Perhaps of greater interest is the glimpse these excavations have afforded of a still more distant past. M. de Morgan found that the Citadel Hill has reached its present altitude of one hundred and twenty feet above the plain entirely by the accumulation of deposit left by successive generations of settlers.
He sank a series of mines of considerable length into the side of the hill, and at various depths, down to 24·90 metres below the surface. The Achaemenian remains reach no farther down than 4·50 metres, and this stratum represents a period extending over 2,500 years. If we assume a similar rate of deposit for the remainder we arrive at more than B.C. 12,000 for the date of the lowest stratum examined. It is very remarkable that it was precisely at this depth, representing in any case an extremely remote period, that he found the most finished pottery, adorned with the most perfect artistic designs; and these, he has no doubt, could not have been produced except in a high state of civilisation.[234] There is some resemblance between these objects and others recently found in Egypt and ascribed to B.C. 6000.[235] This early civilisation seems to have been swept away by the invasion of a people in a much less advanced condition, who occupied the country for a long period of time;[236] it is not till these had disappeared and we ascend to a level of 12·95 metres below the surface that we come to the beginning of the Elamite deposit. It has a thickness of from eight to nine metres, which, according to our estimate, would require about five thousand years to form. It was in this stratum, between 4·50 and 12·95 metres below the surface that he made his principal discoveries. Here he came upon the walls of Elamite palaces and temples, which have enabled him to show that the method of decoration by means of enamelled brick of exquisite colour and design was extensively practised. The quantity of carbonised material leads to the conclusion that wood was largely employed in the construction of these edifices; and the remains of columns prove that the Persians derived their idea of columnar architecture direct from their predecessors. The inscriptions so recently found are still in the hands of Father Scheil, who is now engaged in the work of decipherment. They show, he says, the influence of Semitic speech in Elam at an early period, and the advocates of the antiquity of Semitic civilisation begin to hope they may still have occasion to rejoice.
Very few other inscriptions remain for us to notice. Before the end of the eighteenth century a vase of Xerxes was discovered in Egypt containing a trilingual inscription translated into Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was described by Caylus (after whom it was named), and was long the object of much learned curiosity (Inscr. Qᵃ). Another inscription was found near Suez, in A.D. 1800, and published in the ‘Travels of Denon,’ in 1807. It contains a legend of Darius, and appears to have belonged to a larger monument, afterwards partly recovered, but which has since been entirely destroyed. It was engraved upon a stele and was also quadrilingual: having three cuneiform inscriptions on one side and the Egyptian hieroglyphics on the other. On the Persian side were two human figures with their hands resting upon three cartouches. To the right was the Persian, to the left the Susian, and below the Babylonian text, with the legend ‘Darius the great king, king of kings, king of lands, the king of the wide earth, son of Hystaspes the Achaemenian.’[237] Below, occupying the whole face of the stele, was the longer inscription in twelve lines with the Persian on the top and the others under. Nearly the whole of the Susian was lost, and only a few letters of the Babylonian remained.[238] It begins with the long introductory form, and Darius goes on to say that he has conquered Egypt; and commanded a canal to be dug from the Nile to the ‘sea which is in communication with Persia.’[239] It seems to say that the king ordered the half of the canal toward the sea to be destroyed.[240] It is supposed that this was done in accordance with the advice of the engineers who thought the Red Sea was above the level of the Mediterranean (Inscr. Sᶻ). Two other inscriptions have also been found in Egypt: one on a crystal cylinder now in the British Museum and first described by Grotefend in his ‘Neue Beiträge’ of 1840. It represents Darius in the act of killing a lion. The king is standing upright in a chariot with the tiara upon his head, and carrying a bent bow in his hand. Above him is the winged figure, and in the background a trilingual inscription with the legend ‘I [am] Darius the king.’ The other occurs upon a vase of grey marble, and like the one of Caylus, it is quadrilingual. It was first made known by Longpérier in the ‘Revue Archéologique’ (1844), through an imperfect copy taken by the Abbé Giacchetti, but a complete transcript was afterwards sent by Sir Gardner Wilkinson to Rawlinson. It reads simply: ‘Artaxerxes the great king.’ It is known as the Venice vase, and is preserved in the Museum of St. Mark’s (Inscr. Qᵇ). A few other vases were afterwards found at Susa and at Halicarnassus, but they all repeat the same legend as that found upon the Caylus vase. A short inscription of Darius, containing the long introductory form already described, is also mentioned by Gobineau as having been found near Kermanshah.[241] Two unilingual inscriptions, one of Arsaces and the other of Pharnuches, were also afterwards found on seal cylinders which, with the trilingual of Darius in the British Museum (Nᵃ) raise the number to three in all.[242]
CHAPTER III
DECIPHERMENT OF THE FIRST OR PERSIAN COLUMN—TYCHSEN TO LASSEN, A.D. 1798-1836.
We have already called attention to the important services rendered by Niebuhr to the study of the cuneiform inscriptions. The copies he made at Persepolis were by far the most accurate that had hitherto appeared, and the scholars who first applied themselves to the difficult task of decipherment worked chiefly upon them. He pointed out that the inscriptions generally occur in groups of three columns, and that in each the cuneiform signs are different. He pointed out also that the three different systems always recur in the same definite order: the signs characteristic of the first, second and third columns in one inscription always correspond to those of the first, second and third columns in the others. He observed also that the signs characteristic of the first column are evidently much simpler than those in the other two. After a careful comparison of the various places where they are found, he remarked that they were limited to forty-two in number; and these he collected and published together in his Plate 23, where they occupy a position that might at first sight lead the reader to suppose that they formed a part of the ornamentation of the sculptured staircase.[243] This is the first cuneiform alphabet ever published, and it was not the least important service rendered by Niebuhr to the study. Its formation was not so simple as might be supposed, and it would have been difficult to accomplish it except by a minute study of the monuments themselves. The inscriptions had hitherto been so imperfectly copied that no mere collation of them, however carefully made, could have succeeded in eliminating the whole of the faulty signs arising from the errors of the transcriber. The accidental addition or omission of a wedge, or an alteration in its direction, had the effect of magnifying the apparent number of the letters. It is a singular proof of the accuracy of Niebuhr’s judgment that he should have been so successful in this first attempt to distinguish between the genuine and the defective letters. In his list of forty-two signs, he has only introduced nine that are not true letters, including the sign that was afterwards found to be the mark of separation between the words.[244] On the other hand, amid all the conflicting signs found in the copyists, he passed over only two that are genuine: one (𐎦) is included by Grotefend in his list of defective signs; the other (𐎵) was first added to the alphabet by Rawlinson.[245] It proved of great advantage to concentrate the attention of scholars upon signs that were for the most part genuine, and to save them the dissipation of energy that would have resulted if they had been left to wander unguided among the inscriptions themselves. Niebuhr rendered a farther service by separating each group of wedges that formed a letter by a colon, an idea he copied from the Zend; and the eye thus soon becomes accustomed to recognise the complicated combinations that belong to each other. While he contributed so much to the correct apprehension of the alphabet, it is singular that he never remarked that the words themselves are regularly separated from each other by a diagonal wedge.
This fundamental fact also escaped the notice of Tychsen, who was the first to make a serious attempt at decipherment. Tychsen’s family was of Norwegian descent, but he was born in the small town of Tondern, in Schleswig Holstein, in 1734. Although of humble origin, he was sent to the University of Halle, where he early acquired a taste for Oriental languages. He was appointed a lecturer in the University of Bützow (1760) and subsequently transferred to the more important post of librarian and curator of the Museum at Rostock (1789). He attained a great reputation by his knowledge of Hebrew and Rabbinical archæology; and he was the first to lay the foundation of modern Biblical criticism. His Oriental studies embraced Arabic and Syriac; and he also wrote on the Cufic inscriptions preserved in Venice and London. His works include six volumes of archæological papers, which he calls ‘Pastimes of Bützow,’ ‘A History of the Rostock Library’ (1790), and two treatises on Arabic and Syriac (1791 and 1793). He is also mentioned as having written a treatise on Zoroaster. His opinions on cuneiform are contained in a curious tract entitled ‘De Cuneatis Inscriptionibus Persepolitanis Lucubratio’ (1798). He agreed with Niebuhr that the inscriptions are to be read from left to right, and that the three columns contain three different kinds of writing, which he thought concealed three different languages, probably the Parthian, Median and Bactrian.[246] He recognised that the characters in the first column are by far the simplest, and it is on them that he fastened his attention. By some means which he has failed adequately to explain,[247] he professes to be able to transliterate the cuneiform signs, and he has gratified the curiosity of the reader by presenting him with a table showing the values he has found for a great variety of signs, among which he admitted several that are defective. He saw that more than one sign may be used for the same sound; and he assigned four each to the letters l, r, s and x. Conversely, he thought that the same sign might express the most diverse sounds. E, n, t, are given as the different values of a single sign, No. 5 (𐎿). B, k, r, and b, x, y, are assigned respectively to two others, Nos. 27 (𐎹) and 31 (𐎴); while two different values for the same sign are quite common. Like many of his successors, he recognised a profusion of vowels, and he has allotted nine different signs to his three forms a, ä, ă. It is scarcely surprising that out of the nine, one turned out to be correct, No. 21 (𐎠); and of the four signs he allotted to s, one was correct, No. 38 (𐏁). He was also successful in detecting the signs for d and u: but as his system was based upon no intelligible principle, these results were purely accidental, and could not afford a guide to future inquirers.[248] Having succeeded to his satisfaction in finding known equivalents for the unknown signs, and being thereby enabled to transliterate the cuneiform text, the next step was to endeavour to make some sense of it. This he sought to do by comparing the singular words that resulted from his system with those of languages he thought must be the most nearly allied, such as Zend, Pehlevi, Chaldee, Arabic, Syriac and Armenian.[249] He failed to recognise fully the intention of the diagonal wedge, so that upon some occasions he rendered it by the conjunction ‘and.’ He had, however, the merit of pointing out that a particular group of seven cuneiform letters were continually recurring, often followed by the same group with three or four other letters added to the termination. These are enclosed by diagonal wedges, and we now know they are single words, the simplest form being the nominative singular of ‘King,’ and the two longer the same word with the addition of the genitive singular and the genitive plural terminations. But Tychsen had no suspicion, at this time at least, that the letters occurring between the diagonals must be treated as one word,[250] nor that the terminal variation was a grammatical inflexion. Accordingly he makes the simple form of seven letters represent two words, which he transliterates and translates Osch Aksak, ‘is Aksak’; and the two longer groups he treats as three words—Osch Aksak yka, ‘is Aksak divus,’ for the first; and Osch Aksak acha, ‘is Aksak perfectus,’ for the second.[251] The personage named Aksak, whom he had thus evolved, he took to be Arsaces, the founder of the Parthian dynasty; and he accordingly found himself compelled to attribute the inscriptions and monuments to that comparatively late date.[252] Tychsen’s efforts at translation were exhausted by his rendering of the B and G Inscriptions of Niebuhr both of which he found to belong to Aksak; but he has transliterated the Inscriptions A, H, I, and L, for the benefit of other scholars who may wish to read some meaning into them. The curious feature of his system is that some of his letters actually turned out to be correct, such as his a, u, s, or sch. But as these results are purely accidental he cannot be allowed to have made any real contribution to cuneiform decipherment.
Immediately after the appearance of his tract, it was assailed by Witte, a professor of his own university, who seized that occasion to revive the old view of Dr. Hyde that the cuneiform characters were simply designed as a fantastic ornamentation and had no other signification.[253] On the appearance of Grotefend’s system, Tychsen had the singular magnanimity to abandon his own and he became one of the principal exponents of the theories of the younger scholar.
In the same year (1798) that Tychsen published his ‘Lucubratio,’ a paper on the same subject was read before the Royal Academy of Copenhagen, by Dr. Münter. Münter’s father, who was a clergyman and a poet, was born at Lübeck and died at Copenhagen, where he was pastor of the German church. His son Frederick was born at Gotha, in 1761, but his youth was passed at Copenhagen, and many of his works were written in Danish and subsequently translated into German. Like his father, he entered the Church, and became a Professor of Theology at Copenhagen, and eventually rose to be the Bishop of Seeland (1808). He was a very prolific writer, especially upon theological subjects. His works include a ‘History of Dogma’ (1801), a ‘History of the Danish Reformation’ (1802), and the last, which is considered to be the most important, was on the ‘Symbols and Works of Art of the Early Christians,’ published in Altona, 1824. He also acquired considerable reputation as a philologist and Orientalist. His paper on the Cuneiform Inscriptions was published in Danish in 1800, and translated into German in 1802. It was not till then that it became accessible to the general reading public, and very soon afterwards M. de Sacy noticed it in the ‘Magasin Encyclopédique.’[254] Münter had long been in correspondence with Tychsen on the subject of their common studies; but the two scholars arrived at widely different results. While the latter invented a system of interpretation that enabled him to transliterate the inscriptions with comparative facility, the former could not admit that the solution of the difficulty rested upon any satisfactory basis. His own contribution, if much more modest, is not on that account less valuable.
Münter, in the first place, rendered important service to his successor, Grotefend, by sweeping away the foolish conjecture that the inscriptions belonged to the Parthian age, and with it the misleading inference that the name of Arsaces was to be sought for among them. In a few masterly pages, remarkable alike for wide knowledge and accurate judgment, he showed that Persepolis could only be referred to the Achaemenian kings, an opinion that had already gained the support of Heeren, in opposition to the authority of Herder, who ascribed it to the mythological age of Jamshid.[255] It might be thought that the claims of Darius or Jamshid to be the founder of Persepolis would not give rise to heated discussion; yet in the beginning of last century the tranquillity of Göttingen was convulsed by the fierce controversy that raged between the two learned advocates of the rival theories.[256]