CUNEIFORM WRITING
Thus far curiosity alone gives the stimulus to acquaintance with
ancient scripts--a feeling of aloofness attending all that we learn of
Chinese, Maya, and other systems having no historical connection (for
the derivation of Chinese from pre-Babylonian writing is not proved)
with those from which our alphabet is probably derived. With the story
of these the real interest begins, because within some of them lie the
sources of the alphabets of the civilised world, while all of them
have borne a share in the preservation of intellectual and spiritual
treasures, the loss of which would have arrested the progress of the
vigorous sections of mankind.
Dealing first with those of Mesopotamia, a romance, not lacking
excitement, gathers round the wedge-shaped or cuneiform characters
(Lat. _cuneus_, "a wedge") inscribed on clay tablets and cylinders, and
on the great monuments of Assyria, Babylon, and other Oriental empires
of past renown. The very existence of these relics was forgotten for
some sixteen hundred years, and when they were unearthed from the
rubbish-heaps of centuries, no one dreamed that any serious meaning
was to be attached to the fantastic angular-shaped characters which
covered bricks and tablets. In 1621, Pietro della Valle, a Spanish
traveller, visited the famous ruins of Persepolis, and he appears
to have been the first to suspect that the arrow-headed signs were
inscriptions, although he was unable to decipher them. He, however,
made the shrewd observation that as the thick end of the supposed
letters was never at the right but at the left of the oblique
characters, the signs must have been written from left to right.
"Built on a great platform, artificially constructed for the purpose,
which commands a wide plain, and has a lofty mountain shaped like
an amphitheatre at its rear, the stranger ascends the spot by a
magnificent staircase, or pair of staircases, which separate in
opposite directions to meet at the summit. Here are the gigantic
remains of several palaces, great porticos with winged bulls and
reliefs representing, gods and princes. In the live rock of the
mountains at the rear tombs have been hewn, evidently to receive the
occupants of the palaces, and all the rocks and walls are covered with
the cuneiform or arrow-headed inscriptions, consisting of very simple
elements, which are nothing but thin wedges and angles [Symbol] but
with these elements combined in wonderful variety.... But no record of
the language or its import had survived, and the ignorant inhabitants
of the neighbourhood looked upon the texts with greater awe than
they did the winged monsters that loomed over the plain. They were to
them symbols of magic import, which, if duly pronounced, would unlock
the hidden treasures guarded by the lions and the bulls." (Mahaffy's
_Prolegomena to Ancient History_, p. 168.)
The savants of the seventeenth century were not "wiser in their
generation" than the rude nomads who pitched their tents under the
shadow of the stone monsters. Many years after Della Valle's visit the
Oriental scholar, Hyde, in a book on the Ancient Persian Religion,
soberly suggested that the signs were designed by some fantastic
architect to show into how many combinations the same kind of stroke
would enter. It is a wonder that he did not, with equal sobriety,
suggest that they were related to the well-known Norman "hatchet-work."
And so the guessing went on. One antiquary contended that they were
talismanic signs; another that they were mystic formulæ of the priests,
or astrological symbols of the old Chaldean star-worshippers; another
saw in them a species of revealed digital language wherewith the
Creator talked to Adam, whence the primitive speech of mankind was
derived; while others conjectured them to be Chinese, or Samaritan,
or Runic, or Ogam characters. Most fantastic of all, one ingenious
theorist saw in them the action of numberless generations of worms!
But by the middle of the eighteenth century a sane school of
investigators had found its leader. A great traveller, Carsten
Niebuhr, father of the famous historian of early Rome, was the first
to divine the true character of the inscriptions. He agreed with Della
Valle that they were written from left to right, and he saw that they
were made up of three different sets of characters, each meaning the
same thing. But beyond showing, in his careful transcript published
in 1764, that one of the three scripts was simpler in character than
the others--all, as he assumed, being alphabetic varieties of one
language--he could not go. The meaning still remained a mystery. Thirty
years later, Münter, a Danish philologist, correctly guessed that the
diagonal bar [Symbol], which occurred frequently, was a sign for the
separation of words, and, next, he discovered the vowel signs, which,
as distinct characters, are absent from the Hebrew and other Semitic
languages. This was a great step towards final decipherment. Herodotus
(i. 125, &c.) speaks of the Achæmenid dynasty of Persian kings who were
the lords of Asia in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. The
ruins of Persepolis are identified as the remains of their palaces. Of
this royal house the famous Darius was a member, and Herodotus tells
how that monarch, "having gazed upon the Bosphorus, set up two pillars
by it of white stone with characters cut upon them, on the one Assyrian
and on the other Hellenic, being the names of all the nations which he
was leading with him" (iv. 87). The engraving of the same inscription
in two or more different languages (of course necessitated by making
their decrees known to the various peoples whom they ruled) was thus
shown to be a custom of the Persian kings.
Put upon the quest, a French scholar, M. de Sacy, born at Paris in
1758, copied some inscriptions of the Sassanid dynasty, which reigned
in Persia A.D. 226-651. These were written in a known alphabet
which is a mixture of Persian and Aramaic, called Pehlevi, and were
shown by De Sacy to run in the following form:--"I, (M or W,) king of
kings, son of (X,) king of kings, did thus and thus." Then, grouping
together the several facts, came Dr. Georg Friedrich Grotefend, to
formulate the theory that the Persepolitan inscriptions were written in
three languages, and not three alphabets of one language, as Carsten
Niebuhr had surmised. The recurrence of certain groups of characters
led him to the inference that "the inscriptions were a fixed formula,
only differing in the proper names." If these inscriptions began, like
those read by De Sacy, with the formula, _X, the king of kings, son
of D, the king of kings_, then it was clear that D was X's father;
and, further, that D's father was not a king, because his name was
not followed by that title, D being therefore the founder of a royal
race. Now, Hystaspes, father of Darius, was not king, but satrap
under Cambyses; and, joining his knowledge of history to his skill in
philology, Grotefend found the key to the royal name. He lived for
thirty years after this discovery, but added nothing to his triumph
save "a fortunate guess of the name Nebuchadnezzar in one of the
Assyrian inscriptions." Other decipherments followed; but it was
reserved for the genius and industry of our countryman, the late Sir
Henry Rawlinson, to discover the key whereby the ancient languages
of Persia, Babylon, and Assyria can be read, and thus "a chapter of
the world's history that had been well-nigh wholly lost made known to
mankind." That eminent scholar in no wise exaggerated the importance
of his work in claiming that its value in the interpretation of
cuneiform writing is almost equal to that of the discovery of the
Rosetta Stone in the interpretation of the hieroglyphic texts of Egypt
(_Archæologia_, xxxiv. p. 75).
[Illustration: Fig. 39.--Rock Inscription at Behistun]
The story of Rawlinson's achievement is warrant of the claim. About
sixty years ago, being then a lieutenant, he was sent to Persia to
drill the army of the Shah. His interest in Oriental history and
antiquities was already keen, and he was glad to find himself in
regions rich in materials the obscurity of whose meaning quickened
inquiry. Among these was a trilingual inscription, dating from the
early part of the sixth century B.C., cut on the face of a bare
precipitous rock at Behistun, about twenty miles from Kirmanshah, a
district abounding in monuments of the past (fig. 39). At the risk of
life and limb he climbed the face of the steep cliff to make copies of
such portions of the inscriptions as were accessible with the means
at his command, and after a series of efforts, continued at intervals
through several years, he finally secured a complete transcript of so
much of the writing as time had left uninjured. The inscription is in
three languages--Babylonian, Mede or Scythian, and Persian--arranged in
parallel columns containing above one thousand lines. It commemorates
"the life and acts of Darius Hystaspes, his conquests, and the nations
under his sway." Bas-reliefs portray that monarch, bow in hand, sitting
with his feet on the prostrate usurper, Gaumates, while a train of
nine rebel princes, whose names are inscribed above their effigies,
stand before the "king of kings," chained together by the neck. Two of
the monarch's soldiers are in the rear. Over Gaumates is written: "This
is Gaumates, the Magian; he lied; he said, I am Smerdis, son of Cyrus."
The same formula occurs over the heads of each of the nine captives.
"This is (M); he lied; he said he was king of (N)." The inscription
begins with a solemn invocation to Ormuzd, the old Persian god of light
and purity, and passes on to detail the claim of Darius to the throne
of the Achæmenids and the possessions of the Persian crown. It tells of
the defeat of Smerdis, and of the revolt of Susiana, a province lying
between Persia and Babylonia. "I sent thither an army, and the rebel
Atrina was brought in chains before me; I slew him." The same story
is narrated concerning other rebellious subjects. Of one Phraortes,
it is told that his nose, ears, and tongue were cut off, and that he
was "crucified at Ecbatana, together with his accomplices." Then the
inscription proceeds:
"King Darius saith: These countries rebelled against my power. By
lies they were separated from me. The men thou seest here deceived my
people. My army took them, according to my orders. King Darius saith:
Oh, thou that shalt be king hereafter, see that thou art not guilty
of deceit. Him that is wicked, judge as he should be judged, and if
thou reignest thus thy kingdom will be great. King Darius saith:
What I did, I did ever by the grace of Ormuzd. Thou that readest
upon this stone my deeds, think not that thou hast been deceived,
neither be thou slow to believe them. King Darius saith: Ormuzd be
my witness that I have not spoken these things with lying lips." (Cf.
_Transactions of Royal Asiatic Society_, 1844-46, 1851; also _Life of
Sir Henry Rawlinson_, pp. 146, 153, 326.)
As Professor Mahaffy points out, the exact correspondence of this
record, "especially in the many proper names it contains, with the
names of persons and provinces described by Herodotus, is a convincing
proof of the accuracy of the deciphering. It will give some notion
of the style of the documents that have been preserved. It will also
prove the accuracy of the accounts given by Herodotus and Xenophon
of the character of the ancient Persians, in whom an honest love of
truth and hatred of lies was the prominent feature--a feature which
we justly honour more than any other in a nation, but in which most
Oriental nations, and indeed the Greeks also, were woefully deficient."
(_Prolegomena_, p. 186.)
Sir Henry Rawlinson's decipherment of the great inscription of Behistun
did perhaps more than aught else to open the long-closed door to
the secret of Mesopotamian culture. The Persian inscription is in a
language which is the mother-tongue of modern Persian, and its meaning
being discovered, the interpretation of the Medic or Scythic, and of
the Babylonian, the oldest of the three, followed, while the several
characters supplied a valuable object-lesson in the stages of the
development of writing from the ideographic through the syllabic, and
thence of approach to the alphabetic.
Cuneiform writing appears to have been originally inscribed upon a
vegetable substance called _likhusi_, but the abundant clay of the
alluvial country afforded material whose convenience and permanence
brought it into general use. Upon this the characters were impressed
by a reed or square-shaped stylus, the clay-books being afterwards
baked or sun-dried. For inscriptions on stone or metal a chisel was
used. The writing of the Assyrian scribes is often exceedingly minute,
the tablets containing a mass of matter in a tiny space. The work was
trying enough to sometimes require the use of a magnifying-glass,
and among Sir Austin Layard's discoveries at Nineveh was that of a
lathe-turned crystal lens which was probably used for the purpose.
Obviously the substances chosen account for the angular form of the
characters; as the dyer's hand is "subdued to what it works in," so
the nature of the material in which the sculptor seeks to express his
conceptions largely determines for him the limits of that expression.
Phidias himself could not have produced his Pallas Athene from the
stubborn granite of Syene; and, as the outcome of the Egyptian
temperament, the sphinxes of the Nile valley might have worn a less
relentless look had they been fashioned of the marble of Pentelicus.
Much as the abrupt cuneiform character tends, however, to obscure
the traces of its derivation, there are sufficing proofs that it is
of pictographic origin, although no examples of picture-writing in
Mesopotamia corresponding in primitiveness to those already given from
barbaric sources have been discovered. In the linear Babylonian, as it
is called, the hieroglyph for "sun" is a diamond-shaped figure [Symbol]
which later on became [Symbol], and in the latest cuneiform, [Symbol].
Evidently the earliest sign was a circle, which could not be easily
traced on the stone or clay, and hence appears as the angular character
shown above. The annexed table, which is a copy of one supplied by Mr.
Pinches to Professor Keane, and published in his admirable monograph,
_Man Past and Present_, gives a set of typical examples of the
derivation of cuneiform characters from the earliest known pictographs.
EVOLUTION OF THE AKKADIAN CUNEIFORMS.
1000 B.C. About 2500 Oldest known line forms,
and later. to 1500 B.C. 3000 B.C. and earlier.
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "bird."
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "sheep"
(probably a sheep-fold).
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "ox."
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "to go,"
"to stand."
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "hand."
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "man."
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "dagger."
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "fish."
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "reed."
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "reed."
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "corn"
("ear of corn").
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "god,"
"heaven."
[Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] [Symbol] "constellation,"
"star."
As an illustration bearing upon the specimens set forth in the table
we have the ideogram of Nineveh [Symbol].The archaic form of this
character [Symbol] proves that it was compounded of the ideographic
picture of a house, enclosing the ideogram of the fish [Symbol],
thus preserving record of the instructive fact that imperial Nineveh
was at first, as its name implies (_nun_, "fish," is the name of the
fourteenth letter of the Semitic alphabet), a collection of fishermen's
huts (_cf._ Taylor, i. 41). The frequent mixture of old and new forms
in cuneiform writings and the different values sometimes given to
the same sign, have increased the difficult task of interpretation.
As in the earlier stages of other languages, determinatives were
used; _e.g._ all names of men were preceded by a single upright
wedge, of countries by three horizontal wedges, and so on. But in the
examples given in the table, the gradual conventionalising of the
signs is seen, as in that for "ox," wherein the modification of the
head and horns of the animal into the phonogram is obvious, while
the Behistun inscription exhibits well-defined stages of approach to
simplification. The cumbrous cuneiform which fills the third column
has five hundred symbols, ideograms, phonograms, and homophones; the
Medic, which occupies the second column, is written in ninety-six pure
syllabic signs; while the Persian tells the same story in thirty-six
alphabetic signs, four only of the primitive ideograms being retained.
This survival of use of ideograms, it may be noticed in passing,
has illustration among ourselves in many ways. As certain parts of
the body, _e.g._ hand, foot, bosom (in Anglo-Saxon _fæthem_, _i.e._
"fathom," or the space of both arms extended), and forearm (Latin
_ulna_, Anglo-Saxon _eln_, whence "ell"), became and remain standards
of measurement, so it is with certain modes of reckoning. The digits,
I, II, III, IIII (Latin _digitus_, "a finger") are unquestionably
pictures of fingers, and Grotefend contends with good reason that
V is a picture of the four fingers closed and the thumb extended,
while X would represent the two hands, IV the subtraction and VI
the addition of a finger. The use of a primitive decimal notation
is widespread among barbaric peoples. In chess problems the several
pieces are pictorially represented; in the planetary signs, [Symbol] is
the caduceus or wand of Mercury; ♀ is the mirror of Venus, while the
entomologist, in cataloguing his specimens, uses these symbols for
the male and female respectively. In ♂ we have the shield and spear of
Mars; in [Symbol], the sign for Jupiter, the arm wields a thunderbolt;
and the mower's scythe [Symbol] is the symbol of Saturn (connected with
Latin _sero_, _satum_, "to sow"), the god of agriculture. The signs
of the Zodiac, which were mapped out by the old Chaldeans, supply a
still more cogent example. In the form in which they are depicted on
the ancient temple of Denderah, in Egypt, there may be traced evidence
of their primitive pictorial character, a character still recognised
in the headings of the months in our almanacks (cf. _Whitaker's_), and
to be detected in current symbols. For example, the curved horns of
the ram survive in [Symbol], the sign for Aries; the head and horns of
the bull in [Symbol], the sign for Taurus; the arrow and a portion of
the bow in [Symbol], the sign for Sagittarius; while, as Dr. Taylor
points out, "the curious symbol [Symbol] is found to preserve the whole
outline of Capricornus, the small circle being the head of the goat,
with the forelegs below, and the body and tail extending to the left."
Then in such entries in the almanack as "[Symbol] rises 4h. 25m.,"
"[Symbol] 11h. 54m.," "[Symbol] 10th 9.32 morn.," "[Symbol] 3420" in
tables of the configuration of Jupiter's satellites, as also in the
symbols for money, weights, measures, and so forth, the not wholly
dispensed with picture-writing may be detected. The well-nigh vanished
trade signs doubtless served a useful purpose as pictographs in guiding
the illiterate to the shops of which they were in quest; and here and
there the barber's pole with its spiral bandages reminds us of the
phlebotomy of the past; the golden balls of the great financiers of
Florence hang out from pawnbrokers' shops their delusive signal to the
thriftless; while the "grasshopper" of Messrs. Martin, the "leather
bottell" of Messrs. Hoare, and other remnants of goldsmiths' trade
signs, remind us how many of these swung before the shops of Cheape and
Lombard Street in olden time.
To return to the cuneiform. It will be remembered that in the case
of the _monosyllabic_ Chinese, with its dictionary of forty thousand
words, the symbols of these are compounds of phonograms or sound-words
with determinatives as keys to the precise meaning to be attached
to the phonograms. Now the languages of the ancient peoples of the
Euphrates valley are _polysyllabic_, and hence arose the necessity
for signs denoting full syllables, both complex, "in which several
consonants may be distinguished, or simple syllables composed of
only one consonant and one vowel or _vice versâ_." (Maspero's _Dawn
of Civilization_, p. 728.) And among the libraries of Babylon there
were discovered a number of little grammatical documents on bricks,
called _syllabaria_, where a list of characters is given, with the
phonetic sign explained in simple syllables at one side, and, when used
ideographically, at the other. When a syllabary had thus been adopted,
the grouping into words was effected by combining the syllables. "But
a polysyllabic language did not lend itself so readily as the Chinese
monosyllabic to syllabism," and Halévy explains how the difficulty
was met. It was met, at least in some degree, by the adoption of the
principle of Acrology (Greek _akron_, "extreme" = at the top or start),
_i.e._ by the choice of a name from the likeness which it suggested
between the form of the letter and some familiar thing whose name
began with the letter in question. This re-naming of letters by a word
beginning with them occurred in the Egyptian, Russian, Runic, and
other alphabets. For example, in Russian, the letter _b_ is not called
_beta_ but _buki_, "a beech," while _d_ has lost the old name of delta
and acquired that of _dobro_, "an oak." In the Runic letters of our
forefathers _b_ is named _beorc_ or "birch," and _th_ "thorn," while
the acrologic system comes nearer home to us in the old nursery rhymes:
"A was an Archer, who shot at a frog; B was a Butcher, who had a big
dog," &c.
Now this advance to syllabism had been effected, long before the
Babylonians appear on the scene, by the older inhabitants of
Mesopotamia, the Akkadians, or, more correctly, the Akkado-Sumerians,
the Akkadians being settled on the highlands, and the Sumerians on
the plains, of that region. The racial affinities of either are not
determined, some ethnologists holding that they are of Finno-Turkic
origin, others that they belong to the Tatar-Mongolic branch. Neither
is it known at what period they immigrated into Chaldea, since at the
dawn of history they are already merged in the Semitic conquering race.
Some thousands of years B.C. Chaldea had been invaded by
the people afterwards known as Babylonians, whose primitive home, in
common with that of other Semites, as the Hebrews, Phœnicians, &c., is
conjectured to have been in South Arabia. The Babylonians, mixing their
blood with that of the subject peoples, settled as agriculturists on
the rich alluvial lowlands, while an offshoot from them, the Assyrians,
occupied the mountainous and wooded country to the north of the great
rivers, keeping their Semitic purity of descent. These "Romans of the
East," as they have been called, were soldiers and merchants, strong in
the conviction that "trade follows the flag," and hence embarking in
many an aggressive enterprise to beat the Phœnician and other rivals in
commerce. But, resting on the sword alone, the Assyrian empire perished
by the sword.
As for the Akkadians (using this term to include the pre-Semite
inhabitants), they had passed the barbaric stage when they invaded
Chaldea. They knew the use of metals: they were skilful architects,
and; what was of importance in the marshy districts where dams and
canals were indispensable, good engineers; their laws mark an advanced
social organisation; their writing, as has been seen, had become
syllabic; and their literature, besides recording the details of their
daily life, supplies the key to a religion which profoundly influenced
the Babylonians, and, through them, the Hebrews, ultimately affecting
the whole of Christendom. That religion was a blend of higher and
lower ideas. At base it was Shamanistic. Natural phenomena--sun,
moon, stars, the earth, and so forth--were worshipped, but, as in all
religions, that which touches man more closely in his affairs and
relations has the firmer hold, and hence there was an active belief in
magic, with its allied apparatus of charms, spells, and incantations.
Side by side with formulæ embodying superstitions common to barbaric
folk all the world over, we find penitential psalms, appeals to the
great gods, and spiritual utterances, some of which are on a plane with
Hebrew sacred poetry. All this body of literature, secular and sacred,
made up the vast store of books in the libraries whose interpretation
is one of the brilliant successes of modern scholarship, and whose
contents bring home to us the priceless value of the art of writing to
mankind.
Up to a recent date, the oldest known example of cuneiform writing was
supplied by a porphyry cylinder seal of the Semite king, Sargon I., who
flourished 3800 B.C. (fig. 40). It bears this inscription:--"Sargon,
King of the city of Akkad, to the Sun-god (Sarnas) in the city of
Sippara I approached." It is this same king concerning whom a myth,
which may have been the origin of the myth about the infant Moses in
the bulrushes, is recorded on a tablet preserved, together with the
seal, in the British Museum.
[Illustration: Fig. 40.--Cylinder Seal of Sargon I.]
Another famous cuneiform relic is the Stele of the Vultures, a
large portion of which is in the Louvre. It dates from about 4500
B.C., and besides its sculptured panels, one of which depicts
vultures carrying away the heads of the slain in battle (whence
its name), it records the victory of E-anna-du, priest-king of
Sirpurra, over the "people of the land of the Bow," on the Elamite
frontier, a tribute of corn being imposed on the conquered state.
Other inscriptions testify that "in the fourth millennium before the
Christian era art was fully developed, statues set up, the chariot used
in war, silver and copper worked, weaving and the making of pottery
known, and an elaborate system of calculation into thousands evolved."
But the antiquity of these witnesses pales before that evidenced by the
rubbish-mounds of the city of Nuffar or Nippur, in Northern Babylonia.
Several records of Sargon I. were found among the thousands of tablets
dug from the later deposits, but discoveries were made beneath these
on which Dr. Peters, in reporting on the epigraphic material secured
by Mr. Haynes, writes as follows:--"We found that Nippur was a great
and flourishing city, and its temple, the temple of Bel, the religious
centre of the dominant people of the world at a period as much prior
to the time of Abraham as the time of Abraham is prior to our own
day. We discovered written records no less than six thousand years
old, and proved that writing and civilisation were then by no means
in their infancy. Further than that, our explorations have shown that
Nippur possessed a history extending backward of the earliest written
documents found by us, at least two thousand years." (_Nippur; the
Narrative of the University of Pennsylvania's Expedition_, vol. ii. p.
241.) Upon which Dr. Hilprecht comments: "I do not hesitate to date
the founding of the temple of Bel and the first settlements in Nippur
somewhere between 6000 and 7000 B.C., and possibly earlier."
(_Academy_, 30th April 1898, p. 465.)
[Illustration: Fig. 41.--Tell-el-Amarna Tablet (_circa_ 1450
B.C.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 42.--First Creation Tablet]
Although they are nearly five thousand years later, deeper interest
attaches to the three hundred and twenty clay tablets, inscribed with
the cuneiform character (fig. 41), which were discovered in 1887 among
the ruins of Tell-el-Amarna, the Arabic name of a village on the east
bank of the Nile, about one hundred and eighty miles south of the once
renowned city of Memphis. The village stands on the site of a city
founded by Amenophis III., so that the date of the documents, among
which are letters received by that king, is known to range from 1500 to
1450 B.C. Two of the tablets contain legends, and one gives
a hymn to the war-god, but the larger number comprise communications
passing between the kings of Egypt and the kings of Western Asia, many
of them being docketed with the date and name of the sender written
in Egyptian hieroglyph. One tablet from a Hittite prince is written
in the old Akkadian tongue. They furnish valuable information upon
the political and commercial relations between Egypt and Babylonia,
and upon negotiations between the kings both for wives and subsidies.
"Being all in the cuneiform character, they were unlikely to be
readily deciphered at the Egyptian court. Hence it was the custom of
the Babylonian kings to send interpreters with them, and reference is
made to such messengers in several of the letters. But a scribe able
to read and write the cuneiform was undoubtedly kept by the Pharaohs
for purposes of translation and for inditing replies. Some of the
tablets are copies of such replies, written in cuneiform, but retained
for reference, just as we in the present day keep copies of important
letters."
[Illustration: Fig. 43.--Deluge Tablet (Chaldean Epic) OBVERSE.]
[Illustration: Fig. 44.--Deluge Tablet (Chaldean Epic) REVERSE.]
The actual contents of the Tell-el-Amarna tablets are of secondary
importance to the fact that cuneiform writing was in use in Palestine
fifteen hundred years before Christ, and, therefore, that Babylonian
myths and legends had, in all probability, circulated freely there
centuries before the Book of Genesis took shape. Thus the legends of
the Creation, the Fall, and the Deluge, the Chaldean origin of which
is established (figs. 42, 43, 44), "can very well have existed in
Palestine at the time it was invaded by the Israelites, who would have
learned them from the people they subdued, and would have found plenty
of time to modify them into the forms in which they appear in Hebrew
literature." (_The Witness of Assyria_, p. 11, by Chilperic Edwards.)