The first person to bring reports of cuneiform inscriptions to Europe
was Pietro della Valle, an Italian belonging to a Roman family of noble
birth. In the years 1614-26 he made a journey to Turkey, Egypt,
Palestine, Persia and India, and published an account of his travels in
1650, but the first communication of his discovery of cuneiform
inscriptions at Persepolis was contained in a letter written from Shiraz
and dated October 21st, 1621. Josafat Barbaro at the end of the
fifteenth century had already taken notice of the strange signs found on
the monuments at Persepolis, but Pietro della Valle was the first to
suspect that the inscriptions were something more than mere decorative
incisions on the rock. But though Pietro della Valle had made copies of
a few of the inscriptions on the walls of the ruined palaces of
Persepolis as early as 1621, to Chardin (1674) belongs the honour of
making the first copy of a complete cuneiform inscription, the so-called
“Window-Inscription,” the shortest of the trilingual Achaemenian
inscriptions, and his copy is to be found in the account of his travels
(published 1711). This same inscription was copied in 1694 by Kampfer,
who also copied the Babylonian text of the “H” inscription found at
Persepolis, and who was the first to adopt the term “cuneiform.” In the
work which he published in 1712 he discusses whether the unknown script
is alphabetic, syllabic, or ideographic, and decides in favour of the
last. In 1701, the Dutchman De Bruin commenced his travels: he devoted
the year 1704 to an examination of the ruins at Persepolis and ten years
later he published two new trilingual inscriptions in addition to an Old
Persian and a Babylonian inscription, but to copy was one thing and to
decipher was quite another, and well nigh a century elapsed before any
real progress was made towards the unravelling of these cryptic signs,
and the reconstruction of the languages which they embodied. In 1762 the
inscription on the Vase of Xerxes found by Count Caylus was published,
and a quadrilingual inscription of this king was published the same
year. In 1765 Carsten Niebuhr, a Dane, copied several Achaemenian
inscriptions at Persepolis, and pointed out that the first of the three
columns on each of the trilingual inscriptions that had been found,
contained only forty-two varieties of cuneiform characters from which he
surmised rightly that the system in the first column was neither
ideographic (each sign representing a word), nor syllabic (each sign
representing a syllable), but alphabetic. From 1798 onwards, Tychsen and
Münter, also a Dane, carried on the work begun by Niebuhr, and published
their results in 1802. Münter had correctly guessed that the ubiquitous
diagonal wedge ᐊ served to separate the words from each
other, and one word which occurred at the beginning of each inscription,
he rightly adjudged to be the word for “king.” In the meantime the
Zend[37] language of the later Zoroastrian faith had been rediscovered,
and with the aid of it, de Sacy had been able to decipher the Pehlevi[38]
inscriptions. Now only the older Persian inscriptions of the Achaemenian
kings awaited interpretation. In 1802 G. Friedrich Grotefend, of
Hanover, a schoolmaster by profession, entered the field, and by the
following process of reasoning he became the pioneer discoverer of part
of the Persian cuneiform alphabet, and the first decipherer of a
complete cuneiform inscription. Old writers had provided him with the
all-important information that the palaces of Persepolis, amid the ruins
of which so many of these cuneiform inscriptions had been found, were
built by the Achaemenian kings. The Pehlevi inscriptions moreover, which
had also been found on this site and had been deciphered by de Sacy, led
him to expect that the cuneiform inscriptions would contain something
analogous. Grotefend had already satisfied himself that the
inscriptions read from left to right, and selecting two short
inscriptions, one engraved on a gate-post of a building on the second
palace-terrace, and the other engraved on the wall of a building on the
third palace-terrace at Persepolis, he commenced his successful
investigations. Both inscriptions contained the group of signs which
Münter had already rightly inferred represented “king,” though what was
the Persian for “king” remained as yet unknown, the only difference
being that in Inscription I “king” was preceded by a group of signs
which may be conveniently designated “X,” while in Inscription II “king”
is preceded by a group of signs which may be called “Y,” and that
moreover in Inscription II “X” and the word for “king” following it
occurred after the “Y” + “king.” In I on the other hand “X” + “king” was
followed by another group of signs which may be labelled “Z,” without
however the usual accompanying “king.”
Thus I reads “X” + king......... “Z”.........
And II reads “Y” + king......... “X” + king.
From this, Grotefend concluded that the groups of signs “X” “Y” and “Z”
represented proper names, and that as “X” and “Y” were accompanied by
“king,” they must be king’s names, and lastly Achaemenian kings’ names,
for ancient writers stated that these palaces at Persepolis were built
by Achaemenian kings, and furthermore their position suggested that
these proper names must stand in genealogical relation to each other. In
I “X” must be the son of “Z,” and in II “Y” must be the son of “X”; “X”
and “Y” are accompanied with the sign for “king,” “Z” is not, therefore
“Z” the father of “X” is not a king, and consequently “X” is presumably
the founder of the dynasty. But apart from this hypothesis, some of the
names of the five kings composing the (fortunately) short Achaemenian
Dynasty—Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius, Xerxes and Artaxerxes—were at once
ruled out of court: thus Cyrus and Cambyses were out of the question,
for “X” and “Y” did not commence with the same cuneiform letter (it must
be remembered that it had already been rightly assumed that the system
was an alphabetic one), and moreover Cyrus’ father and son were both
named Cambyses, and accordingly if “X” were Cyrus then “Y” and “Z”
should be the same, which they are not. Cyrus and Artaxerxes were
likewise disqualified, as there was no such discrepancy in the length of
the words, there thus remained only Darius and Xerxes to be considered,
and as “X’s” father “Z” is not called king, and it is further known that
Hystaspes the father of Darius is not styled “king” by the classical
writers, “X” was rightly assumed to be Darius. Having ascertained the
oldest forms of the names of the Achaemenian kings in question from the
classical writers, and Hebrew and Persian literature, he applied these
forms to the groups of cuneiform signs which he had been led to believe
they represented, and he found the respective groups contained the same
number of individual signs as the proper names in question contained
letters, and for
“X” he accordingly read—D A R — — U SH = Darius
“Z” he read—G O SH T A S P = Hystaspes
— the Zend form of the name.
But “Y,” which on his hypothesis should be Xerxes, was not quite so easy
to explain. He already knew the values of four or five of the seven
signs composing group “Y,” and these known values occurred in the order
he expected, but the first and third signs in the group remained to be
dealt with. Grotefend observed that the first sign was the same as the
first sign of the group correctly guessed by Münter to represent “king”:
he ascertained that the Greek letter “x” was transliterated in the Zend
by “kh,” and rightly inferred that the Greek “x” commencing the proper
name Xerxes would be similarly transliterated by “kh” in old Persian, in
other words that the first sign in the group should be read “Kh.” The
result of Grotefend’s investigations was the discovery of the correct
values for eight letters in the Persian cuneiform alphabet, the letter
“a” having been already rightly read by Tychsen and Münter. His method
of decipherment was proved to be correct by the quadrilingual
vase-inscription already alluded to. The first version of this latter
inscription is written in Egyptian hieroglyphics and was deciphered by
Champollion as the name of Xerxes. The other three versions are written
in cuneiform characters, the first of which, the old Persian, gave
precisely the same group of signs as that which Grotefend read as Xerxes
on the inscription from Persepolis. As Sayce[39] well says, the
decipherment of cuneiform and all the far-reaching consequences
resultant from it, depended upon a successful guess, but a guess made
“in accordance with scientific method,” and it was upon Grotefend’s
discovery that all subsequent attempts to decipher cuneiform—Persian,
Median, or Assyrian—were based. But unfortunately, though Grotefend had
thus given the clue, and scented the track for all future scholars, his
own ignorance of eastern languages prevented him from reaping himself
the full harvest of his brilliant commencement, and the work so nobly
begun was not completed till a later day.
The next great step forward was taken by the French scholar Emile
Burnouf in 1836; he discovered that one inscription contained a list of
the satrapies, and as the names of the satrapies were known from the
Greek writers he was able on the partial knowledge of the alphabet
already attained, to fit in the names to the cuneiform signs, and as a
result he produced an alphabet of thirty letters mostly correct. About
the same time Lassen assigned the correct values to almost all the
letters in the alphabet, and further demonstrated that the language of
the inscriptions was akin to the language of the Zend and also to the
Sanskrit, though identical with neither.
Meanwhile Rawlinson had entered the field, and being attached to the
British Mission in Persia, he had opportunities which others lacked, his
position making it possible for him to copy and on a subsequent occasion
take squeezes[40] of the inscription on the sacred rock of Behistun,
which is filled with proper names. The French traveller Otter was
apparently the first European to draw attention to the inscribed rock of
Behistun, about the year 1734, and it is also mentioned by Oliver, but
the earliest reference to it is contained in the History of Diodorus
Siculus who flourished in the first century A.D. Kinneir who saw it in
1810 states that it is clear that the figures portrayed there are of the
same age and character as those from Persepolis. In 1818 Porter made a
sketch of the figures, but did not attempt to copy the inscription in
spite of the experience he had gained in copying the inscription at
Persepolis. The copying of it was no easy task, for Rawlinson had to be
lowered in a basket from the top, the ladders which he had with him not
being long enough to reach the upper part of the inscription from below.
He sent his copy[41] to Edwin Norris, the secretary of the Royal Asiatic
Society, who carefully revised it, and in 1849 an analysis and
commentary on the text was published. With Rawlinson and Norris must be
mentioned the Irish clergyman Hincks, who with his unrivalled genius in
the decipherment of inscriptions was the first to discover that the
alphabet was not a true one, but that a vowel-sound was attached to each
of the consonants; and also Beer Holtzman and Westergaard, all of whom
contributed to the work of investigation and made discoveries in regard
to both the grammar and lexicon. Rawlinson cannot indeed claim to have
actually discovered the first clue which led to the decipherment of
cuneiform, but his translation of the Behistun inscription was
unquestionably the most valuable contribution ever made towards the
unravelling of the old Persian language. His work was moreover at first
quite independent of Grotefend’s, and without any assistance from the
latter he had deciphered the names of Cyrus, Hystaspes and Darius on the
inscriptions from Elvend and Hamadan as early as 1835. Thus the efforts
of half a century resulted at length in the discovery of a new alphabet
and the resurrection of an old language. The Persian texts on the
inscriptions were accompanied by two other texts, which as Grotefend
divined must have been the two other principal languages used in the
Persian Empire. The third text closely resembling the inscriptions on
bricks and cylinder seals found in Babylon was naturally and correctly
assumed to be Assyrian.[42] The decipherment of this third transcript
was fraught with difficulties of every description; there was such an
endless variety of signs of a simple and complex order, and there was
nothing whatever to indicate where a word or a sentence started or
finished, and further the characters on the monuments from Persepolis
differed very considerably from those found on the Babylonian monuments,
which also varied among themselves very greatly. On the seal-cylinders
they were especially complicated, and it was almost impossible to see
any resemblance whatever between the characters on the latter and those
of the Persepolitan inscriptions.
But light was to come from another quarter: in 1842 Botta, French Consul
at Mosul, began excavating on the site of Nineveh, but not meeting with
success he transferred his operations to Khorsabad further north, and
there excavated a large palace which subsequently turned out to be that
of Sargon. In 1845 Layard entered the field, and carried on most
successful excavations at Nimrûd (the ancient Calah) and then at
Kouyunjik, one of the mounds which represents the site of Nineveh.
Botta published the inscriptions he had found in 1846-50, and also
classified the signs, which numbered 642, while he further demonstrated
the identity of the cuneiform system of the Nineveh inscriptions with
that of the third column on the Persepolitan monuments, but it was
reserved for the incomparable Hincks to discover the fact that the
Assyrian cuneiform system was syllabic and not alphabetic like the
Persian.
The proper names in the Persian columns gave the first clue to the
decipherment of the Assyrian columns. The values thus obtained for some
of the Assyrian signs made it possible to read many of the words, their
meanings being determined by a comparison with the Persian columns. It
was then seen that Assyrian was a Semitic language and resembled Hebrew
in particular; this was proved conclusively by De Saulcy in 1849. In
1850 Rawlinson submitted a translation of the inscription on the Black
obelisk of Shalmaneser II to the Royal Asiatic Society, a translation
which was in the main correct, and in the following year he published
the text and translation of the Assyrian transcript on the Behistun
inscription, and announced two facts, one already known, namely that the
Assyrian signs can be used ideographically, i.e. to denote an object or
idea, as well as to represent merely a syllable, the other fact was that
the characters were polyphonous, i.e. could represent more than one
syllable each: this was again proved to demonstration by the redoubtable
Hincks. Both facts alike argued that the cursive Assyrian cuneiform had
its origin in picture writing, for in the latest times when cuneiform
was as it were fully stereotyped, the signs were still used alone singly
to represent an object or an idea, and also the polyphonous character of
the individual signs testified to the same origin, for example the
picture of an arm would signify not merely an “arm” but also
“strength,” “might,” “grasp,” etc., and thus though the sign would—at
least originally—only have one general idea attached to it, it would
have quite a number of phonetic values: these phonetic values would in
the first be inseparably connected with the root _idea_, but in time
when the sign had become cursive and developed and no longer resembled
the original picture, the various phonetic values of the sign would not
necessarily have anything whatever to do with the original root idea.
For example, a character with the _meaning_ and _phonetic_ value of the
word “_win_,” would in later times come to represent the syllable
“_win_” quite apart from the basis meaning of the word win, thus the
sign could be used to represent the first syllable in the word
_win-ter_.
In 1857 the Royal Asiatic Society proposed to test the reliability of
the translations put forward by scholars of the Assyrian inscriptions in
the following manner: some eight hundred lines of cuneiform writing
contained on clay cylinders found by Layard at Ḳalat Sherḳat, the
ancient Ashur, were to be independently translated by any scholars who
were prepared to accept the proposal; the translations were to be sent
under seal to the society’s secretary, and were to be opened together
and examined before a commission on a set day. Rawlinson, Fox Talbot,
Hincks and Oppert entered the lists, and on May 25th their respective
products were opened and compared. The great similarity which they all
displayed afforded conclusive proof as to the correctness of the method
of decipherment, and demonstrated finally that the investigations
carried on, together with the results of those investigations, had not
been mere speculative guesses, but were based on sound scientific
principles.
Many other scholars deserve our gratitude for the share they took in the
decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions, of whom one may perhaps
specially name Westergaarde, Löwenstern, De Saulcy and Longperier, but
for an account of the particular achievements of each, the reader must
refer to general works on the subject.[43]