The Reign of the Manuscript

by Perry Wayland Sinks

) from which the cuneiform writing was entirely constructed was used in multitudinous combinations and in various positions (somewhat as the Chinese ideographic characters are still used) to record the thoughts and deeds of the primitive Accadians. Great libraries, written in cuneiform, were accumulated in different centers of population; these were transmitted to the succeeding Assyrians and Babylonians. The cuneiform writing was read in the prevailing direction which the characters pointed.

The "key" to the decipherment of the cuneiform writing—as that employed in the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs—was a "lucky guess" by Dr. Grotefend, a German scholar. Following the clue of a few known names on the monuments, verifying by these the conjectural values of six cuneiform combinations, he reached basal conclusions from which, finally, the Assyro-Babylonian scholars have been enabled to read these ancient cuneiform texts and inscriptions with as much assurance as the pages of the Old Testament Hebrew; and so he opened up to view a vast body of the otherwise un-read records of the past. Thus the writings of the great libraries written in this character, as at Assur, Calah, and Nineveh, though buried from sight for multiplied centuries, are now accessible through the labors of the Assyriologists.

The cuneiform literature has one preëminent distinction—its comparative incorruptibility. Manuscripts of parchment or papyrus can be easily tampered with; their contents altered or erased; additions inserted, and parts cut out bodily. They are destructible by fire and water; by time and men. Of the exposure of the papyrus literature, in particular, Mr. George H. Putnam says: "Papyrus was an extremely perishable substance. Damp, worms, moth, mice, were all deadly enemies to the papyrus rolls, but even if, through persistent watchfulness, these were guarded against, the mere handling of the rolls, even by the most careful readers, brought them rapidly to destruction."[48] This statement would apply as well though not to the same extent to the literature embodied on parchment and vellum. The writing on tablets, to the contrary, was measurably proof against the obliterations of time and use and accident. The immense number of the tablets which remain after millenniums of years is proof positive that the cuneiform literature is almost unaffected by the "hand of slowly destroying Time." The British Museum contains the largest collection of cuneiform tablets in the world,—Sir Henry Layard, over half a century ago, contributed thereto more than twenty thousand tablets, part results of his explorations on the site of ancient Nineveh.

(3) The alphabetic writing. The alphabet, together with the printing-press, is to be regarded as among the most important associated inventions of all time. With due respect for tradition and oral teaching, no great permanent progress in civilization could have come about without some mode of writing. It has been said that "till one generation of men could transmit to the next the knowledge which they had acquired, and leave behind them a record of their experiments and observations, the arts and sciences must have remained forever in a very rudimentary state, and civilization, after reaching a certain early stage of development, would have remained almost stationary." Canon Taylor affirms that "every system of non-alphabetic (i. e., hieroglyphic or syllabic) writing would have been either so limited in its power of expression as to be of small practical value, or, on the other hand, so difficult and complicated, as to be unsuited to general use."

A concensus of present opinion among scholars ascribes the parentage of the alphabetic literature—at least as related to the development of civilization—to the ancient Phœnicians. The alphabetic writing may have descended from Crete to the Phœnicians, who, in turn, mediated it to all the after ages. (The Chinese literature, while it is conceded to have had a remote origin and a prolific development, cannot be regarded as an alphabetic literature. It has more of kinship with the cuneiform than either the hieroglyphic or the alphabetic writing.)

Testimony as to the source of the alphabetic writing is available: "The vast majority of alphabets are descended from the so-called Phœnician which is the earliest known, and was in existence near a thousand years B. C., although it was probably influenced by the still more ancient syllabary script of the Assyrians, Babylonians, and the Sumerians on the one hand and the Egyptian pictographs on the other."[49] "The Phœnicians were certainly using it" (the alphabet) "with freedom in the ninth century B. C. According to the view accepted till recently, the alphabet was borrowed by the Phœnicians from the cursive (hieratic) form of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.... The more recent view is that of Dr. A. J. Evans who argues ingeniously that the alphabet was taken over from Crete by the 'Cherethites' and 'Pelethites' or Philistines, who established for themselves settlements on the coasts of Palestine. From them it passed to the Phœnicians, who were their near neighbors, if not their kinsfolk."[50] Of the alphabetic writing Professor Sayce says: "The history of our alphabet is a record of slow stages of growth, through which the idea of sound-writing has been evolved. The first effort to record an event, so as to make it widely known, would naturally be to draw a picture of it. A written word, let us remember, is the picture of a sound." And in the same connection, he says that the ancient Phœnicians (because they were the great traders and settlers of the early world) were most in need of a clear, precise, and communicable method of writing. The alphabetic writing was such a method.

The desire and necessity for a medium of thought-exchange that might serve as the means of communicating ideas to persons at a distance, and by means of which information and desires might be exchanged independent of personal contact, probably led to the invention or expedited the development of the alphabetic writing, which differed from both the hieroglyphic and the cuneiform writings. This seems to have been the genesis of the alphabet; and the Phœnicians are commonly regarded as the first to have employed it for this purpose. At any rate an alphabetic form of writing by means of what has been designated an "ideographic alphabet," an alphabet expressing ideas by means of letters (whether original or an inheritance) was in use by the Phœnicians as early as about 1,000 B. C. In the estimate of scholars, all our alphabets (varying in the number of letters, respectively, from twenty-two in the Hebrew to forty-nine in the Sanscrit) have come down to our times, however circuitous may have been the route, by way of the old Phœnicians.

[Explorations recently made in Crete, in which Dr. A. J. Evans has borne a conspicuous part, have revealed a high state of civilization existing there, long anterior to that of Egypt or Assyria, and disclosed "The existence of a highly advanced civilization, going back far behind the historic period." Among other interesting "finds," more than a thousand clay tablets were unearthed in the ancient palace of Cnossos. The great conflagration which long, long ago destroyed the palace served, by baking these tablets, to make them more permanent. These tablets vary in size and shape and the character of their writing, being inscribed "both in pictographic and linear forms of the Minoan script." As based on the results of these explorations, a claim is made for the ante-Phœnician origin of the alphabetic writing there discovered. In accordance with this hypothesis it is held that the Phœnicians only appropriated and developed what had come to them from Crete—what had existed in Crete for centuries previously. But it was no less an important service which the Phœnicians contributed though it be hereafter shown conclusively that they merely appropriated what had descended to them from the earlier Cretan civilization.

These Cretan tablets are, as yet, undecipherable. They are written in an unknown tongue and await the discovery of some bi-lingual text or inscription which shall prove, as in the case of the Rosetta Stone, the line of cleavage to the interpretation of what is, possibly, the earliest of all written languages. The characters of these tablets are varied, consisting of linear writing and of hieroglyphics. Dr. Evans thus sums up the present evidence of the earlier Minoan or pre-Cretan origin of this alphabetic writing: "When we examine in detail the linear script of these Mycenæan documents, it is impossible not to recognize that we have here a system of writing, syllabic and perhaps purely alphabetic, which stands on a distinctly higher level of development than the hieroglyphs of Egypt or the cuneiform script of contemporary Syria and Babylon."[51]]