The discovery and decipherment of the trilingual cuneiform inscriptions

by Arthur John Booth

Very few additional inscriptions in Old Persian have been brought to light since the date of Rawlinson’s Memoir. But a good deal of labour has been spent in clearing up the doubtful passages in those already known. In some cases the text was, as we have said, so much mutilated as to defy intelligible translation. This was the case with the fifth column of the Behistun; and Rawlinson thought it best to omit it altogether from his revised edition of 1873.[591] This diffidence, however, may have stimulated M. Oppert to attempt a restoration of the text. We have already described the process followed by Rawlinson. It consisted in selecting a word or words containing the number of letters required to fit into the space left vacant by the erasure of the text, and which would at the same time make some kind of sense. It is obvious how much of the success of this operation will depend upon the ingenuity of the restorer; and still more upon the restraint he exercises over his imagination. No one is more distinguished than M. Oppert for the ingenuity of his conjectural restorations; and the column that Rawlinson abandoned as hopeless appears in Oppert’s edition as the ‘Complementary Behistun Text,’ and in a comparatively perfect condition. In this case he could receive no assistance from the translations, because both the other columns are destroyed; and not much by comparison, for there are few parallel passages. His work is, therefore, the more admirable as a display of the imaginative faculty. But his reading has not been accepted by Menant or Spiegel, or by Weissbach.[592] No doubt we owe the ‘Testament of Darius at Naksh-i-Rustam’ to the same method which appears to have been exercised upon the few lines copied by Westergaard from the long inscription below the one known and which Spiegel declares it is clearly impossible to translate.[593] One of the three short inscriptions engraved above the figures of the Tomb has also given rise to some discussion. Mr. Tasker, an English traveller, sent them to Rawlinson, by whom they were published in the ‘Journal of the Asiatic Society,’ and an improved version appeared some time afterwards.[594] Even at that period considerable difference of opinion existed as to the meaning of at least one of these short legends. According to Rawlinson, Norris, and Oppert, Aspathines is the ‘keeper of the arrows’ of King Darius; but Norris adds ‘chamberlain’ and Oppert ‘quiver-bearer.’ Elsewhere Oppert translates it quite differently: ‘Aspathines, minister of King Darius, who makes the law observed.’ Spiegel’s version is: ‘Aspacanâ des Königs Darius genosse, Zügelhalter (?).’[595]

In the autumn of 1846, when Rawlinson’s ‘Memoir’ was passing through the press, Dr. Frederick Hitzig published a tract on the Persian Text of the Tomb Inscription of Darius; but his translation shows little advance beyond the point reached by Lassen.[596] The edition of the Persian inscriptions by Theodore Benfey made its appearance early in 1847. His transliteration suffers from having been made before the method of writing explained by Hincks and Rawlinson in the previous year had become generally known. We have already sufficiently noticed Benfey’s translations, which show considerable improvement on those of Lassen, but fall far short of the comparative excellence obtained by Rawlinson. In the course of the summer, another writer appeared whose name has been already mentioned and who was destined to occupy a very important place in the future history of Cuneiform Research. M. Oppert was born in Hamburg in 1825, and studied successively at Heidelberg, Bonn and Berlin. At Bonn he was a pupil of Lassen, and to this circumstance probably we owe his early interest in cuneiform and the publication of a tract on the subject at the age of twenty-two. The promising youth was precluded by his Jewish faith from holding a professorship in Germany, and consequently he went to Paris in 1847. His later writings have all appeared in the French language, and for this reason he is generally included among the number of French scholars, of whom, till quite recent years, he was by far the ablest representative.[597] So far as we are aware, the pamphlet on the ‘Lautsystem des Altpersischen’ was his first effort in this department of knowledge.[598] In it he explains the principle that regulates the employment of the consonants in substantially the same manner as Hincks and Rawlinson had done in the previous year. He had evidently arrived at his conclusion independently, and it is remarkable that he was not better informed of the progress that had recently been made. It might be supposed that the attention of everyone interested in the subject would be directed to the appearance of Rawlinson’s ‘Memoir,’ which was then eagerly expected. It was in fact published before May 1847, and Oppert’s tract was not sent to press till July.

With the publication of Rawlinson’s Memoir, in 1846-7, the decipherment of the Persian inscriptions may be considered accomplished. In 1850, he could write that there ‘are probably not more than twenty words in the whole range of the Persian cuneiform records upon the meaning, grammatical condition or etymology of which any doubt or difference of opinion can at present be said to exist.’[599] The value of his own contribution to the general result received the fullest recognition. Professor Max Müller declared to Canon Rawlinson that, ‘thanks mainly to your brother, we have now as complete a knowledge of the grammar, construction and general character of the ancient Persian language as we have of Latin.’[600] He was greeted as the Champollion of the new decipherment, a position he has retained to a large extent in Germany and France. So late as 1895, M. Oppert found occasion to remark that, ‘after Rawlinson it was only possible for other scholars to obtain gleanings in the field of Persian cuneiform interpretation.’[601] In his own country, however, he seems to have suffered for a time from the singular affectation that was so long in fashion, of looking to Germany alone for all the springs of knowledge. As a matter of fact, in this department at least, few Germans, with the exception of Grotefend, made any important contribution. Rask, Lassen, Westergaard, were all Scandinavians, and it is certain that for many years Rawlinson continued to be the source whence Continental writers drew most largely; and the neglect into which he fell at home occasioned the surprise of at least one eminent Frenchman. ‘Young English and Germans,’ says M. Oppert, ‘pretend not to know him. An Englishman once told me he had never read a line of Rawlinson. I replied: “I supposed just so; if you had read him, your papers would be less imperfect than they are.”’[602] This testimony to the great services of Sir Henry Rawlinson is given by the scholar who for many years occupied by far the most prominent position among Continental writers upon cuneiform subjects, and who has himself contributed largely to the progress of the study.

In 1851, M. Oppert undertook a complete revision of the whole series of Achaemenian inscriptions. The work appeared in the ‘Journal Asiatique,’ between February 1851 and February 1852, and was afterwards published in a separate form.[603] He introduced a considerable number of alterations, in both the transliteration and translation, and, so far as we have noticed, a large proportion of them have been accepted. He criticised some of Rawlinson’s opinions, but rarely with asperity, and he generously acknowledges that the English scholar ‘a grandement mérité de l’histoire du genre humain.’[604] He subsequently revised his own translations for his book on the ‘Expédition en Mésopotamie,’ published in 1858. In the same year Rawlinson made an amended version of the Behistun Inscription for the edition of Herodotus published by his brother; and again in 1873 for the ‘Records of the Past.’[605] The other inscriptions were once more revised by Oppert in 1877 for the same useful publication.[606] But meanwhile a complete edition of the whole Persian inscriptions had been published by Spiegel in Germany in 1862,[607] and in France in 1872, by M. Menant.[608] The latest publications on the subject that have come under our notice are the valuable treatises on the languages of the first and second columns by Weissbach,[609] and of the third column by Dr. Bezold,[610] accompanied in each case by a revised text, transliteration and translation.

CHAPTER V
DECIPHERMENT OF THE SECOND OR SUSIAN COLUMN—WESTERGAARD TO OPPERT—A.D. 1844-52

The signal success that had been achieved in the decipherment of the Persian column of the Achaemenian inscriptions greatly facilitated the accomplishment of the difficult task that still remained. In the other two columns it was comparatively easy, especially in the short inscriptions, to identify the combinations of signs that corresponded to the proper names in the Persian, and to check them by their recurrence in the positions where they were again to be expected. The satisfactory application of this process left no doubt that the writing in both columns was from left to right; and that they were translations of the same text. When the groups of characters composing the proper names were ascertained, the next process was to separate them into letters or syllables, and to identify each with the corresponding letter in Persian. The result of this inquiry was to show clearly that the writing was partly syllabic and to raise the suspicion that it was also partly ideographic. It was seen that the signs were too numerous to be limited to an alphabet, and that long words could be expressed with comparatively few signs. In some cases its ideographic character was illustrated by the occurrence of only one sign to represent an entire word—such as ‘King.’ It was also observed that in the second column a vertical wedge usually preceded proper names as a determinative.

From the time when Niebuhr pointed out that there were three essentially different styles of writing, and that each style was uniformly reproduced in the same relative position in all the inscriptions, the subject had given rise to much speculation. It was at first thought that the three columns repeated the same text in the same language written in different characters.[611] Grotefend, however, recognised that the languages also were different, but he thought they were dialects closely related to each other. The first, as we have seen, he considered to be Zend, which he called the Median language; the second he thought was Parsi, or the language of the Persians; and the third another dialect of Persian, possibly Pehlevi.[612] Subsequently he changed the order of the last two, and described them respectively as resembling Pehlevi and Parsi.[613] As regards the signs, Münter thought that in the second column they were syllabic and in the third ‘hieroglyphic’; Tychsen and Grotefend thought that both had signs for vowels and consonants, which were at times replaced by an ideogram. Grotefend further saw that the second included signs for the combination of a consonant and vowel; the third he considered had no vowel signs, but used signs for the triple combination of consonant, vowel and consonant.[614] He entirely rejected the idea that either system was purely ideographic. In 1824, he prepared a Table for the third edition of Heeren, showing some words that corresponded to each other in the three languages. The inscriptions he selected were the G of Niebuhr, the inscriptions at Murgab and on the Caylus vase. These he arranged word for word in parallel columns opposite to one another. He used a full stop to indicate the combination of wedges that went to form each letter or syllable; indeed at that period it required scarcely less skill to divide the words into letters than to distinguish the words themselves. No attempt was made to assign values to the characters, and for many years no farther progress was made. In 1837 he still thought the three columns represented dialects of Old Persian, though they might not exactly correspond to Zend, Pehlevi and Parsi. The two first he considered nearer to each other as regards language; but he remarked that the two latter presented a closer resemblance to one another as regards the writing. Still he said the resemblance was by no means so close as that between the third column and the Babylonian inscriptions. He saw indeed that the writing of the third column was a mere simplification of the Babylonian; and he hazarded the useful conjecture that the writing of the second might be only an arbitrary modification of the third. He would not even yet admit that either could be, strictly speaking, described as syllabic; and he entirely rejected the idea that the third was a Semitic language.[615]

But the study was now upon the point of entering on an entirely new phase. We have already seen the success with which Burnouf and Lassen applied the discovery made by Grotefend to the long list of names in the I inscription. The visit paid in 1843 by Westergaard to Naksh-i-Rustam resulted in the recovery of a farther list of provinces from the Tomb of Darius. On his return to Germany, he made over his copy of the first column to Lassen, who was best qualified to turn it to account, and he devoted himself to an attempt to decipher the language of the second column. The result appeared in the ‘Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes’ of 1844; and the same year, in English, in the ‘Mémoires des Antiquaires du Nord.’[616] In 1845, the Memoir was republished in German, along with Lassen’s Second Memoir, and this, as the latest, must be regarded as the most authoritative version.[617] The investigation is based upon an analysis of the various proper names contained in the inscriptions. Westergaard began with the well-known names of the Kings which Grotefend had turned to such good account, and afterwards reviewed those of the provinces recently deciphered by Lassen. From these he obtained a sufficient number of values to attempt a transliteration of the more common words occurring in the Persian version, and especially in the well-known form that opens so many of the inscriptions. He has given us a transliteration of this passage, which is the first ever made into Roman characters of a Susian inscription.[618] His work was necessarily based upon Lassen’s defective decipherment of the Persian signs; and it was therefore inevitable that it should reproduce the same erroneous values. He transliterated all the various inscriptions, beginning with those of Xerxes as the shortest and simplest, and proceeding to those of Darius, including the one at Naksh-i-Rustam, which he was the first to copy.[619] It is curious to compare the earliest attempts at transliteration with those subsequently made by Oppert and Weisbach. It will be seen that few of the words in his glossary could now be recognised. He had little opportunity of displaying his skill as a translator, for in this department he implicitly followed Lassen’s rendering of the corresponding Persian column, and we find the same errors in both, from ‘Arça’ downwards; but he concludes with the K inscription, which has no Persian counterpart, and here he achieved a respectable success. He was able to make out sufficient to show that Darius laid claim to the foundation of the Persepolitan platform.[620] In the German edition he omits his adventurous transliterations (as well as the declination of Ku, ‘king,’ which it will surprise some scholars to hear takes the forms of ‘Kuyoni’ in the accusative singular, and ‘Kuthin’ or ‘Kuthrar’ in the genitive plural), and he has consequently lessened the interest, if not the value, of that work.[621]