[Illustration: REVERSE OF A TABLET IN THE HITTITE LANGUAGE FROM
BOGHAZ KEUI.
_Frontispiece._ [_See Preface, p._ vi.]
The Archæology of the
Cuneiform Inscriptions
BY THE
REV. A. H. SAYCE
PROFESSOR OF ASSYRIOLOGY, OXFORD
PUBLISHED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE GENERAL
LITERATURE COMMITTEE
_SECOND EDITION--REVISED_
LONDON
SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE
NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, W.C.; 43, QUEEN VICTORIA STREET, E.C.
BRIGHTON: 129, NORTH STREET
NEW YORK: E. S. GORHAM
1908
RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
PREFACE v
I. THE DECIPHERMENT OF THE CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS 7
II. THE ARCHÆOLOGICAL MATERIALS; THE EXCAVATIONS AT SUSA
AND THE ORIGIN OF BRONZE 36
III. THE SUMERIANS 67
IV. THE RELATION OF BABYLONIAN TO EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION 101
V. BABYLONIA AND PALESTINE 135
VI. ASIA MINOR 160
VII. CANAAN IN THE CENTURY BEFORE THE EXODUS 187
INDEX 215
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_Facing page_
REVERSE OF A TABLET IN THE HITTITE LANGUAGE FROM
BOGHAZ KEUI (_Frontispiece_)
MAP--THE EASTERN WORLD IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY B.C. 7
THE TOMB OF DARIUS 16
BLACK OBELISK OF SHAL-MANESER II 21
CHALDÆAN HOUSEHOLD UTENSILS IN TERRA-COTTA 21
THE TELL OF JERABIS (PROBABLY THE ANCIENT CARCHEMISH) 40
THE TUMULUS OF SUSA, AS IT APPEARED TOWARDS THE MIDDLE OF
LAST CENTURY 46
HEAD OF ONE OF THE STATUES FROM TELLO 58
VASE OF SILVER, DEDICATED TO NINGIRSU BY ENTENA PATESI OF
LAGAS 58
THE TELL OF BORSIPPA, THE PRESENT BIRS-NIMRUD 78
THE SEAL OF SHARGANI-SHAR-ALI (SARGON OF AKKAD): GILGAMES
WATERS THE CELESTIAL OX 88
BAS-RELIEF OF NARAM-SIN 88
SITTING STATUE OF GUDEA 122
MAP--THE FIRST ASSYRIAN EMPIRE 135
VIEW OF THE TEMPLE OF UR IN ITS PRESENT STATE, ACCORDING
TO LOFTUS 141
THE GARDENS AND HILL OF DHUSPAS OR VAN 163
THE RUINS OF A PALACE OF URARTU AT TOPRAK-KALEH 166
THE RUINS AT BOGHAZ KEUI 174
ONE OF THE PROCESSIONS IN THE RAVINE OF BOGHAZ 176
PREFACE
The first six chapters which follow, embody the Rhind Lectures in
Archæology which I delivered at Edinburgh in October 1906. The seventh
chapter appeared as an article in the _Contemporary Review_ for
August 1905, and is here reprinted by the courtesy of the Editor to
whom I render my thanks. The book is the first attempt to deal with
what I would call the archæology of cuneiform decipherment, and like
all pioneering work consequently claims the indulgence of the reader.
For the sake of clearness I have been forced to repeat myself in a
few instances, more especially in the sixth chapter, but what has
thereby been lost in literary finish will, I hope, be compensated by an
increase of clearness in the argument.
If what I have written serves no other purpose, I shall be content
if it draws attention to the miserably defective state of our
archæological knowledge of Babylonia and Assyria, and to the necessity
of scientific excavations being carried on there similar to those
inaugurated by Mr. Rhind in Egypt. We have abundance of epigraphic
material; it is the more purely archæological material that is still
wanting.
The need of it is every year becoming more urgent with the ever-growing
revelation of the important and far-reaching part played by Babylonian
culture in the ancient East. Excavation is just commencing in Asia
Minor, and there are many indications that it has startling discoveries
and surprises in store for us. Even while my manuscript was in the
printer’s hands, Professor Winckler has been examining the cuneiform
tablets found by him last spring at Boghaz Keui, on the site of the
old Hittite capital in Cappadocia, and reading in them the records of
the Hittite kings, Khattu-sil, Sapaluliuma, Mur-sila and Muttallu.
Most of the tablets, though written in cuneiform characters, are in
the native language of the country, but among them is a version in
the Babylonian language of the treaty between the “great king of the
Hittites” and Riya-masesa Mai or Ramses II., the Egyptian copy of which
has long been known to us. The two Arzawan letters in the Tel el-Amarna
collection no longer stand alone; the Boghaz Keui tablets show that
an active correspondence was carried on between Egypt and Cappadocia.
We must revise our old ideas about an absence of intercourse between
different parts of the ancient Oriental world: there was quite as much
intercommunication as there is to-day. Elam and Babylonia, Assyria
and Asia Minor, Palestine and Egypt, all were linked together by the
ties of a common culture; there were no exclusive religions to raise
barriers between nation and nation, and the pottery of the Hittites
was not only carried to the south of Canaan, but the civilization of
Babylonia made its way through Hittite lands to the shores and islands
of Greece. On the south, the Ægean became a highway from Asia Minor to
Europe, while northward the Troad formed a bridge which carried the
culture of Cappadocia to the Balkans and the Danube.
A. H. SAYCE.
_November_ 1906.
[Illustration: THE EASTERN WORLD IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY B.C.]
THE ARCHÆOLOGY OF THE CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS
CHAPTER I
THE DECIPHERMENT OF THE CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS
The decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions was the archæological
romance of the nineteenth century. There was no Rosetta stone to
offer a clue to their meaning; the very names of the Assyrian kings
and of the gods they worshipped had been lost and forgotten; and the
characters themselves were but conventional groups of wedges, not
pictures of objects and ideas like the hieroglyphs of Egypt. The
decipherment started with the guess of a classical scholar who knew no
Oriental languages and had never travelled in the East. And yet it is
upon this guess that the vast superstructure of cuneiform decipherment
has been slowly reared, with its ever-increasing mass of literature
in numerous languages, the very existence of some of which had been
previously unknown, and with its revelation of a civilized world that
had faded out of sight before Greek history began. The ancient East
has risen, as it were, from the dead, with its politics and its wars,
its law and its trade, its art, its industries and its science. And
this revelation of a new world, this resurrection of a dead past,
has started from a successful guess. But the guess had been made in
accordance with scientific method and had scientific reasons behind it,
and it has proved to be the fruitful seed of an overspreading tree.
Seventy years ago a single small case was sufficient to hold all the
Assyrian and Babylonian antiquities possessed by the British Museum.
They had been collected by Rich, to whom we owe the first accurate
plans of the sites of Babylon and Nineveh. But the cuneiform characters
found on the seals and clay cylinders of Babylonia were not the only
characters of the kind that were known. Similar characters had been
noticed by travellers on the walls of the ruined palaces of Persepolis
in Persia. As far back as 1621 the Italian traveller Pietro della
Valle had copied two or three of these, which he reproduced in the
account of his travels some thirty years later. One of the first acts
of the newly-founded Royal Society of Great Britain was to ask in their
_Philosophical Transactions_ (p. 420) whether some draughtsman
could not be found to copy the bas-reliefs and inscriptions which
had thus been observed at Persepolis, though the only result of the
inquiry was that a few years afterwards (in June 1693) two lines of
cuneiform were published in the _Transactions_ from the papers of
a Mr. Samuel Flower, who had been the agent of the East India Company
in Persia. The editor of the _Transactions_ correctly concluded
that the inscriptions were to be read from left to right. The cuneiform
characters which were printed in the _Transactions_ were, however,
not the first specimens of cuneiform script that had been published in
England. Thomas Herbert, in the fourth edition of his Travels, which
appeared in 1677, had already given three lines of characters taken
indifferently from the three classes of inscriptions engraved on the
Persian monuments; these were afterwards annexed by an Italian named
Careri, who published them as his own. But the earliest inscription to
be reproduced in full was a short one inscribed by Darius I. over the
windows of his palace, which had been copied by Sir John Chardin during
one of his two visits to Persepolis (in 1665 and 1673). Chardin was
the son of a Huguenot jeweller in Paris, and after returning from his
travels settled in London, where he became a great favourite of Charles
II., and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. The inscription he had
copied, however, was not printed in the earlier edition of his Travels,
and had to wait until 1735 before it saw the light.[1]
The existence of the cuneiform script thus became known in Europe,
and that was all. It was not until Carsten Niebuhr, the father of the
better-known historian, had been sent by the Danish Government on
an exploring mission to the East that fairly complete and accurate
copies of the inscriptions of Persepolis were at last put into the
hands of European scholars. Niebuhr, who sacrificed his sight to the
work, returned to Denmark in 1767, and seven years later the first
of the three volumes in which the scientific results of his travels
were embodied was published at Copenhagen. With the publication of the
second volume, which contained his description of the Persepolitan
monuments, the attempt to decipher the cuneiform characters began. He
himself had noticed that in the first of the three classes or systems
of cuneiform writing of which every inscription consisted, only
forty-two characters were employed, and he therefore concluded that the
system was alphabetic. Another Dane, Bishop Münter, discovered that the
words in it were divided from one another by an oblique wedge,[2] and
further showed that the monuments must belong to the age of Cyrus and
his successors.[3] One word, which occurs without any variation towards
the beginning of each inscription, he correctly inferred to signify
“king”; but beyond this he was unable to advance.
Meanwhile, Anquetil-Duperron, with self-sacrificing enthusiasm, had
rediscovered the Zend of the later Zoroastrian faith, and de Sacy, with
the help of it, had deciphered the Pehlevi inscriptions of the Sassanid
kings. It was only the older Persian of the Achæmenian cuneiform
inscriptions that still awaited interpretation; and a bridge had been
built between it and modern Persian by means of the Zendic texts. In
1802 the guess was made which opened the way to the decipherment of the
mysterious wedge-shaped signs. The inspired genius was Grotefend, an
accomplished Latinist and a school-master at Frankfort-on-the-Main.
He knew no Oriental languages, but his mother-wit and common-sense
more than made up for the deficiency. It was clear to him that the
three systems of cuneiform represented three different languages,
the Persian kings being like a Turkish pasha of to-day, who, when he
wishes an edict to be understood, writes it in Turkish and Arabic. It
was also clear to him that the first system must be the script of the
Persian kings themselves, of which the other two were translations. The
preparatory work for reading this had already been done by Münter; what
Grotefend now had to do was to identify and read the names to which the
word for “king” was attached.
On comparing the inscriptions together he found that while the word
for “king” remained unchanged, the word which accompanied it at the
beginning of an inscription varied on different monuments. There were,
in fact, two wholly different words, one of which was peculiar to one
set of monuments, the other to another set. But he also found that the
first of these words followed the other on the second set of monuments,
though with a different termination from that which belonged to it when
it took the place of the first word. Hence he conjectured that the two
words represented the names of two Persian kings, one of whom was the
son of the other, the termination of the second name when it followed
the first being that of the genitive. It was now necessary to discover
who the kings were whose names had thus been found. Fortunately the
Achæmenian dynasty was not a long one, and the number of royal names
in it was not large. And of these names, Cyrus was too short and
Artaxerxes too long for either of the two names which Grotefend had
detected. There only remained Darius and Xerxes, and as Xerxes was the
son of Darius, the name which characterized the first set of monuments
must be Darius.
Grotefend’s next task was to ascertain the old Persian pronunciation of
the name of Darius. This had been given by Strabo, while the Persian
pronunciation of Xerxes was indicated in the Old Testament. With this
assistance Grotefend was able to assign alphabetic values to the
cuneiform characters which composed the two names, and a corner of the
veil which had so long covered the cuneiform records was lifted at
last. A comparison of the names which he had thus read gave the needful
verification of the correctness of his method. In the names of Darius
and Xerxes the same letters occur, but in different places; _a_ and _r_
in _Darius_ occupy the second and third places, in _Xerxes_ the fourth
and fifth, while _sh_, which is the last letter in _Darius_, would
be the second and sixth in _Xerxes_. And such was actually the case.
Grotefend was therefore justified in concluding that his guesses were
correct, and that the right values had been assigned to the cuneiform
characters. A beginning had been made in cuneiform decipherment, and in
this instance the beginning was half the whole.
Grotefend’s Memoir was presented to the Göttingen Academy on September
4, 1802. By a curious accident it was at the same meeting that Heyne
described the first attempts that had been made towards deciphering
the Egyptian hieroglyphs. But the learned world looked askance at the
discoveries of the young Latinist. The science of archæology was still
unborn, and Oriental philologists were unable even to understand the
inductive method of the decipherer. The Academy of Göttingen refused to
print his communications, and it was not until 1815 that they appeared
in the first volume of the History of his friend Heeren, who, being
untrammelled by the prejudices of Oriental learning, had been one of
the earliest to accept his conclusions.[4] For a whole generation the
work of decipherment was allowed to sleep.
It is unfortunately true that after his initial success Grotefend’s
ignorance of Oriental languages really did stand in his way. He
assumed that the language of the inscriptions and that of the
_Zend-Avesta_ were one and the same, and accordingly went to the
newly-found Zend dictionary for the readings of the cuneiform names
and words. Vishtaspa, the name of the father of Darius, was thus
read Goshtasp, the word for “king” became _khsheh_ instead of
_khshayathiya_, and that which Grotefend had correctly divined
to signify “great,” _eghre_ instead of _vazraka_. It is not
wonderful, therefore, that he was never able to follow up the beginning
he had made.
To do this was reserved for the Zendic scholars of a later generation.
Rask the Dane in 1826 determined the true form of the genitive plural,
and thereby identified the character for _m_ which gave him the
names of the supreme god Auramazda and of Achæmenes the forefather of
Cyrus.[5] But the great step forward was made by the eminent French
scholar, Emile Burnouf, in 1836.[6] The first of the inscriptions
published by Niebuhr he discovered to contain a list of the satrapies
of Darius. With this clue in his hand the reading of the names and the
subsequent identification of the letters which composed them could
be a question only of patience and time. For this Burnouf was well
equipped by his philological knowledge and training, and the result
was an alphabet of thirty letters, the greater part of which had been
correctly deciphered.
Burnouf’s Memoir on the subject was published in June 1836. In the
preceding month his friend and pupil, Professor Lassen of Bonn, had
also published a work on “The Old Persian Cuneiform Inscriptions of
Persepolis.”[7] He and Burnouf had been in frequent correspondence, and
his claim to have independently detected the names of the satrapies,
and thereby to have fixed the values of the Persian characters, was
in consequence fiercely attacked. To the attacks made upon him,
however, Lassen never vouchsafed a reply. Whatever his obligations to
Burnouf may have been, his own contributions to the decipherment of
the inscriptions were numerous and important. He succeeded in fixing
the true values of nearly all the letters in the Persian alphabet, in
translating the texts, and in proving that the language of them was not
Zend, but stood to both Zend and Sanskrit in the relation of a sister.
Meanwhile another scholar, armed with fresh and important material,
had entered the field. A young English officer in the East India
Company’s service, Major Rawlinson by name, was attached to the
British Mission in Persia. A happy inspiration led him to attempt the
decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions. It was in 1835, when he
was twenty-five years old, that he first began his work. All that he
knew was that Grotefend had discovered in the texts of Persepolis the
names of Darius, of Xerxes and of Hystaspes, but cut off as he was in
his official position at Kirmanshah on the western frontier of Persia
from European libraries, he was unable to procure either the Memoir of
the German scholar or the articles to which it had given rise. Like
Burnouf, he set himself to decipher the two inscriptions of Hamadan,
which he had himself copied with great care. He soon recognized in them
the names that had been read by Grotefend, and thus obtained a working
alphabet. But his position in Persia soon gave him an advantage which
was denied to his fellow-workers in Europe. It was not long before he
found an opportunity of copying the great inscription on the sacred
rock of Behistun, which had never been copied before. It was by far
the longest cuneiform inscription yet discovered, and was filled with
proper names, including those of the Persian satrapies. The copying of
it, however, cost much time and labour, and was accomplished at actual
risk of life, as Major Rawlinson, better known by his later title of
Sir Henry Rawlinson, had to be lowered in a basket from the top of the
cliff in order to ascertain the exact forms of certain characters.
[Illustration: THE TOMB OF DARIUS.]
In the following year (1836) Rawlinson moved to Teheran, and there
received from Edwin Norris, the Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society,
the Memoirs of Grotefend and Saint-Martin. In 1837 he finished his copy
of the Behistun inscription, and sent a translation of its opening
paragraphs to the Royal Asiatic Society. Before, however, his Paper
could be published, the works of Lassen and Burnouf reached him,
necessitating a revision of his Paper and the postponement of its
publication. Then came other causes of delay. He was called away to
Afghanistan to perform the onerous and responsible duties of British
Agent at Kandahar, and it was not until 1843 that he was once more
free to resume his cuneiform studies. A year later he was visited by
the Danish Professor, Westergaard, who placed at his disposal the
copies he had just made of the inscription on the tomb of Darius at
Naksh-i-Rustam and of some shorter inscriptions from Persepolis,
and Rawlinson’s Memoir was accordingly finished at last and sent
to England. Here Norris subjected it to a careful revision, and at
his suggestion Rawlinson once more visited Behistun, where he took
squeezes and re-examined doubtful characters. In 1847 the first part
of the Memoir was published, though the second part, containing the
analysis and commentary on the text, did not appear till 1849.[8]
The work, however, was well worthy of the time and care that had been
bestowed upon it. The task of deciphering the Persian cuneiform texts
was virtually accomplished, and the guesses of Grotefend had developed
into the discovery of a new alphabet and a new language. The capstone
was put to the work by the discovery of Hincks, an Irish clergyman,
that the alphabet was not a true one in the modern sense of the word, a
vowel-sound being attached in pronunciation to each of the consonants
represented in it.
The mystery of the Persian cuneiform texts was thus solved after nearly
fifty years of endeavour. A harder task still remained. The Persian
texts were accompanied by two other cuneiform transcripts, which, as
Grotefend had perceived, must have represented the other two principal
languages that were spoken in the Persian Empire. That the third
transcript was Babylonian seemed evident from the resemblance of the
characters contained in it to those on the bricks and seal-cylinders of
Babylonia. Grotefend had already written upon the subject, and had even
divined the name of Nebuchadrezzar on certain Babylonian bricks.
But this third species of writing, which we must henceforth term
Babylonian or Assyrian, presented extraordinary difficulties. Instead
of an alphabet of forty-two letters, the decipherer was confronted by
an enormous number of different characters, while no indication was
given of the separation of one word from another. Moreover the forms
of the characters as found on the Persepolitan monuments differed
considerably from those found on the Babylonian monuments, which
again differed greatly from each other. On the seal-cylinders, more
especially, they assumed the most complicated shapes, between which and
the Persepolitan forms it was often impossible to trace any likeness
whatever.
Suddenly a discovery was made which furnished an abundance of new
material and incited the decipherer to fresh efforts. In 1842 Botta
was sent to Mossul as French Consul, and at Mohl’s instigation began
to excavate on the site of Nineveh. His first essays there not proving
very successful, he transferred his workmen further north, to the mound
of Khorsabad, and there laid bare the ruins of a large and splendid
palace which subsequently turned out to be that of Sargon. In the
autumn of 1845 the excavations of Botta were succeeded by those of
Layard, first at Nimrûd (the ancient Calah), and then at Kûyunjik or
Nineveh, the result being to fill the British Museum with bas-reliefs
covered with cuneiform writing and with other relics of Assyrian
civilization.
The inscriptions brought to light by Botta were copied and published by
him in 1846–50.[9] The sumptuous work which was dedicated to them was
followed by a smaller and cheaper edition, and the author gave further
help to the student by classifying the characters, which amounted to
as many as 642.[10] His work proved conclusively the identity of the
script used at Nineveh with that of the third transcripts on the
Persian monuments, as well as the substantial agreement of the groups
of characters occurring in each.
The Irish scholar Dr. Hincks--one of the most remarkable and acute
decipherers that have ever lived--was already at work on the
newly-found texts. In 1847 he published a long article on “The Three
Kinds of Persepolitan Writing,”[11] and, two years later, another “On
the Khorsabad Inscriptions.”[12] In 1850 he read a Paper before the
British Association,[13] summing up his conclusions and announcing the
important discovery that the Assyrian characters were syllabic and not
alphabetic, as had hitherto been supposed. With this discovery the
scientific decipherment of the Assyrian inscriptions actually begins.
The proper names contained in the Persian texts furnished the clue to
the reading of the Babylonian transcripts. The values thus obtained
for the Babylonian characters made it possible to read many of the
words, the meaning of which was fixed by a comparison with the Persian
original. It then became clear that Assyrian was a Semitic language,
standing in much the same relation to Hebrew that the Old Persian stood
to Zend.
Its Semitic origin was proved to demonstration by the French scholar
de Saulcy in 1849. Another French scholar, de Longpérier, had already
discovered the name of Sargon in the Khorsabad inscriptions[14]--the
first royal Assyrian name that had yet been read. De Saulcy himself
subjected the Babylonian transcript of the trilingual inscription of
Elwend to a minute analysis, and so carefully was the work performed,
and so secure were the foundations upon which it rested, that the
translation needs but little revision even to-day.[15] The old belief
in the alphabetic nature of the characters, however, still possessed
the mind of the decipherer, although in one passage he goes so far as
to say, “I am tempted to believe” that the signs are syllabic. But he
did not go beyond the temptation to believe, and the discovery was
reserved for Hincks.
Rawlinson was now at Bagdad. De Saulcy sent him his Memoirs, and the
British scholar had the immense advantage of having in his hands the
Babylonian version of the great Behistun inscription, of knowing the
country in which the monuments were found, and of possessing copies of
inscriptions which had not yet made their way to Europe.
Nevertheless, it is amazing with what rapidity and perspicacity he
forced his way through the thick jungle of cuneiform script. In his
Memoir on the Persian texts, published in 1847, he already maps out
with marvellous fulness and exactitude the different varieties of
cuneiform writing. It is his second Memoir, however, which excites in
the Assyriologist of to-day the profoundest feelings of surprise and
admiration. This consists of notes on the inscriptions of Assyria and
Babylonia, and was communicated to the Royal Asiatic Society at the
beginning of the year 1850.[16]
[Illustration: BLACK OBELISK OF SHAL-MANESER II.
[_See p. 21._]
[Illustration: CHALDÆAN HOUSEHOLD UTENSILS IN TERRA-COTTA.
[_See p. 52._]
One of the inscriptions he has translated in full--the annals of
Shalmaneser II., on an obelisk of black marble discovered at Nimrûd
and now in the British Museum. The text is a long one, and for the
first time the European reader had placed before him a contemporaneous
account of the campaigns of an Assyrian monarch in the ninth century
before our era. The translation is substantially correct; it is only
in the proper names that Rawlinson has gone much astray. The values
of many of the characters were still uncertain or unknown, and he was
under the domination of the belief that they represented alphabetic
letters.
He was, moreover, mistaken as to the age of the monument itself, which
he assigned to too early an epoch. It was Dr. Hincks who again settled
the question, by reading upon it the names of Hazael of Damascus and
Jehu of Israel.[17] This was one of the first-fruits of his discovery
of the syllabic character of the Assyrian signs. Another was the
discovery of the name of Sennacherib,[18] as well as those of Hezekiah
and Jerusalem.[19]
Shortly before this Hincks had made another discovery of importance. He
had deciphered the names of Nebuchadrezzar and his father on the bricks
of Babylon,[20] and had further shown that a cylinder of Nebuchadrezzar
brought from Babylon by Sir Robert Ker-Porter, and written in the
cuneiform characters met with on the Persian monuments, contained
the same text as another cylinder obtained by Sir Harford Jones, and
inscribed with characters of the most complex kind. A comparison of the
two texts gave him the values of the latter characters, which we now
know to represent the archaic Babylonian forms of the cuneiform signs.
But the decipherment of the Assyro-Babylonian script was not yet
complete. In 1851 Rawlinson’s long-promised Memoir on the Babylonian
version of the inscription of Behistun was given to the world,[21]
and consisted of the cuneiform text, with translation, grammar and
commentary, besides a list of 242 characters. It announced, moreover,
two facts about these characters, one of which had already been
recognized, while the second was received by the Orientalists with
shouts of incredulity. The first fact was that the characters, besides
having phonetic values, could also be used ideographically to denote
objects and ideas. The second fact was that they were polyphonous, each
character possessing more than one phonetic value.
For once the sceptics seemed to have common-sense upon their side.
How, it was asked, could a system of writing be read the symbols of
which might be pronounced sometimes in one way, sometimes in another?
Anything could be made out of anything upon such principles, and a
method of interpretation which ended in such a result was pronounced
to be self-condemned. Hincks, however, once more entered the field and
demonstrated that Rawlinson was right.[22] Hincks was an Egyptologist,
and consequently the polyphony of the cuneiform characters was not
to him a new and startling phenomenon. It merely showed that they
must once have been pictorial--as, indeed, their ideographic use also
indicated--and in a picture-writing each picture could necessarily
be represented by more than one word, and therefore by more than one
phonetic value, when the pronunciation of the word came to be employed
phonetically. The picture of a foot, for instance, would denote not
only a “foot,” but also such ideas as “go,” “run,” “walk,” each of
which would become one of its phonetic values with the development of
the picture into a conventional syllabic sign.
Excavation was still proceeding on the site of Nineveh. Mr. Hormuzd
Rassam, himself a native of Mossul and the active assistant of Layard,
was sent in 1852 by the British Museum to complete the work from
which Layard had now been called away by diplomatic duties.[23] In
1853 he made a discovery which proved to be of momentous importance
for Assyrian decipherment, and without which, in fact, it could never
have advanced very far. He discovered the library of Nineveh with its
multitudes of closely-written clay tablets, many of them containing
long lists of characters, dictionaries and grammars, which have served
at once to verify and to extend the knowledge of the script and
language that the early decipherers had obtained. Meanwhile a careful
survey of the whole country was made at the expense of the East India
Company,[24] and the French Government sent out an exploring and
excavating expedition to Babylonia under a young and brilliant scholar,
Jules Oppert. The results of the mission, which lasted from 1851 to
1854, were embodied in two learned volumes, the first of which appeared
in 1863.[25] In these Oppert showed, what Hincks and Rawlinson had
already pointed out, that the peculiarities of the Assyrian syllabary
were due not only to its pictorial origin but also to the fact that it
had been invented by a non-Semitic people. This primitive population of
Babylonia, called Akkadian by Hincks, Sumerian by Oppert, had spoken
an agglutinative language similar to that of the Turks or Finns, and
had been the founders of Babylonian civilization. For these views
Oppert found support in the tablets of the library of Nineveh, a large
part of which consists of translations from the older language into
Semitic Assyrian, as well as of comparative grammars, vocabularies and
reading-books in the two languages.
Once more the Semitic scholars protested. There was no end to the
extravagant fantasies of the Assyriologists! The learned world was
comfortably convinced that none but a Semitic or Aryan people could
have been the originators of civilization, and to assert that the
Semites had borrowed their culture from a race which seemed to have
affinities with Mongols or Tatars was an outrage upon established
prejudices. The Semitic philologist was more certain than ever that
Assyrian decipherment was the folly of a few “untrained” amateurs, and
could safely be disregarded.
But the little band of Assyriologists pursued their labours
undisturbed. In 1855–6 Hincks published a most remarkable series of
articles in the _Journal of Sacred Literature_, in which the
various forms of the Assyrian verb were analyzed and given once for
all. The work has never had to be repeated, and the foundations of
Assyrian grammar were solidly laid. A few years later (in 1860) a
complete grammar of the language was published by Oppert. The initial
stage of Assyrian decipherment was thus at an end.
We must now turn back to the second transcript of the Persian
inscriptions, which, thanks to its greater simplicity, had been
deciphered before the Assyro-Babylonian. The way was opened in 1844 by
the Danish scholar Westergaard.[26] With the help of the proper names
he fixed the values of many of the characters and made a tentative
endeavour to read the texts. But the language he brought to light was
of so strange a nature as to throw doubt on the correctness of his
method. Turkish, Arabic, Indian and even Keltic elements seemed alike
to be mingled in it. It was not, therefore, till his readings had been
subjected to revision by Hincks in 1846[27] and de Saulcy in 1850[28]
that any confidence was reposed in it, and the results made available
for the decipherment of the Babylonian transcripts, the characters of
which frequently had the same forms. It must be remembered, however,
that Westergaard worked from defective materials. Rawlinson had not yet
published his copy of the Behistun inscription, which he eventually
placed in the hands of Edwin Norris, who, in 1853, edited the text
along with a syllabary, grammar and vocabulary, as well as translations
and commentary.[29] This edition was a splendid piece of work, and
with it the decipherment of the second transcript of the Persian
inscriptions may be said to have been accomplished. Oppert’s _Peuple
et Langage des Médes_, which appeared in 1870, did but revise,
supplement and systematize the work of Norris.
The new language which had thus been brought to light was
agglutinative. Westergaard had seen in it the language of the Medes,
and, like Rawlinson, had connected it with a hypothetical “Scythian”
family of speech. The term “Scythian” was retained by Norris, who,
however, attempted to show that it was really related to the Finnish
dialects. But the excavations made at Susa by Loftus in 1851 put
another face on the matter. In 1874, and again more fully in 1883,[30]
I pointed out that the inscriptions found at Susa and other ancient
Elamite sites were in an older form of the same language as that
of the second Achæmenian transcripts, and furthermore that certain
inscriptions discovered by Layard in the plain of Mal-Amîr eastward
of Susa were in practically the same script and dialect. At the same
time I fixed the values of the characters in the Mal-Amîr texts
and gave provisional translations of them, with a vocabulary and
commentary. Oppert and myself had already been working at the reading
of the older Susian inscriptions, a task in which we were followed by
Weissbach with a greater measure of success. But the same cause which
had retarded the decipherment of the second transcript of the Persian
inscriptions--a want of materials--militated against any great advance
being made in the decipherment of the older Susian, and it is only
since 1897, when the excavations of M. de Morgan at Susa were begun,
that the student has been at last provided with the necessary means.
Thanks to the brilliant penetration of the French Assyriologist, Dr.
Scheil, the outlines of the language of the ancient kingdom of Elam can
now be sketched with a fair amount of completeness and accuracy.[31]
The name of Neo-Susian has by common consent been conferred upon the
language of the second Achæmenian transcripts; perhaps Neo-Elamite
would be better. At all events it represents the language of the second
capital of the Persian Empire as it was spoken in the age of Darius and
his successors, and is a lineal descendant of the old agglutinative
language of Elam.
The three systems of cuneiform script, which a hundred years ago seemed
so impenetrable in their mystery, have thus, one by one, been forced
to yield their secrets. But as each in turn has been deciphered,
fresh forms of cuneiform writing and new languages expressed in
cuneiform characters have come to light. The first to emerge was that
agglutinative language of primitive Chaldæa which so scandalized
the philological world and excited such strong distrust of the
Assyriologists. The question of the name by which it should be called
has been set at rest by the discovery of tablets in which its native
designation is made known to us. Some years ago Bezold published a
bilingual text in which it is termed “the language of Sumer,”[32] and
more recently Messerschmidt has edited a bilingual inscription of the
Babylonian king Samsu-ditana in which the Semitic “translation” is
described as “Akkadian.”[33] Oppert is thus shown to have been right in
the name which he proposed to give to the language of the inventors of
the cuneiform script.
The first analysis of Sumerian grammar was made by myself in 1870, when
the general outlines of the language were fixed and the verbal forms
read and explained.[34] Three years later Lenormant threw the materials
I had collected into a connected and systematic form, one result of
which was a controversy started by the Orientalist, Joseph Halévy, who
maintained that Sumerian was not a language at all, but a cryptograph
or secret writing. The answers made by the Assyriologists to this
curious theory obliged its author constantly to shift his ground,
but at the same time it also obliged them to examine their materials
more carefully and to revise conclusions which had been arrived at on
insufficient evidence. An important discovery was now made by Haupt,
who had already given the first scientific translation of a Sumerian
text;[35] he demonstrated the existence of two dialects, one of
which is marked by all the phenomena of phonetic decay.[36] This was
naturally supposed to indicate a difference of age in the two dialects,
the one being the older and the other the later form of the language.
Subsequent research, however, has gone to show that the two dialects
were really used contemporaneously, the decayed state of that which was
called “the woman’s language” by the Babylonians being due to the fact
that it was spoken in Akkad or Northern Babylonia, where the Semitic
element became predominant at a much earlier period than in Sumer or
Southern Babylonia.
Up to this time the study of Sumerian had been almost entirely confined
to the bilingual texts, of which a very large number existed in the
library of Nineveh, and in which a Semitic translation was attached to
the Sumerian original. Now, however, the French excavations at Tello in
Southern Babylonia began to furnish European scholars with monuments
of the pre-Semitic period, and to these the decipherers, among whom
Amiaud and Thureau Dangin hold the first place, accordingly turned
their attention. Texts composed in days when Sumerian princes still
governed the country, and written by scribes who were unacquainted with
a Semitic language, were successfully attacked with the assistance of
the bilingual tablets of Nineveh. But it was soon found that between
these genuine examples of Sumerian composition and the Sumerian which
was written and explained by Semitic scribes there was a good deal of
difference. The Semites had derived their culture from their Sumerian
predecessors, and a considerable part of the religious and legal
literature that had been handed on to them was in the older language.
This older language long continued to be that of both religion and
law, the two conservative forces in society, Sumerian becoming to the
Semitic Babylonians what Latin was to mediæval Europe. The inevitable
result followed: Semitic idioms and modes of thought were clothed
in a Sumerian dress, and the ignorance of the scribe produced not
infrequently the equivalent of the dog-Latin of a modern school-boy.
The gradual changes that took place in the cuneiform system of writing,
and the adaptation of it to the requirements of Semitic speech,
contributed to the creation of an artificial and quite unclassical
Sumerian, and the lexical tablets became filled with uses and
combinations of characters which were professedly Sumerian but really
Semitic in origin. All this renders the decipherment of a Sumerian text
even now a difficult affair, and many years must elapse before we can
say that the stage of decipherment is definitely passed and that the
scholar may content himself with a purely philological treatment of the
language.
But Sumerian was not the only new language outside the circle
recognized by the Persian monarchs which the decipherment of the
cuneiform characters has revealed to us. Even before the discovery
of Sumerian, cuneiform inscriptions had been copied on the rocks and
quarried stones of Armenia, which, when the characters composing
them came to be read, proved to belong to a language as novel and as
apparently unrelated to any other as Sumerian itself. As far back
as 1826 a young scholar of the name of Schulz had been sent by the
French Government to Van in Armenia, where, according to Armenian
writers, Semiramis, the fabled queen of Assyria, had once left her
monuments. Here Schulz actually found that the cliff on which the
ancient fortress of the city stood was covered with lines of cuneiform
characters, and similar inscriptions soon came to light in other parts
of the country. Before Schulz, however, could return to Europe he was
murdered (in 1829) by a Kurdish chief, whose guest he had been. But his
papers were recovered, and the copies of the inscriptions he had made
were published in 1840 in the _Journal Asiatique_. The first to
attempt to read them was Dr. Hincks, whom no problem in decipherment
ever seemed to baffle.[37] The characters, he showed, were practically
identical with those found in the Assyrian texts, the values of many of
which had now been ascertained; but Hincks, with his usual acuteness,
went on to use the Armenian or Vannic inscriptions for settling
the values of other Assyrian characters which had not as yet been
determined. In 1848 he was already able to read the names of the Vannic
kings and fix their succession, to make out the sense of several
passages in the texts, and to indicate the nominative and accusative
suffixes of the noun.
Here Vannic decipherment rested for many years. There was no difficulty
in reading the inscriptions phonetically, for they were written in a
very simplified form of the Assyrian syllabary; but the language which
was thus revealed stood isolated and alone, without linguistic kindred
either ancient or modern. The various attempts made to decipher it were
all failures.
So things remained until 1882–3, when I published my Memoir on “The
Decipherment of the Vannic Inscriptions” in the _Journal of the Royal
Asiatic Society_. Here for the first time translations were given of
the inscriptions, together with a commentary, grammar and vocabulary.
At the same time I settled the chronological place of the Vannic kings,
which had hitherto been uncertain, as well as the geography of the
country over which they ruled, and analyzed the ancient religion of
the people as made known to us by the decipherment of the texts. In
revising and supplementing Schulz’s copies of the inscriptions I had
obtained the help of squeezes taken by Layard and Rassam. The task
of decipherment was, after all, not so hard a matter as the absence
of a bilingual text might make it appear. The want of a bilingual
was compensated by the numerous ideographs and “determinatives”
scattered through the inscriptions, which indicated their general
meaning, pointed out to the decipherer the names of countries,
cities, individuals and the like, and gave him the signification of
the phonetically-written words which in parallel passages often
replaced them. Moreover, the French Assyriologist, Stanislas Guyard,
and myself had independently made the discovery that a clause which
frequently comes at the end of a Vannic inscription corresponds with
the imprecatory formula of the Assyrians, while the decipherment of
the inscriptions led to the further discovery that not only had the
characters employed in them been borrowed from the Assyrians in the
time of the Assyrian conqueror, Assur-natsir-pal, but that many of the
phrases used in Assur-natsir-pal’s texts had been borrowed at the same
time.
Other scholars soon appeared to pursue and extend my work, more
especially Drs. Belck and Lehmann, whose expedition to Armenia in 1898
has placed at our disposal a large store of fresh material. Amongst
this fresh material are two long bilingual inscriptions, in Vannic and
Assyrian, one of which had been discovered by de Morgan in 1890. These
have verified my system of decipherment, have increased our knowledge
of the Vannic vocabulary, have corrected a few errors, and, I am bound
to add, have in one or two cases justified renderings of mine to which
exception had been taken. A historical Vannic text can now be read with
almost as much certainty as an Assyrian one.
With the discovery of the language spoken in Armenia before the arrival
of the modern Armenians the list of lost languages and dialects
brought to light by the decipherment of the cuneiform script is by no
means exhausted. Among the tablets found in 1887 at Tel el-Amarna in
Upper Egypt was a long letter from the king of Mitanni or Northern
Mesopotamia in the native language of his country, which has been
partially deciphered by Messerschmidt, Jensen and myself.[38] The
language turns out to be distantly related to the Vannic, but is of
a much more complicated description. Two of the other letters in the
same collection were in yet another previously unknown language, which
the contents of one of them showed to be that of a kingdom in Asia
Minor called Arzawa. Since then tablets have been found at Boghaz Keui
in Cappadocia, on the site of the ancient capital of the Hittites,
which are in the same dialect and form of cuneiform writing, and prove
that in them we have discovered at last actual relics of the Hittite
tongue. Thanks to the light thrown upon them by a tablet from the same
locality, which I obtained last year, it is now possible to raise the
veil which has hitherto concealed the Hittite language, and in a Paper
which will shortly be printed I have succeeded in partially translating
the texts and sketching the outlines of their grammar. But any detailed
account of these discoveries must be reserved for a future chapter; at
present I can do no more than refer briefly to these latest problems in
cuneiform decipherment.
That other problems still await us cannot be doubted. The number of
different languages which the decipherment of the cuneiform script
has thus far revealed to us is an assurance that, as excavation and
research proceed, fresh languages will come to light which have
employed the cuneiform syllabary as a means of expression. Indeed, we
already know that it was used by the Kossæans, wild mountaineers who
skirted the eastern frontiers of Babylonia, and a list of whose words
has been preserved in a cuneiform tablet,[39] and also that there was
a time, before the introduction of the Phœnician alphabet, when “the
language of Canaan”--better known as Hebrew--was written in cuneiform
characters. Canaanite glosses are found in the Tel el-Amarna tablets,
and two Sidonian seals exist in which the cuneiform syllabary is
employed to represent the sounds of Canaanitish speech.[40]
And the key to all this varied literature, this medley of languages,
the very names of which had perished, was a simple guess! But it was a
scientific guess, made in accordance with scientific method, and based
upon sound scientific reasoning. It is true that it needed the slow
and patient work of generations of scholars before the guess could
ripen into maturity; the discovery of the value of a single letter
in the Old Persian alphabet was sometimes the labour of a lifetime;
but, like the seed of the mustard tree, the guess contained within
itself all the promise of its future growth. On the day when Grotefend
identified the names of Darius and Xerxes, the decipherment of the
cuneiform inscriptions, and therewith of the history, the theology
and the civilization of the ancient Oriental world, was potentially
accomplished.