Sugartongue

I must disclose I hate ending a title with a question-mark and I recommend that other authors not do it. In this case, I very nearly tagged the following "Elamite in Late Antiquity?". Because the Elamite language vanished after the Achaemenids fell to Alexander. Or maybe it didn't? (There I go again . . .)

Kevin van Bladel, the man who discovered the roots of (some of) sura 18 (yours truly figuring out the rests'), has published an article... somewhere. Its doi is 10.1017/S1356186321000092. I ain't read it; I cannot read it. But I can dump what I know about the general topic.

This looks into the Khuzestan language; "Khuz" being the Semitic word for "sugar", because under the Sasanians that's what the province was for. But the Khuz language, as the Arabs reported it, was not notably Semitic. Their linguists were good enough to tell if something looked like Arabic, Aramaic, or Hebrew; tho' not quite good enough to discern Mahra from Cushite "Berber". Van Bladel sees the Sugar Tongue as the last gasp of Hatamti-to-Elymais.

Much earlier Cyrus the Persian treated Elamite cuneiform as a language of imperial accounting, and the Achaemenid régime which usurped his line continued that cuneiform as a monumental language. But thereafter the Persian rules found as the Assyrians had found, that the Near East was most important and that the Near East did it in Aramaic. Under the Macedonians, Greek was added to the diwan. Something had to give. What gave, it seems, were Akkadian and the monumental Persian. Elamite gave, too.

The Persians survived and ensured that their Persian language did not give, not in Persia. "Middle Persian" came back under the house of Sasan. The Sasanians were likely some sort of borderland Medean group, many say Kurds. These neo-Medes decided to make the Empire Iranian again; not just Parthian. It turned out nobody but a Kurd wanted to speak Kurdish, even then. So: Persian made a comeback. The Sasanians did keep Parthian "Pahlevi" around. Using the Pahlevi script. Which got used for Persian too.

Meanwhile the 'Iraq remained thoroughly Aramaic, to which the Mandaeans provide a snapshot; and Iraqi Christians went for Syriac as the prestige-tongue. Next door there exists a Khuzestan Chronicle in Syriac. The Chronicler didn't seem even to know about old Elam.

There is talk in the Iraqi Talmud that the Jews in Susa owned a scroll of Esther in Susa's language. Esther is not precisely Biblical for the rest of us, but the Susians did appreciate a local book discussing a local story. Like the classical Arabs, most of us assume the Jews were smart enough to tell if something was "Semitic", "Aryan", or "other". Here is where we might trace Elamite's twilight.

This very-cursory research is telling me that, as Sogdians and Bactrians kept up a local literacy and maybe even a literature, so did the Susians. I mean - why wouldn't they? Who was going to stop them?

Our problem is that we haven't found this nonSyriac Khuz library, yet. So we cannot know - for a start - the alphabet: if they used Pahlevi like the Parthians or Greek like the Bactrians, or Estrangele like the east-Syrian Christians. I do assume the Susian Jews would have stuck with Imperial Aramaic script like the Judaeo-Arabs and the Yiddische.

I READ IT 2/22/2022: And I don't need to retract, anything. What a relief! Van Bladel didn't mention the Jewish take, which at the time I couldn't track, either; but I think we might check the Talmudic gemara to Megilla, which discusses the language in which to read Esther. This called out "Elamite" as one language local Jews used, whether or not they should. I get the impression the word the Talmud actually used was "Khuzi" and/or "Susi". Van Bladel notes that old Susa (Shush), exactly, got Muqaddisi's attention as a city where "Khuzites" held out, as against good (Basrian) "Iraqis".

Van Bladel does track even in Achaemenid times how Elamite was steadily attracting Persian loans. By the Talmud's time and certainly by the time Isho'yahb II sent Marammeh down there, this genos prakticos was probably speaking a creole with true Elamite not even a memory.