The archæology of the cuneiform inscriptions

by A. H. Sayce

Here Vannic decipherment rested for many years. There was no difficulty in reading the inscriptions phonetically, for they were written in a very simplified form of the Assyrian syllabary; but the language which was thus revealed stood isolated and alone, without linguistic kindred either ancient or modern. The various attempts made to decipher it were all failures.

So things remained until 1882–3, when I published my Memoir on “The Decipherment of the Vannic Inscriptions” in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Here for the first time translations were given of the inscriptions, together with a commentary, grammar and vocabulary. At the same time I settled the chronological place of the Vannic kings, which had hitherto been uncertain, as well as the geography of the country over which they ruled, and analyzed the ancient religion of the people as made known to us by the decipherment of the texts. In revising and supplementing Schulz’s copies of the inscriptions I had obtained the help of squeezes taken by Layard and Rassam. The task of decipherment was, after all, not so hard a matter as the absence of a bilingual text might make it appear. The want of a bilingual was compensated by the numerous ideographs and “determinatives” scattered through the inscriptions, which indicated their general meaning, pointed out to the decipherer the names of countries, cities, individuals and the like, and gave him the signification of the phonetically-written words which in parallel passages often replaced them. Moreover, the French Assyriologist, Stanislas Guyard, and myself had independently made the discovery that a clause which frequently comes at the end of a Vannic inscription corresponds with the imprecatory formula of the Assyrians, while the decipherment of the inscriptions led to the further discovery that not only had the characters employed in them been borrowed from the Assyrians in the time of the Assyrian conqueror, Assur-natsir-pal, but that many of the phrases used in Assur-natsir-pal’s texts had been borrowed at the same time.

Other scholars soon appeared to pursue and extend my work, more especially Drs. Belck and Lehmann, whose expedition to Armenia in 1898 has placed at our disposal a large store of fresh material. Amongst this fresh material are two long bilingual inscriptions, in Vannic and Assyrian, one of which had been discovered by de Morgan in 1890. These have verified my system of decipherment, have increased our knowledge of the Vannic vocabulary, have corrected a few errors, and, I am bound to add, have in one or two cases justified renderings of mine to which exception had been taken. A historical Vannic text can now be read with almost as much certainty as an Assyrian one.

With the discovery of the language spoken in Armenia before the arrival of the modern Armenians the list of lost languages and dialects brought to light by the decipherment of the cuneiform script is by no means exhausted. Among the tablets found in 1887 at Tel el-Amarna in Upper Egypt was a long letter from the king of Mitanni or Northern Mesopotamia in the native language of his country, which has been partially deciphered by Messerschmidt, Jensen and myself.[38] The language turns out to be distantly related to the Vannic, but is of a much more complicated description. Two of the other letters in the same collection were in yet another previously unknown language, which the contents of one of them showed to be that of a kingdom in Asia Minor called Arzawa. Since then tablets have been found at Boghaz Keui in Cappadocia, on the site of the ancient capital of the Hittites, which are in the same dialect and form of cuneiform writing, and prove that in them we have discovered at last actual relics of the Hittite tongue. Thanks to the light thrown upon them by a tablet from the same locality, which I obtained last year, it is now possible to raise the veil which has hitherto concealed the Hittite language, and in a Paper which will shortly be printed I have succeeded in partially translating the texts and sketching the outlines of their grammar. But any detailed account of these discoveries must be reserved for a future chapter; at present I can do no more than refer briefly to these latest problems in cuneiform decipherment.

That other problems still await us cannot be doubted. The number of different languages which the decipherment of the cuneiform script has thus far revealed to us is an assurance that, as excavation and research proceed, fresh languages will come to light which have employed the cuneiform syllabary as a means of expression. Indeed, we already know that it was used by the Kossæans, wild mountaineers who skirted the eastern frontiers of Babylonia, and a list of whose words has been preserved in a cuneiform tablet,[39] and also that there was a time, before the introduction of the Phœnician alphabet, when “the language of Canaan”—better known as Hebrew—was written in cuneiform characters. Canaanite glosses are found in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, and two Sidonian seals exist in which the cuneiform syllabary is employed to represent the sounds of Canaanitish speech.[40]

And the key to all this varied literature, this medley of languages, the very names of which had perished, was a simple guess! But it was a scientific guess, made in accordance with scientific method, and based upon sound scientific reasoning. It is true that it needed the slow and patient work of generations of scholars before the guess could ripen into maturity; the discovery of the value of a single letter in the Old Persian alphabet was sometimes the labour of a lifetime; but, like the seed of the mustard tree, the guess contained within itself all the promise of its future growth. On the day when Grotefend identified the names of Darius and Xerxes, the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions, and therewith of the history, the theology and the civilization of the ancient Oriental world, was potentially accomplished.

CHAPTER II
THE ARCHÆOLOGICAL MATERIALS; THE EXCAVATIONS AT SUSA AND THE ORIGIN OF BRONZE

The modern science of archæology has been derisively called “the study of pots.” As a matter of fact, the study of ancient pottery occupies a prominent place in it, and we cannot turn over the pages of a standard archæological work without constantly coming across photographs and illustrations of the ceramic art or reading descriptions of vases and bowls, of coloured ware and fragmentary sherds. Questions of date and origin are made to turn on the presence or absence of some particular form of pottery on a given site, and fierce controversies have arisen over a single fragment of a vessel of clay. A knowledge of ancient pottery is a primary requisite in the scientific excavator and archæologist of to-day.

The reason of this is obvious. Archæology is an inductive science; its conclusions, therefore, are drawn from the comparison and co-ordination of objects which can be seen and handled, as well as tested by all competent observers. It is built upon what our German friends would call objective facts, and the method it employs is that carefully-disciplined and experimentally-guarded application of the ordinary logic of life which can alone give us scientific results. The method is one which the purely literary mind seems often curiously incapable of comprehending; the literary student is accustomed to deal so exclusively with matters of merely individual taste and theory that he is as little able to understand what is meant by scientific evidence and probability as the scholar who is not a mathematician is able to follow the reasoning of Lord Kelvin. This is a fact which has to be borne in mind more especially in archæological science, for the questions with which archæology is concerned so frequently invade the domain of literature or appear so closely connected with questions that are more or less literary, that the purely literary scholar is apt to think himself just as well qualified to discuss them as “the man in the street” is apt to think himself qualified to discuss the etymology of a word. To all such the archæologist would say, “Go and study your pots.”

For pottery is practically indestructible. Like the fossils on which the geologist has built up the past history of life upon the earth, it is an enduring evidence, when rightly interpreted, of the past history of man. Like the fossils, moreover, it exhibits a multitudinous variety of types and forms. But in all these types and forms there is an underlying unity. The primitive needs of man are everywhere the same, and the powers of mind called in to supply them are the same also. The dish and bowl, the vase and its handles, meet us again and again wherever we go; and the same materials for making them meet us also. The hands of man, guided by the brain of man, found clay wherewith to manufacture the vessels that he needed, and to harden it afterwards in the sun or fire. Where or how the first pottery was made we do not know, we probably shall never know. When palæolithic man first makes his appearance in Europe he seems not yet to have been acquainted with it; but it is difficult to prove a negative in archæology as in other sciences, and the absence of palæolithic pottery may be due only to the imperfection of the record. At any rate, as we descend the ladder of chronology the existence of man is marked more and more by the fragments of pottery he has left behind him; at Rome a whole mountain of it grew up in the space of a few centuries, and the huge mounds that encircled Cairo a hundred years ago were mainly formed of mediæval sherds. When excavating on an Egyptian site I have sometimes been tempted to think that the people who once lived there must have spent their whole time in breaking their household ware.