The discovery and decipherment of the trilingual cuneiform inscriptions

by Arthur John Booth

His inquiries did not pretend to go beyond the first or simplest species of writing, but he took occasion to point out the signs in the second and third columns that correspond to the word of seven letters. Their identification, he argued, is indisputable, for when the word occurs twice in succession in the first column the corresponding signs are similarly repeated in the second and third; and their restricted form clearly indicates that they must be syllabic or ideographic.[275]

The Persepolitan inscriptions were now tolerably well known to persons interested in such matters, by the plates of Le Bruyn and more especially by those of Niebuhr. But the inscriptions from Babylon had only just begun to attract notice. So far back indeed as the beginning of the seventeenth century Della Valle, as we have seen, had sent a few inscribed bricks to Rome, but they had received little attention.[276] Later travellers do not appear to have mentioned the existence of these curious relics till the end of the eighteenth century, when Père Emanuel, a Carmelite, who resided at Bagdad, gave a description of them in a manuscript referred to by D’Anville in the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions.[277] Soon afterwards the Abbé Beauchamp, in his account of Hillah, says he found ‘large and thick bricks imprinted with unknown characters, specimens of which I have presented to the Abbé Barthélemy.’[278] His account excited some interest, and it was translated into English in 1792, and also into German by Witte of Rostock. Several of the bricks were deposited in the National Library at Paris, and plaster casts of them were sent to Herder and Münter. Shortly afterwards the same collection was enriched by the Egyptian vase already mentioned, which Count Caylus had discovered, and which he described in his ‘Recueil d’Antiquités.’[279] About the same time also various cylinders and bricks found their way to different European museums and private collections. Drawings of a few of these were also to be found in Caylus; and in 1800 Münter published two others from Babylonian bricks that had not seen the light before.[280]

Meanwhile the directors of the East India Company gave instructions to the Resident at Bussorah to secure ten or a dozen specimens for their museum (1797). They said they had heard that near Hillah ‘there exist the remains of a very large and magnificent city, supposed to be Babylon, and that the bricks contain an indented scroll or label in letters totally different from any now made use of in the East.’[281] The bricks reached London in 1801, and the task of copying and describing them was entrusted to Joseph Hager. Hager was a curious specimen of the wandering scholar, and he enjoyed a reputation that appears to have been quite out of proportion to his acquirements. He was of Austrian descent, but he was born at Milan in 1757, and died at Pavia in 1819. He early took to the study of Oriental languages, and especially Chinese. He roamed about Europe, visiting all the libraries from Constantinople to Madrid, and from Leyden and Oxford to the south of Italy. He wrote both in Italian and German, and apparently also in English and French. One of his first works was in German on a Literary Imposture (1799), and he became known in England as a contributor to Ouseley’s Oriental Collections, and by a book on the ‘Elementary Characters of the Chinese’ (1801). It was in this year that his Memoir on the Babylonian Inscriptions was written, and shortly afterwards he settled in Paris, and was commissioned by Napoleon to compile a Dictionary of Chinese in Latin and French (1802). For this he was to receive 6,000 francs a year; but after some time a suspicion arose as to his qualifications and industry. The result of an inquiry was that he was removed from his post, and he left France in 1806. We afterwards find him a teacher of German at Oxford, and in 1809 he retired to Pavia to fill the chair of Oriental Languages. He wrote several books on Chinese, including a Grammar, a Prospectus of a Dictionary, a ‘Panthéon Chinois,’ and the like; but they were severely handled by the most competent critics. He, however, accomplished his work on the Inscriptions with a fair degree of merit. He began by publishing one of them in the ‘Monthly Magazine’ (August 1801) without note or commentary. It fell into the hands of a M. Lichtenstein, and gave rise to a very foolish essay, to which reference will shortly be made. Next year Hager published the others, accompanied by a learned Dissertation on the subject.[282] He pointed out, as indeed had been already done by Münter, that the characters on the bricks are ‘formed of nearly the same elements and nail-headed strokes’ as at Persepolis; but he showed for the first time that the system of writing must have originated among the Chaldæans, who ‘were a celebrated people when the name of the Persians was scarcely known.’[283] He considered that many ancient alphabets were derived from the cuneiform, even including Devanagari, the oldest Sanscrit character, which was popularly ascribed to Divine revelation.[284] He finds many of the Babylonian characters the prototypes of Samaritan or Cuthean, and the similar Phoenician letters. Finally he shows with striking effect the wedge-like and angular origin of our own alphabetical system.[285] He called attention to the ancient custom of cutting inscriptions upon pillars and columns, and he considers it natural on that account to find that ‘the writing of the ancients was perpendicular rather than horizontal, columns and pillars being much fitter for the former manner of writing than for the latter.’[286] Such at least was the direction of the Egyptian, Ethiopian and Chinese. On account of the absence of stone in Babylon, it was necessary to substitute bricks, and we learn from Clement of Alexandria that Democritus took his treatise on Morals from an inscription written on a brick column.[287] The columnar origin of writing is perhaps the reason that the inscription on the Babylonian bricks is, as Hager asserts, ‘perpendicular rather than horizontal,’ an opinion he thinks he can prove by the gems he has studied. Various conjectures as to the subject of the legend on the bricks had been put forward. Münter and Grotefend thought it was a talisman;[288] others that it recorded some historical event or an astronomical observation; but Hager suggested that the subject was probably the same as that on the Roman bricks: that is to say, that it recorded the name and the place of the maker—a suggestion that turned out to be very nearly correct. He had no doubt that the writing was the same as that discussed by Democritus in his lost treatise, and which is referred to by many of the classical writers.[289] He considers that it is ideographic, ‘for we find single groups composed of abundance of nails, like the various strokes in the Chinese characters, all different from each other and different from the Persepolitan.’ Nor does he consider that they were developed from hieroglyphics, but deliberately ‘formed and combined by an arbitrary institution, and designed to express, not letters nor syllables, but either whole sentences or whole words.’[290] Finally he suggests that the Persepolitan mode of writing was directly derived from the Babylonian by simply laying the perpendicular inscription upon its side; by that means the heads of the wedges that were originally at the top are now all turned to the left, and the inscription that was originally read from top to bottom becomes by its changed position always read from left to right. ‘If we turn our perpendicular characters in such a manner as to make them lie in a horizontal direction, the effect will be exactly what takes place in the Persian writing.’[291] This is a remarkable anticipation of a much later discovery.

Hager’s book was still going through the press when another important inscription was added to the Paris Library (1802). It is on a stone found by M. Michaux at Tak Kasra below Bagdad. The Vase of Caylus and the Caillou Michaux continued for a time to be the two most celebrated samples of the Persepolitan and Babylonian styles in Europe. Later on, the Persepolitan collection was enriched by the discovery of the ‘Suez Stone,’ published in the ‘Travels of Denon,’ in 1807. But all these were entirely eclipsed by the long inscription found at Babylon and sent by Sir Harford Jones to the India House. It was long known simply as the India House Inscription, till later knowledge proved it to be the Standard Inscription of Nebuchadnezzar. Shortly afterwards (1808) the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, received an inscription from Sir John Malcolm of which we hear little till a much later period.

We have said that an inscription published by Hager without commentary in 1801 fell into the hands of Lichtenstein, who made it the subject of a Memoir published in the ‘Brunswick Magazine.’[292] This eccentric writer put forward the theory that the bricks concerning which so much noise was being made were in fact not older than the seventh or eighth century A.D., and that the characters bore a ‘striking resemblance’ to Cufic.[293] Nothing more was necessary than to remove the arbitrary additions of unnecessary wedges, in order to detect the Cufic symbols they concealed. Unlike most other scholars, he chiefly studied the Babylonian bricks and the most complicated of the Persepolitan systems; and he regarded an entire group of characters as only one letter. Having reduced it to the necessary simplicity by simply dropping out all the inconvenient wedges till he could discover something that suggested the appearance of a Cufic letter, he was enabled to draw up an alphabet by which he read all the cuneiform inscriptions with the greatest ease.[294] He then discovered that the language was an ancient form of Arabic and should be read from right to left. He was quite surprised that Hager should have been so deluded by wild dreams of Belus and Semiramis that he failed to see that his bricks ‘contained only a few miserable sentences in Arabic.’ What the Arabic words really were he did not consider it necessary to disclose to the public, but he communicated a few of them to De Sacy, who pronounced that they were not Arabic at all. Lichtenstein was good enough to translate Hager’s brick, and found that it was a prayer; from thence he passed on to Niebuhr’s inscriptions, and selected the difficult specimens (C, E, and L, Pl. 24). From C he obtained the most astonishing result. The words ran as follows: ‘The King, the Sovereign, Prince of all Princes, the Lord Saleh, Jinghis, son of Armerib, governor-general for the Emperor of China, Orkhan Saheb.’[295] Encouraged by this striking success, he next took in hand the long inscription on the Caillou Michaux. It was written, he says, in Armenian, and contains an exhortation addressed by a priest of the ‘Temple of the God of the Dead’ to certain women mourning their departed friends.[296] De Sacy, from whom our information is taken, gives more than a page of this pious effusion, which he says is not more than a sixth part of the translation. It is needless to say that the whole is a pure invention. Indeed it does not clearly appear whether the Memoir was intended by Lichtenstein as a jeu d’esprit, or whether it was simply an impudent imposture. It is certainly curious that he succeeded in getting himself treated seriously. Besides the solemn review and confutation by De Sacy from which we quote, we find so late as 1820 that Grotefend still thought it necessary to combat his theories, and De Sacy even at that period classified together ‘the conjectures of Lichtenstein and the labours of Grotefend’ as equally open to suspicion.[297]

We now come to the scholar to whose ingenuity we owe the first real success that was achieved in deciphering the cuneiform letters.

George Frederick Grotefend was born at Münden, Hanover, in 1775. He was sent to the University of Göttingen in 1795, where two years later he obtained a tutorship. He applied himself to the study of philology under Heyne, and in 1803 he became Pro-Rector. Soon afterwards he was transferred to the Gymnasium of Frankfort on the Maine; and in 1821 he became Rector of the Lyceum at Hanover, where he died in 1853. He was always an industrious student, but he failed in after life to follow up his first great success; and if it had not been for it, his name would probably never have been known. In 1817 he published a Latin Grammar, which was translated into English under the supervision of Dr. Arnold; and subsequently he did some useful service by his inquiries into the early Italian languages. In 1835 he published a book on the Rudiments of the Umbrian, and, in 1837, another on the Oscan, and these were followed in 1840 by a Geography and History of Ancient Italy. The paper on the Cuneiform Inscriptions that first brought him into notice was read before the Göttingen Academy on September 4, 1802; and, curiously enough, at the same sitting Heyne first called attention to the Greek inscription on the Rosetta Stone, from which the reading of Egyptian hieroglyphics takes its departure.[298]

Grotefend himself informs us that he had no special knowledge of Oriental languages,[299] and many of his critics, who were probably quite as ignorant as himself, took care that the fact should not be forgotten. Although he had no special qualification in this respect for the task he undertook, yet he early displayed a remarkable aptitude for the solution of riddles: a peculiar talent which he shared in common with Dr. Hincks, who also acquired great distinction as a cuneiform scholar. In consequence of this peculiarity a friend induced him to turn his attention to Niebuhr’s enigmatical inscriptions, which were then exciting very general curiosity;[300] and he now disclosed the result to the Academy. He communicated the substance of it to the ‘Göttingen Literary Gazette’ (Sept. 18, 1802); and in the following year Silvestre de Sacy, the well-known Arabic scholar, gave a full account of it in the ‘Magasin Encyclopédique’ of Millin.[301] It was subsequently reported in the well-known Vienna periodical, the ‘Fundgruben des Orients’;[302] and in 1815 Grotefend had the opportunity of explaining the matter in his own words in an appendix to Heeren’s ‘Historical Researches.’[303]

The careful investigations of Münter were found of great service by his more successful follower. Münter had already pointed out that the inscriptions belonged without doubt to the period of the Achaemenian dynasty; that the words were separated from each other by a diagonal wedge, and that the writing ran from left to right. He had directed special attention to the word of seven letters, and to the fact that it preceded in many cases another identical to it but terminating with some unknown grammatical inflexion. He had suggested that the former probably signified some such title as ‘king of kings’ and that the royal name must be looked for in the word that precedes it, an opinion he only abandoned in view of the difficulties already explained.