The project LAREGRE focuses on a specific era – Late Antiquity, 200 to 600 AD – in a specific region of Africa – Egypt – and addresses the problem of quite a strong and specific linguistic policy enforced for the first time in that country by its governing powers. It aims to elucidate the reasons, the scope, and the results of that very policy from the documents that came to us from Late Antique Egypt though the medium of papyri sheets and fragments, preserved thanks to the dry climate and the sands.
The linguistic policy I refer to, implemented first by the Roman Emperor Diocletian, then followed by his successors even after the final partition of the Empire (AD 395), consisted in mandating several typologies of documents produced in provincial chanceries – official letters of reproach or recommendation, receipts for military supplies – and the main ones in Imperial capitals – Imperial orders, mostly – to be written entirely or partially in the Latin language, despite the fact that, after 395, the Eastern Roman Empire – and Egypt in particular, one of its wealthiest provinces – were for a vast majority using Greek for everyday communications, as well as their own local languages.
This policy, which forced any individual aiming at a career in civil or military administration to receive at least a smattering of Latin, created a market for Latin teaching – focusing on Roman literature and law – and established Latin as a language of cultivation and solemnity, only attainable by the wealthy and the scholarly, and a mark of being very high in the social ladder. Historians regard this policy as a novelty, for the Roman Empire had never actively tried to undermine the languages of the provinces it conquered or mandated a specific language for the drafting of document; Latin in the West and Greek in the East being the most widespread ones, they were also the expected languages in which documents were written.
Through gathering and categorizing the extant evidence in papyri that can be referred to this practice, LAREGRE investigates the reasons beyond this policy – to be traced back to the crisis the Roman state underwent in the third century AD –, the lengths it reached in the actual provincial offices, the tools employed to enhance Latin literacy in clerks and students, and the reactions it triggered among the Egyptian population; it also tries to understand, what was the degree of rigour demanded by offices in this respect, and how fast the policy declined, as the Eastern Roman Empire lost touch with the Latin-speaking West, until the Arabs took over and captured the country. This persistence of a language in a country where no one speaks it anymore (if anyone ever has), enforced by Imperial authority, speaks more of a symbolic than a practical necessity: Latin became in Late Antiquity the veritable language of the masters, there to remind the provincials on who was in charge.
This study is inspired by, and may relate to, contemporary or recent situations in which a foreign power effectively colonizes a country, and feels the need to underline and reinforce its authority through a linguistic policy where the language of the conqueror becomes the language of power in the conquered country: the voice through which the subjects are addressed, and the tool they must acquire if they have a mind at participating to the administration, if not the decision-making process, concerning their country.
