I am surprised that the article fails to mention that the traditional Mongolian script is, in fact, a form of the modern Aramaic script (Syriac). (This fun fact makes the history of Mongolian writing system much more interesting.)
IIRC, proto-sinaitic gave birth to Phoenician and Arabic (with some lost alphabets like Moabite in there somewhere). Phoenician is the main branch, often called the original alphabet, and its two children are Aramaic and Greek, with alphabets in the "east" being likely descended from Aramaic (Brahmi script, proto-Farsi and Parthian, Syrian) and those in the "west" descendent from Greek (Latin, Armenian, Cyrillic, Coptic). Thus you would in fact expect Mongolian, being in the east, to be an offshoot of Aramaic if you knew it had an alphabet (it could be like Mandarin without an alphabet). That's the real question -- does it have an alphabet or not.
I only say this because a lot of people think that Aramaic script is some exotic thing, but it was the official language of the Persian (Achaemenid) Empire, which was quite large, stretching from India to North Africa, and Aramaic was a lingua franca of that era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaemenid_Empire
Aramaic was the common language of every place east of the Hellespont, including Palestine, and many (not all) jews in Israel had forgotten Hebrew and long ago adopted the Aramaic script even when they did write Hebrew. And from Babylon they adopted the Babylonian Calendar and names for some of the months. That was the subtext of the book of Jubilees, bemoaning how jews had forgotten the proper times and corrupted their calendars with foreign dating systems. That was an amazing and very crazy period if you were a jew trying to hold onto your tradition, because there was a massive Hellenizing push in the wake of Alexander's conquests, and gymnasiums were springing up all over, there was a concerted effort to promote Hellenization as the new "international" culture of global trade and enlightenment, and many jews were even getting surgeries done to undo circumcision as they tried to fit into this new internationalist world. Many were learning and embracing Greek philosophy and the Greek approach to science, as well as the greek language and culture. That created lots of culture wars as traditional factions fought the (pro-Greek) liberalizing factions, leading to revolts, massacres, and significant turmoil in the whole region. The Maccabean revolt can be viewed as an example of traditional counterattack against Hellenizing influences, as can the subsequent revolts against Rome. It's truly a fascinating time period. But remember that even though all those traditionalist revolts ended in disaster, it is in fact the traditional societies that survive to this day, whereas the Greek and Roman empires have long vanished.
> But remember that even though all those traditionalist revolts ended in disaster, it is in fact the traditional societies that survive to this day, whereas the Greek and Roman empires have long vanished.
Might this not "just" be because those "fallen" empires largely blended into and became whatever came next--arguably barely even having an identity other than their government--while these separate smaller cultural groups chose to maintain their heritage (something "Rome" arguably didn't have any of to begin with) and so can be subjugated and suppressed but not destroyed? Like, to the extent to which Rome is even a thing with a culture as opposed to merely the world's most thinly-stretched government, I have seen a lot of historians now take the position that it was more of a decline than a fall, that depending on where you were that it might have existed for a very long time (a century? longer?) in a form where people on the ground might have only barely noticed changes, and that maybe it arguably even still exists in the form of greater western civilization.
Yet here we are, using the Latin alphabet, communicating in a language largely comprised of Romance and Greek words, and (me, at least) living in a world dominated by Western political ideas drawn almost completely from the Greco-Roman world.
I suppose that's right, but I do feel the Anglo-Saxon influence in the British system, and thus that of the US and many Commonwealth countries, doesn't get it's fair due.
There really isn't any direct line from the British parliament back to Rome or Greece, rather it derives from the Anglo-Saxon Witan and folkmoots. Yes this system was interrupted at the top by th Norman invasion, but it fought it's way back up the power structure into the Model Parliament which had actual elected commoner members. Imagine!
I'm sure Greek democracy influenced the process of voting at some point and Athenian democracy set an important cultural and historical precedent, but the principle of commoner representation came from the Anglo-Saxon traditions, at least in England.
The Babylonian Talmud is written in Aramaic, so it is not quite correct to equate Aramic with helenizing influence; also it would rather have been a neobabylonian/sasanian influence. Also all of the elite of Judae came back from babylonian captivity, and part of the Book of Ezra is written in Aramaic, just for a start.
Despite the fact that Koine ("common") Greek and Roman roads were used to spread Christianity, most converts didn't view themselves as "Hellenizing factions" or transmission vectors of Hellenistic culture anymore than they viewed themselves as Judaizers. But some did - it was a topic of much debate. The relationship (and philosophical differences) between Christianity, Hellenism, and Judaism is often discussed the in the letters of Paul:
"Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not — to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him."
That's not really an accurate view. Christianity is open to absorbing anything good in any culture (logos spermatikos) and the Greeks were unrivaled in terms of philosophical and artistic sophistication. St. John couldn't convert the Greeks to Christianity until he made the connection between Christ and Logos (John 1) because Hebrew genealogies didn't mean anything to the Greeks. And then it clicked.
"Hellenizing" better describes the Seleucid influence, which lead to the Maccabean revolt, that not only led Jews to adopt Greek cultural practices and customs at odds with Jewish worship, but even to worshipping the pagan gods.
The Achaemenids kings (Ha-Khaa-Manesh in Persian) were however eminently practical as far as imperial governance was concerned, and as you noted, continued the use of Aramaic, but never in monuments. Sogdians were an Iranian people, so it's likely that Aramaic script made its way into Mongolia via the vector of Persian empire's penetration of Transoxiana and subsequently the Sogdians.
All the semitic languages omit vowels (although there are some mater lectionis). The vowel requirement is not required for alphabets, particularly in languages where vowels play a somewhat ambiguous role in the language itself. Even in modern Hebrew, the nikkud pointing system is only used for the Bible, if you read a newspaper or novel, you aint getting any vowels (again, excluding mater lectionis)
> All the semitic languages omit vowels (although there are some mater lectionis).
I think it is just most. Maltese uses the Latin alphabet. Amharic and Tigrinya use Ge'ez which encodes vowel information. Also Arabizi, Arabic in Latin alphabet, is popular for writing local variations of Arabic.
I'm aware of these things, except for the claim that "vowels are not required for alphabets", since capturing vowels has always been the distinguishing feature of alphabets compared to earlier scripts. Or perhaps maybe it works differently in English, who am I to tell.
And the term "big bang" was introduced in the 20th century. Does that mean that that thing that happened thirteen billion years ago was not a big bang?
At least where I live, the term "alfabeta" refers very specifically to the Greek script, since that's where it comes from.
Your introduction of a term of art didn't advance knowledge here, and saying that Phoenician, being an abjad, wasn't the first alphabet, is meaningfully wrong in most of the ways that claim could be true.
I think it would be really interesting to learn more about the history of the region between ~Georgia and Mongolia before the USSR. It seems fantastic how the Turkic language group can be so geographically widespread as it is (there are languages belonging to it way up in Siberia), though TIL that Mongolian isn't Turkic.
And then the Mongols came from the other direction, unifying the area. What did that do culturally?
This is basically all I know about the area, but it seems extremely interesting.
The Turkic and Mongolian languages all came from the area around south Siberia and Mongolia. So ironically it is those Turkic people in Siberia who are the ones that stayed closest to home!
The Huns might have been a Turkic group, but that's hard to prove or disprove since we don't have any records of their language beyond names and a few words that were probably borrowed anyway.
