The archæology of the cuneiform inscriptions

by A. H. Sayce

For once the sceptics seemed to have common-sense upon their side. How, it was asked, could a system of writing be read the symbols of which might be pronounced sometimes in one way, sometimes in another? Anything could be made out of anything upon such principles, and a method of interpretation which ended in such a result was pronounced to be self-condemned. Hincks, however, once more entered the field and demonstrated that Rawlinson was right.[22] Hincks was an Egyptologist, and consequently the polyphony of the cuneiform characters was not to him a new and startling phenomenon. It merely showed that they must once have been pictorial—as, indeed, their ideographic use also indicated—and in a picture-writing each picture could necessarily be represented by more than one word, and therefore by more than one phonetic value, when the pronunciation of the word came to be employed phonetically. The picture of a foot, for instance, would denote not only a “foot,” but also such ideas as “go,” “run,” “walk,” each of which would become one of its phonetic values with the development of the picture into a conventional syllabic sign.

Excavation was still proceeding on the site of Nineveh. Mr. Hormuzd Rassam, himself a native of Mossul and the active assistant of Layard, was sent in 1852 by the British Museum to complete the work from which Layard had now been called away by diplomatic duties.[23] In 1853 he made a discovery which proved to be of momentous importance for Assyrian decipherment, and without which, in fact, it could never have advanced very far. He discovered the library of Nineveh with its multitudes of closely-written clay tablets, many of them containing long lists of characters, dictionaries and grammars, which have served at once to verify and to extend the knowledge of the script and language that the early decipherers had obtained. Meanwhile a careful survey of the whole country was made at the expense of the East India Company,[24] and the French Government sent out an exploring and excavating expedition to Babylonia under a young and brilliant scholar, Jules Oppert. The results of the mission, which lasted from 1851 to 1854, were embodied in two learned volumes, the first of which appeared in 1863.[25] In these Oppert showed, what Hincks and Rawlinson had already pointed out, that the peculiarities of the Assyrian syllabary were due not only to its pictorial origin but also to the fact that it had been invented by a non-Semitic people. This primitive population of Babylonia, called Akkadian by Hincks, Sumerian by Oppert, had spoken an agglutinative language similar to that of the Turks or Finns, and had been the founders of Babylonian civilization. For these views Oppert found support in the tablets of the library of Nineveh, a large part of which consists of translations from the older language into Semitic Assyrian, as well as of comparative grammars, vocabularies and reading-books in the two languages.

Once more the Semitic scholars protested. There was no end to the extravagant fantasies of the Assyriologists! The learned world was comfortably convinced that none but a Semitic or Aryan people could have been the originators of civilization, and to assert that the Semites had borrowed their culture from a race which seemed to have affinities with Mongols or Tatars was an outrage upon established prejudices. The Semitic philologist was more certain than ever that Assyrian decipherment was the folly of a few “untrained” amateurs, and could safely be disregarded.

But the little band of Assyriologists pursued their labours undisturbed. In 1855–6 Hincks published a most remarkable series of articles in the Journal of Sacred Literature, in which the various forms of the Assyrian verb were analyzed and given once for all. The work has never had to be repeated, and the foundations of Assyrian grammar were solidly laid. A few years later (in 1860) a complete grammar of the language was published by Oppert. The initial stage of Assyrian decipherment was thus at an end.

We must now turn back to the second transcript of the Persian inscriptions, which, thanks to its greater simplicity, had been deciphered before the Assyro-Babylonian. The way was opened in 1844 by the Danish scholar Westergaard.[26] With the help of the proper names he fixed the values of many of the characters and made a tentative endeavour to read the texts. But the language he brought to light was of so strange a nature as to throw doubt on the correctness of his method. Turkish, Arabic, Indian and even Keltic elements seemed alike to be mingled in it. It was not, therefore, till his readings had been subjected to revision by Hincks in 1846[27] and de Saulcy in 1850[28] that any confidence was reposed in it, and the results made available for the decipherment of the Babylonian transcripts, the characters of which frequently had the same forms. It must be remembered, however, that Westergaard worked from defective materials. Rawlinson had not yet published his copy of the Behistun inscription, which he eventually placed in the hands of Edwin Norris, who, in 1853, edited the text along with a syllabary, grammar and vocabulary, as well as translations and commentary.[29] This edition was a splendid piece of work, and with it the decipherment of the second transcript of the Persian inscriptions may be said to have been accomplished. Oppert’s Peuple et Langage des Médes, which appeared in 1870, did but revise, supplement and systematize the work of Norris.

The new language which had thus been brought to light was agglutinative. Westergaard had seen in it the language of the Medes, and, like Rawlinson, had connected it with a hypothetical “Scythian” family of speech. The term “Scythian” was retained by Norris, who, however, attempted to show that it was really related to the Finnish dialects. But the excavations made at Susa by Loftus in 1851 put another face on the matter. In 1874, and again more fully in 1883,[30] I pointed out that the inscriptions found at Susa and other ancient Elamite sites were in an older form of the same language as that of the second Achæmenian transcripts, and furthermore that certain inscriptions discovered by Layard in the plain of Mal-Amîr eastward of Susa were in practically the same script and dialect. At the same time I fixed the values of the characters in the Mal-Amîr texts and gave provisional translations of them, with a vocabulary and commentary. Oppert and myself had already been working at the reading of the older Susian inscriptions, a task in which we were followed by Weissbach with a greater measure of success. But the same cause which had retarded the decipherment of the second transcript of the Persian inscriptions—a want of materials—militated against any great advance being made in the decipherment of the older Susian, and it is only since 1897, when the excavations of M. de Morgan at Susa were begun, that the student has been at last provided with the necessary means. Thanks to the brilliant penetration of the French Assyriologist, Dr. Scheil, the outlines of the language of the ancient kingdom of Elam can now be sketched with a fair amount of completeness and accuracy.[31] The name of Neo-Susian has by common consent been conferred upon the language of the second Achæmenian transcripts; perhaps Neo-Elamite would be better. At all events it represents the language of the second capital of the Persian Empire as it was spoken in the age of Darius and his successors, and is a lineal descendant of the old agglutinative language of Elam.

The three systems of cuneiform script, which a hundred years ago seemed so impenetrable in their mystery, have thus, one by one, been forced to yield their secrets. But as each in turn has been deciphered, fresh forms of cuneiform writing and new languages expressed in cuneiform characters have come to light. The first to emerge was that agglutinative language of primitive Chaldæa which so scandalized the philological world and excited such strong distrust of the Assyriologists. The question of the name by which it should be called has been set at rest by the discovery of tablets in which its native designation is made known to us. Some years ago Bezold published a bilingual text in which it is termed “the language of Sumer,”[32] and more recently Messerschmidt has edited a bilingual inscription of the Babylonian king Samsu-ditana in which the Semitic “translation” is described as “Akkadian.”[33] Oppert is thus shown to have been right in the name which he proposed to give to the language of the inventors of the cuneiform script.

The first analysis of Sumerian grammar was made by myself in 1870, when the general outlines of the language were fixed and the verbal forms read and explained.[34] Three years later Lenormant threw the materials I had collected into a connected and systematic form, one result of which was a controversy started by the Orientalist, Joseph Halévy, who maintained that Sumerian was not a language at all, but a cryptograph or secret writing. The answers made by the Assyriologists to this curious theory obliged its author constantly to shift his ground, but at the same time it also obliged them to examine their materials more carefully and to revise conclusions which had been arrived at on insufficient evidence. An important discovery was now made by Haupt, who had already given the first scientific translation of a Sumerian text;[35] he demonstrated the existence of two dialects, one of which is marked by all the phenomena of phonetic decay.[36] This was naturally supposed to indicate a difference of age in the two dialects, the one being the older and the other the later form of the language. Subsequent research, however, has gone to show that the two dialects were really used contemporaneously, the decayed state of that which was called “the woman’s language” by the Babylonians being due to the fact that it was spoken in Akkad or Northern Babylonia, where the Semitic element became predominant at a much earlier period than in Sumer or Southern Babylonia.

Up to this time the study of Sumerian had been almost entirely confined to the bilingual texts, of which a very large number existed in the library of Nineveh, and in which a Semitic translation was attached to the Sumerian original. Now, however, the French excavations at Tello in Southern Babylonia began to furnish European scholars with monuments of the pre-Semitic period, and to these the decipherers, among whom Amiaud and Thureau Dangin hold the first place, accordingly turned their attention. Texts composed in days when Sumerian princes still governed the country, and written by scribes who were unacquainted with a Semitic language, were successfully attacked with the assistance of the bilingual tablets of Nineveh. But it was soon found that between these genuine examples of Sumerian composition and the Sumerian which was written and explained by Semitic scribes there was a good deal of difference. The Semites had derived their culture from their Sumerian predecessors, and a considerable part of the religious and legal literature that had been handed on to them was in the older language. This older language long continued to be that of both religion and law, the two conservative forces in society, Sumerian becoming to the Semitic Babylonians what Latin was to mediæval Europe. The inevitable result followed: Semitic idioms and modes of thought were clothed in a Sumerian dress, and the ignorance of the scribe produced not infrequently the equivalent of the dog-Latin of a modern school-boy. The gradual changes that took place in the cuneiform system of writing, and the adaptation of it to the requirements of Semitic speech, contributed to the creation of an artificial and quite unclassical Sumerian, and the lexical tablets became filled with uses and combinations of characters which were professedly Sumerian but really Semitic in origin. All this renders the decipherment of a Sumerian text even now a difficult affair, and many years must elapse before we can say that the stage of decipherment is definitely passed and that the scholar may content himself with a purely philological treatment of the language.

But Sumerian was not the only new language outside the circle recognized by the Persian monarchs which the decipherment of the cuneiform characters has revealed to us. Even before the discovery of Sumerian, cuneiform inscriptions had been copied on the rocks and quarried stones of Armenia, which, when the characters composing them came to be read, proved to belong to a language as novel and as apparently unrelated to any other as Sumerian itself. As far back as 1826 a young scholar of the name of Schulz had been sent by the French Government to Van in Armenia, where, according to Armenian writers, Semiramis, the fabled queen of Assyria, had once left her monuments. Here Schulz actually found that the cliff on which the ancient fortress of the city stood was covered with lines of cuneiform characters, and similar inscriptions soon came to light in other parts of the country. Before Schulz, however, could return to Europe he was murdered (in 1829) by a Kurdish chief, whose guest he had been. But his papers were recovered, and the copies of the inscriptions he had made were published in 1840 in the Journal Asiatique. The first to attempt to read them was Dr. Hincks, whom no problem in decipherment ever seemed to baffle.[37] The characters, he showed, were practically identical with those found in the Assyrian texts, the values of many of which had now been ascertained; but Hincks, with his usual acuteness, went on to use the Armenian or Vannic inscriptions for settling the values of other Assyrian characters which had not as yet been determined. In 1848 he was already able to read the names of the Vannic kings and fix their succession, to make out the sense of several passages in the texts, and to indicate the nominative and accusative suffixes of the noun.