The result of his investigations was to show that the language was partly

alphabetical and partly syllabic. Down to 1837, Grotefend had recognised

about sixty different signs.[622] Westergaard rightly calculated, from

the relation of the vowels to the consonants, that they must exceed

a hundred, but his actual identification only reached eighty-two. He

noticed two other probable groups, but he was unable to decide whether

they formed one sign or two. One of them has now gained admission.[623]

In consequence of the great care he exercised in the collation of his

copies only four defective signs found their way into his list.[624] He

noticed the recurrence of twelve other signs, which he ascribed to the

error of the copyist, though he thought three of them might be genuine.

It turned out that three were genuine, but only one of those that seemed

to him likely to be so.[625] In addition to the determinative sign before

proper names, which Grotefend had pointed out, he recognised another, the

horizontal wedge, which is sometimes interchangeable with it. It will

remain a curiosity in the history of decipherment that Westergaard should

have gone out of his way to declare that the words for God, Ormuzd and

Heaven were not preceded by a determinative—‘their importance being, no

doubt, thought too great to need any such distinction.’[626] He, in fact,

mistook the determinative sign itself for the vowel which happens to

precede his rendering of these three names.

He thought he had discovered signs for six vowels (_a_, _â_, _i_, _e_,

_u_ and _o_), and eighteen consonants.[627] Of the former only one (_u_)

turned out to be correct. His _a_ and _i_ have both syllabic values (_an_

and _in_). His long _â_ is a defective sign (No. 10). His _e_ should

be _i_ and his _o_ an _a_. Only four of his consonants were ultimately

found to be used as alphabetical signs, and for these his values are

correct (_t_, _kh_, _s_ and _m_). A few of the others represented correct

consonantal values, though used syllabically. For example, his _p_ is

_ap_, his _r_ is _ra_, his _s_ is _as_, his _n_ is _na_. He was more

fortunate in his syllabic values, sixteen of which have been accepted as

strictly correct, if we include two where _w_ is substituted for the

more usual _m_; and eight others may be passed as approximately correct

(Nos. 5, 11, 12, 22, 23, 60, 69, 81). The values he attached to about

fifteen other signs were, however, highly inaccurate and misleading;

and he was unable to assign any value whatever to twenty-two out of his

eighty-two signs.[628]

He could not identify the sign for _l_; no doubt because there was no

corresponding sound in the Persian by which he was guided, and he thought

that no syllable began with _m_. He considers all the syllables begin

with a consonant, though he detected two possible exceptions, where the

syllables appear to be _as_ (Nos. 8 and 82). Neither of these are in

reality exceptions, but there are numerous other instances where the

vowel is the initial. None of his syllables exceed two letters, though

later investigation has shown that there are several cases where a

vowel separates two consonants. He noticed that the syllabic sign was

frequently replaced by two signs to express the simple consonant and

the vowel. He observed the peculiarity that the language knows of no

difference between the sounds of _m_ and _w_, both being written with the

same letter; and he also showed that the sonants are generally absent,

for while _k_, _p_, _t_ are represented, he could not find _g_, _b_, or

_d_. He saw that the consonants are sometimes doubled in the middle of

a word; and he conjectured that this form was adopted to indicate the

distinction. Thus, he thought the syllabic sign for _pi_ might express

either _pi_ or _bi_; but if preceded by the alphabetical sign for _p_,

the two together denoted the surd.

At a time when the affinities of the language were entirely unknown St.

Martin had given it the name of Median, no doubt under the supposition

that it was allied to Persian and spoken by the Median branch of the

common Aryan race.[629] The investigations now concluded by Westergaard

showed for the first time that its affinities were with the Scythic or

Turanian family of languages, and the inconvenience of retaining the

name of Median first became apparent.[630] There could be no doubt that

the Median conquerors were Aryans, as may be shown from the names of

their leaders, and their close relationship to the Persians in race

and language was accepted by all the early historians as self-evident.

It is clear, therefore, that the language of the second column is not

theirs, yet Westergaard determined to adhere to the name of Median

as its most appropriate designation. He was led to adopt this course

chiefly because there appeared to be no other district except Media

where it could have been spoken, and also because its graphic system

seems to indicate contact with Assyria. There can be little doubt that

his decision was fully justified at the time, and, to avoid unnecessary

confusion, in referring to the earlier writers we have in this chapter

generally followed their description of the language of the second column

as Median. On the other hand, modern discovery has tended to increase the

importance of Susa, by showing that at least a portion of its territory

had become the hereditary dominions of Cyrus, before his accession to

the Persian throne. At the same time the connection between the language

of the second column and that of the ancient inscriptions found in the

district has been more completely recognised. There appears good ground

to believe that the Aryan race had been established throughout Media

long before they rose into historical importance. The inconvenience

of calling a Scythian language after the Aryan Medians has therefore

manifestly increased, while the name of ‘Susian,’ though not free from

objection, has become more appropriate, and is the one now generally

adopted. How far the language was spoken beyond the limits of Susiana,

among the subject tribes of Media, may still be open to conjecture. There

is, as we shall see, some evidence in favour of its extension.

It will be recollected that early in 1846 Rawlinson had been able to

translate the whole of the last paragraph of the second column of the

Behistun inscription from the Median or Susian text, the Persian version

of that passage having been found illegible.[631] Several years later

Mr. Norris, with all his special knowledge, was obliged to confess that

he was ‘unable to give a better translation than Colonel Rawlinson

has prepared’ of that very paragraph.[632] In the same year Rawlinson

announced the opinion his studies had led him to adopt upon this subject.

It does not appear that he was as yet acquainted with Westergaard’s

essay; but he had arrived at the same conclusion with reference to the

Scythic affinities of the language. He likewise estimated the number

of the signs at about a hundred, ‘the vowels, unless they commence a

syllable, being for the most part inherent.’ He does not appear to

have noticed the absence of sonants, but he saw that there must be

considerable interchangeability in letters of the same class, and perhaps

even between _n_ and _l_. He added that the language evinced a repugnance

to _r_. He held that ‘it resembles the Scythic in the employment of

post-positions and pronominal possessive suffixes.’ In the declension of

nouns it uses post-fixed particles that are frequently the same as in

modern Turkish, and he notified the existence of a Tartarian gerund.

The pronouns are, he says, Semitic; the adverbs Aryan; the vocabulary a

strange agglomeration of Turkish and Semitic. Although its construction

is more akin to Aryan than Scythic, yet upon the whole he decides that

its affinity is with the Scythic, and suggests that that would be a

more appropriate name for it than Median.[633] He thought some of its

peculiarities might be explained by comparison with the Georgian, which,

when time permitted, he proposed to undertake.[634] He suggested that

it was the language of the aboriginal race whom the Aryan Medes had

conquered, and whose settlements reached at least to Behistun, where an

inscription had been found without the Persian translation, apparently

indicating that it was locally comprehensible.[635]

When Rawlinson had finished his Persian Memoir he devoted himself to

a more elaborate study of the Median, and he appears to have nearly

completed an essay upon the subject. Meanwhile, however, he was drawn

from this branch of inquiry to the more attractive and useful study of

the Babylonian column: and his work on Median was never published.[636]

He did not, however, lose his interest in the subject. He handed over his

copies and other materials to Mr. Norris, who undertook the investigation

of the subject and to whom he continued to give valuable assistance as

occasion arose.

The study of Median was taken up in the meantime by Dr. Hincks from

the point where it was left by Westergaard and Rawlinson. Hincks’s

contribution is contained in three papers read before the Irish Academy

between June 1846 and January 1847; and the last two appeared after he

had seen the opinions of Rawlinson to which we have referred.[637] These

papers were communicated without delay to the Asiatic Society in London,

as we learn from a note by the Secretary, who says he had just received

(June 1846) a communication on the Median cuneiform from ‘a learned

clergyman in a remote part of Ireland.’[638]

Hincks differed in some material points from Westergaard. He would not

admit the long vowels, and limited them to _a_, _i_ and _u_, adding,

however, _er_ to their number. He restricted the simple consonants to

_m_, _p_, _t_, _k_, _s_, and _n_; and from these he thought all the other

signs were combined. He rightly admitted the compound syllabic form,

consisting of two consonants joined by a vowel, which Westergaard had

overlooked, and he even allows the occasional use of a double syllable,

such as ‘ersa’ and ‘washa.’ He showed that the vowel is never omitted,

though not always necessarily pronounced. Thus the group ‘an-na-ap’

reads simply ‘anap’; and he did not consider that the simple consonants

preceding its syllabic form altered the sound as Westergaard had

suggested.[639] Hincks adopted the eighty-two signs distinguished by

Westergaard, and attempted the identification of sixty-seven, or seven

more than Westergaard. His identification of the three vowels, _a_, _i_

and _u_, was correct: and his limited number of consonants were also

correct so far as they went, with the exception of _p_, which is the

syllable ‘pir’ (No. 40). He, however, allotted more than one sign to

some of his consonants: thus _k_ is represented by three signs, _t_ by

two; and conversely he allowed that several characters might express the

same value. He accepted fifteen of Westergaard’s correct syllabic values

and added nine of his own, to which we may add fifteen others nearly

correct, or thirty-nine in all; thus, including his three vowels and

five consonants, he had forty-seven signs available for transliteration,

as opposed to the twenty-nine of Westergaard. Singularly enough he made

little improvement in the misleading syllabic signs of his predecessor.

Some of them, indeed, he made considerably worse, and added others of his

own, so that, notwithstanding a few corrections, their number rose to

seventeen. He, however, pointed out that there was a determinative before

the words for ‘god,’ ‘Ormuzd’ and ‘heaven,’ contrary to the opinion of

Westergaard; and that the group the latter had mistaken for the vowel a

was precisely that sign. He was less successful in his classification of

the language, which he could not accept as Scythic. He considered its

affinity was with the Aryan family, but he could not find that any of the

Indo-European languages had similar inflections.[640]

A few years later De Saulcy wrote two articles in the ‘Journal Asiatique’

on the Median, without, however, making any important contribution to

the subject.[641] His papers deserve notice chiefly on account of his

eminence in other departments of study, and because he was the only

Continental writer whose attention was directed at that time to this

special branch of inquiry.[642] He thought he could recognise that it

bore a close relationship to Persian, sufficient to justify the opinion

of Strabo that the two languages were the same. Both Westergaard and

Rawlinson had already observed that some of its grammatical forms and

vocabulary could be best explained by reference to the modern Georgian

and Turkish; and De Saulcy, notwithstanding his opinion of its affinity

with Aryan, fully recognised that it had left traces in other quarters,

including Kurd, Mongol, Armenian and the Gipsy tongue, but nowhere to a

greater degree than in Turkish. He supports his opinion with a wealth of

illustration drawn from these sources that must have fairly distracted

his printer, and the indiscriminate use of the mechanism of philological

dictionaries has in fact led the writer into many serious errors. He

does not refer to Hincks, and notwithstanding all the resources at his

command, he has fallen far short of the Irish writer whose country

rectory was ill provided with these artificial appliances. De Saulcy

has not, in fact, added a single correct value to those already known,

and has failed to recognise several already established as correct. The

utmost generosity cannot concede to him the possession of more than

twenty-one correct values and nine nearly correct, all previously known;

so that he had not more than thirty available for transliteration, as

opposed to the twenty-nine of Westergaard and the forty-seven of Hincks.

But he introduced a host of errors that are wholly his own. He assigned

no less that thirty values that are absolutely wrong, although he only

attempted sixty-two out of the eighty-two in Westergaard’s list. But it

is not only in the details of decipherment that he went astray; his error

covers the whole conception of the structure of the language. He has no

less than fifteen different signs for vowels representing many fantastic

gradations of sound. Different modifications of _a_ and _ou_ monopolise

each three signs, besides the concession of one each for _hou_ and _ô_.

A simple _u_ is not suffered to appear; but _ha_, _he_ or _e_?, _ya_,

_aï_?, and _oui_ are classified among the vowels. Some difference still

exists as to the treatment of the vowels. The latest authority limits

them to _a_, _e_, _i_ and _u_, and excludes _o_.[643] M. Oppert ranks

_a_ or _ha_ among the consonants; and in addition to _e_, _i_ and _u_ he

admits _o_ and such sounds as _yi_, _ya_, _ah_ among vowels.[644]

But it is in the treatment of the consonants that De Saulcy has most

departed from the earliest and the latest scholars. He fully admits

the syllabic character of the language, but he has done the utmost

under the circumstances to conceal this peculiarity.[645] In his list

the only sign that appears in syllabic form is the semi-vowel _ar_

attributed to a defective sign (No. 10), and the eye already accustomed

to the appearance of syllabic combinations is struck by the singular

bareness produced by purely alphabetical letters. He admits altogether

twenty-one distinct consonantal sounds, of which fourteen are ‘quiescent’

or simple consonants, and each is represented by one sign only, except

_m_, _w_, to which three are allotted. He allows six gutturals to a

language that has at most but two, and fills the other classes with

scarcely less profusion. He recognises that the signs for _m_ and _w_

are interchangeable, and that _d_ and _t_, as well as _b_ and _p_, have

several signs common to both; but he gives both _p_ and _t_ the exclusive

use of others; and _dè_ and _dh_ have each a sign reserved to themselves.

His consonantal sounds are given different signs according as they are

supposed to be followed by _a_, by _e_ or _i_, and by _o_ or _ou_, an

idea no doubt suggested by the restricted use of the same principle in

Old Persian. These letters may be said to be practically syllabic signs,

as they are only used in conjunction with a vowel; but in reality the

classification involves serious error. It is now admitted that, with

few exceptions, the same sign never conveys the sound of more than one

vowel, and in the isolated cases where it occurs it is generally at the

end of a word. In the whole Syllabarium of Weisbach there is only one

instance where the same sign is given an optional sound of _pe_, _pat_,

and in that of Oppert there are only three where _a_ can be exchanged

for _i_.[646] In neither authority is there a single instance where _e_

and _i_ are interchangeable. It is therefore a fundamental error of the

gravest character to represent the same sign as systematically employed

to express either of two vowel sounds, even if the two selected were

ever interchangeable. It is, moreover, doubtful whether there was any

difference allowed between the sounds of _o_ and _u_, except in the

attempt to express foreign words. De Saulcy’s system also excluded the

compound syllables when two consonants are divided by a vowel. While

Hincks did good service in adding a third determinative to the two

acknowledged by Westergaard, De Saulcy actually refused to admit the

determinative character of the horizontal wedge, and thereby reduced the

number to one. On the other hand, he thought he had detected a sign to

indicate the plural, which is in fact nothing but the syllable _sin_.

Perhaps the most useful contribution he made was the remark that, while a

few of the Median signs bore a certain resemblance to those of the same

value in Persian, the larger number of them were actually ‘identical’

with the Assyrian.[647] It must be confessed that it was long before

this identity was detected, and even such a practised copyist as

Westergaard declared that the five different species of cuneiform writing

then known ‘differed from one another in the shape of nearly every letter

or group,’[648] and considerable practice is still required before their

identity can be brought home to the eye. The similarity—to employ a less

emphatic expression—proved, however, of great assistance in enabling

future inquirers to fix the value of the signs. Some time had yet to

elapse before they could take advantage of this discovery, for when De

Saulcy wrote, the Assyrian characters were themselves still undeciphered.

De Saulcy’s work was criticised by Löwenstern in the ‘Revue

Archéologique’ (1850), where he sought to trace the affinity of Median

to the Aramaic branch of the Semitic family, while he admitted that some

of the endings might be traced in Pehlevi and New Persian. He did not

consider it to be the Median language, which, he maintained, is properly

represented by Zend; and he suggested, as Mr. Rich had done before, that

it might have been the dialect of Susa.[649] Holtzmann fully recognised

that it contained Semitic elements, but still he considered that it

should be regarded as the mother of Pehlevi; and he subsequently added

that it was probably the language of the court at Susa.[650] Still

the opinion of its Scythic origin, first suggested by Westergaard

and Rawlinson, continued to gain ground, supported, no doubt, by the

numerous similarities to this linguistic stock that were pointed out in

the learned Memoirs of De Saulcy. In 1852, M. Oppert, writing on the

Persian column, went so far as to propose to drop the designation Median

altogether, and, following the suggestion of Rawlinson, to substitute

‘Scythic.’ At that time he considered it to be the language of the hordes

who overran Western Asia, and who, after twenty-eight years of domination

in Media, were finally expelled by Cyaxares. It must be admitted

that they were fortunate to leave such a permanent memorial of their

passage.[651]

A more important contribution than any of these was made by Luzzato, who

showed with sufficient clearness that twenty-four of the Median signs

corresponded to the Babylonian (1850).

Down to the time we have now reached the progress made was disappointing.

We have seen that much speculation was indulged as to the affinity of

the language and the people to whom it should properly be attributed;

but very little knowledge of the language itself had been acquired.

Dr. Hincks had read forty-eight signs with sufficient correctness, and

De Saulcy thirty-one, out of the one hundred and eleven with which the

language is written; but both scholars were encumbered by the multitude

of unknown or erroneous values. In 1852, however, a considerable step

was made in advance. On July 3 of that year, Mr. Norris read a paper

to the Asiatic Society on the result of his study of the Median column

of the Behistun inscription with which Colonel Rawlinson had entrusted

him; but the essay did not appear in the Journal in its completed

form till 1855. The much greater diversity of material at his command

enabled him to dispose of many difficulties that had obstructed earlier

scholars. In the first place, he was able to increase the number of signs

from the eighty-two that had puzzled his predecessors to one hundred

and three, and to all of these he endeavoured to assign values. He was

successful with fifty-seven, and twenty-one others were sufficiently

correct for purposes of transliteration, making a total of seventy-eight

in addition to two determinatives. One other sign has not even yet been

satisfactorily settled,[652] and he still had twenty-four incorrect

values. Unlike many decipherers, however, he was able to distinguish

the gradations of certainty attaching to the values he assigned. Those

that appear in his list allied to any vowel other than _a_, _i_ or _u_

are to be regarded as questionable. He estimated their number with

tolerable accuracy at about twenty. He fully recognised the true syllabic

character of the language. ‘Each character,’ he says, ‘represents a

syllable which may be either a single vowel or a consonant and vowel, or

two consonants with a vowel between them.’[653] He has, however, given

six signs in his list a purely consonantal value, _m_, _r_, _s_ and _t_,

the two latter being each represented by two signs.[654] Four of these

are correct, but the second signs for s and t are both wrong. He limited

the vowels to _a_, _i_ and _u_, but he has also allowed _e_ to appear in

his list, because he found a sign in Median that corresponds exactly to

the Babylonian for that letter, and it is now admitted as correct. He

reckoned eleven initial consonantal sounds: they include the consonants

already named with the exception of _m_, together with _th_, _ch_, _p_,

_k_, _v_, _l_, _n_ and _y_. With these united to one of the three vowels

all the syllables in the language are formed. The double syllables

are composed of the same consonantal sounds (excluding _th_ and _y_),

separated by _a_. He did not consider that any of the signs represented

the union of two consonants separated by _i_ or _u_, an opinion that has

been since over-ruled. He recognised that there was no difference between

the surd and sonant consonants at the beginning of a word, and he agreed

with Westergaard that the double letter in the middle emphasised the hard

sound. He saw also that the same sign was used equally to express the

Persian _m_ and _w_; and that ‘the aspirate, which is quite uncertain,

must also be disregarded.’ He accepted the two determinative signs

already admitted by Westergaard, and also the determinative before the

words for ‘god’ and ‘heaven’ which had been pointed out by Hincks.[655]

He also recognised the ideogram for ‘month.’ The gradual recognition of

the similarity of a large number of the Median and Babylonian signs was

at length beginning to bear fruit. Norris indicates a resemblance between

nearly fifty in his list of one hundred and three signs.[656] Twenty

of these are indeed ‘identical’ in form, and independent investigation

proved that they conveyed the same sound in both languages. In the

others the similarity was sufficiently striking to afford an important

confirmation of the values arrived at by the study of the text. Indeed

in a few cases—such, for example, as the _e_ already mentioned, the

similarity to the form of a Babylonian character was the only clue to

the value of the Median sign.[657] If he had allowed himself to be more

influenced by the Babylonian script he would have slightly increased

the number of his correct values;[658] though, on the other hand, a too

rigorous adherence to this rule might have landed him in some errors. He

hazarded the important statement, subsequently so remarkably confirmed,

that there are evident signs that the syllabarium had been originally

devised to express a Scythic tongue,[659] for, he said, ‘the unchangeable

roots, the agglutinative structure and the simple syllabisation of such

tongues are perfectly suited to such a mode of writing, while the Semitic

and Indo-Germanic cannot without the most awkward and unsystematic

arrangements be represented by it.’ He considered that the language of

the second column must have been that of the pastoral tribes of Persia;

and he pointed out that the omission from the Median text of the names

of the districts in which Otiara and Rhages are placed showed that those

towns were well known where the language was spoken, and it also afforded

some evidence of the area it covered. On the other hand, the discovery

of Scythic inscriptions at Susa seemed to point no less emphatically to

its southern range, and the possibility presented itself that that was

the source from which it spread. De Saulcy farther showed that a close

analogy might be traced to Turkish; but Norris was the first to point out

that its nearest modern relationship is with the Volga-Finnish branch

of the Scythic family, and that it bears a close resemblance to the

language now spoken by the Finns.[660]

He was the first to treat the grammar systematically. He pointed out

with sufficient accuracy the case-endings of nouns,[661] and explained

that, in common with Finnish, they distinguished more cases than the

Indo-European languages, such as the allative and the locative. He showed

that there was no distinction of gender, and that the adjectives had the

same case-endings as the nouns. He explained that the plural was formed

by the addition of _pa_ (which, however, ought to have been _p_, _pe_, or

_ip_), and that the case-ending was suffixed to it. He distinguished the

pronouns with tolerable correctness, and showed their relationship to the

Tartar languages. He also proved that the analogies with these languages

are more obvious in the verb than in the other parts of speech.

He has given an admirable transcript of the Median text of the Behistun

inscription in eight plates, accompanied by a transliteration that shows

a remarkable improvement on all previous efforts, though of course it

has since undergone considerable alteration. His translation follows

the rendering of the Persian column made by Rawlinson, and has received

little alteration from later scholars. He brought his essay to a close

by giving the Median transliteration and translation of the remaining

inscriptions, including two that were lately found by Mr. Loftus at Susa,

and which now appear for the first time. The unilingual at Persepolis

was at length intelligibly rendered. Westergaard had made out its

general purport; but even this imperfect result escaped the efforts of

De Saulcy.[662] The last paragraph was, however, found one of unusual

difficulty, and Norris suggested two alternative versions:

1. ‘Ormuzd, protect me, with all the gods, and also this

fortress. Moreover, do not doubt that those confined in this

place are wicked men;’

or

2. ‘Ormuzd, protect me, with all the gods, and also this fortress

and what is enclosed therein. This do not doubt that the wicked

men will be punished.’

In 1879, Oppert reads the same passage:

‘Que me protège Ormazd avec tous les Dieux, et cette forteresse,

et aussi ce qui est dans cette forteresse. Que jamais je ne voie

ce que l’homme méchant souhaite [que je voie]!’

The latest attempt was made by Weisbach, in 1890, and runs thus:

‘Mich möge Ahuramazda mit allen Göttern schützen, und diese

Festung, und wiederum zu diesem Platze...! Das möge er nicht

sehen (?), das, was der feindliche Mann ersinnt!’[663]

The work of Norris excited some controversy, and Holtzmann was especially

concerned to refute the Finnic-Tartar hypothesis. M. Haug revived the

theory of its closer relationship to Turkish, proposed by De Saulcy, and

he suggested that the Persians themselves were originally Tartars.[664]

M. Oppert had now become the chief representative of cuneiform studies

upon the Continent. His essays on the Persian column of the inscriptions

(1851-2), evinced a complete mastery of the subject and considerable

independence in the treatment of doubtful passages. The reputation

he had earned led to his being attached to the French scientific

expedition to Babylonia. On his return he undertook to write an account

of the expedition, and his second volume, which made its appearance in

1859, contains an elaborate account of the work of decipherment.[665]

Although the book is chiefly concerned with Assyrian, he has given a

Syllabarium of the Median, with the object chiefly of comparing it with

the Babylonian and Assyrian systems of writing.[666] The great importance

resulting from such a comparison now becomes apparent. The values of the

Assyrian signs were already ascertained in a large number of cases, and

it was recognised that, with some exceptions, the similar sign in Median

generally expressed the same value. The principle was also definitely

admitted that each sign has only one value,[667] and that an independent

sign may be looked for to express the combination of the vowels _a_,

_i_ and _u_ before and after each of the principal consonants, _k_,

_p_, _t_, _m_, _r_, _l_ and _s_, and therefore we may expect a sign for

each of such forms as _ka_, _ki_, _ku_, _ak_, _ik_, _uk_, and so on.

The application of this system enabled Oppert to make a very decisive

improvement in the Syllabarium. It will be recollected that Norris had

twenty-four wrong values, and twenty-one only approximately correct.

Oppert now corrects twelve of the former and eighteen of the latter. The

result was that he could dispose of eighty-three values absolutely and

six nearly correct. He was doubtful as to the sound of one, wrong as to

seven, and he omitted seven. Thus, when the determinatives are added,

all of the 106 signs in Menant’s list were deciphered except fifteen. He

also added a fourth to the list of determinative signs. He showed that

the one mistaken by Norris for _s_ was in fact used simply to indicate

that the following letter was an ideogram (No. 66 of Hincks). It had long

ago been observed that a single sign was employed for ‘king,’ and Norris

added another for ‘month.’ Oppert points out that the determinative

before ‘god’ was also an ideogram for ‘god,’ and that ‘man,’ ‘water,’

‘animal,’ or ‘horse’ and ‘road’ were likewise indicated by ideographic

signs. He considered that the grammatical forms show analogy first to

Magyar, then to Turkish, Mongol and Finnish. He gave it the name of

Medo-Scythic, and he now considered that it was spoken by the tribes at

Persepolis and Behistun—more particularly by those in the north of Media.

The student of the second column had at his command some ninety-nine

proper names, besides a large number of Persian official terms and titles

transliterated into the Median script; and with their assistance the

pronunciation of about a hundred and forty words was already known.

The remarkable success of Oppert was due almost entirely to the

successful comparison of the Median and Babylonian signs; and it had

something of an accidental character, for it appeared in a work chiefly

devoted to Assyrian and without special reference to this particular

branch of the subject. Indeed the attention of scholars was now so

thoroughly absorbed by the study of Assyrian and the many new discoveries

it opened to their view, that the second column fell into comparative

neglect. Mordtmann wrote papers upon it in 1862, and again in 1870, in

the ‘German Oriental Gazette,’ in which he appears to have ignored the

results already attained, and to have given different values to some of

the signs. He called the language Susian, in consequence of the order

in which the provinces of ‘Persia, Susiana and Babylon’ occur in the

Behistun inscription, and also because Susa bears an entirely different

name in the Median from that given to it in the Persian, while the other

names are alike in both. In support of his opinion he was the first to

show that the inscriptions on some bricks found at Susa, which were then

beginning to attract attention, though written in a different dialect,

were evidently similar in speech and writing to the second column.

It will be recollected that Rawlinson visited Susa in 1836, and observed

a few bricks and a broken obelisk bearing the peculiar inscriptions

to which we have just referred. He considered the style of writing to

be ‘the farthest removed of any from the original Assyrian type,’ and

he surmised that the language is ‘not even, I think, of the Semitic

family.’[668] In 1852, Loftus collected a few other inscriptions in

the same character and language, which were sent to Rawlinson. Mr.

Norris, who announced this acquisition in his Median Memoir, stated

that Rawlinson still thought that the characters were those of ‘the

Assyrian alphabet,’ but in a different language, and that he had made out

sufficient to show that they belonged to Susian kings who were anterior

to Darius.[669]

When Mr. Layard visited the same neighbourhood, in 1841, he was fortunate

enough to be able to copy two inscriptions at Malamir, one of thirty-six

lines and the other of twenty-four.[670] Rawlinson, in his classification

of the cuneiform inscriptions, called them the Elymaean, and from the

differences they presented, he considered that they ‘are entitled to an

independent place,’ apart from Babylonian or Assyrian. In 1850, he again

points out their dissimilarity from either of the two last mentioned, but

he adds that they are not so difficult to read as those he had found on

the bricks at Susa.[671] The surprising discovery of De Saulcy that the

Median and Babylonian characters are ‘identical,’ notwithstanding their

apparent diversity, naturally stimulated the ingenuity of other writers

to widen the sphere of the ‘identical’; and Mordtmann was among the first

who laboured in this direction. The work was continued by Lenormant, who

made his appearance within the circle of cuneiform scholars in 1871, by

the publication of his first series of ‘Lettres Assyriennes,’ followed,

in 1873, by the ‘Choix de Textes.’ The result of the minute comparison he

instituted was to show that the Old Susian script closely resembled Old

Babylonian, while the Elymaean of Malamir is simply an earlier form of

the Median or New Susian character. The development towards ‘identity’

had now gone so far that Bertin describes the difference between Old

Susian and Old Babylonian as very slight, while Elymaean and Median are

simple ‘variants of the same.’[672]

Mordtmann and Lenormant were successful also in showing that both these

two newly-discovered languages, or dialects, are closely related to

Median, and belonged therefore to the Scythic family. The remarkable

discovery that had recently been made that a Scythic language—the

Akkadian—was the primitive speech of Chaldæa, gave a very unexpected

extension to the range of the Turanian races; and it was now beginning to

be recognised that the civilisation of Western Asia is to be referred to

them, and not, as heretofore supposed, to a Semitic people. The effect

of these discoveries was to stimulate once more the flagging interest

in the writing of the second column, and efforts were now directed to

determine the nature of its relationship to the newly-found dialects,

and more particularly to ascertain the people to whom each might be

attributed. The first to enter upon this new field of inquiry after

Lenormant was Oppert, who submitted a tentative translation of an Old

Susian inscription to the Congress of Orientalists in 1873. In the

following year, Mr. Sayce attempted two short inscriptions published by

Lenormant. If we may judge by comparison with a later version given by

Oppert, no great measure of success was yet attained.[673] Indeed three

years afterwards, Oppert himself admitted that the Susian could not yet

be read. The inscriptions of Malamir caused less difficulty, and Sayce

declared that it was ‘the same as the Median with a few unimportant

variations.’ It must be confessed, however, that his subsequent analysis

tended to show that these ‘variations’ had a considerable range both in

grammar and vocabulary.[674]

Meanwhile the language of the second column continued to receive a

great variety of names which has produced immense confusion. Lenormant,

however, heroically adheres to ‘Median,’ because one of the Median tribes

is specially distinguished as Aryan, and it was therefore reasonable to

suppose that the mass of the people were of different, and presumably

of Turanian, race. Professor Sayce admits that it must have been ‘the

vernacular of the lower classes of Persia: in other words, of the Medes’;

but he preferred to call it Elamite, ‘as less likely to lead to ambiguity

and misconception.’ He suggests that Amardian would be still better,

for Susiana is always called ‘Khapirti’ in the Median text; and this is

evidently the same as the country of the Amardians of Strabo. He showed

that its relation to the dialect of Malamir was closer than to that of

Old Susian; and he thought there was no doubt that the latter was related

to the Akkadian.

One of the most interesting parts of Professor Sayce’s essay was the

publication of ‘a revised list of the powers of the Elamite’ (_i.e._

Susian) ‘character, which can now be determined by means of the Assyrian

syllabary.’[675] Written in 1874, this document illustrates the process

of development that occurred between the two works of Oppert, that of

1859 and the one of 1879, to be mentioned shortly. It will be recollected

that we left him with seven wrong values, six nearly correct and seven

omitted altogether. We find that when Sayce wrote, four of the first and

one of the second had been corrected, and three signs omitted by Oppert

were now provided with correct, or nearly correct, values. At the same

time a plentiful crop of fresh errors was introduced. Six or seven

values, correctly ascertained in 1859, were now rejected and erroneous

ones substituted. At least three of the values proposed for the signs

omitted by Oppert were very far indeed from the mark. The ideogram for

‘horse’ was rejected in favour of the syllable _az_, which may have

suggested to Weisbach the substitution of ‘donkey’ in place of the nobler

quadruped preferred by Oppert.

The two writers who have brought the knowledge of the Median syllabary

to its present standard are Oppert and Weisbach: the former in a special

treatise written in 1879 (‘Le Peuple des Mèdes’) long remained the

leading authority on the subject, and his conclusions have in the main

derived confirmation from the more recent investigations of Weisbach on

the language of the second column, which appeared in 1890. With very

few exceptions, to be noticed later, both scholars are in substantial

agreement as to the values of the signs; and it is this agreement

that forms for the present the standard of right and wrong, by which

the efforts of their predecessors have been judged. Both writers were

guided to a large extent by the values of the corresponding Babylonian

characters.[676] Oppert, as was said, thought he could trace a

resemblance between ninety-six of the Median signs and their Babylonian

equivalents. In each case, the sound as well as the form of the character

was appropriated. Weisbach is much less struck by the general application

of this law. He fully admits the strong similarity of many of the signs,

but some have, he says, so far diverged from their original types as

to be hardly recognisable. Others, he thinks, were borrowed from New

Assyrian, and a few from older forms. Indeed he is, on the whole,

indisposed to derive the syllabary direct from the New Babylonian. He

thinks it is more properly to be traced through the writing of Malamir

to the Old Susian, and the development from the Old Babylonian of the

latter was a parallel and independent process similar to that which

produced the New Babylonian. But as the Old Susian character has not yet

been sufficiently investigated, he restricts his comparison to the New

Babylonian, and he points out some of the principles that were followed

in the evolution of the new script. For example, the vertical wedge that

crosses the horizontal in the Babylonian is generally placed before them

in Median, and the same rule applies to the horizontal crossing the

vertical. There is an evident effort to simplify both the writing and the

language. The signs preserve the same signification in both, but when

it happens in Babylonian that the same sign has many different values

(sometimes no less than nine) it has never more than two in Median. So

also the number of homophones, or different signs with the same values,

are strictly limited. Indeed, he considers that the Median was an early

effort to approach an alphabetical system.[677]

We have seen that several of the errors made by Oppert in his list

of 1859 were corrected from various sources before 1874.[678] He was

still left with three wrong values, five only nearly correct and four

omitted altogether. Of the first class he now gives one a value that

accords with that of Weisbach—11ᵇ, ‘ko’ for ‘kam,’ the ‘gau’ of Norris

and Weisbach.[679] Of the second class he corrects four,[680] and he

supplies correct values to three of those previously omitted.[681]

He now presents us with a list of a hundred and twelve distinct signs,

and no less than fifteen ideographs; but when their syllabic values are

also known the majority are included in the hundred and twelve signs.

Four, however, appear among the ideographs for the first time, and

raise the total number of signs to a hundred and sixteen. Six of these

are,[682] however, repeated twice over to express different syllabic

values, thus reducing the number of distinct signs to a hundred and ten.

He accepts a hundred and five of the hundred and six signs that were

already known, rejecting only one (No. 21). He completes his number by

the addition of five other signs,[683] of which Weisbach has accepted

three. With these two exceptions, the whole of Oppert’s signs are to

be found in Weisbach: that is, a hundred and eight out of the hundred

and ten. Weisbach, however, includes in his list the No. 21 of Hincks,

omitted by Oppert.

The two writers are also substantially agreed as to the values of the

signs. Of the hundred and six given in Menant’s list, we find they

differ only as to seven. Of these, two are omitted by Oppert[684] and

one by Weisbach.[685] In four cases only have they arrived at absolutely

contradictory values.[686]

The discovery announced in 1859 of a determinative sign to indicate

that the one preceding it should be read ideographically led to the

identification of a number of signs to which ideographic values may be

attached, and their number is raised from the seven known in 1859 to

sixteen. The ones now added by Oppert are ‘town,’ ‘mountain,’ ‘race,’

‘arch’ (a window), ‘sea,’ ‘house,’ ‘head,’ ‘ship,’ ‘camel’; and Weisbach

has since contributed a fifth determinative which, he says, is placed

before articles of wood.[687]

The difficulty of the transliteration is greatly enhanced by the fact

that the same sign represents both _m_ and _w_, and the three gradations

of sound—the surd, aspirate and sonant—are not distinguished by separate

signs. It is therefore impossible to say in many cases whether to

transcribe _m_ or _w_, _k_ or _g_, _p_ or _b_, _f_ or _d_; and Oppert

has enumerated no less than six different modifications of sounds—_č_

(_tch_), _ḡ_ (_dj_), _z̆_, _ts_, _dz_, and _z_—that are all represented

by a single sign.[688] Weisbach points out that _g_, is only clearly

distinguished from _k_ when it occurs before _i_. The Median _z_

represents the Persian _z_, _c_, _j_, and the Babylonian _s_ (and _o_?);

the _r_ and _n_ are sometimes found to be interchangeable. When the sound

cannot be checked by its occurrence in a proper name, Oppert generally

adopts the hard sound; but he allows himself a certain latitude in the

application of this rule, and he shows a decisive preference of _w_ to

_m_. Weisbach follows the uniform practice of transcribing the gutturals,

dentals and labials by the tenues; he always uses _z_ for the Persian

_c_, _j_ and _z_, and for the Babylonian _z_ and _s_; and, contrary to

Oppert, he prefers _m_ to _w_.

Oppert recognises the five vowels _a_, _e_, _i_, _o_ and _u_; and,

following De Saulcy, he admits _yi_, _ya_ and _ah_ in his list, among

vowels. Weisbach excludes the _o_, for he considers there was no

difference of sound between it and _u_; the _y_ he includes among the

semi-vowels, with both _r_ and _l_. Although Oppert found that all

the five vowels follow the consonant to form the single syllable, he

considered that only _a_, _i_ and _u_ precede it. Both writers agree to

limit the consonantal sounds to about eleven. Oppert was the first to

treat the grammar with elaborate care, and when he claimed that his work

was ‘une création entièrement nouvelle,’ the statement was probably more

strictly accurate than he imagined.

The nouns do not admit of any distinction of gender, and have only the

singular and plural number. Oppert distinguishes no fewer than twelve

different cases, indicated by suffixes, a profusion limited by Weisbach

to eight, viz. nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, ablative,

allative, locative and comitative.

Oppert, however, did good service in unravelling the mysteries of the

verb, though his passion for systematising and ‘restoration’ has carried

him too far; and his verb, declined through all its moods and tenses,

presents a very different appearance from the skeleton which, according

to Weisbach, is all that can be strictly collected from the texts

themselves. For example, we are presented with the six persons of a

complete past tense, where Weisbach can only find authority for three;

and we get a complete imperfect, although only one termination is really

known, viz. that of the first person singular. With no less confidence we

find two verbs—a reciprocative (‘je me sus’), and an ‘intensive’ (‘savoir

bien’)—of which Weisbach can see no trace; and the same remark may be

applied to his desiderative (‘je veux savoir’) and his factitive (‘je

fais savoir’).[689]

Both writers agree as to the personal pronouns; but in the possessive

Weisbach can only find the third person singular and the first person

plural, while Oppert supplies us with the series complete.[690]

Weisbach calls attention to the dialectical differences in the

Naksh-i-Rustam inscriptions, and to the evidence of decay visible in the

language of Artaxerxes at Susa.

For the reasons already mentioned there is considerable diversity

observable in the transliterations made by the two writers, but so far

as we have observed they are in substantial agreement with regard to the

meaning of the text, as may be seen by a comparison of their rendering of

the unilingual inscription.[691] Occasionally, however, Weisbach finds

himself unable to follow the more imaginative flights of his predecessor.

He will have nothing to do with the ‘restoration’ of the concluding

paragraph of the Suez inscription of Darius.[692] He is equally unable

to accept the interesting completion of the detached inscription at

Behistun, marked L by Norris. Norris reads: ‘I made another tablet in

the Arian language, such as did not exist before, and I made a large ...

and a large ... and ... and....’ This not very promising attempt is

perfected by Oppert as follows: ‘I have made also elsewhere a book in

Arian language, that formerly did not exist, and I have made the text

of the Divine Law (Avesta) and a commentary of the Divine Law and the

prayer and the translation.’ He observes truly that ‘the passage is of

first-rate importance,’ and he adds encouragingly: ‘The explanation which

I give is sure.’ It is therefore somewhat disconcerting to find that the

latest writer cannot get much beyond the crudity of Norris. Weisbach

reads: ‘Machte ich Inschriften in anderer Weise (?) (nämlich) auf Arisch,

was vormals nicht war, und das grosse ... und das grosse ... und das ...

und das ... machte ich.’ Alas for the Divine Law and the commentary and

the prayers![693]

We have already said that in 1859 Oppert had abandoned the hypothesis

that the language of the second column was introduced by the Scythic

hordes who were expelled by Cyaxares. He recognised that it was

connected with the ancient Akkadian, and could not, therefore, be a

new importation, but an original native dialect. He considered that

the Median name itself is Turanian and related to ‘Mada,’ the Akkadian

for ‘land.’ He thought it is clear from Herodotus that the six tribes

who composed the Median nation were not all of the same origin. The

dominant caste were, he still held, of the same Indo-European race as

the Persians, but a large part of the population were Turanians, and the

language of the second column was that of the agricultural and nomadic

tribes of Media, especially those of the north. He accordingly gave it

the name of Medo-Scythic to distinguish it from the Aryan Median of the

classical writers.

This very tenable hypothesis he, however, abandoned in its turn, and

advanced one much more hazardous. He relies upon a fable of Herodotus

to show that the Aryans occupied the country from a much earlier period

than has been commonly supposed, and did not, therefore, make their

first appearance with Dejoces. Both Aryans and Turanians, he now thinks,

were long settled together in the same country, and it is impossible to

say which of the two were the first comers, though he inclines to give

precedence to the Aryans. The various tribes were upon an equality,

sometimes the Turanian and sometimes the Aryan gaining the ascendency. He

considers the former were known as the Medes, a word essentially Turanian

in its origin, while the others retained their proper designation of

Aryans. He holds that the Median dynasty of Dejoces was Turanian. He

carefully analyses the names of their kings, and he has succeeded in

affording a fresh illustration of the peculiar power of philology to

prove any thesis whatever, when employed by a skilful manipulator. Not

many years before, he laid it down as self-evident that these same names

were pure Aryan.[694] Now it becomes no less apparent that they are pure

Turanian. The dynasty of Dejoces marks the ascendency of the Turanian

Medes, and the language of the second column is that which was spoken

by them. He accordingly drops his previous qualification of Scythic,

and gives it simply the name of Median. The rise of the Persian power

enabled the Aryan Medes to recover the position they had temporarily

lost, and hence all the names that occur from the time of Darius clearly

belong to that race. Mada became a geographical name which embraced

the whole population of the country now under an Aryan aristocracy,

and Herodotus was therefore fully justified in speaking of the Medes

and Persians as one in speech and descent. The theory of the Turanian

origin of the Median dynasty has been almost universally abandoned.[695]

The attack upon it was led by the Jesuit scholar Delattre,[696] and

the whole controversy has been ably summarised by Weisbach. Recent

writers have thought it so necessary to insist upon the Aryan race of

the Median kings that they decline to give to the Turanian language

of the second column the name of Median. It has accordingly come into

fashion to indicate in an unmistakeable manner the source from which

it has sprung. Delattre called it ‘Anzanisch,’ from the name of the

territory ruled by the Malamir kings. Halévy adopted a suggestion made

by Mr. Sayce, and calls it ‘Amardian.’[697] Hommel speaks of it as

‘Susian-Median’ and ‘Susian,’[698] a term which Weisbach has qualified by

calling it New Susian. The more probable opinion seems to be that it was

the language of Susa at the time of the Persian conquest, and possibly

also of some of the subjugated tribes in Media. The name of Susian is

therefore more appropriate than one that might confuse the people who

spoke it with the Aryan conquerors of their country. Still it is very

far from satisfactory. The great importance of the inscriptions recently

discovered in the Old Susian language will tend more and more to reserve

to them the designation of Susian; and considerable confusion will arise

from its extension also to the language of the second column. The latter

may possibly be a descendant of the true Susian, but both in the system

of writing and in the language the connection is remote.

The relationship of the Median is now placed almost beyond the sphere

of controversy. M. Gobineau, who wrote in 1859, maintained indeed that

it was connected with Pehlevi, half Semitic and half Aryan: and M. Mohl

still earnestly hoped that we might ‘get rid of the Scythic hypothesis

and all the complications it involves.’[699] But this desire was not

destined to be realised, and its affinity to the Altaic branch of the

Turanian family is now admitted. Some doubt is felt as to whether it

has left any successor, and which of the modern languages approaches

the nearest. Oppert inclines to Turkish:[700] Weisbach is more guarded,

and considers that it exhibits marked differences from all the living

representatives of its Turanian relatives.[701]

There is little doubt that it and kindred languages were extensively

spoken in early times throughout Susiana and the lower valley of

the Euphrates down to the Persian Gulf. Its connection with the Old

Susian has never been doubted. Lenormant, Oppert, Sayce and Hommel

have testified to its more distant relationship with the Akkadian, the

primitive language of Babylonia. Weisbach is naturally more sceptical,

for in 1890 he had scarcely emancipated himself from the heresy

of Halévy, who doubted the existence of Akkadian as an independent

language.[702] Sayce and his disciple Hommel added the speech of the

Kossaeans to the same group.[703] They were indeed disposed to create a

new family of languages which they called Alarodian,[704] and included

within it the Elamite, embracing New and Old Susian, Kassite,[705]

Hittite[706] and Vannic.[707] They considered that the nearest modern

representative of this language is the Georgian and Basque, an opinion

which, it will be remembered, had somewhat fascinated both Westergaard

and Rawlinson. The propriety of this classification was, however, doubted

by Lenormant, and it has never been satisfactorily established.[708]

CHAPTER VI

DECIPHERMENT OF THE THIRD OR BABYLONIAN COLUMN—HINCKS AND RAWLINSON—A.D.

1846-1851

The task of deciphering the Third or Babylonian Column led to far more

important results, and cannot be so briefly summarised. The earliest

inscriptions found in Babylonia were observed to consist of two

well-marked styles of writing the cuneiform character. One of these

styles was to be seen on the Michaux Stone, published in the Collection

of Millin. The other occurs on the numerous bricks that were picked up

upon the ancient site of Babylon, and on a number of cylinders. But the

most remarkable example of this style was found in the long inscription

obtained by Sir Harford Jones and published by the East India Company.

The first style is by far the simplest, and it is known as the Cursive or

New Babylonian; the other is so elaborate that Grotefend called it the

‘Zierschrift’;[709] but it is generally described as the Lapidary or Old

Babylonian. All the early scholars were struck by the close similarity of

the writing in the third column at Persepolis to the first or simplest

form of Babylonian. Münter went a step farther, and pointed out that the

similarity extended to the Old Babylonian of the brick inscriptions. In

the collection of inscriptions made by Mr. Rich, he thought he discerned

three well-marked varieties of writing; but he was able to announce that

Grotefend, after a careful comparison, considered that they were all

closely related to one another and to the third Persepolitan.[710] It was

soon recognised that there are in fact only two varieties of Babylonian,

and what Mr. Rich supposed to be a third is due only to the vagaries of

the scribe, or, as Rawlinson explained, it ‘arises from the distortion of

oblique elongation.’[711] It was long, however, before the identification

of the two systems was satisfactorily established. In the fifth volume

of the ‘Fundgruben des Orients’ Grotefend demonstrated the essential

identity of the third Persepolitan and the simple Babylonian, and in

the following volume he illustrated the similarity of the two systems

of Babylonian.[712] In 1840 he succeeded in identifying a few lapidary

characters with their equivalents in New Babylonian. In his contribution

to the subject he endeavoured to render the names of Hystaspes and

Darius into the two Babylonian forms.[713] In Hystaspes he seems to

have succeeded in only one character—the lapidary sign for ‘as’—but his

spelling out of Darius was correct, both in the cursive and lapidary

forms.[714] He was able also to recognise that certain inscriptions on

vases written in the cursive style reproduced in part the same text as

those on the bricks written in the lapidary style. With a little farther

study he would have been able, from the material collected in this Table,

to draw up a short list of equivalent signs in the two systems. As it

was, he left this demonstration to be accomplished by Dr. Hincks in a

much more successful manner than it was in his power to attempt. He had

observed indeed that certain words in the East India House inscription

corresponded to those found on the bricks, and he has collected them

together in line 19 of his Table, and placed them word for word below the

brick inscription for purposes of comparison.[715] But both are in the

same lapidary character, and their juxtaposition served only to show that

the same words, and possibly portions of the same sentence, were to be

found in each. Grotefend, as we shall soon see, had not the smallest idea

of their meaning. It was the good fortune of Dr. Hincks to observe that

portions of the text of the East India House inscription are reproduced

in a fragmentary inscription written in cursive characters and published

by Ker Porter.[716] This, as he says, was ‘a most important discovery,

as the equivalence of certain cursive and lapidary characters which bore

scarcely any resemblance to one another was thus demonstrated, as well

as the equivalence to each other of different lapidary characters which

are constantly transcribed by one and the same cursive character.’ By

this means he succeeded in drawing up a Table of seventy-six cursive

characters, selected from the third Persepolitan column, and placing

opposite each its equivalent lapidary sign taken from the East India

House inscription.[717]

Hitherto the cuneiform inscriptions known to Europe had been practically

limited to the Persepolitan and Babylonian styles of writing. A few

examples of different varieties were, however, beginning to crowd upon

the bewildered student. Almost the first examples of the Assyrian style

were collected by Mr. Rich in 1820, during his visit to Nineveh, and

these were subsequently acquired by the British Museum.[718] In 1827,

Schulz found about forty inscriptions at Van, written in a very similar

character, and these were published in the ‘Journal Asiatique’ of

1840.[719] A prism with a long inscription was discovered at Nineveh in

1830, but it does not seem to have become accessible till purchased by

Colonel Taylor in 1846.[720] In 1840, Mr. Layard copied an inscription at

Malamir that presented another striking variety. But the first period of

great discoveries in Assyria had now approached. In 1843, M. Botta, the

French Consul at Mosul, began his excavations in the mound at Khorsabad,

and he soon uncovered the remains of a palace. He found the doors

adorned with monumental bulls, and the walls decorated with bas-reliefs

and inscriptions. He described the result in a series of letters to M.

Mohl, which appeared in the ‘Journal Asiatique’ between May 1843 and

June 1845. M. Flandin was hastily commissioned to take sketches; but

fortunately the task of copying the inscriptions was left entirely to

Botta. He faithfully transcribed upwards of two hundred, many of them

being, however, exact or slightly varied reproductions of each other.

A large collection of sculptures found its way to the Louvre, and the

drawings and inscriptions made their appearance in 1849 in the great work

‘Monument de Ninive.’ Like many similar productions in France, it was

executed upon such a splendid scale as to place it practically beyond the

reach of ordinary students. The inscriptions were, however, afterwards

published separately; and M. Botta contributed a valuable essay on the

newly found ‘Ecriture Assyrienne’ (1848).[721]

Meanwhile Mr. Layard was rapidly accumulating treasures upon even a

greater scale for the British Museum. He began to excavate at Nimrud—the

ancient Caleh—in November 1845, and speedily brought to light the remains

of three buildings, known as the North-West, Central and South-West

Palaces. In the following year he extended his labours to Kouyunjik, a

mound on the site of Nineveh, where he unearthed a palace of unusual

size, which he found had been erected by the son of the Khorsabad king.

He was rewarded by the discovery of the vast treasures now preserved

in the British Museum—colossal bulls and lions, winged human figures,

and many other symbolical objects; long rows of bas-reliefs depicting

battles, sieges and hunting scenes, and large numbers of inscriptions.

One of the most important of these was found in the autumn of 1846 on

a black obelisk in the central palace of Nimrud. It consists of two

hundred and ten lines, and enjoys the distinction of being the first

purely Assyrian inscription that was ever deciphered.[722] Of scarcely

less importance was the discovery of an inscription upon the pavement

where the names and titles of five kings were clearly recorded. Their

names could not indeed be read as yet, but sufficient was already

known from a comparison with the Persian inscriptions to indicate the

genealogical relationship of the unknown sovereign. The Assyrian signs

for ‘king,’ ‘son of’ and a few others had been made out, which left no

doubt as to the meaning of the document. It began with the father of the

founder of the North-West Palace, and ended with the grandson of the

builder of the Central Palace. On his return to England, in 1847, Layard

wrote an account of ‘Nineveh and its Remains,’ but the work did not

appear till 1849. It was followed in the same year by the ‘Monuments of

Nineveh,’ which contained drawings of the bas-reliefs and copies of the

inscriptions.

Two great collections of Assyrian inscriptions were now in the hands

of scholars, who found themselves face to face with the difficult

problems they suggested. In England the task was divided between Hincks

and Rawlinson; but Mr. Norris, Dr. Birch, and Mr. Layard gave valuable

assistance in the publication of documents. Mr. Norris was farther

engaged in the study of the Susian texts. In France the work was taken

up by Botta, Löwenstern and De Saulcy. M. Oppert does not seem to have

turned his attention to this branch of the subject till 1857, when for

the first time France was worthily represented. Germany was silent,

except for a few contributions made by Grotefend in his declining years

that added little to the general progress.

Nothing could at first be more bewildering than the immense number

of signs. Grotefend counted only a hundred and thirty different

characters in the third Persepolitan column. Mr. Fisher, in 1807,

found that the East India House inscription contained two hundred and

eighty-seven;[723] and Grotefend, in 1837, estimated that the whole

of the Babylonian inscriptions known to him contained about three

hundred different signs.[724] But Botta encountered no less than six

hundred and forty-two at Khorsabad alone.[725] The unskilled eye will

be disposed to agree with Löwenstern that at first sight the Ninevite

character presented no analogy with the Persepolitan, or even with the

characters on the Babylonian bricks. In his ‘Essai de Déchiffrement’

(1845) he was, however, the first to point out that a large number of

them do really correspond to the third Persepolitan; and he based his

attempted interpretation partly upon the analogy he had discovered.[726]

In his first Essay, of 1846, Hincks also stated his belief that ‘the

third Persepolitan agrees in character with the Babylonian and with the

Assyrian writing in Schulz’s inscriptions.’[727] Löwenstern afterwards

admitted that he would scarcely have recognised the similarity from

Schulz’s plates; but it became clearly apparent in the more perfect

drawing of Texier.[728] Indeed he was eventually so much struck by

the resemblance that he hesitated to classify the Persepolitan with

the Babylonian in preference to the Assyrian; in fact, he ultimately

persuaded himself that it was nearer the Assyrian. Meanwhile Botta

had begun the minute study of the Assyrian character to which later

investigators owe more than they are always willing to acknowledge.[729]

Those whose fortune it is to occupy the higher pinnacles of knowledge

are only too prone to despise the humbler artificers who constructed the

scaffolding that enabled them to achieve the ascent. Botta arranged the

signs with great care into fifteen classes, according to the number of

wedges they contain. The first class included all those with one wedge

only; and so on up to the fifteenth class, where we find signs composed

of fifteen wedges and upwards: though none appear to exceed eighteen.

The result of his classification was to persuade him that the graphic

system of Assyria was substantially the same as that found at Persepolis

and Babylon. He accepted Rich and Westergaard as the most faithful

copyists of the former, and he compared ninety-six of their signs with

those at Khorsabad. He found that seventy-two were so similar that

their identity could not fail to be recognised at first sight. Fourteen

others exhibit a greater difference, but their identity is capable of

demonstration. There are therefore eighty-six signs out of ninety-six

concerning which no doubt can exist. He thought the difference was not

so great as between Gothic and Latin characters. With respect to the

writing at Van, he counted a hundred and twelve to a hundred and fifteen

characters, and he found that ninety-eight or a hundred were reproduced

identically at Khorsabad.[730] When he began to write upon this subject

he had only just received a copy of the East India House inscription, and

it was some time before he could hazard an opinion as to the relationship

of the New Assyrian to the Old Babylonian.[731] The result of a first

study of the two hundred and eighty-seven signs in the East India House

inscription was the identification of a hundred and seven of the signs

with the Assyrian, and a more careful investigation ultimately raised the

number to one hundred and seventy-nine.[732] The remaining one hundred

and eight have not, he says, any proper equivalent at Khorsabad. He

was inclined to attribute a good deal of the diversity to the material

and the instrument used. Where, for example, the stone was brittle, as

at Van, the engraver showed a disinclination to make the wedges cross,

and the chisel would naturally produce a different effect from the

impress of a wedge upon soft clay. Much also was, no doubt, due to the

individuality of the scribes, who seemed to think they might increase or

diminish the number of the wedges according to fancy. Others were simple

errors on the part of the original scribe or his copyist, and some may

have been intended for abbreviations. He did not believe it possible to

establish any fundamental distinctions between any of these styles. Thus

he thought the Taylor prism combined the differences peculiar to Nineveh

and Babylon so equally that it would be impossible to decide to which

class it really belongs. He concluded, therefore, that, notwithstanding

considerable apparent variety, there was substantial identity; and that

one and the same mode of writing prevailed in Assyria and Babylon, at Van

and Persepolis. Indeed he went so far as to suppose that whoever could

read a Khorsabad inscription would be able also to read all the others.

It is true he could not himself read or pronounce a single word with any

degree of certainty;[733] and Rawlinson declared that his special studies

afforded him no facility. He could, he says, read the Babylonian of the

third column, but he has not ‘yet succeeded in identifying a single name

in the tablets of Van or Khorsabad.’[734]

At first indeed Rawlinson was much more impressed by the diversity than

by the similarity of the signs, and he described them as ‘constituting

varieties of alphabetical formation.’ He divided Babylonian into the

writing of the third Persepolitan and that of the bricks and cylinders;

the latter he considered was the primitive form ‘which must have embodied

the vernacular dialect of Shinar, when the earth was of one language and

one speech.’ Assyrian he also divided into two classes, Assyrian proper

and Medo-Assyrian or Vannic; but he also distinguished Assyrian proper

into two subdivisions, representing the lapidary and the running hand—a

specimen of the latter being the Taylor prism. The Elymaean inscriptions

he placed in a class apart, ‘as entitled to an independent rank.’ He

pointed out that even the third Persepolitan writing is not identical

with the cursive Babylonian, and that the variation is sufficient to

constitute a serious impediment to study. The writing on the Assyrian

cylinders is ‘quite distinct from any variety of character which occurs

on similar relics at Babylon’; and he found ‘characters at Van that

never occur at Khorsabad and _vice versa_.’ He cannot, therefore, agree

with Botta that they all ‘belong to one single alphabetical system,’ and

that the differences are merely ‘varieties of hand.’[735] Farther study,

however, led him to alter his opinion, and in 1850 he admits that ‘there

is no doubt but that the alphabets of Assyria, of Armenia, of Babylonia,

of Susiana and of Elymais are, so far as essentials are concerned, one

and the same. There are peculiarities of form, a limitation of usage—but

unquestionably the alphabets are “au fond” identical.’ Mr. Layard had

also arrived at the same conclusion. In his opinion, the varieties

appear to be mere ‘caligraphical distinctions.’[736]

The same important discovery was soon afterwards extended, as we have

already related, to include the writing in the second or Susian column

of the Persepolitan inscriptions. In 1846, Hincks called attention

to the similarity that existed between them. Both the Babylonian and

Assyrian modes of writing, he says, ‘agree in principle with the second

Persepolitan,’ and he farther observed that where the characters are

the same, they have generally the same, or nearly the same, value in

all three.[737] It is curious that Botta was quite unable to trace the

existence of this resemblance. Writing of the three columns, he says:

‘The elements of the groups are in each quite different, and even when

the form agrees the sound is quite different’; and this opinion was

shared by Westergaard, who, as we have said, maintained that the various

species of cuneiform writing ‘differed from one another in the shape of

nearly every letter or group.’[738]

A good deal has been said from the time of Botta downwards as to the

similarity of the various styles. There is no doubt that they are

sufficiently formidable to require a special training in reading

each kind,[739] and the Assyrians themselves found it necessary to

make transcriptions from the Babylonian in order to make the writing

intelligible. There was a greater diversity in the writing of Babylonian

than of Assyrian, in consequence of there being no standard official

type in the former as there was in the Assyrian,[740] and consequently

a copyist sometimes altogether mistook a sign, and occasionally he was

actually unable even to divine its meaning; indeed, so great was the

diversity in the manner of writing that the Assyrian scribes made use of

Tables of Variants, and in one of these no less than twenty different

ways of writing the same sign have been found. On the whole, most

students will be inclined to agree with Mr. Budge, who dwells more on the

differences than the similarity of the styles.[741]

The demonstration of the similarity of the cuneiform writing of

Babylon and Assyria was followed by the more important discovery that

the languages expressed by both were the same as that of the third

Persepolitan column. The Persian, now deciphered and translated, was thus

found to afford a key, not only to the language of the third column, but

also to the large collection of inscriptions from Nineveh. Hincks, in

a Postscript of June 1846, to which reference will be frequently made,

announces that he believes the third Persepolitan ‘agrees, to a great

extent at least, in language with the Babylonian inscriptions.’[742] In

1848, Botta endeavoured to establish beyond the possibility of doubt that

the Assyrian of Khorsabad likewise agreed with the language of Babylon

and Persepolis. He showed that the same grammatical inflexions, the same

personal pronouns, the same particles, and very many words agreed in

all three languages. With regard to the inscriptions at Van, Botta was

at first in doubt, but farther study led him to believe that here the

inflexions were not the same.[743] This was subsequently fully recognised

by Hincks[744] and by most other scholars. It did not, however, prevent

De Saulcy from hazarding a translation of one of them on the supposition

that it was written in Semitic.[745] In 1850, Rawlinson agreed that

both the Babylonian and Assyrian languages are to be included in a

common category; but he added that ‘they can hardly be called identical,

inasmuch as each dialect affects the employment of specific verbal roots

and certain particular nouns and adjectives.’[746] They are, in fact,

distinguished by certain dialectical differences which have been compared

in degree to that existing between the dialects of the West and North of

England; but other authorities think the differences scarcely amount to

provincialism.[747]

The suggestion that the newly-discovered language would turn out to

be Semitic was made at an early period of the inquiry. It had not,

however, occurred to Grotefend, who described it, in 1837, as Parsi,

and in 1840 he had apparently returned to his original opinion that it

was Pehlevi, and he expressly rejected a suggestion of Lepsius that the

writing might be compared to Phoenician.[748] Before the decipherment of

the cuneiform every conceivable hypothesis had been started as to the

probable affinities of the Ancient Assyrian language.[749] At length, in

1845, Löwenstern recollected that the Jewish Scriptures place Assur in

the same ethnological division as Heber, and he concluded that Assyrian

must therefore have been a Semitic speech.[750] In June 1846, Hincks

also announced that ‘both Assyrian and Babylonian appear to have much in

common with the Semitic languages’;[751] and in the following January he

stated emphatically that they ‘exhibit a much greater similarity to the

other Semitic languages than I had at first supposed.’ In consequence of

this similarity, he now for the first time sets the fashion, afterwards

generally adopted, of classifying the signs according to the letters of

the Hebrew alphabet, and he endeavoured for a brief time to assimilate

the vowel system to the Semitic method.[752] In a tract written in 1847

Löwenstern dwelt with increasing force upon the Semitic affinities of

the language; and he considered that Rawlinson is fundamentally wrong in

applying the laws of an Aryan speech ‘to a writing and a language that

are Semitic.’[753] It cannot be said that he contributed much towards

the proof of his assertion. He was entirely mistaken in the fundamental

principle of his comparison, the supposed similarity of the vowel systems

of the two languages; but he pointed out the analogy of a few words, such

as ‘rabu,’ ‘great,’ to its Hebrew equivalent, and this was the only word

which, according to Menant, was then correctly read.[754] In the December

previous, Hincks pointed out that the personal pronoun in Assyrian reads

‘a-na-ku,’ but he left it to the learning of his readers to recognise

the identity of this word with the Hebrew. This was afterwards done by

Botta,[755] who, however, continued on the whole to be doubtful of the

Semitic affinities of Assyrian.[756]

In 1849, De Saulcy contributed two memoirs on cuneiform, which seem to

have added considerably to the proof.[757] In the first he is said to

have shown that the two languages agreed in the feminine termination

_t_ and in the relative pronoun ‘sha’; and in the second he identified

the particles for ‘and’ and ‘with.’[758] In the following year, Hincks

added other forms and words that could be best explained by reference

to the Hebrew;[759] and Rawlinson definitely settled the question by an

elaborate comparison of its grammatical forms and vocabulary with those

of other Semitic languages.[760] Since that time its affinity to the

Semitic family has been fully accepted. Rawlinson showed that Babylonian

is found in a more primitive state than any other of the Semitic dialects

of Asia open to our research. It is held to be the oldest representative

of that family yet known, ‘the Ethiopic ranking next in point of

antiquity.’[761]

Hincks declared that it bears the same relationship to Semitic as

Sanscrit to Aryan, an opinion shared by Mr. Sayce and Professor Haupt.

It properly belongs to the northern group, which includes Hebrew,

Phoenician, Syriac and Chaldee; but there is some disagreement as to the

degree of relationship.[762] Mr. King describes it as ‘closely akin’

to the northern group, while Mr. Pinches considers the differences

are often very great, especially in the verbs.[763] Mr. Boscawen

finds striking affinities in grammar to Arabic, one of the southern

group.[764] It was some time, however, before these opinions prevailed.

M. Luzzato, in 1850, still maintained that Assyrian was an Indo-European

language;[765] and Holtzmann that it was a Persian dialect mingled with

Semitic elements.[766] Botta long remained in doubt, and Hitzig did not

hesitate to deny that it is Semitic.[767] So late as 1858 Ewald, the

German Hebraist, entirely refused to accept the grammatical forms of

Assyrian as Semitic.[768] M. Renan wrote to the same effect in 1859,

and he even retained his doubts in the fourth edition of his ‘Langues

Sémitiques,’ published in 1863.[769] The recent discoveries were indeed

peculiarly unacceptable to M. Renan. Not long before, he had laid down

that monotheism was the special ‘note’ of the Semitic races, and he

was naturally extremely disconcerted by the unexpected apparition in

the Louvre of a profusion of Assyrian gods, according as they were dug

up by M. Botta. In 1865 we are still assured that Assyrian, ‘though of

the Semitic type, is only distantly connected with known forms of that

language.’[770]

It is much easier to determine the grammatical affinity of a language

than to read it, and the place of Babylonian in the family of languages

was definitely fixed before much progress was made in the work of

translation. From the time that Grotefend’s attention was first directed

to cuneiform research, he endeavoured to include the second and third

columns, no less than the first, within his sphere of inquiry. But he

achieved very little success. In his Essay published by Heeren (1824) we

find that he had already singled out the groups in the third column that

corresponded to Cyrus, Hystaspes, Darius and Xerxes. The Babylonian,

unlike the Persian, has no sign to mark the division of the words, and

the difficulty attending their separation was at first very great. The

process was facilitated when it was recognised that each line begins and

ends with a word: that is to say, a word is never divided and carried

over from one line to another. In 1837, Grotefend successfully divided

eight lines of the Elvend inscription, with only a slight mistake. He

also divided the B inscription of Darius nearly correctly: the exception

being that at the end of his first line he seems to treat three words as

one.[771] Nor was the difficulty confined to the separation of the words

only. Some of the signs are so long that they were at first mistaken for

two or more letters. Thus the sign for _ar_ in the word for Xerxes was

treated by Grotefend as _th_ and _r_;[772] and Löwenstern divided the

sign for _gi_ into _r_ and _s_, which continued for a long time to be a

source of trouble.

In 1840 Grotefend gives a Table to show the transliteration of his four

royal names. He reads Cyrus ‘Kho · re · s’ for ‘Ku · ra · as’; Hystaspes

‘Wi · scht · as · p’ for ‘Us · ta · as · pa’; Darius ‘Da · r · ha · a ·

wesch’ for ‘Da · ri · ya · a · vus’; Xerxes ‘Kh · sch · ah · th · r ·

sch’ for ‘Hi · si’ar · si.’[773]

We have here sixteen different signs with their values attached; and of

these only three (_as_, _da_, _a_) are absolutely correct; though the

others give the consonantal values. These values appeared substantially

in his tract of 1837, with the addition of ‘wo-hu’ for the signs that

read ‘rabu.’[774] Hincks, writing in December 1846, makes the very

liberal admission that perhaps Grotefend knew the values of ten cursive

characters correctly and of ten others approximately.[775]

It will be seen from the transliteration that he recognised some of the

signs as syllabic and some as alphabetical. He also knew there was a

single sign for ‘son,’ which, he points out, occurred as _a_ in Darius;

and he had found three of the equivalent signs for ‘king.’ It is not

improbable that if he had persevered in analysing a larger number of

proper names, he might eventually have reached other solid results.

Unfortunately, these were not readily accessible. The I inscription,

that yielded so much assistance to Burnouf and Lassen, had no Babylonian

equivalent; and Westergaard had not yet copied the one at Naksh-i-Rustam.

Failing the only true method, he had recourse to another that once more

carried him far away to another ‘constellation of Moro.’

There was much speculation as to what could be the signification of

a certain inscription found on cylinder seals and ‘holy’ vases, and

reproduced with amplification on the bricks collected by Mr. Rich at

Babylon. Hager had long ago thrown out the useful suggestion that the

brick inscriptions most probably recorded the name of the maker or

the builder; but this opinion did not ultimately find favour. It was

contended that the inscriptions on the seals and ‘holy’ vases must have a

religious import, and were no doubt used as talismans, in accordance with

Oriental custom; and nothing could be more natural than that the same

mystical formulae should be impressed upon the bricks, in order to banish

the evil demons from the precincts of the building. Grotefend accordingly

looked about for guidance, and at length found something to suit his

purpose in the Zend-Avesta. He collected a number of brick inscriptions

together, and placed under them such portions of the inscriptions on

seals and ‘holy’ vases as he found to correspond. They are not, however,

exactly alike, for in the latter two or more words are omitted from the

middle of the sentence. The first legend contains sixteen words and,

according to Grotefend, it runs thus: ‘(1) Ich erhebe (2) demüthigst (3)

den grossen (4) König (5) Mithras (6) immerdar (7) mit Grösse (8) und

mit Stärke (9) an diesem (10) öffentlichen Orte (11) Ja (12) ich erhebe

(13) diesen (14) grossen (15) König (16) Mithras.’ The legend taken

from the brick of Nebuchadnezzar (line 13) differs slightly from this.

The name of the king or god is not the same (words 5 and 16); and the

two words ‘öffentlichen Orte,’ ‘ja,’ are also different. At the end, a

seventeenth word is added, signifying, as is supposed, ‘sei gnädig.’ Such

was the last attempt at translation before the breaking of the new light.

The meaning of this inscription is now known to be: ‘(words 1, 2, 3)

Nabu-kudur-usur, (4) King (5) of Babylon, (6-10) Restorer of Bit-Saggatu

and of Bit-Zida, (11) eldest son (12, 13, 14) of Nabu-pal-usur, (15) King

(16) of Babylon, (17) I.’[776]

Löwenstern, in his ‘Essai de Déchiffrement,’ published in 1845,

contributed little to the progress of the study. He, however, boldly

attempted to pass beyond the guidance of the Persepolitan inscriptions,

and to decipher two proper names in an inscription recently found at

Khorsabad. The one he selected is engraved over a bas-relief and appears

in Botta (Plate 25). The subject evidently referred to the capture of

a city, and Löwenstern learned from the Hebrew Scriptures that the

Assyrians had only captured four important places. One of these was

Asdod, which was taken by Esarhaddon, and the appearance of sea in the

bas-relief left no doubt that this was the place referred to. He had

thus ingeniously conjectured the names of the city and the conqueror

by independent means; and there was little difficulty in fixing the

cuneiform groups in which they were to be found. We have already said

that Löwenstern observed the close resemblance between the Assyrian and

Persepolitan characters; and he at first thought that the similarity

extended to the square writing of the Hebrews. It was by comparison with

these that he sought to achieve his decipherment. The name of the town

consisted of five characters. The first he did not know, but assumed to

be _a_; the second corresponded exactly to the Hebrew ‘shin,’ the third

to the Old Persian _d_; and, pursuing this method, he satisfied himself

that he had deciphered ‘Asdoh’ or ‘Asdod.’ Botta afterwards pointed out

that the word had been improperly transcribed, and that the first sign,

translated _a_, was simply the determinative of ‘city.’[777] As regards

the group that should contain the name of Esarhaddon, Löwenstern thought

it consisted of three signs. The first, he erroneously stated, had been

ascertained by Grotefend to be _r_;[778] the second was already known as

_s_ in ‘Asdod’; the third bore a remote resemblance to the Hebrew ‘koph’

turned over on its side. It remained to adapt the result, _r_ _s_ _k_, to

the name of Esarhaddon. The matter was simplified by Isaiah, who calls

the king in whose reign Asdod was captured Sargon. Another reading of

this name is ‘Sarak,’ which is evidently the word in the inscription,

the transposition of the _r_ and _s_ being obviously unimportant. It

happened, curiously enough, that Löwenstern guessed the name of the

Khorsabad king correctly, but his transliteration was entirely at fault.

Two years later, Longpérier pointed out that he had omitted the first

sign of the name altogether; and Botta protested against the separation

of the second sign into two, in order to evolve _r_ and _s_.[779]

In June 1846 Hincks began the series of contributions to the subject

which he continued down to the time of his death, twenty years later. In

his first paper he tells us he had just begun to apply himself to the

third Persepolitan, which, he says, he found to agree in ‘character and,

to a great extent at least, in language with the Babylonian inscriptions,

and to the Assyrian writing in Schulz’s inscriptions.’ ‘In both,’ he

says, ‘some of the characters represent elementary sounds and some

[represent] combinations. In both, two or more characters are used to

represent the same sounds. In both, no vowel is omitted; but vowels and

consonants are repeated in two consecutive characters.’ He also ‘found

it to be a general rule, though it admits of some exceptions, that when

a character occurred in two or more alphabets, it had the same value, or

nearly so, in all of them.’ Thus the _pa_ of the second Persepolitan is

_pa_ in Assyrian, and _ba_ in Babylonian. He claimed to be able to read

the names of ‘Babylon’ and ‘Nineveh’ on certain bricks that had been

brought from those places.[780]

A few months later he was able to announce that he had ‘made considerable

progress in deciphering the Babylonian cursive and also the lapidary

character of the East India House inscription.’ He found that the

writing in the third Persepolitan column was identical with the former,

or cursive, style, and that its title to be called the ‘Babylonian

column’ was therefore incontestable.

The only predecessor he will allow to have had in this inquiry is

Grotefend, who has discovered, he says, that the Babylonian characters

are partly syllabic and partly literal; and that ‘certain lapidary

characters correspond to certain cursive ones.’ Grotefend, he adds,

may also have discovered the values of about ten cursive characters

correctly, and possibly of ten others approximately. But he was not

aware that ‘several equivalent characters might be in use to represent

the same letter or syllable.’[781] Hincks was, however, more adequately

supplied with materials to work with. Besides the Persepolitan

inscriptions which he had the advantage to study in the more perfect

copies of Westergaard, he had also access to the list of provinces at

Naksh-i-Rustam lately copied by the same traveller. The discovery that

a clay cylinder published by Porter reproduced in cursive characters a

portion of the East India House inscription written in the lapidary style

had, as we have already seen, enabled him to compare together seventy-six

signs in the two different modes of writing. These he now attempted to

classify according to what he considered to be their values. The Table

is the first of the kind that appeared, and is consequently of very

exceptional interest. His decipherment was based in the usual manner upon

a comparison between the proper names in the Babylonian and those in

the Persian column. ‘But,’ he says, ‘even more [values] were determined

by comparing different modes of writing the same word.’ His success, so

far as it goes, is certainly remarkable. He recognises correctly the

signs for the three principal vowels, _a_, _i_ and _u_ (Nos. 1, 4 and 7);

a second sign for _u_, used in the late Babylonian, is also correctly

identified. The breathing sign is rendered with approximate correctness

by _ya_ (No. 2; _cf._ King 226), and the two diphthongs _ai_ and _ia_

figure as _yu_ and _ya_ (9 and 3). The list of consonantal sounds is,

of course, far from complete; but it is remarkable that in the great

majority of cases the signs are presented to us as syllabic. They even

include two compound syllables, ‘bar’ and ‘sar.’ They are distributed

among twenty-one different sounds: _r_ or _er_, _ra_, _ru_; _n_, _na_,

_nu_, _ana_; _ba_, _bu_, _bar_; _ak_, _ka_, _ku_; _ta_, _da_; _s_, _as_,

_us_; _sa_, _su_, _sar_, and the signs for the plural. It will be seen

that this affords a remarkable anticipation of a later discovery. A

careful examination will show that, so far as the consonantal sounds are

concerned, there are extremely few errors. Indeed, out of fifty-five

signs, we have only found twelve radical mistakes in this respect. On

the other hand, he was able to give to many signs their absolutely

correct syllabic value. At the time of writing he was of opinion that

the distinction between _i_ and _u_ was not observed; and he accordingly

classifies together the syllabic ending in either of these vowels.

He thought that the same confusion existed among the consonants. He

considered that the language did not admit of distinction between _r_ and

_l_, or between _b_ and _p_, or _w_ and _m_; nor between the gutturals

_k_, _g_ and _kh_; nor between the sibilants; and that _ch_ is expressed

by _s_, and _j_ by _k_. He identified the personal pronoun I—_a-na-ku_;

and he read the name and titles of Nebuchadnezzar in various inscriptions

which Grotefend had mistaken for forms of prayer. He saw clearly the

ideographic and determinative value of some of the signs, and fixed

correctly upon those for ‘and,’ ‘son,’ ‘great,’ ‘earth,’ ‘one,’ ‘house,’

‘god,’ ‘man’ (two), and another sign for ‘king’ not previously recognised

by Grotefend. He also pointed out two signs for the plural. (December

1846.)

In his paper of January 1847 he increases his list of primary signs to

ninety-five, and he analyses the remaining characters found in the East

India House inscription published by Mr. Fisher in 1807. He thinks he has

been able to assign values to a hundred and ninety-nine of these, and

to attach them to some one or other of the ninety-five primary values

to which, in his opinion, they corresponded. If this attempt had been

successful, he would have arrived at the values of the whole of the two

hundred and eighty-seven signs in Mr. Fisher’s list, and a few others

in addition. But the paper in other respects indicates a retrograde

tendency. ‘The language,’ he says, ‘has been brought to exhibit a much

greater similarity to the Semitic ones than I had at first supposed.’

He accordingly abandons the ‘transcription of Babylonian words into

Roman characters’ and assimilates them to the letters in the Hebrew

alphabet.[782] He distributes the signs into classes according as he

supposes them to be labials, gutturals, dentals, nasals, linguals and

sibilants. He does not attempt to subdivide the classes into surds and

sonants, but he separates each class into two divisions, according as

he considers that the consonant is followed by _e_ (:_sheva_) or by _a_

(-_pathac_). ‘Values different from these are annexed to the characters

which admit them.’ In so far as each sign is inseparably attached to one

or other vowel the system remains syllabic; but his new table exhibits

a strong desire to revert, if possible, to an alphabetical system in

correspondence with the Hebrew. His study of the inscriptions at Van

enabled him, even at this early date, to give ‘the mode of expressing

numbers in cuneatic characters from 1 to 100,000’: a system he farther

exemplified in his later paper on the Van inscriptions.

His manipulation of the two hundred and eighty-seven signs induced him to

take a much too favourable opinion of his own achievement, for we find

him, in the course of the following year (May 1848), announcing that

‘the values of the great majority of the [Babylonian] characters are,

in my judgment, already settled beyond the reach of criticism,’[783]

a statement which we now know is, in fact ‘beyond the range of

criticism.’ By that time he had, however, made the important discovery

that Sennacherib and Esarhaddon were the builders of the two palaces

at Nineveh. He would not, however, admit that Sargon was the Khorsabad

king, a fact that had just been demonstrated with remarkable ingenuity by

Longpérier.[784] Hincks suggested that the proper reading was Ni-Shar.

It is worthy of remark that the writings we have just reviewed of Hincks,

in 1846-7, were brought to the notice of Continental students by Mohl, in

his ‘Rapport’ to the Société Asiatique of 1848.

It is, in fact, in these essays that the first real progress in the

decipherment of Babylonian was made. In them Hincks laid the foundation

upon which all subsequent work was raised, a work to which he himself

contributed no small share.

The year 1847 was especially rich in contributions to the study. It

opened with the remarkable paper we have just reviewed; and during its

course Rawlinson expounded his views in the ‘Journal of the Asiatic

Society,’ Botta in the ‘Journal Asiatique,’ Longpérier in the ‘Revue

Archéologique.’ Löwenstern added another Memoir of greater value than

the first, and De Saulcy made his appearance in this field of inquiry by

a paper communicated to the Académie des Inscriptions, and by two essays

that have exposed him to much criticism.

Hincks, as we have seen, had worked exclusively upon the Persepolitan

and Babylonian texts; but the great discoveries of Botta and Layard

soon diverted attention to the more ample materials that were beginning

to pour in from Khorsabad and Nimrud. We have already alluded to the

enormous number of different signs that were found to be employed in

the Assyrian inscriptions—no less than six hundred and forty-two,

according to Botta’s computation. It seemed incredible that they could

all convey different shades of sound. Grotefend noticed that even in

the third Persepolitan some signs appeared to be interchangeable, and

therefore presumably of similar value; and this peculiarity became even

more noticeable in Babylonian.[785] Hincks, as we have seen, noticed

‘the equivalence to each other of different lapidary characters, which

are constantly transcribed by one and the same cursive character.’

In a paper read before the Académie des Inscriptions in 1845, Botta

explained that many Assyrian characters of very different form were

frequently substituted for one another, and the inference was that

there are several signs to express the same, or nearly the same, sound.

Rawlinson’s attention, up to the present, had been almost entirely fixed

upon the Persian column of the Behistun inscription, and his version

of it appeared early in 1847. He saw that it afforded the ‘only key to

the decipherment of the Babylonian alphabet.’[786] We have observed

that Grotefend found himself practically limited to four proper names;

Löwenstern had only twenty to work upon;[787] while Hincks and De

Saulcy, with the addition of the Naksh-i-Rustam inscription, had forty.

From the Behistun and other sources now available to Rawlinson, the

number gradually rose to ninety-four;[788] and with these before him, he

began to apply himself to ‘the determination of the phonetic powers of

the characters.’ Among the new names was that of Nebuchadnezzar, which he

at once recognised was the same as occurred so frequently on the bricks

at Hillah. This discovery was made quite independently of Dr. Hincks;

and Layard is inclined to think that, in actual date, the precedence is

due to Rawlinson.[789] He was able already (1847) to announce that he

had ‘obtained a tolerably extensive alphabet from the orthography of the

proper names’; but he adds: ‘I have left the grammar and construction of

the language hitherto untouched.’ He had, however, been greatly struck

by the number of signs with apparently equivalent sounds.[790] He found

it difficult to admit the existence of variants in the same inscription,

except such as were caused by slight changes in the writing of the same

character. He saw, however, that no such explanation would cover all the

difficulties of the case, for some of the substitutes were obviously

totally distinct in form. In this case he did not believe that they were

‘legitimately interchangeable.’ He thought the ‘phonetic organisation

of the language was so minute and elaborate that although each form was

designed to represent a distinct and specific sound, yet the artist

was perpetually liable to confound the characters.’ He suggested also

that each consonant had a different sign to express the surd and

sonant; and in some cases one might be substituted for the other. The

‘vowel-sounds,’ he declared, ‘were inherent’; but it was allowable also

to represent them by separate signs; and farther redundant consonants

were frequently introduced for the sake of euphony. These opinions were

immediately traversed by Löwenstern, in his ‘Exposé des Eléments’ (1847).

This tract followed the sudden, though happily transient, conversion of

Hincks to the application of the Semitic vowel system to the Babylonian

writing. Löwenstern embraced this view with characteristic energy; and it

was adopted also by De Saulcy, in whose case it became one of the chief

causes of the ultimate failure of his Assyrian studies.

Löwenstern, as we have said, considered that Rawlinson was fundamentally

wrong in applying the laws derived from Indo-European languages ‘to a

writing and a language that are Semitic.’ He absolutely denied that the

vowel is inherent.[791] The signs are simple consonants, and they may

be used in connection with any vowel sound. The vowels may or may not

be expressed, and the signs for them are to a large extent expressive

of any vowel sound. One sign he mentions may convey the sound of _hou_,

_a_, and _ya_; another of _a_ or _ha_, _w_ and _ü_.[792] The vowels are,

he says, by no means limited to the _a_, _i_ and _u_ of the Sanscrit,

but include also the _e_ and _o_ and the diphthong _ao_. He entirely

disagrees with the opinion of Rawlinson that the equivalent signs have

any modified value. He compares Assyrian with Egyptian, and regards the

signs that are apparently interchangeable as simple ‘homophones.’ He

shows the different ways in which the names of the Achaemenian kings are

written; and draws the apparently inevitable inference that the different

signs have one and the same sound. ‘The variants,’ he says, ‘may be used

indifferently without violating the phonetic laws of the language.’[793]

He was apparently the first to observe that some signs ‘express different

sounds’; and these he calls ‘homotypes.’[794] As was natural, he does

not appear to have had any idea of the importance of this discovery. His

homotypes seem limited to the signs for vowels, any one of which may

express almost any vowel sound, and also aspirates and liquids; and he

observed that _m_ and _w_, and _y_ and _i_, are each expressed by the

same signs.

His present pamphlet indicates how rapidly the study was progressing. He

now relies entirely upon the analysis of proper names, in accordance with

the suggestion of Longpérier; and he abandons his attempted comparison

with the form of the Hebrew letters. He surrenders his reading of

‘Ashdod,’ and suggests ‘No Kaschzar’ in place of it; and he even doubts

the identity of Arsak and Sargon. He thinks he has discovered from the

Naksh-i-Rustam inscription that the sign he mistook for _r_ is really

_s_, and that his _k_ is certainly _n_. Accordingly he reads the word _s_

_ch(kh)_ _n_ which somewhat revives his confidence in Sargon.

It is not clear to what extent, if to any, he was indebted to Hincks. His

exaggerated Semitism was probably of native growth. He was not yet aware

of the age of the Babylonian bricks, as explained by Hincks in 1846:

yet he knew the determinative sign for proper names, which apparently

was not known to Hincks.[795] Hincks, on the other hand, recognised a

sign ‘prefixed non-phonetically to the name Ormuzd, and also used by

abbreviation for the word “god.”’ Löwenstern says there is ‘no special

sign accompanying the names of the gods.’ He, however, recognised a

sign as the monogram for ‘god’; but when he found it in conjunction with

the name of ‘Aurmuzd’ he treated it as the initial letter, and gave it

the definite phonetic value of _a_.[796] Such were the difficulties

to be overcome before the determinative for ‘god’ was recognised. He

observed that a word may be expressed by its first and last signs, an

early indication of the phonetic complement.[797] Meanwhile Hincks and

Rawlinson announced the discovery already mentioned that the apparent

equivalent signs in Persian depended in reality upon the vowel that was

associated with the consonantal value. It at once occurred to Longpérier

that the great difficulty of the Assyrian homophones might be solved by

the application of the same principle. If, he says, there is a separate

sign for the consonant _m_ according as it is followed by _a_, _i_ or

_u_, ‘one can understand how a similar practice, if extended to many

consonants, would augment the number of alphabetical signs.’ He warned

scholars not to be too ready to accept the existence of homophones,

because he observed that ‘according as the work proceeds the number of

homophones decreases.’[798]

While these discussions were proceeding, Botta continued his

contributions to the ‘Journal Asiatique’ (1847-8), and afterwards

published them in a separate ‘Mémoire sur l’Ecriture cunéiforme’

(Paris, 1848). He endeavoured to introduce some degree of order among

the profusion of Assyrian signs. He drew up a Table, consisting of a

hundred and twenty-five signs that seemed to be most commonly used; and

under each of these he arranged the signs which he found were sometimes

apparently interchanged for them.[799] In this List of Variants we

constantly find six or seven signs—sometimes many more—grouped together

as of equivalent value. In view of later discoveries, it will be seen how

extremely useful this classification might become, for the signs thus

brought together were no doubt usually those that contained the same

consonantal values. In the meantime, however, Botta was at a loss to find

any reasonable explanation. Like Rawlinson, however, he could not believe

that any of them were, as Löwenstern maintained, real homophones, or

signs having identical values. They must, he thought, be distinguished

from each other by some slight shades of sound that were sufficiently

near to be easily confounded.[800] He explained, in anticipation of

the discovery so soon afterwards made by Hincks, that ‘it is possible

that the language is syllabic—so far, at least, as that each consonant

is represented by a different sign, according to the vowel to which it

is joined. Thus, for example, there would be one sign for _b_; others

for _ba_, _bi_, etc. In Semitic languages the short vowels have little

importance, and therefore the syllable _ba_ might be expressed by the

sign for _b_ only; by the two signs _b_ and _a_; and also in certain

cases, by the signs that represent _b_ in connection with the other

vowels.’ It will be seen that Botta was very far indeed from being the

mere painstaking classifier which it was once the fashion to describe

him. He and Longpérier were, in fact, the only two Continental scholars,

at present occupied with this subject, who were gifted with any real

penetration into its difficulties.

Botta succeeded in dividing nearly the whole of the Bull inscription

correctly into its words, but the difficulty of this task was still

so great that even he occasionally fell into error. He also first

pointed out that the sign Löwenstern mistook for two signs was one and

indivisible. He detected the determinative sign for ‘country’ that is

used in the Khorsabad inscription, and he made the important suggestion

that the phonetic value of the sign for ‘king’ is ‘sar.’[801] Longpérier

at once connected this word with its Hebrew equivalent, and showed that

it is used to express the first syllable in the name of the Khorsabad

king ‘Sar-gin.’ He made an attempt to decipher an inscription on the leg

of the Khorsabad bull, and he was the first to recognise ‘Assur.’ His

translation runs thus: ‘Glorious [is] Sargon, King, great King, King of

Kings, King of the country of Assur.’[802] He also showed that ‘great’

might be expressed by one sign only,[803] which added another step to

the discovery of the phonetic complement begun by Löwenstern. This

short contribution to the ‘Revue Archéologique’ shows that Longpérier

possessed to a high degree a true aptitude for these studies; and if

he had been able to pursue them, he might have vindicated for France

a more favourable position than it was her fortune to obtain. The

difficulty in these matters of recognising truth from error was nowhere

more clearly illustrated than in the case of the identification of

‘Sargon’ by Longpérier. So far was the correctness of this ingenious

suggestion from gaining immediate acceptance, that we find Hincks

subsequently conjectures that the name of the father of Sennacherib

should be read ‘Ni-Shar.’[804] A later attempt, in 1849, which resulted

in ‘Kin-nil-li-n’a’ showed little improvement. Even in 1850 Rawlinson

is still so far afield that he translates it ‘Arko-tsin’; and it is

not till August 1851 that he accepts ‘Sargina,’ the reading given four

years previously by Longpérier.[805] Yet the question was of no little

interest, for it really settled the controversy between Hincks and

Rawlinson as to the date of the Lower Assyrian dynasty in favour of the

former. It was not till Rawlinson read ‘Sennacherib’ in a tablet found

by Layard at Kouyunjik that he would acknowledge his error, and admit

that there was at last found ‘a tangible starting place for chronology.’

Hincks was satisfied, two years earlier, that he had identified the names

of Sennacherib and Esarhaddon.

In June 1849 Hincks read a paper on the Khorsabad inscriptions which

shows a great advance upon any contribution yet made to the decipherment

of the language. There is evidence in his essay on the Van inscriptions

that so early as December 1847 he had practically given up the attempt he

made in the previous January to assimilate the Assyrian writing as far as

possible to the Hebrew—at least as regards the vowel system.[806] He is

now satisfied that the Assyrian maintains a clear distinction between the

vowels, and also between the surd and sonant consonants at the beginning

of a word, though at the end the two sounds were confounded. He points

out that no distinction is made between the sounds of _w_ and _m_, and,

he adds, between _l_ and _r_; but he afterwards correctly admits the

independent existence of these sounds in his Syllabarium.[807] He has

also definitely arrived at the conviction that the Assyrian characters

are wholly syllabic or ideographic—in a large number of cases they

are both. He will not now admit that any of them represents a simple

consonant. He has still no doubt that there are many homophones. Many

characters appear to have precisely the same values, ‘though much fewer

than might be inferred from a mechanical comparison of inscriptions and

observance of interchanges.’ He recognises the existence of polyphones,

already described by Löwenstern in 1847 as ‘homotypes.’

‘Many characters,’ he says, ‘admit of two or more kindred values, the

distinction between which would appear not to have been considered so

great as to require different modes of representing them.’ This discovery

was so perplexing that he doubted how best to present it to the reader:

‘Whether it is more desirable to give different values to the same

character, or to give it one value only, with a warning to the reader

that he may, under certain restrictions, substitute another for it at his

pleasure.’

But the chief importance of his present essay consists in the light it

throws for the first time on the nature of the ideograms. The earliest

inquirers leant to the opinion that the language was at least partly

monogrammatic, though Grotefend was inclined to regard these signs more

in the light of abbreviations. He, however, distinctly pointed out the

existence of ideographic characters in the shorter inscriptions at

Persepolis. In 1846 (December) Hincks recognised a sign that was used ‘by

abbreviation for the word “god”’; and he noticed that ‘besides having

a phonetic value, it is used as a non-phonetic initial before the name

of Ormuzd.’ In the same essay he gave numerous other instances of the

existence of ideographic and non-phonetic determinative signs.[808] In

1849 he added for the first time the true phonetic value (_an_) for the

sign for ‘god’;[809] and in the present essay he shows the various uses

to which ideographic signs may be applied. He explains that many phonetic

characters also express words; these may be considered as abbreviations,

though possibly some ‘originally denoted ideas and thence, in process

of time, the initial sounds in the words which express them.’ A second

class resemble the mixed signs of the Egyptians: they may represent words

by themselves, but they sometimes require the addition of complements.

Another class never have complements, nor any phonetic value except

in compound nouns, of which the word they represent forms an integral

part. The ideograms, however, that give rise to the most interesting

speculation are those that have phonetic values, but where the words

that denote the ideas they express have no phonetic relationship to

the phonetic value of the ideogram. For example, we now know that the

phonetic value of the ideogram for ‘god’ is _an_; but this syllable

forms no portion of the Assyrian word for ‘god,’ which is _il-u_. A

glance over any table giving the syllabic values of ideograms will show

how extensively this peculiarity prevails; and its recognition soon led

Hincks to the important deduction that the writing was borrowed from some

other people where the phonetic value of the ideograms was in some sort

of agreement with the initial sound of the word they represented.[810]

Hincks dwelt on the great difficulty of deciphering a language in which

the characters are sometimes used as phonetic syllables and sometimes

as ideographs. In each case it was necessary first to determine in

which sense it occurred, and, if in the latter, the pronunciation could

only be ascertained when it was found spelt out phonetically in some

known word. For example, the pronunciation of the ideogram for ‘god’

was fixed by finding that it formed the _il-u_ in ‘Bab-ilu.’ When the

pronunciation of the ideogram was known, it afforded, as has been said,

in the majority of cases no clue whatever to the syllabic value of the

sign, and the transliterator was liable to fall into the error of reading

a word ideographically instead of phonetically, just as frequently as

to mistake ideograms for phonetics. Compound ideograms were also not

infrequent, where two or more were used to express an idea, but without

reference to the sound. For example, the word for ‘palace’ is composed

of two ideograms, _bit_ and _rab_, meaning respectively ‘house’ and

‘great’; but Hincks warned the reader that he might fall into a serious

error if he were to suppose that they are employed in conjunction

phonetically, and that ‘bitrab’ is the pronunciation of the Assyrian word

for ‘palace.’[811] He shows that several ideographs may be used as simple

determinative suffixes to words which are phonetically complete without

them. The determinatives probably all originally represented words, and

many of them preserved their phonetic values.[812]

This inquiry into the nature and use of ideograms was the first that

had been made, and it formed an important contribution to the knowledge

of the language. His attempted transliterations are not of equal value.

He rejected the reading of ‘Sargon’ given by Löwenstern, and he does

not seem to have heard of the solution of the difficulty proposed the

year before by Longpérier.[813] He recognised indeed that the sign for

‘king’ with which the word begins forms an integral portion of the name,

but he did not perceive, like Longpérier, that its counterpart is the

Hebrew ‘sar’; and he was led by other comparisons to assign the value

of ‘kin-nil’ to the ideogram. He knew also that the sign Löwenstern

had broken up into two and thought signified _r_, _s_ formed in fact a

single sign, which he pronounced _ri_ or _li_. These efforts resulted in

‘kin-nil-li-n’a,’ which might seem even less manageable than the _r_,

_s_, _k_ of Löwenstern. But Hincks was quite equal to the occasion, and,

with the customary imaginative faculty of the philologist, he found no

difficulty in connecting this person with the Chinzirus of Ptolemy,

who, it appears, was a contemporary of Porus. He had already detected

that the names of the son and grandson of this prince were Sennacherib

and Esarhaddon, the builders of Kouyunjik and the South-West Palace of

Nimrud. The first we find he transliterated ‘Sanki’ or ‘Sankin,’ with the

possible addition of ‘rav’ or ‘ram’—‘Sankin-rav’: the other came out as

‘Adar-ka-dan.’ He also explains how he arrived at ‘Nabiccudurrayuchur’

for Nebuchadnezzar, and how he fancied he had found ‘Jerusalem’; but

these instances only serve to illustrate the great obstacles that had

still to be overcome. We have already mentioned the suggestions that

were made first by Longpérier and afterwards by Botta with the view of

reducing the number of homophones. Hincks confesses he had not seen the

essay of the former, and we have not observed that he has acknowledged

his obligations to Botta, though he was evidently acquainted with his

work, as we see from an unpleasant reference to ‘a mechanical comparison

of inscriptions.’ It was, however, upon the principle these writers

suggested that Hincks was now about to solve one of the greatest

difficulties of the language. The solution is contained in an Appendix

to the essay just reviewed, and was sent to press on January 19, 1850,

the same day that Major Rawlinson read his first paper to the Asiatic

Society. Hincks now explains that there are four distinct vowel sounds in

Assyrian, _ā_, _a_, _i_ and _u_; but the difference between the first two

was not maintained when they preceded a consonant.[814] He laid down that

every sign represented a consonant either preceded or followed by one of

these vowels. Therefore, each consonant was represented by seven signs,

thus: _cā_, _ca_, _ci_, _cu_; _ac_, _ic_, _uc_. He thought there were at

least fifteen consonants, and that the syllabary was of Indo-European

origin, and need not therefore, as he had at first supposed, be adjusted

to the Hebrew alphabet. The principle thus announced has been accepted

with some modifications. The difference between the long and short

_a_ has not been maintained in this connection, and consequently the

syllabic representation of each consonant is reduced from seven to six.

His statement that the difference between surd and sonant is maintained

at the beginning but not at the end of the syllable has also been

admitted. We have thus separate signs for _ba_, _bi_, _bu_ and _pa_,

_pi_, _pu_; but the signs for _ap_, _ip_ and _up_ answer for both.

Hincks’s consonants have been accepted without material change. His

_y_ has been omitted and _h_ added; _z_ has been substituted for _j_.

Two signs for _k_ to represent _Caph_ and _Koph_, and two for _t_ to

represent _Teth_ and _Tau_ have been added, where Hincks only had one for

each, so that the number of consonants is now raised to seventeen. Not

only did Hincks arrive at a correct theory of the simple syllables, but

he identified correctly a very large number of the signs corresponding

to them. Of the seventy-one he gives in his Table at least fifty-seven

are accurate, and possibly even more. He closed the essay with a brief

specimen of a translation from the Khorsabad inscription.

This Essay of Hincks exercised a decisive influence upon the future

study of Assyrian. It demonstrated that, although the language was

Semitic, the mode of writing was not Semitic; and for a time it divided

scholars into two opposing camps. Those who followed Hincks maintained

that the language was syllabic, and that each sign expressed a consonant

associated with an inherent and invariable vowel. Those, on the contrary,

who sought to assimilate it to the Hebrew system were of opinion that

the signs represent simple consonants that might be preceded or followed

by any vowel. We have noted the gradual recognition of the syllabic

nature of the Assyrian writing. The earliest opinion was that the signs

were both syllabic and alphabetical, and we have seen that Grotefend

in his transliteration treated them in this manner. Hincks in his

first Essay followed the same method, but he found the vast majority

of the signs were syllabic, and his Table shows only four that are

purely alphabetical. Then came the discovery that the language itself

was Semitic, and the inference naturally followed that the writing was

so likewise. Under the influence of this conviction, Hincks drew up

his Second Table, showing only the consonantal value of the signs, and

leaving them to be associated indifferently with the vowel sounds. But

he remained in this opinion for a comparatively short time, and in the

end of the same year he had reverted to his original view. The effect

of the present essay was to establish the absolute syllabism of the

language; and in a paper read shortly afterwards before the British

Association ‘On the Language and Mode of Writing of Assyria’ (August

1850), he ‘maintained, in opposition to all other writers, that the

characters had all definite syllabic values, there being no consonants,

and consequently no necessity or liberty of supplying vowels.’ In this

opinion he then stood alone. Rawlinson, in reply, expressed his belief

that the signs had a syllabic origin, but that they were ‘subsequently

used to express a mere portion of a syllable.’ ‘He could,’ he says,

‘adduce numerous instances where the cuneiform signs were used as _bona

fide_ letters.’[815]

In France, the opinion Hincks expounded in his second essay took

immediate root. The logical instincts of the French mind clung with

desperate tenacity to the conviction that a Semitic language could only

be expressed by a Semitic mode of writing. Löwenstern at first (1845)

thought that the signs represented some sort of mechanical union of

consonant and vowel: that is to say, that there was a fixed portion of

the sign to represent the consonantal sound, and a variable portion to

indicate the conjunction of the vowel. ‘The signs,’ he said, ‘reproduce

in part the same forms differently combined, which suggests a syllabic

union in many of the signs.’ But he subsequently became the most

thorough-going champion of the alphabetical theory. Botta only just

found it ‘possible to conceive that the language was syllabic,’ yet he

followed Longpérier in the luminous suggestion already described.[816]

Even De Saulcy was haunted by dim fears that, after all, Assyrian might

turn out to be syllabic, and the consistency with which he adhered to

the opposite or Semitic mode of writing rendered his subsequent studies

almost valueless. Rawlinson, as we shall soon see, yielded in time, and

his transliteration of the Behistun inscription shows small traces of his

early heresy, which he was still ready to defend in August 1850.

Such was the progress already made in decipherment when Rawlinson at

length gave to the world some of the results of his labours in the same

field. It will be remembered that in the autumn of 1847 he succeeded in

taking a copy of the third column of the Behistun inscription. Whatever

leisure he could command during the year 1848 and the early part of 1849

he devoted to its study; and when he returned to England in the autumn

of that year, he brought the translation home with him. The work of

publication was one of great difficulty, in consequence of the multitude

of strange characters in many languages that had to be reproduced and

corrected; and although Rawlinson remained in England till 1851, he was

obliged to leave before it was accomplished. Some Continental writers

chose to make this delay a matter of complaint against Rawlinson, whom

they accused of deliberately withholding his copies for personal and

selfish motives. It would be difficult, however, to mention anyone who

was at that time at all likely to profit by their possession. The special

qualifications of a decipherer are by no means common, and M. de Saulcy

at least gave decisive proof that he did not possess them. M. Oppert, on

the other hand, was still absorbed in the Persian and Median versions.

But these gentlemen, and those who then shared their feelings, write as

though Major Rawlinson had appropriated the rock of Behistun as well as

the copy of the inscription that covered it.[817] They seem to forget

that if they were prepared to undergo the same sacrifice and overcome

the same difficulties, they could in a few weeks procure copies for

themselves. What would have been more natural than to give the commission

to M. Flandin, whose enterprise in such matters had already been so

conspicuously illustrated? Nothing, however, could be farther from

their intentions. They had no notion of foregoing the luxury of feeling

aggrieved with the English soldier whose energy, like his genius, so far

out-soared their own. Rawlinson was, we submit, fully justified in the

course he adopted. He had obtained his copy at great personal sacrifice;

no one in Europe was so qualified to accomplish the task of decipherment

as himself, and the eighteen months he devoted to the task was not

excessive. The subsequent delay in publication was incident to the nature

of the work itself, for which he was not responsible.

He, however, lost no time in placing the general results at which he had

arrived before the public. On January 19 and February 16, 1850, he read

papers before the Asiatic Society ‘On the Inscriptions of Assyria and

Babylon,’ and these, with a few additional notes, were published in March

of that year.

He tells us he had found more than eighty proper names in the trilingual

inscriptions, including those in the Behistun; and ‘by a careful

comparison of the duplicate forms of writing’ them in the Persian and

Babylonian columns he had been able, by means of the former, which were

known, to determine the values of about a hundred Babylonian characters.

The next step was by a collation of the inscriptions to ascertain ‘the

homophones of each known alphabetical power.’ By this means he ‘added

nearly fifty characters to those previously known through the Persian

key.’ He confessed that his knowledge of the Babylonian characters was

at present limited to these one hundred and fifty characters.[818] From

the direction of his studies we may infer that these signs were chiefly

taken from the trilingual inscriptions; and in that case they would be

practically exhaustive; but they would amount to less than one half

of those in general use in the Assyrian text.[819] The same process

of comparison with the Persian translation enabled him to draw up ‘a

list of about two hundred Babylonian words of which we know the sound

approximately and the meaning certainly.’ But in addition to these, he

was able, by ‘an extensive comparison of similar or cognate phrases, to

add about two hundred meanings certainly, and a hundred more, probably,

to the vocabulary already obtained through the Babylonian translation.’

He was thus acquainted with the meaning of about five hundred out of a

vocabulary which he estimated as containing five thousand words.[820]

These words, he explains, ‘are almost all found either in their full

integrity or subjected to some slight modification in Assyrian’; and

they enabled him ‘to arrive at a pretty correct notion of the general

purport of the phrases in which they occur.’ Although his vocabulary was

still limited to one-tenth of the vocabulary, it embraced ‘all the most

important terms in the language’; and he found it sufficient for the

interpretation of the historical inscriptions.

The present Memoir was intended simply as introductory to the subject,

and he did not give a list of the one hundred and fifty signs with their

values attached. We cannot, therefore, institute a comparison as yet with

the Syllabarium already drawn up by Hincks. It is sufficiently clear,

however, that he had not, at the time of writing the Memoir, realised

the essentially syllabic character of the language. There are, he says,

‘cases where a single alphabetical power appertains to the sign,’ and, he

adds, ‘it cannot certainly be maintained that the phonetic portion of the

alphabet is altogether syllabic.’ ‘There is,’ he observes, ‘an extensive

syllabarium; but at the same time many of the characters can only be

explained as single consonants.’ There is no indication that he had as

yet apprehended the principle that governs the combination of consonant

and vowel, as recently expounded by Hincks, and which is interwoven

with the whole structure of the language. Indeed he says distinctly:

‘I have neither adopted, nor do I conceive it possible to adopt, any

system with regard to the employment of the vowels in Assyrian and

Babylonian.’ In some other respects also he was still behind the great

Irish scholar. Hincks, for example, had laid down that the distinction

between the consonantal sounds is uniformly maintained; and the truth of

this statement has been since confirmed. Rawlinson was, however, still

of opinion that ‘the gutturals and sibilants everywhere interchange.’

‘There is the greatest possible difficulty in distinguishing between _k_,

_d_, and _t_. _L_ and _v_ interchange.’ It is evident also that he had

still much to learn from his rival on the subject of the ideograms. It

may be doubted indeed how far he had as yet apprehended the important

place they occupy. ‘The names of the gods,’ he says, ‘are represented by

signs which appear in some cases to be arbitrary monograms, but which

are more generally either the dominant sound of the name or its initial

phonetic power.’ He thought, for example, that the monogram for Bel was

simply the letter ‘B,’ an idea that is wholly unfounded. He is of course

aware that there are many other ideograms besides those used for the

gods, but he gives them no sort of prominence. He, however, attributes an

ideographic origin to the syllables. ‘When a sign represents a syllable,’

meaning apparently a compound syllable, ‘I conjecture that the syllable

in question may have been the specific name of the object which the sign

was supposed to depict; whilst in cases where a single alphabetical

power appertains to the sign it would seem as if that power had been

the dominant sound in the name of the object.’ But this is a purely

academical question. The important point lay in precisely the opposite

direction, and attention had been already called to it by Hincks. The

peculiarity most necessary to emphasise is that in a vast majority of

cases the pronunciation of the ideogram has no relation whatever to the

name of the object it represents, nor, when it has a syllabic power,

to the phonetic value of the syllable. Rawlinson, however, did good

service in the present Memoir by laying down the first rudiments of

the grammar, a branch of the subject that Hincks subsequently did much

to elucidate; and he was also the first to bring into prominence the

polyphonic character of the language. Hincks had indeed remarked that

‘many characters admit of two or more kindred values’; but Rawlinson

farther shows that ‘certain characters represent two entirely dissimilar

sounds—sounds so dissimilar that they cannot be brought into relation

with each other.’ He gives as an example the sign for the vowel _a_,

which also conveys the sound of ‘bar.’