came to be more important than the cuneiform script. With
the rise of Carthage in the sixth century b.c.e. the Phoenician
language developed into what is known as Punic, the offi cial
language of Carthage. A number of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew
words have Phoenician origins. In turn, the Phoenician al-
phabet came to be adapted by various groups to form the ba-
sis of the alphabets of Hebrew, Aramaic, and then Greek. Th e
infl uence of these languages and their alphabets gradually
eroded the use of cuneiform, which dwindled to recording
religious ceremonies and some scientifi c discoveries. Cunei-
form continued to be used in southern Mesopotamia until
the second century c.e.
Aramaic is believed to have been spoken from about
2000 b.c.e. and was probably a written language from 950
b.c.e. It was used throughout the Persian Empire for business
and in provincial administration. Only one royal inscription
in Aramaic survives, on the side of a cliff at Bīsitūn, in Me-
dia, showing that its use was accepted by the Persian court.
It continued to be spoken in Palestine and was the language
used by Jesus. At the time of Christ, Aramaic was develop-
ing into Western Aramaic and Eastern Aramaic, the latter
being infl uenced by the related languages of Syriac, Man-
dean, and Eastern Neo-Assyrian. Aramaic was also the basis
of the Nabataean alphabet, which was used in the kingdom
of Petra. It remained widely spoken until 650 c.e. when it
was supplanted by Arabic, and it is still spoken in the town
of Maaloula in modern-day Syria. Another language in that
region was Moabite, closely related to Hebrew, and using an
early Semitic alphabet.
Two other languages that came to be spoken in the Near
East were Greek and Latin. Greek was widely spoken and in-
deed was eff ectively the lingua franca of the Near East from
well before the time of Alexander the Great (r. 336–323 b.c.e.).
It was the principal language that grew from the spread of
Greek infl uence, or Hellenization, across the Near East. Over
many centuries Greek merchants had settled in ports along
the coast of Anatolia and the Eastern Mediterranean. Th ere
was also a large Greek presence in the Achaemenid Persian
Empire, with many Greeks serving in the Persian army.
During the brief rule of Alexander the Great, Greek be-
came the language of administration of his empire, which
incorporated the Persian Empire, and continued as such in
many of the successor states. Certainly during the wars of the
Diadochi (323–281 b.c.e.), the rival successors to Alexander,
it is clear that Greek was extensively spoken, and the Seleucid
Empire (311–ca. 140 b.c.e.), the Hellenistic successor state to
Alexander’s empire, also used Greek for administrative pur-
poses, with inscriptions surviving on votive tablets of the pe-
riod. Greek was also used as far east as the Kushan Empire,
which covered parts of modern-day Afghanistan, northern
India, Pakistan, and Tajikistan during the fi rst through the
third centuries of the Common Era. Although Latin was
the language of government of the Roman Empire that cov-
ered much of the Near East, it never gained the acceptance
accorded to Greek; for this reason on some offi cial notices,
such as the titulus crucis (the headboard above the cross upon
which a person was crucifi ed), it did not appear fi rst. For ex-
ample, the inscription on the headboard of Jesus was in Ara-
maic, then Latin, and Greek.ASIA AND THE PACIFIC
BY KELLEY L. ROSS
Southern India has a language family, the Dravidian lan-
guages, that probably included the original languages on
the subcontinent. One Dravidian outlier (a language that
is related but geographically detached), Brahui, survives in
the north of India. Linguists speculate that the Dravidian
languages originally were dispersed throughout India and
that the language of the ancient Indus Valley civilization
(ca. 3000–1600 b.c.e.) was a Dravidian language. Th ere is
no direct evidence of this, as the Indus Valley script remains
undeciphered. Th ere are indeed no bilingual texts and most
remaining inscriptions, on seals, are no more than fi ve char-
acters long. Th is is a poverty of evidence compared with what
was used for the decipherment of other ancient scripts, such
as Egyptian hieroglyphics or Mesopotamian cuneiform.
Th e other languages of the north of India are descen-
dants of Vedic Sanskrit, the language of the ancient sacred
scriptures of Hinduism, the Vedas, which date to about 1500
b.c.e. Th ese scriptures could be committed to writing start-
ing around 800 b.c.e., when an alphabet writing system was
borrowed from the Middle East. A later script, the Karoshthi,
still refl ects components of an Aramaic original. Out of Ve-
dic Sanskrit were derived Classical Sanskrit and a group of
spoken languages, the Prakrits. Classical Sanskrit (from a
word meaning “prepared, purifi ed, corrected”) was in part
created by grammarians trying to fi x the Vedic language and
preserve it from phonetic and grammatical changes that were
becoming evident in the Prakrits. Sanskrit then remained theClay tablet with Elamite inscription found in the treasury of the palace
at Persepolis, Persia (modern-day Iran) (Courtesy of the Oriental
Institute of the University of Chicago)
language: Asia and the Pacific 613