1.1 Contact and Inheritance

Contact can be defined in two ways depending on the perspective. As a phenomenon, contact is the exchange of information between two portions of a system. As an epiphenomenon, contact is any diachronic event pertaining to non-system-internal information exchange. In the evolution of a phylogenetic system, regardless of the anthropic fact represented (be it the manuscript tradition of an exquisite literary work, the evolution of a religious creed or system of administration, or the diachronic phylogenesis of a family of related languages), contact models share features in nodes that are not mechanically inherited from common ancestors.

View Full Size

Figure 2.1

An example of diffusion of a feature by contact

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

The graph in Fig. 2.1 contains a generic example. The gray-dot innovation occurs within the AB branch. In the history of writing, it may represent the emergence of vowel notation in a writing system derived from writing system A that only wrote consonants. In the history of religion, it may represent an innovative ritual practice in a cult or system of beliefs that did not yet exist at stage A. In the history of crafting, it may represent a new ceramic technique developed as material culture A was evolving to become material culture B. In linguistics, it may represent the loss of a grammatical category in the morphology of language A, which will no longer be present in language B. The gray-dot innovation is mechanically inherited in the segments BD and BE (full arrow) that stem from node B. In contrast, Segment CF does not have B as an ancestor but displays the gray-dot feature, which, in this case, has been spread by contact with BE (dotted arrow). This is, of course, a very simple model. However, with refinement and further formalization, it will prove to be an extremely powerful diagnostic tool for the study of change in human history.

1.2 Types of Change

So far, we have considered only two options for the emergence of a new feature: mechanical inheritance and contact. Obviously, this does not describe all of the possible changes in a system over time. Let us consider the history of writing systems—a very useful example of a historical field of research that features ‘concrete,’ observable changes—and specifically, the introduction of syllabic phonographic notation through the so-called acrophony principle. The acrophony process—much debated and sometimes misunderstood¹—consists in assigning the value of the first phoneme, syllable, or quasi-syllabic cluster of a word to the sign that represents it logographically. For instance, acrophony was at work when the syllabic values of the Anatolian hieroglyphs were established, with the logogram indicating the verb ‘to give,’ whose reading in Luwian was piya-, becoming a syllabogram with the value /pi/.² Similar patterns of evolution of writing systems have been securely identified in Egypt and—with a more complex debate due to the number of xenographic adoptions of the cuneiform script—in Syro-Mesopotamia. While all of these areas were contiguous and the cultures that inhabited them were in contact with each other for millennia, there are cases of application of the acrophony principle that cannot be related in any way—for instance, the definition of the syllabic values of the Maya logo-syllabary.³ This means that the feature ‘acrophonic reduction of logograms’ is not necessarily diffused by mechanic inheritance/development or areal contact but rather can emerge as an independent development in more than one place and time.

We may refer to such events as polygenetic changes. A polygenetic change, being likely to occur independently in different areas and times, is obviously a poor diagnostic tool for the study of the mutual relationship between systems or subsystems in any field of research. Instead, our focus is on monogenetic changes. The concept of monogeneticity is not polar but scalar as it can only be defined in terms of the likelihood that an identical change would occur independently. Some innovations appear highly unlikely to emerge independently in multiple places. To take an example from the history of religions, one may consider the conception of the solar deity as a god of law(suits) and justice in several cultures in the sphere of influence of the southern Mesopotamia Sumero-Akkadian world. These included the Elamite culture, whose peoples were in close contact with the Sumerians at least since the proto-urban phases of the fourth and third millennia BCE. The solar god of Anšan and Susa was Nahhunte, and his many connotations and functions may have included the supervision of lawsuits and administration of justice (although, to be fair, the only positive evidence of this seems to be his role as a divine witness in legal texts).⁴ The assignment of this type of divine competence to a specific god is not a universal feature. It may emerge accidentally in areally unrelated contexts (after all, the sun does look like an eye watching our every move), but its extension from the Sumerian religion to other Semitic and non-Semitic ones (including Elam) makes it, in all likelihood, a locally monogenetic one.

However, is it accurate to state that we are dealing, in this case, with a diffusion of a divine feature from Sumer to other surrounding cultures? As a matter of fact, no, and this introduces another problem that pertains to the definition and description of contact: the problem of the direction of diffusion. For instance, chronological bias can lead to the assumption that a Sumerian sun god, Utu, influenced a Semitic one, Šamaš, and an Elamite one, Nahhunte. Indeed, the name of Utu is attested earlier than the other two, and the Sumerian culture is considered to have a foundational role with respect to the other cultures of what, in Chapter 6, will be defined as the ‘cuneiform koiné.’ But visible history, especially its most archaic phases, often reflects deeper phenomena that, even during areas of written history, tend not to be represented in the official sources. Whether the early attested god Utu was the source of the diffusion of the shared features of the Sun god or simply one of the targets of said diffusion, is unknown, nor is it possible to imagine a falsification ‘test’ that could answer the question experimentally. Therefore, once contact is identified, an area of interaction will also have emerged, but it will remain extremely important not to push the interpretation of the details any further than the data will allow.

2.1 Why Is Language Relevant to Historical and Cultural Studies?

Many features of human societies and cultures can be studied from the perspective of inheritance, contact and diffusion. Section 1 above offers a few examples from the histories of writing systems and religions, but contact-based inquiry models can be applied to other aspects of culture as well, such as systems of administration, literary traditions, models of urban organization, emic kinship structures (and labels), and human languages. In most cases, categorizing the fundamental features of a human construct—be it cultural, social, religious, political, or juridical—is a very difficult task. A rigorous definition of the object of study in the humanities is not as easy as in the hard sciences. The boundaries of concepts are often ill-defined: a discussion about the extension of the ‘god-of-law’ feature to the solar deity in certain Near Eastern cultures presupposes: 1) a clear definition of the connotation, 2) a clear definition of the concepts of ‘law’ and ‘justice’ in said cultures, 3) the assumption that this concept was shared by the cultures under investigation, 4) a necessarily hypothetical reconstruction of the societies that were involved, and 5) the very assumption that the direction, significance, and diachrony of a hypothetical diffusion can be described based on the available data (which can be shown to be incomplete but never demonstrated to be complete). Each of these presuppositions can be challenged in competing interpretive frameworks, and the probability of validating or disproving any acquisition is low.

Human languages stand out from this picture, at least in part. Social and cultural constructs are innovations that are produced by human beings, but language, as a natural faculty of humans, while being strongly connected to the social and cultural sphere also belongs to the field of natural phenomena, and many of its features evolve mechanically or in ways that depend on their structural features and the implications of their structural patterns. Historical phonology, for instance, works in a way that depends on the Saussurean concept of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign:⁵ no logical implication connects a given concept or meaning to a phonetic form, so any change in the phonological inventory of a language will depend on the phonological level and environment only. This yields to the concept of sound law: the phonological inventory of a language undergoes mechanical alterations over time, which are completely regular in identical phonetic environments and are automatically inherited by the subsequent stages of a language and the languages that derive from it.

Sound laws, while belonging to one of the most technical fields of linguistics, are hugely significant to the general study of the ancient world. Consider the example of Latin rhotacism. It is defined as

Old Latin VsV > Classical Latin VrV for all V’s,

meaning that an intervocalic sibilant of Old Latin, regardless of the position of the accent and any surrounding vowels, will become an /r/ in Classical Latin (for simplicity, we ignore here the special cases in which dissimilation blocks the change, e.g., miser instead of mirer). Cross-analysis with epigraphic material that contains historical information has led linguists to date the change to the third or second century BCE, with older compositions, such as the Carmen aruale, still presenting forms with an intervocalic /s/ (Lases for Lares).⁶ This kind of evidence is of paramount importance for dating documents: an epigraph that does not exhibit rhotacism must have predated the shift.

The highly measurable nature of some (not all!) types of change in language structures has more subtle implications in analyzing cultural interactions. Indeed, if language-internal changes are, to some extent, more measurable than the evolution of other cultural traits, this implies that changes that cannot be explained language internally must have occurred for other reasons. Sticking to the example of the rhotacism of Latin, we can conclude that any Old Latin word must have undergone rhotacism in the passage to Classical Latin, so a word that does not show rhotacism must have entered the lexicon after the time in which the change was applied. A word that famously represents an apparent exception to rhotacism is the Latin word for ‘donkey’ (a somewhat mysterious word in several ancient Mediterranean languages). If asinus had been an inherited word in Classical Latin, it would have turned into *arinus by the third century BCE at the latest. Since it did not, the word must have entered the lexicon after the shift occurred. Indeed, the earliest attestations are in Plautus.⁷ Plautus was probably not a native speaker of Latin but of Umbrian (a language in which rhotacism also occurred)⁸ and almost certainly knew something of the Oscan language (which was impervious to the change).⁹ Could Oscan have been a medium of transmission for the word asinus? The situation, which at this point involves not only linguistics but also the fields of sociolinguistics and social history, is even more complex than this. The words for ‘donkey’ show some superficial similarities and have no clear origin in several Mediterranean languages, including Greek ὄνος,¹⁰ the Anatolian compound tark=AŠŠANA-, Sumerian ANŠE, and perhaps even Hebrew ’aton‘ and Akkadian atānu, both meaning ‘female donkey’.¹¹ While the technical curiosity of the linguist is destined to remain frustrated as no solutions have been found to the word’s diffusion and formal changes, the circulation area of this possible Wanderwort is extremely interesting for the general and historical study of preclassical Mediterranean. If the word circulated, how did it circulate? Can its origin be traced to Africa, matching the diffusion of the Equus africanus to Mesopotamia, the Levant and Anatolia? Was the path of Western diffusion unique or was the pattern of expansion even more complex and discontinuous?

Phonological change is one of the most powerful tools for tracking the diffusion of changes by inheritance or contact, but it is not the only way in which idioms evolve. Morphological structures (e.g., the presence of nominal inflection) also change over time (e.g., the nominal inflection decays, cases are defunctionalized and disappear), and so do the language-dependent, nonuniversal syntactic structures (e.g., a verb-final, or ‘OV,’ mother language yields to a verb-medial daughter language, as occurred with the passage from Latin to Spanish, French, Italian, and all of the other Romance languages). These changes follow typological tendencies, but they are not entirely mechanical. Comparison between genealogically and areally unrelated languages, however, allows assessment of the likelihood of the occurrence of unsolicited changes occurring. For instance, ignoring the complex problem of the position of the subject in epigraphs, all West Semitic languages are head-initial, meaning that the verb precedes the object and adpositional elements have prepositional distribution:

Phoenician: KAI 24, 16

w-	yšḥt	r’š	b‘l ḥmn
and	smash.fut3sg12	head	Ba‘al Ḥammon

“And Ba‘al Hammon will smash (his) head”

Old Aramaic KAI 216, 19–20

w(20)	’nh	bnyt	byt’	znh
and	I	build.pst1sg	house.def	this

“And I built this palace”

South Arabic CSAI 1,31 (as read by Robyn 1987)

bny	w-	s¹ḥd[ṯ	l-ʿṯtr Nwf]2n	w-	ʾlhw S¹qmtm	bytn	Byḥn
build.pst3sg	and	dedicate. pst3sg	to Athtar-Nawfan	and	to.gods.of. S¹qmtm	temple	Bayḥan

“… has built and dedicated to Athtar-Nawfan and to the Gods of S¹qmtm the temple Bayḥan”

Akkadian, on the other hand, being one of the two assured members of the East Semitic branch of the language family (the other being Eblaite) has final verbs (but, contrary to the tendency of OV languages), features prepositions and no postpositions.

A general typological shift may, of course, have occurred as an East Semitic or Proto-Akkadian innovation; however, the retention of the unexpected prepositional pattern seems to contradict this idea. Therefore, the pattern is likely to have emerged due to areal contacts with languages that had a similar structure. The interpretation that seems most likely is that the change in the syntactic clause architecture of Akkadian was the result of Sumerian influence,¹³ which is a verb-final agglutinative language with no proper adpositional elements.¹⁴ Of course, the implications of this reconstruction are different in terms of cultural contact. We are no longer dealing with the circulation of words over a large area but rather with a very deep structural change in the grammatical features of a language in a small region (southern Mesopotamia) in which two languages must have been in close contact for an extended period.

Further explanations of the heuristics of these analyses are necessary to rigorously define the framework that will be employed in this book. Therefore, we will proceed by, first, describing two further methodological and scientific concerns, and, second, explaining the societal and cultural-historical significance of the evidence that will be collected, studied, and discussed in the central chapters of this work.

2.2 Language or ‘Code’?

Despite its potential for the study of the ancient cultures and societies and their interactions, the study of the languages of ancient areas and civilizations present several interpretive problems, some of which are more obvious than others. An obvious limitation is the significance of the available corpora. This is not necessarily equivalent to the amount of material that is preserved and can be studied. If some languages—ancient Lydian, for instance—survive in a limited number of documents and thus can be difficult to interpret, other languages, even those with large corpora, present more subtle difficulties. One could hardly state that Akkadian, Sumerian or Hittite are attested in too small corpora; still, some text types are overrepresented, others are barely visible, and still others are virtually absent. We have, for instance, no proper private juridical or administrative documents from the Bronze Age kingdom of Hatti, and the vast majority of the texts come from a few official archives from the core area.¹⁵ This prevents us from assessing contact-related features such as the diffusion of local linguistic varieties in peripheral areas, unless these were accidentally represented in the central scribal offices, or—even more interesting for the general description of the society—foreign anthroponyms were diffused outside of the elite classes. These issues are corpus-dependent, and, alas, can be dealt with only by acknowledging them. Luckily, if serious caution is applied whenever data are incomplete or only describe a stratum of a culture’s social semiotic inventory, such limitations do not prevent a fruitful analysis of the available data.

Apart from the obvious problem of the limits of the evidence, a subtler issue must be described to determine how it could affect the analysis of ancient documents and be solved and even turned into an advantage for the heuristics of the current research. Ancient corpus languages are, by definition, written languages. Apart from the impossibility of fully reconstructing a spoken language from ancient written records, we also face the problem of recognizing the different grapholects within a language. The Akkadian language used in Hattuša, for instance, was not homogenous: international Akkadian was used for diplomatic documents. In some cases, groups of treaties or letters even display peculiar uses and practices not only in paleography and graphemics but also from a lexical or grammatical perspective. Old Babylonian appears to have been used for early political documents as well as for some literary compositions (unless these derive directly from an elusive Middle Babylonian tradition), as well as for some technical texts that, however, could have been more or less open to infiltrations from the peripheral Akkadian traditions or international Middle Babylonian during the Late Bronze Age. Furthermore, merely graphical phenomena may interfere with the encoding and decoding of the written text, which results in other problems—for example, unusual word ordering derived from the practice of sumerographic (or generally heterographic) writing. Often it is difficult to distinguish epigraphic from linguistic interference.

Although the study of languages in contact is the central heuristic tool of this research, this monograph has not only a traditionally linguistic but also a cultural-historical goal. Our aim is not to reconstruct the phonetics of a Lydian vowel or the original verbal system of Semitic or Indo-European but rather to employ the evidence for contacts to areally describe the interactions between languages and cultures in the Anatolian and peri-Anatolian regions. Therefore, the fact that the graphic medium was also open to interferences that did not necessarily mirror a true linguistic shift is not an obstacle but rather a further opportunity to identify interactions between traditions. Indeed, in the area of interest of the present work, preclassical Anatolia and its ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean contexts, the word ‘tradition,’ in a scholastic and scholarly sense, is key. Although Indo-European studies, especially in the strict frameworks of European historical phonologists, generally tackles ancient languages from a very rigid perspective, aiming at the reconstruction of their true historical forms, how languages were learned and reproduced in the corpora from the ancient Near East differed from how they are learned and reproduced in modern ‘alphabetic’ cultures. The approach in scribal schools was, probably, essentially a combination of a graphical approach and a glottic one, so that language and script in the cuneiform cultures formed an entangled system.

The lexical lists from the Mesopotamian and Syro-Mesopotamian traditions were, at one time, tools for learning languages, writing, and science.¹⁶ An awareness of this fact makes it possible to appreciate the interference between scribal traditions, graphemic practices, and writing systems and is vital to an areal study of the cultural interactions in and around Anatolia. The pattern of diffusion of a paragraphematic device, such as, for instance, that of gloss wedges from the Syrian area to Anatolia before and during the Amarna age, is not less informative than the diffusion of the Luwic i-mutation to Hittite. The presence of an almost unique variant of the sign NUMUN₂ in the medical texts of Hattuša¹⁷ matches the technical grapholect of Akkadian used in these texts. It is also suggestive of the existence of a local scribal school that re-elaborated the materials of the Mesopotamian tradition, which in turn is related to the local elaboration of Sumerian and Akkadian lexical lists in Anatolia by locals or Mesopotamians.

In light of the kaleidoscopic nature of the elements that can help us track the contexts of the Anatolian civilizations and languages, the perspective of contact must be expanded from a purely linguistic conception to a broader historical study of contacts between the Bronze Age Hittite, Akkadian, and Hurrian traditions and between the Luwian, Akkadian and West Semitic Iron Age cultures.

2.3 Language and Culture

The concept of ‘code,’ introduced here in the previous section, should be kept in mind as we proceed to the next theoretical issue that needs to be discussed: how to integrate the competing definitions of a ‘culture.’

The word ‘culture’ and the adjective ‘cultural’ will be used quite frequently in the next chapters. Most people have a basic understanding of what a culture is: if an author employs the label ‘the Etruscan culture,’ the reader will immediately understand that a reference is made to the Etruscan populations that inhabited parts of Italy in the proto-historical and early historical times. But the answers to more complex questions about Etruscan culture will depend on the theoretical framework employed. What are the historical coordinates of ‘Etruscan culture’? An archaeologist will sensibly refuse to neglect the proto-historical one, and, if our imaginary author were a scholar in such discipline, her or his work would certainly include a discussion of the Villanova ceramic production as well as of the funerary practices that were employed in different areas of central Italy during the early centuries of the first millennium BCE. A linguist, on the other hand, would probably employ the label to refer to the historical phase only, thereby applying a glottocentric definition of the culture. Therefore, before sources started being produced (or before we can hypothesize a reconstructed phase of the language), we simply could not tell. A philologist or a historian of classical religions would have yet another perspective, using traces of the Etruscan literary and religious constructs that emerge in the classical sources to shape a description of the ‘culture’ that produced them and the way they were diffused. A historian of writing would be tempted to use the development of the Etruscan alphabet as a defining criterion, and so on. Each of these definitions and approaches is entirely legitimate but partial.

Culture is multifactorial.¹⁸ Therefore, a culture is not fully defined by its linguistic code, which is, indeed, a part of the culture. However, if by linguistic code we refer to the group of languages that are employed by a group in association with two other cultural constructs, its writing system and writing traditions, then the code becomes strong enough to use as a marker to label the culture (even if it cannot describe it in its entirety) and can be used to track a number of its features. In turn, when language, being subject to well-defined patterns of stability and variation, is affected by contacts, the trace left by these contacts allows the reconstruction of social changes that affected one or more of the cultures associated with a given linguistic code.

3.1 Geographical Connotations of the Area(s)

That language contact, being the ‘norm’ rather than an ‘exception’ (Thomason 2001:10), was at work in multilingual as well as interface monolingual settings in the ancient Near East is not a new claim, nor is it sufficient to state this to investigate the cultural and linguistic features of the contact scenarios. Areas of language contact have been described variously in literature, and the definitions and details vary in the secondary literature.¹⁹ There are also many types of interference, ranging from simple lexical borrowing to the sharing of structural and grammatical features; from scenarios of simple borrowing to those featuring a seemingly stable coexistence of two or more codes.²⁰ While this is not the place to enter into the details of the labels and definitions used by historical and general linguists, the construction of a framework for the categorization of the phenomena and cases that will be discussed in the core chapters of the present monograph is essential.

First of all, we are interested in the problem of the geographical dimension of the areas that should be examined when dealing with cultural and linguistic interference in the ancient world (specifically, of Syro-Anatolia and its more or less immediate neighbors). Since the documents available for examination often come from archives or monumental inscribed landscapes or cityscapes, the data tend to capture a picture of the diastratic and diaphasic level of a language code in a given location at a given time. Therefore, while the identification of larger-than-local areas (those that include several languages, as opposed to local varieties, and may potentially host a Sprachbund)²¹ is more than welcome when it can be achieved, in this work we will generally need to concentrate on smaller environments. This will depend on the type of documents we possess and the range of intensive contacts, which, with exceptions that will need to be historically contextualized (e.g., the circulation of Wanderwörter within specific networks), will generally fade with increasing distance. Renouncing the study of the linguistic and cultural situation of—say—Early Iron Age Sam’al (modern Zincirli)—in terms of the areal interference of Luwian, Aramaic and Phoenician only because the area was probably small in the first place (say, east of the Cilician Plains, north of the Amuq Valley, west of the Middle Euphrates river valley, and south of the Middle Ceyhan River) and because the available documents were produced only in a small portion of it (mostly, in the very site of Zincirli), would mean forfeiting the possibility of observing several dynamics that are extremely interesting to the historian and linguist alike.²² In general, most of the areas that will be discussed in the core chapters of this work will be limited in size. This, however, is far from being a limitation. Instead, it grants us the opportunity to investigate to what extent this should be considered an implication of applying the areal methodology to the ancient world and to what extent it constitutes, instead, a specific and real feature of Anatolia and ‘peri-Anatolia’ as a sort of meta-area of cultural and linguistic contacts.

In these peculiar ‘leopard spots’ in the super-area under consideration, the differentiation between specific types of linguistic interferences acquires, if possible, even more significance than it does in general. The difficulty of forming and maintaining strong long-distance connections might have hindered the formation of large networks that would result in intensive and extensive grammatical interference. However, grammatical interference occurred in local sub-areas (see Chapter 15 for further discussion); in such cases we can easily infer that social and cultural melting-pot or mixed-salad contexts emerged. Such shared structures virtually disappear when there are long distances between cultures, but lexical circulation exists, mostly following commercial routes and, to a lesser extent, the political extension of specific dominating cultures. Networks of this type, however, almost never produced large stable areas of intensive cultural, social, and linguistic superposition.

3.2 Type of Phenomena

After clarifying the main types of interference that we will study, it is extremely important to present a taxonomy of the types of contact phenomena that we will encounter and categorize. In general, ever since the birth of modern contact-linguistics during the 20th century, several fine-grained models of the types of contact phenomena have been identified and discussed in the literature. Some categorizations aim at describing the role of the different languages in contact scenarios (e.g., the more prestigious and often intrusive ‘superstrate’ as opposed to the less prestigious ‘substrate’). Other try to distinguish contact scenarios in terms of mechanisms and potential outcomes (will a new superstrate language prevail, will it disappear, or will it mix with local substrate languages and produce a new code?). Distinctions also apply to the different type of contact-induced changes that one may observe, with the fundamental opposition between lexical interference and grammatical one.²³

In the present work, we will assume (and show) that the behavior of interfering linguistic codes in the ancient world shared several common features with modern ones; however, the extension and complexity of the observable ancient areas differed somewhat from those of modern areas. Therefore, to avoid forcing the theory onto the data, we now need briefly outline a dedicated taxonomy for the present research.

When looking at the ancient world in general and ancient Anatolia in particular, for instance, following Goedegebuure (2008:164–165) one may start by referencing the distinction described by Thomason and Kaufmann (1988) between ‘borrowing’ and ‘shifting’ situations. According to Thomason and Kaufmann, phenomena may be categorized based on their prevalence in contexts that will produce (or not produce) the outcome of a change of code in a community. For instance, shifting scenarios that may lead to the generalization of a superstrate or the emergence of a mixed code involve grammatical interference in a way that is, instead, very uncommon in simple borrowing scenarios. While it is certainly legitimate to attempt to use these concepts of ‘borrowing’ and ‘shifting’ to describe contact dynamics in the ancient Near East, the limits of the corpora should be obvious: substrata tend to emerge only sparsely in official documents, and no mixed languages were ever securely identified.²⁴ Of course, phenomena of language shift must have existed: as Hittite disappeared from Anatolia, shifting occurred, and Hittite was replaced by Luwian and Phrygian; and as Aramaic replaced Akkadian in Mesopotamia in the Iron Age, long-standing interference must have produced changes. However, written corpora are not suitable sources for appreciating the steps that led to these shifts; the shifts are only evident after the new code becomes the official language of a literate polity. Therefore, most of the conclusions that can be reached using this distinction and approach are either projected backward based on later historical patterns or, when used in a predictive fashion for illiterate components of the ancient demographic, are destined to remain highly speculative.

A more interesting approach to the categorization of phenomena relating to contacts in the ancient Near East is proposed by Andrason and Vita (2016). They examined theoretical works by linguists and philologists to explore the relationship between the ways languages are exposed to other languages and the type of interference phenomena that may or may not emerge in the corpora of ancient text languages. Their model partially replaces or aims at partially replacing the concepts of linguistic strata with those of higher-ranking and lower-ranking languages, with the former being “more prestigious and dominant, being used as a cultured, ceremonial, scientific, administrative, lingua franca or hegemonial variety”, and the latter being “less prestigious and less dominant, exemplified by vernacular, non-standard or local varieties.”²⁵ As contact situations were probably never as simple as two-edge polarized systems, Andrason and Vita went on to investigate the mechanisms and roles of different codes to produce evidence that allows us to reconstruct a multilingual context based on written sources.

In all of the possible models, whether developed to describe modern, well-known multilingual communities or areal convergences that are only indirectly observable through the written word, one generalized rule almost always governs the occurrence of interference between codes or languages or between representations of codes or languages. It deals with the direction of changes, based on a distinction between morphosyntactic or grammatical change on the one hand and lexical change on the other. By assuming a rather formal definition of a language, or code, as a pair of sets, the former being the set of grammatical rules and the latter the vocabulary set containing all lexical items to be combined by the said rules, there seems to be a tendency for lower-ranking codes in contact scenarios to lend the grammar and higher-ranking codes to lend the lexicon. The core chapters of the present volume will generally reflect this distinction. After describing the historical contexts in which contacts occurred between cultures that had their own languages, we will illustrate the features of the relevant corpora (for the Bronze Age, those of the foreign languages in the central Hittite archives and, when relevant, those of the neighboring areas). After that, the contact phenomena will be described, aiming at a categorization that distinguishes between grammatical changes and lexical changes (a distinction that will be scalar rather than truly polarized). At the same time, when the sources will allow it, we will attempt to describe the historical and social contexts of the contacts.