This Essay of Hincks exercised a decisive influence upon the future study of Assyrian. It demonstrated that, although the language was Semitic, the mode of writing was not Semitic; and for a time it divided scholars into two opposing camps. Those who followed Hincks maintained that the language was syllabic, and that each sign expressed a consonant associated with an inherent and invariable vowel. Those, on the contrary, who sought to assimilate it to the Hebrew system were of opinion that the signs represent simple consonants that might be preceded or followed by any vowel. We have noted the gradual recognition of the syllabic nature of the Assyrian writing. The earliest opinion was that the signs were both syllabic and alphabetical, and we have seen that Grotefend in his transliteration treated them in this manner. Hincks in his first Essay followed the same method, but he found the vast majority of the signs were syllabic, and his Table shows only four that are purely alphabetical. Then came the discovery that the language itself was Semitic, and the inference naturally followed that the writing was so likewise. Under the influence of this conviction, Hincks drew up his Second Table, showing only the consonantal value of the signs, and leaving them to be associated indifferently with the vowel sounds. But he remained in this opinion for a comparatively short time, and in the end of the same year he had reverted to his original view. The effect of the present essay was to establish the absolute syllabism of the language; and in a paper read shortly afterwards before the British Association ‘On the Language and Mode of Writing of Assyria’ (August 1850), he ‘maintained, in opposition to all other writers, that the characters had all definite syllabic values, there being no consonants, and consequently no necessity or liberty of supplying vowels.’ In this opinion he then stood alone. Rawlinson, in reply, expressed his belief that the signs had a syllabic origin, but that they were ‘subsequently used to express a mere portion of a syllable.’ ‘He could,’ he says, ‘adduce numerous instances where the cuneiform signs were used as bona fide letters.’[815]

In France, the opinion Hincks expounded in his second essay took immediate root. The logical instincts of the French mind clung with desperate tenacity to the conviction that a Semitic language could only be expressed by a Semitic mode of writing. Löwenstern at first (1845) thought that the signs represented some sort of mechanical union of consonant and vowel: that is to say, that there was a fixed portion of the sign to represent the consonantal sound, and a variable portion to indicate the conjunction of the vowel. ‘The signs,’ he said, ‘reproduce in part the same forms differently combined, which suggests a syllabic union in many of the signs.’ But he subsequently became the most thorough-going champion of the alphabetical theory. Botta only just found it ‘possible to conceive that the language was syllabic,’ yet he followed Longpérier in the luminous suggestion already described.[816] Even De Saulcy was haunted by dim fears that, after all, Assyrian might turn out to be syllabic, and the consistency with which he adhered to the opposite or Semitic mode of writing rendered his subsequent studies almost valueless. Rawlinson, as we shall soon see, yielded in time, and his transliteration of the Behistun inscription shows small traces of his early heresy, which he was still ready to defend in August 1850.

Such was the progress already made in decipherment when Rawlinson at length gave to the world some of the results of his labours in the same field. It will be remembered that in the autumn of 1847 he succeeded in taking a copy of the third column of the Behistun inscription. Whatever leisure he could command during the year 1848 and the early part of 1849 he devoted to its study; and when he returned to England in the autumn of that year, he brought the translation home with him. The work of publication was one of great difficulty, in consequence of the multitude of strange characters in many languages that had to be reproduced and corrected; and although Rawlinson remained in England till 1851, he was obliged to leave before it was accomplished. Some Continental writers chose to make this delay a matter of complaint against Rawlinson, whom they accused of deliberately withholding his copies for personal and selfish motives. It would be difficult, however, to mention anyone who was at that time at all likely to profit by their possession. The special qualifications of a decipherer are by no means common, and M. de Saulcy at least gave decisive proof that he did not possess them. M. Oppert, on the other hand, was still absorbed in the Persian and Median versions. But these gentlemen, and those who then shared their feelings, write as though Major Rawlinson had appropriated the rock of Behistun as well as the copy of the inscription that covered it.[817] They seem to forget that if they were prepared to undergo the same sacrifice and overcome the same difficulties, they could in a few weeks procure copies for themselves. What would have been more natural than to give the commission to M. Flandin, whose enterprise in such matters had already been so conspicuously illustrated? Nothing, however, could be farther from their intentions. They had no notion of foregoing the luxury of feeling aggrieved with the English soldier whose energy, like his genius, so far out-soared their own. Rawlinson was, we submit, fully justified in the course he adopted. He had obtained his copy at great personal sacrifice; no one in Europe was so qualified to accomplish the task of decipherment as himself, and the eighteen months he devoted to the task was not excessive. The subsequent delay in publication was incident to the nature of the work itself, for which he was not responsible.

He, however, lost no time in placing the general results at which he had arrived before the public. On January 19 and February 16, 1850, he read papers before the Asiatic Society ‘On the Inscriptions of Assyria and Babylon,’ and these, with a few additional notes, were published in March of that year.

He tells us he had found more than eighty proper names in the trilingual inscriptions, including those in the Behistun; and ‘by a careful comparison of the duplicate forms of writing’ them in the Persian and Babylonian columns he had been able, by means of the former, which were known, to determine the values of about a hundred Babylonian characters. The next step was by a collation of the inscriptions to ascertain ‘the homophones of each known alphabetical power.’ By this means he ‘added nearly fifty characters to those previously known through the Persian key.’ He confessed that his knowledge of the Babylonian characters was at present limited to these one hundred and fifty characters.[818] From the direction of his studies we may infer that these signs were chiefly taken from the trilingual inscriptions; and in that case they would be practically exhaustive; but they would amount to less than one half of those in general use in the Assyrian text.[819] The same process of comparison with the Persian translation enabled him to draw up ‘a list of about two hundred Babylonian words of which we know the sound approximately and the meaning certainly.’ But in addition to these, he was able, by ‘an extensive comparison of similar or cognate phrases, to add about two hundred meanings certainly, and a hundred more, probably, to the vocabulary already obtained through the Babylonian translation.’ He was thus acquainted with the meaning of about five hundred out of a vocabulary which he estimated as containing five thousand words.[820] These words, he explains, ‘are almost all found either in their full integrity or subjected to some slight modification in Assyrian’; and they enabled him ‘to arrive at a pretty correct notion of the general purport of the phrases in which they occur.’ Although his vocabulary was still limited to one-tenth of the vocabulary, it embraced ‘all the most important terms in the language’; and he found it sufficient for the interpretation of the historical inscriptions.

The present Memoir was intended simply as introductory to the subject, and he did not give a list of the one hundred and fifty signs with their values attached. We cannot, therefore, institute a comparison as yet with the Syllabarium already drawn up by Hincks. It is sufficiently clear, however, that he had not, at the time of writing the Memoir, realised the essentially syllabic character of the language. There are, he says, ‘cases where a single alphabetical power appertains to the sign,’ and, he adds, ‘it cannot certainly be maintained that the phonetic portion of the alphabet is altogether syllabic.’ ‘There is,’ he observes, ‘an extensive syllabarium; but at the same time many of the characters can only be explained as single consonants.’ There is no indication that he had as yet apprehended the principle that governs the combination of consonant and vowel, as recently expounded by Hincks, and which is interwoven with the whole structure of the language. Indeed he says distinctly: ‘I have neither adopted, nor do I conceive it possible to adopt, any system with regard to the employment of the vowels in Assyrian and Babylonian.’ In some other respects also he was still behind the great Irish scholar. Hincks, for example, had laid down that the distinction between the consonantal sounds is uniformly maintained; and the truth of this statement has been since confirmed. Rawlinson was, however, still of opinion that ‘the gutturals and sibilants everywhere interchange.’ ‘There is the greatest possible difficulty in distinguishing between k, d, and t. L and v interchange.’ It is evident also that he had still much to learn from his rival on the subject of the ideograms. It may be doubted indeed how far he had as yet apprehended the important place they occupy. ‘The names of the gods,’ he says, ‘are represented by signs which appear in some cases to be arbitrary monograms, but which are more generally either the dominant sound of the name or its initial phonetic power.’ He thought, for example, that the monogram for Bel was simply the letter ‘B,’ an idea that is wholly unfounded. He is of course aware that there are many other ideograms besides those used for the gods, but he gives them no sort of prominence. He, however, attributes an ideographic origin to the syllables. ‘When a sign represents a syllable,’ meaning apparently a compound syllable, ‘I conjecture that the syllable in question may have been the specific name of the object which the sign was supposed to depict; whilst in cases where a single alphabetical power appertains to the sign it would seem as if that power had been the dominant sound in the name of the object.’ But this is a purely academical question. The important point lay in precisely the opposite direction, and attention had been already called to it by Hincks. The peculiarity most necessary to emphasise is that in a vast majority of cases the pronunciation of the ideogram has no relation whatever to the name of the object it represents, nor, when it has a syllabic power, to the phonetic value of the syllable. Rawlinson, however, did good service in the present Memoir by laying down the first rudiments of the grammar, a branch of the subject that Hincks subsequently did much to elucidate; and he was also the first to bring into prominence the polyphonic character of the language. Hincks had indeed remarked that ‘many characters admit of two or more kindred values’; but Rawlinson farther shows that ‘certain characters represent two entirely dissimilar sounds—sounds so dissimilar that they cannot be brought into relation with each other.’ He gives as an example the sign for the vowel a, which also conveys the sound of ‘bar.’

But the great distinction of Rawlinson lay in his unequalled power of translation. Large numbers of Assyrian inscriptions were now before the world. The ‘Monument de Khorsabad’ had appeared in 1848; Layard’s collection followed in 1849, and included the inscription on the Black Obelisk found in 1846. So far only a few words had been made out with more or less of accuracy; but nothing had yet been done in the way of a connected translation. The few lines of the Khorsabad inscription which Hincks attempted in the Addenda to his paper (Feb. 26, 1850) had not as yet appeared.[821] Rawlinson, however, observed that many of the common expressions used at Behistun were adopted almost verbatim from the Assyrian annals; and it was the discovery of these known passages in the Assyrian inscriptions that first encouraged him to undertake their translation. He disclaimed all pretensions to be ‘a complete master of the Assyrian language’; and he still speaks of it as to a great extent unintelligible. ‘The first outwork,’ he says, ‘has been carried in a hitherto impregnable position, and that is all’ Indeed he is so discouraged by the difficulty of the task that he is sometimes disposed ‘to abandon the study altogether in utter despair of arriving at any satisfactory result.’ In consequence of the profusion of ideograms in proper names, he finds that their ‘pronunciation is a matter of exceeding difficulty, nay, as I think, of absolute impossibility’; and it was in this department that he achieved the least success. He, however, passes in review many of the principal inscriptions that were then known, and analyses the contents of each.[822] He begins with the earliest in date, the one taken from the North West Palace at Nineveh, which he ascribes to King Assur-adan-pal—really Assur-natsir-pal. He passes on to the inscription of his successor, whom he calls Temenbar II. (really Salmaneser II.), which covers the Black Obelisk, and it is to it that he devotes the largest share of attention.[823] His analysis, partly a verbal translation and partly a summary, fills no less than seventeen pages, and the achievement cannot fail to elicit unqualified admiration. The unfortunate failure to identify a large proportion of the proper names gives to it an unreal appearance that no doubt strikes the modern student unfavourably and may at first lead him to exaggerate its deficiencies. If, however, he is careful to remember that it is the first attempt of the kind ever made, his feelings will soon turn to astonishment that so much should have been correctly made out of what had hitherto been absolutely unintelligible. He may profitably compare a few passages with a modern version. For example, Temenbar begins: ‘At the commencement of my reign after that I was established on the throne I assembled the chiefs of my people and came down into the plains of Esmes, where I took the city of Haridu, the chief city belonging to Nakharmi.’ A recent translation of the same passage runs: ‘At the beginning of my reign when on the throne of the kingdom I had seated myself in state, my chariots and [my] armies I assembled. Into the depths of the land of Simesi I penetrated; Aridu the strong city of Ninni I captured.’ Again Rawlinson translates: ‘I went out from the city of Nineveh and crossing the Euphrates I attacked and defeated Ahuni, the son of Hateni, in the city of Sitrat, which was situated upon the Euphrates, and which Ahuni had made one of his capitals. Ahuni, the son of Hateni, with his gods and his chief priests, his horses, his sons and his daughters and all his men of war, I brought away to my country of Assyria.’ The modern version says: ‘I departed from Nineveh; the Euphrates I crossed at its flood; I marched against Akhuni, the son of Adini. The country of Shitamrat, a mountain peak on the banks of the Euphrates, he made his stronghold. The peak of the mountain I captured; Akhuni, with his gods, his chariots, his horses, his sons, his daughters and his army, I carried away and to my city of Assur I brought’;[824] and so on through the events of thirty-one years of the reign of the great king. On the other hand, it would be too much to say that even the sense is always preserved. There are, in fact, many and serious divergencies from the correct translation as it now stands, after more than forty years’ continuous study. It is impossible that it could have been otherwise with the means then at hand. The wonder is that so much could have been accomplished with one hundred and fifty imperfectly understood characters; and with only five hundred words arrived at conjecturally out of some six thousand. Rawlinson himself warned the reader that here and there ‘little dependence can be placed on the translation’; and he confesses that sometimes he could not ‘conjecture even the meaning of several passages.’ Notwithstanding his difficulty with the proper names, a host of new ones were now for the first time identified: Amanus; the Hittites; Chaldæans; the rivers Tigris, Euphrates, Belikh; the cities of Borsippa, Tyre, Sidon, Gabal, Caleh. On the other hand, the Akkadians now make their first appearance in modern history as ‘Hekdi,’ ‘which may be connected with the Armenian “Haik.”’ Hazael of Damascus is still concealed as ‘Khazakan of Atesh’ and ‘Jehu the son of Omri’ appears as ‘Yahua the son of Hubiri,’ ‘a prince,’ says the translator, ‘of whose native country I am ignorant.’ He called attention to the name of Yehuda in a Khorsabad inscription in connection with that of Hamath; but he hesitated to identify it with Judah. Indeed at this period he could not bring himself to believe that the son of the Khorsabad king was Sennacherib and his grandson Esarhaddon, as Hincks ventured to assert.[825] The signs for Sargon he transliterated ‘Arko-tsin,’ and those for Sennacherib, ‘Bel — — Adonim-sha’; but Esarhaddon came out almost correct as ‘Assar-Adan.’ He concludes his paper by an analysis of the inscriptions found at Khorsabad, containing the annals of ‘Arko-tsin.’

It was not till the following year, and till after Rawlinson’s return to Persia, that the publication of the third column of the Behistun inscription was completed. It fills the fourteenth volume of the ‘Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,’ and the greater part of it was laid on the table before May 1851.[826] A portion of the expense was defrayed by a Government grant, made at the suggestion of Lord John Russell; and the volume consists of seventeen large plates containing the cuneiform text with transliteration and a Latin translation. Then comes an ‘Indiscriminate List of Babylonian and Assyrian Characters,’ with their phonetic powers, and also such ideographic values as had been ascertained. The list includes two hundred and forty-six principal signs, many of which are followed by others varying in form; and generally representing the different methods of writing found at Persepolis, Babylon and Nineveh. An analysis of the text, extending over a hundred pages, follows, but it has not been carried farther than to the end of the first column. The ‘Memoir on the Babylonian and Assyrian Inscriptions’ is even more incomplete. It covers only sixteen pages, and breaks off in the middle of a sentence, before the analysis of the second sign was concluded. No explanation is given of this abrupt termination.

The discovery of a separate sign for each combination of vowel and consonant, explained by Dr. Hincks in his Appendix of January 1850, no doubt exercised considerable influence on Rawlinson,[827] and we are now in a position to recognise the full effect it produced in the progress of the study. How far Rawlinson independently divined the existence of some such principle is by no means clear, but we have no doubt that when he read his first paper to the Society he was still of opinion that the alphabetical system entered largely into the Assyrian language. ‘Many of the characters,’ he then said, ‘can only be explained as single consonants.’[828] In accordance with this view, when he had occasion to refer to the Assyrian characters, he uniformly gives them purely alphabetical values, although in many cases their correct syllabic values had been already definitely fixed in Hincks’s Essay.[829] Hincks himself pointed this out in one notable case. In 1850, Rawlinson said that the suffix of the third person plural is a simple n; but soon afterwards Hincks showed that the consonantal termination is followed by u. This opinion Rawlinson adopted in 1851, and remarked of the word ‘Yatipsu,’ ‘the termination in u marks, of course, the plural number like the Hebrew.’[830] ‘When,’ says Hincks, ‘the commentary was published [in 1850] no u could be discovered. The sign he now reads su was a simple s.’[831] These facts are not sufficiently accounted for by the explanation Rawlinson gives in his present Memoir. ‘In the articulation kat, for example, which is composed of two characters, ka and at, either one or other of these signs must represent a simple letter rather than a syllable; and as this peculiarity of expression pervades the whole Assyrian alphabet, I think I am justified in still adhering to the statement which I announced last year, that the phonetic signs were in some cases syllabic and in others literal.’[832] However this may be, he now finally abandons the description of the signs as letters, and no simple alphabetical values are to be found in his ‘Indiscriminate List.’ There can be little doubt that the alteration in the method of writing is to be best explained by a corresponding change of opinion.[833] However great may have been his obligation to Hincks, he soon made the discovery his own. He corrects the errors and supplies the deficiencies of his predecessor. He suppresses the twofold signs for a, and limits the regular syllabic combinations to the three vowels a, i and u, which thus yielded six instead of seven values for each of the consonants. Following Hincks, he accepts only fifteen distinct consonantal values, but he prefers to use z and kh in place of the j and g of Hincks, now written z and ḫ. With these he has given one hundred and seven simple syllabic combinations, a much larger number than really exists; but he has no less than seventy-eight correct, out of a possible number that slightly exceeds eighty.[834] He, however, took no account of the signs that indicated the exceptional combinations with the vowel e, which amount to about a dozen. This defect was soon afterwards noticed by Hincks, who, however, signally failed in his attempt to identify them. On the other hand, we are now introduced for the first time to the compound syllables that form so large a portion of the Babylonian signs. These, unlike the simple syllables so successfully treated by Hincks, consist of two consonants separated by a vowel. It is true that a few made their appearance in Hincks’s short translation from the Khorsabad inscription (February 1850), such as ‘sib,’ ‘kun,’ ‘bul’ and ‘gur,’ along with three others that are incorrect.[835] We also learn from a later publication that before the appearance of Rawlinson’s Syllabarium Hincks knew the values of upwards of twenty other compound syllabic signs.[836] But they do not seem to have been made known to the world, and they all, with the exception of five, are now met in the Syllabarium for the first time. Rawlinson gives sixty-eight of these syllables, and no less than fifty are correct. He has been unable to give any phonetic value to sixty out of his two hundred and forty-six principal signs, but in several cases he has determined their ideographic meaning. The distribution of the signs, as explained by Hincks, considerably diminished the number of supposed homophones, and the compound syllables now enumerated tended in the same direction. But Rawlinson dwells with increasing bitterness on the extreme confusion introduced into the language by polyphones. He complains that ‘after years of laborious research he has overcome the difficulty to but a limited extent.’ ‘The meaning of a word,’ he says, ‘may be ascertained from the trilingual inscriptions, or from its occurring in a variety of passages with only one possible signification; but unless its correspondent can be recognised in some Semitic tongue it is often impossible, owing to the employment in it of a polyphone character to fix its orthography; and this uncertainty presses on the student with almost crushing severity.’[837] In addition to this, he had to contend with the difficulty that besets all early decipherers—the inability to distinguish between his own correct and incorrect values, where the latter often cause more confusion than if the sound were still regarded as doubtful. Notwithstanding all these obstacles, his transliteration was sufficient to afford a considerable knowledge of the nature of the language; and to enable the student to recognise the connection of the words that resulted with their Semitic relatives. In the forty years that elapsed between the version we are now considering, and that given by Dr. Bezold, a whole army of scholars has been ceaselessly at work upon the Babylonian and Assyrian inscriptions, and the point they have reached is naturally far in advance of that in which it was placed by the first Essay of Rawlinson. The comparison of a few passages, taken almost at random, will enable the reader to appreciate the position the study had reached in 1851.[838] The first lines of the inscription are rendered thus by Rawlinson, De Saulcy and Bezold.

Paragraph I.