It has often been observed how remarkably new discoveries coincide in point of time, just when they are needed to throw light upon one another. At the very moment when Dr. Schliemann was bringing to light the remains buried in the Hill of Hissarlik, Orientalists were engaged in deciphering the inscriptions found among the antiquities of Cyprus, and upon the rock tablets in the island, by the aid of the still recent results of cuneiform interpretation. The Cyprian characters were proved to belong to a syllabic alphabet, which is a varied form of the cuneiform writing of Babylonia and Assyria, and of an origin older than the Phœnician. The leaders in this work were Mr. George Smith and Dr. Samuel Birch, who assigned a phonetic value to 33 characters of the Cypriote syllabary; and it was followed up with especial zeal by the lamented young scholar, Dr. Johannes Brandis, who determined (as was thought) the remainder of the 60 signs. His unfinished posthumous Essay on the Decipherment of the Cyprian Inscriptions forms the landmark of the state of enquiry in the year in which Dr. Schliemann finished his excavations.[318]
To Dr. Martin Haug belongs the honour of first applying this key to the decipherment of the Hissarlik inscriptions. He traced such striking resemblances in some of the characters to those of the Cyprian alphabet, as to make out a good primâ facie case for their identity, and he seemed to have succeeded in deciphering three words. Two of these were formed by the six characters on a whorl from the Trojan stratum, which were afterwards seen to be identical with those on another from the same depth (7 meters), a repetition which seems to show the importance of the inscription. Both had been specially noticed and discussed by Dr. Schliemann on their discovery;[319] and they will be always memorable in the history of this investigation. Haug read these characters ta. i. o. si. i. go., which he interpreted as a dedication, θείῳ Σιγῷ, “to the divine Sigo,” a deity whose name was found in Sigeum, the Scamander, and even Sicyon; and he thought he traced the same name on two of Schliemann’s small funnels (Nos. 145, 146, p. 191).[320] But the deity was otherwise as unknown as the transmutation of ta. i. o. into θείῳ was forced; and, while Haug was doubtless right in his method, his results must be pronounced at best:—
“Fragments of broken words and thoughts,
Yet glimpses of the true.”
It was with such a conviction that the enquiry was taken up by Professor Theodore Gomperz, of Vienna,[322] whose words are well worth quoting as a lesson in the method of investigation: “One circumstance alone appeared to me consoling, namely, that I did not find myself obliged to add a new hypothesis to the numerous ones already existing, and that I felt it still possible to abide by Haug’s discovery, were it only as a starting-point for further efforts. For the beginning of continuity in enquiry is always the surest harbinger of approaching success.” After making one correction in Haug’s reading of the above inscription, he still found it quite unintelligible, till the thought struck him of reading it from right to left round the whorl, instead of from left to right, and the confused syllables flashed, as by a sudden crystallization, into the pure Greek ta. go. i. di. o. i., that is Ταγῷ δίῳ. “To the divine General or Prince,” an interpretation which Professor Max Müller pronounced to be “almost beyond reasonable doubt.”[323] We deem this solution worthy of special record, both as a landmark in the history of the investigation, and still more as a striking example of the power of mere coincidence to produce combinations that seem to bear the stamp of truth.