"I cannot help thinking that both wine and alcohol and tobacco lower the vital powers, and that men are strong in spite of them, not by reason of them.
"Will you forgive me for suspecting that cigars lessen your appetite (which is less keen surely than it ought to be), as well as inflame your eye?"
Newman goes, in his next letter, to a much more intricate subject: i.e. cuneiform inscriptions.
He had been studying them for two months. Emanuel Deutsch, one of the great authorities on cuneiform inscriptions, gives us the following information as regards them:—
The writing itself resembles a wedge, and it has been proved that it was used by the ancient peoples of Babylonia, Assyria, Armenia, and Persia, as well as by other nations. It was inscribed on stone, iron, bronze, glass, or clay. The stylus which impressed the inscriptions on them was pointed, and had three unequal facets, of which the smallest made the fine wedge of the cuneiform signs. The first cuneiform writing of which we know dates from about 3800 B.C.
It was used first in Mesopotamia, and then in Persia, and the districts north of Nineveh. When it became extinct, for nearly sixteen hundred years, its very existence was absolutely forgotten. It was not until the year 1618 that Garcia de Sylva Figuëroa, ambassador of Philip III of Spain, on seeing them, felt convinced that these inscriptions, in a writing to which no one in the wide world possessed a key, must mean something. Therefore he had a line of them copied. In 1693 they were supposed to be "the ancient writings of the Gaures." Hyde, in 1700, trifled with them, and gave them credit for being nothing more than the architect's fancies. Witte saw in them nothing but the disfigurations of many generations of worms. Others had their own speculations as to their meaning. But Karsten Niebuhr took a big step higher and nearer to their real meaning. He made out that there were three cuneiform alphabets, because of the threefold inscriptions at Persepolis.
In 1802 Grotefend, of Hanover, put before the Academy of Göttingen the first cuneiform alphabet. Then, among other great investigators, followed Rawlinson.
The first of these alphabets is Persian; the second the Median; the third the Babylonian.
Deutsch tells us that, originally, the cuneiform signs were pictures of objects drawn in outline on a vegetable substance, known by the native name of likhusi. He thinks it probable that the supply of this was not equal to the demand, for early in the Babylonish history clay was used instead of likhusi.
(This letter is undated.)