Joseph Justus Scaliger. If you’re not a classicist or a historical linguist, you likely don’t know him. But if you are, he is a giant on whose shoulders you stand. Born in France, in 1540, he made his name at the Dutch university of Leiden. Here, at the lofty peak of the Renaissance, he reimagined what language could do. A polyglot — proficient in French, Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic — only someone like Scaliger could have achieved something like De emendatione temporum (“On correcting dates”). Freeing the ancient world from slavish Biblical interpretations, he utterly transformed Europe’s sense of deep history. With him, the continent first began to realise that the cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia predated Greece and Israel by millennia. It would take centuries to properly decipher their scripts and languages, but that was the beginning of a revolution in historical understanding as profound as the Darwinian revolution in biology.
Scaliger showed that linguistic and textual scholarship is about far more than mere verbs or adjectives: it is a key to unlock our world. Now, though, his legacy is in danger of being abandoned. Over recent months, academics everywhere have been shocked by the news of cuts to long-established language programmes, including at Leiden. Among other languages, Turkish, Persian and Hebrew may all stop being offered. Arabic could soon vanish too: especially shocking at Leiden, home to the oldest chair of the language on earth. Yet if the decline has many causes, monoglot academic environments and budget cuts among them, the consequences are far from mundane. For if the trend continues, we will lose some of the best tools for cultural and historical understanding we have.
Modern academia is dominated by the sciences. No one can deny that STEM subjects dominate the public conversation, followed by the more quantitative social sciences. On those rare occasions that the linguistic study of the human past does get a look in, it’s often just because AI is involved — and even then the returns are often dubious. It’s a similar story financially. In the UK, only £70 million of government research funding was allocated to the humanities in 2024-5.
In a sense, meanwhile, this retreat is self-sustaining. Quite apart from the psychological impact on university administrators — the more humanities retreat from the front pages, the harder it is for bean-counters to take them seriously — it’s much easier to irretrievably lose knowledge of rarer languages once the chain of transmission is broken. Let me put it like this: how many experts in Lycian, Palmyrean, Aramaic or Tocharian are there in the world today?
I don’t want to sound defeatist here. There are more than enough people interested to keep these studies alive — if the resources are there. Just one case in point is OxLat. Our Oxford programme teaching Latin to school students, it has twice as many applicants as spaces, despite the Government’s plan to scrap the language from state schools altogether. Yet even within the humanities, the most eye-catching work is often dealing in images rather than words: just think of how much media attention each new fresco in Pompeii gets compared to new finds in manuscripts or inscriptions.
As far as language is concerned, meanwhile, there have surely been spectacular exceptions: yet they only serve to show what we usually miss. Perhaps the last time a historical linguistic discovery truly gripped the public imagination was the decipherment of Linear B in 1953. Yet who really remembers that discovery of the earliest form of Greek in a year that also saw the conquest of Everest and the detection of DNA? More to the point, how many people know anything about the deciphering of Mayan hieroglyphs, let alone the recent epic advances in the history of early writing?
How things change. As Scaliger so vividly proves, linguistics could once change the world — literally. As the Renaissance bubbled on, scholars on both sides of Europe’s sectarian divide built a new community of scholarship aimed at understanding ancient texts. Encompassing Greek, Latin and Hebrew, among other tongues, the litterae humaniores (“more human letters”) were not a theological project per se, and indeed sought to bring bickering Protestants and Catholics closer together. They did, nonetheless, have a deep moral dimension. As the later German scholar Rudolf Pfeiffer remarked, luminaries like Erasmus linked Europe’s “spiritual decline” to the related deterioration of language. “And so,” he added, “it was with language that spiritual and moral renaissance must begin.” Pfeiffer, one of the refugees from Hitler’s Germany who transformed the study of classics in Britain, was no doubt feeling the same moral urgency himself.
Erasmus and Scaliger were only two names in the wider “republic of letters”, an international community of thought and scholarship in active correspondence across Europe. Mostly writing in Latin, Scaliger was not a lone figure even at Leiden himself. Consider Justus Lipsius, the great editor of the Roman historian Tacitus and the Stoic philosopher Seneca, who distilled his learning into bestselling books on political ethics. Another example is Hugo Grotius, the father of international law as we know it. In England, Thomas More with his Utopia was part of the same community.
We shouldn’t idolise these curious Renaissance minds. With modern departments now boasting a far subtler appreciation of Syriac or Aramaic, no scholar today would agree with Scaliger that someone “who knows no Greek knows nothing”. Nor should we resent the integration of visual culture into the study of the ancient world: it is no better to approach another culture by closing your eyes than closing your ears. New quantitative methods, too, have plenty to contribute. We can now understand the living standards, the flow of trade, the size of the population, the impact of disease in the ancient world in ways impossible even half a century ago.
Yet if we doubtless gain by quantitative methods, we also lose something when straightforward knowledge of ancient tongues falls away. That’s true enough for early modern writers: even English authors like Milton or Hobbes can’t truly be appreciated without an intimate understanding of Latin. Not only was it the language in which all of them constantly read, but a large part of their work was simply written in Latin first. For ancient historians or medievalists, meanwhile, a large share of new knowledge still comes from texts in ancient languages, often fragmentary, and which require considerable linguistic expertise to interpret.
To give you a sense of the scale, consider the Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum, a publication covering newly published ancient inscriptions in Greek. Published annually, the Supplementum contains over 2,000 entries each year. Nor is Greek the only relevant language here. In 2013, for instance, a University of Warwick academic discovered a medieval Arabic translation of long-lost Greek text. Covering the financial management of farm estates, and written by a Greco-Roman philosopher called Bryson, it shows understanding of “need” as the driver of exchange and economy, and represents the earliest attempt to explain the price of things by supply and demand.
One of my favourite examples here comes from Jane Lightfoot’s edition of the Apotelesmatica, a set of astrological poems ascribed to an Ancient Egyptian priest. Not only is this translation a major source on ancient astrology and astronomy, but also an encyclopaedia of the social world of Roman Egypt. Keen to know under what star sign the craftsmen of “marvellous machines past mortal ken” were born, and whether it was good to be one? Or “speakers of words, in public fora best at mending strife, and aiding the oppressed”? Or, for that matter, vagabonds in foreign lands, or “failures in business”? There’s no better place to start your research.
I appreciate, of course, that in a world enraptured by AI decipherings in places like Herculaneum, texts like the Apotelesmatica can easily be ignored. Yet if that’s a shame in itself — which sane person wouldn’t want to learn about marvellous machines past mortal ken? — the decline of ancient languages matters for a yet more fundamental reason. To quote Mikhail Gasparov, a Russian classicist whose translations introduced me to Greece and Rome as a teenager, the study of ancient languages is “a service of understanding”.
Our own time and our own culture represent only a tiny fraction of what the human mind is capable of. And, unless we get out of that familiar circle, we never get to see ourselves with some detachment, to detect the blind spots of our own time. From decrees of ancient cities offering a reflection on civic virtue, to Mesopotamian moral proverbs on clay tablets, to sermons discovered in medieval manuscripts, different takes on morality and society continue to appear from ancient sources.
And just as we would never be content to rely on ChatGPT, or Google Translate, to understand another human being we truly cared for, why shouldn’t we go back to the original source to study some vanished culture — just as rich, in its way, as any lover or friend? In both cases, learning the language teaches us that they and their thoughts matter, no less than our own. That is more difficult than just making facile claims on behalf of other cultures, but it is still the thing that makes our studies “more human” than most. We may not think, with Scaliger, that “all divisions in religion arise from ignorance of grammar” — but we would understand each other infinitely better if we paid enough attention to language.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/