberichte Der Preußischen Akademie Der Wissenschaften, Phil.-hist. Klasse. Berlin, 348–52.

——— (1904b). “Handschriften-Reste in Estrangelo-Schrift Aus Turfan, Chinesisch-Turkistan. Teil 2.” Abhandlungen Der Preußischen Akademie Der Wissenschaften. Berlin, Anhang, Nr.2.

Sims-Williams, N. (2004). “A Greek-Sogdian Bilingual from Bulayïq.” In La Persia E Bisanzio, Convegno Internazionale, Roma 14–18 Orrobre 2002, edited by A. Carile, 623–32. Atti Dei Convegni Lincei 201. Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.

——— (2009). “The Bactrian Fragment in Manichaean Script (M 1224).” In Literarische Stoffe Und Ihre Gestaltung in Mitteliranischer Zeit. Kolloquium Anlässlich Des 70. Geburtstages von W. Sundermann, edited by D. Durkin-Meisterernst, C. Reck, and D. Weber, 245–68. Beiträge Zur Iranistik 31. Wiesbaden: Reichert.

Sundermann, W. (1992). Der Sermon Vom Licht-Nous. Eine Lehrschrift Des östlichen Manichäismus. Edition Der Parthischen Und Sogdischen Version. Berliner Turfantexte 17. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

——— (1993). “An Early Attestation of the Name of the Tajiks.” In Medioiranica, edited by W. Skalmowski and A. Van Tongerloo, 163–71. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 48. Leuven: Peeters.

——— (1996). “Dīnāvarīya.” In Encyclopædia Iranica Vol. 7, Fasc. 4, 418–19. New York: Encyclopædia Iranica Foundation.

——— (2007). “Eine Re-Edition Zweier Manichäisch-Soghdischer Briefe.” In Iranian Languages and Texts from Iran and Turan: R. E. Emmerick Memorial Volume, edited by M. Macuch, M. Maggi, and W. Sundermann, 403–21. Iranica 13. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Yoshida, Y. (1983). “Manichaean Aramaic in the Chinese Hymnscroll.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 46 (2): 326–31.

Footnotes

[1] Available online at http://turfan.bbaw.de/projekt-en.

[2] Sims-Williams (2004).

[3] Sims-Williams (2009).

[4] “The Chinese compendium,” see Haloun and Henning (1952).

[5] Mikkelsen (2004).

[6] Müller (1904a, 1904b).

[7] See http://www.bbaw.de/forschung/turfanforschung/dta/m/images/m0172_seite1.jpg, accessed April 3, 2017. See MacKenzie (1994).

[8] Yoshida (1983).

[9] See Durkin-Meisterernst and Morano (2010).

[10] See Sundermann (1996).

[11] M 1, see Klimkeit (1993) and Durkin-Meisterernst (2003).

[12] Sundermann (1993).

[13] See Klimkeit (1993, 203 ff.).

[14] Colditz (1992).

[15] Sermon vom Licht-Nous; Sundermann (1992).

[16] Sundermann (1992).

[17] See Sundermann (2007).

[18] See Sims-Williams (2009).

[19] M 2, see Klimkeit (1993, 204).

[20] See Hitch (1993).

Part V: China

15. Multilingualism and Lingua Franca in the Ancient Chinese World

William G. Boltz

There is no linguistic evidence for the presence of any kind of multilingualism in China for any time prior to the political unification of the empire in 221 BCE. By the same token there is nothing in China that could be called a lingua franca at this early date.[1] To be sure, a complete absence of multilingualism would be a very unlikely circumstance in any society, past or present. The problem in the pre-imperial Chinese case is that, apart from a few brief and hopelessly uninformative anecdotes, there is virtually no documentary evidence that could give any clue to what kind of multilingual environment must have existed.[2] Even later, during the first three centuries of the empire, there is little more in the transmitted textual legacy than scattered passing reference to presumably non-Chinese(-speaking) groups of people.[3] It is only with the advent of Buddhism in the early second century CE that we find concrete evidence for the use of known languages other than Chinese in China, but even here the linguistic context is highly circumscribed and does not allow any significant inferences about the transmission of knowledge, much less about any kind of (“old world”) globalization that might follow from a genuinely multilingual environment. In the absence of real evidence, in particular the absence of written texts in any language other than Chinese, there is little that the sinologist can do, except look with envy on the diverse textual and linguistic riches of India, the Ancient Near East and the classical Mediterranean that are readily available to his philological brethren working in those areas.

The historical period begins very late in China in comparison with Egypt and the Ancient Near East, by a measure of close to two millennia. The earliest known texts written in Chinese date from about 1200 BCE, and for the next thousand or more years, there is nothing known from the Chinese world written in any language other than Chinese. We might admire the pre-eminence of the sinitic cultural hegemony that this homogeneous Chinese literary and linguistic monolith bespeaks, but at the same time we lament the absence of any record of anyone speaking anything other than Chinese, and of how such people might have interacted with the dominant Chinese political, social and linguistic order. In the transmitted literature of the centuries just before the unification of the empire in 221 BCE we find only occasional, anecdotal hints of the existence of what may have been non-Chinese people speaking non-Chinese languages. The following well-known passage from the Mencius (Mengzi 孟子, late fourth century BCE), in which Mencius is reproaching a disciple who has expressed an interest in a heterodox southern school, is representative.

Mencius 3A.4

吾聞用夏變夷者, 未聞變於夷者也. [...] 南蠻鴃舌之人非先王之道. [...] 吾聞出於幽谷遷于喬木者, 未聞下喬木而入于幽谷者.[4]

I have heard of taking advantage of Chinese culture to transform the “backward,” but I have never yet heard of being transformed into the “backward.” [...] The shrike-tongued people of the southern backwaters repudiate the proper ways of the former kings. [...] I have heard of emerging out of a dark valley to perch in a stately tree; but I have never yet heard of descending from a stately tree to enter into a dark valley.

From the evidence of this passage we can see that for Mencius the distinction between “Chinese” and “non-Chinese” is entirely cultural, and the “shrike-tongued” people of the south that he disparagingly refers to could be speaking a dialect or form of Chinese that was considered rustic and inelegant, and therefore uncultured, rather than a non-Chinese language. We have no way of knowing which was the case, because the text is silent on ethnic and linguistic details. It seems to have been only the cultural distinction that was important to the Chinese political and social elite of the time, not the ethnic or linguistic distinction.

The nature of the evidence changes markedly about a hundred and fifty years later, during the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE–CE 25), but we still do not find any useful linguistic data whereby we can know anything in depth about the non-Chinese language environment of early China. To be sure, the Chinese histories from the first century BCE on include numerous accounts of groups of people with whom the Chinese came, directly or indirectly, into contact and whom we presume to be non-Chinese. These accounts often occur collected together in sections of the histories under the heading “Western Regions” (xi yu 西域). Some of the Chinese names of these people can be confidently identified with ethnonyms known from Classical western sources, chiefly Herodotus or Ptolemy, or from slightly later Sogdian or Khotanese sources, and on that basis we can infer some measure of a multilingual environment.[5] The accounts are sometimes rich in what we would now call cultural and ethnographic information, but none of them includes enough linguistic data to allow any certain knowledge about the ethnic or linguistic identities of those groups whose Chinese names resist identification.[6] These accounts reflect a period when the Chinese state was eager to extend its political, economic and martial sway into the far northwest, in the direction of Central Asia and of the lucrative trade routes around and through the Tarim Basin. As a consequence, the official written historical records of encounters with non-Chinese people on the periphery of the expanding Chinese domain tend to describe chiefly the regions of modern Gansu and Xinjiang provinces and areas stretching further west into Central Asia itself. One of the earliest and most important of such records is the richly detailed account of an envoy named Zhang Qian 張騫, who in about 130 BCE was sent by the Han emperor Wudi 武帝 on a mission to the northwest frontier to make contact with the so-called Greater Yuezhi 大月氏 people.[7]

The presumed purpose of Zhang Qian’s mission was to forge an alliance with the Yuezhi against the people known as the Xiongnu 匈奴. According to the Chinese sources, a few surrendered Xiongnu captives had informed the Han court that the Xiongnu had some years earlier defeated the Yuezhi and had made a drinking vessel out of the Yuezhi king’s skull. The Yuezhi then, having fled west out of the area of the Gansu corridor, sans their hapless and headless king, are reputed, not surprisingly, to have harbored great enmity toward the Xiongnu. The Chinese historical accounts thus portray the Xiongnu as the common adversary of the Chinese and the Yuezhi alike and suggest that when the Han court heard these reports, they saw an opportunity to take advantage of the social and political discord in the far northwest by allying with the Yuezhi against the more formidable Xiongnu. This is the ostensible background to the decision to send Zhang Qian to seek an alliance with the Yuezhi in order to mount a joint offensive against the Xiongnu.

Exactly why the Han court was so eager to involve itself in the contentious relations of non-Chinese people on the northwest frontier, hoping to join with the Yuezhi in an offensive against the Xiongnu, is never made very clear by the Chinese sources. The usual explanation starts from a presumption that the Xiongnu were horse-riding, marauding barbarian nomads, invading China from the murky depths of inner Asia in great aggressive hordes to plunder and pillage the northwestern fringes of the settled Chinese state. This is for the most part probably very much a dramatic fiction. There is no real evidence to tell us who the Xiongnu were or where they came from apart from these transmitted Chinese historical records of the late second century BCE. By this time it is already an established historical convention that the Xiongnu were uncultured, unwashed and unwelcome “barbarians” who showed up on the Chinese frontier from some remote, unknown origin in Siberia or Central Asia, but there is in fact no objective basis for this picture.

The real reason for the Han court’s distress at the unification of Xiongnu power on the frontier and the defeat of the Yuezhi was in all likelihood the consequent interruption of the smooth-running trade routes that had operated under cooperative Yuezhi control from Xinjiang, through the Gansu corridor, reaching to the center of Han civilization in the Wei River valley, modern Shaanxi province. With the defeat of the Yuezhi those trade routes had fallen into hostile Xiongnu hands, a hostility that was probably marked at least in part by a Xiongnu attempt to take advantage of their position as trade-route middlemen and commodities brokers, to put a modern label on it, to profit themselves at the expense of the elite Chinese consumers, who were chiefly affiliated with the Han ruling house and court. Zhang Qian was likely not sent to seek an alliance with the Yuezhi against the Xiongnu simply for military purposes; the more important motive was probably to try to outflank the Xiongnu in Gansu and to restore the lost trade routes through territory not under Xiongnu control.[8]

As it happened, the Han court was unsuccessful in its efforts to establish an alliance with the Yuezhi. The historical record says that on his way to make contact with the defeated Yuezhi people, Zhang Qian was captured by the Xiongnu, detained for a decade, given a Xiongnu wife and produced a number of Sino-Xiongnu offspring before he managed to escape and proceed in his quest to meet up with the Yuezhi. The Chinese histories are careful to mention that through all of this Zhang Qian never lost possession of his Han court credentials, inter alia reminding us of the importance of the Chinese / “barbarian” distinction. When Zhang Qian finally made contact with the Yuezhi, it was some two or three thousand li further west than he expected, in the area between the lower reaches of the Jaxartes and Oxus rivers. He discovered that, after their defeat at the hands of the Xiongnu some decades earlier and their migration to the west, the Yuezhi had conquered the Graeco-Indian state of Bactria in northern India and established their own court there. The Chinese historical sources refer to Bactria as Da-xia 大夏, the name by which it would have been known to Zhang Qian. The Shiji 123 account records this as follows:

大月氏在大宛西可二三千里. 居媯水北. 其南則大夏, 西則安息, 北則康居. [...] 故時彊. 輕匈奴. 及冒頓立攻破月氏. 至匈奴老上單于殺月氏王以其頭為飲器. 始月氏居敦煌祁連間. 及為匈奴所敗乃遠去. 過宛西擊大夏而臣之. 遂都媯水北為王庭. 其餘小眾不能去者保南山羌. 號小月支.

The Great Yuezhi were located to the west of Da-yuan (*ddah-ʔwanʔ = Tocharia) perhaps two or three thousand li. They dwelt north of the Gui (Oxus) river. To their south was Da-xia (Bactria), to their west was An-xi (*ʔʔan-sək = Arsacids, i.e., the Parthians) and to their north was Kang-ju (*kkhaŋ-ka) [...] In former times they were strong and treated the Xiongnu dismissively. When Mao-dun was established [as the Xiongnu chieftain] he attacked and smashed the Yuezhi. Later the Xiongnu senior elder Chan-yu killed the Yuezhi king and made his head into a drinking vessel. Before that the Yuezhi had lived in the area between Dun-huang and Qi-lian. It was only when they came to suffer defeat at the hands of the Xiongnu that they moved far away. They passed to the west of [Da-]yuan and attacked Da-xia (Bactria), which state they then subjugated. They then located their royal court to the north of the Gui (Oxus) river. A small number of them remained behind and took refuge in the areas of Nan-shan and Qiang-zhong. These were called the Lesser Yue-zhi.

This part of the Chinese historical record is notable because the defeat of Bactria by the Yuezhi is the first event in human history known to be recorded in both Chinese and western sources. The Chinese account is found in the Shiji, chap. 123, as given here and the western in the extant geographical books of Strabo (11.8.2, first c. CE) and in Trogus (late first c. BCE, preserved in the third-century work of Justinus).[9] To be sure, the actual historical facts are likely to be considerably more complicated and less clear-cut than the simple picture that the Shiji account implies, but there can be little doubt all the same that the Chinese text testifies to a historiographical awareness, however imperfect, in Han China of the vicissitudes of Greek rule in Bactria.[10] As interesting as this may be for the historian, it still does not provide anything in the way of linguistic data to open a window on multilingualism or on the use of a lingua franca in China proper. Clearly it shows that the Chinese of the Han period were in extended contact with people who were surely speaking what were undoubtedly non-Chinese languages, but we have no way of knowing from the Chinese sources what those languages might have been or what linguistic circumstances prevailed among the people of the north and northwest frontiers.

The official Chinese histories, chiefly the Shiji and the Hanshu,[11] tell us a good deal about the customs and habits of the Xiongnu people, as well as of people from many of the other places mentioned in the various accounts of the far northwest region. The Xiongnu are described as having no fixed settlements, but rather moving about with their livestock in search of water and grasslands. In confrontations they are said to have no shame in running away when it is to their advantage to do so. They take whatever benefits they can from wherever they happen to be, and they know nothing of (Chinese) rituals or proprieties. They eat the flesh of their domestic animals, the young and strong among them getting the richest food and the elderly getting the leftovers. They have no surnames and therefore cannot heed the paramount (Chinese) proscription against marrying someone from the same clan. On the death of a father, a son will marry his step-mother, and on the death of a brother, the remaining brothers will take the deceased brother’s wives as their own. And, crucially for our purposes, we are told that they have no written language and that they therefore conclude contracts verbally.

Expressed thusly, the Chinese historiographical record bespeaks, from the traditional Chinese perspective, a considerable cultural disdain for the Xiongnu. The picture is drawn in a way that highlights the great differences in cultural conventions and standards between the Xiongnu and the Chinese, and it is presented exclusively from a Sino-centric point of view. As with the Mencius passage mentioned earlier, the contrast between Chinese and non-Chinese is seen entirely in cultural terms, not in any way that even hints at recognizing the linguistic differences as pertinent. Multilingualism was of no concern to the Chinese court or to the Chinese historians and apparently had no impact on the Chinese attitude toward their non-Chinese neighbors. A kind of multiculturalism instead was the focus, evident not as a genuinely objective interest in the cultural diversity of their known world, but as a strongly judgmental distinction between the cultured Chinese of the Wei and Yellow river homeland and the uncultured, presumably non-Chinese, people of the periphery.[12]

Apart from religious texts that accompanied the introduction of Buddhism from India in the second half of the Eastern Han period (roughly 100–200), it is another three centuries before we find anything in the Chinese record that purports to register real linguistic data of a non-Chinese people, and even here the actual non-Chinese language data are in a seventh century commentary, not in the primary text. Chapter 86 of the Hou Han shu 後漢書 (History of the Later [Eastern] Han Dynasty), compiled by Fan Ye 范曄 (395–451) in the first half of the fifth century, records the Chinese version of three “songs” from a place called Bailang 白狼, the area where the modern provinces of Sichuan and Gansu share a border, north of modern Chengdu. The passage says that because the “king” (wáng 王) of Bailang “ardently yearned for the civilizing influences of Han culture and was eager to show allegiance to the Han state” (mù huà guī yì 慕化歸義), he presented these three songs to the local Chinese prefectural official. The Li Hsien 李賢 (651–684) commentary to this passage says that in compiling his text Fan Ye relied on the Chinese language version of these songs found in the Dong guan (Han) ji 東觀 (漢) 記, a work compiled ca. 175, now extant only fragmentarily (the pertinent parts here are not extant), which included both the Chinese and the Bailang language versions of the songs. The commentary then proceeds to give the Bailang language version of the songs. The people and by implication the language are identified in the Hou Han shu text as Yi 夷, a non-specific ethnonym that in earlier periods referred to a presumably non-Chinese people located in the northeast, but here is used to refer to the Bailang people in the northwest. Modern linguistic analyses of the Bailang songs suggest a Trans-Himalayan / Tibeto-Burman language, though to be sure the exclusively lexical nature of the data, written in Chinese characters, with all of the phonetic imprecision that that entails, renders any linguistic identification more than a little speculative.[13] While the commentary does, to be sure, purport to give real foreign language data and the Hou Han shu text itself makes passing reference to the difficulty of understanding Bailang words and of the unfamiliarity of the flora and fauna in the Bailang region, all the same the contextual focus is entirely on the reputed yearning of the Bailang king and his people to submit themselves to the glory of the Han. Any real linguistic interest is decidedly secondary.

About a century after the compilation of the Hou Han shu (but two centuries earlier than the actual Bailang lingusitic data) we find a record of a non-Chinese language in a Buddhist historical context that reflects the Central Asian linguistic world rather than the somewhat more isolated world of the Bailang. In the Gaoseng zhuan 高僧傳 “Biographies of Eminent Buddhist Monks” (compiled in the early sixth century by Hui Jiao 慧皎 [497–544]) account of the renowned Buddhist monk Fo-tu Deng 佛圖澄, we have a passage that is said to represent the Jie 羯 (Early Middle Chinese [hereafter EMC] kät) language.[14] Fo-tu Deng is speaking to Shi Le 石勒, the non-Chinese military figure who in the early fourth century founded the Later Zhao state in north China:

Gaoseng zhuan chap. 9:

[佛圖] 澄曰

相輪鈴音云「秀支替戾岡, 僕谷劬禿當」. 此羯語也. 秀支軍也. 替戾岡出也. 僕谷劉曜胡位也. 劬禿當捉也. 此言軍出捉得曜也.

Fo-tu Deng 佛圖澄 said [to Shi Le]:

The sounds of the transmigration wheel hand-bells say to me “/suw-tɕi thεj-lεj-kang bəwk-kəwk guə-thəwk-tang/.” This is the Jie (EMC kät = Ket?) language.

秀支 /suw-tɕi/ means ‘army’

替戾岡 /thεj-lεj-kang/ means ‘to come forth’

僕谷 /bəwk-kəwk/ means ‘the “barbarian” seat of Liu Yao’

劬禿當 /guə-thəwk-tang/ means ‘to capture’

Thus, this line means “The army will come forth and capture Liu Yao.”

Fo-tu Deng’s comment is clearly intended to suggest that these sounds, emanating from a kind of Buddhist hand-bell and said to resemble the Jie language, predict a victory for Shi Le over his adversary, Liu Yao, and indeed Shi Le won just such a victory in 328 and executed Liu Yao in 329. Here again the passage is more interesting historically than it is useful linguistically. If the passage does indeed represent in some approximate way one or more sentences in a real (non-Chinese) language, and if the individual word-for-word glosses that the text gives are accurate, we can say at least that the language seems to have a “subject - object - verb” (S-O-V) word order, typical of the various Altaic languages that are known to have been spoken in these areas several centuries later. We might also notice, for what it’s worth, that both verb forms, as identified by the glosses, seem to end in /-ang/. Curious as these observations might be, they tell us next to nothing about what language this might really have been.

The ten-word foreign-language passage is usually referred to as the “Xiongnu couplet,” presuming, or at least implying that the language represented is Xiongnu.[15] But the text says explicitly that the language is 羯 Jie. The usual explanation for this is to presume that the Jie were a linguistically, and by implication ethnically, distinct sub-group of the Xiongnu. The salient further implication is that the Xiongnu was a confederation of ethnically and linguistically diverse groups of non-Chinese people.[16] More than fifty years ago E. G. Pulleyblank proposed that the name Jie < EMC kät, may represent the ethnonym Ket, the name of a people who speak a now nearly extinct Yeniseian language in the area of the Yenisei River in Siberia.[17] Alexander Vovin has recently allowed for this possibility, though the linguistic data are sparse and therefore any conclusion must remain speculative.[18] Early in the twentieth century, Shiratori Kurakichi tried to show that the language was an early form of Turkic, but this is no longer believed to be the case.[19] Pulleyblank suggested that the ethnonym ‘Ket’ and the EMC word kät itself both seem to mean “stone,” and that this is not unrelated to the fact that the Chinese surname Shi 石 of Shi Le, the person to whom Fo-tu Deng confides this ostensible Ket language prediction and who in the course of events defeats Liu Yao, also means, in Chinese, “stone.”[20] Moreover, Shi Le’s biography in Jinshu 晉書 “History of the Jin State,” (chap. 104) says that his ancestors came from a place called Qiang-qu 羌渠, EMC khang-ga, very likely a variant form of the name Kang-ju 康居, OC *kkhaŋ-ka, that occurs frequently in earlier, Han period, texts. Kang-ju is the state that included the largest part of Sogdiana in antiquity.[21] Somewhat to the northeast was the area called in Sogdian Čač, later called by the Turkic name Tashkent “Petrapolis” or “Stone City” and known in later Chinese texts as Shi Guo 石國 “stone country.” People who came to China from Kang-ju often took the surname Shi 石 “stone,” if not Kang 康.[22]

How these data fit together to reveal unambiguously the linguistic identity of Shi Le is difficult to say. The historical record says that he was a Xiongnu, the language of the Gaoseng zhuan and Jin shu passages suggest, tenuously at best, that he was Ket, that is, perhaps Yeniseian, or at least that he was familiar with that language, and the name of his ancestral home seems to be associated closely with Sogdians. Historically, Shi Le was a subordinate to the Xiongnu confederation that sacked the Chinese capital of Luoyang in 311 under the leadership of Liu Cong 劉聰. This is the sacking of Luoyang 洛陽 to which the second of the Sogdian ancient letters is usually thought to refer.[23] It is said to have been carried out by people whom the writer of the letter called xwn, a term that is now fairly universally identified with the name ‘Hun.’[24] The city of Luoyang is called in the letter srγ, that is, saraγ, a Sogdian transcription of 洛 luo < OC *s-rak-, the first syllable of the name Luoyang 洛陽.[25] Shi Le himself was the leader of the attack a year later on the city of 鄴 Yeh, the so-called second capital of the Chinese Jin state.[26] The Chinese historical record says that Shi Le was a Xiongnu; the Sogdian letter calls him by implication a Hun. But the linguistic data of the couplet as well as the evidence of Shi Le’s own name suggest either a Yeniseian or perhaps even a Sogdian identity (see footnote 22). Whatever his linguistic and ethnic identity, he was in the eyes of the Chinese historiographers a “barbarian.” Apart from this exceptional short account in the Gaoseng zhuan, the texts are not concerned in the least with what language he spoke. But they take considerable care to describe him as a descendant of a Xiongnu clan, in particular a non-noble clan, and to record the history of his rise to power and his complete rejection of Chinese political and cultural values.

The moral of this story, as far as multilingualism in early China is concerned, is that names such as Xiongnu in the Chinese written historical record, and perhaps xwn in the Sogdian letters as well, seem to have been as much culturally grounded, impressionistic epithets as they were real ethnic or linguistic designations, if not more.[27] In an early provisional program for the meeting out of which the present paper arose, the first session was called “General reflections on the psychology of multilingualism.” In the final version of the program that became “General reflections on multilingualism.” But thinking about multilingualism in the Chinese case from a “psychology of” perspective can be suggestive. “Multilingualism” is of no consequence; “multiculturalism” is what counts, and the multi- part reduces itself to a pairing of unequal parts, a distinction of the “Greek / barbarian” kind that the late Malcolm Hyman mentioned in a 2006 paper, reminding us of Plato’s famous observation that the dichotomy “Greek / barbarian” leads to the erroneous belief that there is a natural class of barbarians.[28] Almost the same thing can be said, I think, mutatis mutandis for the dichotomy “Chinese / Xiongnu,” at least in a sense psychologically, that is, in respect of the cultural connotation that the term “Xiongnu” has when it is used in early Chinese historical accounts. For the Chinese, cultural identity is what mattered; linguistic identity was of little consequence.

The same near silence that we find in early written Chinese records about non-Chinese languages extends also to non-Chinese orthographies. To be sure, there is no clear evidence of writing of any kind other than Chinese in China prior to the advent of Buddhism in the early second century CE, so there may well have been nothing for the Chinese to have noticed in this regard at such an early period. In fact the historical records describing those various frontier groups with whom the Han court had direct or indirect contact often mention explicitly the absence of any kind of writing among those people. In view of the generally high regard in which the Chinese traditionally hold the Chinese script as a cultural achievement of the first order, such explicit observations about the absence of writing among the non-Chinese “others” are likely a further reflection of the perceived cultural gap between China and the peoples of the periphery.[29]

Accompanying the arrival of Buddhist missionaries and the establishment of Buddhist communities in the major cities of Han China by the second century CE, there were, of course, Buddhist texts. These were predominantly, perhaps exclusively, written in the vernacular Northwest Indic dialect known as Gāndhārī, using the Kharosthī script, an orthography entirely different from and unrelated to Chinese.[30] In the first few centuries CE, owing to the formidable and enduring impact of Buddhism in China, in particular the demand for Chinese translations of Buddhist texts, which inevitably incorporated Chinese transcriptions of a myriad of specialized Buddhist names and technical terms, more than a few representatives of the Chinese learned world must have become intimately familiar with Indic abugida-type orthography, even if motivated by missionary zeal rather than scholarly interest (the two do not always go together).[31] The Indic script in its Buddhist context is therefore the exception to the enduring Chinese disinterest in foreign writing systems, which seems generally to have prevailed on a par with the comparable disinterest, apparent already several centuries earlier, in foreign languages.

Thanks to the predominance of Sogdian traders and merchants across Central Asia and in China, use of the Sogdian language is likely to have been widespread already for several centuries by this time, but nothing in the Chinese historical record attests explicitly to the presence of the Sogdian script having come before Chinese eyes prior to the sixth century.[32] Extant epigraphic evidence shows that by the later half of the sixth century the Chinese were in direct contact with the Sogdian language and script. The tomb of a Sogdian merchant (Figure 15.1) who died in CE 579, found within the suburbs of the modern city of Xi’an 西安 (= pre-modern Chang’an 長安), preserves a large portion of a stone lintel with a bilingual Sogdian-Chinese text (Figures 15.2 and 15.3). This is the earliest Sogdian-Chinese bilingual document known. The Chinese portion of the lintel inscription refers to the entombed person as shi jun 史君 ‘Master Shi’ and identifies him as the sabao 薩保 of Liang 涼 Prefecture of the Da Zhou 大周 “Great Zhou” state.[33] The Sogdian portion gives his name as Wirkak.[34]

Fig. 15.1: The tomb of Sogdian sabao Wirkak (Archaeological Bureau of Xi’an for the Preservation of Cultural Relics 2005).

Fig. 15.2: Wirkak tomb, Chinese and Sogdian bilingual lintel inscription (Archaeological Bureau of Xi’an for the Preservation of Cultural Relics 2005).

Fig. 15.3: Rubbing of a part of the lintel inscription. (Archaeological Bureau of Xi’an for the Preservation of Cultural Relics 2005).

Remarkably, the Sogdian script here is clearly written vertically, though Sun Fuxi points out that, all the same, “it must be read horizontally.”[35] Sun presumably means that in effect one must rotate the text ninety degrees for “normal” reading purposes. Nevertheless, the epigraphic appearance of the Sodgian script here would seem to represent the nascent point of an orthographic development that is usually not thought to have occurred prior to the mid-Tang, some two centuries later, at the time of the An Lushan rebellion, and that prefigures by several centuries evidence of the script’s modification and eventual use for the vertical writing of Uighur, Mongolian and Manchu. The Chinese part of this bilingual inscription, though legible enough (where not damaged or missing), is said to have likely been written by a Sogdian “who was not very familiar with [...] Chinese.”[36] This would suggest that the Sogdians had some reason to attend to the Chinese language and script, learning it well enough and holding it in high enough regard to include a Chinese component as a part of the inscription in a Sogdian tomb. There is no comparable evidence that the Chinese reciprocated that interest or regard toward the Sogdian language or script.

Fig. 15.4: Tangut, i.e., Xi Xia (left), and Chinese (right), preface to the Fan Han heshi zhangzhong zhu 番漢合時掌中珠. From the 1924 printing of the twelfth-century Fan Han heshi zhangzhong zhu bilingual Tangut-Chinese dictionary.

The apparent disinterest on the part of the Chinese toward the languages, and especially the scripts, of the foreign people with whom they interacted in the mediaeval and early modern periods seems generally to have followed unchanged from that same attitude of the earlier periods. The major difference between these later periods and earlier ones is that by the end of the first millennium the non-Chinese states of the north had developed their own writing systems, whereas those from earlier periods did not for the most part have writing of any kind. By the time of the Tangut (Xi Xia 西夏), Khitan (Liao 遼) and Jurchen (Jin 金) states of the far north in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries, and especially with the Mongols in the thirteenth century, the major non-Chinese states had acquired writing systems. The Tangut (linguistically Tibeto-Burman), the Khitans (linguistically Mongol) and the Jurchen (linguistically Tungusic) all were states dominated by non-Chinese speaking (as the indigenous language) ruling houses.[37] By the time that they gained political control over a part of north China all three had devised “siniform” writing systems, based impressionistically on Chinese (Figures 15.4, 15.5 and 15.6). None of these writing systems actually operated or was structured like Chinese writing, and none is even now completely deciphered, though both Tangut and Jurchen are reasonably well understood. The Liao shi 遼史 and the Jin shi 金史, the official Chinese histories of the Liao and Jin states respectively, both conclude with short treatises (in Chinese) on their respective languages, mostly consisting of lists of administrative and cultural terms or material goods in the Khitan, resp. Jurchen, languages transcribed in Chinese characters. Both of these histories were compiled in the middle of the fourteenth century, well after the fall of the states in question, by the history bureau of the succeeding Yuan / Mongol dynasty.[38] In other words, only when the Mongols had achieved dynastic supremacy over the whole of China was any interest shown in these non-Chinese languages, and even here there is next to nothing said about their scripts.

Fig. 15.5: Jurchen writing. Inscription on a bronze mirror, from (Bushell 1897, 21).

Fig. 15.6: Bilingual Chinese (small characters, left) - Khitan (large characters, right) epigraphic text. Second half of the eleventh century, rubbing (partial), from (Luo Zhenyu 羅振玉 1934, chap. 2, plate 20).

With the success of the Yuan / Mongol dynasty itself the picture changes once again. The Yuan is one of the best-documented multilingual states in Chinese history. Apart from the culturally dominant Chinese language, Mongol was the principal language of the ruling house and people. Beyond those two, there were significant populations of Tibetan and Turkic speakers, as well as descendants of the already polyglot Tangut, Khitan and Jurchen states mentioned above. Recognizing the multilingual nature of his empire and the difficulty of using any of the already established writing systems (chiefly Chinese, Uighur and Tibetan; the siniform scripts were marginal at best) for administrative purposes that served all of these different linguistic groups, Qubilai Qagan decreed that a new writing system be created that would accommodate all of the languages of his empire equally effectively. We read in the Yuan shi 元史, the Chinese offical dynastic history of the Yuan / Mongol dynasty, the following mandate:

至元六年詔頒行於天下. 詔曰朕惟字以書言. 言以紀事. 此古今之通制. 我國家肇基朔方. 俗尚簡古. 未遑制作. 凡施用文字因用漢楷及畏吾字以達本朝之言. 考諸遼金以及遐方諸國. 例各有字. 今文治寖興而字書有闕. 於一代制度寔為未備. 故特命國師八思巴創為 蒙古新字. 譯寫一切文字. 期於順言達事而已. 自今以往凡有璽書頒降者並用蒙古新字. 仍各以其國字副之.

In the sixth year of the Ultimate Origin reign period (of Qubilai Qagan, = CE 1269) an imperial edict was distributed throughout the Subcelestial Realm. The edict said:

We aver that —

By means of characters we write words and by means of words we record matters. This has been the ubiquitous practice from antiquity to the present. Our State finds its first foundation in the Far North. Our customs remain still simple and old-fashioned. We have never had the leisure to devise or create [anything new.] In general when we made use of writing we relied on using the “square-shaped” characters of the Han or the script of the Uighurs in order to express the statements of the Present Court. If we look at this in connection with the Liao (Khitan) state, or the Jin (Jurchen) state, or any of the still remoter states, the fact is that each has its own script. For us, literacy and administrative order both have gradually come to be fully developed, yet as far as having documents written in our own script, here we are still wanting. For the practices and institutions of our particular era, this is the thing that has still not been made available.

Therefore–

We especially command the State Preceptor, [the] ‘Phags-pa [Lama], to devise a new Mongol Script, to accommodate the transcription of all other writing systems [of the empire]. We look simply to reflect our language fluently and register our affairs effectively. From this time on in general all documents bearing the imperial seal that are handed down for distribution will use this new Mongol Script, at the same time maintaining the script of the state in question alongside as a supplement to it.[39]

Specifically, the assignment was given to a Tibetan Lama, usually referred to as the ‘Phags-pa Lama, a title that means ‘the glorious Lama,’ who was named by Qubilai Qagan to serve as the guo shi 國史 “State Preceptor” at the Mongol court. The script that he created, modeled generally on Tibetan, is known as the ‘Phags-pa script.[40] The script was to serve the dual proposes of (i) providing the Mongol Empire with its own writing system and at the same time (ii) providing a way to write with a single script all of the languages of the empire. In order to satisfy both of these demands, the script actually was devised with language-specific sets of secondary orthographic distinctions to accommodate the different languages that it was to be used to write. Each language had, in other words, “its own transcriptional conventions.”[41]

Whatever ancillary influences may have been in play, the ‘Phags-pa script is clearly based chiefly on Classical Tibetan, a horizontally written abugida-type of writing with secondary superscript and subscript letters arranged vertically relative to the primary letter. The remarkable feature of the ‘Phags-pa script from the perspective of the development of writing systems is that it is a vertically written script in which the super- and sub-script secondary graphs of the Tibetan abugida have become nearly full-fledged “letters” of an alphabet-type script. In other words, based on a script that was graphically two-dimensional, incorporating both a primary horizontal and a secondary vertical alignment of its graphs, the ‘Phags-pa Lama devised a one-dimensional script; i.e., a script with only a vertical alignment of graphs, in effect largely eradicating the relative status difference between the primary and secondary letters. Even so, the transformation into an alphabet was not quite complete; the ‘Phags-pa script retains the abugida feature whereby a single consonant written without any vowel sign at all is inherently to be read as a syllabic consonant + /a/ vowel, and the secondary letters are attached by graphic ligatures to their associated primary graphs, even though written vertically in alignment with them.

Fig. 15.7: Bilingual Chinese (seal script top, standard script bottom)—‘Phags-pa (middle) stele inscription, dated 1298. From Luo Changpei 羅常培 and Cai Meibiao 蔡美彪 (2004).

The ‘Phags-pa script was intended to be widely used throughout the Mongol empire for all kinds of administrative, literary, ceremonial and practical purposes, but that intention seems not to have been entirely realized. The script is known in large part from extant monumental and epigraphic uses from the Mongol period (Figure 15.7).

Most recently the ‘Phags-pa script was included in a ceremonial silk banner presented to the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin) by the research group of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences (Ulanbator) on the occasion of their visit to Berlin in March, 2011 (Figure 15.8). This is a nice example of the continuing use of a very old script in a formal, classical context.

Fig. 15.8: Mongolian Academy of Sciences Silk Banner, seven varieties of traditional Mongolian script; ‘Phags-pa (right-most vertical script). From ECHO Cultural Heritage Online (http://echo.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/content/buddhism/mongolscript), accessed April 7, 2017. All seven Mongol script varieties simply transcribe the name “Max Planck Society.”

With the fall of the Mongol dynasty political control over China came into the hands of the indigenous Chinese ruling house of Zhu 朱, founders of the Ming dynasty, and once again interest in foreign languages and foreign writing systems waned. To be sure, the Ming court established a “translation bureau,” known as the “Si yi guan” 四夷館 “Bureau for Matters of the Fourfold Foreign Peoples” (later the nearly homophonous “Si yi guan” 四譯館 “Bureau for Translation of the Fourfold Peoples”) that was responsible for translation and interpretation services in diplomatic dealings with the non-Chinese people of the realm. But this was an entirely practical matter and reveals no evidence of any intrinsic interest in either the languages or writing systems of any of these foreign people.[42]

Fig. 15.9: Title page of the Yu zhi wu ti Qing wen jian 御製五體清文鑑. The left-most title is Manchu, Hani araha sunja hačin hergen kamciha Manju gisuni buleku bithe; followed (left to right) by Tibetan, Mongolian and Uighur, with Chinese on the right-most. The full title can be rendered as Imperially Commissioned Mirror of the Five Languages of the Manchu / Qing Dynasty.

Fig. 15.10: The entry for “eight” in the Yu zhi wu ti Qing wen jian (p.0841).

Only with the demise of the Ming and the founding of the non-Chinese Manchu Qing dynasty did a genuine concern with the multilingual nature of the Chinese state again emerge. And once more it was spurred by the establishment of a non-Chinese political state. The Manchu court saw early on the need for multilingual resources. In 1673, less than thirty years after the founding of the Qing dynasty, the Kangxi Emperor Shengzu ordered the compilation of a Manchu lexicon that would take fully into account the needs of Chinese translators and interpreters. This lexicon, which was not completed until 1708, was called the Yu zhi Qing wen jian 御製清文鑑 (Imperially Commissioned Manchu-Chinese Dictionary), but was in fact a monolingual Manchu language lexicon arranged by topic. Two years later work was begun again under court aegis on a bilingual Manchu-Mongolian dictionary, and then by 1780 a trilingual dictionary was completed, now including Chinese. Building on these lexicographical successes, two more dictionaries were compiled, one that added Tibetan, and finally one that added Uighur, resulting in the Yu zhi Wu ti Qing wen jian 御製五體清文鑑 (Imperially Commissioned Qing Pentaglot Dictionary) of the eighteenth century[43] (see Figure 15.9.)

One of the most remarkable of the linguistic and orthographic features of this dictionary is the fact that for every Tibetan and Uighur word, that is, those parts of the dictionary that are written in a script not immediately familiar in a Manchu / Mongol / Chinese context, the entry gives the pronunciation in a Manchu transcription. In the case of Tibetan, an orthography notoriously conservative relative to the pronunciation of the language in the eighteenth century (and later), the dictionary actually gives both a letter-for-letter Manchu transliteration and a representation in Manchu script of the actual contemporaneous pronunciation of the Tibetan word (see Figure 15.10).

The top item is the Manchu entry jakūn “eight” and the bottom is the Chinese. The second from the top is the Tibetan word for ‘eight,’ viz., brgyad, followed by two smaller size Manchu entries. The first of these, (a) in Figure 15.10, is brgyad, written in the standard Manchu script, representing the Tibetan orthography letter-for-letter, and the second, (b) in the illustration, is jad, i.e., /ǆad/, reproducing the actual eighteenth-century pronunciation of the Tibetan word for “eight” as closely as possible in the Manchu script. This same distinction between an orthographically accurate Manchu transliteration and an actual pronunciation given in Manchu script is maintained for every Tibetan word in the dictionary.[44] This practice reveals a surprisingly keen awareness of the relation (and non-commensurability) between language and script, something not directly in evidence in any comparable Chinese materials.

Wolfgang Behr, writing about the history of linguistic and translation concerns in pre-Qing China, concluded his survey by saying:

Looking at the development of translation and interpretation as reflected in non-Buddhist Ancient and Mediaeval Chinese texts, the most striking observation to be made is the enormous paucity of available evidence and references. It is painfully obvious that throughout most of China’s pre-Qing history, there was a deeply engrained lack of interest in foreign languages [...]. (Behr 2010, 201)

Precisely the same thing can be said about the Chinese interest in foreign writing systems. Only when the state was in the hands of non-Chinese rulers do we find any real attention paid to those scripts that reached China’s northern and western borders from across Central Asia, scripts that had evolved and were adapted in a multitude of ways to serve the goal of writing a multitude of languages, but that still, when carefully analyzed, reflect their shared Aramaic origin. None of these scripts ever rose to the level of orthographic predominance vis-à-vis Chinese writing, even in the powerful Mongol or Manchu periods. For as long a period as the historical record in China testifies to, there was no lingua franca, there was only a lingua sinica with its highly prized cultural treasure of grammata serica.

Acknowledgements

A modest version of this paper was presented at the “Crossing Boundaries: Multilingualism, Lingua Franca and Lingua Sacra” TOPOI conference at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin in November 2010, where I benefitted greatly from comments and suggestions offered by the workshop participants and attendees. In preparing this fuller version I have been fortunate to have received very helpful advice, suggestions and corrections from Wolfgang Behr, Ian Chapman, Mårten Söderblom Saarela, Steve Wadley and the late Jerry Norman. For all of this I am very grateful; what remains wrong or confused (or both) is of course my own responsibility.

References

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Behr, Wolfgang (2004). “‘To Translate’ Is ‘to Exchange’ 譯者言易也 – Linguistic Diversity and the Terms for Translation in Ancient China.” In Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China, edited by Michael Lackner and Natascha Vitinghoff, 173–208. Leiden: Brill.

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——— (2007). A Handbook of ‘Phags-Pa Chinese. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

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——— (1948). “The Date of the Ancient Sogdian Letters.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 12 (3–4): 601–15.

Hill, N. W. (forthcoming). “Songs of the Bailang.” Bulletin de L‘Ecole Française d‘Extrême-Orient.

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——— (1955). “Pseudo-Huns.” Central Asiatic Journal 1 (2): 101–6.

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Poppe, Nicholas, and John Krueger (1957). The Mongolian Monuments in Hp’AGS-Pa Script. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.

Pulleyblank, Edwin G. (1963). “The Consonantal System of Old Chinese, Part Ii.” Asia Major, N.s. 9 (2): 206–65.

——— (1970). “The Wu-Sun and Sakas and the Yüeh-Chih Migration.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 33 (1): 154–60.

——— (1991). Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation in Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese, and Early Mandarin. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Salomon, Richard (2007). “Gāndhārī in the Worlds of India, Iran, and Central Asia.” Bulletin of the Asia Institute, N.s. 21.

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Sims-Williams, Nicholas (2005). “Towards a New Edition of the Sogdian Ancient Letters: Ancient Letter 1.” In Les Sogdiens En Chine, edited by Étienne de la Vaissière and É. Trombert, 181–93. Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient.

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Vaissière, Étienne de la (2005a). “Huns et Xiongnu.” Central Asiatic Journal 49 (1): 3–26.

——— (2005b). Sogdian Traders: A History. Edited by trans. James Ward. Leiden: Brill.

Vovin, Alexander (2000). “Did the Xiong-Nu Speak a Yeniseian Language?” Central Asiatic Journal 44 (1): 87–104.

Vovin, Alexander, Edward Vajda, and Étienne de la Vaissière (2016). “Who Were the *Kjet (羯) and What Language Did They Speak?” Journal Asiatique 304 (1): 125–44.

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Wright, Arthur F. (1948). “FO-T‘U-Teng 佛圖澄, a Biography.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 11: 321–71.

Footnotes

[1] For a precise linguistic history of the term lingua franca, see H. and R. Kahane (1976, 25–41). For a more recent, popular discussion of the term as it applies to English in the twenty-first century, with substantial historical background, see Ostler (2010).

[2] The linguistically best-informed analytical survey of language contact in pre-imperial China is “The Role of Language in Early Chinese Constructions of Ethnic Identity” by Wolfgang Behr (2010). Behr observes at the outset of his paper that “early interactions with other languages” are “all but invisible in the early literature” Behr (2010, 568).

[3] Wolfgang Behr, writing about linguistic and the matter of ‘translation’ in ancient China, says “direct or indirect references to the extraordinary linguistic diversity in Ancient China are surprisingly few” Behr (2004, 180). The linguistic diversity in ancient China can be called “extraordinary” not only because of the archaeologically and historically inferable presence of a multitude of different languages, but also because from transmitted Chinese historical records we know names and have summary descriptive accounts of people and states that are presumed to be non-Chinese, but we have, as Behr notes, precious little real linguistic data.

[4] Extant transmitted versions show considerable variation between 于 and 於 in their multiple occurrences in this passage, two characters that are usually assumed to be allographs for the word yú “in relation to” by the time of the Mencius text.

[5] Among the transcriptions that have been identified with the greatest (though perhaps still not quite complete) confidence are, for example, 樓欄 Lóu-lán < *krro-rran ‘Krorayina’ (Sogd. kr’wr’n), 于闐 Yú-tián < *gwa-ddin ‘Khotan’ (Khot. Hvatäna), 龜茲 Qiū-cí < *ku-dzə ‘Kucha’ (Toch. kuśī), 大宛 Dà-yuăn < **ddahʔwanʔ ‘Tocharia’ and 焉耆 Yān-qí < *ʔan-grij ‘Argi’ (Qarashahr, see Henning (1938, 570–71)). All of these names occur in transmitted Chinese historical texts representing the centuries just before and just after the beginning of the Common Era, though the texts themselves may in some cases have been compiled at somewhat later dates. The identifications given here have been proposed more than once in recent decades and most, if not all, are considered unproblematic, notwithstanding the inevitably imprecise and approximate nature of the proposed Old Chinese pronunciations. A large cache of Han period wooden slips dating from about 100 BCE to about 100 CE was found and excavated in 1990–92 in Xuan-quan 懸泉, a settlement on the trade route just east of Dunhuang 敦煌 in modern Gansu province. These wooden slips name two dozen non-Chinese locales of the “Western Regions,” presumably representing twenty-four distinct “countries” with whom the Han state had contact, including the five given here. By virtue of their early date these wooden-slip manuscript documents represent the earliest attested occurrence of virtually all of these names. I am grateful to Wolfgang Behr (University of Zürich) for drawing my attention to the Xuan-quan manuscript material and providing me with this preliminary information. In particular I have relied on his identifications and Old Chinese reconstructions for some (but not all) of the data for the five names given here. For introductory reports and studies of this discovery, see Hu Pingsheng and Zhang Defang (2001) and Hao Shusheng and Zhang Defang (2009).

[6] Even when a Chinese name can be confidently matched linguistically with the name of a people known from a classical western source, we must be careful not to jump to the conclusion that this automatically tells us either the ethnic or the linguistic identity of the people in question. Names are easily transferred and impressionistically (mis-) applied in such circumstances, e.g., the English name “Gypsy” for a people who have no historical link to Egypt at all, or the indigenous people of the Americas called “Indians,” a name that became utterly conventional for half a millennium, long after it was clear that the name itself was a complete misnomer. For an explicit statement of the problem in the Central Asian context, see Maenchen-Helfen (1948).

[7] Shiji 史記 123 (first c. BCE), Hanshu 漢書 61 (late second c. CE).

[8] See Teggart (1939) for a detailed survey of the extent and importance of trade routes in the period between 58 BCE and CE 107 running between the Roman empire and the Han state. Anticipating his conclusions, Teggart writes in his Preface that “Within [the period 58 BCE to CE 107] every barbarian uprising in Europe followed the outbreak of war either on the eastern frontiers of the Roman empire or in the ‘Western Regions’ [i.e., the far northwest, modern Gansu and Xinjiang provinces] of the Chinese. Moreover, the correspondence in events was discovered to be so precise that, whereas wars in the Roman East were followed uniformly and always by outbreaks in the lower Danube and the Rhine, wars in the eastern T’ien Shan [i.e., Chinese Central Asia] were followed uniformly and always by outbreaks on the Danube between Vienna and Budapest.” (p. vii). To be sure, the Chinese could not have had any real knowledge of the Western extent of the trade routes, but this did not prevent them from indulging a considerable appetite for the luxury goods that reached them through these channels.

[9] The corresponding account in the Hanshu (chap. 61) adds a line claiming that on their way west the Yuezhi had attacked the Sakas, causing the Sakas to flee to the south, and allowing the Yuezhi to occupy their land. Pulleyblank has shown that this is very likely a gratuitous detail added after the fact to the Hanshu’s later account of the Yuezhi migration west and their defeat of Bactria. Sakas are nowhere mentioned in any context in the earlier Shiji text, Pulleyblank (1970).

[10] I am grateful to Ian Chapman (Seattle) for providing me a richly detailed and documented set of notes about recent historiographical and archaeological research on the demise of Graeco-Bactria.

[11] See footnote 7.

[12] Chinese attitudes toward “non-Chinese barbarians” is to be sure a complex and multifaceted subject and cannot be summarized in a single word. The point here has only to do with the consistent absence of any significant recognition of language differences as pertinent to the social or political world of early China. For a careful survey of the “Chinese and non-Chinese question” from all important perspectives, see Pines (2005).

[13] See Coblin (1979) and Hill (forthcoming).

[14] See Wright (1948). The fó-tú < EMC but-da part of this name is, of course, a transcription of buddha; what the dèng 澄 represents and how it should be read and understood is less clear. The character 澄 itself can be read either chéng < EMC dring or dèng < EMC dəngh. The Gaoseng zhuan biographical account of Fo-tu Deng says that the third character of his name was variously written as 蹬 dèng < EMC dəngh, 磴 or 橙, both dèng < EMC təngh, in addition to the 澄 that has become conventional. It goes on to say that however it was written, it was a transcription of the sounds of an Indic language (fan yin 梵音). These data, though admittedly inconclusive, suggest a preference for the reading dèng rather than chéng for the name, though the latter is the convention usually followed. Here and infra passim Early Middle Chinese reconstructions are taken largely unchanged from Pulleyblank (1991).

The passage is often called the “Xiongnu couplet” because of an unwarranted assumption that the language is “Xiongnu.” It is also found in the Jinshu chap. 95 biography of Fo-t’u Deng (Jinshu gouzhu 晉書斠注 95.24b). The Jinshu was compiled in the seventh century, about a hundred years later than the Gaoseng zhuan, and thus while contemporary studies usually cite the Jinshu text, the Gaoseng zhuan text is slightly earlier than the Jinshu text, though the uncertain textual histories of each make it difficult to know which is derivative of which. For this particular passage there are no textual variants between the two texts and therefore either can be used with confidence.

[15] Pulleyblank (1963, 264–265).

[16] Such a heterogeneous structure would be in keeping with the social and political organization of historically well-documented Central Asian Turkic and Mongol peoples from several centuries later. Even the names of some of these later groups suggest this kind of organization, e.g., the Toquz Oguz “Nine Oguz” (Turks), the Dörben Oiyrat “Four Oiyrat” (Mongols, i.e., the “Four Allies,” from Cl. Mong. oyir-a- ‘near to,’ possibly with -d [-t] as a plural suffix, “the nearby ones.” [I am grateful to the late Jerry Norman for details on the Mongolian etymology.]). The Mongolian historical chronicles call the Mongol nation by the term Tabun Önggetü “(People) of the Five Colors.” See Poppe and Krueger (1957, 3). For a discussion of this phenomenon from a sociological perspective, see Eberhard (1952, chap. 4: “Patterns of Nomadic Rule,” 65–88).

[17] Pulleyblank (1963). The suggestion that the Xiongnu language may have been Yeniseian seems first to have been made by Louis Ligeti (1950). In the late twentieth century, Ket is said to have fewer than a thousand native speakers. See Harrison (2007, 235).

[18] Vovin (2000). See also Vovin, Vajda and Vaissière (2016).

[19] Shiratori (1902).

[20] Pulleyblank (1963, 246–248). Vovin (2000, 91) points out that linguistic data not available to Pulleyblank in the early 1960s and recent work in reconstructing the history of the Yeniseian languages overall suggest that the name Jie < kät probably does not mean ‘stone,’ but is simply an ethnonym. Basing himself on data from G. Starostin, he allows that as an ethnonym it may be a descendant of Proto-Yeniseian *keʔt ‘person.’

[21] Vaissière (2005b, 119).

[22] Vaissière (2005b, 120) identifies seven Chinese surnames typically taken by Sogdians, each neatly associated with a particular regional origin. The surname Shi 石 in this scheme is matched with Sogdians specifically from the area of Čač. (Chinese shí < EMC dźiajk [“stone”] may in this context in fact have been a transcription of the Sogdian toponym Čač.) De la Vaissière then goes on to point out that it is very much an over-simplification to conclude that a given surname means that the person in question was a Sogdian from whatever place may have been typically identified with that surname. We know from the Chinese sources that Shi Le had the surname Shi, and that he was from Kang-ju, an area very near Čač, but even though these facts fit the neat “one surname - one regional origin” scheme, we cannot simply conclude on this basis alone that Shi Le was a Sogdian, though that possibility is not ruled out.

[23] For an introductory description of the Sogdian letters corpus, see Sims-Williams (2005). The first, and still classic, scholarly paper on these letters is Henning (1948).

[24] Henning (1948).

[25] Pelliot (1927).

[26] This attack is also mentioned in the second letter, where Yeh < *ŋap 鄴 is referred to by the Sogdian transcription ‘nkp,’ i.e., ŋapa. See Henning (1948, 609).

[27] In an extensive discussion of the importance of the Sogdian “ancient letters” for establishing the historicity of a vast, well-organized Sogdian mercantile network stretching from the Aral Sea in the west into the heart of China in the east, Étienne de la Vaissière states that the second letter is “one of the essential documents for the history of the 4th century CE, because of the name it gives to the Xiongnu who sacked Luoyang, xwn, the Huns, sixty years before they swept across the borders of the Roman Empire [...]” Vaissière (2005b, 43). In a later, still more detailed examination of the sixty-year old debate over the Xiongnu / Hun equation, he says that in his view the conclusion that the fourth and fifth century Huns of Europe were in fact the Xiongnu of Chinese record of a few centuries earlier is inescapable. He claims that the Sogdian designation xwn is not a generic term for “barbarians,” but refers specifically and exclusively to the Xiongnu.

De la Vaissière shows, whatever the speculative nature of his conclusions, that the subject is both ethnolinguistically and historically complex. The second of the ancient letters, to be sure, seems clearly to attest to the fact that the hostile forces that destroyed Luoyang in 311, called Xiongnu in the Chinese historical records, are called xwn in the Sogdian epistolary account of the same historical event, a name that is essentially indistinguishable from the name that was applied by later western historians to the invaders who threatened the Roman east, plundering Adrianople, in the late fourth century and who ravaged the west in the fifth. While the letter thus establishes a nominal identity of the Xiongnu with the Huns, it all the same tells us little about who the Xiongnu actually were and what, if any, their historical relation with the Huns (still unknown in western sources this early) might have been. De la Vaissière assembles a great deal of textual, archaeological and linguistic data not available to scholars sixty years ago to claim that the case for the historical identity is now as solid as that for the nominal identity. See Vaissière (2005a). But this body of new information, welcome as it is, does not include anything new from the Chinese side, so to speak, about where the Xiongnu came from or who in fact they were. These questions are as unanswerable today as they were in the mid-twentieth century, claims from other quarters about ostensible Warring States period Xiongnu grave sites having been excavated in Mongolia notwithstanding. Until the origin and early history of the Xiongnu in China, and of their interactions with the various peoples of central Asia known only by name from western sources, is clearer than it now is, any conclusion about the proposed historical identity of the Xiongnu with the Huns must continue to remain tentative. For one article among many representative of the nature of the debate of half a century ago, see Maenchen-Helfen (1955).

[28] Hyman (2006).

[29] That portion of Shiji 123 that refers to An-xi 安息 (*ʔʔan-sək = Arsacids, i.e., the Parthians), includes the one important exception to the early Chinese silence regarding foreign scripts. In this account there is a line that says succinctly “they write in horizontal lines on raw-hide as their way for keeping notes and records” (畫革旁行以為書記).

[30] See Salomon (2007); Brough (1961); Lin Meicun (1991).

[31] The term “abugida” refers to a kind of script that uses “a basic form for the specific syllable consonant + a particular vowel (in practice always the unmarked a) and modifies it to denote the syllables with other vowels or with no vowel.” See Daniels (1990, 730).

[32] See Vaissière (2005b, 119–57, et passim).

[33] See Dien (2003). The term sabao 薩保 < MC sat-pawx is the Chinese transcription of Sogdian s’rtp’w (itself from Skt. sārthavāha ‘caravan leader, merchant chief’), and refers to the person who came to serve as the community spokesman (p. 109).

[34] For a complete report on this tomb, including photographs and line drawings, see “Xi’an bei Zhou Liangzhou sabao Shi jun mu fajue jianbao” (Brief Report of the Excavation of the Tomb of Master Shi, the sabao of Liang Prefecture of the Northern Zhou, at Xi’an) prepared by the Archaeological Bureau of Xi’an for the Preservation of Cultural Relics (2005).

[35] Sun Fuxi (2005, 48).

[36] Sun Fuxi (2005, 48).

[37] In the present state of Tungusic historical linguistics, it is difficult to say with any certainty whether Jurchen is the direct precursor of Manchu, the language of the Qing ruling house and court, or whether Manchu and Jurchen should be viewed on a par as members of a kind of dialect continuum. The late Jerry Norman was inclined toward the latter possibility. See Norman (2014, i).

[38] The Tanguts established an independent state in the far northwest in the late tenth century that lasted until the early thirteenth, when it was conquered by the Mongols and became a part of the Mongol dynasty. See Dunnell (1994). While the Mongol court produced official “dynastic” histories for the Liao and Jin states, and of course for the Song, they did not, for whatever reason, compile any similar history for the Tangut state.

[39] In preparing this translation, I have taken advantage of the careful work of Leon Hurvitz in Poppe and Krueger (1957, 5).

[40] The best recent study of the ‘Phags-pa script is Coblin (2007), from which I have benefitted greatly in preparing the present discussion.

[41] Coblin (2007, 2).

[42] Behr (2004, 202); Wild (1945).

[43] Reprinted in a three volume, western-bound, facsimile edition of the copy held in the Palace Museum in Beijing (Gu gong bo wu yuan 故宮博物院 1957). For an extensive discussion of Manchu-Chinese linguistic, orthographic and lexicographical quiddities, see Mårten Söderblom Saarela (2014). I am grateful to Dr. Saarela (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin) for corrections and elaborations on a previous draft version of this paragraph.

[44] Item (c) in Figure 15.10 is the pronunciation of the Uighur word in Manchu script; it is orthographically equivalent to the transcription of the written Uighur form. I am grateful to Stephen Wadley (Portland [Oregon] State University) and to my former student Yin Yin Tan for confirming this for me.

16. The Imprint of Buddhist Sanskrit on Chinese and Tibetan: Some Lexical Ontologies and Translation Strategies in the Tang Dynasty

Jens Braarvig

When Buddhism was imported into China, it met a complex culture with a rich terminology. Therefore the translation of the sacred scriptures of Buddhism would employ Chinese expressions with already ample religious and philosophical connotations.[1] In the Tibetan case, however, the receiving culture maintained a comparatively simple language, with fairly uncomplicated semantic contents.  The terminology coined to receive the rich Buddhist systems of knowledge in Tibet were created without such preexisting semantics, and, as we shall see, the import of Buddhist culture into Tibet took place in a more systematic way than that of the Chinese case.[2]

In illustrating this movement from one lingua franca to another, namely, from Sanskrit to Chinese, and from a lingua franca to what we may call a national, or local language, namely Tibetan, we focus mostly upon the time of the early Tang period in China, and the same period in Tibetan, because this period shows a highly developed intellectual activity in both countries connected with the transfer and translation of Buddhism, the religion adopted and adapted by similar, but not identical processes by the two countries. The introduction of Buddhism to Tibet began in the seventh century CE, while in the case of China this process started, according to tradition, already in the first century CE.

When systems of knowledge migrate by translation from one language to another, from one culture to another, this may happen in more ordered and systematic ways, or by more arbitrary and individually centered initiatives. Further, the translations may be more verbatim, more in the verbo ad verbum fashion or, on the other side, free translations which try to accommodate the translated text to the receiving culture, or even just retelling the contents of the original text in a free way. Into this picture comes the frequent use of loanwords, balanced with the number of loan translations appearing as neologisms in the receiving language. So our concern is trying to understand the Chinese and the Tibetan case of translation of Buddhist texts in this perspective.

In general it can be said that the Chinese history of Buddhist translating was a more person-centered endeavor, which of course had the blessing of the ruling authorities at the time. The introduction of Buddhism to Tibet was, according to our sources, a strictly controlled process, and Tibetan royal power was the controlling agent and organizing entity in the beginning of the process. Later, with the routines created, the import of everything Buddhist into Tibet followed in general the premises laid down in the initial phase, though further developed and refined. We will start by describing the Tibetan case, because of its relative simplicity, and how the Tibetan chos skad was established—chos skad being a direct equivalent of lingua sacra, as the Tibetan word chos corresponds to Sanskrit dharma and skad denoting language, bhāṣā in Sanskrit. Next, in a comparative perspective, we will look at the dynamics of Chinese translation activities with some representative examples.

First of all, however, we should shortly touch upon how systematically a translation project is carried through. A translation may be undertaken by an individual, who creates much of his translated terminology in an arbitrary way, in accordance with his general understanding of the two languages involved; on one side there is the original and on the other side the receiver language, in which the translator does his best to portray the meaning of the original Vorlage by means of loan concepts, loan translations and loanwords. With the development of translation traditions and general dictionaries with equivalents, the translations become less arbitrary.  The least arbitrary type of translation is where standardization of terminologies is normatively established by comparative grammars and lexica and technical terms have strict equivalents to be employed in the receiving language.

During the long Chinese tradition of translating Buddhist texts—more than a thousand years—we have several phases. In the beginning the terminologies were naturally established by the first translators, but soon a more systematic use of equivalents to Sanskrit words developed, and a certain standardization of terminologies took place. There were, however, no formalized lexica for guiding the translators in the early periods, but earlier translated texts served as guides. This created a situation in the Chinese Buddhist language in which there is sometimes a fairly great number of Chinese equivalents for each Sanskrit term. In the beginning, then, translation techniques were more arbitrary than later, with a stronger established translation tradition, but each translator still had the tendency to develop a personal translation style in the absence of equivalence standards in systematic lexica and word lists. Only in the seventh century do we find lexica for Sanskrit and Chinese, but even these did not establish fixed standards to be followed: the translations remained over all created in the style of the individual translator.

So while we can characterize the Chinese reception of Buddhist thinking and its pertaining conceptual system as moving from an arbitrary process into a situation with more generally accepted translation conventions, the Tibetan endeavor to import Buddhism from India in all its aspects was a much more systematic process, in that a grammar[3] and a lexicon for the standardized chos skad, or lingua sacra, were established under royal patronage and authority. In fact, the ordered and planned way that Buddhism was imported into Tibet, with all its disciplines and systems of knowledge, is quite remarkable, if not unique, in linguistic and translation history.

In the seventh century the Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo (Sroṅ-btsan sGam-po, reigned 618–649 CE) decided that Tibet—an inaccessible country, growing in military and political power—should be Buddhist.  He chose to supplant the Central Asian Shamanistic type of religion with the Buddhism of the high cultures that surrounded the Tibet.[4] The Tibetan king considered sharing the religious culture of the Chinese empire in the East, but was also impressed by the Buddhist religion in India, so much that in the end it was decided to import the sacred teachings from the South rather than from the East. The king even married a Chinese princess, Wencheng, and a Nepalese one, for the purpose of good relations to possible contributors to the import of Buddhism to Tibet. Thus, during the reign of Songtsan Gampo a Tibetan scriptural system was created on the basis of the India Brāhmī script—an alphabet with fewer letters than the Indian, but adopted to Tibetan. It is not surprising that Tibet at the time chose the Brāhmī writing system, since in fact the letters were already employed west and north of Tibet in the language cultures along the Silk Road. However, an additional reason for Tibet to use this system was the general tendency to lean on Indian Buddhism rather than Chinese tradition in the implementation of Buddhist regimes of knowledge in Tibet. The creation of the alphabet is attributed to Thonmi Sambhoṭa, who, according to tradition, was appointed by the king to construct both the alphabet and the necessary Tibetan grammar to facilitate the Buddhist mission to Tibet.[5]

This historical fact that Tibet made the choice to implement Indian Buddhist systems of knowledge based on Sanskrit tradition is also borne out by the so-called Samye debate, or Lhasa Council in the 790s.[6] Here the Chinese Chan-master Hva-shang Moheyan discussed with the Indian renowned scholar Kamalaśīla whether awakening was attained in an instant or by a gradual path of development, and again the Tibetans favored the Indian side; Kamalaśila and his party won the debate. This took place on the initiative of the Tibetan king Thrisong Detsen (Khri-sroṅ Lde-btsan, reigned 755–797 CE), who, after adopting Buddhism in 772, brought Tibetan power to its pinnacle by conquering Dunhuang in the 780s, and even the Tang capital Changan already in 762[7]—being chased away only by an alliance of the Chinese and Orkhon Uighurs.

In the period between Songtsen Gampo and 800 CE quite a number of translations from Sanskrit into Tibetan were made, and this earliest phase of translation is amply documented by the Tibetan contents of the Dunhuang library, which came to light again in the beginning of the early twentieth century, discovered by various Western scholars and explorers. However, the now learned Tibetan scholars noticed that the earlier translations were not uniform in style, and that the then existing Tibetan Buddhist terminology should be revised. To the extent it was possible, it should more accurately represent the semantics of the original Indic texts. Under the successors of Thrisong Detsen, and most of all under Thride Songtsen (Khri-lde Sroṅ-btsan, also called Senalegs, Sad-na Legs, who reigned 799–715), such a revision was decided upon, and a committee of scholars was ordered by the king to develop an equivalence lexicon of Sanskrit and Tibetan terms, to be used as a non-deviable norm for the translation work ahead in revising the previous translations and producing new and correct ones. The context of the situation in which these negotiations took place is described by Christina Scherrer-Schaub as follows:

Unauthorized, personal and unbridled initiative, as well as lack of source material, compelled the high authorities to take specific decisions. A chancery procedure, flanked with an increasingly important bureaucracy and deliberative body, was instituted. (Scherrer-Schaub 2002, 314)

Thus, in the year 814, at the time when the Tibetan kingdom reached its greatest extent, king Thride Songtsen issued the following decree, having as its aim to create a bilingual lexicon based on discussions of etymology as developed by Indian linguistic theory and Buddhist commentaries:

In the year of the horse the ruler (btsan po) Khri lde Sroṅ btsan was staying in the palace ’On caṅ do in sKyi. The old warlords of Higher and Lower Tibet, as well as the “robbers” (i.e., the Uighurs) were vanquished, and he received obeisance from Gar log through an envoy. The great ministers Źaṅ khri Zur ram Śag and Maṅ rje lHa lod, these and others brought tribute from the territories. Camels, horses and oxen in huge numbers were offered to the King, and each and every man was recompensed with gifts from the main (źaṅ) minister and downwards.

The King requested the preceptors from the west (i.e., Indian) Ācārya Jinamitra, Surendrabodhi, Śīlendrabodhi, Dānaśīla, Bodhimitra, and the Tibetan preceptors Ratnarakṣita, Dharmatāśīla, as well as the learned translators Jñānasena, Jayarakṣita, Mañjuśrīvarman, Ratnendraśīla and others to translate from Indic languages into Tibetan the terminologies of the Great and the Small Vehicles (two “ways” of Buddhism), to define the terms and make a written word list.

The decree was issued that “One shall never deviate from this list and make it suitable for everybody to learn.”

Earlier, in the time of Father [king Khri sroṅ lde btsan] of the Divine Son [namely, the present monarch, Khri lde sroṅ btsan], Ācārya Bodhisattva, Ye śes dBaṅ po, Źaṅ rgyal ñen Ña bzaṅ, Blon khri gźer Saṅ śi, the translator Jñānadevakoṣa, lCe khyi ’Brug, and the brāhmaṇa Ananta and others, since the Dharma-language was not known in Tibet, coined many terms; some of these were not in accordance with the Dharma-texts and the principles of grammatical theory (vyākaraṇa), and for this reason [it is now prescribed that] the improper [terms] not [well] formed were to be revised.

So analyzing which were deemed the most important terms of the [Dharma-] language, they augmented [the Tibetan vocabulary] and brought the terms into agreement with how they occur in the texts of the Great and the Small Vehicle, how they are explained by the masters of old like Nāgārjuna and Vasubandhu, and how they accord with the principles in the works on grammatical theory. As for the difficult cases, they analyzed the words into their individual parts, provided reasoned explanations, and finally wrote [the results of their efforts] down as an authoritative document.

On the one hand, simple words that need no explanation and that are appropriate to be translated literally (sgra bzhin du) have been fixed taking the literal expression as the main criterion.

Whereas on the other hand, [in the case of] certain words, which are most appropriately fixed in accordance with the meaning, the [equivalent] term has been fixed taking the meaning as the main criterion.

Then, the great scholar dPal gyi Yon tan, the great scholar Tiṅ ṅe ’dzin and all the others assembled before His Majesty, and after they had respectfully addressed the assembly of Lords and Ministers, they codified the methods of translating the Dharma, as well as the fixed terms in the Tibetan language in reference to the Indian language. Then the following decree was pronounced:

“Regarding the way of translating the True Dharma, do not contradict the meaning, and adhere to good Tibetan usage.

Regarding the translation of the Dharma, when a translation into Tibetan that does not deviate from the word order of the Indian original [retains] the connection between the meaning and words and is good usage, one should translate without deviating.”

If one has to deviate [from the original word order] to produce good usage and intelligibility, one can deviate and translate in a pleasing manner, but only within a single stanza. As far as the meter is concerned, it should consist of four lines, or six if required.

In prose, as long as one arrives at the required meaning, one may deviate [from the original word order] for the sake of good usage while taking both the words and meaning into consideration, and one should translate [accordingly].

When it is possible to interpret one [equivocal] word [in Indian] with many [Tibetan] words, one should strive, in the definition, to make [the translation] agree with the [context, namely the words which come] before and after.

As in the word gautamya, from the sound gau one attains a number of entities: “speech,” “geographic area,” “earth,” “light,” “vajra,” “bull,” “heaven,” etc.; and when one interprets a word like kauśika sound-wise as “having to do with kuśa-grass,” “learned,” “liking lotuses,” “owl,” “equipped with a treasure,” and so on, in the process of translating you attain a multiple list [of Tibetan words].

As it is not possible to unite that multiple list [of meanings] into one [Tibetan word]-form in the process of translation, one has to decide for one [equivalent].

But if there is no major reason [to choose any of the possible Tibetan equivalents], one may leave the Indian [term] untranslated, and use the Indian word.

But wherever there is a [Tibetan] expression with a suitable [equivocal] interpretation, you should render it in accordance with its general [and equivocal sense], and not translate [with a generally employed Tibetan expression], deciding for only one direction [of meaning].

If one translates names of countries, living beings, flowers, trees, and so on, and the possible translations are counter-intuitive, not good usage, imprecise, and as such the object of doubt: “Should they really be like this or not,”—which should be avoided—then one may keep the Indian term and preface it with a single Tibetan word “country” or “flower” and so on as applicable to that [case as a classifier]—whatever [class of things] the word [in question] refers to.

When it concerns numbers, if one translates according to the Indian language, one will have “Monk-hundreds, thirteen less a half [hundred = 1250],” but if one translates in accordance with the ordinary Tibetan language “thousand two-hundred and fifty,” it is not in disaccord with the meaning, and it is also in accordance with good Tibetan usage—thus suitable summing numbers should be established in accordance with the principles of the Tibetan language.

If one translates the prefixes pari, sam, upa and the others, which also may have the function of ornaments, the method should be to construe them in accordance with the meaning and translate them in accordance with its [Indian] word, [so as to produce in Tibetan] yoṅs su, yaṅ dag pa and ñe ba. If no additional meaning is attained, it is not necessary to multiply the construction [of the translated term], one should establish the word in accordance with the meaning.

As for words that belong to a list [of related term or synonyms], if the word in question is not closely related, one should establish an [equivalent] term which is a general word in Tibetan and in accordance with good usage. If it is closely related [as a synonym of other terms in the list] one should employ the [one Tibetan] term which designate each [of the Indian synonyms].

Concerning the degrees of respectful expressions, and expressions relating to a particular status, as concerned with the Buddhas, the Bodhisattvas or the Śrāvakas: One should translate [employing] the respectful expressions as related to the Buddha,

while in other cases, when concerned with the middle and lower forms [of respectful expressions], one should translate in accordance with the principles codified by the translations of the Dharma [scriptures] of the Ratnamegha and the Laṅkāvatāra as made earlier by the learned scholars and analysts assembled before the Father of the Divine Son [that is, the now ruling monarch].

Thus it is not granted to anybody individually to construct and after that establish new words which are differing from the principles of language as decreed in this way. However, if there is a need to construct and establish new words in individual schools, then, in the individual schools, one may construct words without establishing them, and state the causes of their origin in accordance with the dharma-books and the principles of word-[formation], and one should investigate how to establish them in accordance with the dharma. Then one should offer them to assembly in charge of the traditions of the Lord in the Palace and to the school of the great revisers of the dharma-translations, make a proper request, and if accepted it is to be added to the word-list [of the Mahā-vyutpatti].

The Tantras with their mantras are to be kept secret in accordance with the scriptures themselves, and it is not proper that they are explained and taught to those not worthy. However, in the meantime they have been translated and given for practice, but their concealed meanings were not the subject of an oral explanation, thus [the words] were understood literally—and false practices have originated. While it is an established fact that selections from among the Mantra-Tantras and translations into Tibetan do exist, henceforth, with regard to dhāraṇīmantras and the Tantras, it has been decreed that unless permission is granted to translate [a specific such scripture], it is not allowed to collect or translate the Mantra-Tantras and the words of the mantras.

The terms of the [Tibetan] language were not codified before, so since the terms were not fixed in the lexicon, one has adhered to what is derived from the books of the Great and the Small Way as well as books on language when explaining. Now the first part is ended.”

Thride Songtsen’s decree serves as the introduction to the work sGra sbyor,[8] the etymological treatment of Sanskrit terms to be translated by fixed equivalents into Tibetan. The Tibetan terminology generated on the basis of the discussions in the sGra sbyor fills the standard Sanskrit-Tibetan lexicon named Mahā-vyutpatti, “The Great Etymology.”[9]

Usually several alternatives were discussed in the sGra sbyor before the final decision when the standardized Tibetan term was agreed upon, probably reflecting real scholarly discussions on the mentioned occasion, as well as previous considerations. The term chosen should first of all represent the original meaning of Sanskrit, but there was still an ideal not to deviate from good Tibetan usage. As we see, there are also rules proposed for when to employ loanwords, though calques or loan translations are preferred to loanwords when there is no question of mantras and sacred formulas. It should also be noted how there is a conscious translation policy on prefixes, that they should be translated only if they contribute an additional meaning, and are not only an “ornament.” However, prefixes in Sanskrit are in most cases faithfully replicated in Tibetan, even though it is quite doubtful whether they contribute with additional semiosis. Unlike the Chinese policy of often not translating titles and names of Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and Śrāvakas, the Tibetans always translate these semantically into Tibetan.

Probably the intention was to create a sGra sbyor article for every lemma in the Mahā-vyutpatti, but given the great number of terms, this was probably given up. The Mahā-vyutpatti was evidently also revised along with revisions of the Kanjur and Tenjur into the thirteenth century.[10] We will translate into English the first articles from the sGra sbyor, and refer the interested reader to further reading on the mentioned internet site. The English translations correspond to the Tibetan parts of each article. The first chapter is naturally about the Buddha and his titles and appositions, here we quote the four first ones as examples:

1. buddha, Tibetan saṅs rgyas, “The Awakened”

When we interpret the word buddha, one aspect is mohanidrāprabuddhatvāt prabuddhapuruṣavat, as it is said [in the Sanskrit Buddhist scholarly literature], “because he has awakened from the sleep of delusion he is like a man who has awakened,” and by that we obtain the element “awakened” (saṅs). Also one aspect is: buddher vikāśanād buddha vibuddhapadmavat, “Intelligence unfolds widely, and thus the Buddha is just like a lotus opening its mouth and spreads out,” thus we say “Awakened and Flowered” (saṅs rgyas). The meaning of the word is in general “having understood all moments of existence and being absolutely awakened.” (buddhaḥ źes bya ba’i sgra las draṅs (2) na gcig tu na | mohanidrāprabuddhatvāt prabuddhapuruṣavat ces bya ste | gti mug gi gñid saṅs pas na mi gñid saṅs ba bźin te | saṅs pa la sñegs | yaṅ rnam pa gcig tu na | buddher vikāśanād buddha vibuddhapadmavat | blo bye źiṅ rgyas bas na padma kha bye źiṅ rgyas pa daṅ ’dra bar yaṅ bśad de saṅs rgyas źes (3) bya’o | tshig gi don spyir na chos thams cad thugs su chuṅ ciṅ ma lus par byaṅ chub pa la bya |)

2. bhagavān, Tibetan bcom ldan ’das, “The One Having Victory and Transcending,” usually translated into English as “The Lord”

Of the word bhagavān one aspect is bhagnamāracatuṣṭayatvād bhagavān, as it is said, “because he has vanquished the Four Evil Ones he is called Victorious (bcom).” And another aspect: bhaga means “the good lot” and is a general word for these six qualities: beauty, fame, power, grace, wisdom and valiance; vān denotes “having (ldan),” and thus we interpret bhagavān as “his is the good lot.” By this analysis we indicate a well-known earlier translation, but in the sūtras the Lord has among his qualities the quality of transcending the world, and if we make that our basis, we should add the word “transcending” (’das), and we fix the translation “The One Having Victory and Transcending” (bcom ldan ’das), while when we talk about the worldly bhagavān, as in worldly books, we do not call him Victorious (bcom), but still we describe him as having a good lot, and thus we fix the term “having a good lot” (legs ldan) for the worldly bhagavān. (bhagavān źes bya ba gcig tu na | bhagnamāracatuṣṭayatvād bhagavān | źes bya ste bdud bźi bcom pas na bcom pa la bya | yaṅ rnam pa gcig tu na bhaga ni legs pa rnam pa drug gi miṅ ste | gzugs daṅ | (4) grags pa daṅ | dbaṅ phyug daṅ | dpal daṅ | śes rab daṅ | brtson pa ste ’di drug gi spyi la bya | vān źes ’byuṅ ba ni bhago syāstīti bhagavān źes ldan par bśad de | de rnam graṅs ’di skad du bya ba las sṅar bsgyur ba’i tshig grags pa btsan par bya ste | bcom ldan ’das źes bya ba ni mdo sde dag las (5) saṅs rgyas kyi yon tan la mtshan ’jig rten las ’das pa’o || źes kyaṅ ’byuṅ bas na | ’jig rten pa’i bhagavān las khyad bar du ’das źes bla thabs su bsnan te | bcom ldan ’das źes btags | ’jig rten pa’i bhagavān źes bya ba ni ’jig rten ba’i gźuṅ ñid las kyaṅ bcom par mi ’chad de | legs (6) pa daṅ ldan pa źes ’chad bas ’jig rten pa’i bhagavān ni legs ldan źes gdags |)

3. tathāgata, Tibetan de bźin gśegs pa, “The Thus Come”

As for the word tathāgata, tathā means “thus” (de bźin), and gata means either “come” (gśegs pa), “departed,” “having understood” or “explained.” The general meaning of the word is connected to how the previous Buddhas came and went, but also how they understood the suchness (de bźin ñid = Skt. tathatā) of the essence of all moments of existence just as it is, and explained that. However, we fix the well-known previous translation of “Thus Come” (de bźin gśegs pa). (tathāgata źes bya ba tathā ni de bźin gata ni gśegs pa’am byon pa’am mkhyen pa’am gsuṅs pa la bya ste | tshig gi don spyir na sṅon gyi saṅs rgyas rnams ji ltar gśegs śiṅ phyin pa daṅ | chos thams cad gyi raṅ (7) bźin de bźin ñid ji lta ba mkhyen źiṅ gsuṅs pa la bya mod kyi | sṅar grags pa bźin de bźin de bźin gśegs pa źes gdags |)

4. arhan, Tibetan dgra bcom pa, “The One who has Eliminated the Enemy”

Of the word arhat one aspect is pūjam arhatīti arhan, as it is said, “he is the one Worthy of Veneration, as he is worthy of veneration by gods and men and so on.” And another aspect: kleśārihatavān arhan, as it is said, “he has eliminated (bcom) the enemy (ari) of vices (kleśa).” By means of this aspect we wish to strengthen the intent (artha) of the word we fix the translation “The One who has Eliminated the Enemy.” (arhan źes bya ba gcig tu na | pūjam arhatīti arhan źes bya ste | lha daṅ mi la sogs pa kun gyis mchod par ’os pas na mchod ’os źes kyaṅ bya | yaṅ gcig tu na | kleśārihatavān arhan źes bya ste | ñon moṅs pa’i dgra bcom pa źes kyaṅ bya ste | rnam pa ’di las ’dir ni don btsan par bya ste dgra bcom pa źes btags |)

The items of the Sanskrit-Tibetan lexicon proper, the Mahā-vyutpatti, following the introduction and analysis, were ordered according to importance, with the Buddha-names first, the Buddha-qualities, then the disciples of the Buddha, the bodhisattvas with names and qualities, and the way of spiritual development in Mahāyāna Buddhism. After that come various technical terms, names of animals, plants and geographical names, and so on. Thus the lexicon is clearly a Buddhist undertaking, giving priority to the terms according to their importance. In the various editions of the Mahā-vyutpatti the Tibetan script is employed—suiting perfectly for the task, being generated from the Brāhmī alphabet, however, in some editions the siddham-script, as treated below, is used for the Sanskrit quotations of the work.

All the words constructed on the basis of Indic Buddhist terms were undoubtedly quite foreign and strange for the average Tibetan at the time they were created as a mass of neologisms, when compared to the general spoken language. However, over the centuries the terms representing Sanskrit technical terms in Buddhist teachings sifted into general language, written and spoken. The chos skad as thus created still has remained to a great extent a literary style and to a great extent also a lingua poetica, administrativa, and so on. This is most clearly demonstrated by the fact that the verbal system of Tibetan spoken dialects, even today, is quite different from the periphrastic verbal forms created by early Tibetan translators to represent the Sanskrit tempora and modi. These translators, as grammarians, employed the Indian Pāṇinean traditions, as taken up by Buddhist scholars, when they described, normatively, what the Buddhist language of Tibet should be. Thus the modern language situation in Tibet spans from the traditional learned Buddhist language to a mixed written language, based on the spoken language, to the spoken language probably preserving much of the old Tibetan language not that much influenced by the chos skad. However, the case system, also described by Tibetan grammarians with the help of Pāṇinean theories, retains much of the presumably old features of Tibetan, and the case endings of Sanskrit are effectively replaced by Tibetan particles—not as formal equivalents of Sanskrit cases, but semantically treated through Pāṇini theory, well described with its concept of the interplay between kārakas as the grammatical functions and the eight formal cases. However, one trait of the older language fully shared with the chos skad is the ergative structure of Tibetan, placing the logical subject in the instrumental case, replacing the nominative of Sanskrit in the active mode. As we see, the translation language developed to accommodate the complex Buddhist systems of knowledge in a Tibetan form may have differed greatly from the original Tibetan language, but as a created language it enjoyed considerable success, lasting for more than 1200 years. It completely transformed Tibetan culture from a simple warrior culture into a highly sophisticated religious and philosophical culture by import of a rich and complex system of knowledge. When looking at the modern situation of the Tibetan language, there is of course a huge influence of Chinese, loanwords, loan-translations and syllabic calques (both languages being basically bisyllabic), loan concepts and syntax—not to mention the massive influence of Chinese regimes of knowledge.

The historical facts connected with the edict, usually dated to 814, as indicated above, are not uncontroversial. The decree of the king is a political and official document, and follows the rules of bureaucratic language of the time, but the context and the historical events connected with the documents are not completely clear. As has been argued by Christina Scherrer-Schaub (1999, 2002), on the basis of Panglung’s work on another version of the sGra sbyor,[11] the edict as quoted above is only a third version of three consecutive initiatives of Tibetan kings to form a unified and formalized translation language to implement their Buddhist policies.[12]

However that may be, it is clear that there was a strong royal and political interest in producing standards for the “correct” implementation of Buddhist disciplines in Tibet, that is, by education, scholarly activities and religious practices, on the whole an import of the Buddhist conceptual world into a culture and language where this was maybe not quite unknown, but at the time very foreign and strange to the ordinary Tibetan. However, with time Buddhist ways of thinking and Tibetan institutions were created by the implementation of this system of concepts, and Buddhist regimes of knowledge would completely diffuse Tibetan society in respect to religious life, education, cultural life and political institutions. One can admire the systematic procedures that brought these changes about, as expressed in the edicts of the sGra sbyor, which scarcely is paralleled in pre-modern history. The initiative was probably from the scholars, but consistent sponsorship of the king ensured the standardization and high level of organization of the initiative to make Tibet a Buddhist state. The initiative was backed by Indian scholars, Śāntarakṣita and others, as mirrored in the Indian linguistic methods employed. However, the linguistic theories in Indian traditions never cared about translation—Sanskrit, and to some extent some of its dialects, being the only languages of interest. Thus synonym lists existed in Sanskrit from far back in history, as well as the kind of etymology employed in the sGra sbyor, but there was no translation theory as such. But translatological themes were discussed in China, which had a tradition of translating Buddhist texts from Indic languages as far back as the second half of the second century CE. Discussion on how to translate thus crystallized into lexicographical works as well as theoretical notes on how to translate, and a scholarly literature followed the translations as prefaces. With time also Chinese synonym lists for producing good Chinese style in the translated texts, as well as Sanskrit-Chinese lexica, were produced. This literature seems to have gained momentum particularly in the early Tang dynasty, indeed the period when the Tibetan works on the subject were produced in the form of royal decrees. There were also sūtras translated first from their Chinese versions into Tibetan—for probably political reasons the Ratnamegha (see below)—even though this practice was disrupted with the strong Indian initiatives, as mentioned, and the decision to import the Buddhists systems of knowledge from India. But surely Chinese Buddhism played a part on several levels in the Tibetan processes described, and the Chinese translatology described in the works of 義淨 Yìjìng,玄奘 Xuánzàng and others must have influenced the beginnings of the Tibetan scholarly traditions. Tibetans were at war with the Tang dynasty, but the then fairly international mix of cultures in the Tang capital Changan, the main eastern end of the Silk Road, also harbored peaceful and scholarly communication between Chinese, Tokharian, Tibetan, Uighur, Khotanese, Sogdian and other Silk Road cultures. Such communication is witnessed also by the literatures found in Dunhuang and Turfan and the culture of translation existing at the time on the Silk Road. Translations were undertaken for the sake of trade, where Sogdian was the the main lingua franca, but also translations of Buddhist texts, as well as Christian such, where Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, Persian and Syriac texts were Vorlagen of translation.[13]

There is all reason, then, not to look at the beginnings of Tibetan bilingual lexicography as an isolated phenomenon. Though we have seen that it builds on Indian monolingual linguistic traditions, grammar and semantic theories, the Tibetan practices seem also inspired by Chinese bilingual lexicography, archive methods and theories of translation. We will thus go on to give some examples of the latter. First of all we will give some comparisons to the sGra sbyor treatment in the Chinese sources.[14]

The first Sanskrit-Chinese lexicon known, the Fānfànyǔ “The Translation of Sanskrit” 翻梵語, (T. 2130), dated 517, has the same arrangement as the later Tibetan lexicon, in accordance with the importance of the terms in a Buddhist context priority, first come the names and qualities of the Buddha, then the bodhisattvas, and their qualities and practices, further the names of monks and nuns and other persons representing the Buddhist roles, and then officials and laymen, families, animals, vegetation and geographical names (of the Buddhist world view!), winds and fire—a complete exposition of the words related to Buddhist culture as a whole. As such it also builds on various Buddhist literatures of all genres, sūtras and śāstras from all the Buddhist traditions as part of the canonical scriptures of the Chinese. It starts out with the very important scholastic work of Buddhism, the Mahāprajñāpāramitāśāstra (Mppś), now only extant in Chinese translation by Kumārajīva (344–409 CE), but ascribed to the famous Indian scholar Nāgārjuna of the second century CE. This voluminous manual of Buddhist teachings, being a commentary on a Prajñāpāramitā sūtra,[15] is a fairly complete exposition of Mahāyāna Buddhism, and evidently a natural starting point for the Fānfànyǔ, but the lexicon quotes the numerous texts found in Buddhist canon as having been translated at the time, like the Avataṃsaka, the Mahāsannipāta, the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra, and the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka, as well as the Āgamas and the host of Buddhist texts translated into Chinese, with references to the volume (卷 juàn) of the work quoted throughout. The Fānfànyǔ testifies to the prestige of the Mahāprajñāpāramitāśāstra, translated by Kumārajīva (344–409), which seems to have remained an authoritative work for translators for a long time, upon which they modeled their technical terminology.

Being a list of Sanskrit words in the often ambiguous Chinese transliteration with sounds not well fitting to Sanskrit phonology, the Fānfànyǔ must have been quite difficult to use, but it is part of the endeavor to establish Sanskrit loanwords in Chinese, in Chinese writing. The loanwords are usually those with a particularly lingua sacra valeur, as arhat, buddha, and so on.[16] We recognize the Indian style of etymological analysis employed in the sGra sbyor as quoted above, Fānfànyǔ explains loanwords in Chinese on the basis of Indian etymologies, but the author of the lexicon does not seem interested in using the explanations of the words in constructing such loan translations as the Tibetans systematically did. Though not always, in most of the cases the Fānfànyǔ provides Chinese equivalents to the transliterated words. To compare, we quote the corresponding Fānfànyǔ entries to those of the sGra sbyor:

tathāgata: duōtuóāqiétuó—can also be expressed as duōsàājié or dásàājié; and the commentary says: ‘He has accordingly (tathā) understood (gata) all characteristics of the dharma, and he comes (āgata) on the peaceful way of all buddhas, but will thus not go (agata) to further existences.’ 多陀阿伽陀—亦云多薩阿竭, 亦云怛薩阿竭; 論曰如法相解諸佛安隱道來不去也. (T. 981b02)

The transliterations are modern pinyin, and seem very far from the Sanskrit word tathāgata, however, the phonetic values of the Chinese characters were historically closer to the Sanskrit sounds. The calque of the word into Chinese, 如來 rúlaí, “thus come” is not given, even though it is much more frequent in translation than the transliteration. The Sanskrit root gam- means “to go (to),” perfect participle gata, but it also means “to understand.” tathā means “thus,” “accordingly.” English is “The Thus Come.”

Pourquoi est-il nommé To t’o a k’ie t’o (tathāgata)? 1. Il prêche les caractères des Dharma (dharmalakṣaṇa) de la façon (tathā) dont il les a compris (gata). 2. De la façon dont les Buddha [antérieurs] s’en sont allés par le chemin de la sécurité (yogakṣemamārga), ainsi (tathā) le Buddha [actuels] s’en est allé (gata) et n’ira plus à de novelles existences (punarbhava). C’est pourquoi il est nommé Tathāgata. (Lamotte 1949–1980, vol. I, 126) 復有異名. 名多陀阿伽陀等. 云何名多陀阿伽陀. 如法相解如法相說. 如諸佛安隱道來. 佛亦如是來更不去後有中. 是故名多陀阿伽陀. (T. 71b16–19)

The quotations in Fānfànyǔ are abridged. For further references to the Indian “etymologies,” see Lamotte in loco, also in the examples below, such as are also the sources of sGra sbyor.

arhat: āluóhē—can also be expressed as ālíhē; ālí means “thief,” hē means “to kill”; but it also means “to be honoured.” 阿羅呵亦云阿梨訶 論曰阿羅名賊呵名為殺亦云應供. (T. 981b4)

Skt. ari rather means “enemy” than “thief,” cf. the corresponding entry in sGra sbyor. Skt. han- perfect participle hata, means to “kill.” 阿 羅漢 (ā)luóhàn, the loan-word, is the most frequent for arhat in Chinese. In English often “saint,” or, the loanword, “arhat.”

Le Buddha est encore nommé A lo ho (Arhat). Pourquoi est-il nommé Arhat? 1. Ara signifie ennemi (ari) et hat veut dire tuer (han). L’expression signifie donc «tuer d’ennemis.” [...] 3. Enfin, Arhat signifie digne (arhat) de recevoir en culte (pūjā). Chez le Buddha les entraves (saṃyojana) sont coupées, il a obtenu l’omniscience (sarvajñatā); donc il mérite de recevoir le culte (pūjā) de tous les êtres du ciel et de la terre. C’est purquoi le Buddha est nommé Arhat. (Lamotte 1949–1980, vol. I, 127) 復名阿羅呵. 云何名阿羅呵. 阿羅名賊. 呵名殺. 是名殺賊. [...] 復次阿羅呵名應受供養. 佛諸結使除盡得一切智慧故. (T. 71b19–20)

buddha: fótuó—the commentary says: “He is the one who knows, and is awakened.” 佛陀論曰知者亦云覺者 (T. 981b12)

The Skt. root budh- means “to wake up.” 佛 fó is most frequent in Chinese, an abridged form of the loanword 佛陀 fó tuó.

Il est nommé Fo t’o (buddha) [en langue des Ts’in, savant]. Quels Dharma connaît-il? [...] C’est sous l’arbre de l’illumination (bodhivṛkṣa) qu’il les a connus parfaitement, C’est pourquoi il est nommé Buddha. (Lamotte 1949–1980, vol. I, 137) 復名佛陀. 秦言知者知何等法. 菩提樹下了了覺知故. 名為佛陀. (T. 73a2–5)

bhagavat: pógāpó—the commentary says: “pógā” means “virtue” and pó means “to have,” so translated it means “having great virtue,” or, “having crushed the vices.” 婆伽婆論曰婆伽言德婆言有譯曰大德亦破煩惱. (T. 983a7–8)

The nominative is bhagavān, the strong stem bhagavant, and the weak bhagavat; usually translated into English as “Lord.” The two explanations build on two interpretations of Skt. bhaga, bhāga meaning “part” or “good lot.” Cf. also sGra sbyor above on the word, and the Tibetan construction. The transliteration 婆伽婆 pógāpó is used quite often in translations, but the equivalent 世尊 shì zūn “venerated through the ages” is more frequent, but not quoted in the Fānfànyǔ.

1. Dans le mot bhagavat, bhāga signifie qualité (guṇa) et vat marque la possession: «Celui qui possede des qualités». [...] 4. En outre, bhāga signifie briser (bhaṅga) et vat marque le pouvoir. L’homme qui peut briser le désir (rāga), la haine (dveṣa) et la sottise (moha) et nommé Bhagavat. (Lamotte 1949–1980, vol. I, 116) 婆伽言德. 婆言有. 是名有德. [...] 復次婆伽名破. 婆名能. 是人能破婬怒癡故. 稱為婆伽婆. (T. 70b15–c3)

Again the Fānfànyǔ is abridged. A number of entries of less “important” words, however, are given in the format of 1) Chinese transliteration of Sanskrit and 2) equivalent Chinese translation, without explanations and more useful for a translator, or for one trying to learn Sanskrit words. Some examples are the following, quoted from section 6, “Names of various things” (雜法名第六):

gati: jiàndǐ—the translation is “sequence.” 楗柢譯曰次第 (T. 986a15).

gati rather means “going” and all the metaphors from that, root gam-.

mahā: móhē—the translation is “great,” “victory” or “many.” 摩訶譯曰大亦云勝亦云多 (T. 986a16)

dānapati: tányuè—the translation is “giver of gifts.” 檀越譯曰施主

(T. 986a17).

pati basically means “lord,” but also “owner,” one “having control of,” 主 zhǔ corresponds semantically to pati, and thus 施主 shīzhǔ is a loan translation.

vyākaraṇa: pógāluónà also expressed as lìgāluónà—the translation is “receiving an explanation.” 婆伽羅那亦云利伽羅那譯曰受記 (T. 984b19).

vyākaraṇa in general Sanskrit usage means explanation, but in the context, frequent in Buddhist sūtras, the explanation of future lives given by the Buddha, that is, “prophecy.”

The second lexical item of vyākaraṇa is under the heading of “Names of Dharmas of Non-Buddist sects” (外道法名):

vyākaraṇa: bìjiālánà—the explanation says jiāyuánnà means “ear” (karṇa). 蔽迦蘭那譯曰迦園那者耳也 (T. 985b10).

vyākaraṇa here probably refers to the exegetical practices of the Vedas, where the general meaning of vyākaraṇa is specialized as “grammatical explanations” being also regarded as a “sect,” or in the Indian idiom “a way to liberation.” The fanciful etymologization of karaṇa as karṇa (“ear”) is probably built on the fact that explanations are something one hears. In this example we note that the transliterations are not standardized, and seem to a great extent to build arbitrarily on usage of individual translators. Probably the Chinese would read the various transliterated words as unique words, and the understanding of words of many syllables was not the Chinese habit—one would rather read the whole word as a “unit.” In the quoted example vyākaraṇa has two distinct meanings.

Clearly the same intentions were behind the Fānfànyǔ, the Mahāvyutpatti and its commentaries: helping the translator and producing adequate terminologies. But it is not quite clear whether the Fānfànyǔ is conceived originally as a normative list or not—definitely the Mahāvyutpatti has a normative focus. The Fānfànyǔ is a very rich word list, containing almost 3000 terms, however, one could argue that a lexicon appearing some time after, had a completely new standard in giving the equivalents of the Chinese character lemmas in Brāhmī writing rather than transliteration in Chinese characters, and thus would appear more useful in reading and translating the Indic originals. This lexicon was produced by the famed Tang dynasty monk 義淨 Yìjìng (635–713), however with exerted effort, and after a long study. Yìjìng traveled for 25 years—though not the same route as his predecessor, 玄奘 Xuánzàng (602–664), whom Yìjìng is said to have admired greatly. While Xuánzàng traveled the northern Silk Road route to the Western World, that is, India, as described in his travel diary 大唐西域記 Dàtáng Xīyùjì,[17] Yìjìng chose the southern route, and approached India from the kingdoms of South East Asia, among them the Śrivijaya, which he vividly describes in his travel reports.[18] Sanskrit was used in that region not only as a lingua sacra, but also as a lingua administrativa, nobilitatis, etc., as the region was influenced in every way by Indian culture, both politically and religiously. As he describes, Yìjìng learnt Sanskrit language already there before approaching the great institutions of Buddhist learning in India. Such travels, as undertaken by Xuánzàng and Yìjìng are of course crucial for establishing the communication of cultures, not to speak of the systematic exchange of systems of knowledge, and it is of course something undertaken in all such events—scholars from the receiving culture travel to the donor culture to get educated and to receive the manuscripts and written materials needed for the translation processes. Yìjìng, though, was not the first to introduce the Sanskrit alphabet to China. Indeed, Brāhmī writing had been employed for hundreds of years for writing the numerous languages into which Buddhism was received. But at roughly at the same time as Yìjìng’s work we find a systematic treatment of the Brāhmī sound system with the corresponding Chinese sounds expressed with Chinese characters, namely, the 悉曇字記, Explanation of the siddham syllables, based on an Indian work, but rendered into Chinese by a Tang monk 智廣 Zhìguǎng.[19] There is one other work extant probably by the same Zhìguǎng, namely one on mantras for use in Tantric practices, the 密咒圓因往生集, T. 1956. Thus the author was naturally interested in the topic of writing systems, since mantras were to be recited in Sanskrit and naturally written with Brāhmī, also as decorations in temples, as well as being appreciated by Tang calligraphists. This work contains explanations of the consonants, vowel systems and ligatures in the traditional order of the Brāhmī alphabet, a proper manual for teaching Chinese students to read Sanskrit, using Chinese terminology for explaining ligatures, length of vowels, and so on.[20]

On coming home from his long study tour in 695, Yìjìng was received by the Empress Wǔ Zétiān 武則天 (624–705),[21] who, though a women, had attained absolute imperial power in the Tang dynasty by not always moral means, even though building her authority on Buddhist scriptures, in particular the Mahāmeghasūtra[22] and the Ratnameghasūtra,[23] with freshly composed commentaries, to legitimate her unique ambition to became a female Emperor, in which she succeeded. This literature depicts a lady later becoming a universal ruler as an incarnation of Maitreya.[24] She invited a great number of Indian scholars and made several of them officials in connections with making Buddhism the state religion. It is even told about her that she had some linguistic interests, in introducing new characters to the written language (Whitfield 2004, 74), very much in line with the interests of Yìjìng and his endeavor on behalf of Buddhist translation. So with his now very broad background in Indian and Buddhist civilization, and with the support of the Empress, Yìjìng translated a number of important classics of Buddhism, among them the enormous collection of delightful stories connected with the Buddha’s life, also containing the monastic rules of the Buddhist Saṃgha, namely the Mūlasarvastivādavinaya, seemingly the most prestigious collection in North India at the time. This work was also the one to be translated into Tibetan as the source of narrative and monastic rules. In general it can be said that Yìjìng’s style of translation abridges the often overflowing sentences of the Sanskrit original into a more terse Chinese style. Yìjìng produced the most efficient tool for conveying Indian terminology into Chinese, namely his Sanskrit-Chinese lexicon, the 梵語千字文 Fànyǔ qiānzìwén, “A Thousand Characters from the Sanskrit Language” (梵語千字文并序, 三藏法師義淨撰, T. 2133A.). This work employs the Brāhmī, or siddham, writing for the entry in the lexicon, but Yìjìng chose a traditional Chinese order of lemmata based on the Chinese view of the universe instead of the previously described priority of Buddhist terms in the Mahā-vyutpatti and the Fānfànyǔ. His template and the order of the words is similar to that of the 千字文 Qiānzìwén, a manual to teach children to write and read from the sixth century. The composition of this work is ascribed to 周興嗣 Zhōu Xìngsì (470–521) of the 梁朝 Liáng dynasty (502–587), and it starts as follows:

The sky was black and earth yellow; space and time vast, limitless. Sun high or low, moon full or parsed; with stars and lodges spread in place. Cold arrives then heat once more; Autumn’s harvest, Winter’s store. Extra days round out the years; scale in tune with sun and spheres.[25]

It was used widely as a manual of learning, also in Korea, even until today, and Japan, in the Uighur Qocho kingdom, and it was transcribed into Manchu letters to ease communication with the Han. It was also used for a period to order written materials, thus the order of the characters it contains functioned in the same way as the alphabet. Evidently Yìjìng did not want Buddhism to be something foreign, and he wished to integrate it into the traditions Chinese culture—where everybody from the educated classes would know the Qiānzìwén—even though he also would keep the more efficient Brāhmī system for writing Sanskrit, at least in his lexicon. However, in his short introduction, he states the purpose is to help Chinese who wish to go to India to study Indian Buddhist scholarship, with the aim of being able to translate Buddhist texts into Chinese:

For the people who intend to go to the Western Kingdom, I will make a character-learning template. So, as previously [in the original Qiānzìwén], for each entry I place a Sanskrit word under each Han Chinese character. If there is no [corresponding Han] character, I establish [the Chinese equivalent] with a sound transliteration. With these essential and necessary characters, once you master the [template], then you will also gain a thorough understanding of other words. It is, however, different from the traditional Qiānzìwén. So if you read Sanskrit texts with the siddhaṃ script, you will be able to translate them within one or two years.

為欲向西國人. 作學語樣. 仍各註中. 梵音下題漢字. 其無字者. 以音正之. 並是當途要字. 但學得此則餘語皆通. 不同舊千字文. 若兼悉曇章讀梵本. 一兩年間即堪翻譯矣 (T. 2133a, 1190a8–21).

The work is also called “The Sanskrit-Tang Thousand Characters” 或名梵唐千字文.[26] Clearly, as said in the introductions, the purpose of the lexicon is for classically educated Chinese learners well versed in the classical characters to learn Sanskrit. Thus there are, with few exceptions, only one character for each entry in the Classical Chinese way, not like the typical Buddhist bisyllabic or polysyllabic word. The few Buddhist technical terms are interspersed among the approximately thousand entries, some of them loosely grouped. There are also none of the typical loan-translations such as 如來 rúlái, tathāgata, and so on, and no transliterations, notwithstanding what it said in the introduction. The first entries are as follows:

, Too late Too late Too late, Too late Too late, Too late Too late, Too late Too late, Too late Too late Too late

天　地　日　月　陰　陽

, Too late Too late Too late, Too late Too late Too late, Too late Too late,

圓　矩　晝　夜

, Too late Too late Too late Too late, Too late Too late Too late Too late Too late, Too late Too late,

明　闇　雷　電

, Too late Too late, Too late Too late Too late, Too late Too late, Too late Too late, Too late Too late Too late Too late,

風　雨　星　流　雲　散

…

, Too late Too late Too late, Too late Too late Too late, Too late, Too late Too late, Too late Too late Too late

東　西　南　北　上

tiān - svarga (heaven); dì - pṛhivī (earth); rì - sūrya (sun); yuè - candra (moon); yīn - cchāya - (shadow); yàng - ātapa (heat);

yuán - paripūrṇṇa (full); jǔ - ādeśa (order, standard rule); zhòu - divasa (day); yè - ratri - (night);

míng - āloka - (light); àn - andhakara (darkness); léi - devagarjita (thunder); diàn - vidyu(t) (lightning);

fēng - vāyu (wind); yǔ - varṣa (rain); xīng - tāraka (star); liú - srota(s) (flowing water); yún - megha (cloud); sàn -vihanita (dispersed);

…

dōng - pūrva (east); xī - paścima (west); nán - dakṣiṇa (south); běi - uttara (north); shàng - uttara (up). (T.1190a22–b04)

However, a version of the above, with “translatory notes”[27] is also extant, reproducing Yìjìng’s Thousand Character text, but with Chinese character transliterations, employing phonological terminology as in the above-mentioned Explanation of the siddham syllables by Zhìguǎng. Among his successors there were several developments of the Sanskrit lexical ontology as established by Yìjìng.[28] Later in the Tang period the Indian script seems to be abandoned for the Chinese transliterations, as in Huìlín: “Word and meanings in all the sūtras.”[29] In the Song dynasty the Buddhist cleric Fǎyún 法雲 also reverted to the traditional Buddhist ontology with the Buddha-names as introduction to the otherwise rich lexicon, “A collection of nouns and meanings translated,” finished 1151.[30]

We find then, that during the Tang dynasty (618–907) lexicographical projects were undertaken both in Tibet and in China in accordance with the same principles, and indeed Tibet was bordering on the Tang territories, where both friendly and inimical contacts were made in the period. So we have all reason to believe that scholarly communication took place, even though, as mentioned, Tibet consciously chose to import Buddhism from India after the debate at Samye, and for political reasons chose not to cooperate with Chinese scholars and probably downplayed political contacts. In going to the original source of Buddhism in Indian language and in the country of its origin, the Tibetans would preserve autonomy in creating the form of Buddhism they wanted for their country.[31] Before the end of the seventh century, there were contacts between Tang scholars and Tibetan such, as some sūtras were translated into Tibetan from Chinese, as the Laṅkāvatāra, and the Ratnamegha, favorite text of Empress Wú.[32] In the beginning the Tibetans must have regarded this sūtra as an important one, as tradition says that it was the first text Thonmi Sambhoṭa translated into Tibetan (Rinpoche 1994, 342, 441). The revision of this text must in a political perspective have been symbolically very significant. The translator and lexicographer Yìjìng is also said to be “the first to transmit the precepts of Tibetan Buddhism.”[33] The sources are somewhat meager, but it is probable  that the Tibetans were inspired by Tang culture in their appropriation of Buddhism, and also by the Tang methods of translation. Both cultures were of course dependent on Indian linguistic theory and monolingual lexicography, as can be seen in the Indian synonym lexicon Amarakoṣa, in which the lexical patterns follow principles not connected with religion, mentioning firstly expressions connected with the vault of the sky, then secondly the earth with places, men and animals, and as the third part “general terms” (svargādikhāṇḍa, bhūvargādikhāṇḍa, sāmānyādi-khāṇḍa).

The scholars of the Tang dynasty had already a tradition of five hundred years translating Buddhist texts from Sanskrit before them, and according to tradition this activity was initiated already at the height of the Han dynasty in 67 CE, when a delegation of monks visited the Han emperor, who had an anthology of Buddhist teachings translated into Chinese by a certain monk Kāśyapa-Mātaṅga as “The Sūtra in Forty Two Sections.”[34] But in the end of the second century, translation activities gain momentum with the Persian 安世高 Ān Shìgāo, who arrived in Luoyang in 147 CE, and the contemporaneous “Indo-Scyte”[35] Lokakṣema (fl. 168–89 CE) and in his tradition支謙 Zhīqiān (fl. 233–253 CE).[36] Their terminologies are mostly terms from classical Chinese equivocated with the Buddhist terms, but with the prolific Indian scholar Dharmarakṣa (230–316 CE, see Boucher 1996), resident in Luoyang and Changan, a more consistent standardization of Chinese equivalents of Sanskrit terms took place. However, there is another scholar of Indian extraction, Kumārajīva (344–409 CE), who is credited with creating most of the standards of Chinese Buddhist literature, not the least because of his influential translations, like that of the Mahāprajñāpāramitāśāstra, quoted above as a source of the Fānfànyǔ from the sixth century. Kumārajīva did not, however, write any theoretical works on translation theory or any linguistic works apart from that found in his translations. Other Indians were also very important translators and creators of new Chinese terminology, like Paramārtha (499–569 CE).

Translations of Buddhist texts into Chinese are ascribed to single responsible personalities, but most often the translations were produced as team work, where tasks were well defined and in accordance with Chinese sense of order. The participants had particular titles corresponding to their obligations in the production of the Chinese versions, by rank:

Translator in Charge

Holder of the Brush (writing the oral translation down in Chinese)

The Interpreter or translator

Examiner of the Sanskrit sources, with several assistants, then

Polisher of Writing, expert on style

Examiner of Meaning, (whose number in the case of the Abhidharmakośa is given as 300!)

Reciter of Verses

The Collation Officer, and

The Superintendent.[37]

Xuánzàng (600–664 CE), though, is praised for managing the whole process himself,[38] but other sources mentions him as having an assembly for the purpose, with a superintendent. Though translation and producing texts is a laborious process, the great number of officials needed is probably only an ideal, and a way to share the prestigious work—even an emperor is once reported to be Holder of the Brush. But it is clear that translation was a very costly undertaking in including great numbers of scholars and officials. One might suspect that the great number of participants did not necessarily contribute to an accurate translation.

Xuánzàng was concerned with a normative description on how translation should be carried out in terms of loanwords or translation. He is reported to have set down principles for when not to translate terms and use loanwords instead:

Firstly, if a term is part of the esoteric teachings, it is not translated, e.g., 陀羅尼 tuóluóní (Skt. dhāraṇī “mantra,” “incantation,” same as sGra sbyor §25).

Secondly, if a term has multiple meanings, it is not translated. An example is 薄伽梵 bójiāfàn. In Sanskrit this terms has six meanings. (Skt. bhagavat, “Lord.” See the entries of bhagavat above in the Sgra sbyor and the Fānfànyǔ. Tibetans translate the word).

Thirdly, if the object represented by the term does not exist in this part of the world, that term is not translated. An example is 閻浮樹 yánfúshù. In actual fact no such tree exists in our land. (yánfú—Skt. jambu, 樹 shù is tree in Chinese. See Sgra sbyor §18).

Fourthly, if a past rendering of a term has become established and accepted, the term is not translated. An example is 阿耨菩提 ānòupútí (Skt. anubodhi). The term is not untranslatable, but ever since the time of Kāśyapa-Mātaṅga the Sanskrit form has been kept.

Fifthly, if a term elicits positive associations it is not translated. An example is 般若 bōrě (Skt. prajñā, “wisdom”) which carries a sense of authority and has weight. But when the term is semantically translated into 智慧 zhìhuì, its meaning becomes lighter and shallower. [...] 釋迦牟尼 shìjiāmóuní is translated as 能仁 néngrén “able and benevolent,” but such a name is inferior in status to the Duke of Zhou and Confucius (Skt. Śākyamuni, name of the Buddha, prestige of Buddhism as compared with the two great Chinese traditions counts.) Also, 阿耨菩提 ānòupútí (Skt. anubodhi) can be translated as 正遍知 “correct all-encompassing knowledge,” but this makes its meaning indistinguishable from the teachings of Laozi 老子.[39]

We see that the discussion is similar to that of the sGra sbyor, though sometimes with other conclusions. The Tibetans did also not have the problem of relating to earlier terminologies and spiritual authorities other than the Indian scholars who took part in the Tibetan translation project.[40]

In early Tang there was not only religious tolerance where both Buddhism and Daoism were respected, even by imperial decree,[41] but also a remarkable openness to other cultures and willingness to accept other systems of knowledge, including religious thinking from both the West through Persia, and from India. One of the reason may be that the during the Tang there was a true international milieu in China, due to the Silk Road, but probably also because of the various peripheral state formations, like the Old Turks, and the Tibetans, pressing the Chinese center both militarily and culturally. The Götürk and Orchon with their military prowess, at times also allied with the Han, and the other states in the periphery competing for power did not seem to be ideologically stale: they were rather interested in Christianity and Manicheism arriving in Syriac, Persian and Sogdian garb, as well as the Buddhist Culture from the South West. Early Tang was a fruit of such cultural intermingling with the Chinese traditional culture, and indeed Buddhism, flowing in again and again in new waves from India over many centuries. At some point, however, when the Tang dynasty had become rulers of an established culture, Chinese traditionalism would again triumph over the barbaric influences. Later Tang, in particular in the middle of the ninth century, was full of persecution of foreign culture, most of all aiming at eradicating Buddhism—not however succeeding, as Buddhism remained a major influence on Chinese thinking, and, as we suggest, on Chinese language.

In any language learning project, to learn, translate and employ technical terms is certainly an important and difficult practice, in that it is crucial in importing a set or system of concepts into another language than in which they were created. In our case the terms are created in Sanskrit, discussed by scholars of translation in terms of origin and semantic etymologies for the sake of recreating them in Chinese and Tibetan. In this process, it is a bit surprising that the study of grammar was not given more priority. For the period we are treating, there are not many references, and no comprehensible extant systematical works on syntax and inflexion of Sanskrit in Chinese.[42] This, however, does not mean that Sanskrit grammar did not spill over into Buddhist Chinese in the way of inflexion and syntax in the actual translations. In China, one evidently did not see the need for such manual in perfecting the translations of Buddhist texts, and this aspect of the translation activity must have existed in the oral expertise and the oral procedures of translation. And, indeed, as described above, the translation process involved a huge number of translation officials and oral communication in the process, making it maybe less accurate, as van Gulik likes to point out. But morphological analyses were not completely absent in Chinese language, as is documented by a commentary to the Avataṃsakasūtra by the Sogdian translator 法藏 Fǎzàng (643–712 CE), evidently knowing Sanskrit well.[43] The paragraph reflects Pāṇinean categories of nominal inflexion:

The cases refer to the (grammatical) rules of Western (Indian!) countries. If one wants to examine and read the sacred and secular books one has to know the rules for the eightfold declension. If one does not understand these, one cannot know the meaning and arrangement of the text.

puruṣaḥ, the case of direct indication; for instance, in the sentence ‘The man cut down the tree,’ this case points directly to that man [nominative].

puruṣam, the case indicating that to which something happens. As in the sentence ‘The tree that is cut’ [accusative].

puruṣeṇa, the case indicating the instrument with which something is done. As in the sentence ‘to cut a tree with an axe’ [instrumental].

puruṣāya, the case indicating for whom something is done. As in ‘to cut a tree for a man’ [dative].

puruṣāt, the case indicating a causal relation. As in ‘to build a house on behalf of a man’ [ablative].

puruṣasya, the case indicating possession, as in ‘the slave belongs to the master’ [genitive].

puruṣe, the case indicating staying where. As in ‘the guest stays where the host is’ [locative].[44]

Though lexical exercises are mostly emphasized, grammatical manuals still appear also in the Tibetan tradition with time. As says Pieter C. Verhagen:

There are no Tibetan translations of Sanskrit grammatical treatises known to us that can be dated to the first period of translation activities. [...] Nevertheless, we must assume that the Tibetan translators and linguists occupied themselves with Sanskrit grammar to a certain extent in this earliest period of translation. Evidence of this can be found in the Tibetan canon; for instance, in treatises on certain aspects of Sanskrit grammar attributed to Lce-khyi-’brug, an eighth or ninth-century Tibetan translator, [...] .[45]

However, if the historicity of Thonmi Sambhoṭa is accepted, grammatical works built on Sanskrit grammatical theory were produced for Tibetan translators in the beginning of the import of Buddhism to Tibet, concerning not only lexicography, but also phonetics—in the sense of syllabaries ordered according to Indian principles—as well as the eightfold Pāṇinean system represented by Tibetan syntactical particles. In the Dunhuang materials, another grammatical work from the early ninth century, a bilingual Tibetan-Chinese treatment of the mentioned eight categories, namely, the ’Jug pa’i sgra brgyad bstan pa tshig le’ur byas pa appeared about the time of the sGra sbyor. Probably the Tibetan version was based on a Chinese version, and was translated or authored by the Tibetan scholar Chos-grub, also ’Gos Chos-grub, carrying even the Chinese version of his name, 法成 Fǎchéng—indeed indicating Tibetan-Chinese contacts.[46] Analyses of verbs did not attract that much attention in the early period, though, at least for Tibetan, there was a good understanding of Sanskrit tempora and the appertaining verbal inflexion to be reproduced in Tibetan. We also find that in Chinese translations particles would modify the theme characters to represent Sanskrit tempora and modi in a fairly systematic way.

Style and elegance are to some extent topics in the Tibetan tradition, as in the sGra sbyor, but for the Chinese translation activities they are very important topics, as they are for the evaluation of the various translators,[48] though the semantics of the created terms are, at least in principle judged as the most important. When to employ loanwords or loan translations is discussed both in the Chinese and the Tibetan traditions, and they are discussed in terms of both semantics and style and usage in the receiving language. We have seen in the sGra sbyor how these matters were discussed in creating the Tibetan chos skad, their lingua sacra, on the one side, and on the other, the considerations connected with importing Indian concepts into the Chinese language. Thus we find similar discussions in the two traditions, with the Tibetan exercises probably inspired by the Chinese ones—the Chinese had after all been translating Buddhist texts for about 500 years at the time. The processes and discussions are quite similar, though with one major difference. When Buddhism was imported into Chinese, the receiving language was already a great cultural language, carrying great sets of meanings as befitting for a rich literary tradition, while the chos skad of Tibet was created more or less from scratch—Tibetan being at the time a much simpler and younger culture than the Chinese. This had the implication that the Tibetans could form their clerical language much as they wanted, as the words employed did not already have such broad fields of meaning as the already existing Chinese vocabulary of religion, science and philosophy. The discussions on how to create technical terms included a discussion on the connotations of words in Chinese already in place, while this was not a topic in the Tibetan discussions, even though good usage was also discussed there.

In conclusion, one may propose that the Chinese attempted to a certain extent to establish standards for their 1000-year-long translation project, but it remained mostly based on individual initiatives, not withstanding the attempts made by the mentioned authors. The Tibetans were much more successful in systematically standardizing their imported Buddhist terminology. Even though the terminology underwent changes, implemented on a broader scale, it carried authority in the more homogenous Buddhist culture of Tibet. The cases may serve as models of translation projects to understand to what extent they are a systematic undertaking with support of strong organizational and scholarly authorities, or, if they are the result of individual and more arbitrary initiatives. In both cases the translation processes were connected with important political events, and these were mirrored in the linguistic changes which the initiatives entailed. In our argument we have not taken a stand on which is the “best” way of moving a set of concepts into another language culture, and implementing it as a knowledge regime. However, the creation of standards and translation equivalents is a controlled process that serves any political project, while the freedom of translation, where standardization is “immanent” and not collectively and consciously agreed upon by a politically backed process, may better serve cultural communication, being more dependent on the imagination and creativity of the individual translator. Such individual translation is characteristic of modern translation practices, where the sum of translators’ arbitrariness creates a multiplicity of the vocabulary—not withstanding a national language standard—that enriches languages more than standardized procedures.

References

Bacot, J. (1928). Les ślokas Grammaticaux de Thonmi Sambhoṭa, Avec Leurs Commentaires. Traduits Du Tibétain et Annotés. Annales Du Museé Guimet. Paris: Geuthnner.

Bagchi, P. C. (1929–1937). Deux Lexiques Sanskrit Chinois: Fan Yu Tsa Ming de Li Yen et Fan Yu Ts’ien Tsen Wen de Yi-Tsing. Vol. 2 vols. Paris, Calcutta: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner.

Boucher, D. (1996). “Buddhist Translation Procedures in Third-Century China: A Study of Dharmaraksa and His Translation Idiom.” PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania. http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI9636133.

Braarvig, J. (1995). The Phug Brag Versions of the Akṣayamatinirdeśa. Proceedings of the 7th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies. Graz: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

——— (2012). “The Spread of Buddhism as Globalization of Knowledge.” In The Globalization of Knowledge in History, 245–67. Max Planck Research Library for the History and Development of Knowledge, Studies 1. Berlin: Edition Open Access.

Cheung, M. P. (2006). Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translations. Vol. Vol. 1: From Earliest Times to the Buddhist Project. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing.

Demiéville, P. (1952). Le Concile de Lhasa: Une Controverse Sur Le Quiétisme Entre Bouddhistes de L’Inde et de La Chine Au Viiie Siècle de L’ère Chrétienne. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale de France.

Emmerick, R. E. (1992). A Guide to the Literature of Khotan, Studia Philologica Buddhica. Occasional Paper Series, III. Tokyo: The International Institute for Buddhist Studies.

Fuchs, W. (1930). “Zur Technischen Organisation Der übersetzungen Buddhistischer Schriften Ins Chinesische.” Asia Major, 84–103.

Gulik, R. H. van (1974 [1956]). Siddham: An Essay on the History of Sanskrit Studies in China and Japan. Nagpur: Lokesh Chandra.

Hansen, V. (2012). The Silk Road: A New History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ishikawa, M., ed. (1990–1993). SGra Sbyor Bam Po Gnyis Pa and a Critical Edition of the sGra Sbyor Bam Po Gnyis Pa: An Old and Basic Commentary on the Mahāvyutpatti, Materials for Tibetan-Mongolian Dictionaries. Vols. 1–2. Studia Tibetica 18. Tokyo: The Toyo Bunko.

Lamotte, E. (1949–1980). La Traité de La Grande Vertu de Sagesse. Vol. 5 vols. Louvain: Institut orientaliste, Bibliothèque de l’Université.

Li, Rongxi (1995). The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions. Berkeley: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation; Research.

Miller, R. A. (1976). Studies in the Grammatical Tradition in Tibet. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.

Muradyan, G. (2012). Grecisms in Ancient Armenian. Hebrew University Armenian Studies 13. Leuven: Peeters.

Nattier, J. (2008). A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations: Texts from the Eastern Han and Three Kingdoms Periods. Buddhica Bibliotheca Philologica et Philosophica Buddhica. Tokyo: International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Soka University.

Panglung, J. L. (1989). “New Fragments of the sGra Sbyor Bam Po Gñis Pa.” East and West 44 (1): 161–72.

Rinpoche, P. (1994). The Words of My Perfect Teacher. San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers.

Scherrer-Schaub, C. (1999). “Translation, Transmission, Tradition: Suggestions from Ninth-Century Tibet.” Journal of Indian Philosophy 27: 67–77.

——— (2002). “Enacting Words: A Diplomatic Analysis of the Imperial Decrees (Bkas Bcad) and Their Application in the sGra Sbyor Bam Po Gñis Pa Tradition.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 25 (1–2): 263–340.

Schubert, J. (1937). Tibetische Nationalgrammatik. Das Sum Cu Pa Und Rtags Kyi ’Jug Pa Des Grosslamas von Peking Rol Pa’i Dro Rje. Artibus Asiae 1. Leipzig: Artibus Asiae Publishers.

Sen, T. (2016). Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of India–China Relations. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Simonsson, N. (1957). Indo-Tibetische Studien: Die Methoden Der Tibetischer übersetzer, Untersucht Im Hinblick Auf Die Bedeutung Ihrer übersetzungen Für Die Sanskritphilologie. Vol. Vol. 1. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells.

——— (1982). “Refletions on the Grammatical Tradition of Tibet.” In Indological and Buddhist Studies: Volume in Honour of Professor J. W. De Jong on This Sixtieth Birthday, edited by J. W. de Jong. Canberra: Australian National University Press.

Takakusu, J. (1896). A Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practiced in India and the Malay Archipelago. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Takata, T. (2000). “Multilingualism in Tun-Huang.” Acta Asiatica: Bulletin of the Institute of Eastern Culture 78: 49–70.

Verhagen, P. (1994). A History of Sanskrit Grammatical Literature in Tibet. Vol. Vol. 1: Transmission of the Canonical Literature. Leiden: Brill.

——— (1997). “Tibetan Expertise in Sanskrit Grammar—a Case Study: Grammatical Analysis of the Term Pratītya-Samutpāda.” The Journal of the Tibet Society 8: 21–48.

——— (2001). A History of Sanskrit Grammatical Literature in Tibet. Vol. Vol. 2: Assimilation into Indigenous Scholarship. Leiden: Brill.

Wang, B. (1999). “A Discussion of the 42 Syllabary (四十二字門考論).” Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal 12.

Whitfield, S. (2004). The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith. Chicago, IL: Serindia Publications.

Yutaka, Y. (2015). “Sogdian Literature I. Buddhist.” Encyclopædia Iranica.

Zürcher, E. (1959). The Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China. Leiden: Brill.

Footnotes

[1] The classic on the topic, still relevant, of the Chinese reception of Buddhism, is Zürcher (1959).

[2] On the spread of Buddhism as a system of knowledge, see Braarvig (2012).

[3] At least according to tradition, see below.

[4] See Scherrer-Schaub (2002, 266–67), with references, on the (probable lack of) historicity of this tradition.

[5] On the earliest Tibetan grammar Sum cu pa, see Bacot (1928), Schubert (1937), and cf. Simonsson (1982), and on its historicity, Miller (1976, 2ff.) and Verhagen (1994, 207).

[6] Demiéville (1952), Scherrer-Schaub (2002, 267).

[7] Scherrer-Schaub (2002, 76–77 and notes 46–49), with ample references.

[8] *Śabdayukti, “The construction of words.” The term yukti, which is a probable Sanskrit equivalent of Tibetan sbyor, means originally “joining,” but also logical “consistency.” Therefore we have ventured the translation “construction of words,” since this is the subject of the sGra sbyor, but yukti can also mean syntax, thus “the construction of sentences, or language” in general. For sGra sbyor, see Ishikawa (1990-1993); and further the internet version with English translation in Bibliotheca Polyglotta: https://www2.hf.uio.no/polyglotta/index.php?page=volumevid=263, accessed July 7, 2017.

[9] Both works are available in a number of modern versions, and the introductory sGra sbyor is translated into English in two seminars in Berkeley and Marburg 2011–12, see the internet publication of this work in Bibliotheca Polyglotta, texts and translations in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese and English. The latest and best critical edition of the original text is found in Ishikawa (1990–1993). The second volume has ample references to the Indian “etymologies” employed by the sGra sbyor. The classic of the study of Tibetan translatology is Nils Simonsson (1957), which contains a partial translation of the sGra sbyor into German beside the discussions. See also Verhagen (1994, 9–45).

[10] See Braarvig (1995).

[11] Panglung (1989), see the summary of Panglung’s arguments in Scherrer-Schaub (2002, 270–271), and summary of the events as seen by Scherrer-Schaub (2002, 315–17).

[12] Historical revisions did not end with this, as can be gleaned by historical textual criticism, cf. Braarvig (1995, 8, note 22).

[13] On the complex landscape of Silk Road culture, see Whitfield (2004); Hansen (2012). The Uighurs translated Buddhist texts from Chinese, for example from Xuánzàng’s translations of Indic texts, but they also translated from Sanskrit, and used Indian semantics to coin their Buddhist technical terms in Old Turkish. It is worth noting the founder of the Tang dynasty was half Götürk. Many other languages translated Buddhism, mostly from Sanskrit and its dialects. On Khotanese literature, including numerous Buddhist titles, see Emmerick (1992); there is also an example of a Sanskrit-Khotanese bilingual made for the purpose of learning Sanskrit, Emmerick (1992, 47–48). Sogdian Buddhist texts are mostly found in Dunhuang; one surmises that Sogdians emigrating to the East became Buddhist, see Yutaka (2015). In the earlier periods, all non-Chinese languages, including Sanskrit and the Central-Asian ones, were lumped together as 胡語 húyǔ “barbaric languages,” only later the expression 梵語 fànyǔ “Brahmā language” came into use, see Cheung (2006, 6–7). On the multilingualism of Dunhuang, see Takata (2000).

[14] The Chinese lexica we have commented on are all Tang except the Fānfànyǔ. The four Tang lexica are edited and commented on in detail by Bagchi (1929–1937), see also van Gulik’s comments (1974 [1956], 31ff.. Van Gulik disagrees, correctly so, with Bagchi that T. 2133 was made for Indians wishing to learn Chinese, which is born out by the introduction as read by Bagchi—it is rather the other way around. Van Gulik thinks that the lexicon was made to help traveling traders, rather than students of Buddhism, and that the author cannot be 義淨 Yìjìng because of stylistic reasons (pp. 32–33 and 35), but van Gulik’s argument is not convincing in this respect given the lack of day-to-day language terminology.

[15] The Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā, “Perfection of Wisdom in 25000 verses” was translated into Chinese four times, see Lamotte (1949–1980, vol. I, p. VII ff.), T. no. 1509: 摩訶般若波羅蜜經釋論.

[16] See below on Xuánzàng’s principles for employing loanwords or loan translations.

[17] The latest translation is Li (1995).

[18] Takakusu (1896). See Cheung (2006, 167–8) on his other works.

[19] T. 2132, 1186a5 南天竺般若菩提悉曇, 大唐山陰沙門智廣撰.

[20] On the siddham alphabet, see van Gulik (1974 [1956]) and Wang Bangwei (1999).

[21] On Wǔ Zétiān’s remarkable life, see Sen (2016, 93ff.).

[22] There are numerous translations and versions into Chinese, from the early fifth century to Amoghvajra’s Tang translation in the mid-eighth century: T. 387, 991, 992, 993, 950; Tibetan in Derge mdo sde wa 113a–214b, 250b–263a.

[23] Chinese translations in T. 489, 658, 660, Tibetan in Derge mdo sde wa 1b–112b.

[24] Sen (2016).

[25] 天地玄黃宇宙洪荒日月盈昃辰宿列張寒來暑往秋收冬藏閏餘成歲律召調陽, tr. Nathan Sturman.

[26] I thank Jianrong Shi for helping me to understand this introduction.

[27] 梵語千字文譯注. T. 2133b.

[28] 全真: 唐梵文字, T. 2134, no Chinese character transliteration; T. 2135, 梵語雜名 “Various Sanskrit words,” collected by Lǐyán 禮言, with Chinese transliteration, but another order of single Chinese characters as lemmata; and 唐梵兩語雙對集 (T. 2136) starting out with the parts of the body, but having only Chinese transliterations apart from a small Brāhmī quotation in the end.

[29] 慧琳: 一切經音義, between 788 and 810.

[30] T. 2131, 翻譯名義集, see Cheung (2006, 199–200) for his interesting reflections on translation.

[31] A very similar case of the introduction of Buddhism is that of the Armenian choice to translate Greek classical literature as well as Christian texts directly from Greek in the fifth century CE, not basing themselves on Syriac Christian texts which were dominant among the Armenians before that, since Syriac influence was tolerated by the Persians, who constantly sought to dominate Armenia. Thus the creation of an alphabet and various linguistic tools to have direct access to the source of the dominating Greek culture, was a partly, if not mostly, nationalistic project, just as in Tibet at the time of the Tang dynasty. The Armenians, like the Tibetans, did also not have an alphabet before they embarked on the project of gaining cultural autonomy through access to a world culture of learning, in the cases Greek and Sanskrit based. See Muradyan (2012) on the massive influence of Grecisms on Armenian, similar to the Sanskritisms in Tibetan as a result of these important political decisions.

[32] Further in Scherrer-Schaub (2002, 298–304).

[33] Cheung 2006, 166, unfortunately the source for this information is not given.

[34] 四十二章經. The language seems more modern, either the texts is revised, or is later construction. There is no exact Sanskrit counterpart.

[35] 月支, on the role of the yuèzhí as translators in pre-buddhist environments, see article of Bolzmann in this volume.

[36] See further in Cheung (2006), and Nattier (2008).

[37] As described by Zanning (919–1001), in Cheung (2006, 188–190). See also Fuchs (1930, 84–103); van Gulik (1974 [1956], 29–30); Sen, Tansen, (2016, 97).

[38] Cheung (2006, 167).

[39] The translation is by Diana Yue, Cheung (2006, 157–8), though abbreviated and with some modifications.

[40] See further Cheung (2006, 159) on Xuánzàng stressing that Buddhism and Daoism are separate religions, and that Buddhism should not be linked up with Daoist meanings. This, however, naturally was an important discussion in attempts to reconcile the traditions or to suppress the foreign influence.

[41] See Cheung (2006, 169) on Empress Wu’s decree that Buddhist and Daoist priest should pay respect to their respective sacred spaces.

[42] But cf. below, on Chos-grub, and van Gulik on this problem, the latter, who, in describing the Siddham system of writing, cannot hide his depreciation of Chinese intellectual culture that greatly appreciated Indian calligraphy, but not at all Sanskrit grammar, throughout their tradition.

[43] T. 1733, van Gulik’s (1974 [1956], 19–20) translation with some moderations.

[44] In the following, Fǎzàng’s grammatical note explains vocative as the eight category, and then gender and number. T. 1733 T. 1733 149a28–b16: 第十八聲者依西國法. 若欲尋讀內外典藉. 要解聲論八轉聲法. 若不明知必不能知文義分齊. 一補盧沙此是直指陳聲. 如畫像人斫樹指說其人. 二補盧私是所作業聲. 如所作斫樹. 三補盧崽拏是能作具聲. 如由斧斫. 四補盧沙耶是所為聲. 如為人斫. 五補盧沙Too late是所因聲. 如因人造舍等. 六補盧殺娑是所屬聲. 如奴屬主. 七補盧鎩是所依聲. 如客依主. 瑜伽第二. 名上七種為七例句. 以是起解大例故. 聲論八轉更加補盧沙. 是呼召之聲. 然此八聲有其三種. 一男聲. 二女聲. 三非男非女聲. 此上 畫像且約男聲說之. 以梵語名丈夫為補盧沙故. 又此八聲復各三. 謂一聲. 二聲身. 三多聲身. 則為二十四聲. 如喚丈夫有二十四女及非男女聲亦名有二十四. 總有七十二種聲. 以目諸法可以准知. 然此方多無此例.

[45] Verhagen (1997, 22, references to sources in note 5, 32–33). See further Verhagen (1994, 47ff., and 2001, 5ff.) for a more detailed treatment of Lce-khyi-’brug. He is mentioned as a translator in sGra sbyor §4, see above.

[46] See Verhagen (2001, 29ff.) on this work, bibliography,[47] and another Dunhuang grammatical manuscript without title. Further on “The Formation of Bilingual Tibeto-Chinese Communities [in Dunhuang]” in Takata (2000, 62ff.), with a list of “Tibeto-Chinese Bilingual texts,” Takata (2000, 64–65), though produced probably as late as the tenth century.

[47] Verhagen ( Verhagen 2001, in notes 107–110).

[48] See Cheung (2006: passim).

17. Classical Chinese as Lingua Franca in East Asia in the First to Second Millennia CE: Focusing on the Linguistic Situation in Traditional Korea

Vladimir Tikhonov

17.1 Introduction: Classical Chinese as Lingua Franca cum Lingua Sacra

Until shortly before the end of the nineteenth century, the linguistic situation in East Asia was typically characterized by bilingualism. From the second to third centuries CE, the non-Chinese people of East Asia—first proto-Koreans and proto-Japanese, and then a significant number of ethnically non-Chinese dynastic states located on the territory of today’s PRC (People’s Republic of China)—used classical Chinese as the preferred medium of diplomatic contact, scholarship and highbrow literary expression. As Sinified Buddhism and Confucianism spread beyond the borders of the dynastic states on today’s PRC territory, and made inroads into the Korean Peninsula, Japanese Archipelago, and the northern part of what now is Vietnam (SRV: Socialist Republic of Vietnam) in the second to sixth centuries CE, classical Chinese—enriched by so many terms translated and transcribed from Sanskrit that it is often referred to as Buddhist Hybrid Chinese (BHC)—also became the lingua sacra of the whole East Asian region. To a degree, the linguistic situation in the non-Chinese states of East Asia paralleled the situation in the dynastic states on today’s PRC territory, where the spoken language (baihua) started to differ from the written classical norm from the third to second centuries BCE onwards, while the classical language preserved its status as an elite medium of scholarship, statecraft and literary expression. The penetration of classical Chinese outside the boundaries of China proper and the condition of bilingualism it tended to create also had an important socio-linguistic aspect, as command of classical Chinese became an important sign of—and in many cases a precondition for the acquisition of—elite status. At the same time, vocabulary of Chinese origin permeated the spoken language of the underprivileged too, as in many cases—for example, religious or ethical vocabulary—there were few or no native equivalents for the terms that originated from the classical Chinese.[1]

As a rule, the earliest texts in classical Chinese outside of today’s PRC borders (in the second to fifth-sixth centuries CE) were of an administrative or sacral character, and mostly were generated either by early states or by aristocrats playing an important role in the formation of early statehood. As the Buddhist faith penetrated through different social layers in the societies of the Korean Peninsula and Japanese Archipelago in the sixth and seventh centuries CE, votive text on Buddhist sculptures and other devotional texts became another important genre of classical Chinese writing. Later, by the seventh and eighth centuries CE, Buddhist doctrinal exegesis, poetry and historical writings occupied a central place in classical Chinese literature in Silla (the proto-Korean kingdom which conquered most of the Korean Peninsula by 668) and Japan of the Asuka (538–710) and Nara (710–794) periods. By that time, the hybrid writing systems (idu and manyogana respectively) in both places, which purported to convey the “native” sounds through combined—semantic and phonetic—use of the Chinese characters, were already in place.[2] Such a system for Vietnamese (Chữ Nôm) was in place by the thirteenth century.[3] However, all the three hybrid writing systems were hardly any more popular than classical Chinese, and were used mostly by the elites (especially elite females) or sub-elites for literary and administrative purposes. Later, some of the writing systems became more widespread among commoners as well, serving as a tool for communication between the rulers and the ruled. In Japan, the earlier hybrid writing system (manyogana) morphed into easier-to-use hiragana syllabic script by the ninth century, but even for this script, the sphere of usage was initially mostly limited to certain literary genres (Japanese poetry waka, novels and diaries by female authors etc.).[4] In Korea, a completely new phonetic alphabet (known today as hangŭl), almost disconnected from the preceding hybrid systems, was promulgated in 1446, but also was initially used either for certain literary genres (Korean poetry sijo, popular novels etc.) or for the popularization of Chinese Confucian and Buddhist literature.[5] In all the three countries—Korea, Japan and Vietnam—classical Chinese remained the medium of choice for highbrow writing. Philosophical prose, historical writing and administrative documentation were in most cases dominated by classical Chinese, and poetizing in classical Chinese remained the elite’s most important status symbol. In the present chapter, I will describe the process of the introduction of classical Chinese to the Korean Peninsula, and the reasons why neither earlier hybrid writing systems (idu etc.) nor syllabic and alphabetic alternatives emerging later (hangŭl etc.) were able to fully displace classical Chinese from its lingua franca and lingua sacra status.

17.2 Linguistic Situation in Traditional Korea: Chinese Writing and Native Hybrid Systems

Chinese writing was not completely unknown to the proto-Korean contemporaries of the Chinese Warring States period (475–221 BCE). Chinese money was an important, prestigious good—and possibly a medium of long-distance exchange as well—in the late Bronze-Age Korean Peninsula, and some coins bear inscriptions. For example, twenty three hollow handled spade-formed coins produced on the territory of the state of Wei were excavated in April 1930 in Onyang Village, Onhwa Township, Yŏngbyŏng County, Southern P’yŏngan Province; they were most likely produced and imported around the fourth to the third centuries BCE, and had simple inscriptions in Chinese which either indicated the place of production or had a more abstract meaning (“Equal harmony”: pingyong etc.). It was very possibly through such artifacts that the Chinese characters first became known to the incipient sociopolitical elite of the proto-Korean chiefdoms.[6] However, Chinese writing and classical Chinese were introduced in full to the inhabitants of the Korean Peninsula only after the conquest of the oldest proto-Korean state, ancient Chosŏn (which loosely controlled parts of the territories in the north of the Korean Peninsula, and the adjacent territories belonging to today’s PRC), by the armies of Han dynasty emperor Wu (r. 141–87 BCE) in 108 BCE. It is not at all impossible that the elites of ancient Chosŏn were also conversant in classical Chinese, especially taking into consideration that it was purportedly ruled by a refugee from the Chinese state of Yan, Wei Man (Kor. Wi Man) and his descendants during the last century of its existence (194–108 BCE). In any case, no written testaments from this period are extant except for Chinese coins with the inscriptions mentioned above.

On having conquered the territory of ancient Chosŏn, the Han Empire established its four commanderies (borderland administrative units) there: the largest of them, Lelang (Kor. Nangnang), its centre being situated at the place of today’s capital of the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea: North Korea), Pyongyang, managed to survive until 313 CE, and served as the locus of advanced artisanship and trade which obviously were beneficial for the local native population as well. Several counties belonging to Lelang were separated in 204 CE into a new commandery, Daifang (Kor. Taebang), which assumedly occupied the lands of today’s Hwanghae Province of the DPRK. Daifang, a centre of exchange with the south-western proto-Korean tribes of mahan and the proto-Japanese (Jap. wa, Ch. wo), survived until 314 CE. Lelang and Daifang were archetypical Han dynasty Chinese societies where the use of writing was fairly widespread, especially for administrative purposes. In the 1920s–1930s, Japanese archaeologists found hundreds of clay impressions of seals (Kor. pongni) from that period, together with some actual seals. In most cases, these clay impressions bear the titles of various offices in Lelang’s complicated administrative hierarchy.[7] In a word, Chinese script and classical Chinese were closely associated at that point with administration and its capacities for organizing socio-political and economical life. As long as the proto-Korean chiefdoms wished to strengthen themselves by emulating the Chinese administrative methods, learning classical Chinese was a condicio sine qua non.

Given that the remnants of a brush and knife used for making wooden tablets for writing (mokkan) were discovered in a grave of a chief in Tahori site near Ch’angwŏn (Southern Kyŏngsang Province) dated by mid-first century BCE,[8] it looks as if the use of writing for trade and possibly also administrative purposes penetrated the southernmost regions of the Korean Peninsula—which were not controlled by the Chinese administration from Lelang—almost concomitantly with the establishment of the Chinese control in the northern part of the Korean Peninsula. Trade seems to have been the strongest motive: according to a contemporaneous Chinese source (“Account of the Eastern Barbarians” from Sanguozhi, compiled in 297, fascicle 30), c. one thousand people in the land of Three Han (Korean Peninsula to the south of the Han River, which roughly corresponds to today’s Republic of Korea, or South Korea) traded with Lelang and other Han commanderies. These people were obviously the chiefs and nascent aristocrats,[9] and we may assume that they would have been keenly interested in mastering classical Chinese. As chiefdoms and tribal confederations were giving way to the embryonic aristocratic monarchies with some element of centralized administration in the third to fifth centuries CE, classical Chinese very naturally became a part of the “cultural capital” one reasonably expected an aristocrat or middle- or high-ranking official (these two categories largely overlapped) to possess. In the case of the proto-Korean state most exposed to Chinese cultural influences, Koguryŏ (occupied northern parts of the Korean Peninsula and southern parts of the Dongbei region of today’s PRC), the sources already note the existence of the official rank of chubu (literally “bookkeeper”) by the end of the third century. It looks as if this title of rank originated from the designation of the office of the official responsible for royal documentation.[10] The figures of the scribes with wooden tablets and documents writing down the orders from the aristocrat buried in the grave—very possibly Dong Shou (Kor. Tong Su, 289–357 CE), a Chinese bureaucrat known for having moved to Koguryŏ—are visible on the frescos of the Anak-3 grave, dated to the mid-fourth century.[11] In fact, a good number of Chinese scribes and other writing and documentation specialists seem to have relocated to Koguryŏ after Lelang and Daifang were conquered by Koguryŏ troops in 313–314. In this way, the movement of the population, in addition to trade and administrative emulations, is understood to be an important channel for the importation of classical Chinese into Koguryŏ.

However, it should not be thought that all those who were literate in classical Chinese in Koguryŏ were necessarily either high-ranking Chinese migrants or aristocratic officials. We know that fifty-four Koguryŏ tiles with inscriptions have been excavated up until the present day (in most cases, in Jian county, Jilin province of today’s PRC, nearby the North Korean border), and thirty-seven pieces of ceramic with writing on them (mostly in the Koguryŏ sites in today’s South Korean capital of Seoul: this area was under Koguryŏ control in 475–551).[12] All these inscriptions were made either by low-ranking officials in charge of supervising the local artisans, or possibly by the artisans themselves—who were seemingly able to sign their names and inscribe the name of the locality where the production took place, onto their products. Thus, we may assume that by the fifth and sixth centuries—the time from which most of the tiles and ceramic vessels with inscriptions are dated—basic Chinese writing skills, if not deeper knowledge of classical Chinese, had already become a part of Koguryŏ’s urban culture.

Koguryŏ’s proximity to the Chinese dynastic states, and the large number of Chinese migrants integrated into Koguryŏ society, seem to have made any attempt to invent a separate local writing system unnecessary. To be sure, some lower-level officials—for example those responsible for erecting Pyongyang fortress, as we can see from the inscriptions they left (566–589)—sometimes wrote Chinese sentences using a typically proto-Korean, Altaic order of words (subject-object-predicate; for classical Chinese a subject-predicate-object sequence would be more natural).[13] This sort of grammatical “localization” did not result, however, in the creation of a separate local writing system. Koguryŏ, with its very close diplomatic, trade and cultural connections with the Chinese states and its success in integrating the Chinese population of Lelang and Daifang, obviously did not feel much need to distinguish itself from the Chinese dynastic states by adopting a separate system of writing. This sort of self-promoted cultural integration with what was commonly perceived as the centre of civilization in contemporaneous East Asia contrasted with Koguryŏ’s fiercely independent political attitude, and its long record of military conflicts with its western neighbors.[14]

The situation of at least one state in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula was comparable with that of Koguryŏ. The state of Paekche, which consolidated its centralized administration over mahan tribes in the third and fourth centuries, its original centre being today’s South Korean capital of Seoul and its vicinities geographically and culturally close to the Daifang-controlled areas to the north, seems to have widely used the Chinese writing from late third and early fourth centuries: its first ever historical book was allegedly written by a “doctor” (Ch. boshi, Kor. paksa) Gao Xing (Kor. Ko Hŭng), assumedly an intellectual of Lelang or Daifang origin, during the reign of King Kŭnch’ogo (346–375 CE).[15] According to an early Japanese chronicle, Nihon shoki (720), Paekche state operated a system of household registers already in the early sixth century (fascicle 17, Keitai tennō, third year, second month). A good number of Paekche inscriptions in the fourth to seventh centuries —on swords, tiles, bricks, wooden tablets, Buddhist reliquaries and steles—survived, but the absolute majority of them are written in fully grammatical Chinese; very few demonstrate the possible influence of Korean word order, and only to a very slight degree. Obviously, Paekche’s earlier connections to nearby Daifang and later trade, diplomatic and cultural connections with the southern Chinese dynasties were too close to allow any local variations in writing.[16]

The cultural policies of Paekche’s eastern neighbor, Silla, which consolidated its power over the south-eastern tribes of chinhan and pyŏnhan by the fifth and early sixth centuries, were, however, saliently different from that of Koguryŏ and Paekche. The latter developed their power apparatuses after the basics of Chinese writing were already introduced there, primarily by the migrants from Lelang and Daifang; the former, however, had already built the basics of the centralized aristocratic hierarchy by the mid- or late fifth century, when, according to a later Chinese source, the dynastic chronicle Liang shu (Book of Liang, compiled in 635; fascicle 54, “Account of Silla”), Silla people still “did not have letters and corresponded by making wooden signs.” It meant that the “language of power” of the early Silla state was based upon an elaborate oral tradition. Silla’s high- and middle-ranking officials, for example, were known to have titles of rank of mostly native origin (first rank—ibŏlch’an, second rank—ich’an, fourth rank—p’ajinch’an etc.) which were later—in the early sixth century or even later—written down with the Chinese characters used phonetically. Some of these titles later acquired the translated equivalents rendered in writing by Chinese characters used semantically. The rank of the first title ibŏlch’an, for example, was translated as kakkan, literally “horn-decorated official,” possibly following the particular appearance of the ritual hairstyle and hair decorations of Silla’s chief courtiers.[17] However, such attempts in translation only emphasized the importance of the original native naming, as preserved through oral transmission. By the late fifth century, Silla appears to have developed its own distinctive patterns of official speech, which seemed to be dutifully reflected in the earlier epigraphic monuments of Silla, dated to the early to mid-sixth century. There, the sentence structure mostly tends to follow the native Korean order of words, with modifying words placed in front of the word they modify, and verbs placed at the end of the sentence, after the object. A typical later example of such a “Koreanized” style of Chinese writing is the wooden tablet No 149 from the Wŏlsŏng (a fortress in the centre of Silla capital city of Sŏrabŏl, today’s Kyŏngju) moat, dated to the early seventh century. Most characters are still used semantically, but the order of words in the short inscription—a report on the acquisition of paper, assumedly for the needs of the court—is that of a complex Korean sentence.[18]

By the late seventh century—when Silla, having already defeated Paekche (660) and Koguryŏ (668), safely controlled the whole central and southern part of the Korean Peninsula—this “Koreanized” style of Chinese writing was further elaborated and systemized into a complicated system, which in the Koryŏ period (918–1392) of Korea was often called idu, “the petty-clerks’ writing.” The tradition describes a prominent Silla Confucian, Sŏl Ch’ong (late seventh—early eighth centuries) as the inventor of idu, although in reality he is thought to have just systematized the pre-existent practice of idu use. The use of idu was a distinctively indigenous feature of Silla culture, which sharply separated Silla cultural practices from that of either Koguryŏ or Paekche. All of the three ancient proto-Korean states were essentially bilingual societies where the local oral languages of Altaic origin overlapped with the use of Chinese writing and the classical Chinese language—a language belonging to a different, Sino-Tibetan language family. It was, however, only in the relatively “backward” Silla that the local oral language was also given an expression in writing. The development of idu should be without a doubt regarded as one of Silla’s most important contributions to the development of Korea’s own distinctive culture. Having survived Silla’s demise in 936, idu continued to serve as the language of lower-level administrative practice (purchase and sale contracts, letters by petty clerks, etc.) and popular religious worship (votive inscriptions, inscriptions on the Buddhist statues and paintings detailing the process of their creation, etc.) practically until the early twentieth century, under the Koryŏ (918–1392) and Chosŏn (1392–1910) dynasties.

At the same time, it is important to note that idu in reality, was a complimentary writing system rather than an alternative to classical Chinese. It underwent a course of development—from the earlier, late fifth to late seventh century documents (typified by the wooden tablet No 149 from the Wŏlsŏng mentioned above) which represented rather a sort of “Koreanized Chinese writing,” with most characters being used semantically but just following the Korean word order, to the authentic idu documents of the early eighth century and later, where some characters were used phonetically in order to render the Korean grammatical particles. A good, early example of the latter category is the 755 record on the copying of Avatamsaka sutra, (Kor. Hwaŏm sagyŏng chosŏnggi) in which the Korean grammatical particles sik’i (“to make to do something”), na (“or.. or”) or e (locative particle) were rendered either phonetically or semantically by such Chinese characters as Too late (“extensive, full, complete”), 那 (“that”) or 中 (“middle.”) Although the word order was fully Korean, most nouns and verb stems were “normal” Chinese words, aside from some Chinese-character based, Silla-coined nouns like chŏp’it’al 楮皮脫, “paper mulberry peeler.”[19] In other words, the idu script fully depended on Chinese for the bulk of its vocabulary, despite all of its inventiveness in the matter of rendering Korean grammatical patterns with a set of carefully chosen Chinese characters. Rather than a full-blown substitute for classical Chinese, instead it played the role of “Chinese for the masses”—that is, a Chinese-based script which the low-level officials or artisans, less accustomed to the grammatically correct, high-level classical Chinese, could easily use following the Korean grammatical norms.

In the late Silla—early Koryŏ period (tenth to eleventh centuries), some idu documents, apparently authored by the “subalterns” of the mediaeval Korean society with very little training in proper Chinese, showed a tendency towards a “radicalization”—that is, a higher proportion of Chinese characters used phonetically. In the 1031 record on Chŏngdosa Temple’s (today’s Northern Kyŏngsang Province, Ch’ilgok County) five story high stone pagoda building (Kor. Chŏngdosa och’ŭngsŏkt’ap chosŏng hyŏngjigi), for example, practically all the particles one can expect from a Korean sentence, as well as some adverbs (“together,” etc.) and the grammatical forms of the past tense and causality of verbs are all rendered by the Chinese characters used phonetically or semantically-phonetically. Still, even in this monument, all the main nouns and verb stems are “normal” Chinese words and Chinese characters used semantically.[20] Then, as Korean society increasingly Confucianized in late Koryŏ—early Chosŏn periods (thirteenth-fifteenth centuries), idu was also showing a tendency to a “re-Sinification” of sorts: classical Chinese expressions and grammatical forms were added to the fixed patterns of phonetically rendered Korean grammatical particles. It looks as if idu was commonly perceived rather as a “vulgarized” form of classical Chinese writing than as an independent writing system—not to speak about any “competition” between idu and classical Chinese. By early and mid-Chosŏn time (fifteenth-seventeenth centuries), idu was progressively becoming a conservative, anachronistic script, as many of its fixed patterns of rendering Korean grammatical forms phonetically reflected the Koryŏ language rather than the contemporaneous one.[21] It narrowed its sphere of use: only the clerks with good expertise in idu patterns could correctly use it for the sake of document compilation.

Some subdivisions of idu possessed a distinctive functionality. For example, hyangch’al (literally “native script”) was utilized exclusively for ritual poetry in Silla and early Koryŏ, known as hyangga (literally “native songs”). Only twenty-five typical hyangga are extant—fourteen are recorded in Samguk Yusa (Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms, 1285), a late Koryŏ compilation of native and Buddhist legends and other forms of “unofficial history,” and eleven were written by a famed Avatamsaka School monk, Kyunyŏ (923–973) and recorded in his biography of 1075.[22] Many more hyangga are mentioned in the sources—mostly in connection with Buddhist or native rituals—but are no longer available. Hyangch’al differs from the “normal” idu of administrative documentation through the far more elaborate phonetic use of Chinese characters for rendering Korean grammar (including sophisticated honorific forms) and also partially for some verb stems; the absolute majority of the nouns and pronouns, however, are Chinese words used semantically. While Silla people are known to be fond of hyangga—indeed, in 888 one of the most influential courtiers, kakkan Wihong, even spent time compiling an inclusive anthology of hyangga, entitled Samdaemok ([Hyangga] of Three Epochs—no longer extant)[23]—there was also a clear understanding that hyangga poetry lacked in universality. As Kyunyŏ’s biographer, Hyŏngnyŏn Chŏng (eleventh and twelfth centuries), masterfully put it in his foreword to Kyunyŏ’s hyangga collection, “Chinese people would not be able to understand more than the foreword here; so, while it would be easy for the people of our country to immerse themselves in these songs and learn them by heart, the songs still bring only half of the possible benefit [...].”[24] Hyangga were seen as “too provincial” compared to Buddhism’s more universal tasks. In fact, one of the reasons the native systems of writing did not spread outside of their prescribed niches (certain spheres of document administration, certain genres of poetry, etc.) in ancient and early medieval Korea was the paramount importance of classical Chinese for Buddhism. Accepted on the official level in 372 in Koguryŏ, in 384 in Paekche and much later, in 527, in Silla, by the seventh-eighth centuries Buddhism had become a “civil religion” of sorts—it was universally spread across all the social strata and in all the regions under Silla rule. Buddhist sutras and sutra commentaries were all in Chinese—universally legible in all regions despite the differences of dialect. Sutra commentaries produced in Korea in classical Chinese were often also read and cited in China and Japan.[25] Thus, Chinese possessed the status of the “universal religion’s universal language”—which made any “competition” with it absolutely impossible for any locally designed writing system. The result was a bilingual society in which both classical Chinese and local systems had their own, clearly defined roles.

While the invention in 1443–1444 of the Korean alphabet—solemnly re-named hangŭl, “great writing,” by linguistic nationalists in early twentieth-century Korea[26]— on royal orders is often described as a breakthrough on the path towards creating the “national language,” bilingualism seems to have remained the core of the linguistic situation on the Korean Peninsula. Just like idu with all its variations, the new alphabet—phonetic and independent from Chinese writing—had its own niche in administrative and cultural life; it was, however, somewhat larger in scope. First, it was used for what we would today call the “entertainment sphere.” The alphabet was widely used for writing down the vernacular sijo poetry[27] assumedly developed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by aristocratic scholar-officials (sadaebu) who wanted to express either their Confucian ideals or their (often Taoist in spirit) spiritual searches for a bucolic utopia in a form well suited to singing.[28] Among all the various sijo sub-genres, the narrative sijo (sasŏl sijo), also known as long sijo (chang sijo), had the strongest connection to institutional entertainment. Most poems in this form—which was developed by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in sync with the further development of the middle layers in Chosŏn dynasty’s urban society—were composed either by middle- or low-ranking officials and merchants who (unlike the aristocratic scholar-officials whose behavior was subject to stricter regulations) enjoyed unrestricted access to the quarters of the female entertainers (kisaeng). It was exactly the female entertainers who usually sang these poems—and even wrote some of them.[29] Second, the alphabet was actively used for creating and spreading popular prose. Vernacular novels—in the beginning often translations of such famed Chinese works as Jiandeng Xinhua (New Tales Told by Lamplight) by Qu You (1347–1433), but from early seventeenth century also Korea-produced works—were often authored by aristocratic scholar-officials; however, the main consumers of such works were originally the aristocratic ladies whose “correct moral education” was one of the main concerns of the novel writers. From the eighteenth century, however, the vernacular novels by anonymous authors, which often were used as scenarios for popular folk operas (p’ansori), also gained a readership among the literate commoners attracted to—among other features of these novels—their parodying of the high-classes’ moralist hypocrisy, and their often challenging approach to the rules of patriarchal ethics. The absolute majority of commoners, especially women, were, of course, illiterate; but the vernacular novels were customarily read aloud in groups by the few literate members of the community rather than enjoyed alone.[30]

Third, the alphabet was used by lower-ranking administrators for certain documents—especially these pertaining to the legal proceedings—that were to be announced to or read by the broader community, including the women and commoners who sometimes could read the alphabet but were almost completely illiterate in Chinese writing. Typically, personal attests or certificates of various kinds (sugi, or sup’yo)—for example, sale and purchase receipts or the divorce agreements between commoners (in the families of aristocratic officials, with their strict Confucian norms, divorces by mutual agreement were almost impossible)—were written in the alphabet.[31] Fourth, the alphabet was usable in the realm of personal communication—especially if women were to communicate among themselves, or if the communication was of a strictly private, familial sort.[32] And fifth, technical officials, specialists (medics etc.) and commoners were to use ŏnhae (vernacularly commented) versions of Confucian classics, Buddhist sutras or medical and military reference books.[33] All in all, the alphabet was usable mostly in the cases of communication between various social strata (vernacular novels written by aristocratic officials, government-issued documents in alphabet or government-printed Confucian classics ŏnhae are good examples of the alphabet being used to “enlighten the masses”) or between the underprivileged (commoners or women). When, however, the communication was to take place between the male members of the privileged aristocratic official class, there was hardly any space for using the alphabet, at least in the majority of normal situations. The use of the alphabet was rather unthinkable in the genres, for example, of court memorial (presented by the aristocratic officials to the king) or Confucian philosophical treatises. The alphabet could be useful for the task of learning Chinese—in fact, one of the most important ŏnhae texts of Chosŏn times was the vernacular rendition of Du Fu’s (712–770) poems (first published in 1481), thought to be a must-read on the way to becoming an accomplished poet in classical Chinese.[34] In this case too, however, the Korean alphabet was to facilitate “proper” written communication in classical Chinese rather than to be a substitute for it. Not unlike idu, it was a complimentary, secondary writing system—a local script with no ambition to take the place of the regional lingua franca and lingua sacra safely occupied by classical Chinese from the second to third centuries CE onwards.

17.3 Conclusion: Why the Classical Chinese Retained its Centrality

Before the status of classical Chinese as the state’s official script was abolished as a part of modernizing reforms in 1894,[35] it used to function as the main administrative tool and the main medium of elite communication in various states on the Korean peninsula for two millennia. The locally devised systems, originally based on Chinese writing (idu) but then designed in a highly scientific way independently of it (Korean alphabet)[36] were to assist in learning Chinese, or to facilitate the communicative process in cases the sub-elites (petty clerks, technical specialists etc.) or non-elites were to be involved in. But completely supplanting the classical Chinese with any of these systems was out of question. As Buddhism was an important dominant religious discourse until the end of the Koryŏ dynasty, classical Chinese was playing the part of lingua sacra. It was the language of sutras and commentaries: Buddhist Hybrid Chinese (BHC) had already begun to spread to the Korean Peninsula in the fourth century CE. It was also the language of the Confucian teachings, which already played an important role in statecraft under the Han Empire’s four commanderies and became (in the form of neo-Confucianism) the official ideology of the Chosŏn dynasty since its founding in 1392.[37] To a degree, the Chosŏn state exhibited the traits which might be termed “ideocratic.”[38] Neo-Confucian ideology not only simply legitimised the domination of the aristocratic scholar-official elite, but also provided the elite with a monistic framework of thought and behaviour which was widely regarded as the only universally valid one.[39] In such a milieu, the language of Confucian ideology—which was simultaneously the language of “model” Chinese statecraft—could not but acquire a very special status. As the language of the presumed universal ethical truth, it was the central element of the cultural capital a member of the ruling class was supposed to possess and display to their peers. Together with classical Chinese, the multitude of historical facts from the Chinese past and the plethora of ideological, philosophical and literary texts, mostly of Chinese provenance, were to be memorized and internalized. The internalization of Chinese—and thus, common regional—culture played the crucial role in the system of status distinctions providing the society with a visible yardstick of societal differentiation. The elites were to be a part of the universal regional civilizational space, linguistically and culturally; and the ruled were left to live in a multitude of local lingo-cultural spaces. Bilingualism, in this way, was first and foremost a class phenomenon. In such a structure, the local writing systems, even if they—like the Korean alphabet—were not directly based on the Chinese script, ultimately provided the masses with some limited access to the supposedly universal—that is, classical Chinese-based—cultural resources. After all, the absolute majority of the key ideological terms one could write down in the alphabet—the words like “loyalty and filial piety” (ch’unghyo) or “Heavenly principles” (ch’ŏlli)—were taken from classical Chinese. The class-based bilingual system was not, of course, static. It is undeniable that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the prominence of vernacular literature, for example, became much more tangible.[40] However, the decisive blow to the hegemony of classical Chinese was eventually dealt by the changes in the socio-political basis of the society—that is, by the dissolution of the hereditary status system in the early twentieth century and the empowerment of new, modern ruling classes (bureaucrats and entrepreneurs) whose main cultural capital was both the command of modernized vernacular Korean and mastery of the new “universal” foreign languages—Japanese and ultimately English.

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Palais, James (1996). Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions: Yu Hyŏngwŏn and the Late Chosŏn Dynasty. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Piekalkievicz, Jaroslaw, and Alfred Wayne Penn (1995). Politics of Ideocracy. New York: State University of New York.

Rutt, Richard, ed. (1998). The Bamboo Grove: An Introduction to Sijo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Yi, Chinho (2009). “17–18 Segi Pyŏngsŏ ŏnhae Yŏn’gu (Research on the Military Reference Books’ ŏnhae, 17–18th C.).” PhD thesis, Taegu: Kyemyŏng University.

Yi, Chŏngja (2005). “Wijin Sidae Koguryŏ-Chungguk Kwan’gye Insik (Perceptions of Wei-Jin Period Koguryŏ-Chinese Relations).” Ch’ungbuk Sahak 14: 85–104.

Yi, Kimun (1978). Kugŏsa Kaesŏl (General Description of the History of the [Korean] National Language). Seoul: T’ap Ch’ulp’ansa.

Yi, Kŏnmu (1992). “Tahori Yujŏk Ch’ult’o Put (P’il) E Taehayŏ (on the Brush Excavated in Tahori Site).” Kogohakchi 4: 5–29.

Yi, Kyŏngsŏp (2009). “Silla Chunggogi Mokkan ŭi Yŏn’gu (Study on the Middle-Period Silla Wooden Tablets).” PhD thesis, Seoul: Tongguk University.

Yŏ, Hogyu (2011). “Koguryŏ ŭi Hancha Munhwa Suyong Kwa Pyŏnyong (the Acceptance of Chinese Characters’ Culture by Koguryŏ and Its Changes).” In Kodae Tongasia ŭi Muncha Kyoryu Wa Sot’ong (the Exchange and Communication in Writing in Ancient East Asia), edited by Tongbuga Yŏksa Chaedan, 87–127. Seoul: Tongbuga Yŏksa Chaedan.

Yun, Sŏnt’ae (2007). “Han’guk Kodae Mokkan ŭi Hyŏngt’ae Wa Chongnyu (the Forms and Types of the Ancient Korean Wooden Tablets with Inscriptions).” Yŏksa Wa Hyŏnsil 65: 157–87.

——— (2011). “Paekche Wa Silla ŭi Hancha, Hanmun Suyong Kwa Pyŏnyong (the Acceptance of Chinese Characters and Classical Chinese in Paekche and Silla and Its Changes).” In Kodae Tongasia ŭi Muncha Kyoryu Wa Sot’ong (the Exchange and Communication in Writing in Ancient East Asia), edited by Tongbuga Yŏksa Chaedan, 127–58. Seoul: Tongbuga Yŏksa Chaedan.

Footnotes

[1] Holcombe (2001, 60–78).

[2] Nam (2000, 11–48); Loveday (1996, 27–46).

[3] De Fransis (1977, 20–45).

[4] Frellesvig (2010, 14–16, 158–183).

[5] Yi (1978, 57).

[6] Kim (1977).

[7] Harada (1968).

[8] Yi (1992).

[9] Barnes (2000, 19–31).

[10] See Yun (2007).

[11] Chŏn (2006).

[12] Kim et al. (2008, 58–91, 97–125); Yŏ (2011).

[13] Nam (2000, 62–66).

[14] Yi (2005).

[15] Kim et al. (1993, 402).

[16] Yun (2011).

[17] Kwŏn (2001).

[18] Yi (2009, 18–49).

[19] Nam (1986), 2000, 200–240).

[20] Nam (1997, 2000, 481–534).

[21] Han’guk komunsŏ Hakhoe (2002, 21–25).

[22] See the English translation of this biography: Adrian Buzo (1993).

[23] Kim et al. (1993, 230).

[24] Cited in Hwang (1997, 284–308).

[25] On Korean influences on China and Japanese Buddhism, see Buswell (2006).

[26] Lee (2003, 27).

[27] Sijo is a three-line Korean poem, usually containing 44–46 syllables. See Rutt (1998, 10–12).

[28] Chang (1986, 277–285).

[29] Kang (1999, 159–253).

[30] Chŏng (1999, 181–283).

[31] Paek (2007).

[32] Han’guk komunsŏ Hakhoe (2002, 28–29).

[33] See, for example, Kim (1999) and Yi (2009).

[34] Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies (2010, 168–169).

[35] Kim (1990, 35).

[36] Ledyard (1966).

[37] Deuchler (1992).

[38] Piekalkievicz and Penn (1995, 62).

[39] Palais (1996, 25–61, 125–170).

[40] Ko (1998, 65–70, 229–253).

Part VI: The Americas

18. Multilingualism and Lingua Francae of Indigenous Civilizations of America

Lars Kirkhusmo Pharo

18.1 Multilingualism and Lingua Franca

La Malinche aka Doña Marina (1500?–1551? CE)—born under the name Malinali (from the reverential Malintzin later changed into Malinches[1]—epitomizes the multilingualism and lingua franca of pre-European and early colonial America. Moreover, her epithet—Tenepal, “thanks to the one who has a mouth” or “through the one who speaks”—symbolically intimates her political-linguistic impact on American history.[2]

A Nahua born in the Coatzacoalco region in Veracruz, Mexico, La Malinche became the trilingual translator of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. Initially, she was sold or given to Maya slave traders from Xicalano where she learned the Maya language Chontal [Acalan]. Subsequently in 1519 La Malinche was given as a slave from Chontal Maya of Potonchán in Tabasco to Hernan Cortés where she was introduced to the Spanish language. Cortés had found a Spanish priest, Gerónimo de Aguilar, who had been in captivity among the Maya in Yucatán after a shipwreck. He had learned some of the Maya language, but he did not speak Nahuatl, which was the language of the Aztec empire. Cortés used La Malinche for translating between Nahuatl and Chontal Maya. Aguilar could interpret from Maya into Spanish, until La Malinche learned Spanish and accordingly become the only translator.[3] It is evocative that Indigenous peoples compounded the title of “Malintzin” for both La Malinche and Cortes, because he literally spoke through her. In Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España (The True Story of the Conquest of New Spain), Bernal Díaz del Castillo writes repeatedly and reverentially of the “great lady” Doña Marina. Without the help of Doña Marina, according to Díaz del Castillo, “we would not have understood the language of New Spain and Mexico.” La Malinche was consequently linguistically pivotal in the political dialogue and discourse that led to the conquest of Mexico. Nahuatl and Spanish represented lingua francas of the Aztec and Spanish empires respectively. She mastered the lingua franca of Central Mexico, Nahuatl, of the pre-European period and early colonial period and later learned the new lingua franca, Spanish, of colonial Latin America.[4]

Various nations from Europe—English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Russian and Portuguese were the foremost representatives—invaded the vast continent to be known as the Americas from the beginning of the sixteenth century. Currently, English (North America) and Spanish (Latin America), with the exceptions of French (Quebec, Canada) and Portuguese (Brazil), dominate as lingua franca on this extensive cultural and linguistic continent. Hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages and language families[5]—exactly how many depends upon the different linguistic classifications—are recognized to have existed before the European invasion,[6] many of which still exist,[7] making the Americas a complex multilingual region.[8]

The concept “multilingualism” has received various definitions. Quite simply, I employ it in order to categorize the existence of and communication between two or more linguistic cultures, intralingual and interlingual, within a particular region and/or society. Economic, religious, scientific, social, military and political interaction promotes multilingual communication, for instance through alliances by marriage (endogamy), ritual collaboration, diplomacy, and trade. Among Indigenous American peoples there can be great linguistic diversity. For example, it is not uncommon among the Hupa of northwestern California to master five or more languages whereas peoples of another culture of North America, the Wappo of northern California, are recognized to have learned fourteen languages.[9] Cultural and social multilingualism are exhibited in the Valleys of Coixtlahuaca and Tamazulapan-Teotongo (Mixtec. Tocuij Ñudzavui region) in the Mixteca of the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, which from the mid-sixteenth century contain a quite unique trilingual and bilingual corpus of Chocholtec of the Popoloca language family, Mixtec of the Mixtecan language family both belonging to Otomanguean stock and the Mesoamerican lingua franca Nahuatl of the Uto-Aztec stock (Nahuatl language family). In the colonial period there was a complex sociolinguistic setting of Chocholtecs (Ngiwa, Chochon, Chocho) and Mixtecs in different pueblos and barrios belonging to a linguistic composite polity. Multiple sociolinguistic polities were a rather common phenomenon in pre-European Mesoamerica.[10] Moreover, families or lineages could be multilingual, through intermarriage, independent of the linguistic situation of the pueblo or barrio.[11] Multilingualism is accordingly signified by various exchanges between different languages in addition to the lingua franca. Despite considerable bilingualism or trilingualism[12] there is a requirement for communication across language borders, which necessitates a lingua franca.

A “lingua franca” constitutes a supralanguage employed as a method of communication between people who do not speak mutually intelligible vernacular languages. In quite a few cases, a lingua franca is political as it relates to linguistic imperial or authority systems. Throughout history a great many empires had a propensity of impressing upon their subjects and conquered peoples the language of the governing elite, and the conceptual and terminological systems embedded within all cultural and social fields, whether economic, religious, judicial political, military, scientific, and educational. “Language empires” are imposed especially through political, religious, educational, and administrative systems and institutions. In addition, trade and diplomacy may generate particular lingua franca.

In 1492 (the year Christopher Columbus arrived on the continent later called America), after being presented with his book Gramática de la lengua castellana (“Grammar of the Castilian language”) Queen Isabella of Spain asked the linguist author Antonio de Nebrija: “What is it for?” The Bishop of Avila replied on his behalf: “Your Majesty, language is the perfect instrument of empire.”[13]

Language associated with philosophy, ideology, or a belief, symbol and practice system is definitely a powerful strategy when instigating not only a religious but also a cultural, economical, political, and social conquest. This combination of linguistics and theology is manifested by the grammarian Nebrija and the Bishop of Avila respectively. Language does not merely represent a linguistic system of grammar and phonology. The cultural history and collective identity, as well as the mindset, is embedded in language.[14] The Arizona Tewa say: Na:-bí hi:li na:-bí wowa:ci na-mu “my language is my life (history)” according to Paul Kroskrity.[15] Furthermore, Marianne Mithun maintains that language organizes experience into concepts and ideas. When it vanishes together with stories, ritual, symbols and oratory rhetoric, culture also disappears. Concerning the many endangered Indigenous languages of America she notes that Indigenous “speakers commonly remark that when they speak a different language, they say different things and even think different thoughts.”[16] For instance, the Pirahã of the Amazon in central Brazil are monolingual despite more than 200 years of consistent contact with Brazilians and the Tupi-Guarani-speaking Kawahiv according to Daniel L. Everett.[17]

Portuguese is incommensurate with Pirahã in many areas and culturally incompatible, like all Western languages, in that it violates the immediacy of experience constraint on grammar and living in so many aspects of its structure and use. The Pirahã say that their heads are different. In fact, the Pirahã language is called 'apaitiso a straight head, while all other languages are called 'apagiso a crooked head. …Given the connection between culture and language in Pirahã, to lose or change ones language is to lose ones identity as a Pirahã – hiaitih, a straight one/he is straight.[18]

Portuguese is incommensurate with Pirahã in many areas and culturally incompatible, like all Western languages, in that it violates the immediacy of experience constraint on grammar and living in so many aspects of its structure and use. The Pirahã say that their heads are different. In fact, the Pirahã language is called 'apaitiso a straight head, while all other languages are called 'apagiso a crooked head. …Given the connection between culture and language in Pirahã, to lose or change ones language is to lose ones identity as a Pirahã – hiaitih, a straight one/he is straight», Everett (2005, 633–634).

Multilingualism and lingua franca in the pre-European, colonial, and postcolonial Americas comprise a huge topic.[19] Despite the destructive impact of colonial European and the later postcolonial nation states of the Americas, many different linguistic, religious, philosophical, and cultural systems of the Indigenous peoples are extant. In many places, epistemologies and languages have survived in the oral local traditions, which represent important sources of information for the various cognitive and linguistic systems. The objective of this, indeed limited, research review essay is to introduce some aspects of lingua franca and multilingualism fundamental to explications of religion, science, philosophy, and the political social system or of what Einar Haugen categorizes as “the ecology of language.”[20] Between the many Indigenous languages and between Indigenous and European languages of the Americas there is a variety of language contact such as the borrowing of vocabulary as well as phonological, grammatical, and semantic patterns.[21] Expressed by various oral[22] and scriptural technologies language is conceived in this study as a semantic system of interrelated concepts, for example, terminology intimately associated with knowledge, ideas, and practices. Epistemological concepts, also conceived visually and symbolically, can be transmitted and translated between different linguistic and intellectual (intersemiotic) systems. Where there is production, diffusion, and manipulation of epistemologies, ideas, and concepts but also an invention of novel terminologies and technologies for literacy, the semantic-linguistic implications for science, religion, philosophy, law, economics, and politics in multilingual and/or lingua franca contexts are profound. It is exactly this epistemological, philosophical, and ideological aspect of multilingualism and lingua franca in America I intend to consider. I introduce the following methodical and analytical categories of intralingual and interlingual multilingualism and/or lingua franca of the Americas in the following order: Loanwords and calques; taxonomy of diglossia: code-switching or compartmentalization, lingua nobilis, lingua sacra where there can be an exceptional literacy and numeracy; lingua franca; scriptura franca (pasigraphy); translation. These represent fundamental elements for an explication of the conceptional conditions and interactions of multilingualism and lingua francae.

18.2 Loanwords and Calques

There are various categories of linguistic borrowings[23] between Indigenous languages and Indigenous and European languages and vice versa. I will give a few examples of lexical loans. Borrowed words are particularly frequent in the vernacular vocabularies from the various Indigenous and later European lingua franca. One prominent example of a borrowed European word from an Indigenous language is the name of the nation-state “Canada,” which was introduced into novel lingua franca. “Canada” or kaná:ta, “settlement” is a loanword from the Haudenosaunee (aka Iroquoian) language Laurentian.[24]

There are, however, examples where loanwords are ultimately ignored. As observed by Edward P. Dozier,[25] there is a reluctance in the Pueblo communities Tewa and Tao of the Southwest of the US to incorporate Spanish loanwords. Instead they construct new words (neologisms) or extend the meaning of existing words in their own languages.[26] The language ideology of the Arizona Tewa signifies linguistic conservatism and purism. After the Pueblo revolts of 1680 and 1696 this Pueblo group escaped Spanish influence by migrating in 1700 to the Hopi region and integrating into First Mesa Hopi society. The Arizona Tewa do not have nostalgic memory for homeland but maintain their Kiowa-Tanoan language. It was the only culture that kept their language and associated identity in the diaspora after the Pueblo revolt.[27] Moreover, the kinship terminology of the contemporary Qheswa (i.e. Quechua, descendants of the Inka empire) of the high plateau (puna) community Alccavitoria in the province of Chumbivilcas, Peru represents an interesting example of averseness to the practice of loanwords.[28] Bruce Mannheim notes that key terms are used in Quechua for kins in close economic cooperation. There is also another complex of loanwords from Spanish but without such a close relation,[29] which indicates a preference for Quechua instead of the Spanish of the colonizer. That an Indigenous language is favored instead of a European language is not uncommon even in Christian (Catholic and Protestant) religious ritual practices or scriptures.[30] On the other hand, there are many cases of grammatical and lexical loans between Indigenous languages and language families where in particular the politically dominant linguistic cultures are the lenders. For instance, lexemes from Quechua and Mapuche have influenced the vocabulary of minor Indigenous languages in the Andes.[31] Due to language contact for more than a thousand years, Aymara and Quechua, which are probably two different Andean language families (Aymaran and Quechuan), have quite a few grammatical features and lexical items in common—Aymaran and Quechuan = Quechumaran.[32]

Middle America or Mesoamerica[33] contains many pre-European writing and semiotic systems, which display variant examples of multilingualism. There were contacts between the different Mesoamerican cultures through migrations, pilgrimage, trade, diplomacy, war, tribute, and conquest. To some extent, the Mesoamericans shared principles of writing and pictorial-logographic systems, which were for instance employed in screen fold books aka codices. Despite numerous traditions and languages, the peoples of Mesoamerica had several cultural, philosophical, and religious elements in common.[34] Furthermore, there is evidence of multilingual and intellectual interaction between Mesoamerican and Indigenous cultures of the Southwest of the US demonstrated through ritual rhetorical languages such as difrasismos (diphrasism) or paired couplets and metaphors.[35] This is also the case between unrelated languages from various groups of a particular region. The Pueblo culture, which consists of twenty villages in northern New Mexico and Arizona, contains nine languages.[36] Leslie A. White has established that exceptional concepts of prayers and songs of the ritual vocabulary among different Pueblo languages, belonging to singular language families and cultures, have been exchanged between the different linguistic groups.[37]

The earliest documented, in writing, lexical borrowing between Indigenous languages of the Americas is probably the Mixe-Zoquean loanword pomoj or “copal (incense),” spelled syllabically po-mo-ja according to Søren Wichmann, inscribed in the earliest known Maya inscription (first century BCE) from the late preclassical mural of the city San Bartolo in Petén, Guatamala.[38] The San Bartolo inscription represents the earliest known example of deciphered writing in America.[39] This inscription represents an example of the so-called Olmec civilization’s (aka the “Mother culture of Mesoamerica”) influence upon the Maya. The Epi-Olmec culture (c. 300 BCE–c. 250 CE) in the central region of Veracruz of Mexico was a successor to the Olmec civilization (c. 1200–c. 400 BCE) in the Gulf coast region of southern Mexico. Its writing system is designated as Epi-Olmec or Isthmeian script from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec of Southern Mexico. The Olmec people were probably the predecessors of the existing Mixe and Zoque cultures of Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico. The word pomoj is accordingly a loan from the language family of Mixe-Zoque into the Maya language family.

Besides various loanwords from the neighbor linguistic culture (proto-) Mixe-Zoquean there are examples of borrowed terms from the more remote Uto-Aztecan language family (Nahuatl) in the classic Maya inscriptions.[40] Interactions between linguistic groups of Highland Mexico (Nahuatl) and the northern Maya lowlands are known from written recordings. There is evidence for linguistic contact between Nahuatl of the Nahua (Uto-Aztecan stock) of Central Mexico and the Maya in the writing systems of the Maya civilization. In sections of the Venus table of the postclassical Maya Dresden Codex, several Nahua deity names are spelled syllabically—ta-wi-si-ka-la or Tlahuzcalpantecuhtli,xi-wi-te or Xiuhtecuhtli and ka-ka-tu-na-la or Cactonalli(?)—in the Maya writing system.[41] Moreover, Stela 13 from the Maya city Seibal located in the northern Petén Department of Guatemala from the late ninth century BCE contains a name of the Nahua wind deity Ehecatl (an aspect of the major deity Quetzalcoatl) spelled e-je-ke. Iconography and the calendar system of the inscription confirm a non-Maya (Central Mexican) origin suggesting the introduction of Venus/Quetzalcoatl from Central Mexico into the Maya religious system according to Alfonso Lacadena.[42]

Scholars have identified many examples of calques or loan translations in Mesoamerica.[43] David Charles Wright Carr argues that in contrast to the European semantic practices in keeping or adapting the phonological form across linguistic frontiers, Mesoamerican linguistic cultures represent concepts with their own morphemes. According to Wright Carr, the quite extensive use of calque expressing the same concepts in Otomí (hñähñu) of the Otopame family of the Otomanguean stock of Central Mexico and Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan) suggest “an essentially homogenous plurilinguistic culture” in late pre-European and early colonial Central Mexico according to Wright Carr. He has identified calques of Otomí and Nahuatl in calendrical terms,[44] in the social system, kinship, confederations of society,[45] and deity names in early colonial dictionaries.[46] For instance, the important names of the Nahua deity Quetzalcoatl and Yucatec Mayan deity K’uk’ulkan both signify: “precious feather serpent.”[47]

18.3 Intralingual and Interlingual Diglossia

The semantics of multilingualism and lingua franca is interrelated to the phenomenon of diglossia in a region or society. Diglossia or bilingualism contains quite a few linguistic elements or principles.[48] This linguistic analytical category conventionally refers to the use of a dominant majority (often a lingua franca) language vs. minority language(s), a so-called “high” vs. a so-called “low” language in a multilingual society or community. Diglossia also distinguishes between idioms or dialects of the same language. It is therefore important to point out that diglossia can be either interlingual or intralingual. Moreover, a prestigious, exclusive, and commonly arcane language of a minority social group used in particular contexts (code-switching or compartmentalization) can oppose the colloquial language of the majority (e.g. the general public or commoners). This language of specialists or political privilege comprehends an extraordinary terminology or concepts not practiced in the vernacular. This also applies to gender. For instance, in the vocative of nouns in Classic Nahuatl men use the suffix –é, in this manner they emphasise the word whereas women transfer the accent from the penultimate to the last syllable (Launey: 81-82). The Chiquitano of the Andes have a gender-determined language where women employ unmarked forms whereas men apply masculine forms and endings. Only men make gender distinctions. The exception is when women and men respectively quote each other’s speech.[49] Furthermore, linguistic codes of a restricted language not only have sociolinguistic and political implications, for example reflecting the organization of society, but in addition certain philosophical and cognitive qualities. In the Americas there are various examples of diglossia of an exceptional epistemology or ideology expressed in lingua nobilis and lingua sacra.

18.4 Diglossia of Lingua Nobilis and Lingua Sacra

There may be a variant (esoteric) language within a linguistic entity—where multilingualism becomes social, political, philosophical, or religious—categorized as the lingua nobilis or lingua sacra of a political and/or religious group in addition to “knowledge specialists.” This can be oral and scriptural where literacy can be both lexical and numerical, that is, in the latter case outline an exclusive numeracy.

The language of the classic Maya writing system may be classified as a lingua nobilis. The classic Maya civilization[50] of the southern and the central lowland was (c. 200–c. 900 CE) organized in independent cities or city states, which consisted of a religious-political hierarchical and social differentiated system governed by an aristocracy and/or one or numerous lords called (k’uhul) ajaw.[51] The Maya never created an empire like, for example, the later Aztecs of Central Mexico, but at certain moments in time certain cities managed to some degree establish local hegemonies (city states) during the classic period. The central southern lowland came to be depopulated in the terminal classic period (c. 800–c. 900 CE). From c. 850 CE a foreign Central Mexican influence is manifested in the classic Maya cities; as we saw earlier this is represented linguistically in the writing system with various loanwords from Nahuatl. After 900 CE the city-state culture of the southern and central lowland classic Maya civilization fell into decline and ended up being annihilated.[52] The classic Maya writing system replicated the language aka ‘Classic Ch’olti’an’ of the aristocracy.[53] The level of literacy among the different social strata is, however, disputed.[54] Despite dialectal differences, Stephen D. Houston asserts that due to marriages and alliances there was an “elite diglossia” making the independent cities of the classic Maya civilization unified and the inscriptions “monoglot.”[55] Written Classic Ch’oltian held symbolic prestige, which legitimized the rulership of native speakers of Tzeltal and Yucatec.[56] But the sociolinguistic and multilingual condition is more complicated, making a lingua nobilis less heterogeneous. Classic Yucatec also influenced the written language of the elite and spoken Ch’oltian through loanwords. Lacadena and Wichmann emphasize that in Northern Yucatan in the classic period, Classic Yucatecan was a literary language “alongside the more universally prestigious medium for written communication, which is of Ch’olan derivation.”[57]

A colloquial (common) vernacular might not only oppose a political lingua nobilis but also a religious (sacred) and ceremonial language or lingua sacra. The vocabulary may be particularly elaborated and replicate a definite emphasis. Especially known for their impressive illustrated pictorial-logographic manuscripts (ñii ñùhu, “sacred skin”) from the post-classic (c. 900 CE) and early colonial period, the Mixtecs[58] of Oaxaca, Mexico refer to themselves and their territory as Ñuu Savi, Ñuu Sau, or Ñuu Dzavui,[59] “people of the rain” or “the people belonging to the rain god”[60] or “La Mixteca,” “people of the cloud place” in Nahuatl. In Mixtec pictorial-logographic manuscripts the signs and numeral coefficients of the 260-day calendar correspond to the same Nahua calendar. The Mixtec employed, however, an extraordinary language—various versions are known from the different dialects—for the day signs and day numbers of the pivotal 260-day calendar.[61] For instance in the language of the Nahua, Nahuatl, the day (or year) “One Reed” is rendered as Ce Acatl in the colloquial vocabulary. Conversely, in order to render “One Reed” from the 260-day calendar, the Mixtec did not employ the vernacular Een Doo but instead Ca Huiyo for “One Reed.”[62] Furthermore, the legendary Mixtec Lord Eight Deer would be named Naa Cuaa after the day of the 260-day calendar he was born and not by the conventional number una (“eight”) and word for the animal idzu (“deer”). Table 18.1 demonstrates the difference between names and numbers and calendar names and day numbers of the Mixtec 260-day calendar:[63]

Normal Vocabulary | Special Day-Sign
(Alvarado Dictionary) | Vocabulary
1. Ee coo yechi | ca, co quevui (1 Alligator).
2. Vvui tachi | ca, co, cu chi (2 Wind).
3. Uni huahi | co cuau; mau (3 House).
4. Qmi, cumi (ti) yechi | qui q(ue) (4 Lizard).
5. Hoho coo | q yo (5 Serpent).
6. Iño ndeye, sihi | ñu na mahu(a) (6 Death).
7. Usa idzu, sacuaa | sa cuaa (7 Deer).
8. Una idzo | na sayu (8 Rabbit).
9. Ee nduta | q tuta (9 Water).
10. Usi ina | si hua (10 Dog).
11. Usi ee codzo | si i ñuu (11 Monkey).
12. Usi vvui yucu | ca cuañe (12 Grass)
13. Usi uni ndoo | si huiyo (13 Reed).
14. Cuiñe | huidzu (Jaguar).
15. Yaha | sa (Eagle).
16. (ti)sii | cuii (Vulture).
17. tnaa, nehe | qhi (Movement).
18. Yuchi | cusi (Flint).
19. Dzavui | co (Rain).
20. Ita | huaco (Flower).

18.1 The Mixtec 260-day calendar: Dahlgren (1954, 282–287); Smith (1973, 23–27).

Moreover, Michael W. Swanton and G. Bas van Doesburg[64] have found that not only the Mixtec but also the Chocho-Popoloca, whose 260-day calendar has in general different day-names from the Mixtec 260-day calendar, from the same region employed a special vocabulary of the names of the days of the 260-day calendar different to their ordinary vocabulary. The only exceptions are the days for “wind” and “water.”

The Mixe (Mije)[65] of the southern part of Mexico had an extraordinary vocabulary for calendar numerology but apparently not for the calendar days.[66] The Table 18.2 shows the difference between Mixe colloquial numbers and calendar numbers:

Calendar numbers | Mixe numbers | Day names
1. Tu.m | tu’k | hukpi (root)
2. mac | meck | sa’a (wind)
3. tu:k | tukok or to.hk | how (palm)
4. makc | maktask | hu:’n (hard, solid, resistant
|  | i.e. of tree or hb).
5. moks | mugo.sk | ca’an (serpent)
6. tuht | tudu:k or tuhtti.k | ?uh (earth, world)
7. kuy | westu:k | koy (rabbit)
8. tu.gut | tuktu:k | na:n (deer)
9. ta:s | tastu:k | ni’in (water, river)
10. mahk | mahk | ho’o (?)
11. ki’in | mahktu’k | hai.m (fine white ashes)
12. ki’is | mahkmeck | ti’ic (tooth)
13. pagac | mahktikok or maktu.hk | kep (reed)
14. |  | ka: (jaguar)
15. |  | hu.ik (tobacco)
16. |  | pa’a (edge, border, to break)
17. |  | ?uhs (earthquake)
18. |  | tahp (covered up, darkening)
19. |  | miy (grass)
20. |  | hugi’ñ (point [weaving])

18.2 The Mixe 260-day calendar (si: tu’u “road of days” or si: may: y’g, “to divine” or “to count the days”), Lipp (1983, 203–205; 1991, 62–63).

The different designations of numbers suggest an exceptional numerology or perhaps a lingua numerica today used in some Mixe communities.[67]

An especially sacred (ceremonial) terminology is not uncommon in Indigenous linguistic cultures of the Americas where there is an extraordinary and an ordinary vocabulary with different words for semantic equivalents (synonyms). In Pueblo languages, White has recorded quite a few examples.[68] For instance the word for “rain” is katca’ata in the vernacular but ci’wana in the ceremonial language of Santa Ana Pueblo.[69] There is an American intralingual diglossia, which is not only religious but also social and political. In field research among the Mixe (Ayuujk), Araceli Rojas Martínez Gracida observes that there is a special language with parallelisms, difrasismo, and particular expressions used in ceremonies by xëë maywë, calendar specialists, but also when taking offices in the government of the community. This requires particular ability by particular people, which they acquire over many years.[70] A stylized version of a particular religious, social, and political language where there is a paired couplet (difrasismo) connoting semantic associations exists in many Mesoamerican languages: K’iche’, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Yucatec, Nahuatl, Ocuiltec, Amuzgo, Popoloca, Totonac, Mixe-Zoque, and so forth.[71] Special (esoteric) and ritual languages with an extraordinary terminology, proverbs, riddles, and metaphors are known from pre-European manuscripts.[72] It was called iya in Mixtec culture;[73] today in ritual religious language it is denominated as ‘parangón’ in Spanish and categorized as shahu or sa’vi (Sp. “palabra de reverencia”) in Mixtec. With its distinct style and structure, this exceptional language is employed in particular by peoples with a socio-political and religious office (cargo). It is the group of elders called Tanisa’nu, “señores principales o caracterizados” or tse ka’an sa’vi, “people who speak the ceremonial language” who use and have exclusive knowledge of the sa’vi.[74] In Nahua culture an arcane language was called nahualltolli[75] or yectlatolli, “formal speech” of the contemporary Nahua from Puebla and the State of Mexico.[76] There was also a favored language tecpillatolli of the nobility[77] and a particular moral and political discourse huehuetlatolli by knowledge specialists composed of elders.[78] Furthermore, The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel of the Yucatec Maya contains the Zuyua language (Zuyua Than) exclusive to the initiated elite, which is also in Popol Wuj of the K’iche’ Maya.[79] It constitutes riddles, which educate and legitimize rulers.[80]

Kroskrity advocates that a strategic usage of interlingual or intralingual diglossia through code-switching or compartmentalization constitutes a linguistic ideology and simultaneously a language maintenance strategy among the Arizona Tewa.[81] Tewa language ideology gives eminence to ceremonial kiva talk (te’e hiili). During a ceremony the Tewa do not employ foreign (including Hopi or other Indigenous) words or an alien social dialect. Accordingly, there is no linguistic innovation but invariable stories, prayer, and songs. Hopi and English are, however, applied in the colloquial, although foreign influence is kept from the Tewa vernacular, which gives them an economic and political advantage. Furthermore, there is a resilient linguistic indexing of sociocultural identity marked by evidential particles and self-reference.[82] Code-switching between Hopi and Tewa exhibit that “[...] the Arizona Tewas identify both as Hopi and as Tewa and use these distinct languages to interactionally construct these identities [...].”[83]

I conclude this section elucidating how Nahuatl as lingua sacra is employed in order to convey a divine message from the European (and Middle Eastern) Virgin Mary shortly after the Spanish invasion of Central Mexico. Concurrently, the example serves to introduce the next chapter of lingua francas of empires. On December 9 and 11, 1531 CE, the Nahua Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin or Juan Diego (1474–1548 CE) was, according to Mexican Catholic tradition, the one who reported the apparition of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe or Our Lady of Guadalupe on Tepeyacac or Tepeyac hill—originally dedicated to the Nahua goddess Tonantzin (“Our Revered Mother”)—north of Mexico City. Virgin Mary, called “La Morenita” (“the little brunette”), communicated a sacred message in Nahuatl to Juan Diego. He translated the meaning from Nahuatl, the present lingua franca of pre-European Central Mexico, into the new lingua franca of Spanish for the first bishop of New Mexico Juan de Zumárraga.[84] The Nahuatl speaking Virgin Mary or Our Lady of Guadalupe today enjoys global reverence. She has her own chapel beside the grave of St. Peter in the St. Peter basilica in Rome and in the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. In January 1999 the Roman Catholic Church declared the multilingual Virgin Mary of Guadalupe the first and greatest evangelist of America.[85]

18.5 Lingua Franca of Empires and Regions of the Americas

Multilingualism with a (common) lingua franca is found when interconnecting multiple socio-political and/or cultural groups have a different primary language but where there is a general (prestigious) secondary language with mutual intelligibility employed in intergroup communication.[86] Lingua francas also epitomize, however, asymmetric multilingualism. It is habitually the language of the dominant socio-political and/or cultural group that operates as a lingua franca. Consequently, in many cases there is a politics of lingua franca.

There are indeed numerous regional lingua francas (Sp. “lenguas generales” in Latin America) or contact languages of prominent nations, political alliances, confederacies and empires of the multilingual American continent before and after the European arrival. Lingua franca comprise many (sub-)categories. It is important to make a distinction of lingua franca of languages of the same but also of different language families of a region. Moreover, there are different constructed forms of lingua francas. For instance, a simplified grammar and lexicon of a language classified as “foreign talk” but also hybrid systems, trade languages, jargon, and pidgin.[87] From the sixteenth century onwards, English and French in North America and Spanish and Portuguese in Latin America (with some exceptions) have functioned as lingua franca in colonial and postcolonial America. I will not concentrate upon Indo-European colonial languages or neoindigenous pidgin, creolized or other lingua franca after the European invasion. Instead, I will focus upon Indigenous American lingua francas where I will bring attention to, in particular the lingua francas of Middle American and South American empires of the pre-European and early-colonial period.

First, however, I will give examples of lingua francas in North America, although much of the data are uncertain regarding lingua franca between Indigenous peoples. There are French reports in the seventeenth century about Algonquin and Huron as languages functioning as lingua franca in New France. But this cannot be substantiated. Later observations of Southwestern Ojibwa or “Chippewa” (aka Saulteaux or Algonquin) in the western Great Lake area, Ottawa (“Chippewa”) between Lake Michigan and Lake Ontario and Cree north of the Great Lakes were regional lingua francas respectively. Occaneechi of Virginia lingua was apparently also the lingua franca used by Algonquinan nations in the Southeast. Confederacies like the Creek Confederacy in North America may have employed Creek lingua franca lingua franca between the member groups. Quite a few Siouan languages were applied as lingua francas on the western Plains as well as Navajo in the southwest. In addition, a pidgin or jargon (e.g. Muskogean Mobilian Jargon of southeast) could have been developed before European contact.[88] Quite a few other regional lingua franca could be mentioned.[89] Interestingly, despite only having been developed as a definite language from Shoshone at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in the nineteenth century the Central Numic Uto-Aztecan language Comanche became a lingua franca during their short-lived empire on the southern Plains.[90]

There is more knowledge about the linguistic empires just before the European invasion of Middle America and South America. Classical Nahuatl,[91] the language of the Aztec[92] empire[93] of multilingual Central Mexico, was a lingua franca in the post-classic and the early colonial period in Mesoamerica.[94] Nahua refer to Indigenous peoples of Middle America speaking one of the related dialects of Nahuatl (“intelligible,” “clear,” “audible”). Millions of descendants of the Nahua, who once formed the Aztec Empire, are living in Mexico today.[95] Because the Aztec empire dominated a great part of Mesoamerica before the Spaniards arrived at the beginning of the sixteenth century, numerous written recordings outline Nahua culture in Central Mexico. In addition to dictionaries, grammars (Sp. Arte), and anthropological data, Catholic missionaries produced a considerable Nahuatl catechistic or doctrina literature. Moreover, Spanish civil and religious officials used Nahuatl as an administrative language in the early colonial period.[96]

The practice of a lingua franca differed, however, among linguistic groups in the same multilingual region.[97] For instance, in Villa Alta, Oaxaca, three variants of Zapotec, Mixe, Chinantec, and Nahuatl were used in the colonial period. Zapotec, Mixe, and Chinantec were primary languages whereas Nahuatl was used as a secondary language. Zaoptec, as well as Nahuatl, were employed in alphabetic writing, translated in oral and written testimony, in business and law records, and for evangelization. The Chinantec applied Bijanos Zapotec whereas the Mixe applied Nahuatl as their intermediary language. The Mixe elite applied Nahuatl as a prestige language for speaking and writing, as they could not write their own language or Spanish. The Aztec never conquered the Sierra Norte. Nahuatl was accordingly originally a trade language later applied as a lingua franca by the Spanish colonial administration and the Dominican Order.[98]

Codex Sierra Texupan is a sixteenth-century book of community accounts from Santa Catalina Texupan, a community in the Mixteca Alta (1550–1564), and encompasses analogous Mixtec logographic-pictorial, Nahuatl alphabetic commentary, and Latin, Arabic and Mesoamerican numerical components. The Mixtec and Chocho or Popoloca (Ngiwa) scribes employed images and words in a complementary manner in order to communicate to a multilingual public. Codex Sierra Texupan was produced in Mixtec and Chocho or Popoloca (Ngiwa) Santa Catalina Texupan but written in Nahuatl. The manuscript thus exemplifies the transitional character of Nahuatl in a multilingual region, before alphabetic writing was fully developed in an Indigenous language.[99]

Nahua intellectuals recorded history in the Latin script not in Spanish but Nahuatl, the lingua franca of the early colonial period. For instance, the Nahua chronicler Domingo Francisco de San Antón Muñon Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin (1579–16?) contributes scant and incoherent but still vital information in Diferentes Historias Originales. As an historian Chimalpahin wrote accounts of various polities or altepetl—Tenochtitlan, Tlatelolco, Tetzcoco, and so forth, organized in xiuhtlapohualli (year annals). Chimalpahin was a learned Indigenous (Nahua) annalist and a descendent of the ruler lineage of Tzaqualtitlan Tenanco, a subdivision of Amecameca (Amaquemecan), Chalco. Dominican friars from the local monastery probably educated him. Chimalpahin moved to Mexico City when he was fourteen years old. Writing in Nahuatl, he had access to ancient pictorial-logographic manuscripts. Chimalpahin transcribed these into alphabetical script and travelled to other cities to search for material and interview distinguished elders in order to corroborate his information.[100]

The Inka ruled the largest known empire, c. 1430–1532 CE, in the Americas before the European invasion. They spoke a dialect of Quechua, which became an administrative lingua franca within the multicultural and multilingual empire and for a period after the Spanish conquest (early colonial period). The Inka may have called themselves Runa, “people” or “human beings,” which the present-day descendants Quechua (runa simi, “human speech”)[101] still do today. Quechua is the most widely spoken Indigenous American language, with over 8 million speakers. There is a quite extensive colonial literature only comparable to Nahuatl and Maya of Mesoamerica. There is a plethora of cultures and languages in the Andes, quite a few unrelated, but of course far more when the Spanish arrived, which the Inka empire called Tawantinsuyu (“the parts that in their fourness make up a whole”) in 1532.[102] Four of the most used languages in the empire were Puquina, Mochica (or Yunga), Aymara and Quechua. Southern Peruvian Quechua dialect was employed as a political, religious, and administrative lingua franca by the Inka administration.[103] A majority of Andean linguists agree that the lingua franca of the Inka Empire was not founded upon Central Cuzco (the capital of the Inka Empire) dialect but a dialect from the Central Andes.[104] Initially, the Spanish apparently used this dialect as a lingua franca but soon changed to Quechua of the southern highlands. The Spanish administration and missionaries in the early colonial period, that is, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, promoted what is known as pastoral Quechua or a standardized variety of Southern Quechua. Furthermore, they classified the multilingual Andean region as lenguas generals (“widely spoken languages”) and lenguas particulares or lenguas maternas (local languages).[105] Although a lingua franca, Bruce Mannheim maintains that Quechua never was hegemonic or standardized in the multilingual pre-European Inka Empire, not even in the region close to the capital. Through local lords the Inka had an indirect rule. Moreover, there is nothing to suggest that they tried to impose their language upon the conquered peoples but local administrators were to learn Quechua. Reports claim that the Inka evacuated the Ayacucho region and replaced the local population with colonists (mitmaq) of various ethnic and linguistic origins from other regions of Tawantinsuyu. In other regions, the invasive groups of settlers (mitmaq) enjoyed a higher status and kept social, ritual and linguistic contact with their homeland.[106] The Inka lingua franca was accordingly practiced among the mitmaq and between ethnic polities and the Inka state.[107] The supposed founder of the Inka dynasty, Mango Qhapaq, demanded that the language and dress of a group should be different. It would then be easy to recognize their place of origin. Language was intimately connected to territory, establishing the cultural identity of certain people in the Andes, but language does not necessarily correspond to ethnicity. Linguistic boundaries persisted in central Peru at least 1000 years before the arrival of the Europeans. Later, the Spanish colonizers linguistically “homogenized” the former Inka Empire by not only introducing Spanish of socio-political domination but also advancing Southern Peruvian Quechua over the numerous other Andean languages. Spanish therefore became the common language of the dominators (descendants of the Spanish invaders) whereas Southern Peruvian Quechua remained the common language of the dominated indigenous peoples of the Andes today.[108] Consequently, it is the same situation as in other parts of postcolonial America.

Like Chimalpahin, the bilingual-speaker Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1530s?–1540s? CE–c. 1616 CE), born of Quechua speaking indigenous parents, made use of a non-European lingua franca in El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno. This is an extensive book of Andean history and guidance for colonial governance (1615/1616 CE). Indoctrinated into Christianity, Guaman Poma de Ayala served in missionary campaigns.[109] On pp. 22–47, 48–85 ten ages of human history are outlined: five of Christian and Andeans history respectively. There are also ten ages of the ancient Andean past and future. The ninth period delineates the present age, whereas the tenth period of the future defines—symbolically important in Quechua and not Spanish—an exclusive Andean hegemony with “our Christianity,” according to pp. 48–85, 925. The last Christian Inka (his son) should have autonomous rule of the “preferred” Andean region (p. 963) under the universal Christian rule over Christians and non-Christians by the Spanish monarch.[110]

Apart from Southern Peruvian Quechua, Mapuche and Muisca operated as regional lingua francas in the Andes.[111] In Amazonia, the Tukano language in the Vaupés region of the northwest Amazona basin (Brazil) is a lingua franca. Previously in the same region Tupí-Guaraní dialects, a creolized form of Tupinamba known as Língua Geral (“general language”) or Nheengatu, was the lingua franca of the Amazonian region. It was replaced with Tukano as lingua franca by civil authorities and Catholic missionaries. Tupí and its dialect, Paraguayan Guaraní, survive in Paraguay as the national language.[112] The community in the Vaupés region of the northwest Amazon basin represents a particular interesting case of multilingualism and regional lingua franca. There are three unrelated language families—Tukanoan, Carib, Arawakan—and twenty languages but with more or less the same material culture and social organization. The people are horticulturalists living in multifamily patrilocal longhouses, which are separated by a few hours or a day walk. The longhouses are multilingual but share a common language. These can be classified as subunits of “language aggregates” but with no determined territory or organization. People have to marry another person who is not member of the same “language aggregate.” Language identity is accordingly fundamental in the marriage system where linguistic exocamy is practiced. The majority of speakers can master three languages fluently, while many people know more than four or five. There are also people who can understand ten languages. As noted, Tukanoan (Tucano) constitutes the lingua franca. Language reflects social identity but there is no status in speaking a particular language. As there is no linguistic hegemony, the choice of language between the multilingual speakers is therefore not determined in communication.[113]

18.6 Writing Systems and Scriptura Franca Representing Multilingualism and Lingua Franca

The different linguistic strategies of literacy (writing and semiotic) systems reflect multilingualism and lingua francas of the Americas. The various graphic communication systems can be multilingual but also predominantly monolingual.[114] They may well also represent a hegemonic lingua franca.

Multilingualism and lingua franca are communicated and manifested in different manners in the various graphic systems of indigenous cultures of the Americas. A graphic (writing and semiotic) system may represent a particular language—although it can include grammatical elements, loanwords, calques, or neologisms from a different language—that is, be exclusively phonetic, for example, glottographic. It can moreover contain semiotic codes and signs shared by people of different languages representing a scriptura franca, for example, basically non-phonetic, or there can be a synthesis between phonetic graphic systems and a scriptura franca.[115] The history of literacy in the Americas can simply be summarized as: c. 1000 BCE–c. 1700 CE, non-European Indigenous writing and pictorial-logographic (semiotic) systems dominate. Subsequently, from around 1520 CE to the present day, colonial intersemiotic systems and colonial and postcolonial alphabetization campaigns were introduced into the Latin script by foreign missionary linguists and civil governments and administrations of the different nation-states.

18.7 Phonetic Graphic Systems in Mesoamerica and North America

Due to phoneticism, the logosyllabic (Maya, Zapotec; Nahua; “Epi-Olmec” or Isthmian[116] of Mesoamerica and the later Mikmak of North America), syllabic (Cherokee, Cree; Inuktitut of North America[117]), and alphabetic (also with pictorial-logographic systems in the early colonial period) constitute writing systems representing a particular language.[118] Consequently within a multilingual context, the use of a phonetic graphic system implies that one language is given preference instead of a linguistically miscellaneous pictorial-logographic system.

A logosyllabic writing system, also called “hieroglyphic” (gr. hieros “sacred” and glufos “writing”),[119] denotes a writing system incorporating two types of signs. These are word signs, also called logograms (gr. logos, “word,” gramma, “is written”), and phonetic syllables or vowel signs (sound signs). The logosyllabic writing system consists of logographs for whole words and signs for syllables and vowels. Logosyllabic writing, because it is phonetic (glottographic; gr. glotta, “tongue”), provides opportunities to express abstract ideas and concepts through a specific language. During the late preclassical period (c. 600–c. 200 BCE) logosyllabic writing systems were developed in Mesoamerica. Isthmian (aka Epi-Olmec), Maya, Zapotec cultures have geographical proximity. There are semiotic similarities of the signs of these preclassical writing systems but each scripture was connected to a particular language[120] belonging to different language families: Mixe-Zoque language family, Maya language family, and Otomanguean language family. Alfonso Lacadena hypothesizes that many of the signs of the Maya syllabary were taken from the Isthmian (aka Epi-Olmec) writing system, most likely written in the unrelated Mixe-Zoque language.[121] Neither the writing of Zapotec nor Isthmian has, however, been deciphered.[122] Lacadena argues that later Aztecs and Nahua cultures applied a logosyllabic writing system in their manuscripts. He maintains that a group of manuscripts (including the Codex Santa María Asunción and the Memorial de los Indios de Tepetlaztoc) represent Nahua writing of the scribes tlaculioque of the Tetzcocan scribal school or calmecac.[123] What makes the case of the classic Maya unique in Mesoamerica is that they have a nearly fully deciphered corpus with a logosyllabic system of writing.

The Maya system of writing was first decoded in the second half of the 1980s and the 1990s.[124] As we have seen, the classic Maya inscriptions are written in Ch’oltian a branch of the Ch’olan languages. This is a variant used today by Maya (Ch’orti’) of southeastern Guatemala and western Honduras. Linguists and epigraphers have designated this language as “Classical Ch’olan”, “Classic Ch’olti’an” or “Classic Lowland Maya.”[125] Houston, Robertson, and Stuart[126] and Lacadena García-Gallo and Wichmann[127] have demonstrated that besides a homogenous written language, local languages or dialects existed in different regions of the Classic Lowland area.[128] The classic Maya writing system was accordingly also multilingual, representing a specific language family because it transcribed various Maya languages: “[...] Classic Ch’oltian (or Classic Mayan, the proposed prestige language), the Classic Ch’olti’an vernacular, Classic Western Ch’olan (Classic Chontal?) and Classic Yucatecan, as well as their descendants Colonial Ch’orti’, Colonial Yucatec, and Colonial Itza (and possibly Colonial Chontal [...]). It also includes words from Tzeltal.”[129] These three languages have all affected the written norm. Notwithstanding some paleographic variations and the three linguistic areas there was a system of writing which reflected an integrated Lowland Classic Maya plurilingual culture.[130] Classic Maya sign inventory was indeed fundamentally unitary.[131] Despite of elements of loanwords from the Maya languages of Yucatec, Tzeltzal (and maybe Kekchi) and regional palaeographic diversification, the writings were understandable for the scribes from the various Maya cities.[132]

Paleographic as well as linguistic (phonological) distinctiveness of the individual city was, however, an identity marker in the logosyllabic writing system of the individual city, according to Søren Wichmann. Maya script has an exceptional phonological transparency. The logosyllabic system allows for various possibilities, which represent different degrees of phonological specification and individual spellings. Regional linguistic variants are regularly “spelled out” in the orthography of the inscriptions. The alternative spellings of identical words represent a collective awareness of regional and cultural identity through language. Phonology operates therefore in Classic Maya scriptures as an indicator of political identity of the city and city-state. Inscriptions are phonologically transparent in principally small-scale monolingual societies where the scribes set off pronunciations of words from other possible pronunciations by speakers of different dialects or languages. But this was not the case in large centralized polities subsuming many cultural-linguistic groups.[133]

Situated not far from Tenochtitlan (Mexico City),[134] Teotihuacan of the early classic period (c. 100–c. 600 CE) was the greatest known multilingual cosmopolitan metropolis (c. 150,000 inhabitants at its peak) of the pre-European Americas. Foreign multilingual inscriptions are also present at Teotihuacan. There are paintings from the apartment compound Tetitla at Teotihuacan, which encompass fragments of phonetic written early classic Mayan inscriptions, with one of them describing deity impersonation. Furthermore, a stone monument from Oaxacan Barrio had Zapotec writing with the calendar date 9 “L.”[135] Teotihuacan texts[136] are located at various sites outside Central Mexico.[137] An interesting case is the “Temple inscription” in Temple 26 (Structure 10L–26) of the classic Maya city, Copan of western Honduras. It displays Teotihuacan symbolic script. Full-figure signs of the inscriptions consist of two separate but parallel texts or fonts: Teotihuacan and Maya. A single text is accordingly “written” in two graphic systems. David Stuart asserts that a restored left section of this inscription reads: Waxaklaju’n U’b’aaj K’awil (name of lord at Copan) ? 9.16.5.0.0 8 Ajaw 8 Suutz’ (April 10, 756 CE). The calendar date alludes to the dedication date of the structure and Stela M, in front of the Hieroglyphic Stairway. The Teotihuacan inscription was apparently to be read first and then translated into Maya. Hence, this is a bilingual text, or biscript, of Mexican (Teotihuacan) pseudo-writing representing no language and Maya writing.[138] These Teotihuacan examples demonstrate not only the unique semantic relationship between writing and a particular language but in addition that phonetic systems might appear in symbiosis with foreign linguistic cultures.

In 1904 Silas John Edwards constructed a particular “phonetic-semantic” system recording ritual prayers for the Western Apache in east central Arizona. Despite the influence of Christianity, the writing system is based upon signs from Apache tradition but significantly not for traditional Apache invocations or colloquial communication in Western Apache. A few Apache, who live on the Fort Apache and San Carlos reservations, are initiated into the knowledge of the system and employ it today. Although esoteric, the writing systems principles are recognized by US linguist anthropologists. Like the indigenous Cherokee syllabary the writing system of Silas John represents “stimulus diffusion” which created a new graphic-cultural form for native speakers.[139] Cherokee syllabic writing represents another intriguing example of a contemporary exclusive indigenous writing (i.e graphic monolingual) system. Cherokee origin is from the southeastern part of what is today is known as the US. Today numerous Cherokees live in reservations in Oklahoma and North Carolina, but other Cherokee groups who are not federally recognized also reside in the US. The Cherokee comprise three major political entities: the Eastern Band of Cherokees in North Carolina, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and the United Keetoowah Band in Oklahoma. It is the largest contemporary indigenous nation in the US, with more than 300,000 people. Around 14,000 peoples speak a Cherokee dialect.[140] The Cherokee and non-English speaker Sequoyah (aka George Guest or Gist) invented a syllabary (85 symbols: 5 vowels; 1 s sound; 79 syllables), which was developed 1819–1821. It was used to produce a variety of secular and religious texts, which created a high level of literacy among the Cherokee. Today the syllabary is generally used for the purpose of ceremonies, publication of translations of the Bible and bilingual newspapers and periodicals (The Cherokee Phoenix, The Cherokee Messenger, and The Cherokee Advocate) from 1828 onwards.[141]

18.8 Synthesis of Pictorial-logographic (Scriptura Franca) and Phonetic Writing in Mesoamerica

Numerical notation systems are principally translinguistic non-phonetic whereas lexical numeral systems are phonetic or linguistically determined.[142] These epitomize open as opposed to close (language) systems.[143] We have seen that for the Mixtec and Mixe lexical numeracy signifies intralingual differentiation and exclusivity. Conversely, in Mesoamerica various numeral-sign systems can function as scriptura franca, that is, translingual. For instance, the bar-and-dot numeral sign-systems (Epi-Olmec/Isthmian, Zapotec, Maya, Teotihuacan, Mixtec-Puebla), however, were known to be used for calculating calendar time. Later, dot-numerals were employed by various linguistic civilizations in Oaxaca, the Gulf Coast and the Valley of Mexico.[144] Scriptura franca is a graphic literacy system not associated with a particular language, operating as a semiotic lingua franca. Scriptura franca represents an open or inclusive vs. a closed or exclusive communication system—the latter pertaining to a specific language, manifested as we saw in different phonetic (writing) systems. This has consequences for communication in multilingual societies and regions.

Civilizations of Central Mexico have a graphic or pictorial-logographic system called “Mixteca-Puebla Horizon Style” or The “Mixteca-Puebla style” (the system has many designations). This is a common graphic and symbolic system, for example, scriptura franca of peoples who spoke different languages (Nahuatl, Otomí, Totonac, Cuicatec, Chocho, Mixtec,[145] Zapotec, Tlapanec etc.) in the postclassical and early colonial period (c. 900–c. 1700 CE) in Mesoamerica. People of various cultures could communicate in writing independent of their different languages.[146] Although a regional variation in terms of graphic conventions, there are analogous iconography, symbols, and logographic signs in manuscripts of the Mixteca-Puebla tradition. This “postclassical international style” may signify a pan-Mesoamerican religious system. It pre-existed but was later promoted by the Aztec Empire.[147] Scholars have classified this graphic system as pictorial-ideographic,[148] as pictorial,[149] or as semasiographic.[150] It encompasses narrative pictures accompanied with logographic signs for names, places, and dates. I therefore prefer the category pictorial-logographic, but the other mentioned categories are helpful in defining the various semiotic meanings and uses. A pictogram (Lat. pictus, “painted,” Gr. -gram, “something written,” “illustrated”) is a visual representative sign. It depicts a concrete object or an action. The signs may function ideographically or semasiographically (Gr. semasia, “meaning,” -gram, “something written,” “illustrated”) by providing qualities, attributes, or ideas associated with the depicted object. An illustrated eye may for example be applied as an ideogram (“ideas,” “-grafi”) for the verb, “to see” whereas footprints may represent travel or dancing, and so forth.[151] An ideogram can be representative when the iconic sign depicts, by natural association, an element or a part of a meaning. Conventions may decide that the sign has this visual association. Ideograms can consequently symbolize cultural metaphors graphically.[152] A verb is frequently represented by a depicted action. Such a system was ambivalent since a sign could simultaneously have several meanings. A pictorial-logographic system is not phonetic, that is, founded on a particular or defined language. A codified sign system was applied to communicate ideas independent of a particular language. This was an advantage in multilingual Central Mexico. Logograms can, however, contain phonetic elements (rebus). There are some phonetic elements after the rebus principle in this writing system, especially in Aztec but also in some Mixtec place names.[153] Another factor, which connects the system to a linguistic culture, is that pictograms and ideograms are signs culturally determined by codes or conventions. For example, day and year signs can be distinguished by a different semantic determinative in Mixtec and Aztec manuscripts respectively.[154] Moreover, this was partly a mnemonic principle of conveying traditional knowledge mainly by initiated specialists and accordingly not for intercultural communication. The “Mixteca-Puebla style” embodies therefore independent graphic systems for a cultural and linguistic identity of the individual city and state.

According to David Charles Wright Carr, calques represent concepts of scriptura franca in these pictorial-logographic manuscripts, because the various languages of Central Mexico—Nahuatl, Mixtec, and Otomí—employed the same signs to express the same concepts. But each linguistic culture group could employ homophonic words in order to construct glottographs or logograms (morphemes and phonographs).[155] For instance, the lexical entries for “writing” in Mixtec (tacu), Nahuatl (tlacuilo), Maya (tz’ihib’) and Zapotec (tozeea) are synonyms of semantically derivative terms from the word for painting and sculpturing.[156] Moreover in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis a Nahua scribe writes bilingual signs for “day” in Maya (k’in) and Nahuatl (ilhuitl). The same signs can be found on 56a in the postclassical Maya Codex Dresden.[157]

Cartographic manuscripts from the Cuauhtinchan archive (1525–1565 CE) produced by indigenous peoples of the Altepetl (city) of Cuauhtinchan in Puebla, Mexico exemplify that a scriptura franca were employed by different linguistic cultures within a community.[158] The recently rediscovered Mapa de Cuauhtincan no. 2 (MC2) were made shortly after the Spanish invasion.[159] The pictorial and graphic system of the map outline names, places (space), and calendar dates (time) with logosyllabic signs. Cuauhtinchan was a multilingual city dominated by Pinome or Chocho (Mixtec-Popolloca) and Nahua of the Otomanguean and Uto-Aztec language families respectively.[160] It was, however, written for both linguistic groups.[161] This intersemiotic cartographic document constitutes a scriptura franca with mainly Nahua (Aztec) but also Mixtec and partly European (three place names are written in Nahuatl in the Latin alphabet) semiotic conventions.[162] The early colonial multilingual literate Mixtec and Chocholtec notaries of the Tocuij Ñudzavui region used calendrical names, calendar dates, and place names interchangeably in different languages—whether Mixtec, Chocholtec, or Nahuatl—in bilingual and trilingual documents.[163] The non-translation of these calendrical names, calendar dates, and place names by indigenous polyglots contribute to explain the existence of a common Mesoamerican semantic and linguistic epistemology, a general scriptura franca conventional code, in the pre-European and early-colonial logosyllabic-pictorials like MC2 and other indigenous manuscripts of the postclassical and early-colonial periods. Moreover according to Terraciano, there were Mesoamerican “interlingual puns” expressing graphically semantic conventions involving body parts to outline location and other meanings unrelated to the body.[164]

In the pre-European period there were regional scribal schools among the Nahua and the Maya, with a phonetic and a non-phonetic emphasis respectively.[165] This signifies that synchronically, language was important for the scribes of the “phonetic school” whereas it did not play a significant role for scribes of the “non-phonetic school.” In most cases graphic communication systems diachronically “evolve.” But when a graphic system becomes more attached to a specific language (i.e. phonetic) should not to be seen as a progressive cultural-linguistic evolution. Maya logosyllabic writing gradually turned out to be more syllabic (phonetic), in particular in certain regions.[166] The graphic system of the Zapotec of Oaxaca, Mexico represents a different development. After the loss of Zapotec political power throughout the collapse of Monte Alban, its logosyllabic system was from the thirteenth century replaced by the predominately non-phonetic Mixteca-Puebla style. In the later part of sixteenth century, however, European alphabetic script was appropriated for use of the Zapotec language (c. 1550AD – c. 1750),[167] which also was the case for other Indigenous Latin American languages.

18.9 Scriptura Francas of North America and South America

Intercommunication in multilingual cultural regions of pre-European America required a spoken common language, lingua franca, but other non-oral strategies could be used between different linguistic entities. Khipu of South America and wampum and sign languages of North America appear to have represented scriptura francas serving as general media for various regional linguistic cultures.

Khipu (pl. khipukana)—from Quechua or chinu from Aymara (pl. chinunaka), which both signify “knot”—constitutes a quite complicated system. It apparently represents a combination of dyed knotted strings where form, ply, structure, color, direction, placement, and number are significant for communication.[168] This system—which may have a binary codified, mnemonic, or phonetic (i.e. writing) function—is, however, not deciphered. Frank Salomon[169] has summarized three theoretical positions for the principles of khipu: a Quechua syllabography or phonography;[170] a semasiographic system; a neutral binary code.[171] Leland Locke[172] decoded the decimal arithmetic code of khipu[173] and recently Sabine Hyland, Gene A. Ware, and Madison Clark have corroborated the hypothesis by Gary Urton[174] that khipu semantically (not phonetically) conveys affiliation to moiety.[175] It is likely that Inka and other linguistic groups of the Andes of South America used khipu in order to record and convey a variety of interrelated accounts (narratives) and transference of quantitative (mathematical) information: calendars, censuses, tribute records, royal deeds, inventories, genealogies, ritual records, and so forth.[176] It might well have functioned as a scriptura franca in the multilingual Andes region and for the Inka Empire. Khipu was not reserved for the elite since thousands of people were probably competent in its use in the Inka Empire.[177] Furthermore, there is no reason to assume that khipu were only employed as individual mnemonics.[178] Archaeology and anthropology have demonstrated that the fiber-based media in the Andes known as khipu was used a long time before the Inka Empire. Speakers of languages other than Quechua also practiced it more than 400 years after its demise. Perhaps it was for that reason not connected to a specific language[179] but represented a scriptura franca. Extant Andean khipus indicate a typology of at least three categories of khipu according to Gary Urton and Carrie Brezine. These are the Wari khipu (600–1000 CE), Canuto (e.g. tube) khipu and Inka khipu (1400–1552 CE), where the latter have far more existing samples. There are differences but also basic similarities between these khipus.[180] Urton and Brezine tentatively support a scriptura franca hypothesis of shared principles independent of languages in the multilingual Inka empire in part because: “[...] Inka administrative record keeping was based on a shared recording tradition among record keepers operating at different levels in the empire, from local communities to state accounting institutions.”[181] Moreover, they conclude that different functional types of khipus of various local and styles and regional traditions appear to have equivalent “standardized formatting principles.”[182] But according to a highly interesting report, Sabine Hyland have found two eighteenth century khipus in the village of San Juan de Collata of Huarochiri in Peru. Hyland hypothises a conceivable logosyllabic principle for these khipus, used as epistles according to local informants, written in Quechua.[183] This implies that they do not follow a scriptura franca principle. As Hyland recognizes, however, alphabetic writing could well have exercised influence upon post-European khipus,[184] which may signify that the pre-European khipu might have followed a different (non-phonetic) principle. If that was the case, the khipu exhibit a development from a non-phonetic to a phonetic system. Future research from Hyland and her colleagues will hopefully reveal the genuine nature of the principle(s) of the pre-European and post-European khipu.

The sign systems among native peoples of North America[185] did not contain logosyllabic inscriptions (phonetic), as in Mesoamerica, but logograms or petroglyphs (stone). Therefore, they were iconic, and had a mnemonic function not related to a specific language. The Kiowa, Lakota, Mandan, Hidatsa, Cheyenne, Praire Apache, Blackfeet had a pictorial-logographic calendar historiography. Community historians, known as season count keepers, maintained and used these pictographic records as mnemonic devices to remember the sequence of events that marked each year or season. As some Lakota people learned to write their own language in the nineteenth century, a few keepers began to add written words to the pictures, and eventually some winter counts consisted entirely of written year names.[186] European missionary linguists later constructed North American logographic systems for the translation of scriptures.[187]

Conventionalized sign language of the Gulf Coastal Plain as far north as British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba of North America, also known as Plains Sign Talk (PST), was used for interlinguistic communication between nations where some even speak languages of different language families. PST had regional variations but it was a lingua (scriptura) franca which has survived to a limited extent among elders. English replaced PST as lingua franca in North America. It was invented before the European arrival, probably at the Gulf Coast, where it later dissipated and was first used by the Kiowa-Tanoan of the Great Plains. Nomadic groups were the foremost operators of PST. It was practiced in rituals between different nations, in conversations and in storytelling, including among speakers of the same language. PST constitutes a particular syntax and grammar.[188] It can, moreover, be employed with or without speech. With speech PST may provide the same or different information. There are dialect differences but with no problem for communication. Furthermore, there is iconicity but also cultural knowledge necessary to master the system.[189] A report from the five missions of the Colegio, de la Santa Cruz in Texas makes this observation of PST as lingua/scriptura franca:

Although there are many languages in these five missions, [...] the language of making signs alone is universal in all the nations, making long orations for any purpose, as if it were just any other language that is spoken.[190]

How the principles of a regional North American pictorial-logographic system are associated with the principles of PST can be exemplified by the following story: after the great Civil War, a charter member of the Ethnological Society of Great Britain, Dr. William A. Bell, gives an eyewitness account in his book, New Tracks in North America: A Journal of Travel and Adventure whilst engaged in the survey for a southern railroad to the pacific ocean during 1867–8, a quite peculiar event involving the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux (Lakota) involving three unrelated languages that took place in 1867.[191]

Dr. Bell was the photographer of a survey expedition organized by the Kansas Pacific Railway Company (KPRC) with the purpose of finding the best course for a southern railway to the Pacific coast. The problem, from the perspective of KPRC, was the encounter with so-called “hostile” indigenous nations on the way. His sojourn in the Far West entailed a remarkable incident on June 26, 1867, near Fort Wallace in western Kansas.[192] A party of soldiers was attacked by a war party led by the famous Cheyenne war-chief Roman-nose. Seven soldiers were killed and five were wounded. This attack was most likely a retaliation for the infamous massacre of the peaceful Cheyenne village at Sand Creek, around 100 miles southeast of Denver about three years before. On November 29, 1864, a state militia of Colorado Volunteers headed by the former Methodist minister Colonel J. M. Chivington mutilated and scalped men, women, and children of the Cheyenne and Arapaho. In all, seventy people were murdered.[193] During another attack near Fort Wallace in 1867, Sergeant Frederic Wylyams—an Englishman educated at Eton and later disowned by his bourgeois family who subsequently immigrated to America—encountered a quite remarkable fate. Wylyams was found lying dead with his horse, and both horse and man had been stripped of their clothes and trappings:[194]

A portion of the sergeant’s scalp lay near him, but the greater part was gone; through his head a rifle-ball had passed, and a blow from the tomahawk had laid his brain open above his left eye; the nose was slit up, and his throat was cut from ear to ear; seven arrows were standing in different parts of his naked body; the breast was laid open, so as to expose the heart; and the arm, that had doubtless done its work against the red-skins, was hacked to the bone; his legs, from the hip to the knee, lay open with horrible gashes, and from the knee to the foot they had cut the flesh with their knives. Thus mutilated Wylyams lay beside the mangled horse.[195]

By analyzing the body of Sergeant Wylyams,[196] Bell was able to acknowledge “some meaning in the wounds”:

The muscles of the right arm, hacked to the bone, speak of the Cheyennes, or “Cut arms;” the nose slit denotes the “Smeller tribe,” or Arapahoes; and the throat cut bear witness that the Sioux were also present.[197]

A union of nations of the southern plains had united their forces against the European invaders. They had different signs of which the individual nation was recognized:

The sign of the Cheyenne, or “Cut arm,” is made in peace by drawing the hand across the arm, to imitate cutting it with a knife; that of the Arapahoe, or “Smeller tribe,” by seizing the nose with the thumb and fore-finger; of the Sioux, or “Cut-throat,” by drawing the hand across the throat. The Comanche, or “Snake Indian,” waves his hand and arm, in imitation of the crawling of a snake; the Crow imitates with his hands the flapping of wings; the Pawnee, or “Wolf Indian,” places two fingers erect on each side of his head, to represent pointed ears; the Blackfoot touches the heel, and then the toe, of the right foot; and the Kiowa’s most usual sign is to imitate the act of drinking.[198]

Consequently, there is semiotic evidence that warriors of the Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and the Sioux partook in the battle. Bell admits that he did not find, “what tribe was indicated by the incisions down the thighs, and the laceration of the calves of the legs, in oblique parallel gashes. The arrows also varied in make and colour, according to the tribe; and it was evident, from the number of different devices, that warriors from several tribes had each purposely left one in the dead man’s body.”[199]

How can these symbols or signs be deciphered? I put forward the theory that the wounds on the Sergeant’s body represent the sophisticated sign language of Plain Indians—which the Cheyennes, Arapahoes (both Algonquian language family), and the Sioux (Siouan language family) practiced—transferred into graphic signs, in this case on a human body.

Many different languages were spoken on the Great Plains. Thus the PST sign language functioned as a lingua (scriptura) franca. Captain William Clark employed sign language during his field research in the 1870s. Later he wrote the book The Indian Sign Language.[200] Despite the fact that the regional differences of the signed vocabulary implied dialect variations, the sign talkers had no problems communicating. The PST sign language can be categorized as logographic. Manual gestures (signs) vs. vocal gestures (speech) comprise abstract sound combinations of a spoken language (arbitrary signs). The sign language comprises iconic signs (the signs look like the objects and actions that they refer to) and indexical signs (grammaticalized-pointing gestures).[201] But this does not necessarily make it a universal language because sign language is also culturally determined. It was, however, applied interlinguistically and within the same nation, mainly for storytelling and public speech. The system is in use among certain nations today where there is a revival of interest. This is manifested by its incorporation into language-maintenance programs.[202]

As semiotic technology for indigenous nations of the northeastern part of North America, Wampum could be used as scriptura franca in intercommunication between peoples of different languages. Wampum is a denomination for small white or dark violet cylindrical marine-shell beads. The word “wampum” etymologically derives from the eastern part of the Algonquian language family but it has different appellations in various indigenous languages. It is produced on the Northeastern coast of North America, in particular by Algonquian nations in the eastern part of Long Island and the coast of Connecticut and Rhode Island.[203] Wampum is sometimes strung together into belts or into strings used in rituals for condolence or affirming kinship.[204] The most extensive application of wampum belts was by the original Five Nations Haudenosaunee (aka Iroquois) Confederacy and the Huron Confederacy. A more limited use of belts is documented in New England and among the Mikmak, but very rarely to the south among the Lenape and their neighbors in the Delaware Valley and beyond. Wampum has many functions and was therefore practiced in different manners.[205] What concerns us here is the intercultural and interlinguistic function of wampum for diplomatic and political purposes. Several wampums were exchanged between various groups, and as we shall see, including Europeans, to substantiate verbal agreements. For the Haudenosaunee the ritual meanings of wampum were the reason why wampum was applied in intercultural relations. During ceremonies, the use of wampum strings indicates that the speaker’s words are true.[206]

Wampum belts were quite commonly used in native diplomacy as presentation pieces and also as mnemonic devises. Belts become essential for making and accepting, or rejecting, requests at treaties. One of the uses of wampum strings is to invite the other nations to meetings. At the end of the wampum string is a wooden stick. The wooden stick tells the people of the nation when the meeting is to take place. As each day passes, a notch is cut off the stick and when the notches are gone, the meeting will take place. Logograms or other pictorial signs could be engraved in the wampum belt. The colors had a particular symbolic communicative significance. The symbolism of the two colors in combination or alone, sequences, patterns, and figures on the strings or belts served to transmit and preserve information and traditional epistemology. The meanings in the designs can become very complicated, for example a belt may have white designs on a purple background but be surrounded by a white border, indicating a relationship that was once hostile is now peaceful. White pearls colored red were used as a declaration of war or to invite allies to participate in war. The Haudenosaunee used black pearl wampum-belts to let other nations know that one of their chiefs were dead. Some belts were employed to give a double message, that is, one part to a person and the other to another person or two messages to an individual or to the single nation or confederacy.[207] Chiefs, elders, or specially appointed men appeared in meetings as annalists to remember the principles of this semiotic system. In particularly complex and important matters, chosen individuals were commissioned to memorize a part of this long and complicated message. Early European observers’ reports that a person who kept a wampum-belt could repeat every word of a long and important convention several years after it was agreed.[208]

18.10 Translation, Multilingualism and Lingua (Scriptura) Franca

The technology in transference and exchange of knowledge and ideas between different cognitive and linguistic systems in translation is highly significant in the explication of multilingualism and lingua franca as intellectual phenomena. Translations between lingua franca and local languages were part of the history of linguistic interaction in the Americas long before the European arrival. Since the early sixteenth century, social, judicial, economical, religious, philosophical, and political concepts and terminologies from Indo-European lingua franca and languages became translated into many indigenous languages and lingua francas of the Americas. The multilingual translation endeavor of Christian missionary linguists has been ongoing for about 500 years in the Americas. Because it constitutes the most extensive corpus and represents some of the first documented examples of translation into indigenous languages executed after the arrival of the Europeans to the Americas, I will mainly review European ethnographer missionary and missionary linguistic practices of translating scriptures into intersemiotic and alphabetic script respectively. Despite differences between the many languages (language stocks and language families) of the Americas, we must make a distinction between translations between these languages and translations from Indo-European languages and semiotics into the languages of the Americas. This applies not only to the different grammars of the lingustic systems but also cultures, religions, and philosophies, which are expressed by idiomatic language categories and concepts. The Europeans applied various semiotic and linguistic strategies to the American cultures. But as we have seen in the cases of the innovative Apache and Cherokee writing systems by Apache and Cherokees and as we shall see the Military Code Talkers of various North American nations, indigenous peoples also developed new semiotic strategies in translating and producing meaning.

18.11 Intersemiotic Translations

From the beginning of the sixteenth century, Catholic missionaries almost immediately followed the European military invasion and initiated religious-linguistic and -semiotic campaigns against indigenous cultures. The missionary linguist applied various linguistic and semiotic strategies. They imposed Indo-European lingua franca and translated indigenous languages, in particular lingua franca of the region, into alphabetic script but they also constructed transcultural intersemiotic systems transmediated towards different indigenous language groups, accordingly representing an innovative form of scriptura franca.

In particular in Mesoamerica and the Andean region of South America—where the Europeans encountered numerous city-states and empires with sophisticated semiotic- and writing systems—missionaries, together with selected (converted) indigenous individuals, constructed various translated intersemiotic pictorial-logographic catechisms and confessionals based upon indigenous and European semiotic, symbolic, and iconographic conventions. European graphic codes were also introduced into indigenous manuscripts, where not only alphabetic script but also new graphemes were employed. Semantic elements of concepts and expressions came from both European and indigenous American pictorial-logography. But because of regional variation, there were not three graphic stages equivalent to what James Lockhart has linguistically categorized for Nahuatl in relation to Spanish in the early colonial period.[209]

Missionary linguists were imaginative in transmitting evangelization of conversion through indigenous communication (semiotic) systems and languages. Colonial pictorial-logographic catechisms and confessionals could be written using the indigenous semiotic system with European iconic conventions. This was not only in order to transmit theological principles in a manner receptive to the indigenous peoples, but also because many of them did not master the indigenous language.[210] Indigenous iconic images (often logosyllabic, or rebus, writing but also “semasiographic mnemonic”) and European symbols were sometimes, but not always, accompanied by Latin alphabetic script in an indigenous language. Pictorial-logographic catechisms, some accompanied by alphabetic script in an Indigenous language, by the so-called “Testerian manuscripts”,[211] after the Fransciscan Jacobo de Testera (1490? –1554), were made in Mesoamerica from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries and produced by both indigenous peoples and missionaries.[212] Burkhart asserts that pictorial catechisms of New Spain were composed by native peoples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[213] These catechisms were to be “read” in a line-by-line, word(s)-for-image manner.”[214] The particular code, context, and language, however, had to be known in order to be able to read the pictorial catechisms, so this colonial manuscript tradition represents a hybrid (intersemiotic) combination of non-European indigenous pictorial-logographic and European catechistical systems. Iconic images were employed with the purpose of conveying Christian theology and practices in order to convert Indigenous peoples. For instance, The Lord’s Prayer is depicted with the use of Nahua principles of logosyllabic (rebus)writing in a Testerian seventeenth-century manuscript. But also Nahuatl text written in the Latin alphabet is included.[215] Forty-two manuscripts are extant containing Roman Catholic doctrine including Our Father, Hail Mary, Salve Regina, Apostles’ Creed, Ten Commandments, Seven Deadly Sins and Church sacraments. Each pictorial element represents a word or a phrase creating a visual syntax. Some images are phonetic whereas others are iconographic signs. There are abstracted and abbreviated images, not mimetic references. For instance, the letters D and A represent the concepts Dios/Deus and Amen in Libro de Oraciones. In addition there can be some alphabetic glosses in Spanish, Nahuatl, Mazahua and Otomí.[216]

Pictorial Roman Catholic catechisms for conversion were constructed for Quechua and Aymara speakers from the Lake Titicaca region of Bolivia and Peru in the Andes as late as in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Andean religious practices influenced by European Catholic Christianity is communicated. Most of the Andean pictorial catechisms are, as is the case with the Testerian, written in boustrophedon, although there is no iconographic relation to the Mexican Testerian tradition. Neither is the visual language of these two traditions associated with the ledger art tradition of the nineteenth-century North American Plains Indians or the Cunas of Panama.[217] Intriguingly the pictographs follow the syntax of Quechua and Aymara. They convey concepts by using natural and abstract signs. Ideas are also transmitted with phonetic rebus signs (homonyms) rendered in either Aymara or Quechua. But the majority of signs are semantic or semasiographs (ideographs). This category of iconic or symbolic sign is not related to a particular language. There are many local traditions where signs are idiosyncratic for individual use. Some catechisms also include alphabetic script. These catechisms can therefore be classified as “semasiographic mnemonic” in the local systems of communication rather than glottographic connected to a specific language.[218]

Khipu was employed as confessionals and catechisms by Spanish Catholic missionaries (Jesuit and Mercedarian) but also as registers realizing ceremonial duties for festivals of the community.[219] According to the Jesuit José de Acosta in 1590, confessional khipus (confessional manuals) were also used as catechisms by elders in order to record sins, particularly among women. Lay specialists record confessions on khipus into the early seventeenth century. The Roman Catholic calendar was recorded on khipus according to the Mercedarian Martín de Murúa. Furthermore, “khipu boards” were probably developed by Spanish clerics.[220] This suggests moreover that khipu was a scriptura franca, able to communicate theology from Spanish (Latin) to speakers of languages of the Andes. Khipu were also transcribed, translated, and recorded in the early colonial period for administration archives.[221] The Spanish vice royalty converted the Inka tribute system into European languages based upon khipus for accounting. They were also presented to the Spanish royal colonial courts and in gathering information in inspection visits (visitas).[222] Additionally, the Spanish used khipu masters (khipukamayo) in economic (accounting and tribute census), demographic census, registries, in judicial and political affairs among the Quechua and Aymara speaking people from the 1570s, in co-existence with Latin script and European numeracy.[223] Andeans also applied khipus to bookkeeping information for litigation in Spanish courts.[224] There was accordingly a semiotic co-existence of khipu together with Castilian and Latin literacy in the colonial period. It was used until the late eighteenth century in local (vernacular) indigenous administration, some places even later recording communal work and non-Christian rituals by the khipu-alphabetic objects or “khipu-boards.”[225]

Wampum was employed by Jesuits in the Catholic mission among Northeastern American Indigenous cultures in the eighteenth century. Wampum-belts, strings, and pearls could be displayed in churches. Latin inscriptions on wampum were engraved as dedications to the Virgin Mary. The Vatican wampum belt is 15 rows of beads wide and over two meters long. This particular wampum represents an important agreement between Grand Chief Membertou and the Mikmak districts and the Roman Catholic Church, represented by missionaries. The first known examples of religious belts date from the 1650s. The last known example is the Vatican belt that was made at the Lac des Deux Montagnes missionary community in 1831 near Montreal, Canada, and sent as a gift to Pope Gregory XVI in Rome.[226] Thus, colonial European and American governments and missionaries, and not only various indigenous nations, employed wampum in intersemiotic communication in this manner transcending language.

Wampum was also applied for interlinguistic communication with Europeans in politics and diplomacy. Treaties between the Haudenosaunee-Confederacy (aka Six Nations) and Europeans and European Americans were often confirmed with wampum belts. The Two Row Wampum treaty between the Haudenosaunee and Dutch colonists was the first treaty made by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy with European settlers. The Two Row Wampum dates to 1613 and documents a meeting between Dutch merchants and the Haudenosaunee, which symbolizes the conditions by which both groups could peacefully occupy the land together. Each of the two rows represents nations whose paths are parallel but do not intersect or interfere with one another.[227] In 1776 a treaty was established with the Haudenosaunee-Confederacy at Fort Pitt with the purpose of keeping them outside the Revolutionary War. John Hancock commissioned a wampum belt for this occasion symbolizing the “13 fires” of the United States.[228] The longest and most famous wampum is the 1794 Canandaigua Treaty belt. President George Washington commissioned this belt made to commemorate the ratification of the Treaty at Canandaigua or Canandaigua Treaty or the Pickering Treaty signed in Canandaigua, New York, on November 11, 1794.[229] The belt is 6 feet long and composed of thirteen figures holding hands connected to two figures and a house. The 13 figures represent the 13 States of the recently established United States of America. The two figures and the house symbolize the Haudenosaunee. It is quite remarkable that President Washington elected to utilize the medium of wampum as a multilingual (scriptura franca) diplomatic instrument in order to commemorate this event and to confirm the treaty with the Haudenosaunee.[230]

Wampum is not the only device that has been intersemiotically employed for non-doctrinal translations. Military intelligence has been translated through a cryptic code developed and practiced by bilingual North American indigenous Code Talkers from various linguistic cultures: Cherokee, Choctaw, Hopi, Lakota, Meskwaik, Comanche, and Navajo. It was used by the US Marine Corps in the First World War, and also in the Second World War when it was used to transmit encrypted messages. The army of Bolivia employed Chiquitano/Chiquito as a secret code or cypher language in the Chaco War between Boliva and Paraguay.[231] The enemy never decrypted codes from North-American indigenous languages. The Navajo in particular were employed as Code Talkers until the Vietnam War. There was a principle of substitution where indigenous metaphors outlined military terminology. But more importantly, code translations of Navajo words representing letters in the English language made this an intersemiotic multilingual telephone and radio communication system.[232]

18.12 Ethnographer Missionary and Missionary Linguistic Translations into Alphabetic Script

As one of their principal missionary strategies, Catholic and Protestant missionary linguists applied translation, through a developed alphabetic literacy, in order to accommodate non-Indo-European languages of various religious scriptures into indigenous languages. Through translation they did not intend to create a general sacred lingua franca, but rather a common sacred vocabulary achieved by translating scripture into the vernacular. In addition, missionary linguists produced dictionaries and grammars of indigenous languages, whereas ethnographer missionaries made systematic descriptions of the languages, history, and cultures of the Americas in order to ease conversion.

An unsurpassed work, written by an ethnographer missionary in America, is Fray Bernardino de Sahagun’s (c. 1499–1589) encyclopedia known as The Florentine Codex.[233] The book, entitled Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España (The General Story About the Things in New Spain) was transcribed in Mexico City c. 1578–1580.[234] The Franciscan friar Sahagun evangelized the Catholic gospel while collecting information about the language, culture, and religion of the Nahua. He translated sacred scriptures, homilies, sermons, and books of songs and prayers in Nahuatl as aids for preaching.[235] In 1559, a provincial of the Franciscans in Mexico, Francisco de Toral, had ordered Sahagun “to write in the Mexican language all that which seems useful for the indoctrination, culture, and religious conversion to Christianity among the natives of New Spain, to aid the workers and missionaries toward their indoctrination.”[236] Sahagun was convinced that the Christian indoctrination of the Nahua had to be carried out in Nahuatl. They were to be called upon in Church service, make the catechisms, and confess in their own language. Sahagun also recognized that his own work had to explain the old traditions in Nahuatl in order to expose possibly dangerous—for example, diabolical or demonical—indigenous rituals and traditions. Sahagun writes this explicitly in his prologue to Book I “About the Gods” in The Florentine Codex.[237] The Florentine Codex is a peerless multilingual work due to the compiled and systematized material collected just a few decades after the Spanish invasion written in the native vernacular. Sahagun comments and explains his own meticulous methods and thoroughness in the Prologue to Book II of The Florentine Codex.[238] Sahagun worked with native assistants and informants. He used standard questions in a now lost questionnaire and consulted pictorial documents, which were commented upon and explained by his indigenous assistants and informants. Sahagun has for that reason, perhaps not undeservedly, been called, “the father of modern ethnography.”[239] Sahagun’s indigenous collaborators consisted of a small group of trilingual—Nahuatl, Spanish, and Latin—sons of the ancient aristocracy educated at Colegio de Santa Cruz, established 1536 in Tlatelolco, of the old Aztec empire. Sahagun and his assistants interviewed anonymous survivors of the Aztec empire from Tepepolco (Hidalgo), Tlatelolco, and Tenochtitlan about their history and culture.[240]

The missionary linguistic operation of French Catholics (in particular Jesuit) and English Protestants and Anglicans in North America (Canada and the US) originated around 1620 CE. Apart from Moravian (German), the “English tradition” of missionary linguistics began in reality with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) in the mid-1930s.[241] Missionary linguists mainly applied Latin script but in some cultures they transferred translations of various Christian scriptures into indigenous languages with developed orthographies and sign systems.[242] The Puritan John Eliot (1604–1690) translated the first Bible into an indigenous language, that is, Natick of the Americas. The Bible was translated and transcribed into Cherokee syllabic writing.[243] The American Bible Society produced a Cherokee New Testament of the Cherokee syllabary in 1860.[244] A particular syllabary of the Algonquinan language Cree of Northern and North-Western Canada was created by the Weleyan Methodist missionary James Evans (1801–1846) and later adapted to Inuktitut in the 1850s by Anglican missionaries. Evans also translated the Gospel of St. John into the syllabary of Cree from 1846. With Cree native speaker and wife Sophia, the Rev. William Mason published the Bible in Cree syllabic writing in 1861. The syllabary is employed today by the Cree and is officially accepted by the Canadian government.[245] Thus, bilingual literacy has been produced in quite a few North American indigenous languages, in particular by missionaries who have developed adapted writing and orthographic systems.[246]

Translated Catholic doctrinal scriptures—for example, catechisms and confessionals—were produced in the Latin alphabet. Missionary linguists, in particular the Jesuit, Mercedarian and Franciscan orders, operated in the Andean region of South America from the mid- sixteenth century. They translated catechisms, doctrines and sermons primarily into Aymara, Quechua, and Puquina but also other languages of Latin script.[247] Representatives of the Spanish monastic orders—in particular the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and the Jesuits—began to evangelize the indigenous people of “New Spain”[248] early on with translations in the Latin script.[249] Scripture was not only translated from an Indo-European language but also between indigenous languages.[250] In addition, indigenous peoples produced bilingual texts in alphabetic script in both indigenous and Latin-based scripts.[251] The Imperial Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco (1536) was the earliest colonial academic library and institution in the Americas. Tlatelolco was the former commercial center of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). This multilingual library contained translated books in Latin script of various genres from Europe and the Middle East, mostly in Latin and to a lesser degree in Spanish and in Italian, but also books translated into Nahuatl and probably other indigenous languages of Mesoamerica like Maya, Otomí, and Purépecha. Ecclesial confiscations and control, including by the Inquisition censorship, limited the expansion in addition to the loss of collections of books.[252]

The postcolonial twentieth and twenty-first centuries brought a new wave of missionary linguists. North American Evangelical Protestantism is characterized by a theology about the Bible as the single authority of faith, life, and teachings. There are two global Christian evangelical missionary linguist organizations for indigenous people: The US based organizations New Tribes Mission with its headquarters in Sanford, Florida[253] and the Summer Institute of Linguistics today known as SIL[254] or Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT) centered in Dallas, Texas and Orlando, Florida, respectively.[255] It is the North American Christian-Evangelical institution Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) or Wycliffe Bible Translators[256] that have been most active in the production of grammars, dictionaries, literacy campaigns, and new translations of the New Testament—in cooperation with Liga Bíblica de México and the United Bible Societies—into indigenous languages with the intention of converting believers of Catholicism or indigenous religions, as well as non-believers. A majority of the missionary linguists of SIL are members of the partner organization Wycliffe Bible Translators, which raises funds and recruits people for SIL.[257] This international missionary linguistic evangelical Protestant organization—SIL[258] was founded in 1934 and Wycliffe Bible Translators in 1942 by William Cameron Townsend—is one of the largest evangelical missionary and scientific enterprises in the world today, combined with contributions of medical assistance, education, community development and social aid.[259] SIL has a staff of around 5,500 missionaries from more than 60 countries. SIL International educates 200–300 linguists every year.[260] Approximately 950 of the missionary linguists of SIL have an advanced degree from a college or university.[261] Its linguistic venture exceeds 2,550 languages spoken by more than 1.7 billion people from almost 100 countries.[262] The organization’s objective is to bring the evangelical word to the Bible-less people worldwide[263] and it recently completed its five-hundredth translation of the New Testament.[264] SIL and Wycliffe Bible Translators are interdenominational but its mandatory Statement of Doctrine ensures that it recruits from the conservative layer of US Protestantism.[265] Its members working in the Americas are mostly Caucasian North Americans collaborating with selected indigenous informants and assistants. Like the founder, Townsend, the missionaries of SIL and Wycliffe Bible Translators are from a conservative Evangelical environment in the Midwest and the South of the US. The missionary linguist enterprise illustrates the complexity of translating ideas between different linguistic and epistemological systems in a globalized multilingual world.[266]

Translations can be conveyed through different media: written, oral, and visual. Christian missionary linguists have been and are quite original in transmitting evangelization into indigenous languages of the Americas. For instance, multilingual translated rhetoric of conversion is publicly displayed in churches in Latin America. A mural on the baptistery entrance from the seventeenth-century in the church of Andahuaylillas, close to Cuzco (capital of the former Inka empire) of Peru displays a fine example of missionary translated multilingualism. The baptismal inscription on the portal (“I baptise you in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen”) was written in Latin, Spanish, Quechua, Aymara, and Puquina. A baptistery entrance mural from the same time period in the church of Checacupe, also near Cuzco, contains four of these languages, except Puquina. The mural text was written so that the indigenous peoples should learn the baptismal form in their mother tongue to give baptism to children. Mannheim argues that this mural was a symbolic representation of the Pentecostal multilingualism of the church and “as an icon of the translation process.” In addition, the placement of the various texts represents a linguistic hierarchy and its chain of transmission.[267] In Ciudad de Oaxaca of southern Mexico the Jesuit Templo y Convento del Compañia de Jesús, also known as Templo de Inmaculada o Templo de Compañia—dedicated to or celebrating the Immaculate Conception—contains a section dedicated to Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. The following multilingual inscription in English, Spanish and various indigenous languages[268] is inscribed on the interior wall of one of the chapels dedicated to the Virgin Mary: “Am I not here, for I am your Mother? (¿No estoy aquí, que soy tu madre?).” These are some of the words, originally in Nahuatl, from Virgin de Guadelupe to Juan Martin in 1531.[269]

Rachel M. McCleary asserts that since Guatemala is a highly illiterate country with limited access to expensive translated New Testaments, Protestant missionaries began, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to mass evangelise orally, aurally, and visually through open-air services and at fiestas with music and preaching in the Indigenous language. The Protestants made use of new audio and visual communication technologies: latern projectors (applied in 1880s), portable organs (employed in 1880s), portable phonograph (invented in 1913), reel-to-reel tape recorder (1930s), video (1951), fingerfono (1957), cassette recorder (1963), light-weight portable bullhorn (operated on commercially viable alkaline battery invented 1959), portable projector (commercial use introduced in the late 1950s). From the 1940s missionaries started employing the radio to evangelise in Spanish and in Indigenous languages. Scripture reading in Indigenous languages is an important feature of the Protestant radio shows.[270]

SIL and Wycliffe Bible Translators are beginning to make translated New Testaments available in PDF. They are accompanied by film and sound.[271] Films and audio (Mp3), which can be downloaded free of charge, gain more and more importance in evangelization and proselytizing for SIL and Wycliffe Bible Translators. Using technological visual media like the “The JESUS Film Project”[272] from the Gospel of Luke, in addition to text, is a powerful tool in the future converting work for the missionary linguists. The “JESUS” film has been translated into more than 1500 languages of the world, with a new language being constantly added. Based upon printed editions of the New Testament, it is mostly the SIL and Wycliffe Bible Translators who produce the translations.[273]

18.13 Future Research Explicating Semantics of Multilingualism and Lingua Franca

Administration and educational programs of national governments, mission and churches of various colonial and postcolonial nation-states of the Americas impose an Indo-European lingua franca—Spanish, English, Portuguese, and French—upon the original inhabitants. Missionary linguists (“language and religion”), colonial and postcolonial governments and various institutions (“language and development”) thereby contribute to undermining indigenous languages of the American continent.[274]

Considerable systematic research on multilingualism and lingua franca as intellectual phenomena, in both literate and oral traditions, is left to be executed both synchronically and diachronically in the Americas—where there exist an enormous amount of indigenous languages[275] and related philosophies. It is important to emphasize that this analysis should be conducted in close collaboration with native speakers and scholars. This is not only a moral obligation but also a necessity since the indigenous peoples are the genuine experts on their languages, practices, and philosophies.

The Bible, and the New Testament in particular, is one of the foremost examples of texts where there are various translations accessible, also known as “massive parallel text (MPT).”[276] Besides translated religious scriptures, scholars ought, however, also turn attention to multimedia productions of both originals and translations of scientific, political, economic, and judicial material into Indigenous American languages. For instance, multilingualism and lingua franca can be analyzed in the internationally multitranslated legal document of the UN Declaration of Human Rights of 1948[277] as well as The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted by the General Assembly in 2007.[278] But national constitutions translated into indigenous languages are also particularly important as well as significant. Translation of the constitution of Colombia into Nasa Yuwe and Guambiano are examples of indigenous revitalization and representation involving Indigenous elders, linguists, and teachers, and so forth, applying indigenous linguistic methodology appropriating European concepts as well as constructing Indigenous neologisms. Accordingly, indigenous peoples can make definitions and reconceptualizations of core and key concepts and terminology of the constitution and, consequently, the national state through translation.[279] A future comparative analysis of translations of Spanish legal terminology and concepts of Latin American national constitutions into, for instance, Quechua and Shuar of Ecuador, into Nahuatl of Mexico and into Guaraní of Paraguay, should therefore indeed be fascinating in relation to developing original methodologies and theories about multilingualism and lingua franca as linguistic-intellectual phenomena.

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West, L. (1960). “The Sign Language: An Analysis.” PhD thesis, Indiana University.

White, L. A. (1944). “A Ceremonial Vocabulary Among the Pueblos.” International Journal of American Linguistics 10 (4): 161–67.

Whitecotton, J. W. (1977). The Zapotecs: Princes, Priests, and Peasants. The Civilization of the American Indian Series. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Whittaker, G. (1986). “The Mexican Names of Three Venus Gods in the Dresden Codex.” Mexicon 8 (3): 56–60.

Wichmann, S. (1995). The Relationship Among the Mixe-Zoquean Languages of Mexcio. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

——— (1999a). “A Conservative Look at Diffusion Involving Mixe-Zoquean Languages.” In Archaeology and Language Ii: Archaeological Data and Linguistic Hypotheses, edited by Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs, 297–323. London: Routledge.

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——— (2006a). “A New Look at Linguistic Interaction in the Lowlands as a Background for the Study of Maya Codices.” In Sacred Books, Sacred Languages: Two Thousand Years of Ritual and Religious Maya Literature. Proceedings of the 8th European Maya Conference, Madrid, November 25–30, 2003, edited by V. Rivera and G. L. Fort, 45–64. Acta Mesoamericana 18. Markt Schwaben: Verlag Anton Saurwein.

——— (2006b). “Mayan Historical Linguistics and Epigraphy: A New Synthesis.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35: 279–94.

——— (2006c). “Mixe-Zoquean Loanword on the Late Preclassic Maya Murals of San Bartolo?” 2006.

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Footnotes

[1] The Nahuatl name derives from the most disastrous sign, Ce Malinalli (“1 Twisted Grass”) of the Nahua divinatory 260-day calendar.

[2] Spanish chroniclers called La Malinche la lengua, “the tongue” or nuestra lengua, “our tongue,” Valdeon (2014, 51).

[3] It is not known whether La Malinche mastered the Aztec aristocratic language, tecpillahtolli, an eloquent oratory which was also used in diplomacy, in order to translate Moctezuma. See Valdeon (2014, 55–56).

[4] Baudot (2001, 156–157). Cf. also Valdeón (2014, 52–56).

[5] There are quite a few, although it is disputed how many, phylogenetic lineages, for example, language stocks, language families, and linguistic isolates in the Americas (cf. http://mesandlingk.eu/project), accessed April 4, 2017.

[6] Based upon civilization theories of the sixteenth century claiming that multilingualism is a sign of barbarism quite a few of the European invaders perceived the huge linguistic diversity of the cultures of South America as uncivilized: Pagden (1982, 126–136, 180); Mannheim (1991, 36–37).

[7] Around 42 million Indigenous people inhabit the American continent today.

[8] Cf. Campbell (1997); Mithun (1999). Linguists have classified different Indigenous American “Sprachbunde” and linguistic areas: Campbell (1997, 330–376); Mithun (1999, 311, 297–616). General surveys of American languages can be found in Adelaar et al. (2007); Campbell (1997); Mithun (1999); Campbell and Mithun (2014). Cf. also: http://mesandlingk.eu/project, accessed April 4, 2017.

[9] Miller (1996, 239).

[10] Cf. Lockhart (1992, 20–28).

[11] Swanton (2008, 347–349, 360–361).

[12] For North America, cf. Miller (1996).

[13] Hanke (1959, 8). In the prologue to Grámatica Nebrija had, however, already stated: “siempre la lengua ha sido compañera del imperio,” “always the language has been the companion of empire,” Hanke (1959, 127, note 31). In addition, Nebrija writes in Grámatica that “one thing I discovered and concluded with certainty is that language was always the companion of empire; therefore it follows that together they begin, grow, and flourish, and together they fall,” Rafael (1992, 23). This is an idea inspired by Lorenzo Valla’s Elegantiae claiming a Latin connection to the empire of Rome. It also was asserted in Cicero’s De senectute and later in grammars into Portuguese, Padley (1985–1988, 162, note 38); Asensio (1960).

[14] Leavitt (2011, 43). Cf. Swann (2011) for analysis of translations of Indigenous American languages into European languages.

[15] Kroskrity (1998, 104; 2000, 336).

[16] Mithun (1999, 2).

[17] Everett (2005, 621).

[18] Everett (2005, 633–634).

[19] Linguistic research aims to establish early and secondary linguistic and migratory relations between North America and South America. Cf. for instance Adelaar and Wichmann (2011); Brown, Wichmann and Beck (2014).

[20] Haugen (1972, 325).

[21] Campbell (1997, 10–13, 260–329); Mithun (1999, 311–325).

[22] In tonal languages there can be various categories of oral cultural communication and function: whistle speech, speech, hum speech, musical speech, yell speech in Pirahã (Everett 2008, 185–189). Cf. Chinantec and other Mesoamerican whistle languages, Campbell (1997, 346, note 17).

[23] Cf. classifications by Haugen (1972, 79–109).

[24] Mithun (1999, 312). Cf. various lexical and grammatical borrowings of North America in Callaghan and Gamble (1996) and among North American Indigenous peoples, Foster (1996, 66–67).

[25] Dozier (1956; 1958).

[26] Mithun (1999, 311).

[27] Kroskrity (1998, 104, note 2, 118–119, 105–110, 112; 2000, 331).

[28] Quechua and Spanish are official languages of Peru.

[29] Mannheim (1991, 24–26).

[30] Cf. Pharo (2016; 2017).

[31] Adelaar et al. (2007, 5).

[32] Cf. Adelaar (1986; 2007, 34–36); Heggarty (2005); Cerron-Palomino (2008).

[33] Mesoamerica has been defined as a cultural-geographical region incorporating the northwestern, central, and southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and the western part of Honduras and El Salvador. In this area people, like the Maya, Aztec, Olmec, Zapotec, Toltec, Tlapanec, Teotihuacano, Tarascos, Otomí, Mixtec, and so forth, lived in sophisticated urban civilizations c. 1000 BCE–1521 BC ‘Mesoamerica’ was originally outlined as a cultural and geographical unity by Paul Kirchoff in 1943, Kirchhoff (1943). Other definitions of this region have been suggested as well, cf. Carrasco (2001, ix, xiii). For a linguistic definition of Mesoamerica cf. Lyle Campbell, Terrence Kaufman, and Thomas Smith-Stark (1986).

[34] Karen Dakin gives a survey of languages and language families in Mesoamerica at the time of the European arrival, Dakin (2010, 218, fig. 1).

[35] Dakin (2010, 222).

[36] Miller (1996, 224).

[37] White (1944). Cf. Mithun (1999, 318).

[38] Wichmann (2006c).

[39] Saturno (2006, 8).

[40] See Brown, Wichmann and Beck (2014); Dakin and Wichmann (2000); Kaufmann (2003); Lacadena and Wichmann (2004); Wichmann (1995; 1999a). Wichmann argues that there was an exchange of loanwords between UtoAztecan and MixeZoquean (1999b).

[41] Taube and Bade (1991); Taube (1992, 120–121, 125–127); Whittaker (1986).

[42] Lacadena (2010, 389–390).

[43] It would be interesting to look into the grammatical level where there might be in some “[...] stable bilingual communities [...] accommodation between symbiotic languages, such that they cease to reflect distinct cultural worlds: their sentences approach a word-for-word translatability, which is rare among really autonomous languages,” Haugen (1972, 335).

[44] Wright Carr (2009).

[45] Wright Carr (2008).

[46] Toponyms, anthroponyms, gentile nouns, “difrasismos,” and the names of social structures, animals, and plants, according to Wright Carr (2007; 2008). Thomas Smith-Stark has collected lists of calques in Mesoamerica giving evidence for linguistic diffusion in Mesoamerica. Cf. also Campbell, Kaufman and Smith-Stark (1986, 553–555).

[47] Dakin (2010).

[48] Cf. Calvet (1987, 44–49); Ferguson (1959); Fishman (1967).

[49] Adelaar et al. (2007, 478–479).

[50] Archaeologists has designated the period of the lowland Maya as “classic” because of the existence of dates from the so-called Long Count calendar corresponding to c. 200–c. 900 CE found inscribed in their writing system on monumental architecture.

[51] The constructed denomination “Maya” comprises around seven or eight million people who speak a Mayan language today (there are 29 extant Mayan languages). The various contemporary Mayan peoples constitute cultural and linguistic minorities in the Mexican states Veracruz, Tabasco, San Luis Potosí, Chiapas, Campeche, Yucatán and Quintana Roo, in Belize, in Guatemala, in the western parts of El Salvador and Honduras.

[52] Cf. Martin and Grube (2000); Houston and Inomata (2009). The regents of the most prestigious dynasties are from the fourth century bearing the k’uhul ajaw (“sacred lord”) title, a title that spread to the smaller cites during the Classic period. This was to distinguish the rulers from the increasing aristocracy who came to usurp the ajaw title, Houston and Stuart (1996, 295); Martin and Grube (2000, 17).

[53] Houston, Robertson, and Stuart (2000).

[54] Cf. Houston and Inomata (2009).

[55] Houston (2011, 27–28).

[56] Lacadena García-Gallo and Wichmann (2005, 40). Cf. the thorough grammatical study by Danny Law about interaction and contact between Maya languages in the lowlands (2014).

[57] Lacadena and Wichmann (2002, 313); Wichmann (2006a).

[58] The Mixtec language is called Tu’un Savi “language of the rain” where tu’un can be translated as “words; talk; language; history.” Dadavi, “language of the rain” where da is a contraction from da’an, “language” and davi is “rain.” A variant is Daidavi, “sacred language of the rain” where i of dai means sacred. Da’an Ñuu Davi, “language of the Pueblo of the Rain” whereas da’an enka ñuu, “language of the other Pueblo” is used in order to describe a foreign language. In addition the verb ka’an can be employed to describe the language of the Mixtecs, López García (2008, 407–408).

[59] There are different spellings according to the various dialects (Perez Jimenez (2008, 13).

[60] The term “Mixtec” derives from Nahuatl mixtecatl, “Cloud People,” Whitecotton (1977, 23).

[61] Mixtec is a tonal language with high, mid, and low tones, which probably explains the apparent identical words for different numerical coefficients. See Smith (1973, 26).

[62] Dahlgren (1954, 282–287); Smith (1973, 23–27); Boone (2007a, 4).

[63] The 260-day calendar consists of the combination of 13 numbers and 20-day names (13 x 20 = 260 days).

[64] Swanton and Doesburg (1996).

[65] The term Mixe or Mije originates from Nahuatl. The Mixe apply Ayu:k, “word” or “language,” which is etymologically connected to ha’ ’y yu:k, “people of the mountains” to identify themselves as a particular culture. See Lipp (1983, 7; 1991, 1).

[66] Smith (1973, 23–27); Lipp (1983, 203–205; 1991, 62–63); Duinmeijer (1997, 180–181); Boone (2007a, 4). The application of the thirteen calendar numbers is today restricted to pueblos of the lowland. The calendar numbers are close to ordinal numerals of the Zoque of the same language family, for example, Mixe-Zoque, Lipp (1983, 204); Duinmeijer (1997, 181–182). The Mixe calendar numbers might have become tabooed in everyday life and therefore confined to the 260-day calendar according to Søren Wichmann, Duinmeijer (1997, 181–182).

[67] Cf. Lipp (1983; 1991).

[68] White (1944).

[69] White (1944, 164). Cf. Miller for ceremonial rhetoric of various Indigenous cultures in North America (1996, 225, 231–232).

[70] Rojas Martínez Gracida (2012, 122).

[71] Campbell, Kaufman and Smith-Stark (1986, 558); Campbell (1997, 346, note 19).

[72] Anders and Jansen (1993); Jansen and Pérez Jiménez (2010; 2011); Anders et al. (1992); Mikulska Dabrowska (2008; 2010).

[73] Jansen (1985, 7–10).

[74] Pérez Jiménez (2008, 220–222); López García (2007; 2008, 409–412).

[75] López Austin (1967).

[76] Peralta Ramírez (2004, 175).

[77] López Austin (1967).

[78] García Quintana (2000); Sullivan (1986); Mikulska Dabrowska (2010).

[79] Colop (2011).

[80] Stross (1983); López Austin and López Luján (1998). For a comparative analysis and a survey of sources to this subject cf. the work of Katarzyna Mikulska Dabrowska (2008; 2010).

[81] Kroskrity (2000).

[82] Kroskrity (1998, 104, 118–119 note 2, 105–110, 112; 2000, 25, 331, 336–340).

[83] Kroskrity (2000, 340–342). Cf. also Kroskrity (1992; 1993).

[84] Laso de la Vega (1998, 61–89).

[85] Poole (2001, 446–447).

[86] Silverstein (1996, 117).

[87] Campbell (1997, 10, 18–25, 145); Mithun (1999, 319, 322–325, 603–604).

[88] Silverstein (1996, 118–121); Mithun (1999, 319, 322–325); Taylor (1981, 177–179).

[89] Cf. overview in Mithun (1999); Taylor (1981).

[90] Cf. Hämäläinen (2009); Mithun (1999, 542).

[91] Classical Nahuatl refers to the colonial Nahuatl dialect that is generally used in documents from Central Mexico.

[92] The Prussian scholar Alexander von Humboldt and the American historian William H. Prescott introduced the word “Aztec” to the Western public in the early nineteenth century. I apply the term “Aztec” instead of “Mexica” despite the fact that several scholars, since Robert Barlow in 1949, have pointed out that this designation is incorrect.

[93] The term “Aztec” derives from aztecatl, “person from Aztlán.” Aztlán, which can be paraphrased as “the white place” or “the place of the herons” in Nahuatl, was the designation for their mystic place of origin. The name “Mexica” was given to the Aztecs by their patron deity, Huitzilopochtli, during their migration from Aztlán. The Aztecs or Mexica was originally a Nahuatl-speaking nomadic nation. They founded the city of Tenochtitlan, today’s Mexico City, which became the capital in the northern and central part of Mexico 1345–1521 CE, (López Austin2001); Nicholson (2002, 17).

[94] Dakin (2010).

[95] Nahuatl-speakers reside in Federal District (Mexico City, D.F.), Durango, Guerrero, Michoacán, Morelos, Oaxaca, Puebla, Jalisco, Nayarit, San Luis Potosí, Tabasco, Tlaxcala, Sonora, Sinaloa, and Veracruz in Mexico, but also in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua, Sandstrom (2010, 23).

[96] Karttunen and Lockhart (1977); J. H. Hill and K. C Hill (1986); Lockhart (1992).

[97] Robert C. Schwaller (2012) argues that Nahuatl as lingua franca varied, according to different factors, in the colonial period.

[98] Yannakakis (2014, 83–87).

[99] Cf. Terraciano (2015).

[100] Schroeder (2001, 196–198).

[101] Quechua is probably an invention by the Spaniards from qheswa simi, “valley speech,” Mannheim (1991, 6).

[102] Cf. Pärssinen (1992).

[103] Around two million peoples use Southern Peruvian Quechua today in the departments of Apurímac, Arequipa, Ayacucho, Cuzco, Huancavelica and Puno, Mannheim (1991, 4–5).

[104] Cf. Ramos (2011, 21–23) for references to theories about the origin and dissemination of Andean languages.

[105] Cf. Adelaar et al. (2007); Ramos (2011, 21–23); Torero (1974; 2002); Durston (2007, 37, 40–42, 190–191); Mannheim (1991, 2, 6, 9, 16–21, 34–35, 43–47, 50–51, 64, 80); Itier (2011, 74). Durston (2007, 109–110) claims that this “Standard Colonial Quechua” was a written construction by Spanish clergy used in pastoral scriptures and not a spoken language. Itier (2011) argues that this was a spoken lingua franca. Cf. Itier (2011) for summary and references to theories about Quechua as a colonial lingua franca (lengua general).

[106] “The linguistic complexity was socially significant. For instance, in Vilcashuamán language, differences were used as one of the bases for determining the pattern of resettlement of mitmaq colonists, with Quechua speakers assigned to the temperate valleys (qheswa) and Aymara speakers assigned to contiguous high punas. In Collaguas and Cavanas (Arequipa), the Quechua-speaking Cavanas maintained a stable symbiotic relationship with the Aymara-speaking Collaguas,” Mannheim (1991, 49).

[107] Ramos has, however, recently suggested that the Inka introduction of other linguistic groups into the Cuzco region fortified Quecha as a lingua franca. This immigration continued after the Spanish arrival, Ramos (2011, 27–28).

[108] Mannheim (1991, 2, 16, 45–47, 49–53).

[109] Adorno (2011).

[110] Adorno (2011, 76–77).

[111] Adelaar (2007, 3).

[112] Aikhenvald (2002, 16, 20–21, note 8).

[113] Cf. Jackson (1974); Mannheim (1991, 32–33).

[114] Cf. Frank Salomon and Sabine Hyland for examples of Indigenous American systems of graphic pluralism (2010).

[115] The category “scriptura franca” was put forward by Florentina Badalanova Geller at the conference “Multilingualism, Linguae Francae and the Global History of Religious and Scientiﬁc Concept” at The Norwegian Institute at Athens April 3–5, 2009, organized by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG).

[116] The recently discovered although not deciphered Cascajal Block found in the Olmec region of Veracruz, Mexico derives from the first millennium BCE. It represents the oldest known system of writing in the Americas, Rodríguez Martínez et al. (2006).

[117] European missionary linguists created specific North American writing systems, that is, syllabaries for indigenous languages. Western Apache and Cherokee represent exceptions as they were constructed by indigenous people in the (post)colonial period (see below). North American indigenous literacy culture competes with the new dominating lingua franca of English (and to a lesser degree French) and Latin script as a scriptura franca. Cf. for bibliographic references Campbell (1997) and Mithun (1999, 34–36).

[118] More than a dozen graphic systems are recognized in Mesoamerica: Ñuiñe of Mixteca Baja, Teotihuacan, Xochicalco, Chalco, Teotenango, Cacaxtla, Tula, Aztec of Central Mexico and the Mixteca Alta (Mixteca-Puebla), Mixtec, Zapotec of Oaxaca (Monte Alban; Mitla), Coztumalhuapa of Highland Guatemala, Epi-Olmec (Isthmian), and Maya, Urcid (2001, 1–4). Some of the many American writing systems are recently presented in Boone and Urton (2011).

[119] The concept “hieroglyph” is ambiguous. It is a designation for both individual signs and combinations of signs in expressions, like words or compound of words. For example the “hieroglyph” for “to be born” incorporates three signs: SIY-ya-ja, Wichmann (2000). A more correct category for the writing system is therefore logosyllabic.

[120] Stuart (2005, 7–8).

[121] Lacadena (2005; 2010).

[122] Urcid (2001; 2005); Houston and Coe (2003).

[123] Lacadena (2008).

[124] Houston, Chinchilla Mazariegos and Stuart (2001).

[125] Houston, Robertson and Stuart (2000); Wichmann (2006b).

[126] Houston, Robertson and Stuart (2000).

[127] Lacadena García-Gallo and Wichmann (2002; 2005).

[128] See also Mora-Marín (2003) and Mora-Marín, Hopkins, and Josserand (2009, 15–28). Cf. Wichmann (2006b) for a synthesis of Mayan historical linguistics and epigraphy.

[129] Lacadena García-Gallo and Wichmann (2002, 313).

[130] Lacadena García-Gallo and Wichmann (2002, 313–314).

[131] Grube (1990); Lacadena (1995).

[132] Lacadena García-Gallo and Wichmann (2002); Wichmann (2000); 2006b). Thus “Just as Mesopotamian syllabic cuneiform in the Near East was used to write not only Akkadian as the prestige written language, but also vernacular Akkadian, Hurrian and Hittite, the Maya hieroglyphic system was used for transcribing several languages [...],” Lacadena García-Gallo and Wichmann (2002, 313).

[133] Wichmann (2006b).

[134] Teotihuacan is situated c. 40 km northeast of Tenochtitlan (today Mexico City), the capital of the later Aztec Empire.

[135] Taube (2000, 1; 2004, 273, 285–287).

[136] Language unknown but probably Nahuatl. Cf. Dakin and Wichmann (2000).

[137] Cf. Taube (2011).

[138] Stuart (1998, 29–32; 2000, 495–498); Martin and Grube (2000, 207–208).

[139] Cf. Basso and Anderson (1973).

[140] King (1996, 95).

[141] Daniels and Bright (1996); King (1996, 97); Walker (1996, 162–167); Mithun (1999, 34–35); Coulmas (2003, 69–74); Cushman (2011).

[142] Chrisomalis (2010, 3).

[143] Houston (2004).

[144] Chrisomalis (2010, 284–300). For a summary of the mathematics and numeral notation and systems in America cf. Closs (1986); Chrisomalis (2010). Numeral systems of the world languages: https://mpi-lingweb.shh.mpg.de/numeral/, accessed April 4, 2017.

[145] Cf. Jansen and Pérez Jiménez (2010).

[146] Boone (2000, 32).

[147] Cf. Boone and Smith (2003).

[148] Dibble (1971, 324).

[149] Prem (1992, 54).

[150] Boone (2000, 30–31).

[151] Dibble (1971, 324).

[152] Boone (2000, 30–35).

[153] Boone (2000, 35–38); Dibble (1971, 324, 326).

[154] Nicholson (1966); Umberger (1981a;1981b); Boone 2000, 41–42).

[155] Wright Carr (2008).

[156] Urcid (2001, 4).

[157] Macri (2010, 207–209, figs. 15 and 16).

[158] These are Mapas de Cuauhtinchan 1, 2, 3, and 4 and Mapa pintado en papel europeo y aforrado en el indiano. Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca written in Nahuatl (alphabet) and pictorial-logographic script has been a “Rosetta Stone” in the explication of these manuscripts, Kirchhoff et al. (1976).

[159] Cf. Carrasco and Sessions (2007).

[160] In the story related in MC2 the bilingual Coatzin is described as a linguistic mediator and interpreter between the Toltecs and the Chichimecs.

[161] Ruiz Medrano (2007, 92–94); Wake (2007, 208).

[162] Boone (2007b, 29); Yoneda (2007, 186); Wake (2007, 209–211).

[163] Swanton (2008, 354–356).

[164] Cf. Terraciano (2015).

[165] Lacadena (2008).

[166] Wichmann (2006b).

[167] Urcid (2001, 4; 2005, 5–9).

[168] Urton (2002; 2008); Hyland (2014).

[169] Salomon (2008, 286–287).

[170] Sabine Hyland maintains that khipu have a logosyllabic principle (2017). Cf. below.

[171] Cf. also Quilter and Urton (2002).

[172] Locke (1923; 1928).

[173] Salomon (2008, 286).

[174] Urton (2003).

[175] Hyland et al. (2014). Cultures in Mesoamerica used a vigesimal system.

[176] Urton (2009, 823–824, note 10).

[177] Salomon (2008, 288). Cf. also Salomon and Niño-Murcia (2011, 71–79).

[178] Urton (2003, 15–26); Salomon (2008, 286).

[179] Salomon (2008, 285). For khipu used today cf. Salomon (2008) and Salomon et al. (2011).

[180] Urton and Brezine (2011, 321–325).

[181] Urton and Brezine (2011, 328).

[182] Urton and Brezine (2011, 344–345). Hyland (2014) argues that the ply directional technique was semiotic and not phonetic.

[183] Hyland (2017).

[184] Hyland (2017).

[185] In annual reports and bulletins and other series, the Bureau of American Ethnology documents linguistics, religions, history, and traditions of indigenous peoples of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century in North America. John Wesely Powell established the Bureau of Ethnology in 1879, renamed the Bureau of American Ethnology from 1897.

[186] Mooney (1992 [1897]); Greene and Thornton (2007); Greene (2009).

[187] Taylor (1996, 283–287, 289).

[188] Cf. Clark (1982 [1885]); Mallery (1880; 1881); West (1960).

[189] See Mithun (1999, 292–294); Campbell (1997, 10); Wurtzburg and Campbell (1995); Taylor (1996).

[190] Mithun (1999, 292–293); Wurtzburg and Campbell (1995, 160).

[191] Taylor (1975, 90–93; 1991, 78–81).

[192] Bell (1965 [1869], 60–65).

[193] Taylor (1975, 90; 1991, 78–79).

[194] Bell (1965 [1869], 62).

[195] Bell (1965 [1869], 62–63).

[196] Cf. drawing on p. 64 in Bell (1965 [1869]).

[197] Bell (1965 [1869], 63).

[198] Bell (1965 [1869], 63).

[199] Bell (1965 [1869], 63). An intriguing feature, not mentioned by Bell, is that a quite large tattoo was removed from the Sergeant’s chest. The tattoo was recaptured from the Cheyennes sometime later. Photographs of the deceased Sergeant and of his chest skin scalp showing the tattoo are located in the archives of the Smithsonian, Taylor (1975, 91).

[200] Cf. Clark (1982 [1885]).

[201] Sign language can also accompany speech.

[202] Farnell (1996, 589–590).

[203] Hamell (1996, 662).

[204] Hamell (1996, 663).

[205] Dutch traders used wampum as money from the beginning of the seventeenth century. This was never its function among indigenous peoples. Wampum became a currency in New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. In West New Jersey wampum was the main currency up to 1682. Until 1693 passengers on the ferry between New York and Brooklyn could pay for their ticket with wampum. The last known exchange of wampum as payment was a transaction in New York in 1701, but as late as 1875, Germans in Bergen, New Jersey employed wampum in trade with indigenous peoples, Hewitt (1910, 905–909).

[206] Arnold (2011, 5). For a description of various extant wampum belts of the Haudenosaunee, cf. Tehanetorens (1999).

[207] Arnold (2011, 6); Hewitt (1910, 907–908).

[208] Hewitt (1910, 908). Wampum is featured in the story of the founding of the Great Binding Law of Peace, which is the beginning of the Confederacy of the Iroquois, or the Haudenosaunee, which is composed of the Seneca, Tuscarora, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk. See Arnold (2011, 3).

[209] Lockhart (1992, 261–325). Cf. Boone (2011, 205–219).

[210] Ricard (1966, 104).

[211] But cf. Burkhart (2014, 186–187, note 58).

[212] Edgerton (2001, 28–30); Glass (1975); Galarza and Bequelín (1992).

[213] Burkhart (2014).

[214] Burkhart (2014, 186).

[215] Edgerton (2001, 28–30).

[216] Leibsohn (2001, 214–215); Burkhart (2014).

[217] Mitchell and Jaye (2008, 265, 267). Cf. also Hartmann (1991); Ibarra Grasso (1948; 1953); Mitchell and Jaye (1996).

[218] Mitchell and Jaye (2008, 266–267).

[219] Cf. Hyland et al. (2014).

[220] Acosta (2002 [1590]). Cf. Urton (2009, 824–827); Salomon (2008, 295–296); Harrison (1992; 2002; 2008; 2014); Hyland et al. (2014). Cf. also http://sabinehyland.com, accessed April 4, 2017.

[221] Urton (2009, 823–824, note 10); Pärssinen and Kiviharju (2004; 2010).

[222] Brokaw (2010, 137–139).

[223] Salomon (2004, 199; 2008, 290–292); Porras (1999).

[224] Murra (1998, 55).

[225] Salomon (2008, 286–287, 292, 297, 299–300). Khipu are kept in some villages today but only as community symbols. They are applied in corporate kin groups (ayllu). There is no evidence of people able to read or produce khipus after the mid-twentieth century: Mackey (1970; 2002); Salomon (2002; 2004; 2008, 292, 296–302); Salomonetal (2011).

[226] Hamell (1996, 664).

[227] Arnold (2011, 11–12).

[228] Arnold (2011, 14).

[229] Cf. Arnold (2011); Jemison and Schein (2000).

[230] Arnold (2011, 1).

[231] Adelaar et al. (2007, 478, 609).

[232] Cf. Aaseng (1992); Durrett (2009); Meadows (2002); Robinson (2011).

[233] The Florentine Codex is named after the manuscript’s (Ms. 218–220, Col. Palatina) present place of residence, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana of Florence, Italy.

[234] An earlier work than The Florentine Codex is Primeros Memoriales (a name given to it later by Francisco Paso y Troncoso) (1558–1560), Sahagun (1997 [1560], 3–4). This manuscript incorporates chapters about the rituals and gods, the heavens and the underworld, and government and human affairs.

[235] Olwer and Cline (1974, 188).

[236] Olwer and Cline (1974, 187–188).

[237] Sahagun (1982 [1565], 45–46).

[238] Sahagun (1982 [1565], 53–56).

[239] Nicholson (2002, 25).

[240] Sahagun (1982 [1565], 53–55).

[241] Koerner (2004, 49, 63).

[242] Cf. Walker (1981); 1996); Goddard (1996).

[243] See http://cherokeeregistry.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=188&Itemid=259, accessed April 4, 2017.

[244] Walker (1996, 164).

[245] Walker (1996, 174); Koerner (2004, 74, note 47).

[246] Cf. Walker (1996).

[247] Cf. Durston (2007); Harrison (2008); 2014; Durán (1984–1990); Rivet and Crequi-Montfort (1951–1965).

[248] Mexico, after the name of the capital Mexica-Tenochtitlan of the Aztecs, was the name the Spaniards eventually chose to denominate this country. The Aztecs, as noted, were called Mexica.

[249] Catechisms and other doctrinal multilingua alphabetic texts in Spanish and many different Indigenous languages (cf. Contreras Garcia (1987); Resines (1992); 1997).

[250] Cf. Doesburg and Swanton (2008).

[251] Cf. for instance Swanton (2001) and Indo-European languages (cf. Lockhart (1992); Terraciano (2001).

[252] Mathes (1982). Cf. the catalogue of known books in Mathes (1982).

[253] http://www.ntm.org/, accessed April 4, 2017.

[254] The designation SIL derives from the first Summer Institute of Linguistics in 1934 in Arkansas, Olson (2009, 646, note 2).

[255] WBT consists of many independent organizations and international partners, Olson (2009, 646, note 1).

[256] The two designations, WBT and SIL, serve respectively to represent the mission for Conservative North Americans and to present an image of disinterested scholarship to Latin American authorities, according to Stoll (1990, 17).

[257] Olson (2009, 650).

[258] http://www.sil.org/, accessed April 4, 2017.

[259] Epps and Ladley (2009).

[260] Svelmoe (2009, 629).

[261] Cf. SIL webpage for an outline of procedures, goals, cooperation and team roles in making the translation (http://www.sil.org/translation/bibletrans.htm), accessed April 4, 2017.

[262] There are around 7,000 languages spoken today according to SIL reference work called Ethnologue: Languages of the World (http://www.ethnologue.com/), accessed April 4, 2017.

[263] Hvalkof and Aaby (1981); Stoll (1982).

[264] Svelmoe (2009, 635).

[265] Hvalkof and Aaby (1981, 11); Stoll (1982, 237); Smalley (1991, 167).

[266] Cf. Pharo (2017).

[267] Mannheim (1991, 47–48); Durston (2007, 123–124).

[268] Nahuatl; Mixteco de la Costa; Amuzgo; Chianteco Alta; Triqui de Sn Juan Copala; Mazateco; Alto, Cuicateco; Huaves; Chatino de Yaitepec; Zapoteco del Valle; Zapoteco Sierra Sur; Zapoteco del Istmo; Zapoteco de Teotitlan de Valle.

[269] Cf. Pharo (2017).

[270] McCleary (forthcoming in 2017).

[271] http://www.scriptureearth.org/00i-Scripture_Index.php?sortby=country&name=MX, accessed April 4, 2017.

[272] http://www.jesusfilm.org/, accessed April 4, 2017.

[273] Cf. Pharo (2017).

[274] Mannheim (1991, 61–63).

[275] This also applies to the various idioms or dialects of a language. For instance, in order to make a “Unified Nahuatl” translation of the Roman Catholic Mass the discussion between Nahuatl speaking priests at the 7th Pastoral Workshop on Nahuatl Language and Culture in 2014 in Tehuipango, in the Sierra de Zongolica in Central Veracruz, Mexico, exhibited conflicting issues of grammar due to the diverse language practices of various dialects (cf. Pharao Hansen (n.d.)).

[276] Cysouw and Wälchli (2007, 95).

[277] http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/SearchByLang.aspx, accessed April 4, 2017.

[278] https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/declaration-on-the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples.html, accessed July 12, 2017.

[279] Rappaport (2005, 93–98, 235–240). Cf. Rojas Curieux (1997; 2001).