ABSTRACT

Some sixty five years ago, the Colt expedition carried out a series of excavations in the ruins of the late Byzantine town of Nessana, now a couple of miles inside Israel on the Negev border with Egypt. The early Arab conquests brought the area from the Pyrenees to the western borderlands of present-day India, and from Aswan, in southern Egypt, nearly as far north as Grozny, in Chechnya, in the Caucasus, under Arab rule. Greek became a vastly important language of administration, of culture and of religion for a thousand years after Alexander; it was everywhere. But it never reached all those levels of society to which Arabic later managed to penetrate; it never became a major language of speech here. One of the reasons for the overall success of Arabic was of course that it was a Reichssprache, a language of empire. Arabic was the spoken language of the rulers, and of those who associated themselves with the rulers.