The archæology of the cuneiform inscriptions

by A. H. Sayce

BLACK OBELISK OF SHAL-MANESER II.

[See p. [21].

CHALDÆAN HOUSEHOLD UTENSILS IN TERRA-COTTA.

[See p. [52].

One of the inscriptions he has translated in full—the annals of Shalmaneser II., on an obelisk of black marble discovered at Nimrûd and now in the British Museum. The text is a long one, and for the first time the European reader had placed before him a contemporaneous account of the campaigns of an Assyrian monarch in the ninth century before our era. The translation is substantially correct; it is only in the proper names that Rawlinson has gone much astray. The values of many of the characters were still uncertain or unknown, and he was under the domination of the belief that they represented alphabetic letters.

He was, moreover, mistaken as to the age of the monument itself, which he assigned to too early an epoch. It was Dr. Hincks who again settled the question, by reading upon it the names of Hazael of Damascus and Jehu of Israel.[17] This was one of the first-fruits of his discovery of the syllabic character of the Assyrian signs. Another was the discovery of the name of Sennacherib,[18] as well as those of Hezekiah and Jerusalem.[19]

Shortly before this Hincks had made another discovery of importance. He had deciphered the names of Nebuchadrezzar and his father on the bricks of Babylon,[20] and had further shown that a cylinder of Nebuchadrezzar brought from Babylon by Sir Robert Ker-Porter, and written in the cuneiform characters met with on the Persian monuments, contained the same text as another cylinder obtained by Sir Harford Jones, and inscribed with characters of the most complex kind. A comparison of the two texts gave him the values of the latter characters, which we now know to represent the archaic Babylonian forms of the cuneiform signs.

But the decipherment of the Assyro-Babylonian script was not yet complete. In 1851 Rawlinson’s long-promised Memoir on the Babylonian version of the inscription of Behistun was given to the world,[21] and consisted of the cuneiform text, with translation, grammar and commentary, besides a list of 242 characters. It announced, moreover, two facts about these characters, one of which had already been recognized, while the second was received by the Orientalists with shouts of incredulity. The first fact was that the characters, besides having phonetic values, could also be used ideographically to denote objects and ideas. The second fact was that they were polyphonous, each character possessing more than one phonetic value.