# Text and the City: How the City Shaped Language

Nour Efrat-Kowalsky

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Nour Efrat-Kowalsky. Text and the City: How the City Shaped Language. Old World. Journal of Ancient Africa and Eurasia, 2022, 2 (1), pp.1 - 19. 10.1163/26670755-01010013. hal-05519496

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# Text and the City: How the City Shaped Language

Nour Efrat-Kowalsky

Department of Comparative Language Science,
University of Zurich, Switzerland

nour.efrat-kowalsky@uzh.ch

## Abstract

This paper presents the first case of dramatic and large-scale loss of linguistic diversity. Language death has been part of our history as long as languages were spoken, but in the fourth millennium BCE urbanisation and a growing regional economy caused a decrease in both language and typological diversity on a much larger scale than ever before. The first cities in Mesopotamia had developed writing and administration which centralised power and disseminated its influence. In particular, standard languages that were used for official purposes over large areas emerged. Written standard language slowed down the rate of change and consolidated diverging dialects. The larger areas in which languages were spoken in combination with increased mobility and long-distance contacts increased language contact and decreased typological differentiation. Massive population movements due to natural and human made disasters wiped out whole linguistic lineages through language shifts. In effect, this was a first wave globalisation, resulting in the first extensive linguistic diversity eradication.

## Keywords

linguistic diversity – standard language – first cities – language contact – language death

## Introduction

With the rise of urbanism in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BCE the societies of the ancient Near East became more centralised and long-distance communication became commonplace. This paper argues that these two effects, centralisation and standardisation on the one hand, and long-distance
communication and integration on the other, have had irreversible effects on linguistic diversity, and eventually led to the loss of complete language families, the diminished intra-language dialectal diversity, and the decrease in cross-language typological distance resulting in less linguistic diversity overall.

Though agriculture was practised in the Near East in small scale farming communities and villages since the Neolithic (Bar-Yosef 1998), in the fourth millennium BCE a momentous change in community sizes and lifestyle was taking shape: the emergence of the first cities. The fertile soil and reliable irrigation of the alluvial plain of southern Mesopotamia increased agricultural production immensely while at the same time decreasing the human labour involved in its production. Fertility rates rose and caused group sizes to soar, and lowered infant and elderly mortality changed the social composition. Seasonal agriculturalism in this fertile and consistent environment in combination with new technological advancements, such as the wheel and animal plough, freed up time for large portions of the population to engage in non-subsistence related activities, developing further technologies, culture and administration. The surplus agricultural produce became large enough to sustain a specialised workforce for building permanent infrastructure such as irrigation canals, storage facilities, city walls, central temples and squares, and a political elite that maintained the infrastructure, distributed the agricultural produce, and converted the surpluses into merchandise for trading (cf. Ringen et al. 2021). And just like that, the city was born.

Cities in Mesopotamia and later in the Levant had central administration, social stratification, bureaucracy and civil hierarchies (Chavalas 2005). They were fortified, surrounded by a city wall, and an access road from the main trading route led to the city gate. Within the city, a square for trading with foreign merchants could be found next to the city gate (Oppenheim 1969), and something like a main street, or a precursor to the Islamic suq, lined with small smithies and other craftsmen ran diagonally across the city, ending at the city gate (Stone and Zimansky 2004). House sizes, house plans, and the distribution of house types were remarkably stable over time and space. These patterns correspond to modern communities with house sizes ranging between 40 and 500 square metres, the majority of which between 60 and 200 square metre (Figure 1). Reconstructed genealogies of city dwellers indicate high levels of social mobility (Stone 2007). Different social classes lived together and regularly interacted with one another. Houses of all sizes neighbours each other and objects delineating high social status and wealth, such as badges of office, cylinder seals and imported copper and bronze, have been excavated in all areas of the city (see Stone and Zimansky 2004 for Mashkan-shapir). The
large amount of expensive goods excavated from third and second millennia sites in Mesopotamia suggest a general level of wealth for city dwellers.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 1 Plan of residential areas in third millennium BCE Tell Asmar and second millennium BCE Ur</figcaption></figure>

SOURCE: STONE 2007, THE COTSEN INSTITUTE OF ARCHAEOLOGY PRESS
The population living in urbanised areas grew steadily throughout the fourth millennium BCE. The population of the city Uruk, for example, grew from 20,000 in 3700 BCE to almost 80,000 in 3100 BCE (Kouchoukos and Wilkinson 2007). A sharp increase in the total occupied area and the number of sites of every size category is well documented for the end of the third millennium BCE (Adams 1981). The population increased threefold since the beginning of the millennium, and by fivefold since the previous millennium (Adams 1981). According to inscriptions, UruKAgina, the ruler of the city of Lagash in 2400 BCE, was chosen from a population of 36,000, and only a couple of centuries later, Gudea ruled over a population of 216,000 in 2144 BCE (Steible 1982:298–299 Ukg. 4 vii 29-viii 6; Edzard 1997:32 Gudea Statue Biii 6–11), numbers which are supported by archaeological surveys.

The same process of urbanisation and state formation took place in Egypt around the same time. The Nile's predictable floods favoured agricultural production, and just as in Mesopotamia it led to the development of centralised administration and unified political identity, as well as massive advancements in technology and culture, including the invention of the hieroglyphics writing system, probably through Mesopotamian influence (Barraclough and Stone 1989).

A few centuries later urbanisation reached the Levant and the greater neighbouring regions. By the Early Bronze Age (late mid-fourth millennium BCE), the lifestyle in the Levant shifted from mostly pastoralist nomadic tribes living in seasonal encampments to a more sedentary way of life (Liverani 2013). No longer subsistence-based, cities developed political hierarchies, administration and infrastructure that allowed for specialised production intended for trade.

The many advancements that came with city dwelling benefitted from one key technological innovation: writing. In the late mid-fourth millennium BCE, the Sumerians started recording their language in cuneiform – a wedge shaped script rendered through reed or stylus impressions on a clay tablet. Cuneiform is a logo-syllabary script. The ‘logo’ part refers to having one sign, a logogram, to represent one word. Multiple sign combinations were commonly employed to disambiguate between homophones that were written with the same logo-gram, a practice which promptly extended to all words. For example, the words ‘raven’ [UGA] and ‘soap’ [NAGA] had the same logogram. In order to affirm the meaning ‘raven’, two phonetic syllabaries, [u] and [gu], enveloped the logo-gram, the ‘syllabary’ part, and a final symbol of a bird was used as a determiner (to define the semantic field of the symbol). The first non-pictographic known tablets were of an accounting nature (Schmandt-Besserat 2007). Soon writing
was used for all genres from depicting historical events and king lists to religious, literary and scientific texts (Walker 1987).

The amazing technology of writing was promptly adopted by neighbouring cultures. The earliest attested Semitic speakers in the Akkadian Empire to the north adapted the Sumerian cuneiform in the 23rd century BCE, which subsequently evolved to write the Akkadian daughter varieties of Assyrian and Babylonian, and the contemporary East Semitic Eblaite. Cuneiform was also used by the Elamites to the east to write their language isolate, along with a native writing system known as linear Elamite (Daniels & Bright 1996). In the late third millennium BCE the Assyrian empire expanded to Anatolia and controlled colonies there. The cuneiform script was then adapted to write a variety of Anatolian languages from different affiliations: Hatti, an unclassified language due to lack of sufficient documentation; Hurrian and Urartian, sister languages unrelated to any known language (Wilhelm 2008a; Wilhelm 2008b); Hittite, the Indo-European language that replaced Hatti; Palaic, another Indo-European language that was attested at Hattusa; and Luwian, an Indo-European language that used both a cuneiform based script and a hieroglyphic based script. Cuneiform expanded west to the Levant in the second millennium BCE where early Northwest Semitic languages adapted it and used it as an alphabet. The Ugaritic alphabet from the city of Ugarit, mid to late second millennium BCE, is an abjad with 30 symbols which are unrelated to the Akkadian symbols (Pardee 2008), and was sometimes employed to write other languages as well, such as Hurrian. This early alphabet was the precursor for the Phoenician alphabet that was written with ink. Around the same time that the Sumerians started to record their language in cuneiform in Mesopotamia, the Egyptians began writing their own language in hieroglyphics, likely through Mesopotamian influence (Yoffee 2015; Nissen 2015).

The invention of writing was a major event in human history. It was an extremely practical technology that made accounting, recording, legal contracts and land deeds possible. It slowly evolved to include the cultural and political realms and created new forms of cultural and political expressions such as poetry and literature, myths and propaganda. It tremendously advanced the bureaucratic, scientific, legal, medical, cultural, religious, and political realms. Less obviously though, writing has also created a new linguistic concept: *standard language*, which changed the linguistic dynamics and the way languages evolve and are distributed (Section 4). It also gave the opportunity for languages to travel independently of their speakers, and set up new ways for language contact and second language learning (Section 3). Section 2 introduces the diverse linguistic situation in the Ancient Near East.
## 2 The Linguistic Landscape of the Ancient Near East

We don't know much about the languages of the ancient Near East before the emergence of writing. The languages we know of from direct and indirect written materials are Sumerian, a language isolate spoken in Lower Mesopotamia from the fourth millennium BCE and by mid-second millennium BCE it was taught in schools as a dead language. Akkadian, the first known Semitic language, from the East-Semitic branch, is attested in Mesopotamia from mid-third millennium BCE. In the second millennium it diverged into two major dialects: Assyrian and Babylonian, each is documented until the mid-first millennium BCE and different diachronic stages are distinguished for each. Eblaite is a closely related language to Akkadian that is only attested from the city of Ebla in a half a century period, from around 2,300 to 2,250 BCE. Amorite is a Semitic language that was spoken from mid-third millennium BCE all through mid-second millennium BCE in Syria and Mesopotamia. Later on, in the ninth century BCE, Aramaic, another Semitic language, entered Mesopotamia from Syria and is attested in various local and diachronic dialects. It is spoken in population pockets in different forms until today. Phoenician, Northwest Semitic, is attested in the coastal cities of the Levant from the beginning of the Iron Age (1,200 BCE) as various city-state varieties. A later variety, Punic, is attested in the Phoenician colonies in North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula from the 8th century BCE to mid-first millennium CE. A related language that is attested in the records is Ugaritic, which is the language of the city of Ugarit in northern Syria. A continuum of Northwest Semitic dialects, known as Canaanite languages, were spoken around the Levant which eventually split into distinct languages including Israeli and Judaean Hebrew, Moabite, Ammonite, and Edomite. Ancient North Arabian is a collection of related dialects that were spoken by settled and nomadic peoples of central and north Arabia and is attested through over 40,000 graffiti inscriptions in the Arabian desert (Macdonald 2004), from the eighth century BCE to mid-first millennium CE. In a complementary distribution in the Arabian desert, Epigraphic South Arabian is a collection of dialects that were spoken in southern Arabia and attested from the seventh century BCE to the sixth century CE. Arabic only began to be written extensively with the rise of Islam in the seventh century CE, but was spoken in the Arabian desert and the east coast of the Arabian peninsula as early as first millennium BCE (Rabin 1951; Versteegh 2014). To the East, in the lower Zagros Mountains in southwestern Iran, Elamite is a language isolate that was recorded from the middle of the third-millennium BCE until around 350 BCE. Kassite, another language isolate, was spoken in the Zagros mountains and Lower Mesopotamia from the 18th to the fourth
centuries BCE, though it left only few traces. Old Persian, an Indo-European language from the Indo-Iranian sub-family, is attested throughout the Persian Empire, from the seventh to the fourth centuries BCE. To the west in Anatolia, Hurrian, a language isolate, is attested from mid-third millennium BCE until the end of the Bronze Age in the 12th century BCE. The only other known relative of Hurrian is Urartian which is attested from the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE, though the attestation is too meagre to have a full understanding of its grammar. The oldest attested Indo-European languages (belonging to the Anatolian sub-family) were also spoken in Anatolia at this time: Hittite, which was spoken from the 16th through the 12th centuries BCE, and Luwian which is attested from mid-second millennium BCE to around mid-first millennium BCE. To the South in Egypt ancient Egyptian is attested in various forms (Earlier, Middle and Later Egyptian, Demotic, Coptic) for well over 4,000 years, from mid-late fourth millennium BCE up until the second millennium CE. It is an Afro-Asiatic language, distantly related to the Semitic languages, but no other languages are known from its sub-family.

All together, over twenty distinct languages are attested from written materials in the Ancient Near East, divided into at least fifty distinct diachronic and local varieties. They represent two sub-families of the Afro-Asiatic family, three branches of the Semitic sub-family, two sub-families of the Indo-European family (one more was spoken in adjacent Greece and was in continuous contact with the languages of the Near East), and at least four language isolates from four dead language families. One more unclassified language, Minoan, was spoken on the island of Crete and was in contact with the Near Eastern languages, and another, Solubba, was spoken in the Arabian desert and was marginalised by the Semitic speaking peoples in the third and second millennium BCE (Betts 1989).

Language isolates are so called because they are the only survivors of their language family. They cannot be related to any other known language, spoken or dead through conventional comparative methods. In the case of the Ancient Near Eastern isolates, all other members of their families were eradicated before they were documented. Sumerian, Hurrian, Elamite and Kassite, though the only ones in their family to be documented by their speakers, were certainly not the only ones to be spoken. It is impossible to conceive of a way for language isolates to have evolved which is not through the same differentiation process as all other language families arise (Urban 2021). Therefore, at some point in time they were part of a larger, undocumented, genealogy, with a distinct familial typology. It is through accident that these language isolates are lone survivors, and in the case of dead languages, that only one language per family was documented. Certainly, other language families must have been
spoken in and around the Ancient Near East but have left no written evidence of their existence all together. Such language families were probably disadvantaged and marginalised by large language spreads of larger, more powerful agriculturalist societies. Language spreads have been associated with agriculture because agriculturalist societies grew in range, population and economic power. Language spreads may cause the extinction of the indigenous languages through genocide and/or new diseases and the death of the local population (Diamond & Bellwood 2003), or through language shift. In the case of language shift, the local population abandons its native tongue for the dominant variety brought in with the spread (either because they were forced to or in order to gain social and economic advantages) (Nichols 1992; Nichols 2020). Language isolates sometimes survive such erosion with much reduced territory on the edge of the spread zone (Dimmendaal 2015).

By the time the Indo-European languages appear on record they appear as distinct languages and even branches and sub-families. It is deducible that the very few documented languages per sub-family were not the only ones spoken at the time. Two Near Eastern sub-families of the Afro-Asiatic family appear in written material: Egyptian and Semitic. While the Semitic sub-family is well represented in written material, Egyptian is the only one in its sub-family we know of, the rest of its close relatives extinct. It is evident that Egyptian did not evolve as a sole language on its branch, much like language isolates, and had other relatives (Cooper 2020). The Semitic sub-family too, though well represented in the written record with three branches and many more varieties well documented, included many more dialects that were spoken but not written. The Aramaic dialects documented from seventh and sixth centuries BCE are not direct descendants of the Aramaic Syriac Koiné that was written in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE. Rather, they are descendants of other Syrian and Mesopotamian varieties that were shadowed in the written record by standard Aramaic in Syria and by standard Akkadian in Mesopotamia (Gzella 2017). Other linguistic evidence, such as phonetic developments in the different written attestations of sixth century Aramaic, also posit a wide dialectal continuum and speaker contact that has no direct written attestation.

Just as is the situation in the world today (Harrison 2007), most of the languages that were spoken in the ancient Near East were not written. Thus, though we do have direct attestations for many and diverse languages from the ancient Near East, the languages we know of do not come close to complete the picture of the linguistic diversity of the region.
3 Integration

With time and technology, the contacts and degree of integration between speech communities grew. Unlike nomadic-pastoralist communities and small villages, cities were not entirely self-sufficient. The surrounding hinterlands were incorporated into their economic scheme, administered in the standard language in which contracts, trade agreements, seasonal production forecasts and legal documents were written up. Rural producers sent supplies into the city (Nissen 2007). Woollen cloth in particular was increasingly used as a form of value in the transregional economy, and was sent to the cities from pastoral producers in the periphery (Kouchoukos and Wilkinson 2007). The artificial canal system that was dug out for field irrigation and the natural riverways made the transport of goods to and from the dependent hinterlands extremely simple and cost effective (Algaze 2007). Having the cities and hinterland under one controlling body weakened the differentiating social and linguistic markers between urban and rural and across large areas, the size of which grew alongside the influence of the governing state.

The early Mesopotamian cities controlled a rural radius of ten to twenty kilometres (Liverani 2005). The areas between cities were replete with rural inhabitants (Steinkeller 2007) so communities were far from isolated and were highly connected and dependent on each other. People living in both rural and urban environments routinely interacted with people from nearby settlements. The median distance between individual sites in third millennium Babylonia, for example, was four kilometres, and between large villages and towns it was roughly nine kilometres (Steinkeller 2007). About the same settlement density is deduced for Bronze Age upper Mesopotamia, where bigger tells were distributed across the plains every ten to fifteen kilometres, with smaller tells in between (Wilkinson 2000). The long term proximity of settlements fostered exchange, competition and technological innovation (Renfrew and Cherry 1986). The lack of a clear barrier between rural and urban, the shared political identity and the intensity of communication quickened the pace of linguistic homogenization.

Another factor that contributed to increased contacts and potential lan-
guage levelling was the continuous immigration into urban areas. The close
proximity city-dwelling together with lack of sanitation (McMahon 2015)
meant that disease was rampant and mortality rates were high (Sołtysiak 2012).
In order for cities to sustain their populations, a steady stream of immigrants
in the low thousands per annum was necessary, and much more than that to
grow (Algaze 2017). Rural to urban immigration is well supported by archae-
ological surveys (Adams 1981) and was a reasonably regular condition during
antiquity. Settlement trends in southern Mesopotamia in the fourth millen-
nium BCE also reveal that population replacements took place across much
larger distances as well. In particular, population growth in the Mesopotamian
alluvium is inversely correlated with concurrent population losses in the Jezira
plains of Upper Mesopotamia, the Khuzestan plains of southwestern Iran and,
possibly, the Fars area of the southwestern Zagros Highlands in Iran (Wilkinson
2007), bringing unrelated, typologically distant languages into the region and
in contact with the local languages for decades.

As the cities in the region grew in size and influence, trade became more
and more central for their economies and for the import of materials needed
for the vast building projects and rare prestige items for the elites. The north-
south flow of the Tigris and Euphrates connected the Sumerian and Akkadian
city-states in lower Mesopotamia to upper Mesopotamia, Syria and Anatolia.
The vast network of natural and artificial canals and lagoons at the delta of the
rivers put the urban centres within reach of each other and gave access to the
Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. In addition, overland routes led to the Arabian
Peninsula. Whereas the cost of transporting bulky goods on land is high and
increases with distance, on riverways the cost is cheap and constant for long
distances. Through these routes communication was fast and efficient, and
the waterways provided an easy, cheap transportation for goods and people.
For the locals, the vast water and land networks provided a window to cul-
tures and languages previously unknown. In order to sustain this long-distance
trade, trading posts were formed along the way, and foreign merchant quarters
were established in remote cities, such as the well known Assyrian merchant
quarters in the Anatolian city Kanesh (Stone 2007; Touillon-Ricci & Hermoso-
Buxán 2022).

The Levantine cities were integrated in a network of roads and trade posts (Hopkins 2003). Though the fragmented geography of the Levant encouraged political disintegration and isolation, cultural remains suggest that the different communities in the Levant had communication and trade connections through roads (starting as footpaths) at least as far back as the Neolithic (6,000-4,000 BCE). The improved roads had a particularly important role in the fragmented landscape of the Levant and smaller settlements developed along the two-lane roads connecting the big cities (Dorsey 2003).

4 Standard Language

As cities and their influence grew larger, so did the bureaucracy that was necessary to rule them together with the power of their rulers. In order to manage
such large operations efficiently, some level of standardization was needed. Politically it turned out to be a smart move. Having only one standard language consolidated the power in the ruling city and strengthened the level of centralisation. Moreover, employing a common language is an effective tool for the unification of a new emerging identity group such as a city, a state or an empire.

Cuneiform writing was a complicated system, though, and schooling was required for its mastery. At the beginning of Sumerian and Akkadian writing traditions, the only people responsible for writing were professional scribes. All scribes received a lengthy education period in which they learned not only the symbols and technique but also the formulas required by the state for each genre. In this way, the standard language was codified and moulded through formal curricula in the various scribal schools. With time, scribal schools became more common and literacy grew. In Mashkan-shapir, a typical southern Mesopotamian site of the late third and second millennium BCE, a scribal school was identified in each of the city regions and school texts (i.e. homework) were found in almost every house (Stone 2007). Thus the standard language was disseminated further, perhaps even becoming the dominant language in homes which were educated for generations, a situation that was not unusual in cities of the third and second millennium BCE.

In the first millennium BCE the alphabet, or more accurately the abjad system, written with ink, rose in prominence in the Levant. The first attestation of the use of symbols to represent a single consonantal sound was found in the cuneiform writing in the city of Ugarit in northern Levant. The city was destroyed during the Bronze Age Collapse, a period of time in which climate change causing crop failures and famines, wars and population unrest hit the region around 1,200 BCE. It was responsible for the collapse of many cities and kingdoms and the withdrawal of major powers from the region, such as Egypt and the Hittite empire (Matthews 2003). The political vacuum left by the receding big empires from the Levant allowed pastoral tribes who dominated the region after the collapse of cities to assemble into polities based on common descent (Hopkins 2003; Liverani 2005). The Phoenician city-states dotted the coastline, in the hills polities as Israel, Ammon, Moab and Edom were established, and in the north numerous Aramean kingdoms (Rendsburg 2003). The establishment of independent kingdoms contributed to the dialectal divergence of the Northwest Semitic languages from the Canaanite dialectal continuum and led to differentiated identities and what is now considered mutually intelligible distinct languages. There, a language really was just a dialect with city walls (and an army).
Unlike cuneiform or hieroglyphics which involved both ideographic and syllabary writing styles and were composed of hundreds of signs, the alphabet was a much simpler system to learn and was easily adaptable to the different languages. Lengthy schooling was no longer necessary in order to gain proficiency in reading and writing. City dwellers with free professions could easily take advantage of this technology in their jobs. Literacy was no longer solely in the hands of high-ranking bureaucrats, but now the privilege of many, as illustrated by the ostraca recovered from Arad, a remote Judahite desert fortress. New image processing and document analysis methods in combination with machine learning algorithms reveal at least six authors for the corpus of 16 ostraca from around 600 BCE, with low ranking military personnel identified as authors alongside their commanders (Faigenbaum-Golovin et al. 2016).

The standard language of a state, a city or an empire elevated one chosen variety or dialect that was spoken under its control (Haugen 1966). It became the language of culture and religion, in which myths were told and liturgic expressions were made. As writing spread, so did the role of the standard language in everyday life. The official communication was done in the standard language, so it was necessary for the population to adopt it for doing business or the chance of social climbing. This happened regularly in the exiled Judean community in the Neo-Babylonian empire. The deportees from Judah were resettled together in Mesopotamia in one settlement named *Al-Yahudaya* "the city of Judeans". This name was later frozen as *Al-Yahudu* "Judah city", as the inhabitants became more heterogeneous (Berlejung 2017). Second generation deportees from this city were already economically and culturally integrated into the Babylonian society, as can be seen in the name seal of one such businessman, Ahīqam, which depicts a typical cultic Babylonian scene rather than his own traditional Judean religion. Ahīqam partnered up with a Babylonian individual, Erībā, to improve his economic and social status, as evident from their contract, which was written and conducted in standard Babylonian.

Because the standard language was the language of the temple and palace, the language of the elite and educated, and the language of business and culture, as well as the mere fact that it was written, it was held in high prestige. Therefore, the local spoken variety and the standard language were in asymmetrical power relations when they came into contact. In some cases this type of unbalanced contact may result in diglossia, a situation whereby a community uses the high and low prestige varieties in complementary circumstances. Though the majority of the Near East was well connected for centuries or even millennia before the rise of cities, the linguistic contact scenarios that were afforded were different. Before the rise of big influential cities and empires, contact happened between more or less equal neighbouring pastoralist groups
or small farming communities that cooperated with each other. In such a case,
even if two (or more) communities had long lasting trade or marriage rela-
tions, they had an equal chance of inheriting linguistic traits from the other
language. Not so the case with contact between low prestige variety and a high
prestige standard language. Generally, in such cases the standard language is
more immune to contact effects, especially lexical, while the low prestige vari-
ety may experience lexical borrowings as well as grammatical transfer from the
prestige language (Winford 2003). The consequence of such long term one-di-
rectional influence is morphosyntactic homogenization. The local varieties
become more structurally convergent with the standard language, resulting in
loss of differentiation.

Another possible consequence of this uneven contact scenario is language
shift and language death. As one language becomes more prominent than
another and used in a wider array of situations, the subordinate language
may fall into disuse and eventually disappear or diminish. This is how the
many unattested languages found their demise by Sumerian and Akkadian in
Mesopotamia, and many more languages unknown to us around the world.
Amorite, as one example, was most likely comprised of various dialects that
were never standardised or written. Its speakers were often sheep-graz-
ing semi-nomads, and held much less soft and hard power compared to the
Babylonians. Amorite eventually disappeared from the Babylonian record, its
speakers absorbed completely into Babylonian society and language (Streck
2011).

Language shift can also occur between two competing standard languages,
a case which is well attested in written history. In the ancient Near East
Akkadian replaced Sumerian as the formal Imperial and spoken language, and
Aramaic later replaced Akkadian. Both scenarios lead to the eventual death of
the former standard language. In both cases too, the dying prestige language
lingered on for centuries after its death as a written variety for liturgic or highly
official purposes. Had they not been official imperial languages and therefore
documented in writing, we would have never known about their existence.

While language shift may happen with political upheaval, as a result of war
or regime turn, it can also occur bottom up through long-term social processes.
In the centuries preceding the Akkadian to Aramaic shift that was complete
by the fifth century BCE, Aramaic was rapidly gaining traction in the region
beyond its homeland in Syria. Thanks to population movements during the
expansion period of the Neo-Assyrian empire in the ninth and eighth cen-
turies BCE, and the relatively open borders and ease of movement and trade
within the giant empire in the centuries that followed, Aramaic speaking peo-
ple could be found across the Near East. Alphabetic carvers' and fitters' marks
were found in the city of Nimrud, indicating the presence and employment of Aramaic speaking merchants and craftsmen in Mesopotamia as early as the ninth century BCE (Millard 2010). The next centuries were of extensive bilingualism that left many marks on the languages themselves. One telling aspect of Aramaic encroaching on the pragmatic dominance in everyday use is the nature of the loanwords. While Aramaic borrowed new legal, administrative and religious jargon from Akkadian, Akkadian borrowed basic vocabulary and function words from Aramaic. Aramaic became the prominent language of the population, marginalising Akkadian to formal use only. The final adoption of Aramaic as an official language was the last step in the bottom-up language shift that was taking place, rather than the result of deliberate language planning. Language replacement does not necessarily entail population replacement. As the term 'shift' indicates, the population of a dying language is commonly absorbed into the society and shifts to the new dominant language. As the Akkadian speaking population adopted Aramaic in growing numbers as second language learners, they left linguistic traces of their first language in Aramaic which was then transmitted to next generations (Gzella 2017).

Lastly, standard languages tend to be more stable. One of the reasons is indeed because they seem to more easily resist grammatical borrowing through contact because of their power and prestige, another is simply the fact that they are written (Zengel 1968). Written materials in Sumerian have been excavated from a period of about 2,000 years, but no true diachronic varieties can be distinguished throughout this long period. Some of the conservative nature of Sumerian comes from the writing system that may make it harder to identify some morphological or phonological changes, and some can be attributed to the formulaic nature of the inscriptions. Even so, it is astonishing that no major grammatical changes can be identified, even though for most of this period Sumerian was still in regular use as a spoken language. Of course, it is unreasonable to assume that this stagnation extended to the spoken language, but it is worth noting the possibility of the speakers to refer to the archaic written form, potentially increasing adherence to the written morphological and syntactic structures, slowing down change.

## Discussion

The rise of cities and urbanisation was the source of unprecedented linguistic changes.
On the one hand, higher degrees on contact and integration were possible, and on the other hand, the invention of writing created standardisation of the spoken language.

The urbanised era saw population contacts in a depth and distance that were not hitherto present. With the invention of the wheel and the expansion of road and waterway routes, moving long distances became faster and easier than before. Cities brought about close proximity living and the option of daily communication with large numbers of people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds and different social classes, rather than the relatively smaller bands of extended kin that predominated before. The city's economic advantages and chance for social mobility attracted many immigrants from close and far, influencing the linguistic opportunities available in the city. The large numbers of inhabitants caused much larger population movements and displacements in cases of war and conquest – populations that settled elsewhere in large linguistically influential groups.

Another linguistically influential aspect of city living was the invention and prominence of writing. Writing effectively centralised, froze, and disseminated linguistic forms. The high prestige of the written standard language and its beneficial nature for city inhabitants gave its linguistic attributes a robustness in language contact situations, transmitting lexical and grammatical traits to other languages.

Written language is not ephemeral like speech, and in ancient times many of the written texts were composed with the intention to last for perpetuity, to be put in libraries, archives, or on large scale monuments and buildings. The language of previous generations, going back centuries and even millennia, was visible to contemporary speakers, and was held in high regard. The spoken language echoed its former self more closely than it could have before, in all likelihood encouraging the retention of archaic forms, and deterring dialectal divergence.

The high levels of linguistic contacts and integration together with language standardisation and power that began in the fourth millennium BCE and increased in degree ever since resulted in diminished linguistic differentiation. Both through forceful expansions and annexations as well as through corporations and cultural assimilations, language death was inescapable. The change in scale meant that whole language families could be wiped out as large populated areas were taken over by powerful empires or city expansions. The eradication of whole language families is particularly pertinent as it makes linguistic features that were common in those families, but not in surviving ones, rare in today's distribution. Indeed, a few of the morphosyntactic features that survived in the ancient language isolates are quite rare in the world today and
are retained only in small pockets around the world, for example morpholog-
ical optative (Bickel & Nichols 2006; Nichols 2016; Efrat-Kowalsky, Bickel &
Widmer In Press). The high degree of unbalanced contacts and the growth in
the area languages are spoken in leads to the diffusion of traits from a small
pool of languages to other less powerful languages causing the loss of typo-
logical diversity. This effect is not limited to the Near East. With time, empires
and cities grew, connections became ever more present and the Near East was
increasingly connected to the rest of the Mediterranean and western Eurasia
(Achaemenid empire, Islamic conquests, Hellenistic Empire, Roman Empire),
as evident with the diffusion of the alphabet throughout those regions). The
death of languages, the loss of language families and the diminished typolog-
ical distance between (related and unrelated) languages resulted in reduced
linguistic diversity in the larger region, an effect that holds until today.

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