CHAPTER V.
LANGUAGE AND WRITING.
Greek phrase [—]—HEROD. iv. 137.
There has never been much difference of opinion among the learned with regard to the language spoken by the Assyrians. As the Biblical genealogy connected Asshur with Eber and Aram, while the Greeks plainly regarded the Syrians, Assyrians, and Babylonians as a single race, it was always supposed that the people thus associated must have possessed a tongue allied, more or less closely, to the Hebrew, the Syriac, and the Chaldee. These tongues were known to be dialectic varieties of a single form of speech the Semitic; and it was consequently the general belief, before any Assyrian inscriptions had been disinterred, that the Assyrian language was of this type, either a sister tongue to the three above mentioned, or else identical with some one of them. The only difficulty in the way of this theory was the supposed Medo-Persic or Arian character of a certain number of Assyrian royal names; but this difficulty was thought to be sufficiently met by a suggestion that the ruling tribe might have been of Median descent, and have maintained its own national appellatives, while the mass of the population belonged to a different race. Recent discoveries have shown that this last suggestion was needless, as the difficulty which it was intended to meet does not exist. The Assyrian names which either history or the monuments have handed down to us are Semitic, and not Arian. It is only among the fabulous accounts of the Assyrian Empire put forth by Ctesias that Arian names, such as Xerxes, Arius, Armamithres, Mithraus, etc., are to be found.
Together with the true names of the Assyrian kings, the mounds of Mesopotamia have yielded up a mass of documents in the Assyrian language, from which it is possible that we may one day acquire as full a knowledge of its structure and vocabulary as we possess at present of Greek or Latin. These documents have confirmed the previous belief that the tongue is Semitic. They consist, in the first place, of long inscriptions upon the slabs of stone with which the walls of palaces were panelled, sometimes occupying the stone to the exclusion of any sculpture, sometimes carried across the dress of figures, always carefully cut, and generally in good preservation. Next in importance to these memorials are the hollow cylinders, or, more strictly speaking, hexagonal or octagonal prisms, made in extremely fine and thin terra cotta, which the Assyrian kings used to deposit at the corners of temples, inscribed with an account of their chief acts and with numerous religious invocations. [PLATE XXXIX., Fig. 1.] These cylinders vary from a foot and a half to three feet in height, and are covered closely with a small writing, which it often requires a good magnifying glass to decipher. A cylinder of Tiglath-Pileser I. (about B.C. 1180) contains thirty lines in a space of six inches, or five lines to an inch, which is nearly as close as the type of the present volume. This degree of closeness is exceeded on a cylinder of Asshur-bani-pal’s (about B.C. 660), where the lines are six to the inch, or as near together as the type of the Edinburgh Review. If the complexity of the Assyrian characters be taken into account, and if it be remembered that the whole inscription was in every ease impressed by the hand, this minuteness must be allowed to be very surprising. It is not favorable to legibility; and the patience of cuneiform scholars has been severely tried by a mode of writing which sacrifices everything to the desire of crowding the greatest possible quantity of words into the smallest possible space. In one respect, however, facility of reading is consulted, for the inscriptions on the cylinders are not carried on in continuous lines round all the sides, but are written in columns, each column occupying a side. The lines are thus tolerably short; and the whole of a sentence is brought before the eye at once.
Besides slabs and cylinders, the written memorials of Assyria comprise inscribed bulls and lions, stone obelisks, clay tablets, bricks, and engraved seals. Tin seals generally resemble those of the Chaldaeans, which have been already described: but are somewhat more elaborate, and more varied in their character. [PLATE XXXIX., Fig. 2.] They do not very often exhibit any writing; but occasionally they are inscribed with the name of their owner, while in a few instances they show an inscription of some length. The clay tablets are both numerous and curious. They are of various sizes, ranging from nine inches long by six and a half wide, to an inch and a half long by an inch wide, or even less. [PLATE XL., Fig. 2.] Sometimes they are entirely covered with writing; while sometimes they exhibit on a portion of their surface the impressions of seals, mythological emblems, and the like. Some thousands of them have been recovered; and they are found to be of the most varied character. Many are historical, still more mythological; some are linguistic, some geographic, some again astronomical. It is anticipated that, when they are deciphered, we shall obtain a complete eneyclopaedia of Assyrian science, and shall be able by this means to trace a large portion of the knowledge of the Greeks to an Oriental source. Here is a mine still very little worked, from which patient and cautious investigators may one day extract the most valuable literary treasures. The stone obelisks are but few, and are mostly in a fragmentary condition. One alone is perfect—the obelisk in black basalt, discovered by Mr. Layard at Nimrud, which has now for many years been in the British Museum. [PLATE XL., Fig. 1.] This monument is sculptured on each of its four sides, in part with writing and in part with bas-reliefs. It is about seven feet high, and two feet broad at the base, tapering gently towards the summit, which is crowned with three low steps, or gradines. The inscription, which occupies the upper and lower portion of each side, and is also carried along the spaces between the bas-reliefs, consists of 210 clearly cut lines, and is one of the most important documents that has come down to us. It gives an account of various victories gained by the monarch who set it up, and of the tribute brought him by several princes. The inscribed lions and bulls are numerous. They commonly guard the portals of palaces, and are raised in a bold relief on alabaster slabs. The writing does not often trench upon the sculpture, but covers all those portions of the slabs which are not occupied by the animal. It is usually a full account of some particular campaign, which was thus specially commemorated, giving in detail what is far more briefly expressed in the obelisk and slab inscriptions.
This review of the various kinds of documents which have been discovered in the ancient cities of Assyria, seems to show that two materials were principally in use among the people for literary purposes, namely, stone and moist clay. The monarchs used the former most commonly, though sometimes they condescended for some special object to the coarser and more fragile material. Private persons in their business transactions, literary and scientific men in their compositions, employed the latter, on which it was possible to write rapidly with a triangular instrument, and which was no doubt far cheaper than the slabs of fine stone, which were preferred for the royal inscriptions. The clay documents, when wanted for instruction or as evidence, were carefully baked; and thus it is that they have come down to us, despite their fragility, often in as legible a condition, with the letters as clear and sharp, as any legend on marble, stone, or metal that we possess belonging to Greek or even to Roman times. The best clay, skilfully baked, is a material quite as enduring as either stone or metal, resisting many influences better than either of those materials.
It may still be asked, did not the Assyrians use other materials also? Did they not write with ink of some kind on paper, or leather, or parchment? It is certain that the Egyptians had invented a kind of thick paper many centuries before the Assyrian power arose; and it is further certain that the later Assyrian kings had a good deal of intercourse with Egypt. Under such circumstances, can we suppose that they did not import paper from that country? Again, the Persians, we are told, used parchment for their public records. Are not the Assyrians a much more ingenious people, likely to have done the same, at any rate to some extent? There is no direct evidence by which these questions can be determinately answered. No document on any of the materials suggested has been found. No ancient author states that the Assyrians or the Babylonians used them. Had it not been for one piece of indirect evidence, it would have seemed nearly certain that they were not employed by the Mesopotamian races. In some of the royal palaces, however, small humps of fine clay have been found, bearing the impressions of seals, and exhibiting traces of the string by which they were attached to documents, while the documents themselves, being of a different material, have perished. It seems probable that in these instances some substance like paper or parchment was used; and thus we are led to the conclusion that, while clay was the most common, and stone an ordinary writing material among the Assyrians, some third substance, probably Egyptian paper, was also known, and was used occasionally, though somewhat rarely, for public documents.
The number of characters is very great. Sir H. Rawlinson, in the year 1851, published a list of 216, or, including variants, 366 characters, as occurring in the inscriptions known to him. M. Oppei t, in 1858, gave 318 forms as those “most in use.” Of course it is at once evident that this alphabet cannot represent elementary sounds. The Assyrian characters do, in fact, correspond, not to letters, according to our notion of letters, but to syllables. These syllables are either mere vowel sounds, such as we represent by our vowels and diphthongs, or such sounds accompanied by one or two consonants.
The vowels are not very numerous. The Assyrians recognize three only as fundamental—a, i, and u. Besides these they have the diphthongs ai, nearly equivalent to e, and au, nearly equivalent to o. The vowels i and u have also the powers, respectively, of y and v.
From these sounds, combined with the simple vowels, comes the Assyrian syllabarium, to which, and not to the consonants themselves, the characters were assigned. In the first place, each consonant being capable of two combinations with each simple vowel, could give birth naturally to six simple syllables, each of which would be in the Assyrian system represented by a character. Six characters, for instance, entirely different from one another, represented pa, pi, pu, ap, ip, up; six others, ka, ki, ke, ak, ik, uk; six others again, ta, ti, tu, at, it, ut.
If this rule were carried out in every case, the sixteen consonant sounds would, it is evident, produce ninety-six characters. The actual number, however, formed in this way, is only seventy-five. Since these are seven of the consonants which only combine with the vowels in one way. Thus we have ba, bi, bu, but not ab, ib, ub; ga, qi, gu, but not ay, iq,ug; and so on. The sounds regarded as capable of only one combination are the mediae, b, q, d; the aspirates kh, tj; and the sibilants ts and z.
Such is the first and simplest syllabarium: but the Assyrian system does not stop here. It proceeds to combine with each simple vowel sound two consonants, one preceding the vowel and the other following it. If this plan were followed out to the utmost possible extent, the result would be an addition to the syllabarium of seven hundred and sixty-eight sounds, each having its proper character, which would raise the number of characters to between eight and nine hundred! Fortunately for the student, phonetic laws and other causes have intervened to check this extreme luxuriance; and the combinations of this kind which are known to exist, instead of amounting to the full limit of seven hundred and sixty-eight, are under one hundred and fifty. The known Assyrian alphabet is, however, in this way raised from eighty, or, including variants, one hundred, to between two hundred and forty and two hundred and fifty characters.
Finally, there are a certain number of characters which have been called “ideographs,” or “monograms.” Most of the gods, and various cities and countries, are represented by a group of wedges, which is thought not to have a real phonetic force, but to be a conventional sign for an idea, much as the Arabic numerals, 1, 2, 3. etc., are non-phonetic signs representing the ideas, one, two, three, etc. The known characters of this description are between twenty and thirty.
The known Assyrian characters are thus brought up nearly to three hundred! There still remain a considerable number which are either wholly unknown, or of which the meaning is known, while the phonetic value cannot at present be determined. M. Oppert’s Catalogue contains fourteen of the former and fifty-nine of the latter class.
It has already been observed that the monumental evidence accords with the traditional belief in regard to the character of the Assyrian language, which is unmistakably Semitic. Not only does the vocabulary present constant analogies to other Semitic dialects, but the phonetic laws and the grammatical forms are equally of this type. At the same time the language has peculiarities of its own, which separate it from its kindred tongues, and constitute it a distinct form of Semitic speech, not a mere variety of any known form. It is neither Hebrew, nor Arabic, nor Phoenician, nor Chaldee, nor Syriac, but a sister tongue to these, having some analogies with all of them, and others, more or fewer, with each. On the whole, its closest relationship seems to be with the Hebrew, and its greatest divergence from the Aramaic or Syriac, with which it was yet, locally, in immediate connection.
To attempt anything like a full illustration of these statements in the present place would be manifestly unfitting. It would be to quit the province of the historian and archeologist, in order to enter upon that of the comparative philologer or the grammarian. At the same time a certain amount of illustration seems necessary, in order to show that the statements above made are not mere theories, but have a substantial basis.
The Semitic character of the vocabulary will probably be felt to be sufficiently established by the following lists:
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