This section continues the story of Neaira. As in Section 12 there are long exercises which practise the grammar which has been introduced. Once again you may decide to do the exercises when they occur, or to continue reading to the end of Section 13 and then go back to revise the grammar and do the relevant exercises.

13A

Page 162

1–4 The main clause (δῆλά ρὰ τεκμήρια ‘There are clear proofs that …’) is delayed until the end of the sentence. The subordinate clauses (ὄτι μὲν … δούλη ἦν Νέαιρα … καὶ ἀπέδρα … καὶ ὁ Φρυνίων … κατηγγύησε …) come first. These clauses are all subordinate to the main clause.

8 πρὶν ʾθήναζε ἐλθεῖν πρίν + infinitive, GE pp. 272–273, #252: ‘Before she came to Athens’. You will meet lots of examples of this in 13A and B.

8–9 ὥσπερ αὑτοῦ θυγάτηρ οὗσα ‘as his own daughter’. Note the breathing: αủτοῦ could have meant someone else's daughter αὑτοῦ or έαυτοῦ ‘his own’ belongs to the subject of the main verb.

10–11 καὶ δὴ ἴστε τὴν Φανώ … μαθοῦσαν Accusative and participle: ‘You know that Phano had learned’.

14–16 Note the structure: ‘Phrastor seeing (ὁρῶν) that (acc. + participle twice) …, and having found out (ἄμα δὲ πνθόμενος) that (acc. + participle) … was very angry (ὠργίσθη μάλισια) … considering (ἠγούμενος) that he … (nominative + infinitives).’

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

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

WRITING SYSTEM

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

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

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

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

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Gothic, mainly known from a Bible translation of the fourth century AD, is the only Germanic language that has come down to us from antiquity in a reasonably complete state of preservation. Lacking direct descendants itself, it is closely related to the early medieval dialects ancestral to Modern English, German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese). The family tree of the Germanic languages can be drawn as follows:

As can be seen from this figure, Gothic is the sole representative of the East Germanic branch of the family. The more numerous North and West Germanic languages are much later: Old English and Old High German are first substantially attested in the eighth century, while Old Saxon and Old Low Franconian date from the ninth and tenth centuries, respectively. The remaining “Old” Germanic languages – Old Frisian and the early Scandinavian dialects – are essentially languages of the High Middle Ages, contemporary with Middle English and Middle High German. It is thus not surprising that Gothic presents a significantly more conservative appearance than its Germanic sister dialects. The only comparably archaic remains of an early Germanic language are the Early Northwest Germanic inscriptions of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries, mostly from Denmark and written in the indigenous runic alphabet (see Ch. 10). These, however, are only tantalizing fragments, often deliberately obscure and topheavy with personal names.

Now we return to Dikaiopolis and the rhapsode, and to an episode based on another play of Aristophanes, where he escapes into fantasy from the bitter realities of life in Athens during the Peloponnesian War. The social comment, however amusingly expressed, is deeply serious.

This section introduces the genitive case formally. You have already met it frequently, but now all forms of it are laid out (GE pp. 160–161, #178–179) and the main uses are listed (GE pp. 163–165, #180). You will also meet other forms of the comparative (GE pp. 165–167, #181–182) as well as the optative mood (GE pp. 167–169, #183–186).

8A

Page 90

1 Look for the subject and the two aorist participles before you go on to the main verb.

4 ἀπιόντα Remember the difference between ὤν (‘being’) and ἰών (‘going’). The ‘going’ verb has an iota, the ‘being’ verb does not.

3–4 καθορᾶ …, κατιδών If you remove the prefix, καθ-, κατ-, you should be able to recognise the verb. ἰδ is the stem of the second aorist εἶδον.

8 λαμβάνεται τοῦ ἱματίου He takes hold of his tunic. The genitive is used because he takes hold of part of his tunic (not the whole thing). This is called a partitive genitive.

Page 91

11 τίς ὤν σύ … Note the idiomatic use of the participle, ‘Who are you to take hold of …?’

This passage is reproduced unadapted from Herodotus, Histories 1.34–45. Herodotus writes in the Ionic dialect (see Introduction). You will find that you get used to this quite quickly, and the vocabularies will help you as well. However, before you start, you may want to look at GE pp. 359–360, #333–334 ‘The Dialect of Herodotus’.

It is very important to read both the introduction on pp. 225–226 of RGT and the beginning of the story, pp. 227–229, which is translated for you.

19A

Page 230

1 νέμεσις ‘retribution’. This is not punishment for an evil act, but punishment for ‘thinking more than mortal thoughts’. Perpetual happiness is the prerogative of the gods and not of man. Croesus commits an act of ‘hubris’ by exhibiting pride in his continuing happiness, and thus attracts the vengeance of the gods.

2 ἑωντόν = ἑαντόν.

ὀλβιώτατον Note the emphatic position.

οἱ ‘to him’.

2–3 ἐπέστη ὄνειρος The dream is personified; it ‘stood over him’, or ‘stood beside him’.

4 διεφθαρτο Literally this means that ‘he had been destroyed’, a brutal word for ‘handicapped’ (cf. ‘written off’), but it shows Croesus' feeling that he had only one son, for all practical purposes.

5 ῷν = οὗν. Note this carefully. You will meet it frequently, and it is always easy to confuse it with ὣν ‘being’. Apart from the accent, its position near the beginning of a sentence should help to distinguish it.

Preliminary remarks

What makes a language ancient? The term conjures up images, often romantic, of archeologists feverishly copying hieroglyphs by torchlight in a freshly discovered burial chamber; of philologists dangling over a precipice in some remote corner of the earth, taking impressions of an inscription carved in a cliff-face; of a solitary scholar working far into the night, puzzling out some ancient secret, long forgotten by humankind, from a brittle-leafed manuscript or patina-encrusted tablet. The allure is undeniable, and the literary and film worlds have made full use of it.

An ancient language is indeed a thing of wonder – but so is every other language, all remarkable systems of conveying thoughts and ideas across time and space. And ancient languages, as far back as the very earliest attested, operate just like those to which the linguist has more immediate access, all with the same familiar elements – phonological, morphological, syntactic – and no perceptible vestiges of Neanderthal oddities. If there was a time when human language was characterized by features and strategies fundamentally unlike those we presently know, it was a time prior to the development of any attested or reconstructed language of antiquity.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

The Venetic language is attested by approximately 350 inscriptions that have come to light in the territory of pre-Roman Venetia in northeastern Italy. The inscriptions cover a span of nearly five hundred years, dating from the final quarter of the sixth century to the middle of the first century BC. The spoken language did not survive Roman colonial expansion and the spread of Latin into the northeastern portions of the Italian peninsula during the second and first centuries BC. Venetic has no modern descendants.

Venetic inscriptions have been found at sites scattered throughout most of pre-Roman Venetia as well as in territories lying to the north and east. The community of Adria, which is situated in the Po River valley a few kilometers inland from the Adriatic Sea, marks the southern limit. The rock inscriptions at Würmlach and the votive texts from Gurina, both sites located in the valley of the Gail River in Austrian Carinthia, mark the northernmost boundary. Venetic inscriptions have been uncovered as far east as Trieste at the head of the Adriatic.

The most abundant source for Venetic inscriptions is the sanctuary of the goddess Reitia at Baratella just east of Este. The religious sanctuary at Làgole di Calalzo in the valley of the Piave River is another principal source, yielding nearly a quarter of the total number of Venetic texts.

This passage is reproduced unadapted from Plato, Protagoras 320c–323a. The style is not typical of Plato. It is likely that he is here imitating the style of the sophist Protagoras, into whose mouth he puts the speech, but the iambic rhythms also suggest that the myth may be based on a long established story which had been told often in verse, perhaps in tragedy. Whatever its origins, it is a fascinating passage which describes the creation of the world and the social necessity for man of possessing δίκη and αἰδώς (a sense of right and a moral awareness of others and their response to one's actions). The introduction to this section in Reading Greek is important.

18A

Page 216

1 The verb ‘to be’ is often used in the sense of ‘to exist’.

2 χρόνος εἰρμαρμένος ‘allotted’ in the sense of ‘allotted by destiny’, ‘fated’.

γῆς ἔνδον ‘within the earth’.

3 τῶν = ἐκείνων. Here the article is used as a demonstrative pronoun. This is rare in Attic Greek, though normal in Homer.

ὄσα πυρὶ καὶ γῆ κεράννυται ‘as many as are mixed with fire and earth’. This refers to air and water, the other two elements. (Some Greek philosophers believed that all things were composed of four elements, earth, air, fire and water.)

5–6 νεῖμαι, νείμαντος, νέμει, νέμων Note the repetitions, and also that the aorist stem of νέμω is νειμ-.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

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

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

THE AFRO-ASIATIC FAMILY

Introduction

In the following paragraphs only a brief overview of the Afro-Asiatic family can be given, with some of the shared features that have prompted recognition of the family. Work on Afro-Asiatic is still in its infancy, and work on the reconstruction of Proto-Afro-Asiatic has barely begun. The remainder of this chapter will be concerned with one of the two well-known ancient branches of Afro-Asiatic, the Semitic branch (the other ancient branch is Egyptian, for which see WAL Ch. 7; for a probable ancient formof Berber, see below, §1.1.3).

The original homeland of Afro-Asiatic has been the subject of some discussion. Most scholars would place it somewhere in the vicinity of the center of the family's current geographical range, or rather further to the east, in far southern Egypt or northern Sudan. A few scholars, however, have argued for an original location in southwest Asia (see Militarev 1994; Diakonoff 1998).

Older names of the Afro-Asiatic family, still used by some scholars, include Hamito-Semitic and Semito-Hamitic, names that have generally been abandoned because they imply a subgroup of “Hamitic” languages (i.e., of all languages in the family apart from the Semitic languages) that is not indicated by any isoglosses.

The Afro-Asiatic family comprises at least five and as many as eight branches.

Egyptian

See WAL Chapter 7.

Semitic

See §§2–3 below.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

The position of Hebrew within the Semitic languages

Hebrew, the language of ancient Israel and Judah and their descendant Jewish communities, is a Northwest Semitic language. Northwest Semitic and Arabic constitute Central Semitic, which is a subgroup of West Semitic, one of the two primary divisions of the Semitic branch of the larger Afro-Asiatic family (Appendix 1, §§1–2). Within Northwest Semitic, Hebrew is classified as Canaanite as distinct from Aramaic. Other members of the Canaanite subgroup include the dialect of the city-state of Ugarit (cf. Ch. 2, §1) in the Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1200 BC), and the languages of Israel's immediate neighbors in the Iron Age (c. 1200–586 BC), namely, Phoenician (Ch. 4) and the Transjordanian languages of Ammonite, Moabite, and Edomite (Ch. 5).

Stages in the development of Ancient Hebrew

Although linguistic features found in the limited surviving evidence for the Canaanite dialects of the Late Bronze Age anticipate some of the distinctive characteristics of Iron Age Hebrew, it is unlikely that Hebrew emerged as a discrete language before the end of the Late Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age. Prosodic and linguistic studies suggest that the earliest poetry preserved in the Hebrew Bible may have been composed before the end of the second millennium BC, and this poetry represents the first identifiable phase of the language, which is called Archaic or Archaic Biblical Hebrew (before c. 1000 BC).

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

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

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

History of the language and its speakers

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

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

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