The archæology of the cuneiform inscriptions

by A. H. Sayce

But it was in the direction of the Greek seas that Hittite influence was most powerful. Through Asia Minor Babylonian culture penetrated to the West. A native imitation of the Babylonian seal-cylinder was found by Dr. Schliemann in the ruins of Hissarlik,[147] and the so-called “heraldic” position of the lions at Mykenæ can be traced back through Asia Minor to the designs of the Babylonian gem-cutters. The winged horse, Pegasus, is found on Hittite seals, and, like the double-headed eagle of Eyuk and other composite figures, is derived from Babylonian prototypes.[148] They represented the first attempts of the creative power, as conceived of by Babylonian cosmology, and an old Babylonian legend of the creation accordingly describes the monsters suckled by Tiamât as “warriors with the bodies of birds, men with the faces of ravens.”[149] The fantastic monsters of “Minoan” art, which have been brought to light by the excavations in Krete, claim an intimate connection with the similar composite beings which are a characteristic of Hittite art.[150]

The early Hittite art of Asia Minor, as I pointed out many years ago, is dependent on that of Babylonia, and has little in common with the art of Assyria.[151] It is not until we come to the later Hittite monuments of Cilicia and Syria that the influence of Assyrian art makes itself visible. Hence was derived the partiality of the Hittite artist for the composite animals that adorn the seal-cylinders of Babylonia, and which consequently became known wherever the seal-cylinder and the literary culture it accompanied had made their way. As I have already stated, though Subari was an Assyrian province and Kara Eyuk an Assyrian colony, the form of the cuneiform script that was used in Cappadocia was of Babylonian origin.

The writing material of “Minoan” Krete, we now know, consisted of clay tablets. The fact is a proof that the influence of Babylonian culture had extended thus far. But it was an indirect influence only. Though the clay tablet was employed, the characters impressed upon it were the native Kretan. This in itself, however, demonstrates how strong the influence must have been, for the Kretan characters, whether hieroglyphic or linear, were less easy to inscribe on clay than the cuneiform. Krete, moreover, is a land of rock and stone rather than of clay. We may infer, therefore, from the use of the Babylonian material that the first impulse to write was inspired by the civilization of Babylonia.

How it was brought to Krete we do not know. It may have passed over from the shores of Canaan; it may have come from Cyprus or Asia Minor. A seal-cylinder, which I have lately published, and which was found in the early copper-age cemetery of Agia Paraskevi in Cyprus, shows that the so-called Cypriote syllabary was already in use in the island at a remote date,[152] and this syllabary is closely connected with the linear characters of Krete. Inscriptions in the same form of script have been found on the site of Troy, and the pre-Israelitish pottery of Southern Palestine is marked with signs which seem to be derived from it. So, too, is certain Egyptian pottery of the age of the Eighteenth dynasty, and even of the age of the Twelfth.[153]

It is possible that Krete was the birthplace of the picture writing which developed into the linear script of Knossos and the Cypriote syllabary; it is possible that it was rather Cyprus. I do not think, as I once did, that it comes from Asia Minor, for Asia Minor had its own pictographic system, which we see represented in the Hittite inscriptions, and an increased knowledge of this system tends to dissociate it from the pictographs and syllabaries of Krete and Cyprus.

Wherever it arose, however, it was associated with the Babylonian writing material and the Babylonian seal-cylinder. So far as our present knowledge goes, Cyprus is more likely than any other part of the world to have been the meeting-point of Babylonian culture and the nascent civilization of the West. The numerous seal-cylinders which characterize the early copper age of the island are native imitations of Babylonian seal-cylinders of the epoch of Sargon of Akkad, when the boundaries of the Babylonian Empire were pushed to the coasts of the Mediterranean, if not into Cyprus itself, and the great eastern plain of Cyprus was better fitted to provide clay for the tablet than any other Mediterranean district with which I am acquainted.

That no written tablets have been found by the excavators in Cyprus is not surprising. In an island climate where heavy rains occur the unbaked tablet soon becomes hardly distinguishable from the earth in which it is embedded. It was almost by accident that even the practised eye of Dr. A. J. Evans was first led to notice the clay tablets of Knossos.

The Greek term δέλτος, which was borrowed from the language of Canaan, is evidence that the tablet was once known to the Greeks. For the letters of the Phœnician and Greek alphabet rolls of papyrus or leather were needed; the fact that the writing material was a tablet and not a roll refers us back to Babylonia. With the introduction of the Phœnician letters the word δέλτος necessarily changed its meaning, and became synonymous with a wooden board. But it is possible that a reminiscence of its original signification is preserved in a famous passage of the Iliad (vi. 169), where the later “board” has been substituted for the earlier “tablet.” Here we are told how Bellerophon carried with him to Lycia “baleful signs”—which may have been the pictographs of Krete or the Hittites, or even cuneiform characters—written upon “a folded board.” The expression would have most naturally originated in the folded clay tablet of early Babylonia, the inner tablet being enclosed in an envelope on which the address or a description of the contents of the document is written.

On the literary side, however, this is the utmost contribution that we can claim for Babylonia to have made to historical Greece. In the sphere of religion it is possible that the anthropomorphism of Greece was influenced by the anthropomorphism of Babylonia through Asia Minor, where the rock sculptures of Boghaz Keui show how the primitive Hittite fetishes had become human deities like those of Chaldæa; in the sphere of philosophy Thales and Anaximander clothed in a Greek dress the cosmological theories of the Babylonians; and in the domain of art the heraldry and composite monsters of Babylonia made their way to Europe, while the Ionic artists of Ephesus carved ivories into forms so Oriental in character that similar figures found in the palace of Sargon have been pronounced to be the work of Phœnicians. But the literary culture of historical Greece did not begin until the tide of Babylonian influence had already rolled back from Western Asia, when the Phœnician alphabet had taken the place of the cuneiform syllabary in Syria, and the Hittite populations of Asia Minor had returned to their clumsy hieroglyphs.

It is, however, remarkable how very nearly the cuneiform script became what the Phœnician alphabet has been called, “the mother of the alphabets of the world.” At one time it covered nearly the whole area of the civilized globe. A seal-cylinder with a cuneiform inscription in an unknown language has been discovered on the hills near Herat;[154] in the west its use extended as far as Cappadocia, perhaps further. Northward it made its home in Armenia; southward it obliged even the Egyptian Foreign Office to employ it for correspondence, while military scribes wrote in it their memoranda of the Pharaoh’s campaigns. In both Mitanni and Van the syllabary was on the high-road to becoming an alphabet; in Persia it actually became one.