From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

The discovery of the key to the Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions was practically the work of one man—the immortal Jean François Champollion. The decipherment of the Assyro-Babylonian inscriptions was the joint achievement of many men, laboring during many generations, in many and widely separated parts of Asia and Europe. It was effected by daring travelers and explorers, by philologists, philosophers, and historians, most of them laboring independently of one another, but all working, although nearly always unconsciously, toward the same goal.

And an even more singular fact was that the first clue towards the unraveling of the great enigma was found far away from both Assyria and Babylonia and in a place where an explorer bent on searching for it would certainly not look for it. This place was Persepolis, where are the remains of the splendid edifices constructed by Darius I, Xerxes I, and Artaxerxes I, the celebrated Persian Kings of the Achæmenian dynasty.

So far as known the first European to visit these remarkable ruins was the noted Franciscan friar, Fra Oderico, on his way to Cathay in the first quarter of the fourteenth century.

In the latter half of the sixteenth century Persepolis was visited by an Augustinian monk, Antonio de Gouvea, whom Philip III, King of Spain and Portugal, had sent as an ambassador to Shah Abbas the Great, King of Persia. Among the many things which attracted his attention in the old Persian city were the inscriptions which he saw on the monuments, which, “although they are in many parts very distinct, there is nevertheless no one who can read them, for they are not written in Persian, or Arabic or Armenian or Hebrew, which are the languages spoken in this land.”[366]

Some thirty years later Gouvea was followed, as ambassador to Shah Abbas from Philip III, by Don Garcia de Sylva y Figueroa, who wrote a letter on the monuments of Persepolis which attracted deep interest when published in Europe in 1620. In this communication he speaks of “one notable inscription cut in a Jasper-table, with characters still so fresh and faire that one would wonder how it could escape so many ages without touch of the least blemish. The Letters themselves are neither Chaldæan nor Hebrew, nor Greeke, nor Arabike, nor of any other Nation which was ever found of old, or at this day, to be extant. They are all three-cornered, but somewhat long, of the forms of a pyramide, or such a little Obliske as I have set in the margine: (△) so that in nothing do they differ one from one another, but in their placing and situation, yet so conformed that they are wondrous plaine, distinct and perspicuous.”[367]

But the first one to make known these peculiar characters to the scholars of Europe was the learned traveler, Pietro della Valle, of whom we have already spoken. And it was thus that this eminent Roman patrician had the honor of being the first of that long line of investigators whose labors have resulted in building up that comprehensive branch of science now known as Assyriology.[368]

From the time of Pietro della Valle the number of travelers who visited the ruins of Persepolis and wrote of the inscriptions which they saw on the ruins of this old Persian capital rapidly increased. But, although their published observations failed to arouse any special interest at the time, some of them deserve at least a passing notice for the quaint language in which the views of the authors found expression. Thus Thomas Herbert, referring to the inscriptions of Persepolis, writes:

Wee noted above a dozen lynes of strange characters, very faire and apparent to the eye, but so mysticall, so oddly framed, as no Hierogliphick, no other deep conceit can be more difficultly fancied, more adverse to the intellect.... And, though it have small concordance with the Hebrew, Greek, or Latine letter, yet questionlesse to the Inventer it was well knowne; and peradventure may conceale some excellent matter, though to this day wrapt up in the dim leafes of envious obscuritie.[369]

The Italian, Spanish, and English writers on Persepolis were followed by travelers and writers of other nationalities. Among these were Jean Chardin of France, Cornelis de Bruin of Holland, Engelrecht Kaempfer of Germany, and Carsten Niebuhr, a German, long in the service of Denmark. Each of these men made a contribution—small though it was—towards the decipherment of the Persepolitan inscriptions.

Chardin was the first to reproduce in his superbly illustrated work[370] an entire inscription from one of the monuments of Persepolis. This, to scholars, was incomparably more valuable than any of the fragments that had hitherto come to Europe. De Bruin, who visited Persepolis in 1704, and subsequently published a book with magnificent views of the ruins of the old Achæmenia capital, together with numerous inscriptions from its monuments, put more material in the hands of scholars than had any of his predecessors. Kaempfer advanced a step further when he published in 1712 a long inscription in Assyro-Babylonian.