Shapeshifting Tongues: Linguistic Consciousness in the Hellenistic World

Abstract

In order to demonstrate the applicability of sociolinguistic methods for studying the ancient world, my dissertation, “Shapeshifting Tongues: Linguistic Consciousness in the Hellenistic World,” investigates the role of language in the formation and maintenance of identity in the Hellenistic period (323-31 BCE). This period was a time of political and linguistic change for the Mediterranean world. Kingdoms connected by their shared use of Greek culture arose as the dominant powers, founded after the partition of Alexander the Great’s empire and headed by his former generals, with the largest and most powerful centered not in Greece, but in Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Syria and Mesopotamia. Since no single Hellenistic kingdom held complete power, the political environment of the Hellenistic period was a balance between these separate kingdoms and other smaller polities. While political institutions may have been multipolar, the use of Koine Greek as a force for spreading and maintaining Greek culture provided a unified sense of Greekness throughout the newly established boundaries of the Greek “inhabited world” (oikoumene). As Koine Greek spread as a lingua franca throughout the Hellenistic world and linked the various cultures and languages of the Mediterranean together, Hellenistic peoples developed a complex relationship between culture and language by strengthening existing notions of cultural identity through language use. My dissertation explores the fundamental role language played in determining cultural identity in the Hellenistic period. It argues that language was socially significant by mediating between cultural identities and linguistic stereotypes associated with them, through the process of linguistic profiling. It accomplishes this over four chapters. Chapter One introduces the model of linguistic consciousness as an approach for understanding identity in the Hellenistic period. Linguistic consciousness is defined as a cultural system formed from a collective awareness of communal language acquisition, use, and adoption (linguistic stereotypes), which manifests in social stratification based on language use (linguistic profiling). My approach, exploring the linguistic consciousness of the wider Hellenistic world, allows for a comparative systematic analysis of the diversity of peoples and cultures across the Mediterranean and Near East in the Hellenistic period. This model is developed over three chapters of case studies designed to demonstrate how linguistic consciousness helps solve difficult problems of Hellenistic identity. Chapter Two explores the Phoenicians, a Semitic-speaking people from the Levant, through their diaspora in Athens, and Greece at large. The Phoenicians of Athens were metics, or “resident aliens,” whose identity as Phoenicians was shaped by their continued use of the Phoenician language on funerary inscriptions for their community. By applying my model, the use of the Phoenician language by the diaspora is seen as marking a pan-Phoenician identity based on the Phoenician language. Chapter Three studies the reasons behind the increased complexity of Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian Cuneiform in the Hellenistic period and their implications for Egyptian and Mesopotamian scribal identities respectively. The sociolinguistic reason for the continued use of Hieroglyphs and Cuneiform was their existence as primarily written (“scriptic”) languages. The survival, and thriving, of these scripts in this period, relied on their lack of living speech communities, and in their ability to represent the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia as cultural institutions. Chapter Four utilizes my model for studying the motivations behind the literary dialects of Hellenistic poetry (Theocritus Idyll 15) and Demotic literature (the First Tale of Setne Khaemwas), to argue that literary languages manipulated the spoken and written boundaries of linguistic realism by playing with concepts of artificiality and reality. This manipulation, in turn, helped to develop larger literary themes connected to language use popular both in Hellenistic poetry and Demotic tales. This chapter also compares the literary evidence with documentary evidence from Ptolemaic Egypt to situate literary works within their multilingual and multiscriptal environment. Finally, an epilogue explores linguistic consciousness on the outer edges of the Mediterranean world, like the Romans, and the Bactrians.