Delanceyplace.com 08/22/06-Cleopatra

In today's excerpt, the Egyptian language becomes marginalized in Egypt for the first time in three thousand years after the country is subjugated by the Persians in 552 BC, who brought with them Aramaic, their official language. Then came Alexander the Great:

"When Alexander took the country in 332 BC, initiating three centuries of Greek rule, he found an administration run in Aramaic...but in general Aramiac was then replaced in official use by Greek. Although the Ptolemies took their role as Greek successors to the Pharoahs seriously, and Greek Egypt became an autonomous and prosperous country again, the Egyptian language was henceforth relegated to the extremes of sacred and profane: in the temples, and on the lips of the common people. Alexandria, which replaced Athens as the academic centre of the ancient world, was a Greek-speaking city. Famously, Queen Cleopatra, the last Ptolemy to rule (51-30 BC), was also the first to learn Egyptian--and that apparently only because she had a passion for languages.

"As Plutarch wrote in Antony, 'There was pleasure in the very sound of her voice. Like a many-stringed instrument, she turned her tongue easily to whatever dialect she would, and few indeed were the foreigners with whom she conversed through an interpreter, since she answered most of them in her own words, whether Ethiopian, Trogodyte, Hebrew, Arab, Syriac (Aramaic), Median or Parthian. The kings before her had not even had the patience to acquire Egyptian, and some had even been lacking in the Macedonian.'

"...Plutarch adds that Cleopatra is said to have spoken many other languages besides the ones he does mention. Most likely her amours with Caesar, and later Antony, were conducted in Greek."

Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word, Harper Collins, 2005, p. 131