From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

But of the four travelers mentioned the one who performed the most important work was Niebuhr, an experienced traveler, an accurate observer and a man of broad scholarship. Besides making careful drawings and measurements of the monuments of Persepolis—monuments which in many respects were the most important in the East—he made copies of numerous cuneiform texts which had not appeared in any preceding work. His studies of the inscriptions also led him to conclude that there were three classes of them and that they were, as some of his predecessors had surmised, to be read from left to right. He had thus not only supplied scholars with new and valuable material but, by his comparative study, blazed the way which led to their final decipherment.

Among the first to attempt decipherment of these inscriptions were such distinguished philologists as Professor Tychsen, of the University of Rostock, and Friedrich Munter, of Copenhagen, and such eminent Orientalists as Eugène Burnouf, Anquetil-Duperron, and Silvestre de Sacy, who was the most eminent Arabist of his age. They did not succeed in solving the problem which had so long baffled the keenest minds of Europe, but they had accumulated the material that was necessary for its solution.

Several years before Botta and Layard sent their vast stores of tablets from Nineveh and Nimroud to the Louvre and the British Museum, it was evident from the few specimens of cuneiform inscriptions which had reached Europe from Mesopotamia that the script on the Babylonian tablets was the same as one of the varieties occurring in the trilingual inscriptions of Persepolis. It was then only a step to the conclusion that these two scripts were identical and represented identical languages. Thanks to the researches of De Sacy, Burnouf, Anquetil-Duperron, and others, it was now possible to make the old Persian script—the first class—of the trilingual inscriptions of Persepolis serve as a key to the third class, or what is now designated as the Assyro-Babylonian script. The process was exactly similar to that which enabled Champollion to use the Greek on the Rosetta stone as a key to the mysterious hieroglyphics of the Egypt of the Pharaohs.

But, although the method to be adopted seemed simple enough, the labor involved was incomparably greater than that which was required of the illustrious French savant. For the Greek on the Rosetta stone was a well-known language, whereas Old Persian, which was to serve as the key for deciphering the Babylonian script, was itself quite as unknown as the writing to be deciphered. It was only after a knowledge of Old Persian had been acquired by comparing it with Avestan, Pahlavi, and Sanscrit, that it could serve as the long-sought key to Assyro-Babylonian.

The first one to read an Old Persian word was Georg Friederich Grotefend. This was in 1802, when he was only twenty-seven years of age and without any knowledge of oriental languages. Nevertheless, he was, wonderful to relate, able “to solve the riddle practically in a few days, that had puzzled much older men and scholars apparently much better qualified than himself. Under the magical touch of his hand the mystic and complicated characters of ancient Persia suddenly gained new life. But when he was far enough advanced to announce to the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen the epoch-making discovery which established his reputation for ever, that learned body, though comprising men of eminent mental training and intelligence, strange to say, declined to publish the Latin memoirs of this little-known college teacher, who did not belong to the University circle proper nor was even an Orientalist by profession. It was not until ninety years later—1893—that his original papers were rediscovered and published by Prof. Wilhelm Meyer, of Göttingen, in the Academy’s transactions—a truly unique case of post mortem examination in science.”[371]

Notwithstanding, however, the attitude of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, scholars like De Sacy, Heeren, and others were not slow to recognize the importance of Grotefend’s far-reaching discoveries. The number of investigators in the studies of Europe and in the ruin-dotted plains of Persia and Mesopotamia gradually increased. The careful researches of Niebuhr were followed in the first half of the nineteenth century by the painstaking observations of Rich, Ker Porter, and Colonel Chesney. But while those noted explorers were winning laurels in the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates, Sir Henry Rawlinson “forced the inaccessible rock of Behistun to surrender the great trilingual inscription of Darius, which, in the quietude of his study on the Tigris, became the ‘Rosetta Stone’ of Assyriology and in his master hand the key to the understanding of the Assyrian documents.”[372]

While Rawlinson was conducting his celebrated investigations relating to the trilingual inscription of Behistun, and Layard and Rassam were unearthing the priceless documents of Asurbanipal’s library, Edward Hincks in Ireland, Edwin Norris in England, Eugène Burnouf and M. de Saulcy in France, Westergaard, a Dane, and Lassen, a Norwegian, both living in Germany, were astonishing the learned world by their wonderful contributions towards the decipherment of the inscriptions of Persepolis and Behistun and of tablets and seals and cylinders taken from the temples and palaces of Assyria and Babylonia.

Thanks to the investigators named and to a rapidly increasing number of others, the decipherment of Assyrian inscription was gradually assuming the dignity of an exact science. But there were still scholars of acknowledged eminence who questioned the validity of the system employed and who openly expressed grave doubts about the translations of the cuneiform inscriptions which had been published by divers scholars of Great Britain and the Continent.

Finally, in 1857, it was suggested to make a test which should silence all objectors and demonstrate that the method of the decipherers reposed on a scientific basis. An Assyrian text was translated independently by Hincks, Talbot, Oppert, and Rawlinson, and sent sealed to the Royal Asiatic Society. When these versions were compared by a committee of distinguished scholars they were found to show such a remarkable correspondence that there could no longer be any reasonable doubt as to the system of decipherment or the substantial accuracy of the four translations which had been offered to the distinguished committee of the Royal Asiatic Society.

But, notwithstanding this remarkable confirmation of the correctness of the method of decipherment employed by Assyriologists, there still remained a certain number of skeptics even among the most noted scholars of the age—men like Gutschmid in Germany and Renan and Gobineau in France—who refused to admit the conclusiveness of the demonstration which had silenced most other objectors. Even after the French Institute on July 15, 1863, had awarded to Oppert the coveted quinquennial prize of twenty thousand francs for “that work or discovery which is best calculated to honor or serve the country,” skepticism still persisted among certain Orientalists.[373] Indeed, it was not until the appearance in 1872 of the masterly Die Assyrisch—Babylonischen-Keilinschriften of Eberhard Schrader that general confidence in the prevailing system of cuneiform decipherment was firmly established and that all opposition to its methods was finally abandoned.