The discovery and decipherment of the trilingual cuneiform inscriptions

by Arthur John Booth

Löwenstern, in his ‘Essai de Déchiffrement,’ published in 1845, contributed little to the progress of the study. He, however, boldly attempted to pass beyond the guidance of the Persepolitan inscriptions, and to decipher two proper names in an inscription recently found at Khorsabad. The one he selected is engraved over a bas-relief and appears in Botta (Plate 25). The subject evidently referred to the capture of a city, and Löwenstern learned from the Hebrew Scriptures that the Assyrians had only captured four important places. One of these was Asdod, which was taken by Esarhaddon, and the appearance of sea in the bas-relief left no doubt that this was the place referred to. He had thus ingeniously conjectured the names of the city and the conqueror by independent means; and there was little difficulty in fixing the cuneiform groups in which they were to be found. We have already said that Löwenstern observed the close resemblance between the Assyrian and Persepolitan characters; and he at first thought that the similarity extended to the square writing of the Hebrews. It was by comparison with these that he sought to achieve his decipherment. The name of the town consisted of five characters. The first he did not know, but assumed to be a; the second corresponded exactly to the Hebrew ‘shin,’ the third to the Old Persian d; and, pursuing this method, he satisfied himself that he had deciphered ‘Asdoh’ or ‘Asdod.’ Botta afterwards pointed out that the word had been improperly transcribed, and that the first sign, translated a, was simply the determinative of ‘city.’[777] As regards the group that should contain the name of Esarhaddon, Löwenstern thought it consisted of three signs. The first, he erroneously stated, had been ascertained by Grotefend to be r;[778] the second was already known as s in ‘Asdod’; the third bore a remote resemblance to the Hebrew ‘koph’ turned over on its side. It remained to adapt the result, r s k, to the name of Esarhaddon. The matter was simplified by Isaiah, who calls the king in whose reign Asdod was captured Sargon. Another reading of this name is ‘Sarak,’ which is evidently the word in the inscription, the transposition of the r and s being obviously unimportant. It happened, curiously enough, that Löwenstern guessed the name of the Khorsabad king correctly, but his transliteration was entirely at fault. Two years later, Longpérier pointed out that he had omitted the first sign of the name altogether; and Botta protested against the separation of the second sign into two, in order to evolve r and s.[779]

In June 1846 Hincks began the series of contributions to the subject which he continued down to the time of his death, twenty years later. In his first paper he tells us he had just begun to apply himself to the third Persepolitan, which, he says, he found to agree in ‘character and, to a great extent at least, in language with the Babylonian inscriptions, and to the Assyrian writing in Schulz’s inscriptions.’ ‘In both,’ he says, ‘some of the characters represent elementary sounds and some [represent] combinations. In both, two or more characters are used to represent the same sounds. In both, no vowel is omitted; but vowels and consonants are repeated in two consecutive characters.’ He also ‘found it to be a general rule, though it admits of some exceptions, that when a character occurred in two or more alphabets, it had the same value, or nearly so, in all of them.’ Thus the pa of the second Persepolitan is pa in Assyrian, and ba in Babylonian. He claimed to be able to read the names of ‘Babylon’ and ‘Nineveh’ on certain bricks that had been brought from those places.[780]

A few months later he was able to announce that he had ‘made considerable progress in deciphering the Babylonian cursive and also the lapidary character of the East India House inscription.’ He found that the writing in the third Persepolitan column was identical with the former, or cursive, style, and that its title to be called the ‘Babylonian column’ was therefore incontestable.

The only predecessor he will allow to have had in this inquiry is Grotefend, who has discovered, he says, that the Babylonian characters are partly syllabic and partly literal; and that ‘certain lapidary characters correspond to certain cursive ones.’ Grotefend, he adds, may also have discovered the values of about ten cursive characters correctly, and possibly of ten others approximately. But he was not aware that ‘several equivalent characters might be in use to represent the same letter or syllable.’[781] Hincks was, however, more adequately supplied with materials to work with. Besides the Persepolitan inscriptions which he had the advantage to study in the more perfect copies of Westergaard, he had also access to the list of provinces at Naksh-i-Rustam lately copied by the same traveller. The discovery that a clay cylinder published by Porter reproduced in cursive characters a portion of the East India House inscription written in the lapidary style had, as we have already seen, enabled him to compare together seventy-six signs in the two different modes of writing. These he now attempted to classify according to what he considered to be their values. The Table is the first of the kind that appeared, and is consequently of very exceptional interest. His decipherment was based in the usual manner upon a comparison between the proper names in the Babylonian and those in the Persian column. ‘But,’ he says, ‘even more [values] were determined by comparing different modes of writing the same word.’ His success, so far as it goes, is certainly remarkable. He recognises correctly the signs for the three principal vowels, a, i and u (Nos. 1, 4 and 7); a second sign for u, used in the late Babylonian, is also correctly identified. The breathing sign is rendered with approximate correctness by ya (No. 2; cf. King 226), and the two diphthongs ai and ia figure as yu and ya (9 and 3). The list of consonantal sounds is, of course, far from complete; but it is remarkable that in the great majority of cases the signs are presented to us as syllabic. They even include two compound syllables, ‘bar’ and ‘sar.’ They are distributed among twenty-one different sounds: r or er, ra, ru; n, na, nu, ana; ba, bu, bar; ak, ka, ku; ta, da; s, as, us; sa, su, sar, and the signs for the plural. It will be seen that this affords a remarkable anticipation of a later discovery. A careful examination will show that, so far as the consonantal sounds are concerned, there are extremely few errors. Indeed, out of fifty-five signs, we have only found twelve radical mistakes in this respect. On the other hand, he was able to give to many signs their absolutely correct syllabic value. At the time of writing he was of opinion that the distinction between i and u was not observed; and he accordingly classifies together the syllabic ending in either of these vowels. He thought that the same confusion existed among the consonants. He considered that the language did not admit of distinction between r and l, or between b and p, or w and m; nor between the gutturals k, g and kh; nor between the sibilants; and that ch is expressed by s, and j by k. He identified the personal pronoun I—a-na-ku; and he read the name and titles of Nebuchadnezzar in various inscriptions which Grotefend had mistaken for forms of prayer. He saw clearly the ideographic and determinative value of some of the signs, and fixed correctly upon those for ‘and,’ ‘son,’ ‘great,’ ‘earth,’ ‘one,’ ‘house,’ ‘god,’ ‘man’ (two), and another sign for ‘king’ not previously recognised by Grotefend. He also pointed out two signs for the plural. (December 1846.)

In his paper of January 1847 he increases his list of primary signs to ninety-five, and he analyses the remaining characters found in the East India House inscription published by Mr. Fisher in 1807. He thinks he has been able to assign values to a hundred and ninety-nine of these, and to attach them to some one or other of the ninety-five primary values to which, in his opinion, they corresponded. If this attempt had been successful, he would have arrived at the values of the whole of the two hundred and eighty-seven signs in Mr. Fisher’s list, and a few others in addition. But the paper in other respects indicates a retrograde tendency. ‘The language,’ he says, ‘has been brought to exhibit a much greater similarity to the Semitic ones than I had at first supposed.’ He accordingly abandons the ‘transcription of Babylonian words into Roman characters’ and assimilates them to the letters in the Hebrew alphabet.[782] He distributes the signs into classes according as he supposes them to be labials, gutturals, dentals, nasals, linguals and sibilants. He does not attempt to subdivide the classes into surds and sonants, but he separates each class into two divisions, according as he considers that the consonant is followed by e (:sheva) or by a (-pathac). ‘Values different from these are annexed to the characters which admit them.’ In so far as each sign is inseparably attached to one or other vowel the system remains syllabic; but his new table exhibits a strong desire to revert, if possible, to an alphabetical system in correspondence with the Hebrew. His study of the inscriptions at Van enabled him, even at this early date, to give ‘the mode of expressing numbers in cuneatic characters from 1 to 100,000’: a system he farther exemplified in his later paper on the Van inscriptions.

His manipulation of the two hundred and eighty-seven signs induced him to take a much too favourable opinion of his own achievement, for we find him, in the course of the following year (May 1848), announcing that ‘the values of the great majority of the [Babylonian] characters are, in my judgment, already settled beyond the reach of criticism,’[783] a statement which we now know is, in fact ‘beyond the range of criticism.’ By that time he had, however, made the important discovery that Sennacherib and Esarhaddon were the builders of the two palaces at Nineveh. He would not, however, admit that Sargon was the Khorsabad king, a fact that had just been demonstrated with remarkable ingenuity by Longpérier.[784] Hincks suggested that the proper reading was Ni-Shar.

It is worthy of remark that the writings we have just reviewed of Hincks, in 1846-7, were brought to the notice of Continental students by Mohl, in his ‘Rapport’ to the Société Asiatique of 1848.

It is, in fact, in these essays that the first real progress in the decipherment of Babylonian was made. In them Hincks laid the foundation upon which all subsequent work was raised, a work to which he himself contributed no small share.

The year 1847 was especially rich in contributions to the study. It opened with the remarkable paper we have just reviewed; and during its course Rawlinson expounded his views in the ‘Journal of the Asiatic Society,’ Botta in the ‘Journal Asiatique,’ Longpérier in the ‘Revue Archéologique.’ Löwenstern added another Memoir of greater value than the first, and De Saulcy made his appearance in this field of inquiry by a paper communicated to the Académie des Inscriptions, and by two essays that have exposed him to much criticism.

Hincks, as we have seen, had worked exclusively upon the Persepolitan and Babylonian texts; but the great discoveries of Botta and Layard soon diverted attention to the more ample materials that were beginning to pour in from Khorsabad and Nimrud. We have already alluded to the enormous number of different signs that were found to be employed in the Assyrian inscriptions—no less than six hundred and forty-two, according to Botta’s computation. It seemed incredible that they could all convey different shades of sound. Grotefend noticed that even in the third Persepolitan some signs appeared to be interchangeable, and therefore presumably of similar value; and this peculiarity became even more noticeable in Babylonian.[785] Hincks, as we have seen, noticed ‘the equivalence to each other of different lapidary characters, which are constantly transcribed by one and the same cursive character.’ In a paper read before the Académie des Inscriptions in 1845, Botta explained that many Assyrian characters of very different form were frequently substituted for one another, and the inference was that there are several signs to express the same, or nearly the same, sound. Rawlinson’s attention, up to the present, had been almost entirely fixed upon the Persian column of the Behistun inscription, and his version of it appeared early in 1847. He saw that it afforded the ‘only key to the decipherment of the Babylonian alphabet.’[786] We have observed that Grotefend found himself practically limited to four proper names; Löwenstern had only twenty to work upon;[787] while Hincks and De Saulcy, with the addition of the Naksh-i-Rustam inscription, had forty. From the Behistun and other sources now available to Rawlinson, the number gradually rose to ninety-four;[788] and with these before him, he began to apply himself to ‘the determination of the phonetic powers of the characters.’ Among the new names was that of Nebuchadnezzar, which he at once recognised was the same as occurred so frequently on the bricks at Hillah. This discovery was made quite independently of Dr. Hincks; and Layard is inclined to think that, in actual date, the precedence is due to Rawlinson.[789] He was able already (1847) to announce that he had ‘obtained a tolerably extensive alphabet from the orthography of the proper names’; but he adds: ‘I have left the grammar and construction of the language hitherto untouched.’ He had, however, been greatly struck by the number of signs with apparently equivalent sounds.[790] He found it difficult to admit the existence of variants in the same inscription, except such as were caused by slight changes in the writing of the same character. He saw, however, that no such explanation would cover all the difficulties of the case, for some of the substitutes were obviously totally distinct in form. In this case he did not believe that they were ‘legitimately interchangeable.’ He thought the ‘phonetic organisation of the language was so minute and elaborate that although each form was designed to represent a distinct and specific sound, yet the artist was perpetually liable to confound the characters.’ He suggested also that each consonant had a different sign to express the surd and sonant; and in some cases one might be substituted for the other. The ‘vowel-sounds,’ he declared, ‘were inherent’; but it was allowable also to represent them by separate signs; and farther redundant consonants were frequently introduced for the sake of euphony. These opinions were immediately traversed by Löwenstern, in his ‘Exposé des Eléments’ (1847). This tract followed the sudden, though happily transient, conversion of Hincks to the application of the Semitic vowel system to the Babylonian writing. Löwenstern embraced this view with characteristic energy; and it was adopted also by De Saulcy, in whose case it became one of the chief causes of the ultimate failure of his Assyrian studies.