Meanwhile the excavations at Tellô (Lagash) which had been brought suddenly to an end by the death of the brilliant French excavator (M. de Sarzec) in May, 1901, were resumed in January, 1903, under the directorship of Captain Gaston Cros. The principal fresh discovery made was a massive fortification wall built by Gudea (circ. 2450 B.C.). It is about thirty-two and a half feet thick, and in places is still in position to the height of twenty-six feet. Captain Cros also excavated a large rectangular building, and brought to light various objects of interest, including implements of flint and copper, together with a brick-stamp of Narâm-Sin, which latter may be regarded as evidence that building operations were carried on in Lagash by a Semitic king of Agade during the period of Semitic supremacy.
CHAPTER III—DECIPHERMENT OF THE CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS
THE first person to bring reports of cuneiform inscriptions to Europe was Pietro della Valle, an Italian belonging to a Roman family of noble birth. In the years 1614-26 he made a journey to Turkey, Egypt, Palestine, Persia and India, and published an account of his travels in 1650, but the first communication of his discovery of cuneiform inscriptions at Persepolis was contained in a letter written from Shiraz and dated October 21st, 1621. Josafat Barbaro at the end of the fifteenth century had already taken notice of the strange signs found on the monuments at Persepolis, but Pietro della Valle was the first to suspect that the inscriptions were something more than mere decorative incisions on the rock. But though Pietro della Valle had made copies of a few of the inscriptions on the walls of the ruined palaces of Persepolis as early as 1621, to Chardin (1674) belongs the honour of making the first copy of a complete cuneiform inscription, the so-called “Window-Inscription,” the shortest of the trilingual Achaemenian inscriptions, and his copy is to be found in the account of his travels (published 1711). This same inscription was copied in 1694 by Kampfer, who also copied the Babylonian text of the “H” inscription found at Persepolis, and who was the first to adopt the term “cuneiform.” In the work which he published in 1712 he discusses whether the unknown script is alphabetic, syllabic, or ideographic, and decides in favour of the last. In 1701, the Dutchman De Bruin commenced his travels: he devoted the year 1704 to an examination of the ruins at Persepolis and ten years later he published two new trilingual inscriptions in addition to an Old Persian and a Babylonian inscription, but to copy was one thing and to decipher was quite another, and well nigh a century elapsed before any real progress was made towards the unravelling of these cryptic signs, and the reconstruction of the languages which they embodied. In 1762 the inscription on the Vase of Xerxes found by Count Caylus was published, and a quadrilingual inscription of this king was published the same year. In 1765 Carsten Niebuhr, a Dane, copied several Achaemenian inscriptions at Persepolis, and pointed out that the first of the three columns on each of the trilingual inscriptions that had been found, contained only forty-two varieties of cuneiform characters from which he surmised rightly that the system in the first column was neither ideographic (each sign representing a word), nor syllabic (each sign representing a syllable), but alphabetic. From 1798 onwards, Tychsen and Münter, also a Dane, carried on the work begun by Niebuhr, and published their results in 1802. Münter had correctly guessed that the ubiquitous diagonal wedge
served to separate the words from each other, and one word which occurred at the beginning of each inscription, he rightly adjudged to be the word for “king.” In the meantime the Zend[37] language of the later Zoroastrian faith had been rediscovered, and with the aid of it, de Sacy had been able to decipher the Pehlevi[38] inscriptions. Now only the older Persian inscriptions of the Achaemenian kings awaited interpretation. In 1802 G. Friedrich Grotefend, of Hanover, a schoolmaster by profession, entered the field, and by the following process of reasoning he became the pioneer discoverer of part of the Persian cuneiform alphabet, and the first decipherer of a complete cuneiform inscription. Old writers had provided him with the all-important information that the palaces of Persepolis, amid the ruins of which so many of these cuneiform inscriptions had been found, were built by the Achaemenian kings. The Pehlevi inscriptions moreover, which had also been found on this site and had been deciphered by de Sacy, led him to expect that the cuneiform inscriptions would contain something analogous. Grotefend had already satisfied himself that the inscriptions read from left to right, and selecting two short inscriptions, one engraved on a gate-post of a building on the second palace-terrace, and the other engraved on the wall of a building on the third palace-terrace at Persepolis, he commenced his successful investigations. Both inscriptions contained the group of signs which Münter had already rightly inferred represented “king,” though what was the Persian for “king” remained as yet unknown, the only difference being that in Inscription I “king” was preceded by a group of signs which may be conveniently designated “X,” while in Inscription II “king” is preceded by a group of signs which may be called “Y,” and that moreover in Inscription II “X” and the word for “king” following it occurred after the “Y” + “king.” In I on the other hand “X” + “king” was followed by another group of signs which may be labelled “Z,” without however the usual accompanying “king.”
Thus I reads “X” + king.........“Z”.........
And II reads “Y” + king......... “X” + king.
From this, Grotefend concluded that the groups of signs “X” “Y” and “Z” represented proper names, and that as “X” and “Y” were accompanied by “king,” they must be king’s names, and lastly Achaemenian kings’ names, for ancient writers stated that these palaces at Persepolis were built by Achaemenian kings, and furthermore their position suggested that these proper names must stand in genealogical relation to each other. In I “X” must be the son of “Z,” and in II “Y” must be the son of “X”; “X” and “Y” are accompanied with the sign for “king,” “Z” is not, therefore “Z” the father of “X” is not a king, and consequently “X” is presumably the founder of the dynasty. But apart from this hypothesis, some of the names of the five kings composing the (fortunately) short Achaemenian Dynasty—Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius, Xerxes and Artaxerxes—were at once ruled out of court: thus Cyrus and Cambyses were out of the question, for “X” and “Y” did not commence with the same cuneiform letter (it must be remembered that it had already been rightly assumed that the system was an alphabetic one), and moreover Cyrus’ father and son were both named Cambyses, and accordingly if “X” were Cyrus then “Y” and “Z” should be the same, which they are not. Cyrus and Artaxerxes were likewise disqualified, as there was no such discrepancy in the length of the words, there thus remained only Darius and Xerxes to be considered, and as “X’s” father “Z” is not called king, and it is further known that Hystaspes the father of Darius is not styled “king” by the classical writers, “X” was rightly assumed to be Darius. Having ascertained the oldest forms of the names of the Achaemenian kings in question from the classical writers, and Hebrew and Persian literature, he applied these forms to the groups of cuneiform signs which he had been led to believe they represented, and he found the respective groups contained the same number of individual signs as the proper names in question contained letters, and for