So Latin spread pretty well across Europe, being the basis of almost every language there, but how come it didn’t take as strong a hold in the Middle East? It’s not as if the Romans were never there, and they lingered there far longer than they did in Europe. Was it just a matter of a stronger preexisting culture, or did the Arabs have something to do with it? What happened here?
All of this, but I will also add that at least part of it is because the Roman Empire already had a pretty strong administrative hegemony to work from in the the eastern empire because it consisted of the leftover rump states from the fall of the Hellenic (Greek) Empire under Alexander the Great. The existence of a unifying Greek administrative class (the infamous Byzantine Bureaucracy of which much ink has been spilled) made it viable to simply leave Greek as the administrative language of the east. Where they had to build their own institutional infrastructure from the ground up in the west which made the association with Latin as the language of leadership far easier, it was far less ubiquitous in the east where most officials outside the governor’s inner circle spoke Greek.