Pehlevi (Middle Persian) versus Greek and Egyptian (2)

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The relationship between conqueror and conquered did nothing to bring the two peoples closer together. Persians had already long suffered from a negative prejudice (especially since Cambyses II), which the occupation reactivated and amplified, as shown by literary and, to a lesser extent, papyrological sources, rife with "misoperse" rhetoric, indicative of anti-Persian racism among Egypt's conquered.

Under these conditions, we can hardly expect Persian to have an impact on Greek and vice versa. Persian words have long been studied in Greek, but the impact of the Persian conquest on papyrus Greek has attracted less attention. It's true that we're quick to assess it. Leaving aside Iranian words that had already entered Greek and could therefore be encountered in papyri, only one Persian word passed into Greek between 619 and 629: σελλάριος, from the Persian sālār, denoting a wide range of officers and officials.

Οn recently sought to identify another term of Persian origin in a Greek document from Egypt: κάρδαξ, Middle Persian kārdāg "traveler, merchant", said to appear in an ostracon from the archives of Theopemptos and Zachariah(O.Petr.Mus. 529). But the re-edition of this text undertaken in seminar showed that it was a misreading.

Contemporary literary sources offer a little more material, but not much more. The richest testimony - admittedly not Egyptian but Palestinian - is the hagiographic record revolving around the figure of Saint Anastasius, a Persian soldier who became a monk in Palestine and was martyred by the Persians in 628. There are three Persian words in a passage recounting how Anastasius met martyrdom in Caesarea of Palestine(Vita et martyrium sancti Anastasii Persae, 17): besides σελλάριος, μαρζαβανᾶς, Persian marzbān, denoting the Persian governor in charge of frontier countries; and δερβᾶς, glossed as "the praetorium of the sellarios ", derived from Middle Persian dlp's /darbās/"palace". I proposed to identify it with the word ṭarāwus, which designates the Persian palace in Alexandria according to theHistory of the Patriarchs, written in Arabic, in a passage recounting the arrival of the Persians in Egypt and the capture of Alexandria. This is a second borrowing of Persian by the Greco-Egyptians during the conquest.

These two borrowings(sellarios and derbas) are confined to the institutional domain, precisely where the most superficial interferences occur and where we might expect conquered people to borrow from conquerors.
On the scale of various forms of multilingualism, the era of the Persian conquest thus offers the example of a degree zero (or almost). Conquerors and conquered seemed to coexist in separate worlds, with the latter, despite friction or conflict, continuing to live as before. Although the Persian conquest had virtually no linguistic or cultural impact, it nonetheless prepared the Egyptian population for another conquest fifteen years later, the consequences of which would irreversibly reshape Egypt's linguistic and cultural make-up.