The Story of the Alphabet

by Edward Clodd

The savants of the seventeenth century were not "wiser in their generation" than the rude nomads who pitched their tents under the shadow of the stone monsters. Many years after Della Valle's visit the Oriental scholar, Hyde, in a book on the Ancient Persian Religion, soberly suggested that the signs were designed by some fantastic architect to show into how many combinations the same kind of stroke would enter. It is a wonder that he did not, with equal sobriety, suggest that they were related to the well-known Norman "hatchet-work." And so the guessing went on. One antiquary contended that they were talismanic signs; another that they were mystic formulæ of the priests, or astrological symbols of the old Chaldean star-worshippers; another saw in them a species of revealed digital language wherewith the Creator talked to Adam, whence the primitive speech of mankind was derived; while others conjectured them to be Chinese, or Samaritan, or Runic, or Ogam characters. Most fantastic of all, one ingenious theorist saw in them the action of numberless generations of worms!

But by the middle of the eighteenth century a sane school of investigators had found its leader. A great traveller, Carsten Niebuhr, father of the famous historian of early Rome, was the first to divine the true character of the inscriptions. He agreed with Della Valle that they were written from left to right, and he saw that they were made up of three different sets of characters, each meaning the same thing. But beyond showing, in his careful transcript published in 1764, that one of the three scripts was simpler in character than the others—all, as he assumed, being alphabetic varieties of one language—he could not go. The meaning still remained a mystery. Thirty years later, Münter, a Danish philologist, correctly guessed that the diagonal bar

, which occurred frequently, was a sign for the separation of words, and, next, he discovered the vowel signs, which, as distinct characters, are absent from the Hebrew and other Semitic languages. This was a great step towards final decipherment. Herodotus (i. 125, &c.) speaks of the Achæmenid dynasty of Persian kings who were the lords of Asia in the sixth and fifth centuries b.c. The ruins of Persepolis are identified as the remains of their palaces. Of this royal house the famous Darius was a member, and Herodotus tells how that monarch, "having gazed upon the Bosphorus, set up two pillars by it of white stone with characters cut upon them, on the one Assyrian and on the other Hellenic, being the names of all the nations which he was leading with him" (iv. 87). The engraving of the same inscription in two or more different languages (of course necessitated by making their decrees known to the various peoples whom they ruled) was thus shown to be a custom of the Persian kings.

Put upon the quest, a French scholar, M. de Sacy, born at Paris in 1758, copied some inscriptions of the Sassanid dynasty, which reigned in Persia a.d. 226-651. These were written in a known alphabet which is a mixture of Persian and Aramaic, called Pehlevi, and were shown by De Sacy to run in the following form:—"I, (M or W,) king of kings, son of (X,) king of kings, did thus and thus." Then, grouping together the several facts, came Dr. Georg Friedrich Grotefend, to formulate the theory that the Persepolitan inscriptions were written in three languages, and not three alphabets of one language, as Carsten Niebuhr had surmised. The recurrence of certain groups of characters led him to the inference that "the inscriptions were a fixed formula, only differing in the proper names." If these inscriptions began, like those read by De Sacy, with the formula, X, the king of kings, son of D, the king of kings, then it was clear that D was X's father; and, further, that D's father was not a king, because his name was not followed by that title, D being therefore the founder of a royal race. Now, Hystaspes, father of Darius, was not king, but satrap under Cambyses; and, joining his knowledge of history to his skill in philology, Grotefend found the key to the royal name. He lived for thirty years after this discovery, but added nothing to his triumph save "a fortunate guess of the name Nebuchadnezzar in one of the Assyrian inscriptions." Other decipherments followed; but it was reserved for the genius and industry of our countryman, the late Sir Henry Rawlinson, to discover the key whereby the ancient languages of Persia, Babylon, and Assyria can be read, and thus "a chapter of the world's history that had been well-nigh wholly lost made known to mankind." That eminent scholar in no wise exaggerated the importance of his work in claiming that its value in the interpretation of cuneiform writing is almost equal to that of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in the interpretation of the hieroglyphic texts of Egypt (Archæologia, xxxiv. p. 75).

Fig. 39.—Rock Inscription at Behistun

The story of Rawlinson's achievement is warrant of the claim. About sixty years ago, being then a lieutenant, he was sent to Persia to drill the army of the Shah. His interest in Oriental history and antiquities was already keen, and he was glad to find himself in regions rich in materials the obscurity of whose meaning quickened inquiry. Among these was a trilingual inscription, dating from the early part of the sixth century b.c., cut on the face of a bare precipitous rock at Behistun, about twenty miles from Kirmanshah, a district abounding in monuments of the past (Fig. 39). At the risk of life and limb he climbed the face of the steep cliff to make copies of such portions of the inscriptions as were accessible with the means at his command, and after a series of efforts, continued at intervals through several years, he finally secured a complete transcript of so much of the writing as time had left uninjured. The inscription is in three languages—Babylonian, Mede or Scythian, and Persian—arranged in parallel columns containing above one thousand lines. It commemorates "the life and acts of Darius Hystaspes, his conquests, and the nations under his sway." Bas-reliefs portray that monarch, bow in hand, sitting with his feet on the prostrate usurper, Gaumates, while a train of nine rebel princes, whose names are inscribed above their effigies, stand before the "king of kings," chained together by the neck. Two of the monarch's soldiers are in the rear. Over Gaumates is written: "This is Gaumates, the Magian; he lied; he said, I am Smerdis, son of Cyrus." The same formula occurs over the heads of each of the nine captives. "This is (M); he lied; he said he was king of (N)." The inscription begins with a solemn invocation to Ormuzd, the old Persian god of light and purity, and passes on to detail the claim of Darius to the throne of the Achæmenids and the possessions of the Persian crown. It tells of the defeat of Smerdis, and of the revolt of Susiana, a province lying between Persia and Babylonia. "I sent thither an army, and the rebel Atrina was brought in chains before me; I slew him." The same story is narrated concerning other rebellious subjects. Of one Phraortes, it is told that his nose, ears, and tongue were cut off, and that he was "crucified at Ecbatana, together with his accomplices." Then the inscription proceeds:

"King Darius saith: These countries rebelled against my power. By lies they were separated from me. The men thou seest here deceived my people. My army took them, according to my orders. King Darius saith: Oh, thou that shalt be king hereafter, see that thou art not guilty of deceit. Him that is wicked, judge as he should be judged, and if thou reignest thus thy kingdom will be great. King Darius saith: What I did, I did ever by the grace of Ormuzd. Thou that readest upon this stone my deeds, think not that thou hast been deceived, neither be thou slow to believe them. King Darius saith: Ormuzd be my witness that I have not spoken these things with lying lips." (Cf. Transactions of Royal Asiatic Society, 1844-46, 1851; also Life of Sir Henry Rawlinson, pp. 146, 153, 326.)

As Professor Mahaffy points out, the exact correspondence of this record, "especially in the many proper names it contains, with the names of persons and provinces described by Herodotus, is a convincing proof of the accuracy of the deciphering. It will give some notion of the style of the documents that have been preserved. It will also prove the accuracy of the accounts given by Herodotus and Xenophon of the character of the ancient Persians, in whom an honest love of truth and hatred of lies was the prominent feature—a feature which we justly honour more than any other in a nation, but in which most Oriental nations, and indeed the Greeks also, were woefully deficient." (Prolegomena, p. 186.)