By the first millennium B.C.the world changed. This
change was most
palpable at the level of political power. Lacking definite physical
boundaries, Mesopotamia was exposed to the risk of foreign invasion.
It suffered a significant intrusion in the third millennium B.C., and
matters were much worse in the second. Sometimes the intruders were the
hill tribes of western Iran, such as the Gutians of the third
millennium and the Kassites of the second. Sometimes they were the
pastoralists of the southern Near East, such as with the Amorites
around 2000 B.C. and the Arameans a millennium later. But something all
these invasions, large and small, had in common was that the newcomers
as yet posed no threat to the cultural continuity of Mesopotamian
civilization. The Amorites, for example, are described as a people who
dwell in tents and have no knowledge of houses or grain. If such people
successfully established their power in Mesopotamia, they soon found
that they needed the appurtenances of civilization; and since they
lacked their own, they adopted that of their subjects.
In the first millennium B.C. it might have seemed as
if the pattern
would continue as before. In the sixth century Mesopotamia was again
invaded from Iran, this time by the Persians, who went on to devise a
cuneiform script for their own language, and to use it in their royal
inscriptions. But there was a difference. Mesopotamia was now only one
of several cultural provinces of a very large Persian empire. In the
fourth century the Greeks overthrew the Persians, and this time the
invaders brought with them an urban civilization of their own.
Unlike neighboring Egypt and Mesopotamia, Syria was
neither embellished
nor weighed down by a third-millennium cultural tradition. Instead, the
keynote of Syrian cultural history was instability and innovation. In
the third millennium Ebla shows us a typical local adoption of the
Sumerian literary tradition. Yet by the middle of the second millennium
Syria had broken with the cumbersome script of Mesopotamia and adopted
the alphabet. This proved immensely attractive and spread far and wide.
Thus it was received in Yemen, even though this remote region had shown
no interest in earlier writing systems. But what concerns us here is
the use of the alphabet to write Aramaic, the language that in the
course of the first millennium B.C. displaced the older Semitic tongues
of Syria and Mesopotamia in daily life.
Alphabetic writing in Mesopotamia was normally done
on perishable
materials, not on clay, with the result that little of it has survived.
But it seems that even in Mesopotamia the old cuneiform tradition was
losing ground to the new alphabetic culture. And it was Aramaic, not
Akkadian, that was to be used as the primary written language of
administration in the Persian Empire.
