The discovery and decipherment of the trilingual cuneiform inscriptions

by Arthur John Booth

Grotefend continued to write upon these subjects down to his death in 1853. He endeavoured to keep abreast of the new discoveries in Assyria. He was familiar with the writings of Botta and Layard. He studied the disquisitions of Westergaard, Hincks, and Rawlinson. He contributed articles on the builder of the Khorsabad Palace; on the age of the Nimrud Obelisk; on the foundation and destruction of the buildings of Nimrud; and on inscriptions found at Babylon and Nimrud. When M. Mohl, the well-known secretary to the French Asiatic Society, visited him shortly before his death, he found his table littered with inscriptions, chiefly those received from Bellino in the early years of the century.[346] He professed to have given up his Persepolitan studies in favour of the new Assyrian inscriptions; and he saw no reason why he should not succeed in unravelling their mystery. It is somewhat pathetic to observe the old man of seventy-eight, still animated by the recollection of a success he had achieved fifty years before, but had never been able to repeat, vainly hoping that at the last moment he might be rewarded by another fortunate guess that would redeem the long failure of so many years. The new discoveries were coming upon him with extraordinary rapidity and magnitude, and he could not but feel crushed and helpless beneath such an accumulation of fresh materials. The solution of the difficulties they involved had passed into younger and abler hands than his, and he had to comfort himself as best he might with the recognition so freely accorded to him, that he had laid the foundation upon which others were now building; and with the assurance that the recollection of his services would not wholly pass away from the remembrance of men.[347]

Grotefend’s method of decipherment, when it first appeared, met with a varying degree of success in different quarters. In Germany, as we have seen, it was at once adopted by Tychsen, who became one of its chief exponents; and it also secured the favour of Heeren, who allowed it to share in the wide popularity accorded to his own writings. But even in Germany it was some time before it gained general recognition. The theory of Lichtenstein, absurd as it may now appear, continued to command attention, and even in 1820 Grotefend still thought it necessary to defend his own opinions against those of his rival.[348] His views, however, gradually gained the ascendant, and in 1824 he felt he could now allow the controversy to drop; and in the new edition of Heeren he left out a large portion of the criticism he published in 1815. Since then his merits have been fully acknowledged by his own countrymen, who are rarely disposed to underrate any of the achievements of their kindred. In England his system never had to contend with the rivalry of Lichtenstein. It was received at once with general approval by all who were best qualified to form a judgment. The learned Ouseley, the more brilliant Morier, Sir R. K. Porter and Mr. Rich never doubted for a moment that Grotefend had deciphered the names of Hystaspes, Darius and Xerxes. Very different was its reception in France. De Sacy, who was really the first to introduce it to the notice of Europe, could never feel any real conviction that it rested upon solid grounds. He was quite uninfluenced by the jealousies that blind the judgment of smaller men, and he would gladly have given it his approval if he could have brought himself to accept the evidence. But this he was entirely unable to do; and it was certainly not because he failed to apprehend the process by which it was reached. The explanation he has given of it greatly excels in lucidity and in logical precision the account of Grotefend himself—so much so, indeed, that we are inclined to think that Grotefend never thoroughly understood his own system till it was explained to him by De Sacy. The French scholar was fully acquainted with the subject, for he had himself made frequent attempts at decipherment, always, he frankly acknowledges, with a ‘total absence of success.’ The only point he considers tolerably certain is that the word with seven signs is the title of King.[349] He doubts altogether that the names of the kings had been correctly ascertained, and he points out the difficulty of accepting an alphabet that contains three or four signs for e, three for o, and so on. The opinion he formed in 1803 he repeats in 1820. In his letter to M. Dorow, he confesses that he is still unable to find the names of the Persian kings or of the god Ormuzd in the cuneiform inscriptions; and he declares he does not believe that anything hitherto published on the subject is worthy of confidence.[350]

While the cuneiform inscriptions were thus engaging the attention of European scholars, English travellers had begun the investigation of the sites of Babylon and Nineveh that were so soon to yield such surprising results. In 1808, Kinneir visited Hillah, accompanied by Captain Frederick, of the Royal Navy; and two years later they extended their explorations to the mounds near Mosul. Kinneir’s ‘Geographical Memoir,’ published in 1813, contains an excellent account of both these historic ruins. Soon after his visit, Mr. Rich went to Hillah and began his investigations (1811). He found the surface of the ground covered with ‘broken pans and bricks, some of which have writing on them.’[351] He was able to make a small collection of antiquities, including a curious basaltic stone covered with cuneiform characters, and these specimens eventually found their way to the British Museum.[352] The Memoir he published on the subject made its first appearance in the ‘Fundgruben des Orients,’ but was, republished in England by Sir James Mackintosh. A second Memoir, written in 1817 and printed soon afterwards, was enriched by three plates containing several cuneiform inscriptions that now appeared for the first time.[353] Rich considered there were three different kinds of writing to be found at Babylon, which he divided ‘according to the order of their complication.’[354] The first, he observed, corresponds to the third Persepolitan; and in Plate 8 he gives three specimens of it, all found upon stones resembling the ‘Caillou Michaux’ described by Millin. The second occurs rarely, and Mr. Rich says he was the first to publish an example, although Grotefend had already seen a copy of a similar kind. It is on a piece of baked clay in shape like a barrel, about 4¾ in. long and 1½ in. in diameter (Plate 9, No. 4). The third species is that generally found on bricks and cylinders, of which he gives four examples.[355] While he wrote, he learned that the three different kinds of Babylonian writing had been submitted to Grotefend, and that ‘learned and ingenious person’ had come to the conclusion that they ‘are only varieties of different modes of writing the same character, and that there is in fact but one real kind of Babylonian writing.’[356] Although Rich found a vast number of bricks at Babylon, he observed that the inscriptions were nearly all alike: in fact only four different legends had up to that time been noticed on the Babylonian bricks. The most common consists of seven lines. The others are in six, four and three lines; of these Grotefend had seen copies of the inscriptions in seven and three lines. The other two are comparatively rare. The inscribed bricks are generally about 13 in. square by 3 in. thick, and are of different colours, red, white and black.[357] They were usually found with the inscriptions downwards, and when they occur in a different position there is a strong presumption that they have been moved from their original place. The cylinders found by Mr. Rich varied from 1 to 3 in. in length and were of different materials—some of stone, others of paste or composition.[358] They are perforated to admit of the passage of a cord, and were carried about to be used for seals. Rich was among the earliest to recognise that this was their purpose; and he thus accounted for the writing being from right to left, contrary to the invariable custom. He also made the useful suggestion that, as the language of the first Persepolitan was no doubt that of the court of Darius, the languages of the other two columns were in all probability those of Susa and Babylon.[359] Rich exercised considerable influence in Germany by his contributions to periodical literature, and his cordial assent to the opinions of Grotefend was of importance at that time. We have seen that his first Memoir was published in Vienna before it appeared in London; and he continued to write to the ‘Fundgruben des Orients’ to describe the inscriptions he had procured from Babylon and Nineveh. The cylinder from Nineveh is said to have been the earliest specimen brought to light, and it was the first to attract the attention of Grotefend to the Babylonian system of writing.[360] It was published by Dorow in 1820, when inscriptions of that kind were almost unknown. Rich’s secretary, Bellino, was also in constant correspondence with Grotefend down to the period of his early death.[361] He sent him a copy of the first column of one of the inscriptions at Hamadan, which Grotefend presented to the University Library of Tübingen, where Bellino had been educated.[362] He also sent him copies of inscriptions on forty bricks in Mr. Rich’s collection, many of them of service by illustrating slight differences in the writing of words and characters.[363]

We have said that De Sacy remained unconvinced that the names of Darius and Xerxes were to be found in the Persepolitan inscriptions. Two years after he had solemnly repeated this confession, a M. St. Martin announced that he had made the same discovery as Grotefend, which he professed to have reached by an entirely different and far more scientific method: a circumstance which, if true, would have afforded a strong confirmation of the reality of the original discovery. St. Martin was born in 1791, and died of cholera in 1832, at the early age of forty-one. He rose from a comparatively humble sphere of life, and the aristocratic prefix to his name seems to have been merely assumed. He was for a time a traveller to his father, who was a tailor, but his talent for languages soon transferred him from the mercantile to the learned world, and, combined with his strong Monarchical opinions, enabled him to secure a fair amount of success. He was especially devoted to Oriental studies, and he learned Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Armenian; but his attainments seem to have struck his contemporaries as more pretentious than profound. He was appointed, when only nineteen, to be secretary to the Society of Antiquaries (1810), and at thirty-one he became Curator of the Library of the Arsenal (1824) and afterwards an Inspector of the Royal Printing House, a position that enabled him to introduce the Zend and cuneiform type. He was a very precocious scholar, for one of the writings on which his fame rests was published at the age of twenty—‘Egypt under the Pharaohs’ (1811). Seven years later his most important work appeared: ‘An Historical and Geographical Memoir on Armenia’ (1818). He is remembered also as one of the founders of ‘L’Universel’ (1829), a strong organ of the Legitimist party.

His paper on the cuneiform inscriptions was read before the Académie des Inscriptions, of which he was a member, in 1822, and it was afterwards published in the ‘Journal Asiatique’ (February 1823). A more detailed account of his discoveries was promised, but it never seems to have appeared; and the only other authoritative expression of his opinion occurs in Klaproth’s ‘Aperçu de l’Origine des diverses Ecritures’ (1832), where we are favoured with the latest development of his cuneiform alphabet. His treatment of this subject is not calculated to raise his reputation as a scholar; and it certainly exposes him to the charge of want of candour.

He is good enough to begin the account of his original discoveries by a reference to the previous labours of Grotefend, of which he had a very poor opinion. He has seen the analysis of Grotefend’s system given by Tychsen in the ‘Göttingen Gazette’ of September 1802, and the Essay of De Sacy, written in the following year. These publications, he says, produced little impression at the time, and they were farther discredited by Grotefend’s own contribution to Heeren, in 1805.[364] None of the papers since contributed by Grotefend to periodical literature have shown any improvement upon his earliest writings, and St. Martin lays it down that the contents of the inscriptions are rightly regarded as still wholly unknown. But in addition to this unfavourable opinion, which was shared also by De Sacy, he brings charges of his own against Grotefend’s system that are wholly without foundation. He accuses him of frequently varying the values he assigned to the characters, whereas it was in consequence of the extreme tenacity with which he clung to the values he originally assigned that his progress was in great measure arrested. St. Martin says Grotefend attributed five or six entirely different values to the same character, and that he considered that each character is susceptible of assuming a variety of different forms, both statements being equally without foundation.[365] He affects to regard the corrections introduced into the texts by Grotefend—which is one of his most valuable services—as purely arbitrary, and he professes to believe that interpretations based upon these emendations can inspire no confidence, and can only be regarded as an exercise of the imagination. He was surprised to find that his own interpretations, which he reached by ‘proceeding in an entirely different way,’ should have conducted, so far as they went, to precisely the same result: and he will not dispute that Grotefend is entitled to the priority of merit in detecting the royal names.[366] It does not appear that St. Martin got any farther himself, and we may be permitted to doubt whether he would have accomplished even this but for the labours of the predecessor he is so careful to disparage. When we come to inquire into ‘the entirely different way’ followed by St. Martin we find that in fact it is precisely the same as that with which we are already familiar. He worked on the same two inscriptions, the B and G of Niebuhr; he treats us over again to the analogy of the Sassanian inscriptions: the well-known phrase ‘king of kings’; the genitive suffix; the position of the royal names; the evident relationship of father and son, and so on. Our original investigator continues to carry us over all the old ground. He is struck by the similarity of the wedges in the word for ‘king’ and in one of the royal names; he is guided by the Zend khsheio to the cuneiform words for ‘king’ and ‘Xerxes,’ and he tells us how dexterously he proceeded from this to the decipherment of the names of Darius and Hystaspes. In one name only he differed from his predecessor. It will be remembered that Grotefend deciphered ‘Cyrus’ in the Murgab inscription. St. Martin preferred to transliterate ‘Houschousch’ and to read ‘Ochus’;[367] but in this single attempt at originality he turned out to be wrong and Grotefend right. He has spared us all the reasons that led him to these important results, as well as many grammatical and literary considerations which he promised to publish in a more extended Memoir. One success he may indeed claim. In reading the name of Hystaspes he compared it to a Zend form ‘Vyschtaspo,’ which gave a more correct result than the ‘Goshtasp’ of Grotefend.[368] This happy accident enabled him to assign the correct value of v instead of g to one cuneiform sign; and in the second letter of the same word he substituted y for Grotefend’s o, and thereby approached nearer the correct value, which is i. These are the sole contributions he made to the work of decipherment.

It must not, however, be supposed that his treatment of the alphabet was wanting in originality. It will be recollected that Grotefend was in possession of thirteen correct values; but of these St. Martin rejected five.[369] The eight that remained added to the two he determined himself (v and y or i) gave him an alphabet of ten correct values, as opposed to the thirteen in the possession of Grotefend. He altered the values Grotefend had incorrectly assigned to nine other characters, without making any improvement upon them.[370] He confessed with admirable modesty that there were twelve characters of which he could make nothing; and this struck Lassen as being the most satisfactory portion of his work.[371] Among them Grotefend had already condemned four as defective; one he had determined correctly as f, and he had nearly approximated to two others, th for t before u (22) and dj for j before i (32). St. Martin’s alphabet in its complete form consists of twenty-five letters, represented by twenty-seven cuneiform signs.[372] But of these letters he has three different modifications of the sound of e, which alone monopolise six cuneiform signs. Three signs are allotted to h, two to a, two to ou, two to ch, and two to r. In its latest form ten of the letters of our alphabet are left without equivalents in cuneiform—b, f, g, i, l, q, u, w, x, z. He was not, however, always without a b.[373] It was probably not till after 1826 that he saw reason to substitute an m. Rask had recently suggested that the word which Grotefend transliterated ‘Akeotchoschoh’ should be ‘Aqamnosoh,’ and signified ‘Achaemenian.’ St. Martin had no suspicion of this when he first wrote his paper, and he translated the phrase ‘race illustrious and very excellent.’[374] But when Klaproth appeared, in 1832, the transliteration and translation were made to run as follows: ‘Poun Oukhaamychye,’ ‘race d’Achémènes,’ which differs from the first only by the substitution of an m where b occurred before.[375] This is a farther instance of unacknowledged borrowing. St. Martin accommodates himself to the view taken by Rask; but, as ill luck would have it, he changed the wrong letter: the sign he altered into m is in fact the n in the word ‘Achaemenian.’[376] With this our notice of St. Martin’s Memoir may fitly close. It is indeed a singular production for a scholar of repute. He begins by assuring his readers that the contents of the Persepolitan inscriptions were still entirely unknown; he censures the method adopted by Grotefend that had yielded him the names of three of the Achaemenian kings; for himself, he leads us to suppose that he is about to announce an entirely different and more scientific method. He then proceeds, without a word of warning and in simple confidence in our ignorance, to follow precisely the method he has just denounced, and he affects astonishment that it should lead him to precisely the same result. He can make no progress beyond the three names already known. In the case of the Murgab inscription he ventures to take a step upon his own account and immediately blunders into error. His alphabet is remarkable for its inferiority to the one he desires to supersede. It has at most ten correct values to Grotefend’s thirteen or fourteen.[377] Eight cuneiform letters are abandoned altogether in simulated despair. Nine are changed without being improved, and ten of the most important sounds in human language are left without expression. We do not condemn him for being inferior to his master: many pupils suffer from that disability; but we censure him for denying his obligation and for affecting an originality he did not possess. One service indeed he rendered. If he made no new discoveries in cuneiform, he at least has the merit of discovering Grotefend’s discovery to France. Many of his countrymen were willing to take upon his authority what they would not accept from the German writer, and it gradually came to be believed (though even yet by no means universally) that the names of Hystaspes, Darius and Xerxes were to be read in the Persepolitan inscriptions.[378]

The first advance in cuneiform decipherment after Grotefend was made by Rask, a distinguished Danish scholar. He was born in 1782, and at first he devoted himself entirely to Icelandic. He spent two years in the island, and on his return, in 1817, he published an edition of the Edda. Subsequently he added Oriental languages to the range of his acquirements. For a time his serious attention was devoted to Sanscrit, Persian and Arabic, while his leisure moments were diverted by the acquisition of Russian and Finnish. He then went to India for three months, to perfect himself in such trifling matters as Sanscrit, Hindustani, Zend and Pehlevi. A short visit to Ceylon was devoted to Cingalese, Pali and Elu. On his return to Copenhagen he filled two professorial chairs—those of Oriental Languages and Icelandic. He is regarded as one of the earliest founders of Comparative Philology, and the number of his writings is very large. Among them are Grammars of Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, Cingalese, Acra, Lapp, Danish and Italian. But it is to the little volume ‘Ueber das Alter der Zend-Sprache’ that we have now to refer.[379] Some writers contended that Zend is merely a dialect of Sanscrit, restricted in its use to sacred literature, and never employed as a spoken language. It was also asserted that the Zend-Avesta was of comparatively recent date, possibly not earlier than the third century A.D.[380] One of the many arguments adduced by Rask to confute these theories was the similarity between the Zend and the language of the first Persepolitan column. He pointed out that, so far as it had been deciphered by Grotefend, it bore a strong resemblance to that of ‘Father Zoroaster’; and he argued that where they differed to a marked degree in their case-endings, the probability was that the divergence is due to an error in the values assigned to the letters by Grotefend. Thus, the genitive plural as given by Grotefend ends in e or a, ch (tsch), a, o, which bears no resemblance to anything to be found in Zend; and he casually threw out the suggestion that it should read a-n-a-m, which is a usual Zend form.[381] He farther showed, in support of this view, that the change of an o into m would go a long way to solve the difficulty of the word that follows ‘stirps’; and he hazarded the improved transliteration ‘aqamnosoh,’ from which ‘Achaemenian’ might be derived. The change of tsch into n, and o into m, which was at once accepted and ultimately proved to be correct, was of great importance; and both Burnouf and Lassen admit the extent of their obligations. Rask’s own studies lay in an entirely different direction, and he made no attempt to follow up his success in decipherment; but he took occasion to point out that there must be some radical error in an alphabet that assigns two different sounds—e and a—to the same sign, and two signs to the same sound, a; and he lays down the rule ‘that one letter should have only a single sound, and two or more letters can never denote one and the same sound.’ The last maxim was not, however, verified, for it is found that some letters are represented by two and even three signs, according to the vowel they precede. He added the useful warning that the language of the inscription is probably Old Persian, and not, therefore, identical with the language of Zoroaster. Hence, while they are similar, and may be usefully compared, it by no means follows that the grammatical forms and the vocabulary are always identical.[382]

We now come to the two great scholars, Burnouf and Lassen, to whom, after Grotefend, the decipherment of the cuneiform is chiefly to be ascribed.