The discovery and decipherment of the trilingual cuneiform inscriptions

by Arthur John Booth

Mordtmann and Lenormant were successful also in showing that both these two newly-discovered languages, or dialects, are closely related to Median, and belonged therefore to the Scythic family. The remarkable discovery that had recently been made that a Scythic language—the Akkadian—was the primitive speech of Chaldæa, gave a very unexpected extension to the range of the Turanian races; and it was now beginning to be recognised that the civilisation of Western Asia is to be referred to them, and not, as heretofore supposed, to a Semitic people. The effect of these discoveries was to stimulate once more the flagging interest in the writing of the second column, and efforts were now directed to determine the nature of its relationship to the newly-found dialects, and more particularly to ascertain the people to whom each might be attributed. The first to enter upon this new field of inquiry after Lenormant was Oppert, who submitted a tentative translation of an Old Susian inscription to the Congress of Orientalists in 1873. In the following year, Mr. Sayce attempted two short inscriptions published by Lenormant. If we may judge by comparison with a later version given by Oppert, no great measure of success was yet attained.[673] Indeed three years afterwards, Oppert himself admitted that the Susian could not yet be read. The inscriptions of Malamir caused less difficulty, and Sayce declared that it was ‘the same as the Median with a few unimportant variations.’ It must be confessed, however, that his subsequent analysis tended to show that these ‘variations’ had a considerable range both in grammar and vocabulary.[674]

Meanwhile the language of the second column continued to receive a great variety of names which has produced immense confusion. Lenormant, however, heroically adheres to ‘Median,’ because one of the Median tribes is specially distinguished as Aryan, and it was therefore reasonable to suppose that the mass of the people were of different, and presumably of Turanian, race. Professor Sayce admits that it must have been ‘the vernacular of the lower classes of Persia: in other words, of the Medes’; but he preferred to call it Elamite, ‘as less likely to lead to ambiguity and misconception.’ He suggests that Amardian would be still better, for Susiana is always called ‘Khapirti’ in the Median text; and this is evidently the same as the country of the Amardians of Strabo. He showed that its relation to the dialect of Malamir was closer than to that of Old Susian; and he thought there was no doubt that the latter was related to the Akkadian.

One of the most interesting parts of Professor Sayce’s essay was the publication of ‘a revised list of the powers of the Elamite’ (i.e. Susian) ‘character, which can now be determined by means of the Assyrian syllabary.’[675] Written in 1874, this document illustrates the process of development that occurred between the two works of Oppert, that of 1859 and the one of 1879, to be mentioned shortly. It will be recollected that we left him with seven wrong values, six nearly correct and seven omitted altogether. We find that when Sayce wrote, four of the first and one of the second had been corrected, and three signs omitted by Oppert were now provided with correct, or nearly correct, values. At the same time a plentiful crop of fresh errors was introduced. Six or seven values, correctly ascertained in 1859, were now rejected and erroneous ones substituted. At least three of the values proposed for the signs omitted by Oppert were very far indeed from the mark. The ideogram for ‘horse’ was rejected in favour of the syllable az, which may have suggested to Weisbach the substitution of ‘donkey’ in place of the nobler quadruped preferred by Oppert.

The two writers who have brought the knowledge of the Median syllabary to its present standard are Oppert and Weisbach: the former in a special treatise written in 1879 (‘Le Peuple des Mèdes’) long remained the leading authority on the subject, and his conclusions have in the main derived confirmation from the more recent investigations of Weisbach on the language of the second column, which appeared in 1890. With very few exceptions, to be noticed later, both scholars are in substantial agreement as to the values of the signs; and it is this agreement that forms for the present the standard of right and wrong, by which the efforts of their predecessors have been judged. Both writers were guided to a large extent by the values of the corresponding Babylonian characters.[676] Oppert, as was said, thought he could trace a resemblance between ninety-six of the Median signs and their Babylonian equivalents. In each case, the sound as well as the form of the character was appropriated. Weisbach is much less struck by the general application of this law. He fully admits the strong similarity of many of the signs, but some have, he says, so far diverged from their original types as to be hardly recognisable. Others, he thinks, were borrowed from New Assyrian, and a few from older forms. Indeed he is, on the whole, indisposed to derive the syllabary direct from the New Babylonian. He thinks it is more properly to be traced through the writing of Malamir to the Old Susian, and the development from the Old Babylonian of the latter was a parallel and independent process similar to that which produced the New Babylonian. But as the Old Susian character has not yet been sufficiently investigated, he restricts his comparison to the New Babylonian, and he points out some of the principles that were followed in the evolution of the new script. For example, the vertical wedge that crosses the horizontal in the Babylonian is generally placed before them in Median, and the same rule applies to the horizontal crossing the vertical. There is an evident effort to simplify both the writing and the language. The signs preserve the same signification in both, but when it happens in Babylonian that the same sign has many different values (sometimes no less than nine) it has never more than two in Median. So also the number of homophones, or different signs with the same values, are strictly limited. Indeed, he considers that the Median was an early effort to approach an alphabetical system.[677]

We have seen that several of the errors made by Oppert in his list of 1859 were corrected from various sources before 1874.[678] He was still left with three wrong values, five only nearly correct and four omitted altogether. Of the first class he now gives one a value that accords with that of Weisbach—11ᵇ, ‘ko’ for ‘kam,’ the ‘gau’ of Norris and Weisbach.[679] Of the second class he corrects four,[680] and he supplies correct values to three of those previously omitted.[681]

He now presents us with a list of a hundred and twelve distinct signs, and no less than fifteen ideographs; but when their syllabic values are also known the majority are included in the hundred and twelve signs. Four, however, appear among the ideographs for the first time, and raise the total number of signs to a hundred and sixteen. Six of these are,[682] however, repeated twice over to express different syllabic values, thus reducing the number of distinct signs to a hundred and ten. He accepts a hundred and five of the hundred and six signs that were already known, rejecting only one (No. 21). He completes his number by the addition of five other signs,[683] of which Weisbach has accepted three. With these two exceptions, the whole of Oppert’s signs are to be found in Weisbach: that is, a hundred and eight out of the hundred and ten. Weisbach, however, includes in his list the No. 21 of Hincks, omitted by Oppert.

The two writers are also substantially agreed as to the values of the signs. Of the hundred and six given in Menant’s list, we find they differ only as to seven. Of these, two are omitted by Oppert[684] and one by Weisbach.[685] In four cases only have they arrived at absolutely contradictory values.[686]

The discovery announced in 1859 of a determinative sign to indicate that the one preceding it should be read ideographically led to the identification of a number of signs to which ideographic values may be attached, and their number is raised from the seven known in 1859 to sixteen. The ones now added by Oppert are ‘town,’ ‘mountain,’ ‘race,’ ‘arch’ (a window), ‘sea,’ ‘house,’ ‘head,’ ‘ship,’ ‘camel’; and Weisbach has since contributed a fifth determinative which, he says, is placed before articles of wood.[687]

The difficulty of the transliteration is greatly enhanced by the fact that the same sign represents both m and w, and the three gradations of sound—the surd, aspirate and sonant—are not distinguished by separate signs. It is therefore impossible to say in many cases whether to transcribe m or w, k or g, p or b, f or d; and Oppert has enumerated no less than six different modifications of sounds—č (tch), ḡ (dj), z̆, ts, dz, and z—that are all represented by a single sign.[688] Weisbach points out that g, is only clearly distinguished from k when it occurs before i. The Median z represents the Persian z, c, j, and the Babylonian s (and o?); the r and n are sometimes found to be interchangeable. When the sound cannot be checked by its occurrence in a proper name, Oppert generally adopts the hard sound; but he allows himself a certain latitude in the application of this rule, and he shows a decisive preference of w to m. Weisbach follows the uniform practice of transcribing the gutturals, dentals and labials by the tenues; he always uses z for the Persian c, j and z, and for the Babylonian z and s; and, contrary to Oppert, he prefers m to w.