THE DISCOVERY AND DECIPHERMENT OF THE INSCRIPTIONS
The Site of Babylon.--The site of Babylon was never forgotten. In the
twelfth century, Benjamin of Tudela describes the ruins of
Nebuchadrezzar's palace which he saw there, and in 1573 the English
traveller Eldred visited the spot, and found the Tower of Babel in the
Birs-i-Nimrud, which he states to be a mile in circumference and about
as high as St. Paul's Cathedral. Other travellers have left notices of
the ruins. But the first to explore them scientifically was Rich, the
Resident of the East India Company at Bagdad, who surveyed and made a
map of them. His work on the site of the old city was published in
1811. But it was not until 1850 that the first excavations were made
by Sir A. H. Layard, which were followed in 1851-4 by the French
expedition under Fresnel, Thomas, and Oppert. The fruit of the
expedition was an elaborate memoir by Oppert, which marks an epoch in
the history of cuneiform decipherment, and determined the ancient
topography of Babylon. The excavations were resumed by Sir H. Rawlinson
in 1854, who discovered the architectural records of Nebuchadrezzar, at
the same time that other ancient sites of Babylonian civilization were
being excavated by Loftus and Taylor. At a much later period (in 1879
and 1882) the work of excavation was again taken up by Mr. Hormuzd
Rassam, who discovered the site of Sippara, and disinterred the ancient
temple there of the Sun-god. Equally important were the discoveries
made by the French consul, M. de Sarzec, in 1877-81 at Tello (the
ancient Lagas) in southern Chaldaea. Monuments of the early Sumerian
period of Babylonian history were brought to light, including seated
statues and bas-reliefs, which are now in the Museum of the Louvre.
The Site of Nineveh.--The identification of Nineveh was less easy than
that of Babylon. Its site was lost, although the natives of the
district had not altogether forgotten the name of Nunia, and Niebuhr in
the last century, believed that it marked the site of the Assyrian
capital[1]. But its real discovery was due to Rich. Shortly before his
visit to Mosul a bas-relief had been found on the opposite side of the
Tigris, which the Mohammedans had destroyed as being the work of the
'infidels.' His examination of the mounds from which it had come led to
the discovery of walls and cuneiform inscriptions, which left no doubt
in his mind that the site was that of Nineveh. He accordingly drew up a
map of the ruins, which he sent to Europe along with his collection of
Babylonian and Assyrian antiquities. A single case, three feet in
diameter, was sufficient for their accommodation in the British Museum.
[1] In Dapper's _Circumstantial Description of Asia_, it is
stated that opposite Mosul is 'a little town called up to the
present day by Arab writers Nennouwi, and by the Turks Eski
Mosul,' or Old Mosul.
Excavations.--These antiquities, however, inspired the French _savant_,
Mohl, with the conviction that if excavations were undertaken at the
place where they had been found, important results would follow.
Accordingly, he induced Botta, who had been sent as French Consul to
Mosul in 1842, to commence digging there the following year. Botta was
led by a native to the mound of Khorsabad, and his labours were soon
rewarded by the discovery of Assyrian sculptures covered with cuneiform
writing. The French government granted funds for the continuation of
the work, and before 1845 the palace of Sargon was laid bare.
Meanwhile Layard had arrived on the spot, and with the help of funds
principally supplied by Sir Stratford Canning, had opened trenches in
the mound of Nimrud (the ancient Calah). The spoils of the palaces he
found here were transported to England in 1847. Among them was the
famous Black Obelisk, on which mention is made of Jehu of Israel. At
Kouyunjik also, among the ruins of the palaces of Sennacherib and
Assur-bani-pal, excavations had been begun. But it was only after the
return of Sir A. H. Layard to Mosul in 1849, with a grant from the
British Museum, that a systematic exploration of this mound took place.
Assisted by Mr. Hormuzd Rassam, he discovered here the libraries of
clay books from which most of our knowledge of Assyria and Babylonia
is derived. Excavations were further undertaken at Kalah Sherghat
(the ancient Assur), where the records of Tiglath-pileser I were
disinterred, in the ruined palaces of Sennacherib and Esar-haddon at
Nebi Yunus, at Arban on the Khabour (the ancient Sidikan), and at
several other places. When the work was closed in 1852, a new world of
art and literature had been revealed. Nothing further was done till
the beginning of 1873, when George Smith was sent to Nineveh by the
proprietors of the _Daily Telegraph_ in order to search for the missing
portions of the Deluge-tablet, and a year later he was again sent out
to excavate by the British Museum. After his death, near Aleppo, in
1876, the excavations were entrusted to Mr. Hormuzd Rassam, who, in
1878, discovered the bronze gates of Balawat, and three years later the
site of Sippara in Babylonia, as well as a library in the temple of its
Sun-god. A similar library has since been discovered (in 1891) by the
American expedition in the mounds of Niffer, where monuments of Sargon
of Accad (B.C. 3800) have been brought to light.
The Decipherment of the Inscriptions.--The decipherment of the
cuneiform texts has been one of the scientific triumphs of the present
century. The key was given by the inscriptions on the ruined palaces
and tombs of ancient Persia. Travellers at an early date had noticed
these inscriptions at Persepolis and elsewhere, and while some compared
the forms of the characters composing them to arrows, others considered
them to be wedges, _cunei_ in Latin. The latter comparison was the
origin of the term 'cuneiform,' ordinarily applied to them. We find it
already used by Hyde in his _Historia Religionis veterum Persarum_,
which was published at Oxford in 1700[2].
[2] Hyde's words are 'ductuli pyramidales seu cuneiformes.'
The Italian traveller, Pietro della Valle, in 1621, was the first who
made the characters known in Europe by printing a few of them; at the
same time he put forward the correct suggestion that the inscriptions
were to be read from left to right. A more important collection of
signs, however, was published in 1693, in one of the early volumes (No.
201) of the _Philosophical Transactions_ of the Royal Society from the
papers of Mr. Flower, who had been specially charged by the East India
Company with the duty of investigating the antiquities of Persia. But
it was not till the middle of the eighteenth century that Cornelius van
Bruyn (1714) and Carsten Niebuhr (1774-8), the father of the historian,
first copied and published the inscriptions in anything like a complete
and accurate manner. Niebuhr further pointed out that they comprised
three different systems of cuneiform writing, which in the case of
every text followed one another in a regular order. The first system of
writing was the simplest, as it consisted of only forty-two different
characters, whereas the number of characters in the second and third
systems was very large.
With Niebuhr's publication the work of decipherment became possible.
In 1798, Professor Tychsen, of Rostock, discovered that in the first
system an oblique wedge was used to divide the words from one another,
and in 1802 the Danish Bishop, Muenter, starting from this basis,
showed that the language possessed suffixes, pointed out that certain
characters denoted vowels, and even divined the word for 'king,' as
well as the value of two letters, one of them being _a_. He also
maintained that while the first system of writing was alphabetic,
the second was syllabic, and the third ideographic, and that as
the inscriptions were found in Persia and on the buildings of the
Achaemenian kings, the text which always comes first must represent
the language of ancient Persia, which he identified, though
erroneously, with Zend.
It is, however, to George Frederick Grotefend, of Hanover, that the
discovery of the key which has unlocked the secrets of cuneiform
literature is really due. On September 4, 1802, he read before the
Royal Society of Goettingen a Memoir, in which he announced his
discovery of the names of certain Achaemenian kings in the cuneiform
inscriptions, and explained the method by which he had arrived at his
results. By a curious coincidence it was at the same meeting of the
Society that Heyne described the first efforts that had been made
towards deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Grotefend first showed
convincingly that the inscriptions must be read from left to right, a
portion of a word which ends a line on the right side in one of the
texts beginning the next line on the left side in a duplicate copy of
it. He next pointed out that the analogy of the Sassanian inscriptions,
which had just been deciphered by de Sacy, indicated that the
Persepolitan texts must commence with the names of the kings who had
erected the monuments, followed by their titles, and that a comparison
of the texts one with another made it pretty evident that such was
actually the case. In this way he succeeded in finding (like Muenter
before him) the word for 'king,' and in addition to this the royal
names preceding it. Those on the Persepolitan monuments represented a
father and a son, though in certain cases the father added his own
father's name, but without the royal titles. Thanks to the classical
writers, it was known that the monuments were of Achaemenian origin,
and the names of the Achaemenian kings had also been preserved. It only
remained to fit them to the characters in the cuneiform texts.
Hystaspes, Darius, and Xerxes alone suited, since Cyrus was too short
and Artaxerxes too long; moreover, the letters _a_, _r_, and _sh_, in
the names of Darius and Xerxes appeared in their right places if these
names were adopted. So, too, did _a_ and _sh_ in the name of Hystaspes.
Such a coincidence was sufficient to prove that Grotefend was right in
his guess that the words in question represented proper names, for
guess it was, though founded on strong probability and scientific
induction. He had noticed that two of the names (those of Darius and
Xerxes) occurred separately on two particular groups of monuments,
whereas the word which followed them was always the same. It was
natural to conclude that the latter word denoted 'king,' while those
which preceded it were proper names.
The alphabet Grotefend had constructed out of the proper names enabled
him to read the word for 'king,' and thus to show its near affinity to
the corresponding word in Zend. But he was a classical scholar rather
than an orientalist, better known by his Latin grammar than by his
knowledge of Eastern languages, and consequently as soon as his
pioneering work of decipherment was accomplished, he lacked the
philological knowledge which would have allowed him to continue it.
Moreover, he was hampered by the false theory that the language of the
inscriptions was identical with Zend. The next step of importance was
taken by Rask in 1826, who discovered the termination of the genitive
plural and the true reading of the title 'Achaemenian.' Rask was
followed in 1836 by the great Zendic scholar Burnouf at Paris, and
by Lassen at Bonn. Burnouf demonstrated that the language of the
Achaemenian texts was not Zend, but a sister dialect spoken in western
Persia, and his discovery of the names of the satrapies, in one of the
inscriptions copied by Niebuhr, enabled him and Lassen simultaneously
almost to complete what we may henceforth call the Old Persian
alphabet. A few corrections in it were subsequently made by Beer,
Jacquet, Holzmann, and Lassen himself.
Meanwhile a young English officer in the East India Company's service,
now Sir Henry Rawlinson, had been working in Persia unassisted, and at
a distance from libraries, upon the Old Persian texts. He knew that
Grotefend had discovered in them the names of the early Achaemenian
monarchs, and with this clue he set himself to construct an alphabet
and interpret the inscriptions. He soon found means of providing
himself with fuller materials for the work of decipherment than those
at the disposal of scholars in Europe, by copying the great inscription
which Darius had caused to be engraved on the sacred rock of Bagistana
or Behistun in commemoration of his accession to the throne of Persia,
and re-conquest of the empire of Cyrus. The task of copying the
inscription--by far the longest Persian one known--was an arduous
one, and not unattended with danger, and it occupied several years.
Rawlinson first saw the inscription in 1835; it was not till 1839 that
the whole of it was copied. A few years later he revised it again, but
his memoir upon it and upon the other Old Persian texts was not ready
for publication till 1845. In the following year the text was published
by the Royal Asiatic Society, and the translation and commentary
followed in 1849. Dr. Hincks, of Dublin, had already (in 1846) given
the last touch to the decipherment of the Old Persian alphabet by the
discovery that the consonants composing it contained inherent vowels.
As we have seen, Niebuhr had perceived that the Persepolitan
inscriptions were in three different systems of writing. But it was
only after the decipherment of the Persian texts that it was found that
the three systems of writing embodied three separate languages, and
belonged to three separate countries. As in modern Turkey a governor
has to issue an edict in agglutinative Turkish, Semitic Arabic, and
Aryan Persian, so too in ancient Persia a king who wished to be
understood by all his subjects had to appeal to them in the Aryan
language of Persian itself, in the Semitic language of Babylonia and
Assyria, and in the agglutinative language of Susiania or Elam. When
the second and third systems of writing came to be read it was
discovered that the second contained the script and language of
Elam--sometimes, but incorrectly, called Scythian, Medic or Protomedic,
sometimes, more properly, Amardian or Neo-Susian--while the third was
Babylonian. The three capitals of the empire, Persepolis, Susa and
Babylon, were thus each of them represented.
The number of characters used in Amardian, though large, was limited,
and accordingly, with the help of the proper names occurring in the Old
Persian texts, a syllabary, or list of characters each expressing a
syllable, was soon formed and the work of translation commenced.
Westergaard, the Dane, who had already travelled in Persia, and there
copied the inscription on the tomb of Darius at Naksh-i-Rustem, led the
way in 1845. He was followed by Hincks, de Saulcy, and above all Edwin
Norris, the learned Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, who
published in 1853 the Amardian (or as he called it the 'Scythic')
version of the Behistun inscription, with an elaborate translation,
commentary, and vocabulary. Further progress, in the study of the
language was made by Oppert, whose book _Le Peuple et la Langue
des Medes_ (1879) is a monument of systematic research. Sayce's
decipherment of the inscriptions of Mal-Amir, south-east of Susa, in
1884 (in the Proceedings of the Sixth Oriental Congress), showed that
we must look to that part of Susiania for the origin of the Amardian
syllabary and dialect. The language was, in fact, one of the
agglutinative dialects spoken in Elam, the native language of Susa
itself being closely related to it. Unfortunately, however, there is no
known language with which the dialects of ancient Elam can be compared,
and consequently our knowledge of them hardly extends beyond the help
afforded by the trilingual Persian texts.
The decipherment of the third system of writing long seemed to baffle
the inquirer. The characters were multitudinous, some of them were
plainly ideographs, denoting ideas and not letters or syllables, while
the same character did not always appear to have the same value.
Moreover, the belief that the characters must represent alphabetic
letters long stood in the way of the decipherer. Grotefend had already
observed that they resembled in form the characters found on some of
the antiquities which came from Babylonia, but it was not till after
the excavation of Nineveh that any serious effort was made to decipher
them. Botta and Layard, at the very outset, pointed out that the script
used in Assyria was the same as that of the third Achaemenian system,
and thus attracted fresh attention to the latter. Loewenstern was the
first to attack the problem in 1845. His first essays, however, were
unsuccessful, like those of de Saulcy in 1847, and his second
publication (in 1847) did little more than establish the fact that the
same name might be written with different signs. In the same year de
Longperier correctly deciphered the words and ideographs denoting
'palace,' 'king,' 'great,' and the like, though without being able to
read phonetically any one of them. But in 1848 Botta published the
numerous inscriptions he had discovered at Khorsabad, at the same time
subjecting them to a careful analysis. He divided them into words,
wherever it was possible, noting the variations in writing the same
word, and drawing up a list of 642 classified characters. He further
proved that the terminations or suffixes of words in the Assyrian texts
agreed with those of the third Achaemenian system, an indication that
the language was the same as well as the script. Finally he made it
clear that the script contained not only phonetic characters, but also
ideographs, and he correctly determined many of these ideographs,
including that which denotes plurality. All that was now needed was to
discover the phonetic equivalents of the characters.
This was done half a year later by de Saulcy, who analyzed the
Babylonian transcript of the Achaemenian inscription at Elwend, and
gave phonetic values to 120 characters. He was, however, still under
the belief that they represented letters instead of syllables, and was
consequently obliged to admit the existence of 'homophones.' The fact
that they really represented syllables,--_ba_, _bi_, _be_, _bu_,
&c.--was discovered by Dr. Hincks immediately afterwards (1847 and
1850). Hincks also discovered the name of Nebuchadrezzar in the
Babylonian inscriptions, and by the further discovery that an
inscription brought from Babylon by Sir Robert Ker-Porter, which was
written in the complicated characters of early Babylonia, was a
duplicate of one in the 'Neo-Babylonian' characters of the Achaemenian
era, he made it possible to read the oldest forms of Babylonian script.
From this time forward the work of decipherment went on apace. The
Semitic character of the Assyro-Babylonian language, which had been
guessed at by Loewenstern, was now put beyond question, and the
well-known laws of Semitic grammar came to the help of the student in
reading the text. In 1851 Rawlinson published the Babylonian text of
the Behistun inscription, and in his commentary upon it announced to a
wondering and incredulous world the existence in Assyrian of
'polyphones.' If the method of decipherment were right, it was
necessary to assume that the same character could have more than one
phonetic value. The cause of this extraordinary fact--which, however,
is paralleled in Old Egyptian as well as in Japanese--was soon made
clear by Oppert, Hincks, and Rawlinson himself. The Assyrian syllabary,
which had originally been a collection of pictorial hieroglyphs, was
not the invention of the Semitic Babylonians, but of an earlier people
who spoke an agglutinative language, and to whom the name of Accadians
or Sumerians was given. When the script was adopted by the Semites, the
Sumerian words denoting the objects or ideas for which the characters
stood became phonetic values; thus _du_ 'to go' and _gub_ 'to stand'
became the phonetic values of the character which had originally been a
picture of a human leg.
The interpretation of the Assyrian and Babylonian texts now advanced
rapidly, in spite of the smallness of the body of students, and the
incredulity of Orientalists, especially in Germany. In 1847 Rawlinson
was able to give a fairly complete account of the several varieties of
cuneiform writing, and in 1850 he published a translation of the long
inscription of Shalmaneser II on the Black Obelisk of Nimrud. The
translation is on the whole marvellously correct, and proves
conclusively the soundness of the method on which it was based. The
proper names, however, were still but imperfectly read, and it was not
till Hincks discovered the names of Jehu and Omri in the inscription
(in 1851) that the age of it could be fixed. Shortly afterwards Hincks
deciphered the names of Hezekiah and Jerusalem in the texts of
Sennacherib, as well as the name of Sennacherib himself, and thus
showed that Longperier had been right in his conjecture that the king
of the Khorsabad monuments was Sargon. The foundation of Assyrian
grammar was next laid by Hincks in 1855 in a series of remarkable
articles on the Assyrian verb, to which the progress of discovery has
since added little that is important. A complete and systematic grammar
itself was first written by Dr. Oppert in 1860, and eight years
afterwards M. Menant analyzed his results and tested their correctness.
The Decipherment tested.--Orientalists, however, still looked askance
at the new science which threatened to dwarf the older Semitic
learning. The Council of the Royal Asiatic Society, accordingly,
determined to subject it to a conclusive test. Copies of the annals of
Tiglath-pileser I, which had been found at Kalah Sherghat, were sent to
Rawlinson, Hincks, Fox Talbot, and Oppert; they were asked to translate
them independently of one another, and send the translations under seal
by a given date to the Secretary of the Society. When the translations
were opened they were found to be in substantial agreement. This was in
1857, a year which we may therefore regard as closing the first epoch
of decipherment.
Sumerian.--The decipherment of the Assyrian texts brought with
it the decipherment of the Sumerian texts. The library of Nineveh was
stocked with tablets intended to facilitate the study of the old
language of Chaldaea. Among them are grammars, vocabularies, and
reading-books, as well as interlinear or parallel translations of
Sumerian texts in the Semitic language of Babylon and Assyria. Oppert
in his _Expedition scientifique en Mesopotamie_ led the way to the
use of them in 1859, and the outlines of Sumerian grammar were first
sketched by Sayce in 1870, followed by Lenormant in 1873. Since then
the labours of Lenormant, Haupt (who demonstrated the existence of two
Accado-Sumerian dialects), Hommel, Amiaud, Ball and others, have given
us an extensive knowledge of the primitive language of Babylonia.
Vannic.--Northward of Assyria, in Ararat, the modern Armenia, the
cuneiform script of Nineveh had been borrowed in the ninth century B.C.
As the characters of the script continued to preserve their Assyrian
values there was no difficulty in transliterating them, and as early as
1852 Hincks read the names of the kings they had been employed to
write, and even used them in determining the values of the characters
found at Nineveh. The majority of the inscriptions, which had been
copied by Schulz at the cost of his life in 1829, and published in
France in 1840, were met with in the neighbourhood of Van; hence the
term 'Vannic' which is usually applied to them. The language in which
they are written was however utterly unknown, and bore no obvious
relationship to any with which we are acquainted; consequently though
the texts could be transliterated they could not be translated. More
than one attempt was made to decipher them, but to no purpose, until
1882 when Guyard pointed out that the formula with which many of them
end corresponds with the imprecation often attached to the Assyrian
inscriptions, and Sayce, following up this clue, with the help of the
ideographs borrowed from Assyria, finally succeeded in solving the
problem. A bilingual text (Assyrian and Vannic), recently discovered by
M. de Morgan in the pass of Kelishin in Kurdistan, has verified the
correctness of his results, which have been further modified or
extended by D. H. Mueller, Belck, and Lehmann.
Other Languages.--Yet two more languages written in the cuneiform
syllabary have lately been revealed by the cuneiform tablets found at
Tel el-Amarna in Upper Egypt. One was the language of Mitanni, the
Aram-Naharaim of the Old Testament, in which there is a long letter
from the king of Mitanni to the Egyptian Pharaoh. The other language,
which is quite distinct from that of Mitanni, was spoken at Arzawa in
northern Syria. Both languages are still undeciphered[3].
[3] For the language of Mitanni, called that of Su(ri) in the
Assyrian lexical lists, see Jensen, Bruennow, and myself in the
_Zeitschrift fuer Assyriologie_, v. 2, 3 (Aug. 1890), and for
that of Arzawa see my letter to the _Academy_, Aug. 20, 1892,
pp. 154, 155.
The origin of the Cuneiform Syllabary.--As we have seen, the pictorial
origin of the cuneiform characters was perceived in the early days of
Assyrian decipherment, as well as the cause of their polyphony. Their
wedge-like forms were due to the use of clay as a writing material. The
impression made by the stylus upon it resembled a wedge; curved lines
became angles, and after a time the original picture passed into a
conventional form. In the course of centuries the characters grew more
and more simplified by the omission of unnecessary wedges, the least
complicated being those of the official hand of Assyria, and the later
Babylonian or Persepolitan script. It must not be supposed, however,
that when the system of writing ceased to be pictorial it was already
complete. Down to a comparatively late period new characters were
invented or old characters combined in a new way, while new phonetic
and ideographic values were assigned to the characters which already
existed. Though the syllabary is essentially of Sumerian origin there
is much in it which is traceable to a Semitic source. Many of the
values given to the characters as well as many of their ideographic
meanings are Semitic. Moreover the Sumerians and Semites lived in
contact with one another long after the adoption of Sumerian culture by
the Semitic nomads; consequently not only did the Semites borrow
Sumerian words, the Sumerians borrowed Semitic words, more especially
in the northern part of the country. The early date at which some of
these were borrowed is shown by their having undergone the phonetic
changes which distinguished the northern Accado-Sumerian dialect from
the southern. False etymologizing also has given rise to new values
just as it has given rise to new spellings in English. The Semitic
scribes of a later day were as fond of deriving Semitic words from
Sumerian as our own etymologists used to be of deriving Teutonic words
from Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. Thus the purely Semitic _sabattu_
'Sabbath,' from _sabatu_ 'to rest,' is derived from the two Sumerian
words _sa_ 'heart' and _bat_ 'to complete,' and interpreted to mean 'a
day of rest for the heart.'
Simplification of the Syllabary.--The script used at Susa before the
overthrow of the kingdom of Elam was the same as the archaic script of
Babylonia. But the Amardian syllabary was a selected one. Not only were
the forms of the characters simplified, a comparatively small number
of them was employed to each of which one value only was assigned. In
the Vannic texts also polyphony was similarly avoided. Characters
expressing open syllables like _ba_ and _ab_ were chosen, to which a
few more denoting closed syllables and ideographs were added; but in no
case was a character allowed to possess more than one value. Large use
was further made of the vowels, the syllable _ba_, for example, being
written _ba-a_, so that the syllabary tended to become an alphabet.
This step was taken in Old Persian, where the forms of the letters were
often so simplified as to lose all resemblance to their primitive
forms. Apart from its alphabet of thirty-six letters Old Persian
retained only one syllabic character (_t[r.]_) and a few ideographs.
The pictorial origin of the syllabary has proved of important
assistance in reading the texts. Certain of the ideographs were used as
'determinatives' for indicating the generic character of the word to
which they are prefixed or affixed. Thus there is a determinative to
denote that the word which follows is the name of a 'city,' and another
which shows that the preceding word is a plural. In this way a glance
at an Assyrian, an Amardian, or a Vannic text will enable us at once to
distinguish the names of men, women, towns, countries, animals, trees,
metals, stones, and the like. It is a help which we look for in vain in
Phoenician or Hebrew inscriptions.