He sank a series of mines of considerable length into the side of the

hill, and at various depths, down to 24·90 metres below the surface. The

Achaemenian remains reach no farther down than 4·50 metres, and this

stratum represents a period extending over 2,500 years. If we assume a

similar rate of deposit for the remainder we arrive at more than B.C.

12,000 for the date of the lowest stratum examined. It is very remarkable

that it was precisely at this depth, representing in any case an

extremely remote period, that he found the most finished pottery, adorned

with the most perfect artistic designs; and these, he has no doubt, could

not have been produced except in a high state of civilisation.[234] There

is some resemblance between these objects and others recently found in

Egypt and ascribed to B.C. 6000.[235] This early civilisation seems to

have been swept away by the invasion of a people in a much less advanced

condition, who occupied the country for a long period of time;[236] it is

not till these had disappeared and we ascend to a level of 12·95 metres

below the surface that we come to the beginning of the Elamite deposit.

It has a thickness of from eight to nine metres, which, according to our

estimate, would require about five thousand years to form. It was in this

stratum, between 4·50 and 12·95 metres below the surface that he made his

principal discoveries. Here he came upon the walls of Elamite palaces and

temples, which have enabled him to show that the method of decoration by

means of enamelled brick of exquisite colour and design was extensively

practised. The quantity of carbonised material leads to the conclusion

that wood was largely employed in the construction of these edifices;

and the remains of columns prove that the Persians derived their idea of

columnar architecture direct from their predecessors. The inscriptions

so recently found are still in the hands of Father Scheil, who is now

engaged in the work of decipherment. They show, he says, the influence

of Semitic speech in Elam at an early period, and the advocates of the

antiquity of Semitic civilisation begin to hope they may still have

occasion to rejoice.

Very few other inscriptions remain for us to notice. Before the

end of the eighteenth century a vase of Xerxes was discovered in

Egypt containing a trilingual inscription translated into Egyptian

hieroglyphics. It was described by Caylus (after whom it was named),

and was long the object of much learned curiosity (Inscr. Qᵃ). Another

inscription was found near Suez, in A.D. 1800, and published in the

‘Travels of Denon,’ in 1807. It contains a legend of Darius, and appears

to have belonged to a larger monument, afterwards partly recovered, but

which has since been entirely destroyed. It was engraved upon a stele

and was also quadrilingual: having three cuneiform inscriptions on one

side and the Egyptian hieroglyphics on the other. On the Persian side

were two human figures with their hands resting upon three cartouches.

To the right was the Persian, to the left the Susian, and below the

Babylonian text, with the legend ‘Darius the great king, king of

kings, king of lands, the king of the wide earth, son of Hystaspes the

Achaemenian.’[237] Below, occupying the whole face of the stele, was

the longer inscription in twelve lines with the Persian on the top and

the others under. Nearly the whole of the Susian was lost, and only a

few letters of the Babylonian remained.[238] It begins with the long

introductory form, and Darius goes on to say that he has conquered Egypt;

and commanded a canal to be dug from the Nile to the ‘sea which is in

communication with Persia.’[239] It seems to say that the king ordered

the half of the canal toward the sea to be destroyed.[240] It is supposed

that this was done in accordance with the advice of the engineers who

thought the Red Sea was above the level of the Mediterranean (Inscr. Sᶻ).

Two other inscriptions have also been found in Egypt: one on a crystal

cylinder now in the British Museum and first described by Grotefend in

his ‘Neue Beiträge’ of 1840. It represents Darius in the act of killing

a lion. The king is standing upright in a chariot with the tiara upon

his head, and carrying a bent bow in his hand. Above him is the winged

figure, and in the background a trilingual inscription with the legend

‘I [am] Darius the king.’ The other occurs upon a vase of grey marble,

and like the one of Caylus, it is quadrilingual. It was first made

known by Longpérier in the ‘Revue Archéologique’ (1844), through an

imperfect copy taken by the Abbé Giacchetti, but a complete transcript

was afterwards sent by Sir Gardner Wilkinson to Rawlinson. It reads

simply: ‘Artaxerxes the great king.’ It is known as the Venice vase, and

is preserved in the Museum of St. Mark’s (Inscr. Qᵇ). A few other vases

were afterwards found at Susa and at Halicarnassus, but they all repeat

the same legend as that found upon the Caylus vase. A short inscription

of Darius, containing the long introductory form already described, is

also mentioned by Gobineau as having been found near Kermanshah.[241] Two

unilingual inscriptions, one of Arsaces and the other of Pharnuches, were

also afterwards found on seal cylinders which, with the trilingual of

Darius in the British Museum (Nᵃ) raise the number to three in all.[242]

CHAPTER III

DECIPHERMENT OF THE FIRST OR PERSIAN COLUMN—TYCHSEN TO LASSEN, A.D.

1798-1836.

We have already called attention to the important services rendered

by Niebuhr to the study of the cuneiform inscriptions. The copies he

made at Persepolis were by far the most accurate that had hitherto

appeared, and the scholars who first applied themselves to the difficult

task of decipherment worked chiefly upon them. He pointed out that the

inscriptions generally occur in groups of three columns, and that in

each the cuneiform signs are different. He pointed out also that the

three different systems always recur in the same definite order: the

signs characteristic of the first, second and third columns in one

inscription always correspond to those of the first, second and third

columns in the others. He observed also that the signs characteristic of

the first column are evidently much simpler than those in the other two.

After a careful comparison of the various places where they are found,

he remarked that they were limited to forty-two in number; and these he

collected and published together in his Plate 23, where they occupy a

position that might at first sight lead the reader to suppose that they

formed a part of the ornamentation of the sculptured staircase.[243]

This is the first cuneiform alphabet ever published, and it was not the

least important service rendered by Niebuhr to the study. Its formation

was not so simple as might be supposed, and it would have been difficult

to accomplish it except by a minute study of the monuments themselves.

The inscriptions had hitherto been so imperfectly copied that no mere

collation of them, however carefully made, could have succeeded in

eliminating the whole of the faulty signs arising from the errors of

the transcriber. The accidental addition or omission of a wedge, or an

alteration in its direction, had the effect of magnifying the apparent

number of the letters. It is a singular proof of the accuracy of

Niebuhr’s judgment that he should have been so successful in this first

attempt to distinguish between the genuine and the defective letters. In

his list of forty-two signs, he has only introduced nine that are not

true letters, including the sign that was afterwards found to be the mark

of separation between the words.[244] On the other hand, amid all the

conflicting signs found in the copyists, he passed over only two that

are genuine: one (𐎦) is included by Grotefend in his list of defective

signs; the other (𐎵) was first added to the alphabet by Rawlinson.[245]

It proved of great advantage to concentrate the attention of scholars

upon signs that were for the most part genuine, and to save them the

dissipation of energy that would have resulted if they had been left to

wander unguided among the inscriptions themselves. Niebuhr rendered a

farther service by separating each group of wedges that formed a letter

by a colon, an idea he copied from the Zend; and the eye thus soon

becomes accustomed to recognise the complicated combinations that belong

to each other. While he contributed so much to the correct apprehension

of the alphabet, it is singular that he never remarked that the words

themselves are regularly separated from each other by a diagonal wedge.

This fundamental fact also escaped the notice of Tychsen, who was the

first to make a serious attempt at decipherment. Tychsen’s family was

of Norwegian descent, but he was born in the small town of Tondern, in

Schleswig Holstein, in 1734. Although of humble origin, he was sent to

the University of Halle, where he early acquired a taste for Oriental

languages. He was appointed a lecturer in the University of Bützow (1760)

and subsequently transferred to the more important post of librarian and

curator of the Museum at Rostock (1789). He attained a great reputation

by his knowledge of Hebrew and Rabbinical archæology; and he was the

first to lay the foundation of modern Biblical criticism. His Oriental

studies embraced Arabic and Syriac; and he also wrote on the Cufic

inscriptions preserved in Venice and London. His works include six

volumes of archæological papers, which he calls ‘Pastimes of Bützow,’ ‘A

History of the Rostock Library’ (1790), and two treatises on Arabic and

Syriac (1791 and 1793). He is also mentioned as having written a treatise

on Zoroaster. His opinions on cuneiform are contained in a curious

tract entitled ‘De Cuneatis Inscriptionibus Persepolitanis Lucubratio’

(1798). He agreed with Niebuhr that the inscriptions are to be read

from left to right, and that the three columns contain three different

kinds of writing, which he thought concealed three different languages,

probably the Parthian, Median and Bactrian.[246] He recognised that the

characters in the first column are by far the simplest, and it is on

them that he fastened his attention. By some means which he has failed

adequately to explain,[247] he professes to be able to transliterate the

cuneiform signs, and he has gratified the curiosity of the reader by

presenting him with a table showing the values he has found for a great

variety of signs, among which he admitted several that are defective.

He saw that more than one sign may be used for the same sound; and he

assigned four each to the letters _l_, _r_, _s_ and _x_. Conversely,

he thought that the same sign might express the most diverse sounds.

_E_, _n_, _t_, are given as the different values of a single sign, No.

5 (𐎿). _B_, _k_, _r_, and _b_, _x_, _y_, are assigned respectively to

two others, Nos. 27 (𐎹) and 31 (𐎴); while two different values for the

same sign are quite common. Like many of his successors, he recognised

a profusion of vowels, and he has allotted nine different signs to his

three forms _a_, _ä_, _ă_. It is scarcely surprising that out of the

nine, one turned out to be correct, No. 21 (𐎠); and of the four signs he

allotted to _s_, one was correct, No. 38 (𐏁). He was also successful in

detecting the signs for _d_ and _u_: but as his system was based upon

no intelligible principle, these results were purely accidental, and

could not afford a guide to future inquirers.[248] Having succeeded to

his satisfaction in finding known equivalents for the unknown signs,

and being thereby enabled to transliterate the cuneiform text, the

next step was to endeavour to make some sense of it. This he sought to

do by comparing the singular words that resulted from his system with

those of languages he thought must be the most nearly allied, such as

Zend, Pehlevi, Chaldee, Arabic, Syriac and Armenian.[249] He failed to

recognise fully the intention of the diagonal wedge, so that upon some

occasions he rendered it by the conjunction ‘and.’ He had, however, the

merit of pointing out that a particular group of seven cuneiform letters

were continually recurring, often followed by the same group with three

or four other letters added to the termination. These are enclosed by

diagonal wedges, and we now know they are single words, the simplest

form being the nominative singular of ‘King,’ and the two longer the

same word with the addition of the genitive singular and the genitive

plural terminations. But Tychsen had no suspicion, at this time at least,

that the letters occurring between the diagonals must be treated as one

word,[250] nor that the terminal variation was a grammatical inflexion.

Accordingly he makes the simple form of seven letters represent two

words, which he transliterates and translates Osch Aksak, ‘is Aksak’; and

the two longer groups he treats as three words—Osch Aksak yka, ‘is Aksak

divus,’ for the first; and Osch Aksak acha, ‘is Aksak perfectus,’ for the

second.[251] The personage named Aksak, whom he had thus evolved, he took

to be Arsaces, the founder of the Parthian dynasty; and he accordingly

found himself compelled to attribute the inscriptions and monuments to

that comparatively late date.[252] Tychsen’s efforts at translation were

exhausted by his rendering of the B and G Inscriptions of Niebuhr both

of which he found to belong to Aksak; but he has transliterated the

Inscriptions A, H, I, and L, for the benefit of other scholars who may

wish to read some meaning into them. The curious feature of his system

is that some of his letters actually turned out to be correct, such as

his _a_, _u_, _s_, or _sch_. But as these results are purely accidental

he cannot be allowed to have made any real contribution to cuneiform

decipherment.

Immediately after the appearance of his tract, it was assailed by Witte,

a professor of his own university, who seized that occasion to revive the

old view of Dr. Hyde that the cuneiform characters were simply designed

as a fantastic ornamentation and had no other signification.[253] On the

appearance of Grotefend’s system, Tychsen had the singular magnanimity

to abandon his own and he became one of the principal exponents of the

theories of the younger scholar.

In the same year (1798) that Tychsen published his ‘Lucubratio,’ a paper

on the same subject was read before the Royal Academy of Copenhagen, by

Dr. Münter. Münter’s father, who was a clergyman and a poet, was born

at Lübeck and died at Copenhagen, where he was pastor of the German

church. His son Frederick was born at Gotha, in 1761, but his youth was

passed at Copenhagen, and many of his works were written in Danish and

subsequently translated into German. Like his father, he entered the

Church, and became a Professor of Theology at Copenhagen, and eventually

rose to be the Bishop of Seeland (1808). He was a very prolific writer,

especially upon theological subjects. His works include a ‘History of

Dogma’ (1801), a ‘History of the Danish Reformation’ (1802), and the

last, which is considered to be the most important, was on the ‘Symbols

and Works of Art of the Early Christians,’ published in Altona, 1824. He

also acquired considerable reputation as a philologist and Orientalist.

His paper on the Cuneiform Inscriptions was published in Danish in 1800,

and translated into German in 1802. It was not till then that it became

accessible to the general reading public, and very soon afterwards M.

de Sacy noticed it in the ‘Magasin Encyclopédique.’[254] Münter had

long been in correspondence with Tychsen on the subject of their common

studies; but the two scholars arrived at widely different results.

While the latter invented a system of interpretation that enabled him

to transliterate the inscriptions with comparative facility, the former

could not admit that the solution of the difficulty rested upon any

satisfactory basis. His own contribution, if much more modest, is not on

that account less valuable.

Münter, in the first place, rendered important service to his successor,

Grotefend, by sweeping away the foolish conjecture that the inscriptions

belonged to the Parthian age, and with it the misleading inference that

the name of Arsaces was to be sought for among them. In a few masterly

pages, remarkable alike for wide knowledge and accurate judgment, he

showed that Persepolis could only be referred to the Achaemenian kings,

an opinion that had already gained the support of Heeren, in opposition

to the authority of Herder, who ascribed it to the mythological age of

Jamshid.[255] It might be thought that the claims of Darius or Jamshid to

be the founder of Persepolis would not give rise to heated discussion;

yet in the beginning of last century the tranquillity of Göttingen was

convulsed by the fierce controversy that raged between the two learned

advocates of the rival theories.[256]

Münter did not profess to be able to transliterate and still less to

translate the inscriptions. His pretensions were limited to a very

tentative endeavour to assign values to thirteen characters; and of

these, four were not derived from Niebuhr’s list, and they turned out

to be merely errors of the copyist. Having fixed the date of Persepolis

and presumably therefore of the inscriptions, he inferred that the

language must be closely allied to the Zend or the Pehlevi. He made a

minute investigation of all the cuneiform inscriptions that were known

in his day in Europe, and studied Kaempfer and Le Bruyn with the same

attention as he studied Niebuhr. He accepted Niebuhr’s division of the

Persepolitan inscriptions into three different kinds of writing; and

he conjectured that the first was alphabetical, the second syllabic,

and the third ideographic. The latter he thought bore some resemblance

to Chinese. He saw that the language of the first column admitted of

too many vowels to be closely related to the Pehlevi. He was, on the

whole, disposed to think that the three columns contained translations

of the same text into different languages, which might probably be

Zend, Pehlevi and Parsi.[257] On this point, however, he did not

consider the evidence sufficient to exclude all doubt. Indeed, he said

the three columns might turn out to be in the same language, expressed

in different characters.[258] He studied carefully the inscriptions

that occur on vases, cylinders and bricks from Babylon, a few of which

were then beginning to find their way to the European museums and

the private collections of Sir W. Ouseley and Mr. Townley. The most

important of these was upon the vase described by Caylus, which, in

addition to the cuneiform inscription, was also inscribed with Egyptian

hieroglyphics.[259] Tychsen pronounced the latter to be Phoenician, and

he believed that the urn itself had formerly contained the ashes of

his friend Aksak.[260] Münter made the more important remark that the

characters on the Babylonian relics were nearly identical with that of

the third Persepolitan column.

Meanwhile, he devoted his attention exclusively to the simplest form of

writing, which is found in the first column; and he speedily recognised

that the diagonal wedge which occurs so frequently was evidently intended

to separate one word from the other. He compared it to the cypress tree

that divides the groups in the procession on the sculptured staircase

seen at Persepolis; and adds that in one of the old Hindu alphabets the

words are similarly separated by a small oval.[261] This discovery, now

announced for the first time, had till then escaped the observation of

Tychsen, who, it will be remembered, fancied he found three different

words enclosed within the same diagonals. In order to find values for

the cuneiform letters, he had recourse to a twofold method. He sought

out the signs that recurred the most frequently and that were the most

uniformly repeated in the same word, for he concluded that these would

naturally turn out to be vowels. He soon identified three in particular

(𐎠, 𐎹, 𐏂) that were constantly recurring: the first in almost every word,

and occasionally several times in the same word.[262] In the inscriptions

analysed, he found that the first was repeated 183 times, the second 146,

and the third 107 times.[263] He then proceeded to compare the forms

of these letters with those of the vowels in other kindred languages;

and he thought he discerned a strong resemblance between the first and

third in the Zend character for _a_ and in the Armenian for _o_.[264] He

could not find a letter anywhere that resembled the second. However, he

observed another cuneiform sign that also recurred with great frequency

(𐎶), and which might easily bear comparison with the Zend letter for _a_

long.[265] A likeness between a defective cuneiform sign ([Persian]) and

the Zend letter for _i_ gave him a fourth vowel. Similar considerations

led him to assign the values of _ou_ _w_ _ii_ _y_ to another sign (𐏁),

a conjecture that turned out to be less happy than that of Tychsen, who

accidentally hit upon its correct value, _s_. Münter had now pointed out

six signs he thought expressed vowels (viz. 𐎠 _e_ or _a_, 𐎹?, 𐎡 _o_,

𐎶 _a_, [Persian] _i_, 𐏁 _ou_, &c.). The second he dropped out of his

alphabet, for after careful search he could find no letter in any other

alphabet to give him a clue to its value. The fifth was not a genuine

letter; and of the four that remained two were, as he surmised, vowels

(Nos. 1 and 3). The other two were both consonants. Only one of the

former—the first, _a_—was found to be correct; but it had already been

recognised by Tychsen. The other—the _o_—was afterwards found to be _i_.

He also identified seven other signs with the consonants _p_, _kh_ (two),

_r_, _r_ strong, _s_ and _b_, which he obtained by the simple process of

comparing them with other letters found in Zend, Armenian and Georgian,

to which they had ‘no small similarity.’[266] Three of the signs he

selected were not genuine; and of the four others the only one that was

correct was _b_ (𐎲). His efforts in this direction were thus limited to

finding correct values for two signs (_a_ and _b_).[267]

Like Tychsen, he was attracted by the frequent repetition of the word

of seven letters. In one short inscription it may be found five times,

and it is repeated at least twenty-eight times in the inscriptions

copied by Niebuhr. He also observed that the same seven letters occur

frequently with a terminal addition of three or four other letters, and

this word is immediately preceded by the simpler form in seven letters.

He concluded that the additional letters must be an inflexion: not, as

Tychsen thought, an independent word, such as ‘pius’ or ‘perfectus.’

Münter confessed his inability to read the word, but he regarded it as

the key of the whole alphabet.[268] His first impression corresponded

with that of Tychsen, in so far as he supposed it to be a proper

name.[269] But its recurrence so frequently seemed to discredit this

supposition, particularly as no name of any king of the Achaemenian

dynasty appeared to fit into seven letters.[270] Then he assumed it must

be a title, possibly ‘king of kings,’ and in that case he clearly saw

that the preceding word must be the name of the king. Here he had got on

the right track, for the word does in fact signify ‘king,’ and the one

that precedes it, at the beginning of the inscriptions, was afterwards

found to be the royal name; but he ultimately rejected this explanation,

because in Niebuhr’s Table A it followed a word of two letters, which

could not possibly express the name of any of the Achaemenian kings. The

passage he refers to happens to be erroneously copied, for a diagonal

wedge has been introduced where there should be a letter, and Münter

was misled by this unfortunate mistake. He thus abandoned an hypothesis

that, if persevered in, might have led to some result. He may also have

thought that the word of seven letters was too long to be simply ‘king,’

and consequently he made the unfortunate guess that it signified ‘king

of kings.’ This assumption stood greatly in the way of his arriving at

the correct meaning. The truth is that the two words already referred

to as occurring together are required to make up the signification of

‘king of kings,’ the second being merely a repetition of the first with

the addition of the genitive termination, corresponding to ‘rex’ and

‘regum.’ Münter could derive no assistance from a Zend grammar, for at

that time none had been written.[271] What information he collected by

his own study afforded him no help in the present matter. According to

his transliteration, he knew three out of the four letters with which

the longer word terminates: these were _e_; an unknown sign, possibly a

_j_, followed by _ea_; but Zend could not guide him to the signification

of the inflexion ‘ejea.’ The transliteration was at fault, for the

four letters are really ‘anam,’ which corresponds exactly to the Zend

genitive plural. To be thus baffled when so near the truth is a curious

illustration of how completely even an exceptionally keen inquirer may

fail to recognise what might seem self-evident. With the very phrase

‘king of kings’ constantly present to his mind, it never struck him that

two words occurring one after the other, and differing in only what he

recognised to be an inflexion, were precisely the ‘king of kings’ he was

in search of.[272]

In this dilemma De Sacy suggested that the word or words were probably a

religious formula, such as an invocation of God or the Ferhouer, and this

opinion gained confirmation by its occurrence on cylinders and bricks

which Münter had no doubt were inscribed with magical incantations. He

was thus led far away from the true solution.[273]

Münter made a careful study of the words that showed a change of

termination, and he drew up a list of seven of the most common

inflexions.[274] The two last in this list are the ones added so often to

the enigmatical word he vainly sought to read, and which are, as we now

know, the signs of the genitive singular and plural.

His inquiries did not pretend to go beyond the first or simplest species

of writing, but he took occasion to point out the signs in the second

and third columns that correspond to the word of seven letters. Their

identification, he argued, is indisputable, for when the word occurs

twice in succession in the first column the corresponding signs are

similarly repeated in the second and third; and their restricted form

clearly indicates that they must be syllabic or ideographic.[275]

The Persepolitan inscriptions were now tolerably well known to

persons interested in such matters, by the plates of Le Bruyn and more

especially by those of Niebuhr. But the inscriptions from Babylon had

only just begun to attract notice. So far back indeed as the beginning

of the seventeenth century Della Valle, as we have seen, had sent a few

inscribed bricks to Rome, but they had received little attention.[276]

Later travellers do not appear to have mentioned the existence of

these curious relics till the end of the eighteenth century, when Père

Emanuel, a Carmelite, who resided at Bagdad, gave a description of

them in a manuscript referred to by D’Anville in the Memoirs of the

Academy of Inscriptions.[277] Soon afterwards the Abbé Beauchamp, in

his account of Hillah, says he found ‘large and thick bricks imprinted

with unknown characters, specimens of which I have presented to the

Abbé Barthélemy.’[278] His account excited some interest, and it was

translated into English in 1792, and also into German by Witte of

Rostock. Several of the bricks were deposited in the National Library at

Paris, and plaster casts of them were sent to Herder and Münter. Shortly

afterwards the same collection was enriched by the Egyptian vase already

mentioned, which Count Caylus had discovered, and which he described

in his ‘Recueil d’Antiquités.’[279] About the same time also various

cylinders and bricks found their way to different European museums and

private collections. Drawings of a few of these were also to be found in

Caylus; and in 1800 Münter published two others from Babylonian bricks

that had not seen the light before.[280]

Meanwhile the directors of the East India Company gave instructions to

the Resident at Bussorah to secure ten or a dozen specimens for their

museum (1797). They said they had heard that near Hillah ‘there exist the

remains of a very large and magnificent city, supposed to be Babylon,

and that the bricks contain an indented scroll or label in letters

totally different from any now made use of in the East.’[281] The bricks

reached London in 1801, and the task of copying and describing them was

entrusted to Joseph Hager. Hager was a curious specimen of the wandering

scholar, and he enjoyed a reputation that appears to have been quite out

of proportion to his acquirements. He was of Austrian descent, but he

was born at Milan in 1757, and died at Pavia in 1819. He early took to

the study of Oriental languages, and especially Chinese. He roamed about

Europe, visiting all the libraries from Constantinople to Madrid, and

from Leyden and Oxford to the south of Italy. He wrote both in Italian

and German, and apparently also in English and French. One of his first

works was in German on a Literary Imposture (1799), and he became known

in England as a contributor to Ouseley’s Oriental Collections, and by

a book on the ‘Elementary Characters of the Chinese’ (1801). It was in

this year that his Memoir on the Babylonian Inscriptions was written,

and shortly afterwards he settled in Paris, and was commissioned by

Napoleon to compile a Dictionary of Chinese in Latin and French (1802).

For this he was to receive 6,000 francs a year; but after some time a

suspicion arose as to his qualifications and industry. The result of

an inquiry was that he was removed from his post, and he left France

in 1806. We afterwards find him a teacher of German at Oxford, and in

1809 he retired to Pavia to fill the chair of Oriental Languages. He

wrote several books on Chinese, including a Grammar, a Prospectus of a

Dictionary, a ‘Panthéon Chinois,’ and the like; but they were severely

handled by the most competent critics. He, however, accomplished his work

on the Inscriptions with a fair degree of merit. He began by publishing

one of them in the ‘Monthly Magazine’ (August 1801) without note or

commentary. It fell into the hands of a M. Lichtenstein, and gave rise to

a very foolish essay, to which reference will shortly be made. Next year

Hager published the others, accompanied by a learned Dissertation on the

subject.[282] He pointed out, as indeed had been already done by Münter,

that the characters on the bricks are ‘formed of nearly the same elements

and nail-headed strokes’ as at Persepolis; but he showed for the first

time that the system of writing must have originated among the Chaldæans,

who ‘were a celebrated people when the name of the Persians was scarcely

known.’[283] He considered that many ancient alphabets were derived from

the cuneiform, even including Devanagari, the oldest Sanscrit character,

which was popularly ascribed to Divine revelation.[284] He finds many of

the Babylonian characters the prototypes of Samaritan or Cuthean, and

the similar Phoenician letters. Finally he shows with striking effect

the wedge-like and angular origin of our own alphabetical system.[285]

He called attention to the ancient custom of cutting inscriptions upon

pillars and columns, and he considers it natural on that account to

find that ‘the writing of the ancients was perpendicular rather than

horizontal, columns and pillars being much fitter for the former manner

of writing than for the latter.’[286] Such at least was the direction

of the Egyptian, Ethiopian and Chinese. On account of the absence of

stone in Babylon, it was necessary to substitute bricks, and we learn

from Clement of Alexandria that Democritus took his treatise on Morals

from an inscription written on a brick column.[287] The columnar origin

of writing is perhaps the reason that the inscription on the Babylonian

bricks is, as Hager asserts, ‘perpendicular rather than horizontal,’

an opinion he thinks he can prove by the gems he has studied. Various

conjectures as to the subject of the legend on the bricks had been put

forward. Münter and Grotefend thought it was a talisman;[288] others that

it recorded some historical event or an astronomical observation; but

Hager suggested that the subject was probably the same as that on the

Roman bricks: that is to say, that it recorded the name and the place of

the maker—a suggestion that turned out to be very nearly correct. He had

no doubt that the writing was the same as that discussed by Democritus

in his lost treatise, and which is referred to by many of the classical

writers.[289] He considers that it is ideographic, ‘for we find single

groups composed of abundance of nails, like the various strokes in the

Chinese characters, all different from each other and different from

the Persepolitan.’ Nor does he consider that they were developed from

hieroglyphics, but deliberately ‘formed and combined by an arbitrary

institution, and designed to express, not letters nor syllables, but

either whole sentences or whole words.’[290] Finally he suggests that the

Persepolitan mode of writing was directly derived from the Babylonian

by simply laying the perpendicular inscription upon its side; by that

means the heads of the wedges that were originally at the top are now all

turned to the left, and the inscription that was originally read from top

to bottom becomes by its changed position always read from left to right.

‘If we turn our perpendicular characters in such a manner as to make them

lie in a horizontal direction, the effect will be exactly what takes

place in the Persian writing.’[291] This is a remarkable anticipation of

a much later discovery.

Hager’s book was still going through the press when another important

inscription was added to the Paris Library (1802). It is on a stone

found by M. Michaux at Tak Kasra below Bagdad. The Vase of Caylus and

the Caillou Michaux continued for a time to be the two most celebrated

samples of the Persepolitan and Babylonian styles in Europe. Later on,

the Persepolitan collection was enriched by the discovery of the ‘Suez

Stone,’ published in the ‘Travels of Denon,’ in 1807. But all these were

entirely eclipsed by the long inscription found at Babylon and sent

by Sir Harford Jones to the India House. It was long known simply as

the India House Inscription, till later knowledge proved it to be the

Standard Inscription of Nebuchadnezzar. Shortly afterwards (1808) the

Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, received an inscription from Sir

John Malcolm of which we hear little till a much later period.

We have said that an inscription published by Hager without commentary

in 1801 fell into the hands of Lichtenstein, who made it the subject

of a Memoir published in the ‘Brunswick Magazine.’[292] This eccentric

writer put forward the theory that the bricks concerning which so much

noise was being made were in fact not older than the seventh or eighth

century A.D., and that the characters bore a ‘striking resemblance’ to

Cufic.[293] Nothing more was necessary than to remove the arbitrary

additions of unnecessary wedges, in order to detect the Cufic symbols

they concealed. Unlike most other scholars, he chiefly studied the

Babylonian bricks and the most complicated of the Persepolitan systems;

and he regarded an entire group of characters as only one letter. Having

reduced it to the necessary simplicity by simply dropping out all the

inconvenient wedges till he could discover something that suggested the

appearance of a Cufic letter, he was enabled to draw up an alphabet by

which he read all the cuneiform inscriptions with the greatest ease.[294]

He then discovered that the language was an ancient form of Arabic and

should be read from right to left. He was quite surprised that Hager

should have been so deluded by wild dreams of Belus and Semiramis that he

failed to see that his bricks ‘contained only a few miserable sentences

in Arabic.’ What the Arabic words really were he did not consider it

necessary to disclose to the public, but he communicated a few of them to

De Sacy, who pronounced that they were not Arabic at all. Lichtenstein

was good enough to translate Hager’s brick, and found that it was a

prayer; from thence he passed on to Niebuhr’s inscriptions, and selected

the difficult specimens (C, E, and L, Pl. 24). From C he obtained the

most astonishing result. The words ran as follows: ‘The King, the

Sovereign, Prince of all Princes, the Lord Saleh, Jinghis, son of

Armerib, governor-general for the Emperor of China, Orkhan Saheb.’[295]

Encouraged by this striking success, he next took in hand the long

inscription on the Caillou Michaux. It was written, he says, in Armenian,

and contains an exhortation addressed by a priest of the ‘Temple of the

God of the Dead’ to certain women mourning their departed friends.[296]

De Sacy, from whom our information is taken, gives more than a page of

this pious effusion, which he says is not more than a sixth part of the

translation. It is needless to say that the whole is a pure invention.

Indeed it does not clearly appear whether the Memoir was intended by

Lichtenstein as a _jeu d’esprit_, or whether it was simply an impudent

imposture. It is certainly curious that he succeeded in getting himself

treated seriously. Besides the solemn review and confutation by De Sacy

from which we quote, we find so late as 1820 that Grotefend still thought

it necessary to combat his theories, and De Sacy even at that period

classified together ‘the conjectures of Lichtenstein and the labours of

Grotefend’ as equally open to suspicion.[297]

We now come to the scholar to whose ingenuity we owe the first real

success that was achieved in deciphering the cuneiform letters.

George Frederick Grotefend was born at Münden, Hanover, in 1775. He

was sent to the University of Göttingen in 1795, where two years later

he obtained a tutorship. He applied himself to the study of philology

under Heyne, and in 1803 he became Pro-Rector. Soon afterwards he was

transferred to the Gymnasium of Frankfort on the Maine; and in 1821 he

became Rector of the Lyceum at Hanover, where he died in 1853. He was

always an industrious student, but he failed in after life to follow up

his first great success; and if it had not been for it, his name would

probably never have been known. In 1817 he published a Latin Grammar,

which was translated into English under the supervision of Dr. Arnold;

and subsequently he did some useful service by his inquiries into the

early Italian languages. In 1835 he published a book on the Rudiments of

the Umbrian, and, in 1837, another on the Oscan, and these were followed

in 1840 by a Geography and History of Ancient Italy. The paper on the

Cuneiform Inscriptions that first brought him into notice was read before

the Göttingen Academy on September 4, 1802; and, curiously enough, at the

same sitting Heyne first called attention to the Greek inscription on the

Rosetta Stone, from which the reading of Egyptian hieroglyphics takes its

departure.[298]

Grotefend himself informs us that he had no special knowledge of Oriental

languages,[299] and many of his critics, who were probably quite as

ignorant as himself, took care that the fact should not be forgotten.

Although he had no special qualification in this respect for the task

he undertook, yet he early displayed a remarkable aptitude for the

solution of riddles: a peculiar talent which he shared in common with

Dr. Hincks, who also acquired great distinction as a cuneiform scholar.

In consequence of this peculiarity a friend induced him to turn his

attention to Niebuhr’s enigmatical inscriptions, which were then exciting

very general curiosity;[300] and he now disclosed the result to the

Academy. He communicated the substance of it to the ‘Göttingen Literary

Gazette’ (Sept. 18, 1802); and in the following year Silvestre de Sacy,

the well-known Arabic scholar, gave a full account of it in the ‘Magasin

Encyclopédique’ of Millin.[301] It was subsequently reported in the

well-known Vienna periodical, the ‘Fundgruben des Orients’;[302] and in

1815 Grotefend had the opportunity of explaining the matter in his own

words in an appendix to Heeren’s ‘Historical Researches.’[303]

The careful investigations of Münter were found of great service by

his more successful follower. Münter had already pointed out that the

inscriptions belonged without doubt to the period of the Achaemenian

dynasty; that the words were separated from each other by a diagonal

wedge, and that the writing ran from left to right. He had directed

special attention to the word of seven letters, and to the fact that it

preceded in many cases another identical to it but terminating with some

unknown grammatical inflexion. He had suggested that the former probably

signified some such title as ‘king of kings’ and that the royal name must

be looked for in the word that precedes it, an opinion he only abandoned

in view of the difficulties already explained.

Such was the state of the inquiry when Grotefend entered upon it. The

Memoirs on the Antiquities of Persia, published by M. de Sacy in 1793,

afforded a sort of text-book to the decipherer. De Sacy had succeeded

in reading some inscriptions at Naksh-i-Rustam, written in Pehlevi.

Like those at Persepolis, they were engraved above the sculptured

representations of kings, and they were found to contain the royal name

and title. Grotefend inferred that the cuneiform inscriptions had very

probably served as models for these later legends. The simplest of

these and, from its brevity, the one that afforded the most striking

resemblance to the B and G of Niebuhr ran: ‘N N rex magnus rex regum

[rex-um] Filius ... [regis] stirps Achaemenis[?]’[304] The first step

Grotefend made in advance of his predecessor was to perceive that it

required two words to make up the phrase ‘king of kings,’ and that these

two words no doubt corresponded to the two in the cuneiform: the one with

seven letters and the longer form of the same word that followed it. This

apparently obvious necessity had, as we have seen, wholly escaped Münter.

When it was once recognised that the word of seven letters was clearly

‘king,’ it became obvious that, according to the analogy of the Pehlevi

model, the first word of the inscription was the name of the sovereign,

the third a qualifying title corresponding to ‘magnus’ and the two

following, where he found the word of seven letters again repeated, and

on this occasion followed by the longer form, evidently corresponded to

‘rex’ and ‘rex-um’ (‘regum’).

Comparing the two inscriptions (B and G), he found they began with

different words, which he now inferred were the names of two different

kings; but he observed that the name in B, which was presumably in the

nominative case, also occurred in the third line of G with a case-ending,

followed by the word for ‘king.’ also with a case-ending. The termination

differed from that already observed in the phrase ‘king of kings,’ and

it marked, no doubt, the genitive singular, as the other denoted the

genitive plural. Referring to his Pehlevi model, he inferred that the

passage indicated the relationship of the two monarchs, and that the king

of the second inscription (G) here declared himself to be the son of the

king of the first inscription (B). This little bit of ingenuity solved

the whole mystery. In the corresponding place in B he found another word

in the genitive case, which was no doubt the name of the father of the

king of that inscription; and he remarked that this name was not followed

by the royal title. He had thus discovered the cuneiform signs that,

with little doubt, expressed the names of three Achaemenian princes,

and he had recognised that these personages stood to each other in the

relation of father, son and grandson, and that the first was probably not

of royal rank. That is to say, from ‘G’ he found that ‘King Z’ was son

of ‘King Y’; and from ‘B’ he found that ‘King Y’ was son of ‘X’ without

the addition of ‘King.’ It only remained to determine who these three

princes were most likely to be: and as the Achaemenian dynasty was a

short one and their names already known from history, the task was not a

difficult one. The two kings at the head of the inscriptions could not

be Cyrus and Cambyses, because their names did not begin with the same

cuneiform letter; they could not be Cyrus and Artaxerxes, because there

is no such discrepancy in the length of the cuneiform words. There thus

only remained Darius and Xerxes for the names occurring first in the two

inscriptions; and this result was confirmed by the absence of the royal

title from the name of the father of the king in one of the inscriptions,

for he recollected that Hystaspes is not called king by the Greek

writers. He assumed, therefore, that the first word in B was Darius (and

it must have been satisfactory to notice that the second letter, _a_, was

precisely the _a_ of Münter) and the other Hystaspes; while the first

word in G he assumed was Xerxes.

From these three known words he now set himself to get at least the

approximate values for the letters they contained. According to De Sacy,

Grotefend first transliterated Darius and then Xerxes, from which two

names he obtained the word for ‘king,’ and finally he transliterated

Hystaspes. But according to Grotefend’s own account of the matter, he

fastened in the first instance on the word that should read ‘Hystaspes.’

It consists of ten cuneiform signs, including the inflexion. He learned

from Anquetil’s Zend-Avesta that the Zend form of the name was Goshtasp,

Gustasp, Kistasp. Placing a letter of the name under each cuneiform sign,

he arrived at the following result:

𐎻 · 𐎡 · 𐏁 · 𐎫 · 𐎠 · 𐎿 · 𐎱·

_G_ _o_ _sh_ _t_ _a_ _s_ _p_.

Here, then, were seven letters of the cuneiform alphabet for which

values were provisionally assigned and three left over for the genitive

termination. The word for Darius also consisted of seven letters, which

he at first read thus:

𐎭 · 𐎠 · 𐎼 · 𐎹 · 𐎺 · 𐎢 · 𐏁·

_D_ _a_ _r_ — — _u_ _sh_.

The process so far was confirmed by the repetition of the same letters

_a_ and _sh_ in both words in the position in which they were to be

expected. There was more difficulty with Xerxes. The cuneiform word

consisted of seven letters:

𐎧 · 𐏁 · 𐎷 · 𐎠 · 𐎲 · 𐏁 · 𐎠

— _sh_ — _e_ _r_[305] _sh_ _e_

of which he already knew, or guessed, five, and these known values

occurred in the order he expected; the first and third letters remained

to be determined. It happens that Herodotus mentions that the name of

Xerxes corresponded in sound to that of the Persian for ‘warrior’ or

‘king’; and Grotefend noted that the first two letters in the words for

‘Xerxes’ and ‘king’ were the same in the inscriptions. He ascertained

that the Greek letter ξ transliterates the Zend ‘kshe’; but he could

find nothing in the Zend vocabulary under ‘kshe.’ There were, however,

several forms under ‘kh,’ ‘sh,’ which left no doubt that the first letter

required should be read ‘kh.’ This assumption also enabled him to read

the word for ‘king’ which had so long attracted attention. Of the seven

letters that composed it he now knew four, which occurred in the order

𐎧 · 𐏁 · 𐎠 · 𐎹 · 𐎰 · 𐎡 · 𐎹.

_kh_ _sh_ _e_ — — _o_ —.

The Zend word for ‘king,’ ‘khsheio,’ corresponds almost exactly to the

form thus reached,[306] and it enabled him to add _i_ conjecturally to

his alphabet (𐎰). No explanation of the third letter in ‘Xerxes’ had yet

presented itself; but it nearly resembled the fourth and seventh in the

word for ‘king,’ and the fourth in the signs for ‘Darius’; and Grotefend

presumed—erroneously, as it turned out—that they were the same. He

observed that in Zend the aspirate is sometimes left out, and he thought

the Zend _kh_ _sh_ _e_ _i_ _o_ might very well be supposed occasionally

to take an _h_. He accordingly conjectured that this was the value of the

unknown letter, and he read _kh_ _sh_ _e_ h _i_ _o_ h for ‘king,’ _kh_

_sh_ h _e_ _r_ _sh_ _e_ for ‘Xerxes,’ and _D_ _a_ _r_ _h_ _e_ _u_ _sh_

for ‘Darius.’ It was not, therefore, till this point had been reached

that he completed ‘Darius’ by the addition of _h_. He was led to decide

for _e_ as the value of the fifth letter, 𐎺, by the pronunciation of

the name of Darius in Hebrew.[307] The form for Xerxes must have seemed

at first sight rather disconcerting; but by the time the Appendix was

republished, in 1824, Grotefend was able to announce that his conjecture

was fully confirmed by Champollion, who spelt out the hieroglyphics for

Xerxes on the Vase of Caylus to read _Kh_ _sh_ _h_ _a_ _r_ _sh_ _a_.

The result of his labours on the three proper names was that he arrived

at the values of thirteen cuneiform signs: _G_ _o_ _sh_ _t_ _a_ _s_ _p_

from Goshtasp or Hystaspes; _D_ _r_ _e_ _u_ from Darius, and _kh_ and _h_

from Xerxes. Of these thirteen letters, nine turned out ultimately to be

correct; but the _a_ had been previously recognised by Tychsen and by

Münter: so that Grotefend now added eight correct values to the cuneiform

alphabet, viz. _sh_ _t_ _s_ _p_—_d_ _r_ _u_—_kh_.

He did not, however, rest satisfied with this achievement. He sought to

transliterate and translate the remainder of the two inscriptions, but in

this his fortune failed him. He does not explain in his own Memoir the

method he pursued, but de Sacy has given us an insight into the process

which no doubt rests on good authority.[308] We may suppose that he kept

the Pehlevi inscription before him and continued to be guided by its

analogy. He accordingly expected to find that the word after ‘king’ would

express some honorary epithet corresponding to ‘magnus’ in the example

before him. It was in fact composed of four letters of which he already

knew the first and third, _e_ — _r_ —. The nearest word in Zend to suit

his purpose was _e_ _gh_ _r_ _e_, ‘strong.’ He therefore considered

himself entitled to add a _gh_ and another _e_ to his list—both wrong.

So also in the position in the cuneiform where he should expect to find

a word corresponding to the one translated ‘stirps,’ in the Pehlevi

he observed a word of three letters of which he knew the first two,

_p_, _u_ —. He hit upon a word in Pehlevi—_bun_—that had precisely the

signification of ‘stirps.’[309] So he gave his _p_ the alternate value

of _b_, and added _n_ to his list. These also were both wrong. His

attention was next turned to the two different inflexions which had been

remarked at the end of ‘king.’ In the one consisting of three signs, he

already knew the two last, — _h_ _a_, and, for some reason we have not

found explained, he assumed the first (𐏃) was a second sign for _a_.

In this addition to his alphabet he was nearly right, for the letter

has the value of _h_ before _a_, _i_, _u_. In the second inflexion of

four letters the first and third signs are the same, his _e_ or _a_;

and he learned from Anquetil that the Zend has a genitive ending _e_

_tsch_ _a_ _o_. This was sufficient to add _tsch_ and another _o_ to his

alphabet—both wrong. Here, then, are six more letters, _gh_, _e_, _n_,

_a_, _tsch_ and _o_, to be added to the thirteen already found, making

nineteen in all. There are twenty-five letters in the two inscriptions

given by De Sacy in 1803; and there is no doubt that before that time

Grotefend had, with two exceptions, completed his alphabet, as it is

found in the Appendix to Heeren in 1815.[310] According to it we see

that he had already attempted to assign values to thirty-seven cuneiform

signs, three of which are not to be found in Niebuhr’s list and are due

to defective copying. Two others occur in Niebuhr’s list, but are also

defective (_e_, [Persian], and _r_, letter No. 8), so that there remain

thirty-two genuine signs for which he has now found values. Several signs

are, however, allotted to express the same sound. Thus he gives three

signs for _e_ (Nos. 3 [defective], 4 and 10) besides the sign for _e_

or _a_ which he generally transliterates _e_. He also gives three signs

for _o_ (Nos. 12, 16 and 23). It was afterwards found that these signs,

which he took to be synonymous, are very far from being so: for example,

not one of his three signs for _o_ has that value, being respectively

_i_, _ch(a)_, and _m(a)_. Indeed, among all the additions we are now

considering he only succeeded in arriving at two correct values, 𐎳, _f_

(No. 39) and 𐏃, _a_ (No. 41), if indeed the second may be allowed to

pass. Its true value is the aspirate _h_. But, as we shall afterwards

see, it takes an inherent _a_, and it is very commonly used to express

the sound ‘Ha,’ the vowel _a_ being altogether omitted. In an inquiry

of this kind it is necessary to admit approximate values as correct;

and in the present case the value allotted to this sign by Grotefend

ultimately led to the important identification of the word ‘Achaemenian.’

Here the first syllable, ‘Ach,’ is represented by the two signs for _h_

and _kh_; and before it was known that the first letter had the sound

of ‘Ha’ it was a comparatively slight error to drop the aspirate and

set it down as _a_. We have therefore added this letter to the number

of Grotefend’s correct discoveries. He also observed that the word for

‘king’ is often represented by an ideogram (𐏋) which, like the word, is

subject to inflexions. This discovery he, however, generously attributes

to Tychsen;[311] but we have not found it in the ‘Lucubratio.’ De Sacy

was not aware of the origin attributed to it, and he has given the credit

entirely to Grotefend himself.[312]

Soon after the completion of the alphabet, but still before the

appearance of the Appendix in 1815, he was induced to change the value of

two of the signs.[313] One of these he now fixed correctly, _k_ (25), and

the other approximately _sr_ (40).

It will be recollected that Sir William Ouseley visited Murgab in 1811

and made a copy of the inscription that is found repeated there several

times. His book did not appear till 1821; but Grotefend had the advantage

of seeing a copy of the inscription in time to include it in his Memoir.

According to the alphabet as it then stood, the transliteration would

render _z_ _u_ _sch_ _u_ _d_ _sh_;[314] but if we follow his own account,

he saw reasons, which he does not explain, to change the first letter

from _z_ to _k_ and the third from _sch_ to _sr_; with the result that

he produced _k_ _u_ _sr_ _u_ _e_ _sch_, which he read ‘Kurus.’ He does

not mention the change of the _d_ into _e_, but a more correct copy of

the same inscription showed that that sign did not exist in the original,

which consists of five signs only. After he had arrived at this result,

he tells us, he came across the French translation of Morier’s first

Memoir, published in 1813, where, it will be recollected, that acute

traveller suggested that Murgab was Pasargadae, the city of Cyrus.[315]

This confirmation of his own studies was certainly satisfactory, though

the sequence of events as he describes them is remarkable. Grotefend had

now contributed eight correct values from the inscriptions B and G, two

from the Murgab inscriptions, and two from other sources—that is, twelve

in all (if we admit the _sr_, really _r_ before _u_, and the _a_ which is

_h_ before _a_, _i_, _u_). In addition to these the _a_ and _b_ of Münter

were known, though Grotefend erroneously changed the _b_ into _v_; and

hence in 1815 fourteen correct values had been reached.

Grotefend was now able to transliterate after his own fashion all the

inscriptions in the first style of writing. It was quite a different

matter to translate the mass of strange words that began to pour in

upon him. He had to seek for analogous words in Zend or Pehlevi, or in

other languages he considered akin; and he was assured by many candid

friends that this was an undertaking for which he was incompetent. In

the excitement of the first discovery he was much more reckless in this

matter than he afterwards became, when he had more experience of the

difficulties of the task. We find that he contributed the following

translation of the B and G inscriptions to the ‘Göttingen Literary

Gazette,’ August 1802. B: ‘Darius, the valiant King, the King of Kings,

the Son of Hystaspes, the Successor of the Ruler of the World, in the

constellation of Moro.’ This figures in De Sacy in 1803 as follows:

‘Darius, rex fortis, rex regum, rex populorum, Hystaspis stirps, mundi

rectoris in constellatione mascula Moro τοῦ Ized.’ For G we have:

‘Xerxes, the valiant King, the King of Kings, the Son of Darius the King,

the successor of the ruler of the world.’[316]

His next attempt at translation appeared in the ‘Göttingen Literary

Gazette’ of August 1803. In the interval he had made a study of Niebuhr’s

inscriptions A, H and I, and compared the A with Le Bruyn’s inscription

No. 131, which it nearly resembles.[317] The translation of the second

paragraph of A he gives thus: ‘Xerxes the Monarch, the valiant King,

the King of Kings, the King of all pure nations, the King of the pure,

the pious, the most potent assembly, the Son of Darius the King, the

descendant of the Lord of the Universe, Jemsheed.’[318] The H of Darius

ran to much the same effect and also culminated in Jamshid. Subsequently

he attempted the inscription on the windows of the Palace of Darius that

remained for so long a stumbling-block to his successors, and also the

one on the royal robe in the Palace of Xerxes given by Le Bruyn (No.

133). He likewise allowed the complete translation of the Le Bruyn No.

131 to appear in the Appendix to Heeren in 1815.[319] Many of these

attempts excited well-deserved ridicule, and even in 1815 we find him

much less eager to gratify public curiosity, and perhaps less confident

in his own ability to do so adequately. He willingly furnished Heeren

with the transliteration of the texts, but it was only by special

request that he added some of his translations. ‘If I have,’ he says,

‘as a decipherer established the value of the signs, it belongs to the

Orientalist to complete the interpretation of the writing now for the

first time made intelligible.’[320] He, however, still thought he could

answer for the general sense of his rendering, though not for its verbal

accuracy, and subject to that limitation the window inscription and the

Le Bruyn plate No. 131 appeared in 1815. In the later edition of 1824

they are, however, suppressed.

We have now given an account of this once famous discovery and the

results that were first attained. We have credited Grotefend with

having found correct, or at least nearly correct, values for twelve

characters; and the achievement may be allowed to merit the fame it

still confers upon its ingenious author. Each step in the process now

appears simple enough, and it is not easy for us to estimate the full

magnitude of the difficulties he surmounted. They can indeed only be

realised by remembering how completely a man like Münter had failed.

Yet it is exceedingly curious to consider how so ingenious a person

was baffled when he might seem to be on the point of farther success.

Grotefend was harassed by the continued recurrence of the two words he

transliterated ‘Bun Akeotscheschoh.’ There was, of course, no punctuation

to guide the translator, and he constantly connected these two words

together. His translation usually ran: ‘Darii regis [filius] stirps

mundi rectoris.’[321] He was quite satisfied from the beginning that

‘bun’ signified ‘stirps,’ and in the Pehlevi inscription, which was his

constant model, he had before him the very appropriate reading ‘stirps

Achaemenis.’ No phrase, he well knew, was more likely to appear in these

inscriptions than this very one. He had already arrived at the first

three letters of this word, _a_, _k_, _e_ or _a_, and it is strange the

suspicion never entered his mind that the rest of his transliteration

should be modified in accordance with the apparently inevitable

conclusion that the mysterious word was in fact ‘Achaemenian.’ This is

all the more remarkable from another consideration. De Sacy had expressly

exhorted him to keep a look out for ‘Ormuzd,’ which was certain to occur

frequently in the cuneiform, as it did in the Sassanian inscriptions. In

the Le Bruyn No. 131 he found a word which, according to his alphabet

read ‘euroghde’; and in this with singular acuteness he fancied he

detected some trace of Ormuzd.[322] But he identified the first portion

of the word with the Zend of Anquetil ‘éhoré,’ and read for the whole

‘Oromasdis cultor.’[323] Yet, according to his own transliteration the

word gave him _a_ _u_ _r_ . . _d_ _a_,

𐎠 · 𐎢 · 𐎼 · 𐎶 · 𐏀 · 𐎭 · 𐎠·

_a_ _u_ _r_ . . _d_ _a_.

He knew that a vowel may be omitted; and it is certainly strange that

he never suspected that the two intervening letters might express

‘muz,’ and the whole give him ‘Aurmuzda.’ In deference to the Murgab

inscription he had already changed his original _z_ into a _k_, and

his _sch_ into _sr_; and we should think he might have seen sufficient

ground in what has been said to justify his abandoning the _o_ _gh_.

His singular attachment to _o_ _gh_ prevented him from observing that

the fourth letter in this word is the same as the letter that follows

‘aka’ in the other; and it is curious he did not see that an _m_ in one

case would help him on with ‘Ormuzd,’ just as an _m_ in the other would

lead up to ‘Akam[enian].’ There was an additional reason indeed for his

changing his _o_ into _m_, for he knew that (according to Anquetil) _m_

was the sign of the accusative—a form from which he was forced to depart

when he made _o_ an accusative termination.[324] If he had advanced to

‘akam,’ we can scarcely suppose that he would have failed to recognise

‘Achaemenian,’ and would have modified his transliteration in accordance

with this new discovery. It was the identification of _m_ and _n_ long

afterwards by Rask that to a great extent facilitated the way for farther

progress towards completing the alphabet, an opportunity that Grotefend

unfortunately allowed to escape him.

One of the chief services rendered by Grotefend to the alphabet was to

draw up a long list of the various signs he found in the inscriptions

which were evidently due to errors on the part of the copyist. These he

ascertained by a careful collation of the inscriptions as they appeared

in the works of Le Bruyn, Niebuhr, and others.[325] Even Niebuhr had

admitted eight of these into his corrected list of forty-two letters, but

they existed in great numbers in the inscriptions, and till cleared out

of the way, they presented a serious obstacle to the decipherer. Some of

his detractors, like St. Martin, have accused him of wilfully excluding

these signs, or of changing them arbitrarily to suit the exigencies of

his own system; but the charge is entirely without foundation, as De Sacy

recognised from the first.

Grotefend was of opinion that the cuneiform system was intended only

for engraving, and that some other writing must have been in use for

ordinary purposes.[326] He divided the various specimens that had come

under his notice into three classes. The first included the Persepolitan

inscriptions; the second was to be seen upon the stone recently published

by Millin, which he says partly resembles the third Persepolitan and

partly the Babylonian bricks;[327] and the third the Babylonian

inscriptions, the most important being that published by the East India

Company. ‘These are the most complicated,’ and are to be ‘distinguished

by the number of the strokes of union and by the eight-rayed star.’ The

first class—namely, the Persepolitan—he again subdivided into three

kinds, according to the relative complexity of the writing. He considers

they represent different languages: the first or simplest is the ‘Zend,

which is apparently the Median language’; the second the Parsi, or

language of the true Persians; the third ‘perhaps a Persian dialect,

perhaps Pehlevi; but in consequence of the absence of prefixes it cannot

belong to the Aramean family,’ a reason also that excluded the two others

from the same classification. He thought the first system of writing

was the Old Assyrian; the second differs from it by having a greater

number of oblique and fewer angular wedges; while it differs from the

third system by avoiding, like the first, wedges placed diagonally, and

by having more wedges that cross each other.[328] He held that all the

three systems of Persepolitan are alphabetical and not merely syllabic

or ideographic; in the first system he finds words composed of eleven

characters, in the second of nine, and in the other of seven. On account

of the number of signs required in the second system to compose a word,

he concludes that it employs separate letters for long and short vowels;

and also to express the combination of a consonant and vowel. He thought

the number of letters in its alphabet was about forty, and he observed

that the monogram for ‘king’ is always used; neither here nor in the

third system is the royal title ever written alphabetically. In the Plate

(No. 2, 1815) he gives three short inscriptions: the Xerxes (G, Niebuhr),

the Cyrus (Murgab) and the Xerxes on the Vase of Caylus, arranged word

for word to show the signs in the three systems that correspond to each

other; and he found that the second system corresponds word for word

to the first, but that the third differs considerably. In the third

system he remarked also that a word could be formed with so few signs

that he thought it avoided the use of vowel signs as far as possible,

and employed a single character to express the threefold combination of

consonant, vowel and consonant; and to that extent he concedes that it

may be called syllabic.[329]

It is a very singular circumstance that Grotefend seems to have spent

the whole of his ingenuity upon his first efforts; from that time he

was unable to make any farther contribution of importance, and the work

of decipherment was carried on entirely by other scholars. Yet he never

withdrew his attention from the subject, and when he died, in 1853, all

the difficulties of the Persian column had been overcome with but little

farther assistance from him, and sufficient was already known of the

Babylonian to disclose a wonderland of new and unexpected knowledge.

Grotefend made a careful study of all the available inscriptions as they

came to light, and from first to last his interest in them never flagged.

We have already seen how carefully he analysed the three Persepolitan

columns, seeking out in each the signs that might be supposed to

correspond to each other. The classification of the Babylonian

inscriptions as they now began rapidly to accumulate afforded him fresh

material for the exercise of his ingenuity. It seems to have been some

time before he would admit the practical identity of the writing of the

third Persepolitan column with that of the simplest of the Babylonian

styles. According to his earliest classification the three Persepolitan

systems were kept entirely apart from the two that had been remarked

at Babylon. But it was not long before the similarity of the most

complicated of the Persepolitan with the simplest of the Babylonian

became apparent. This was fully recognised by Rich, in 1811, and we

cannot suppose that Grotefend was far behind.[330] Rich was the first

to announce that Grotefend had come to the important conclusion that

the two or three different forms which had been observed at Babylon

were mere varieties of one and the same method of writing, analogous to

our Roman and Gothic character. Grotefend’s attention was now chiefly

directed to the Babylonian inscriptions, mainly in consequence of the

articles contributed by Rich to the ‘Fundgruben des Orients,’ and

afterwards by the constant correspondence he maintained with Bellino,

the German secretary Rich had brought out with him to Bagdad.[331]

Grotefend now abandoned the idea that the third column was written in

Pehlevi. He described the language as Median Persian, and he called it

the ‘Babylonian column.’ He showed also that the many differences in the

writing of the simple Babylonian were due no doubt to the idiosyncrasies

of the engravers; but they added greatly to the difficulty of the

decipherment.[332] He noted also the frequent occurrence of different

ideograms for the same word, such, for example, as for ‘son.’ He

sharply contrasted it with such writing as is found in the India House

Inscription which he called ‘the complex’ (_zusammengesetzt_). Mr. Rich

had lately obtained several specimens of cylinders; two of these were

found on the site of Nineveh and a few others at Borsippa. The account

he gave of them in the ‘Fundgruben’ speedily attracted attention, and the

facsimile of one in red jasper from Nineveh was published by Dorow in

1820. Grotefend called attention to the well-marked differences in the

cuneiform writing that characterise these specimens, and which remove

the third Persepolitan still farther from them than even from the most

complicated Babylonian.[333] These opinions he expressed in his letter

to Dorow, and in a tract on the ‘Elucidation of certain Babylonian

Cylinders’ included in the same publication (1820).[334]

After his promotion, in the following year, to the rectorship of the

Lyceum at Hanover (1821) other studies began to engage his time. He wrote

a History of his Academy (1833); he edited the fragments of Sanchoniathon

(1836); and he dabbled somewhat deeply in such matters as the Oscan and

Umbrian languages (1835-1838). He had not, however, entirely forgotten

his old subject, and in 1832 he attempted a translation of the I

inscription, which he sent to the ‘Göttingen Gazette.’ He recognised that

it contained a list of geographical names, which, however, he was unable

to render correctly; but he had the merit of attracting the attention

of other scholars to their existence, and it was from them that Lassen

was afterwards enabled to make such remarkable progress.[335] In 1837 he

began to contribute a succession of papers to the Scientific Society of

Göttingen on his old subject, many of which were afterwards republished

in separate form. He was now sixty-two years of age, and his mind was,

no doubt, less able to grapple with the series of discoveries that were

just on the point of being made. In the previous year (1836) Burnouf

and Lassen had simultaneously published their Memoirs on the cuneiform

decipherment that soon carried the subject far beyond the point at

which Grotefend had left it some thirty years before. Grotefend accepts

the general results, but without much evidence of enthusiasm.[336] The

reading of ‘Auromazda’ is now satisfactorily established; but he clings

to his _ogh_ with unabated affection.[337] On the other hand, he suggests

the surrender of the _sr_ in ‘Kurus,’ and reads _r_ or _rh_. As regards

‘Achaemenian,’ the utmost he will concede is that the Greeks probably

derived it from ‘Akhâosô-schôh,’[338] and to do this he reluctantly

softens his _tsch_ to a soft _c_ to give the _s_; but he will on no

account admit the true reading, _n_.[339] He still contends that the

languages of the three Persepolitan columns are related to each other,

but he sees that the first, though resembling Zend, is not identical

with it. He entirely rejects the idea already broached that the third is

Semitic, and he adheres to his conviction that none of the three can be

called syllabic or ideographic in the strict sense of those terms.[340]

Notwithstanding the tenacity with which he adhered to some of his old

errors, his later contributions were not entirely without result. He

devoted great attention to the comparison of the language of the first

with those of the other two columns, and in this task he exhibited a

considerable amount of penetration.[341] For example the word ‘adam,’

which is constantly recurring in the Old Persian, continued to be

translated, even by Lassen in 1836, as ‘posui.’[342] It was Grotefend

who first observed that it was rendered in the other two columns by

words that were certainly elsewhere used for the pronoun, ‘mân, manâ,’

and the suggestion led to the recognition of ‘adam’ as the first person

singular, ‘ego.’[343] The writings of Burnouf and Lassen revived an

interest in cuneiform studies, and Grotefend was enabled for the first

time to publish inscriptions which he had received twenty or even thirty

years before from Bellino, and which had lain till now unseen in his

desk. He was still regarded as the chief authority upon the subject, and

newly discovered inscriptions were invariably forwarded to him. Among

these he received one that had recently found its way to the British

Museum, and in which he was able to read the name of Artaxerxes, a

king not previously met with in the inscriptions (1837). But his chief

triumph in this respect was the publication, in 1848, of an inscription

of Sennacherib. The original cylinder was said to have come from

Kouyunjik,[344] but Bellino had long ago made a copy of the inscription

and the cylinder is now called after him. When the inscription was at

length translated by Mr. Fox Talbot in 1856, it was found to relate the

first two years of the Annals of the King. Grotefend caused an admirable

engraving of it to be made on copper, and this, said the translator,

not without a tinge of irony, ‘was, I think, the greatest service that

painstaking savant rendered to the science of archæology.’[345]

Grotefend continued to write upon these subjects down to his death in

1853. He endeavoured to keep abreast of the new discoveries in Assyria.

He was familiar with the writings of Botta and Layard. He studied the

disquisitions of Westergaard, Hincks, and Rawlinson. He contributed

articles on the builder of the Khorsabad Palace; on the age of the Nimrud

Obelisk; on the foundation and destruction of the buildings of Nimrud;

and on inscriptions found at Babylon and Nimrud. When M. Mohl, the

well-known secretary to the French Asiatic Society, visited him shortly

before his death, he found his table littered with inscriptions, chiefly

those received from Bellino in the early years of the century.[346] He

professed to have given up his Persepolitan studies in favour of the new

Assyrian inscriptions; and he saw no reason why he should not succeed in

unravelling their mystery. It is somewhat pathetic to observe the old

man of seventy-eight, still animated by the recollection of a success

he had achieved fifty years before, but had never been able to repeat,

vainly hoping that at the last moment he might be rewarded by another

fortunate guess that would redeem the long failure of so many years. The

new discoveries were coming upon him with extraordinary rapidity and

magnitude, and he could not but feel crushed and helpless beneath such an

accumulation of fresh materials. The solution of the difficulties they

involved had passed into younger and abler hands than his, and he had to

comfort himself as best he might with the recognition so freely accorded

to him, that he had laid the foundation upon which others were now

building; and with the assurance that the recollection of his services

would not wholly pass away from the remembrance of men.[347]

Grotefend’s method of decipherment, when it first appeared, met with

a varying degree of success in different quarters. In Germany, as we

have seen, it was at once adopted by Tychsen, who became one of its

chief exponents; and it also secured the favour of Heeren, who allowed

it to share in the wide popularity accorded to his own writings. But

even in Germany it was some time before it gained general recognition.

The theory of Lichtenstein, absurd as it may now appear, continued to

command attention, and even in 1820 Grotefend still thought it necessary

to defend his own opinions against those of his rival.[348] His views,

however, gradually gained the ascendant, and in 1824 he felt he could now

allow the controversy to drop; and in the new edition of Heeren he left

out a large portion of the criticism he published in 1815. Since then

his merits have been fully acknowledged by his own countrymen, who are

rarely disposed to underrate any of the achievements of their kindred. In

England his system never had to contend with the rivalry of Lichtenstein.

It was received at once with general approval by all who were best

qualified to form a judgment. The learned Ouseley, the more brilliant

Morier, Sir R. K. Porter and Mr. Rich never doubted for a moment that

Grotefend had deciphered the names of Hystaspes, Darius and Xerxes.

Very different was its reception in France. De Sacy, who was really the

first to introduce it to the notice of Europe, could never feel any real

conviction that it rested upon solid grounds. He was quite uninfluenced

by the jealousies that blind the judgment of smaller men, and he would

gladly have given it his approval if he could have brought himself to

accept the evidence. But this he was entirely unable to do; and it was

certainly not because he failed to apprehend the process by which it was

reached. The explanation he has given of it greatly excels in lucidity

and in logical precision the account of Grotefend himself—so much so,

indeed, that we are inclined to think that Grotefend never thoroughly

understood his own system till it was explained to him by De Sacy. The

French scholar was fully acquainted with the subject, for he had himself

made frequent attempts at decipherment, always, he frankly acknowledges,

with a ‘total absence of success.’ The only point he considers tolerably

certain is that the word with seven signs is the title of King.[349]

He doubts altogether that the names of the kings had been correctly

ascertained, and he points out the difficulty of accepting an alphabet

that contains three or four signs for _e_, three for _o_, and so on. The

opinion he formed in 1803 he repeats in 1820. In his letter to M. Dorow,

he confesses that he is still unable to find the names of the Persian

kings or of the god Ormuzd in the cuneiform inscriptions; and he declares

he does not believe that anything hitherto published on the subject is

worthy of confidence.[350]

While the cuneiform inscriptions were thus engaging the attention of

European scholars, English travellers had begun the investigation of the

sites of Babylon and Nineveh that were so soon to yield such surprising

results. In 1808, Kinneir visited Hillah, accompanied by Captain

Frederick, of the Royal Navy; and two years later they extended their

explorations to the mounds near Mosul. Kinneir’s ‘Geographical Memoir,’

published in 1813, contains an excellent account of both these historic

ruins. Soon after his visit, Mr. Rich went to Hillah and began his

investigations (1811). He found the surface of the ground covered with

‘broken pans and bricks, some of which have writing on them.’[351] He

was able to make a small collection of antiquities, including a curious

basaltic stone covered with cuneiform characters, and these specimens

eventually found their way to the British Museum.[352] The Memoir he

published on the subject made its first appearance in the ‘Fundgruben

des Orients,’ but was, republished in England by Sir James Mackintosh.

A second Memoir, written in 1817 and printed soon afterwards, was

enriched by three plates containing several cuneiform inscriptions that

now appeared for the first time.[353] Rich considered there were three

different kinds of writing to be found at Babylon, which he divided

‘according to the order of their complication.’[354] The first, he

observed, corresponds to the third Persepolitan; and in Plate 8 he gives

three specimens of it, all found upon stones resembling the ‘Caillou

Michaux’ described by Millin. The second occurs rarely, and Mr. Rich says

he was the first to publish an example, although Grotefend had already

seen a copy of a similar kind. It is on a piece of baked clay in shape

like a barrel, about 4¾ in. long and 1½ in. in diameter (Plate 9, No.

4). The third species is that generally found on bricks and cylinders,

of which he gives four examples.[355] While he wrote, he learned that

the three different kinds of Babylonian writing had been submitted to

Grotefend, and that ‘learned and ingenious person’ had come to the

conclusion that they ‘are only varieties of different modes of writing

the same character, and that there is in fact but one real kind of

Babylonian writing.’[356] Although Rich found a vast number of bricks

at Babylon, he observed that the inscriptions were nearly all alike:

in fact only four different legends had up to that time been noticed

on the Babylonian bricks. The most common consists of seven lines. The

others are in six, four and three lines; of these Grotefend had seen

copies of the inscriptions in seven and three lines. The other two are

comparatively rare. The inscribed bricks are generally about 13 in.

square by 3 in. thick, and are of different colours, red, white and

black.[357] They were usually found with the inscriptions downwards, and

when they occur in a different position there is a strong presumption

that they have been moved from their original place. The cylinders found

by Mr. Rich varied from 1 to 3 in. in length and were of different

materials—some of stone, others of paste or composition.[358] They are

perforated to admit of the passage of a cord, and were carried about to

be used for seals. Rich was among the earliest to recognise that this was

their purpose; and he thus accounted for the writing being from right

to left, contrary to the invariable custom. He also made the useful

suggestion that, as the language of the first Persepolitan was no doubt

that of the court of Darius, the languages of the other two columns

were in all probability those of Susa and Babylon.[359] Rich exercised

considerable influence in Germany by his contributions to periodical

literature, and his cordial assent to the opinions of Grotefend was of

importance at that time. We have seen that his first Memoir was published

in Vienna before it appeared in London; and he continued to write to the

‘Fundgruben des Orients’ to describe the inscriptions he had procured

from Babylon and Nineveh. The cylinder from Nineveh is said to have been

the earliest specimen brought to light, and it was the first to attract

the attention of Grotefend to the Babylonian system of writing.[360]

It was published by Dorow in 1820, when inscriptions of that kind

were almost unknown. Rich’s secretary, Bellino, was also in constant

correspondence with Grotefend down to the period of his early death.[361]

He sent him a copy of the first column of one of the inscriptions at

Hamadan, which Grotefend presented to the University Library of Tübingen,

where Bellino had been educated.[362] He also sent him copies of

inscriptions on forty bricks in Mr. Rich’s collection, many of them of

service by illustrating slight differences in the writing of words and

characters.[363]

We have said that De Sacy remained unconvinced that the names of Darius

and Xerxes were to be found in the Persepolitan inscriptions. Two years

after he had solemnly repeated this confession, a M. St. Martin announced

that he had made the same discovery as Grotefend, which he professed to

have reached by an entirely different and far more scientific method: a

circumstance which, if true, would have afforded a strong confirmation

of the reality of the original discovery. St. Martin was born in 1791,

and died of cholera in 1832, at the early age of forty-one. He rose

from a comparatively humble sphere of life, and the aristocratic prefix

to his name seems to have been merely assumed. He was for a time a

traveller to his father, who was a tailor, but his talent for languages

soon transferred him from the mercantile to the learned world, and,

combined with his strong Monarchical opinions, enabled him to secure a

fair amount of success. He was especially devoted to Oriental studies,

and he learned Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Armenian; but his attainments

seem to have struck his contemporaries as more pretentious than profound.

He was appointed, when only nineteen, to be secretary to the Society of

Antiquaries (1810), and at thirty-one he became Curator of the Library

of the Arsenal (1824) and afterwards an Inspector of the Royal Printing

House, a position that enabled him to introduce the Zend and cuneiform

type. He was a very precocious scholar, for one of the writings on which

his fame rests was published at the age of twenty—‘Egypt under the

Pharaohs’ (1811). Seven years later his most important work appeared: ‘An

Historical and Geographical Memoir on Armenia’ (1818). He is remembered

also as one of the founders of ‘L’Universel’ (1829), a strong organ of

the Legitimist party.

His paper on the cuneiform inscriptions was read before the Académie des

Inscriptions, of which he was a member, in 1822, and it was afterwards

published in the ‘Journal Asiatique’ (February 1823). A more detailed

account of his discoveries was promised, but it never seems to have

appeared; and the only other authoritative expression of his opinion

occurs in Klaproth’s ‘Aperçu de l’Origine des diverses Ecritures’ (1832),

where we are favoured with the latest development of his cuneiform

alphabet. His treatment of this subject is not calculated to raise his

reputation as a scholar; and it certainly exposes him to the charge of

want of candour.

He is good enough to begin the account of his original discoveries by a

reference to the previous labours of Grotefend, of which he had a very

poor opinion. He has seen the analysis of Grotefend’s system given by

Tychsen in the ‘Göttingen Gazette’ of September 1802, and the Essay of

De Sacy, written in the following year. These publications, he says,

produced little impression at the time, and they were farther discredited

by Grotefend’s own contribution to Heeren, in 1805.[364] None of the

papers since contributed by Grotefend to periodical literature have

shown any improvement upon his earliest writings, and St. Martin lays

it down that the contents of the inscriptions are rightly regarded as

still wholly unknown. But in addition to this unfavourable opinion,

which was shared also by De Sacy, he brings charges of his own against

Grotefend’s system that are wholly without foundation. He accuses him of

frequently varying the values he assigned to the characters, whereas it

was in consequence of the extreme tenacity with which he clung to the

values he originally assigned that his progress was in great measure

arrested. St. Martin says Grotefend attributed five or six entirely

different values to the same character, and that he considered that

each character is susceptible of assuming a variety of different forms,

both statements being equally without foundation.[365] He affects to

regard the corrections introduced into the texts by Grotefend—which

is one of his most valuable services—as purely arbitrary, and he

professes to believe that interpretations based upon these emendations

can inspire no confidence, and can only be regarded as an exercise of

the imagination. He was surprised to find that his own interpretations,

which he reached by ‘proceeding in an entirely different way,’ should

have conducted, so far as they went, to precisely the same result: and he

will not dispute that Grotefend is entitled to the priority of merit in

detecting the royal names.[366] It does not appear that St. Martin got

any farther himself, and we may be permitted to doubt whether he would

have accomplished even this but for the labours of the predecessor he

is so careful to disparage. When we come to inquire into ‘the entirely

different way’ followed by St. Martin we find that in fact it is

precisely the same as that with which we are already familiar. He worked

on the same two inscriptions, the B and G of Niebuhr; he treats us over

again to the analogy of the Sassanian inscriptions: the well-known phrase

‘king of kings’; the genitive suffix; the position of the royal names;

the evident relationship of father and son, and so on. Our original

investigator continues to carry us over all the old ground. He is struck

by the similarity of the wedges in the word for ‘king’ and in one of the

royal names; he is guided by the Zend _khsheio_ to the cuneiform words

for ‘king’ and ‘Xerxes,’ and he tells us how dexterously he proceeded

from this to the decipherment of the names of Darius and Hystaspes. In

one name only he differed from his predecessor. It will be remembered

that Grotefend deciphered ‘Cyrus’ in the Murgab inscription. St. Martin

preferred to transliterate ‘Houschousch’ and to read ‘Ochus’;[367]

but in this single attempt at originality he turned out to be wrong

and Grotefend right. He has spared us all the reasons that led him

to these important results, as well as many grammatical and literary

considerations which he promised to publish in a more extended Memoir.

One success he may indeed claim. In reading the name of Hystaspes he

compared it to a Zend form ‘Vyschtaspo,’ which gave a more correct result

than the ‘Goshtasp’ of Grotefend.[368] This happy accident enabled him to

assign the correct value of _v_ instead of _g_ to one cuneiform sign; and

in the second letter of the same word he substituted _y_ for Grotefend’s

_o_, and thereby approached nearer the correct value, which is _i_. These

are the sole contributions he made to the work of decipherment.

It must not, however, be supposed that his treatment of the alphabet was

wanting in originality. It will be recollected that Grotefend was in

possession of thirteen correct values; but of these St. Martin rejected

five.[369] The eight that remained added to the two he determined himself

(_v_ and _y_ or _i_) gave him an alphabet of ten correct values, as

opposed to the thirteen in the possession of Grotefend. He altered the

values Grotefend had incorrectly assigned to nine other characters,

without making any improvement upon them.[370] He confessed with

admirable modesty that there were twelve characters of which he could

make nothing; and this struck Lassen as being the most satisfactory

portion of his work.[371] Among them Grotefend had already condemned

four as defective; one he had determined correctly as _f_, and he had

nearly approximated to two others, _th_ for _t_ before _u_ (22) and _dj_

for _j_ before _i_ (32). St. Martin’s alphabet in its complete form

consists of twenty-five letters, represented by twenty-seven cuneiform

signs.[372] But of these letters he has three different modifications

of the sound of _e_, which alone monopolise six cuneiform signs. Three

signs are allotted to _h_, two to _a_, two to _ou_, two to _ch_, and

two to _r_. In its latest form ten of the letters of our alphabet are

left without equivalents in cuneiform—_b_, _f_, _g_, _i_, _l_, _q_, _u_,

_w_, _x_, _z_. He was not, however, always without a _b_.[373] It was

probably not till after 1826 that he saw reason to substitute an _m_.

Rask had recently suggested that the word which Grotefend transliterated

‘Akeotchoschoh’ should be ‘Aqamnosoh,’ and signified ‘Achaemenian.’ St.

Martin had no suspicion of this when he first wrote his paper, and he

translated the phrase ‘race illustrious and very excellent.’[374] But

when Klaproth appeared, in 1832, the transliteration and translation

were made to run as follows: ‘Poun Oukhaamychye,’ ‘race d’Achémènes,’

which differs from the first only by the substitution of an _m_ where

_b_ occurred before.[375] This is a farther instance of unacknowledged

borrowing. St. Martin accommodates himself to the view taken by Rask;

but, as ill luck would have it, he changed the wrong letter: the sign he

altered into _m_ is in fact the _n_ in the word ‘Achaemenian.’[376] With

this our notice of St. Martin’s Memoir may fitly close. It is indeed a

singular production for a scholar of repute. He begins by assuring his

readers that the contents of the Persepolitan inscriptions were still

entirely unknown; he censures the method adopted by Grotefend that had

yielded him the names of three of the Achaemenian kings; for himself, he

leads us to suppose that he is about to announce an entirely different

and more scientific method. He then proceeds, without a word of warning

and in simple confidence in our ignorance, to follow precisely the method

he has just denounced, and he affects astonishment that it should lead

him to precisely the same result. He can make no progress beyond the

three names already known. In the case of the Murgab inscription he

ventures to take a step upon his own account and immediately blunders

into error. His alphabet is remarkable for its inferiority to the one he

desires to supersede. It has at most ten correct values to Grotefend’s

thirteen or fourteen.[377] Eight cuneiform letters are abandoned

altogether in simulated despair. Nine are changed without being improved,

and ten of the most important sounds in human language are left without

expression. We do not condemn him for being inferior to his master:

many pupils suffer from that disability; but we censure him for denying

his obligation and for affecting an originality he did not possess. One

service indeed he rendered. If he made no new discoveries in cuneiform,

he at least has the merit of discovering Grotefend’s discovery to

France. Many of his countrymen were willing to take upon his authority

what they would not accept from the German writer, and it gradually came

to be believed (though even yet by no means universally) that the names

of Hystaspes, Darius and Xerxes were to be read in the Persepolitan

inscriptions.[378]

The first advance in cuneiform decipherment after Grotefend was made

by Rask, a distinguished Danish scholar. He was born in 1782, and at

first he devoted himself entirely to Icelandic. He spent two years

in the island, and on his return, in 1817, he published an edition

of the Edda. Subsequently he added Oriental languages to the range

of his acquirements. For a time his serious attention was devoted to

Sanscrit, Persian and Arabic, while his leisure moments were diverted

by the acquisition of Russian and Finnish. He then went to India for

three months, to perfect himself in such trifling matters as Sanscrit,

Hindustani, Zend and Pehlevi. A short visit to Ceylon was devoted to

Cingalese, Pali and Elu. On his return to Copenhagen he filled two

professorial chairs—those of Oriental Languages and Icelandic. He is

regarded as one of the earliest founders of Comparative Philology, and

the number of his writings is very large. Among them are Grammars of

Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, Cingalese, Acra, Lapp, Danish and Italian. But it

is to the little volume ‘Ueber das Alter der Zend-Sprache’ that we have

now to refer.[379] Some writers contended that Zend is merely a dialect

of Sanscrit, restricted in its use to sacred literature, and never

employed as a spoken language. It was also asserted that the Zend-Avesta

was of comparatively recent date, possibly not earlier than the third

century A.D.[380] One of the many arguments adduced by Rask to confute

these theories was the similarity between the Zend and the language of

the first Persepolitan column. He pointed out that, so far as it had been

deciphered by Grotefend, it bore a strong resemblance to that of ‘Father

Zoroaster’; and he argued that where they differed to a marked degree in

their case-endings, the probability was that the divergence is due to

an error in the values assigned to the letters by Grotefend. Thus, the

genitive plural as given by Grotefend ends in _e_ or _a_, _ch_ (_tsch_),

_a_, _o_, which bears no resemblance to anything to be found in Zend; and

he casually threw out the suggestion that it should read _a_-_n_-_a_-_m_,

which is a usual Zend form.[381] He farther showed, in support of this

view, that the change of an _o_ into _m_ would go a long way to solve

the difficulty of the word that follows ‘stirps’; and he hazarded the

improved transliteration ‘aqamnosoh,’ from which ‘Achaemenian’ might

be derived. The change of _tsch_ into _n_, and _o_ into _m_, which was

at once accepted and ultimately proved to be correct, was of great

importance; and both Burnouf and Lassen admit the extent of their

obligations. Rask’s own studies lay in an entirely different direction,

and he made no attempt to follow up his success in decipherment; but he

took occasion to point out that there must be some radical error in an

alphabet that assigns two different sounds—_e_ and _a_—to the same sign,

and two signs to the same sound, _a_; and he lays down the rule ‘that

one letter should have only a single sound, and two or more letters can

never denote one and the same sound.’ The last maxim was not, however,

verified, for it is found that some letters are represented by two and

even three signs, according to the vowel they precede. He added the

useful warning that the language of the inscription is probably Old

Persian, and not, therefore, identical with the language of Zoroaster.

Hence, while they are similar, and may be usefully compared, it by no

means follows that the grammatical forms and the vocabulary are always

identical.[382]

We now come to the two great scholars, Burnouf and Lassen, to whom, after

Grotefend, the decipherment of the cuneiform is chiefly to be ascribed.

Eugène Burnouf was the son of a distinguished father, who was a Professor

at the Collège de France. Eugène was born in 1801, and died in 1852.

At the age of twenty-five he acquired a great reputation for Oriental

scholarship by the publication of his essay ‘Sur le Pali,’ which he

wrote in collaboration with Lassen.[383] But his fame rests principally

upon his Zend studies, the first of which, the Vendidad, appeared in

1830. More than a hundred years had elapsed since the first copy of the

original text was brought to Europe by George Bouchier, an Englishman

(1718), who had obtained it from the Parsees at Surat. Bouchier

presented it to the University of Oxford, where it might be seen long

afterwards chained to a wall in the Bodleian. No one, however, could

read a word of it. At length a young Frenchman, Anquetil de Perron,

determined if possible to overcome the difficulty. He went to Surat in

1758, and put himself under the tutorship of the learned Parsees. He

was, however, surprised to find that, although they knew the value of

the characters, they were completely ignorant of the language itself.

Yet their sacred books were written in it, and they daily recited the

meaningless sounds in their ritual. It was sufficient, they said, that

God should understand the prayers they were enjoined to repeat. By an

ingenious comparison with the Pehlevi and Persian vocabularies Anquetil

at length arrived at a probable translation; and after his return to

Paris he published a French version of the Zend-Avesta (1771).[384]

His work was very unduly depreciated by Sir W. Jones, the leading

English Orientalist, but it attracted a larger degree of esteem on the

Continent, and a German edition by Kleuker appeared at Riga, in 1777,

which enjoyed a fair amount of popularity.[385] Both the language and

the subject-matter of the Zend-Avesta began to receive the attention

of scholars, and those especially who were interested in cuneiform

recognised their importance. Tychsen, for example, wrote on the

religion of Zoroaster,[386] and Rask on the relation of the language to

Sanscrit;[387] and the same conjunction of studies was preserved in later

times by Burnouf, Westergaard, Oppert and Spiegel. Down to the time of

Burnouf, however, the knowledge of Zend continued to be very imperfect,

and Grotefend was constantly impeded in his attempt to elucidate the

language of the cuneiform inscriptions by reference to the very defective

work of Anquetil. Burnouf was appointed to the chair of Sanscrit in the

Collège de France in 1832, and the idea occurred to him to connect his

Sanscrit and Zend Studies. He found that a translation of the Yaçna

into Sanscrit had been made by two Persian scholars some four hundred

years before, while the recollection of Zend was still preserved; and

it is entirely due to his labours upon this text that such remarkable

progress was made in the study. His ‘Commentaire sur le Yaçna’ appeared

in 1834; and in addition to its other merits it was at once recognised

that it afforded the most valuable assistance to the cuneiform student.

Indeed, Sir Henry Rawlinson admitted that it was to a great extent in

consequence of the knowledge he derived from it that he was enabled to

overcome the difficulties of the Behistun inscription. Burnouf’s ‘Mémoire

sur deux Inscriptions cunéiformes’ appeared in 1836. It was submitted

to the Académie des Inscriptions in March, and finally given to the

world on June 1. He considered that the Inscriptions B and G of Niebuhr

had been sufficiently worked upon; and if additional results were to

be obtained they should be sought from fresh materials.[388] Although

Schulz’s papers were not yet published, Burnouf obtained access to them;

and found they included two trilingual inscriptions from Elvend near

Hamadan, copied by Mr. Stewart, and a trilingual from Van.[389] The two

Hamadan inscriptions reproduce precisely the same text, except that

the name of Darius occurs in one in the place of Xerxes in the other.

Comparing these with the trilingual of Xerxes at Van, he found that the

first two paragraphs are the same in both; but the last paragraph of the

Van inscription is not found at Hamadan. At Persepolis the whole of the

Hamadan inscription is repeated on the Anta of the Porch to the Palace of

Darius; and considerably more besides. But the additional portion does

not correspond to that found in the last paragraph at Van. The whole of

it was copied long before by Le Bruyn (No. 131). Burnouf next observed

that the inscription on the sculptured stairs—the A of Niebuhr—bears a

strong resemblance to those just mentioned; but the beginning is clearly

imperfect. Ouseley, however, had published a five-lined inscription

from Persepolis, which corresponds exactly to the Darius at Hamadan;

and Grotefend pointed out that it was probably the beginning of the A

inscription.[390] With this addition the A runs for a time parallel to

the Hamadan, while at its close it corresponds to the Le Bruyn. Burnouf

had thus a considerable number of copies of the same text, and by careful

collation he sought to eliminate the errors due to the engraver or the

transcriber. By these means he obtained a correct recension of the

Hamadan inscription upon which his work was chiefly founded. But there

was another to which he made frequent reference, especially towards the

close of his Memoir. This is the I inscription of Niebuhr, which is

copied from the outside wall, on the southern side of the great platform

of Persepolis.[391]

It will be recollected that Grotefend had called attention to this

inscription in 1832, and had pointed out that it evidently contained a

long list of proper names.[392] Whether this suggestion ever reached

Burnouf it is impossible to say, but it is certain he made it an early

object of study; and from it he derived the cuneiform sign ‘B,’ with

which he signed his letters to Lassen.

The method he pursued to determine the value of an unknown sign was to

collect all the words in which it occurred, and endeavour to assign to

it a letter, from among those not already rigorously determined, that

would produce a word for which some meaning might be found by comparing

it with Zend. For example, the word with which the Darius at Hamadan

begins consists of only two letters, which, according to Grotefend,

would yield _vu_. But Burnouf could make no sense out of this, and he

accordingly substituted a _b_ for the first letter (𐎲). The result was

that he could not only extract a sense out of _bu_—which he compared with

the Sanscrit _bhû_ and _bû_ ‘to be,’ but two or three other words were

also rendered intelligible by the same change.[393] The consideration,

however, that finally settled the matter was the discovery of a name

in the I inscription, which, upon the supposition that the letter in

question was a _b_ would yield ‘Bakhtroch,’ and this he had no difficulty

in identifying with Bactria. Hence he altered the _v_ of Grotefend into

a _b_ without apparently recognising that he merely restored the value

originally given to that sign by Münter.[394]

Unfortunately, his method did not lead to very important results, for

it only enabled him to add two additional values correctly. Both of

these were suggested to him by the second word in this same Hamadan

Inscription.[395] The word occurs also in the B and G inscriptions, where

it was transliterated by Grotefend _e_ _gh_ _r_ _e_. Burnouf accepted the

change of the initial _e_ (𐎺) into _i_, which was made by St. Martin,

without approaching nearer to the correct value, which is in fact a _v_.

The emendation of the second letter lay ready at hand, and could not

well be longer overlooked. Since Rask had identified the sign for _m_,

this particular sign (𐏀) was the only one that required alteration in

order to read _Aur_ _m_ _z_ _da_,[396] and it was therefore inevitable

that Grotefend’s _gh_ should at length be surrendered for a _z_; the

only wonder is that this change should have been so long delayed.[397]

The emendation of the last letter of the word (𐎣) displays an entirely

different order of ingenuity. The letter occurs in only seven different

words in all the inscriptions of Niebuhr, Le Bruyn, and Schulz but in

one instance it is the initial sign in a word of which the others are

_t_ _p_ _d_ _h_ _u_ _k_. It was certainly no common feat of imagination

that led Burnouf to see that if a _k_ were to precede this remarkable

agglomeration, the province of Kappadocia would turn up. By these means,

however, he got rid of another of Grotefend’s _e_’s, and altered it into

a _k_, which proved to be correct. Having thus changed _e_ _gh_ _r_ _e_

into _i_ _z_ _r_ _k_, the next step was to find some similar word in

Zend that might suggest its meaning. This, however, was not easy; the

nearest he could think of was ‘yazata,’ which might bear to be translated

‘divine.’[398]

Such was the method that enabled Burnouf to restore one correct value,

_b_, that had been recently neglected, and to add two others, _z_ and

_k_, to the alphabet. He was on the point of increasing the number of

correct values by two or three others, but unfortunately he hesitated to

yield to his first intuition. In the twelfth line of the I inscription

he found a word which, according to his alphabet he transliterated

‘Arion.’[399] It occurred in a position in the geographical list that

would naturally suggest that it indicated ‘Armenia,’ and to obtain

this result it was only necessary to change the sign (𐎷) which he read

_i_ into _m_. There was a farther reason that appeared to justify this

alteration. In the Hamadan inscription the same sign occurs in _bu_ _i_

_om_, which he translated ‘excellent’; but if it were permitted to alter

the _i_ into _m_ we should obtain _bumom_, ‘earth.’ The meaning of the

sentence would then be: ‘He has given [or created] this earth; he has

given [or created] this heaven,’ which would be an evident improvement

in the sense.[400] He would not, however, allow that the alphabet could

include more than one _m_, and he was not prepared to sacrifice the

_m_ (𐎶) discovered by Rask in the genitive termination _anam_. Thus

he narrowly missed adding the _m_ (𐎷) before _i_ to the number of his

correct values. So also in line 11 there occurs a word he reads _ayura_,

but by the change of the _y_ into _th_ he would arrive at ‘Athura,’ the

ancient ‘Aturia.’[401] This change was farther sanctioned by another

name, which his system transliterated _pryi_; but by the hypothesis under

consideration, it would become _prthi_, a manifest form for ‘Parthia.’

Moreover, the same alteration would introduce an important improvement

in the word for ‘king,’ which would then read _khchâhthôh_ (from the

Zend _khchathrô_) in place of _khchâhyôh_.[402] Notwithstanding all

these probabilities, he finally rejected the alteration and lost the

addition of another correct value. It is interesting also to observe

how nearly he approached the correct value of Grotefend’s _h_ (𐎹, No.

27). He perceived that if it were changed into a _y_, it would yield

_yuna_ in the twelfth line, which there could be no doubt would indicate

‘Ionia.’ As it is, however, he retained the incorrect value; and he

could find no satisfactory explanation of _huna_; for he, of course,

rejected ‘Huns’ as an evident anachronism.[403] It would be tedious and

unnecessary to go through the other signs to which he gave new values,

for they unfortunately all turned out to be wrong. Indeed, if his

services to decipherment were to be estimated by this test alone, they

would not rank higher than those of St. Martin or Rask; for although he

lays claim to have ascertained the value of twelve characters, eight of

these are erroneous, one (the _b_) fairly belongs to Münter, another (the

_a_) to Grotefend, and only two remain to be placed to his own credit:

precisely the same number as were contributed by St. Martin and Rask.

His alphabet gives definite values to thirty cuneiform signs and an

uncertain value to three others.[404] Following the analogy of Zend, he

allots a separate sign to the long and short values of each of the vowels

_a_, _i_, _u_, and in this he considers he has reached ‘a result that

should satisfy criticism.’ With respect to the consonants, however, he

agrees with the maxim of Rask, and strives as far as possible to avoid

according more than one sign to each. He has, however, found it difficult

to avoid giving two signs to _l_ and _h_, and no less than four to _gh_.

As regards _l_ or _h_, he introduces the second signs apologetically,

followed by a mark of interrogation, indicating that they may be variants

or defective signs. We now know there is no well-authenticated _l_ in the

language, and his first sign turned out to be _d_ before _i_ (𐎮) and the

other _r_ before _u_ (𐎽). He was equally unfortunate with regard to _h_,

neither of his signs for that letter being correct. He felt that the four

signs for _gh_ required explanation. He places only one among the thirty

definite values in his alphabet. The others he labels as uncertain.

(These are 𐎦, 𐎪, 𐎸.) He thought that a comparison of these would convince

the student that they are composed of exactly the same elements, so that

they seem to differ from each other only by the caprice of the engraver,

who has arranged the wedges according to his fancy, while he has neither

altered their form nor increased nor diminished their number.[405] He

recognised, however, the objection that all cuneiform writing consists of

the same elements, and that the sole difference of one sign from another

consists in the arrangement of the wedges. He was forced to fall back

upon the impossibility of assigning different values to these signs and

at the same time preserving any sense in the words where they occur. The

second _gh_ (𐎦) he considered justified by its occurrence in the word he

thought must be ‘çughd,’[406] the third (𐎪) because it would enable him

to read ‘baghem,’ ‘destiny,’ and the fourth (𐎸) by its completing the

sense of ‘_gh_udraha,’ which he thought denoted the Gordyans.[407] In

this latter case the correct transliteration is ‘m’udray’; but it is not

likely, even if he had read the word correctly, he would have detected in

this form the name of Egypt. As a matter of fact, the first _gh_, which

he has put in his alphabet (𐎯, 34) as the usual form, is _d_ before _u_;

the second (𐎦) is _g_ before _u_; the third (𐎪, 32) is _j_ before _i_;

the fourth (𐎸, 33) is _m_ before _u_.

Grotefend thought he found four and St. Martin six signs for _e_, but

Burnouf correctly excluded that letter altogether from his alphabet.

He, however, incorrectly admits one sign for _ô_ long. He considers the

absence of _th_, a form that occurs frequently in Zend, is probably

due to the scarcity of documents. The want of the palatals, _tch_ and

_dj_, may perhaps be assigned to the same cause; though more probably it

arises from the nature of the alphabet itself, for these letters are only

developments of the consonants _k_ and _g_.[408]

Burnouf acknowledges his obligation to Grotefend for twelve letters; but

these should properly be raised to fifteen.[409] The twelve he admits

include eight correct values and four incorrect. The three he leaves

unacknowledged are _t_ (24), _u_ (36), and _a_ (41), all of which are

correct, and they raise the number of correct values accepted from this

source to eleven. Burnouf attributes three of his letters to St. Martin,

namely _t_, _u_ and _i_: the first two are already accounted for from

Grotefend; the _i_ is indeed due to St. Martin, but it is wrong. Burnouf

rejected the only absolutely correct value found by St. Martin, viz.

_v_. Two letters, the _m_ and _n_, he refers to Rask, from whom also

he must have derived the _q_ (25) which he erroneously substitutes for

Grotefend’s _k_.

The twelve values which Burnouf credits to his own account include the

_a_ of Grotefend and the _b_ of Münter.[410] There remain the two values

which he was the first to fix correctly, viz. _k_ (4) and _z_ (18); the

others are all incorrect. We have thus accounted for twenty-nine signs

out of the thirty of his alphabet;[411] the other, the _ng_ (28) of

Grotefend, he treated as uncertain, but suggested _h_, the true value

being _j(a)_[412] Besides the thirty just mentioned he gives three other

signs, to which he hesitates to assign any value, though he thought

they might all represent the sound of _gh_. These are, as we have

already explained, the _dj_ (32) and the ‘_k_?’ (33) of Grotefend, now

ascertained to be _j_ before _i_, and _m_ before _u_. The other does not

appear in Niebuhr’s list, and Lassen is the first to assign it a value,

_g_, which turned out correct (_g_ before _u_).

Burnouf dropped one letter entirely out of his alphabet (𐏂, No 13):

the _n_ that completed the _bun_ or ‘stirps’ of Grotefend. Since Rask

had found the true sign for _n_, a second _n_ might well seem to be

redundant;[413] and this supposition was confirmed by finding the sign

written at Hamadan with three horizontal wedges instead of with two: a

difference that transformed it into a _p_. Burnouf accordingly thought

the other form was an error of the copyist, and he read _pup_, upon which

he confesses neither Zend nor Sanscrit could throw any light; though

from the context it evidently means ‘son,’ and may therefore possibly

be a monogram for the Zend _puthra_.[414] He trusted, however, that

future research would re-establish the ejected sign; in which case he

proposed to give it the value of _th_, and to read _puth_. It was, in

fact, afterwards found to be a genuine sign entirely distinct from _p_,

and it has received the value of _tr_ or _thr_, which has completed the

transformation of _bun_ or _pun_ into _puthra_.

To sum up: of the thirty-three different cuneiform signs in Niebuhr’s

list for which values have been ultimately found, Burnouf knew only

sixteen correctly (two from Münter, _a_ and _b_; ten from Grotefend; two

from Rask and two from himself), or not quite one half.[415] Yet with

such imperfect materials to work with he was able to render important

service in the matter of translation. It is obvious that, according as

the letters became known, and the words of the new language began to

be made out, the task of finding their meaning would depend upon the

knowledge of the languages most nearly akin, and upon the acumen with

which the interpreter could apply the resources at his disposal. In other

words, the task would pass from the decipherer to the translator; and it

is in this department that Burnouf has earned the greatest distinction.

Although he could command only a limited number of correct values, and

consequently his transliteration was still extremely imperfect, yet his

knowledge of Zend, which was greater than that of any other scholar then

living, enabled him to make sense of many of these crude forms and for

the first time to approach to a correct translation of the words that

were not simply proper names. When he began his labours, there were

apparently only two words, ‘king’ and ‘son,’ that were correctly read, in

addition to a few proper names, such as Achaemenian, Hystaspes, Darius,

Xerxes, Cyrus and Persia;[416] but to these both Grotefend and St. Martin

had accumulated a vast number of worthless and misleading meanings, from

‘the constellation of Moro’ down to ‘Jamshid.’ Burnouf added several

correct words to the vocabulary, and he was always able to avoid falling

into extravagant error. He showed, for example, that the word Grotefend

had taken for the conjunction ‘and’ was in reality a form of the verb ‘to

give or create.’[417] He overcame the chief difficulty in the word he

read ‘aqunuch’ = ‘generator,’ really ‘ak’unaush,’ ‘to make,’ and read by

Grotefend ‘florentem.’[418] The word Grotefend translated ‘Dominus’ he

rendered ‘this is,’ and suggested the possibility of its being ‘I am,’

which turned out to be its correct meaning. Besides these contributions,

he recognised the demonstrative pronoun ‘this’ (_aim_ for _avam_, ‘ce’);

and he added the words ‘heaven,’ ‘man,’ ‘master,’ ‘province,’ ‘world,’

and some others.[419] The great improvement in translation that resulted

will be best appreciated by a comparison. The text of the first paragraph

in the Hamadan inscription, translated by Burnouf, is word for word the

same as that of the Le Bruyn (No. 131) translated by Grotefend, except

that ‘Darius’ in the former is ‘Xerxes’ in the latter. We have placed the

translation of Burnouf opposite that of Grotefend.

PARAGRAPH I

_Grotefend, Le Bruyn 131_[420] _Burnouf, Hamadan, Darius O_[421]

Pius probus[422] Oromasdis cultor L’être divin [est] Ormuzd

hanc constellationem sanctam il le Homa excellent

et hunc diem a donné; il ce

coelestem et illum defunctum ciel a donné; il l’homme

eumque lumine fulgentem a donné; il la nourriture

et defuncti [filium] a donné à l’homme;

hunc Xerxem regem il Darius roi

florentem summum a engendré ce

quorumlibet regem des braves roi,

summum quorumlibet ce des braves

amplificet chef.

_Paraphrase of above_[423] _Correct Version of Inscr. O_[424]

Ormuzd [est] l’être divin; Great God is Ormuzd

il a donné le Homa excellent: who this earth created,

il a donné le ciel: who that heaven created,

il a donné l’homme: who man created,

il a donné la nourriture who happiness has created

à l’homme: il a engendré for man: who has made

Darius roi, Darius king,

ce roi des braves, the one king of many,

ce chef the one Lord

des braves. of many.

PARAGRAPH II

_Grotefend_ _Burnouf_

Dominus Ceci est

Xerxes rex Darius roi

fortis rex divin roi

regum des rois

rex populorum Roi des provinces

quorumlibet purorum rex qui produisent les braves, roi

collegii puri du monde excellent

probi vi divin redoubtable

maxima [praediti] Darii protecteur, de Goshtasp

stirps mundi rectoris Djemschidis fils, Achéménide

_Paraphrase of above_ _Correct Version of Inscription O_

Ceci [est] I am

Darius roi Darius the great King,

divin, roi

des rois, King of Kings,

roi des provinces, King of countries

qui produisent les braves, which consist of many races,

roi du monde excellent king of this great earth

[et] divin; redoutable, afar and near,

protecteur: fils

du Goshtasp Achéménide. son of Hystaspes the Achaemenian.

A comparison of the two translations with the final version will show

at a glance how vastly superior Burnouf’s rendering was to that of his

predecessor. Not the least important of his contributions to the work of

translation was the identification of the names of some of the provinces

of Darius, which are contained in the I inscription. We have already

observed that Grotefend had attempted a translation of this inscription

in 1832;[425] and in 1836 he again drew attention to the circumstance

that it contained a series of geographical names. The list included no

less than twenty-four proper names, some of which were entirely beyond

Burnouf’s power to decipher; but he made an attempt to read sixteen,

and out of these eight were correct. He thus added Persia, Media,

Babylon, Arabia, Cappadocia, Sarangia, Bactria and Sogdiana to the names

deciphered from the cuneiform;[426] and we have seen how nearly he

arrived at four more—Athura (or Assyria), Armenia, Ionia[427] and Parthia.

Among his contributions to a knowledge of the grammar, he pointed out

that the change of Grotefend’s _o_ into _m_ brought the accusative

singular into line with the Zend and Sanscrit; the genitive _aha_ is also

found in Zend, and both languages alike use it as a dative. A nominative

ending in _oh_ has also its counterpart in the Zend termination in _o_.

He indicated the apparent barbarism that treats the nominative case as

inherent in the word itself; so that the case-ending is appended to it

without modification, as if we wrote ‘dominus-um’ for ‘dominum,’ or

‘dominus-i’ for ‘domini.’[428]

He inferred from the two words ‘Aurmzda’ and ‘izrk’ that cases occur in

which both the vowels and the aspirate are suppressed; and he concluded

that the system of cuneiform writing could not have been originally

applied to express a Sanscrit or Zend language, in both of which the

vowel is rigorously represented. He conjectured also that the cuneiform

signs for the vowels might include an aspirate that rendered its separate

expression unnecessary.[429] ‘There is therefore an evident disagreement

between the language of the inscriptions and the characters in which

they are written’; and this he ascribed ‘to the influence of a system of

transcription of Semitic origin.’[430] The discovery that there was a

marked discrepancy between the mode of writing and the characteristics of

an Indo-European language, now announced for the first time, was soon to

receive very ample confirmation, though it was no small surprise to most

scholars when the origin of the writing was traced, not to Semitic, but

to Turanian sources. In opposition to the opinion of Grotefend, Burnouf

thought that the greater simplicity of the mode of writing in the first

Persepolitan column indicated its later development, and he showed that

the language was not identical with Zend, as Grotefend at first imagined,

but a dialect less pure than Zend, and in actual process of developing

into a later form.[431] Indeed it already exhibited by its interchange of

letters some of the peculiarities noticed in modern Persian. He has no

doubt that it was the living language of the court of Darius; and it is

peculiarly interesting, inasmuch as its existence fully establishes the

greater antiquity of Zend, and removes for ever all the doubts that had

arisen as to the authenticity of that sacred language.[432]

We have already said that Burnouf was connected by ties of friendship

with Lassen from an early age. Lassen was a Norwegian, born at Bergen

in 1800, and consequently a year older than his friend. He was educated

at Christiania, and at the age of twenty-two he left Norway to continue

his studies at Heidelberg. He obtained a travelling studentship from

the Prussian Government, and visited London and Paris in the years

1824-6. During his stay in the latter capital he made the acquaintance

of Burnouf, and collaborated with him in the production of the ‘Essai

sur le Pali’ (1826). On his return to Germany he settled at Bonn, whither

he was attracted by the presence of Schlegel and Bopp. Like them, he was

devoted to the study of Sanscrit and the literature of India; and in

conjunction with Schlegel he became the founder of Sanscrit philology in

Germany. In 1829, he assisted him in the publication of the Râmâyana,

and subsequently edited other ancient texts. In 1830, he received a

Professorship at the University with the munificent stipend of three

hundred thalers, or about forty-five pounds, a year; and ten years later,

when he had attained a wide celebrity, a chair of Indian Languages and

Literature was created for him with a salary of seven hundred thalers.

Here he spent his life, writing and lecturing on his favourite studies,

which also included modern Persian and English literature. His chief

works were the ‘Prakrit Grammatik’ (1837), the Vendidad (1852), and

notably the ‘Indische Alterthumskunde,’ begun in 1847 and continued down

to 1867.

Lassen was troubled during the greater portion of his life by a weakness

of sight, which from 1840 became a serious impediment to his studies.

His last lectures were delivered in the session 1868-9, but he lived

on to 1876, when he died in the city which partly from his own labours

had acquired the name of ‘the second Benares, on the shore of a second

Ganges.’

When he left Paris in 1826 he continued to correspond with Burnouf, and

received letters from him subscribed with the cuneiform sign for B (𐎲).

Burnouf had in fact long devoted himself to cuneiform studies, as is

apparent from his edition of the Yaçna in 1833; but it is not stated when

Lassen first directed his attention to the same subject. Both scholars

published their essays upon it in 1836. When Burnouf communicated his

Memoir to the Academy of Inscriptions, in March 1836, Lassen confesses

that he was entirely taken by surprise.[433] His own Memoir on the

subject was already in the press, and his preface is dated in May. Both

essays were published about the same time, though we cannot say which had

the actual priority of appearance. It is perfectly certain that neither

scholar was dependent upon the published work of the other, and if they

had not been personal friends, the question of the complete independence

of their discoveries could never have arisen. As it is, however, we know

that in the summer preceding the publication of the Memoirs, Burnouf

visited Bonn, and had much conversation with Lassen on the subject of

their common pursuits.[434] He told him that he had ‘deciphered the

names of all the old Persian provinces,’ which sufficiently indicated

the direction of his studies; and it is quite possible that he told him

also of his identification of the letters _k_ and _z_ as well as _b_.

At all events, his Memoir preceded by a clear month (April) the writing

of Lassen’s preface, and he is entitled to claim these two letters.

Whatever confidences Burnouf may have imparted, Lassen was evidently more

reticent, for although the discoveries of the Bonn professor embraced the

re-discovered _b_ of Münter and the _k_ and _z_ of Burnouf, they include

also several other correct values of which Burnouf had no knowledge.

Lassen was not without enemies, and among them the bitterest was

Holtzmann, whom we shall afterwards meet as a contributor to cuneiform

studies. It appears that Lassen, writing to a friend in November 1835,

expressed great surprise to find that Burnouf had deciphered the names of

the Persian provinces. Holtzmann took this to mean that Lassen had till

then known nothing of either the I inscription or the Persian provinces,

and that he had borrowed the whole idea of his book and part of its

substance from his friend. There is, however, nothing inconsistent with

the far more probable assumption that he had been at work upon it long

before the summer visit of Burnouf, and was possibly annoyed as well as

surprised to find that his friend had gone so far upon the same track.

Much has been said of this matter, and it has even been attempted to

raise it to the dignity of a grave literary scandal; but it seems to

have originated in a misunderstanding of Holtzmann, prompted possibly by

personal antipathy, and to have been fostered by those unamiable persons

who love to sow discord, and whose delight it is to sever friendships

that are the chief joy of life. Happily, in this case their efforts were

unsuccessful. It is certain at least that the friendly relations between

the two scholars were never interrupted, and M. Jacquet, who knew both,

said that they had worked simultaneously and without communication with

each other.[435] It is quite possible also that Grotefend’s previous

mention of the inscription had escaped Lassen’s notice. However this

may be, we give his own account of the discovery. He tells us he

was attracted to the I inscription by recollecting the statement of

Herodotus that Darius set up a column on the banks of the Bosphorus

with an inscription in Assyrian and Greek, recording the names of the

nations that had followed his banner. He considered that the sculptured

staircase at Persepolis undoubtedly portrayed the representatives of

various nations bearing tribute to the great King, and he thought that

there must be a record of their names somewhere among the ruins.

Accordingly, with such assistance as he could obtain from Grotefend’s

alphabet, he examined the various inscriptions in Niebuhr and Le Bruyn,

till at length he discovered what he sought in the I inscription of the

former.[436] It was natural to suppose that the nations would be arranged

in geographical order and follow somewhat the same succession as in

Herodotus. The names given by the Greek historian, some of which are also

found in the Zend-Avesta, would afford a clue to their pronunciation in

the cuneiform language, and he might hope with this assistance to carry

on the work so successfully begun by Grotefend. It was in consequence

of the discovery of the names of the three kings in the B and G

inscriptions that Grotefend had been able to fix the values of some of

the signs; and it was natural to suppose that the list now brought to

light, which contained twenty-four proper names, would yield results of

proportionately greater importance. Indeed Lassen believed that he had by

this means found the values of almost all the signs that still remained

doubtful or unknown. Many other scholars had already indulged the same

delusion. St. Martin boasted that his system was ‘_à l’abri de la

critique_.’[437] Burnouf felt convinced that after his own labours ‘there

could be no further doubt except with reference to the letters that

rarely occur.’[438] Lassen was certainly more successful than any of his

predecessors, Grotefend alone excepted. He can lay an indisputable claim

to having correctly deciphered six additional signs; and this number may

be raised to eight if, as is not improbable, he independently discovered

the _k_ and _z_ of Burnouf; and to ten, if we allow two other letters

to pass, the _w_ (𐎺, No. 10) and the _t_ (𐏂, No. 13), which he brought

very close to their true values of _v_ and _tr_—or _ti_ as Spiegel writes

it.[439]

At the time we have now reached, the forty-two signs collected by Niebuhr

had been reduced to thirty-three by the elimination of the diagonal and

of eight others found to be defective. Lassen accounted for all the

thirty-three that remained, and he added three others he found elsewhere.

Of these one (𐎦) is treated by Grotefend as a defective sign for _n_;

but it turned out to be a genuine letter.[440] Burnouf was the first to

recognise its claim, and it figures as one of his three conjectural signs

for _gh_. Lassen gives it the definite value of _g_, which was correct,

for it was eventually determined as _g_ before _u_. The two other signs

he added, ([Persian]) _t_ and ([Persian]) _v_, were both ascertained to

be defective, and he subsequently dropped them from his alphabet. At

this period, therefore, he admitted thirty-four genuine signs and two

defective. His alphabet contained twenty-three correct values as opposed

to the thirteen of Grotefend and the sixteen of Burnouf. It was made up

of the