A Primer of Assyriology

by A. H. Sayce

(2) The ideographs often prove a great assistance, as words of unknown meaning interchange with ideographs the signification of which is already known.

(3) The fact that the characters express syllables gives us the precise pronunciation of the words, and so enables us to read them with a certainty which is impossible in Hebrew or Phoenician where the vowels are not denoted in writing.

(4) Assyrian is a Semitic language, and the Semitic languages are as closely related to one another as are the Romanic languages (French, Italian, Spanish, &c.) in modern Europe. Consequently most of the words and grammatical forms found in Assyrian recur in one or other of the Semitic idioms.

(5) But above all, the Assyrian scribes themselves have provided us with the most abundant materials for interpreting the inscriptions.

The libraries.—The amount of Assyro-Babylonian literature already known is very large. If all the texts at present in the museums of Europe and America could be published, they would rival in extent the books of the Old Testament. Most of the texts are on tablets of clay and have come from the libraries of Nineveh and Babylonia. Every great Babylonian city had at least one library, and the Assyrian kings established other libraries in their own country in imitation of those of Babylonia. About two-thirds of the library of Nineveh, which was largely the creation of Assur-bani-pal, is now in the British Museum. Scribes were kept constantly at work there copying and re-editing old texts, and sometimes writing new ones. A considerable proportion of the texts was brought from Babylonia: a colophon attached to each tablet usually states from what library the text had originally come. The texts were carefully edited; when there was a lacuna in the original the scribe tells us so, and whether it was old or recent; also if the Babylonian character were one which he did not recognize he confesses that he could not read it. Besides the clay tablets, the libraries contained papyri which have now perished.

Varieties of literature.—The texts related to all the branches of knowledge studied at the time. Astronomy and astrology, mathematics, geography, medicine, law, history, religion, and mythology, private and public correspondence, mercantile transactions, political documents, the pseudo-science of omens, lists of beasts, birds, vegetables, and stones, are all represented in it, and last, but not least, philology. The necessity of translating and explaining the Sumerian texts doubtless gave philology so prominent a place. Under the head of philology come interlinear and parallel translations of Sumerian documents, together with commentaries and exercises, reading-books and grammars of the two languages, endless lists of characters with their phonetic values and significations, and numerous vocabularies partly bilingual, partly containing catalogues of Semitic synonyms. The decipherer thus has at his command a most elaborate system for learning the Assyrian and Sumerian languages compiled by the Assyrians themselves. Time after time the signification of a new word is given by its synonym or synonyms in the lexical lists, and words of uncertain meaning in Hebrew have more than once been settled by means of their Assyrian equivalents.

The texts autotypes.—The cuneiform texts further possess an advantage of which the student of the Old and New Testament Scriptures might well be envious. They are the autotypes of the scribes who wrote them for the libraries in the ruins of which they have been found. The texts have never passed through the hands of later copyists little acquainted with the language in which they were composed. The corruptions of the text, such as they are, go back to the scribes of Assur-bani-pal or Nebuchadrezzar, in some cases to the scribes even of the pre-Semitic period.

Part of an Assyrian Book.

Astronomy.—The great work on astronomy and astrology in seventy-two chapters or books was originally compiled for the library of Sargon of Accad. It contained chapters on the eclipses or conjunction of the sun and moon, on the planets, the fixed stars, and the comets, and proves that observations of the heavens had been made for a long while previous to its composition. The path of the sun through the signs of the Zodiac had already been mapped out: in fact the Zodiacal Signs owe their origin to the astronomers of Babylonia. At the time they were first named the vernal equinox began with Taurus.