The archæology of the cuneiform inscriptions

by A. H. Sayce

NOTE

According to the mineralogists, in the western part of the northern hemisphere tin is found only in Britain, Spain and the neighbourhood of Askabad, the scanty surface-tin of Saxony, France and Tuscany being too poor and insignificant to have attracted attention in antiquity (see de Morgan, Mission Scientifique au Caucase, ii. pp. 16–28). The American excavations at Askabad under Professor Pumpelly appear to have made it clear that bronze was not invented in that part of the world, or indeed used in early days, and we are thus thrown back on Britain and Spain. It is quite certain, however, that bronze made its way to the west of Europe from the east, and the Hon. John Abercromby has proved (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xxxii. pp. 375–94, and Proceedings of Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 1903–4, pp. 323–410) that the bronze culture came to this country from the valley of the central Rhine where it cuts the river at Mayence. On the other hand, the bronze-age civilization of the Danube valley, the Balkan peninsula and Italy forms a whole with that of the south-eastern basin of the Mediterranean, which again is closely connected with the bronze-age culture of the Ægean, Asia Minor and Egypt, while the civilization of the Danube valley leads on to that of Central Europe and, to a less extent, of Scandinavia and Northern Germany. Montelius (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 1900, pp. 89 sqq.) has pointed out that the early bronze culture of Northern Italy was carried to Scandinavia along the route of the amber trade as far back as the close of the neolithic age in Sweden, and the numerous objects of Irish gold found in Scandinavia—though, it is true, of somewhat later date—show that commercial relations must have existed between the British Islands and the Scandinavian peninsula. Tin might have followed the gold route until it met the amber route, by which it would have been carried southward to Central Europe and the Adriatic.

In Western Europe the sword, like the socketed celt, is first met with in the third and last period into which the bronze age has been divided. The earliest examples of the sword, in fact, are those discovered at Mykenæ, which belong to the age of the Eighteenth Egyptian dynasty. Schliemann found only the dirk at Troy, and, so far as our present evidence goes, the dirk alone was used by the Hittites and Proto-Armenians down to the seventh century B.C. The scimitar, however, was known in Assyria and at Gezer at least as early as the fourteenth century B.C. (see p. 57 above), and in Cyprus the sword makes its appearance along with the knife and fibula in the later bronze age after the close of the age of copper. Similarly in Krete it was only in tombs of the Late Mykenæan (or Late Minoan) period that the cemetery of Knossos yielded swords of bronze (Annual of the British School at Athens, x. p. 4). The dirk of the copper age was stanged as at Troy and in the Danube valley, the Cyprian and Hungarian forms being practically identical. From the Danube valley the stanged spear-head passed to Western Europe during the second period of the bronze age. The fibula is not found at Troy, where the early bronze age will have corresponded with the copper age of Cyprus.

All this goes to show (1) that the scimitar—the harpê of the Perseus myth—was a Semitic invention, while the long sword was of European origin; (2) that at Troy, and possibly also in Southern Palestine, to which Hittite polychrome pottery was carried at an early date, bronze was known at a time when only copper was used in Cyprus and Egypt; and (3) that the characteristic weapon of this primitive bronze age was the dirk, which continued to characterize Asia Minor long after the sword and scimitar had been invented elsewhere. Taken in connection with the fact that the pottery and decorative designs of Asia Minor can be linked with those of the Balkan peninsula and the valley of the Danube, we may provisionally conclude that Northern Asia Minor was the home of the invention of bronze. Against this is the fact that no tin has hitherto been found there, and we should accordingly have to explain the origin of bronze by the theory that after the discovery of various processes for hardening copper, further experiments were made with imported tin. Unfortunately, neither the south of Cornwall nor Asia Minor, with the exception of the Troad, has as yet been scientifically explored from an archæological point of view. But it deserves mention that the curious needles with a double head of twisted wire, which are met with among the remains of the bronze age in Britain, are characteristic of the copper age in Cyprus and of the early bronze age at Troy.

CHAPTER III
THE SUMERIANS

Among the first results of the decipherment of the Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions was one which was so unexpected and revolutionary, that it was received with incredulity and employed to pour discredit on the fact of the decipherment itself. European scholars had long been nursing the comfortable belief that the white race primarily, and the natives of Europe secondarily, were ipso facto superior to the rest of mankind, and that to them belonged of right the origin and development of civilization. The discovery of the common parentage of the Indo-European languages had come to strengthen the belief; the notion grew up that in Sanskrit we had found, if not the primeval language, at all events a language that was very near to it, and idyllic pictures were painted of the primitive Aryan community living in its Asiatic home and already possessed of the elements of its later culture. Outside and beyond it were the barbarians, races yellow and brown and black, with oblique eyes and narrow foreheads, whose intelligence was not much above that of the brute beasts. Such culture as some of them may have had was derived from the white race, and perhaps spoilt in the borrowing. The idea of the rise of a civilization outside the limits of the white race was regarded as a paradox.

It was just this paradox to which the first decipherers of Assyrian cuneiform found themselves forced. And another paradox was added to it. Not only had the civilization of the Euphrates and Tigris originated amongst a race that spoke an agglutinative language, and therefore was neither Aryan nor Semitic, the civilization of the Semitic Babylonians and Assyrians was borrowed from this older civilization along with the cuneiform system of writing. It seemed impossible that so revolutionary a doctrine could be true, and Semitic philologists naturally denounced it. For centuries Hebrew had been supposed to have been the language of Paradise, and the old belief which made the Semitic Adam the first civilized man still unconsciously affected the Semitic scholars of the nineteenth century. It was hard to part with the prejudices of early education, especially when they were called upon to do so by a small group of men whose method of decipherment was an enigma to the ordinary grammarian, and who were introducing new and dangerous principles into the study of the extinct Semitic tongues.

The method of decipherment was nevertheless a sound one, and the result, which seemed so incredible and impossible when first announced, is now one of the assured facts of science. The first civilized occupants of the alluvial plain of Babylonia were neither Semites nor Aryans, but the speakers of an agglutinative language, and to them were due all the elements of the Babylonian culture of later days. It was they who first drained the marshes, and regulated the course of the rivers by canals, thereby transforming what had been a pestiferous swamp into the most fertile of lands; it was they who founded the great cities of the country, and invented the pictorial characters, the cursive forms of which became what we term cuneiform. The theology and law of later Babylonia went back to them, and long after Semitic Babylonian had become the language of the country, legal judgments were still written in the old language and the theological literature was still studied in it. The Church and the Law were as loth to give up the dead language of Sumer as they were in modern Europe to give up the use of Latin.

This dead agglutinative language has been called sometimes Akkadian, sometimes Sumerian, but Sumerian is the name which has been finally selected. In fact, this was the name applied to it by the Semitic Babylonians themselves, who included in the term the two dialects—or rather the two forms of the language at different periods of its development—which have been preserved to us in the cuneiform tablets. Strictly speaking, the dialect which had been most affected by contact with the Semites, and had in consequence suffered most from phonetic decay, was known as the language of Akkad, but this was because Akkad represented Northern Babylonia, which had become Semitic at an earlier date than the south and had been the seat of the first great Semitic Empire.[66] Both names, Akkadian and Sumerian, are correct as applied to the primitive language of Chaldæa, but of the two Sumerian is preferable, not only because it was used by the Babylonian scribes themselves, but also because it denoted the oldest and purest form of the language before it had passed under foreign influence.

This, then, was the great archæological fact which resulted from the decipherment of the Assyro-Babylonian texts. The earliest civilized inhabitants of Babylonia did not speak a Semitic language, and therefore presumably they were not Semites. It is perfectly true that language and race are not synonymous terms, and that we are seldom justified in arguing from the one to the other. But the Sumerian language is one of the exceptions which proves the rule. Those who spoke it were the first civilizers of Western Asia, the inventors and perfecters of a system of writing which was destined to be one of the chief humanizing agents of the ancient world, the authors of the irrigation engineering of the Babylonian plain, and the builders of its many cities. The language they spoke, accordingly, could not have been forced upon them by conquerors who have otherwise left no trace behind them, and they certainly would not have exchanged it of their own accord for their native tongue. The Semitic languages have always been conspicuous for the tenacity with which they have held their own, and the conservatism with which they have resisted change. We may still hear in the Egyptian Arabic of to-day the very words which were written by Semitic Babylonian scribes upon their tablets some four or five thousand years ago. A Semitic people would have been the last to borrow the language of its less-civilized neighbours without any assignable reason. The fact, consequently, that the pioneers of Babylonian culture spoke an agglutinative language fully justifies us in concluding that they belonged to a race that was not Semitic.