Eugène Burnouf was the son of a distinguished father, who was a Professor at the Collège de France. Eugène was born in 1801, and died in 1852. At the age of twenty-five he acquired a great reputation for Oriental scholarship by the publication of his essay ‘Sur le Pali,’ which he wrote in collaboration with Lassen.[383] But his fame rests principally upon his Zend studies, the first of which, the Vendidad, appeared in 1830. More than a hundred years had elapsed since the first copy of the original text was brought to Europe by George Bouchier, an Englishman (1718), who had obtained it from the Parsees at Surat. Bouchier presented it to the University of Oxford, where it might be seen long afterwards chained to a wall in the Bodleian. No one, however, could read a word of it. At length a young Frenchman, Anquetil de Perron, determined if possible to overcome the difficulty. He went to Surat in 1758, and put himself under the tutorship of the learned Parsees. He was, however, surprised to find that, although they knew the value of the characters, they were completely ignorant of the language itself. Yet their sacred books were written in it, and they daily recited the meaningless sounds in their ritual. It was sufficient, they said, that God should understand the prayers they were enjoined to repeat. By an ingenious comparison with the Pehlevi and Persian vocabularies Anquetil at length arrived at a probable translation; and after his return to Paris he published a French version of the Zend-Avesta (1771).[384] His work was very unduly depreciated by Sir W. Jones, the leading English Orientalist, but it attracted a larger degree of esteem on the Continent, and a German edition by Kleuker appeared at Riga, in 1777, which enjoyed a fair amount of popularity.[385] Both the language and the subject-matter of the Zend-Avesta began to receive the attention of scholars, and those especially who were interested in cuneiform recognised their importance. Tychsen, for example, wrote on the religion of Zoroaster,[386] and Rask on the relation of the language to Sanscrit;[387] and the same conjunction of studies was preserved in later times by Burnouf, Westergaard, Oppert and Spiegel. Down to the time of Burnouf, however, the knowledge of Zend continued to be very imperfect, and Grotefend was constantly impeded in his attempt to elucidate the language of the cuneiform inscriptions by reference to the very defective work of Anquetil. Burnouf was appointed to the chair of Sanscrit in the Collège de France in 1832, and the idea occurred to him to connect his Sanscrit and Zend Studies. He found that a translation of the Yaçna into Sanscrit had been made by two Persian scholars some four hundred years before, while the recollection of Zend was still preserved; and it is entirely due to his labours upon this text that such remarkable progress was made in the study. His ‘Commentaire sur le Yaçna’ appeared in 1834; and in addition to its other merits it was at once recognised that it afforded the most valuable assistance to the cuneiform student. Indeed, Sir Henry Rawlinson admitted that it was to a great extent in consequence of the knowledge he derived from it that he was enabled to overcome the difficulties of the Behistun inscription. Burnouf’s ‘Mémoire sur deux Inscriptions cunéiformes’ appeared in 1836. It was submitted to the Académie des Inscriptions in March, and finally given to the world on June 1. He considered that the Inscriptions B and G of Niebuhr had been sufficiently worked upon; and if additional results were to be obtained they should be sought from fresh materials.[388] Although Schulz’s papers were not yet published, Burnouf obtained access to them; and found they included two trilingual inscriptions from Elvend near Hamadan, copied by Mr. Stewart, and a trilingual from Van.[389] The two Hamadan inscriptions reproduce precisely the same text, except that the name of Darius occurs in one in the place of Xerxes in the other. Comparing these with the trilingual of Xerxes at Van, he found that the first two paragraphs are the same in both; but the last paragraph of the Van inscription is not found at Hamadan. At Persepolis the whole of the Hamadan inscription is repeated on the Anta of the Porch to the Palace of Darius; and considerably more besides. But the additional portion does not correspond to that found in the last paragraph at Van. The whole of it was copied long before by Le Bruyn (No. 131). Burnouf next observed that the inscription on the sculptured stairs—the A of Niebuhr—bears a strong resemblance to those just mentioned; but the beginning is clearly imperfect. Ouseley, however, had published a five-lined inscription from Persepolis, which corresponds exactly to the Darius at Hamadan; and Grotefend pointed out that it was probably the beginning of the A inscription.[390] With this addition the A runs for a time parallel to the Hamadan, while at its close it corresponds to the Le Bruyn. Burnouf had thus a considerable number of copies of the same text, and by careful collation he sought to eliminate the errors due to the engraver or the transcriber. By these means he obtained a correct recension of the Hamadan inscription upon which his work was chiefly founded. But there was another to which he made frequent reference, especially towards the close of his Memoir. This is the I inscription of Niebuhr, which is copied from the outside wall, on the southern side of the great platform of Persepolis.[391]
It will be recollected that Grotefend had called attention to this inscription in 1832, and had pointed out that it evidently contained a long list of proper names.[392] Whether this suggestion ever reached Burnouf it is impossible to say, but it is certain he made it an early object of study; and from it he derived the cuneiform sign ‘B,’ with which he signed his letters to Lassen.
The method he pursued to determine the value of an unknown sign was to collect all the words in which it occurred, and endeavour to assign to it a letter, from among those not already rigorously determined, that would produce a word for which some meaning might be found by comparing it with Zend. For example, the word with which the Darius at Hamadan begins consists of only two letters, which, according to Grotefend, would yield vu. But Burnouf could make no sense out of this, and he accordingly substituted a b for the first letter (𐎲). The result was that he could not only extract a sense out of bu—which he compared with the Sanscrit bhû and bû ‘to be,’ but two or three other words were also rendered intelligible by the same change.[393] The consideration, however, that finally settled the matter was the discovery of a name in the I inscription, which, upon the supposition that the letter in question was a b would yield ‘Bakhtroch,’ and this he had no difficulty in identifying with Bactria. Hence he altered the v of Grotefend into a b without apparently recognising that he merely restored the value originally given to that sign by Münter.[394]
Unfortunately, his method did not lead to very important results, for it only enabled him to add two additional values correctly. Both of these were suggested to him by the second word in this same Hamadan Inscription.[395] The word occurs also in the B and G inscriptions, where it was transliterated by Grotefend e gh r e. Burnouf accepted the change of the initial e (𐎺) into i, which was made by St. Martin, without approaching nearer to the correct value, which is in fact a v. The emendation of the second letter lay ready at hand, and could not well be longer overlooked. Since Rask had identified the sign for m, this particular sign (𐏀) was the only one that required alteration in order to read Aur m z da,[396] and it was therefore inevitable that Grotefend’s gh should at length be surrendered for a z; the only wonder is that this change should have been so long delayed.[397] The emendation of the last letter of the word (𐎣) displays an entirely different order of ingenuity. The letter occurs in only seven different words in all the inscriptions of Niebuhr, Le Bruyn, and Schulz but in one instance it is the initial sign in a word of which the others are t p d h u k. It was certainly no common feat of imagination that led Burnouf to see that if a k were to precede this remarkable agglomeration, the province of Kappadocia would turn up. By these means, however, he got rid of another of Grotefend’s e’s, and altered it into a k, which proved to be correct. Having thus changed e gh r e into i z r k, the next step was to find some similar word in Zend that might suggest its meaning. This, however, was not easy; the nearest he could think of was ‘yazata,’ which might bear to be translated ‘divine.’[398]
Such was the method that enabled Burnouf to restore one correct value, b, that had been recently neglected, and to add two others, z and k, to the alphabet. He was on the point of increasing the number of correct values by two or three others, but unfortunately he hesitated to yield to his first intuition. In the twelfth line of the I inscription he found a word which, according to his alphabet he transliterated ‘Arion.’[399] It occurred in a position in the geographical list that would naturally suggest that it indicated ‘Armenia,’ and to obtain this result it was only necessary to change the sign (𐎷) which he read i into m. There was a farther reason that appeared to justify this alteration. In the Hamadan inscription the same sign occurs in bu i om, which he translated ‘excellent’; but if it were permitted to alter the i into m we should obtain bumom, ‘earth.’ The meaning of the sentence would then be: ‘He has given [or created] this earth; he has given [or created] this heaven,’ which would be an evident improvement in the sense.[400] He would not, however, allow that the alphabet could include more than one m, and he was not prepared to sacrifice the m (𐎶) discovered by Rask in the genitive termination anam. Thus he narrowly missed adding the m (𐎷) before i to the number of his correct values. So also in line 11 there occurs a word he reads ayura, but by the change of the y into th he would arrive at ‘Athura,’ the ancient ‘Aturia.’[401] This change was farther sanctioned by another name, which his system transliterated pryi; but by the hypothesis under consideration, it would become prthi, a manifest form for ‘Parthia.’ Moreover, the same alteration would introduce an important improvement in the word for ‘king,’ which would then read khchâhthôh (from the Zend khchathrô) in place of khchâhyôh.[402] Notwithstanding all these probabilities, he finally rejected the alteration and lost the addition of another correct value. It is interesting also to observe how nearly he approached the correct value of Grotefend’s h (𐎹, No. 27). He perceived that if it were changed into a y, it would yield yuna in the twelfth line, which there could be no doubt would indicate ‘Ionia.’ As it is, however, he retained the incorrect value; and he could find no satisfactory explanation of huna; for he, of course, rejected ‘Huns’ as an evident anachronism.[403] It would be tedious and unnecessary to go through the other signs to which he gave new values, for they unfortunately all turned out to be wrong. Indeed, if his services to decipherment were to be estimated by this test alone, they would not rank higher than those of St. Martin or Rask; for although he lays claim to have ascertained the value of twelve characters, eight of these are erroneous, one (the b) fairly belongs to Münter, another (the a) to Grotefend, and only two remain to be placed to his own credit: precisely the same number as were contributed by St. Martin and Rask. His alphabet gives definite values to thirty cuneiform signs and an uncertain value to three others.[404] Following the analogy of Zend, he allots a separate sign to the long and short values of each of the vowels a, i, u, and in this he considers he has reached ‘a result that should satisfy criticism.’ With respect to the consonants, however, he agrees with the maxim of Rask, and strives as far as possible to avoid according more than one sign to each. He has, however, found it difficult to avoid giving two signs to l and h, and no less than four to gh. As regards l or h, he introduces the second signs apologetically, followed by a mark of interrogation, indicating that they may be variants or defective signs. We now know there is no well-authenticated l in the language, and his first sign turned out to be d before i (𐎮) and the other r before u (𐎽). He was equally unfortunate with regard to h, neither of his signs for that letter being correct. He felt that the four signs for gh required explanation. He places only one among the thirty definite values in his alphabet. The others he labels as uncertain. (These are 𐎦, 𐎪, 𐎸.) He thought that a comparison of these would convince the student that they are composed of exactly the same elements, so that they seem to differ from each other only by the caprice of the engraver, who has arranged the wedges according to his fancy, while he has neither altered their form nor increased nor diminished their number.[405] He recognised, however, the objection that all cuneiform writing consists of the same elements, and that the sole difference of one sign from another consists in the arrangement of the wedges. He was forced to fall back upon the impossibility of assigning different values to these signs and at the same time preserving any sense in the words where they occur. The second gh (𐎦) he considered justified by its occurrence in the word he thought must be ‘çughd,’[406] the third (𐎪) because it would enable him to read ‘baghem,’ ‘destiny,’ and the fourth (𐎸) by its completing the sense of ‘ghudraha,’ which he thought denoted the Gordyans.[407] In this latter case the correct transliteration is ‘m’udray’; but it is not likely, even if he had read the word correctly, he would have detected in this form the name of Egypt. As a matter of fact, the first gh, which he has put in his alphabet (𐎯, 34) as the usual form, is d before u; the second (𐎦) is g before u; the third (𐎪, 32) is j before i; the fourth (𐎸, 33) is m before u.
Grotefend thought he found four and St. Martin six signs for e, but Burnouf correctly excluded that letter altogether from his alphabet. He, however, incorrectly admits one sign for ô long. He considers the absence of th, a form that occurs frequently in Zend, is probably due to the scarcity of documents. The want of the palatals, tch and dj, may perhaps be assigned to the same cause; though more probably it arises from the nature of the alphabet itself, for these letters are only developments of the consonants k and g.[408]
Burnouf acknowledges his obligation to Grotefend for twelve letters; but these should properly be raised to fifteen.[409] The twelve he admits include eight correct values and four incorrect. The three he leaves unacknowledged are t (24), u (36), and a (41), all of which are correct, and they raise the number of correct values accepted from this source to eleven. Burnouf attributes three of his letters to St. Martin, namely t, u and i: the first two are already accounted for from Grotefend; the i is indeed due to St. Martin, but it is wrong. Burnouf rejected the only absolutely correct value found by St. Martin, viz. v. Two letters, the m and n, he refers to Rask, from whom also he must have derived the q (25) which he erroneously substitutes for Grotefend’s k.
The twelve values which Burnouf credits to his own account include the a of Grotefend and the b of Münter.[410] There remain the two values which he was the first to fix correctly, viz. k (4) and z (18); the others are all incorrect. We have thus accounted for twenty-nine signs out of the thirty of his alphabet;[411] the other, the ng (28) of Grotefend, he treated as uncertain, but suggested h, the true value being j(a)[412] Besides the thirty just mentioned he gives three other signs, to which he hesitates to assign any value, though he thought they might all represent the sound of gh. These are, as we have already explained, the dj (32) and the ‘k?’ (33) of Grotefend, now ascertained to be j before i, and m before u. The other does not appear in Niebuhr’s list, and Lassen is the first to assign it a value, g, which turned out correct (g before u).