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Now before Psammetichus became king of Egypt, the Egyptians believed that they were the oldest people on Earth. But ever since Psammetichus became king and wished to find out which people were the oldest, they have believed that the Phrygians were older than they, and they than everybody else. Psammetichus, when he was in no way able to learn by inquiry which people had first come into being, devised a plan by which he took two newborn children of the common people and gave them to a shepherd to bring up among his flocks. He gave instructions that no one was to speak a word in their hearing; they were to stay by themselves in a lonely hut, and in due time the shepherd was to bring goats and give the children their milk and do everything else necessary. Psammetichus did this, and gave these instructions, because he wanted to hear what speech would first come from the children, when they were past the age of indistinct babbling. And he had his wish; for one day, when the shepherd had done as he was told for two years, both children ran to him stretching out their hands and calling "Bekos!" as he opened the door and entered. When he first heard this, he kept quiet about it; but when, coming often and paying careful attention, he kept hearing this same word, he told his master at last and brought the children into the king's presence as required. Psammetichus then heard them himself, and asked to what language the word "Bekos" belonged; he found it to be a Phrygian word, signifying bread. Reasoning from this, the Egyptians acknowledged that the Phrygians were older than they."

This story was told by the Ancient Greek historian and travel writer Herodotus, in his Histories. While Herodotus wrote the story down in the 5th century BCE, it concerns the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik I, Hellenized as Psammetichos, apparently actually probably pronounced in Egyptian as something like /psa'maːt͡ʃək/, (although Egyptologists would no doubt insist on pronouncing it as Pesmetchek, according to their peculiar pronunciation conventions), who reigned around 200 years earlier.

It is by far the oldest known reference to a kind of experiment that has provoked intrigue ever since, in the details of the experimental method, with its methodically unhinged cruelty, and then the genuinely fascinating question it aims to answer - what language, if any, do humans innately speak? And to some extent a version of this question persists to the present day. Even if no linguist would take the idea seriously that there is a particular language that is the innate language of humanity, that people would speak if they were not exposed to any other language, what remains to some extent an unsolved problem is whether or not there are certain features common to all languages that humans have a sort of innate capacity to understand, or whether every single aspect of language is purely a product of learning from the language that we are exposed to.

But now, back to Psamtik's experiment.

First question: did this actually happen?

Just how reliable Herodotus is as a historian is a complicated and controversial question. As far as I can tell, scholars far more knowledgeable than me have been arguing about this pretty much since his lifetime in the 5th century BCE, and they don't seem to be much closer to a final answer. Over the centuries, the man has picked up two nicknames: "the Father of History" and "the Father of Lies".

He did come out with some obviously false claims. For example he says that the Persian emperor Xerxes invaded Greece with a force of five million, two hundred and eighty three thousand, two hundred and twenty soldiers (not to mention camp followers). He also makes the bizarre claim that Persian names all end with a s sound. This is sort of mostly true for Greek versions of Persian male names (as it is for Greek male names), but absolutely not true for the names in Persian. Xerxes is a Hellenized form of Khshayarsha, for example. Then there's things like how in the far east of the Persian Empire there are ants the size of foxes that dig up gold dust, and this became a well-established cryptid over the subsequent centuries. Various explanations have been suggested, including one that I like about how he had acquired a garbled account of Himalayan marmots, that, in parts of the Karakoram Mountains, actually do dig up soil very rich in gold dust that the French explorer Michel Peissel claimed the local Brokpa people collect.

On the other hand, he doesn't seem to have just taken everything at face value. He was skeptical of plenty of things - for example, he remarks on a rumour among the Greeks and the Scythians that the Neuri, who inhabited parts of Eastern Europe, were in fact werewolves, saying "For my part I do not believe them when they say this, but they say it nevertheless, and swear it moreover". And this was a rumour that, around 500 years later, the Roman Geographer Pomponius Mela would take completely at face value. He's also extremely skeptical of the Poet Aristeas, who claimed that other parts of Eastern Europe were populated by the one-eyed Arimaspi, and griffins that guarded gold.

I think it's reasonable to suppose that in most cases Herodotus is reasonably faithfully reporting what his sources tell him, even if the sources themselves aren't necessarily particularly reliable. If people were in the habit of describing scientific experiments that Psamtik did, that does suggest something about the Pharaoh's reputation, and perhaps the sort of person he was or how he chose to present himself, even if it doesn't tell us with certainty that they actually happened.

Anyway, with that caveat, we can continue.

Herodotus writes that he learned about the experiment from the priests of Hephaestus, the God of volcanoes and metalwork (although given that this took place in Egypt, he's likely actually talking about priests of Ptah, the Egyptian god of craftsmen, who the ancient Greeks regarded as Hephaestus's Egyptian equivalent). Herodotus's account is the only account of this event that survives to the present day, but he mentions that other versions of the same story existed in Ancient Greece - especially with the gruesome detail of Psammetichus having achieved the linguistic isolation of the children by having them raised by women whose tongues he had cut out. There's also an argument that a version was apparently told in the Genealogies of Hecataeus of Miletus, which predates Herodotus by about a century, and only survives in fragments. So it's certainly likely that this was an already popular story in Greece at the time, rather than simply an invention of Herodotus. This is not an especially good reason to believe it actually happened, and even if Herodotus genuinely heard it from the priests of Ptah, it's not at all unlikely that they were recounting a legend or an urban myth, rather than a genuine historical event. Maybe the Egyptian priests were telling Herodotus their version of the story, one that portrays their own Pharaoh as a benign and curious investigator, who is committed to seeking truth to the point that he's willing to subject the deepest assumptions of his own civilisation to honest empirical investigation, rather than a brutal tyrant (although by our modern standards he still comes off looking pretty bad). Not actively cutting out people's tongues is a pretty low bar for benevolence, but I guess most pharaohs did much worse than even this.

A quick aside on the Phrygian language: It was spoken in Central Anatolia in antiquity, and was one of the most important languages of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean. It lasted right through the Roman period, and seems to have become extinct around the 5th century. Not much of it is known, and we only have fragmentary inscriptions. What we do know, though, is that bekos actually was the Phrygian word for bread. Interestingly, although not enough is known about Phrygian to say very much definitive about how it relates to other languages, it's reasonably certain that it was an Indo-European language, so distantly related to English, and it's even been suggested that bekos is cognate with bake.

One odd thing about this experiment is that The Egyptians seem like far more plausible candidates for the world's first people than the Phrygians. Ancient Egyptian civilisation was spectacularly old even at the time of Psamtik. After all, the Great Pyramid is from 2000 years earlier. The first known Phrygian text, however, dates from the 8th century BCE, only a few decades before Psamtik's experiment. And the Egyptians were well aware of their civilisation's extraordinary antiquity (as indeed were the Greeks). Herodotus himself doesn't explicitly say whether he considers Psamtik's conclusion to be plausible or not, but he doesn't generally seem to think of the Phrygians as being particularly special among the many nationalities he writes about.

I've see it suggested that this counts in favour of the story's truth, that the Egyptians wouldn't invent a story that showed that they were inferior to another civilisation. It certainly wasn't pro-Egyptian propaganda, but it's still quite possible it was made up. Other ideas I've come across are that this story might have been a Greek legend intended to make fun of Egyptians, stupid enough to consider the possibility that the Phrygians were older than them, or maybe that the Egyptian priests who Herodotus says he got the story from were telling him an absurd story as a prank.

If it did happen, we're left with three possibilities:

First, it's possible that the babies were simply babbling, as babies do. Maybe Psamtik, confidently expecting them to say something in either Egyptian or Phrygian, interpreted the nonsense sound reported by the shepherd as the closest Phrygian word he could think of. As Antoni Sułek points out though, it's implausible that the Egyptians conducting this experiment would have rendered random babbling as a vaguely-similar-sounding Phrygian word rather than a vaguely-similar-sounding Egyptian one (and apparently the ancient Egyptians had the word bek, meaning 'oily', 'white', or 'innocent', which would have presumably also been a decent approximation of whatever they decided sounded like bekos).

Another possibility is that the children were imitating the sound of the goats, which is the only sound they would have heard. This was apparently a fairly popular view in antiquity, but I don't really see any reason to believe this over the former idea. The other problem with this is that goats don't say bekos. If a goat came up to me and said bekos, I would be somewhat alarmed. If the children had said something like ma'a'a'a'a, this argument would be somewhat understandable, but bekos makes no sense - maybe something like be'e'e'e'kos, but even then it's silly, and there's probably an Egyptian word that would sound just as close.

Of course, one further possibility is that the children actually were saying the Phrygian word for bread, because Phrygian is the original language of humanity.

I think we need to also say a little bit about the pharaoh himself. We don't know all that much about Psamtik, on the whole. He's hardly Ramesses II or Tutankhamun or Khufu or Akhenaten or Cleopatra, and unless you're a huge Ancient Egypt nerd or Herodotus scholar, you've probably never heard of him, and if you have it's probably purely on account of this experiment.

When Psamtik came to the throne, the golden age of the Egyptian Old Kingdom, the age of the Pyramids, had ended around 1500 years ago. Even the New Kingdom, of Ramesses II, Tutankhamun, and the great monuments of Abu Simbel had come to an end amid the raids of the mysterious "sea peoples" over 400 years ago. Towards the end of what historians unimaginatively call the Third Intermediate Period, Egypt had been conquered by invaders from their comparably ancient rival civilisation of Kush, far up the Nile in present-day Sudan, who had formed the 25th dynasty, often known as the Black Pharaohs. After a few decades of Kushite rule, Egypt was invaded again, in the 670s BCE, by the Assyrian King Esarhaddon. Esarhaddon's successor, the better-known Ashurbanipal, completed the conquest, and in 664 BCE installed Psamtik, the son of Necho I, King of Sais in the Nile Delta, as one of twelve puppet rulers, ruling Sais and Memphis.

Herodotus tells us a story about Psamtik, this time that isn't about a strange experiment, but about a time when the twelve kings sacrificed to Ptah, and were about to offer the god wine. After the priest gave out the cups for the kings to pour the wine from, he found he'd miscounted. There were only eleven cups for twelve kings, and Psamtik was left without one. However, he was resourceful, and took off his bronze helmet to be filled with wine.

It turned out, though, that there was a prophecy that said whoever made an offering from a bronze cup would become the sole Pharaoh. So just to be safe, Psamtik was banished to the marshlands of the Nile Delta.

Now, if you're at all familiar with these kinds of stories, you might have guessed a broad outline of what happens next. Psamtik vowed revenge and consulted another oracle, this time the priest of the winged cobra goddess Wadjet, the patron of Lower Egypt, in the city of Buto. The priest told him that

"Vengeance would come when men of bronze appeared from the sea"

Psamtik was skeptical, but before long, a messenger brought news from the coast. Raiders had arrived. Ionians and Carians, from the west coast of Asia Minor, and they wore armour made from bronze.

Psamtik saw his chance, and promised the raiders handsome rewards if they would support him. And together, they overthrew Ashurbanipal's eleven puppet kings, and confirmed the prophecies of the priests of both Ptah, the creator, and Wadjet, the winged serpent of Lower Egypt. The men of bronze had arrived from the sea, and the man who had offered to Ptah from a bronze cup had become King.

It's not clear how much of this is true, even if it's a very good story. The bit about drinking out of the helmet sounds like the sort of thing that would be made up, but Psamtik did ally with Ionians and Carians, even if these were mercenaries he had requested from the King of Lydia, rather than raiders who just randomly showed up. But anyway, Psamtik conquered the Southern Egyptian city of Thebes in 656 BCE, arranging for Shepenupet II, the daughter of the first Kushite Pharaoh Piye and a powerful priestess of Amun known as the God's Wife, who had ended up as co-ruler of the city, to appoint his daughter as her successor, and Upper and Lower Egypt were now firmly unified under a single, Egyptian king, for the first time in well over a century.

Psamtik remained an ally of the crumbling Assyrian Empire, sending Egyptian troops to the Levant to fight against the numerous peoples - Medes from Northwestern Iran, Scythians from the Steppe, Babylonians and Chaldeans from Mesopotamia - who successively attacked their territory, and he died in 610 BCE, having established the 26th dynasty as rulers of Upper and Lower Egypt.

Like most Egyptian pharaohs, we don't know much about Psamtik's personality. However, there are hints that he had a reputation for scientific curiosity. Herodotus also tells us another anecdote about him and his scientific interests (this time he heard it from a scribe a the temple of Neith in Psamtik's home city of Sais). This time, the Pharaoh had an exceptionally long rope made, thousands of fathoms long, and attempted to measure the depth of the source of the Nile, at a point where he said it rose between two mountains, called Crophi and Mophi, near Aswan, with one half flowing North from there to Egypt and the other flowing South, further into Africa. The scribe told Herodotus that the currents were too strong for the rope to reach the bottom. This isn't anywhere near the actual source of the Nile, but in fairness, Herodotus said "To me however this man seemed not to be speaking seriously when he said that he had certain knowledge of it", and went to investigate the area himself, finding the first cataract of the Nile as you would expect, and describing how difficult it is to navigate the shallow waters and strong and unpredictable currents here.

This is bringing is in the direction of a question that came up earlier - whether the story of Psamtik's experiment was a Greek story or an Egyptian story. Herodotus says he heard it from the Egyptian priests of Ptah in Memphis, but also suggests another version of the story already existed as a Greek story, so the situation in that regard is complicated. What I think is a strong argument in favour of the Greek origin of the story, though, is its position in the history of scientific experimentation.

As you're likely aware, Ancient Egyptian civilisation was in many ways exceptionally technologically and intellectually sophisticated for their time. They had a remarkably sophisticated understanding of chemical processes - they developed new dyes and pigments from natural materials, they produced perfumes, they produced the oldest known glass objects from any civilisation in history. They had an in-depth understanding of astronomy for the time, enabling them to track the seasons from the positions of the stars, and align structures - most famously the pyramids, with celestial phenomena. In medicine, they demonstrated impressively detailed knowledge of anatomy (the amount of time they spent cutting up bodies and pulling the organs out to mummify them was no doubt helpful here). We have a few texts describing techniques for performing minor surgery, as well as a range of pharmaceuticals, a lot of which would actually have worked at least a bit.

As far as I can tell, though, there's not really any evidence that they designed experiments, in the strict sense. To get to their sophisticated medical, chemical and technological knowledge, they must have made and recorded observations, but there's nothing to suggest that these advancements were made by deliberately designing experiments, with dependent variables, independent variables, controls, and hypotheses. They could just as well have been the product of many generations of repeated trial and error.

Greek writers, though, tell us other instances of things that look a lot like experiments or thought experiments from the time of Herodotus and earlier - and remember Herodotus is early on the timescale of classical Greek scholarship, writing decades before Plato and about a century before Aristotle.

What Psamtik does is different from these other early examples of "experiments", and from other cases of empirically-derived knowledge that were already commonplace in Egypt and Mesopotamia and presumably basically everywhere since some early hominid worked out the best way of making flint spearheads by trial and error, in ways that seem oddly modern:

• The experiment is testing a hypothesis - that the Egyptians are the oldest people in the world. Psamtik was not simply measuring something, like he did when he measured the depth of the first cataract of the Nile.
• The result of the experiment is not known beforehand. Psamtik was not simply demonstrating a phenomenon that he had already observed, like Anaxagoras playing with his clepsydra. Something comparable to that would have been if it was already well-known that children who have not been exposed to language speak Phrygian, and Psamtik was showing someone this in order to reinforce his point that the Phrygians are the oldest nation. But this isn't the case. Psamtik didn't know beforehand whether the experiment would prove or disprove the hypothesis.
• The experimenter has deliberately engineered an unnatural scenario specifically to test the hypothesis. The children were not being kept isolated from language for any other reason than to test whether they would speak Egyptian. In this way it's different from the early hominid working out how to make flint spearheads, since the early hominid would have been making lots of spearheads anyway, and figuring out the optimal technique is just a fortunate side effect of that process.
• The hypothesis is general, rather than specific to these experimental subjects. Psamtik was not just trying to find out whether these children are inherently predisposed to speak Egyptian, he was generalising from the children involved in the experiment to children in general. In this way it's different from Croesus testing the reliability of the Oracles, in that he was only trying to find something out about those specific oracles, rather than oracles in general, or Xerxes testing whether his specific dream was genuine, rather than trying to find out something about dreams in general.

Presumably this isn't genuinely the first time anyone ever had the idea of an experiment. I would be surprised if no early hominid ever deliberately tested two different methods for making flint arrowheads to see which one was better. And the experiment Herodotus tells us Darius did, with the Greek and the Indian Cannibal, mostly fits these criteria as well (Darius had the hypothesis that everyone thinks their own culture is superior, he was testing something, as opposed to making a point by demonstrating an already-familiar phenomenon, he deliberately got the Greek and the Indian to explain their funeral practices, rather than simply observing them having a conversation, and he was trying to find something out about human cultures in general, rather than just these specific people's attitudes). On top of all that, Herodotus or whoever told him about Psamtik's experiment seems to have still basically understood the concept of an experiment as something someone might do, and what it might involve. It doesn't sound like the concept is particularly novel to Herodotus. But it does seem to be one of the earliest, and I'm by no means the first person to point this out an impressively early written account of a modern-style experiment as a formal, defined process.

Whether it happened or not isn't even all that relevant, since there's hardly a slew of written accounts of experiments between the 7th and 5th centuries BCE, and whether he knew it or not, the priest of Ptah who made the story up was certainly doing a thought experiment, even if he wasn't reporting the result of a real experiment.

Going back to the way there's no other evidence that the Ancient Egyptians really did experiments in a modern sense, that's often given as a strong piece of evidence that the story is indeed Greek in origin. Alan Lloyd points this out, saying that the idea of doing experiments to find things out is Greek in origin, as is the assumption that people will speak the language of their ancestors, and that all languages share a common ancestor (I will come clean here and say that I can't find a copy of Alan Lloyd's commentary on Herodotus for under £150, so I'm relying on how other authors quote him). He says in a footnote to a paper (which is on JSTOR, where I can get 100 free articles per month), that

"It is inconceivable that an Egyptian king could have proceeded in the way described by Herodotus. We can only assume that these interests have been foisted onto Psammetichos by Greeks themselves"

Linguistics was an issue that the ancient Greeks generally did take an interest in, including the origin of language. The result of the experiment that Herodotus reports - or even the assumptions underlying the methodology - certainly weren't taken for granted as linguistic fact. The anonymous text the Dissoi Logoi - "contrasting arguments" - written in Sicily in the late 5th century BCE, probably a few years after the death of Herodotus, argues that language is in fact something we learn, rather than being known innately.

"And if someone is not persuaded that we learn our words but thinks we are born knowing them, let him form a judgement from what follows: if someone should send a child away to the Persians as soon as he was born and should bring him up there, hearing nothing of the Greek tongue, he would speak Persian. And if one were to bring a Persian child here, he would speak Greek. We learn our words in this fashion and we don't know who our teachers are."

It's worth noting that this doesn't directly contradict Psamtik's assumptions. It could still be the case that if the child was not exposed to any language he would end up speaking Phrygian, but the author of the Dissoi Logoi is very insistent in general in this passage that language is learned, while Psamtik seems to take for granted that it's innate.

The debate about the innateness of language is one we're quite familiar with. Nobody important nowadays believes that any particular language is innately known, but Noam Chomsky's idea of Universal Grammar - that humans have an instinctive knowledge of certain aspects of language in general - is still fairly respectable. However, Psamtik's experiment also relates to other linguistic concerns of the ancient Greeks, many of which a modern linguist would consider to be quite strange, including concerning the origin of language, and where the meanings of words originate. Take as an example Plato's dialogue Cratylus, written presumably a few decades after Herodotus wrote about Psamtik's experiment in his Histories. It is concerned primarily with the idea of the "correctness of names" - that is, the question of why words mean the things they mean, and consists of a debate between two characters, Hermogenes and Cratylus, mediated by Socrates. Hermogenes advances the position that words have their meanings purely on account of convention. "Dog" only denotes the animal it does because English speakers all agree that it denotes that animal. This is the position held by basically all present-day linguists, apart from with a small handful of obviously onomatopoeic words. In ancient Greece, it had previously been held by the pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus, perhaps best known for his atomism - his now thoroughly-vindicated belief that all matter is made up of miniscule particles in constant motion. Hermogenes supports it by pointing out that people speak different languages with completely different words for the same things. The position taken by the title character, Cratylus, is much stranger from a modern perspective. Cratylus holds that there is some natural property of words that makes them particularly appropriate to use for particular meanings. There is something about dogs that makes the word "dog" particularly suited to them. Socrates challenges both Hermogenes and Cratylus. First he criticises Hermogenes's conventionalism, arguing that words are tools for the task of identifying distinct things. Tools have to be made for a specific purpose, and some tools are better for that purpose than others, so it must be the same with words. A word can be objectively well-suited or poorly-suited to the task of identifying the thing it's supposed to identify.

Socrates then proceeds to take wild stabs at the etymologies of various Greek words. For instance, he claims that "anthropos", the Greek word for "human", comes from "anathron ha opope", meaning "one who observes what he has seen", or that "phronesis", meaning "wisdom", derives from "phoras kai rhou noesis", meaning "perception of motion and flux". Here he's breaking down complex words into compounds of other words, and he even attempts to argue that maybe the individual words of which complex words are formed can be broken down into individual sounds that all contribute to the meaning. It's genuinely controversial what position Socrates ends up coming down on, and it's not completely clear how much of his etymological reasoning is intended sarcastically, or as a reductio ad absurdum, but he seems to end up at a compromise between the views of Cratylus and Hermogenes, where words are composed from parts that are supposed to have something to do with their meanings, but that the original process of assigning meanings was imperfect, and the meanings have changed since.

Later on, the Stoics would come to agree with the naturalist position from Cratylus, that words have particular natural connections to their meanings, in keeping with the overall Stoic belief in a logically ordered universe. They took this position to an extreme, attempting to develop their understanding of the universe and the Gods through the study of etymologies - indeed, the word etymology - whose own etymology is the Greek for the "study of the true sense of words" - was likely coined by the 3rd-century-BCE Stoic philosopher Chrysippus (who was reported to have died from laughing at a donkey eating figs). For example, the founder of Stoicism, Zeno of Citium, supports his claim that the primordial void of Greek mythology, called Chaos, was made of water, by deriving the word chaos from the verb kheesthiai, meaning "to be poured" (the two words are in fact completely unrelated), and Chrysippus was said to have believed that the name of Zeus, Zena in the accusative, was a result of the fact that he is the cause of all life, or zen in Greek (again, the two words are actually completely unrelated).

Epicurus lived between 341 and 270 BCE, so almost exactly contemporary with Zeno of Citium. Epicurus is notable for his materialistic worldview, and his atomism - i.e. his belief that all matter is made up of extremely small atoms that are in constant motion, following the view of the pre-Socratic Democritus - and nowadays he's best known for his ethics, in particular the claim that pleasure is the supreme good, and we should seek pleasure and avoid pain. As to the philosophy of language, Epicurus and his followers were less interested in the truths that can be learned from etymologies, and more interested in how humans began to develop the use of language. Epicurus rejected out of hand the idea that Socrates seems to take for granted in Cratylus, that there was someone or something that deliberately decided to exercise dictatorial power to allocate names, saying:

"…nor let us believe those philosophers who say that names were given to things by prescription and teaching so that men might have symbols of them for the sake of easy communication one with another. The idea is absurd, in fact it is more absurd than any absurdity as well as being quite impossible that anyone should bring together so many multitudes being only one himself-for as yet there were no kings nor even letters where there were no sounds-for as to these now for the mere collecting of these it needed a royal command for their collection to take place-and after bringing them together that he should instruct them like a schoolmaster, taking hold of a bough and touching each thing should say as he did so, 'This is to be called stone, and this wood, and this man'…"

Epicurus, much like his fellow atomist Democritus, claimed that the first people to use language made random noises based on just how things made them feel, and within each particular tribe they gradually agreed on noises corresponding to particular things to make it easier to communicate, and so was largely echoing the conventionalist view of Hermogenes in Cratylus, that the meanings of words are a matter of convention within a particular community. He wrote in his "letter to Herodotus" (writing to a completely different Herodotus to the one who we've already talked about, who had been dead for several decades):

"Thus names too did not originally come into being by imposition, but men's own natures underwent peculiar feelings and received peculiar impressions which varied from race to race, and they exhaled breath in a peculiar way according to each of the feelings and impressions, according also to the racial difference from place to place. Later, particular coinings were made by agreement within the individual races, so as to make the designations less ambiguous and more concisely expressed."

Diodorus Siculus, a Greek-speaking Sicilian historian from the 1st Century BCE, in his Bibliotheca Historica, a sprawling attempt in 40 books (of which only 15 survive in full) at chronicling the entire history of the known world from the origins of Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilisation to Caesar's Conquest of Gaul, which was pretty much contemporary at the time, similarly rejected the idea that there is an original, perfect language and instead claimed that

"Their words were confused, without any certain signification; but by degrees they spoke articulately, and making signs, and giving proper terms to every thing upon occasion. At length their discourse became intelligible to one another: but being dispersed into several parts of the world, they spoke not all the same language, every one using that dialect proper to the place, as his lot fell: upon which account there were various, and all sorts of languages in the world; and these associations of men first planted all the nations of the world."

It's interesting that both Epicurus and Diodorus are claiming that different groups independently invented language out of a sort of primitive grunting - in some sense kind of the absolute opposite of the idea that there is a particular primordial language, but at the same time supporting the idea that the capacity for language is an innate aspect of what it is to be human - a bit like modern theories of Universal Grammar - but that this has to be sort of activated by particular natural circumstances.

Lucretius, an atomist in the mould of Democritus, in his rather uninformatively-titled De Rerum Natura - "On the Nature of Things" - specifically makes a connection between how the first humans to speak used language, and how children communicate before learning to use language:

"But the various sounds of the tongue nature drove them to utter, and convenience moulded the names for things, not far otherwise than very speechlessness is seen to drive children to the use of gesture, when it makes them point with the finger at things that are before them."

Epicurus and Lucretius don't concern themselves particularly with whether or not words have any particular connection to the objects they represent. This reflects a general Epicurean concern with trying to establish material causes of things, rather than viewing the world in a teleological sense. To me, this feels far more modern than the view of Cratylus, or of the Stoics.

Psamtik's experiment sort of presupposes something a bit like the naturalist position - or at the very least it would certainly make no sense if Psamtik accepted the Conventionalist position of Hermogenes, or the account of Epicurus or Diodorus, whereby the original language that was innate would have just been a sort of meaningless caveman grunting, that would require the presence of a human society to be shaped into a coherent language. The Epicurean model isn't really compatible with the idea of the primacy of any particular language, and instead supposes that each separate community of people naturally develops their own language aligned with their own communication needs. I guess, considering there were two children, then in the Epicurean model they might have developed a language between themselves by gradually transforming their babblings into meaningful words, but this wouldn't correspond to any real language. Whereas, in the Stoic model, maybe they could be expected to instinctively hit upon the natural words for things, and maybe these correspond to their Phrygian words. And it's important to remember that Psamtik never considered the possibility that the children don't speak any language at all - the question was "which language will they speak?" not "which language, if any, will they speak?"

Of course, eventually the Romans would convert to Christianity, and the Classical World would begin to embrace another view of the origin of language, one that had already been popular among Jewish intellectuals for several centuries. The Bible is very clear that, shortly after creating the World, God spoke to Adam and Eve in some particular language. The story in the Bible, which you probably already know, is that in the first few generations after the flood, everybody on earth spoke the same language - presumably the same language spoken in the Garden of Eden. And then everyone decided to build a big tower all the way up to Heaven, God was pissed off and decided he would thwart their efforts by creating a huge and diverse and splendid array of languages that is fascinating and beautiful and miraculous but admittedly inconvenient if you're trying to organise a major construction project.

The Bible itself gives no information at all about what language was spoken before the Tower of Babel, but a story had developed, loosely based on the Bible, that explains it. Various Roman Christian theologians, including probably the most influential of them all, St Augustine of Hippo, wrote that there was one person who refused to help with building the Tower of Babel - Heber, or Eber, a great-great grandson of Noah and the ancestor of the Hebrews, who took their name from him. As a reward, the story goes that he was allowed to keep his original language (I'm not sure how much use this would have been when nobody else spoke it anymore), which was of course Hebrew, showing that that's the language God spoke to Adam. If the world's languages were confused by God at the Tower of Babel, it's presumably not possible to find deep truths about the world based on Greek etymologies. After all, the story of the Tower of Babel presents, if taken at face value without any augmentation, an argument for the equality of languages - that all the world's languages were created in the same moment of punishment, equally fallen and corrupt, with no connection to the divine language of Eden. It follows that there isn't one particular language for which the view of Cratylus is correct. However, if you believe the legend of Heber, you can still have something to cling on to.

As we leave the intellectual concerns of the pagan Ancient Mediterranean behind for those of the Medieval Mediterranean, dominated by the Abrahamic religions, the question of humanity's default language remained a source of great interest (and the story of Heber was not always accepted as fact). Next time, we're going to talk about another story, about another ruler, who claimed to have conducted his own version of this strange experiment.