Khūzī: a Bronze Age language in Islamic Iran

Most of the information below comes from K. Van Bladel’s “The Language of the Xuz̄ and the Fate of Elamite”, published by the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society just last year, but also from D. T. Potts’ The Archaeology of Elam.

For nearly three thousand years, from the beginning of the Bronze Age in 3000 BC to the coming of the Persians and Alexander the Great, the civilization of Elam thrived in what is now the Khuzestan region of Iran. Their language was a language isolate, unrelated to any other and having left no descendants. Nonetheless, Elamite holds a dual distinction as being not only one of the world’s first written languages—the earliest deciphered text in the language is a cuneiform treaty from 2250 BC—but one of its most continuously attested ones. Cuneiform-script attestation continues up to the very end of the Persian empire, in the mid-300s B.C. This is two thousand years’ worth of material.

But did the Elamite language go extinct when it stopped being used in writing? Apparently not. Unlike Sumerian, where the written language survived the demise of the spoken one, Elamite continued as an unwritten tongue long after the end of cuneiform. Rulers in the region from the second century B.C. had etymologically Elamite names that the Greeks did their best to transcribe as “Kamniskires” (Elamite kapniškir “treasurer”), “Okkonapses”, and “Pittit”. The Biblical Book of Acts mentions “Parthians, Medes and Elamites” as peoples who are “declaring the wonders of God in [their] own tongues”. Several hundred years later, the Babylonian Talmud cites on the authority of the fourth-century rabbi Rabbah bar Nahmani) that the Jews of Susa—the ancient capital of Elam—used “their own language” to read the Book of Esther.

There is no record of the linguistic situation in former Elam for another four hundred years. But in the eighth century, the Persian statesman Ibn al-Mufaqqa’, serving the new Arab conquerors of his native land, described the former Persian empire as having five important languages:

  • Pahlavi or Parthian, a Northwestern Iranian language
  • Parsi or literary Middle Persian, which by this time did not reflect the spoken language, and which Ibn al-Mufaqqa’ calls the “language of the priests and scholars”
  • Dari or Early New Persian, the colloquial descendant of Middle Persian generally spoken by the king and the court
  • Suryani or Aramaic, the Semitic language of Iraq
  • Khūzī, spoken in Khuzestan, the lands of ancient Elam; Khuzestan itself means “the land of Khuz”, with Khuz being the capital Susa

Based on geographic position, Khūzī can only be Elamite or, at best, some unknown Iranian language. But Van Bladel notes that the tenth-century geographer Al-Istakhri says:

As for their language, the common people speak Persian and Arabic, although they have another, Khūzī language which is not Hebrew, Aramaic, or Persian.

In early Arabic sources, “Persian” (fārsī) refers generically to any Iranian language, suggesting that Khūzī was perceived as a language unrelated to the Iranian ones.

A hundred years later, al-Jahiz, a polymath writing in the 840s, briefly mentions Khūzī as a language with an apparently very complicated phonology:

Points of articulation [are] innumerable and a subject about which there is no agreement. The same consideration applies to the consonants in foreign languages, and it is true in no respect more than it is in the language of the Khūz.

Al-Jahiz lived in Basra, right next to Khuzestan, and may have heard the language personally. Al-Jahiz makes the same point in another work, adding that the phonology apparently makes the language very difficult to learn:

human languages are more or less difficult to learn due to the number and difficulty of their phonemes so that a person can learn the language of East Africa more or less in a month, whereas you can do business with and be a neighbor to Khūzīs for a long time without any profit.

Ibn al-Muqaffa describes the position of Khūzī in the pre-Islamic Persian court thusly:

As for the Khūzı̄ language, the [Persian] kings and nobles used to speak it in private quarters, places of recreation and pleasure, and together with attendants.

How was this possible? Another version of the text says:

As for the Khūzı̄ language, the kings and nobles used to speak it in private quarters, in the privy and toilet, and at the time of disrobing for the bath, the wash-basin, and the bathtub.

In Van Bladel’s reading, Khūzī was a language associated “with attendants responsible for baths and bodily waste”, and the kings and nobles who did speak it must have learned it from “nannies, wet-nurses, maids, and the like, as children”, not unlike how white elites in the Spanish Americas sometimes learned Nahuatl or Quechua from servants as children. So its social status was very low, explaining why it was never written down.

When did Khūzī go extinct? The last mention of the language in Islamic sources is by Al-Muqaddasi, a traveler who visited in the 980s. He reports that most people in Khuzestan were bilingual in Arabic and Persian and often mixed the two when speaking, but that in the town of Ramhormoz an incomprehensible language was still spoken. Al-Muqaddasi adds that being called “Khūzī” was perceived as an insult due to the low social prestige of the region’s native culture, its distinctive language presumably included.

With this final sad remark, perhaps the final stage of Elamite—a language more than three thousand years old at this point—passed into history.