When the first Assyrian sculptures were found by Botta and Layard not fifty years ago in the mounds of rubbish which covered the ruins of Nineveh, and brought home to Europe, it was seen that they were covered with inscriptions in an unknown character. It was called the cuneiform, because it was made up of combinations of a single sign, resembling a thin wedge or arrow-head. This sign was made in three fundamental ways, i.e. either horizontal [symbol], vertical[symbol], or angular [symbol], and all the characters were made up of combinations of these primary forms, which were obviously produced by impressing a style with a triangular head on moist clay. They resembled, in fact, very much the strokes and dashes used in spelling out the words conveyed by the electric telegraph, in which letters are formed by oscillations of the needle.
This mode of writing had apparently been developed from picture-writing, for several, of the groups of characters bore an unmistakable resemblance to natural objects. In the very oldest inscriptions which have been discovered the writing, is hardly yet cuneiform, and the primitive pictorial character of the signs is apparent.
But the bulk of the cuneiform inscriptions not being pictorial, there could be little doubt that they were phonetic, or represented sounds. The question was, what sounds these characters signified, and when translated into sounds, what words and what language did the groups of signs represent?
The first clue to these questions was, as in the parallel case of Egypt, afforded by a trilingual inscription. The kings of the Persian Empire reigned over subjects of various races and languages. The three principal were the Persians, an Aryan race who spoke an inflectional language which has been preserved in old Persian and Zend; Semites, who spoke Aramaic, a language closely allied to Hebrew; and descendants of the older Accadian races, whose language was Turanian, or agglutinative.
It is almost the same at the present day in the same region, where edicts or inscriptions, to be readily intelligible to all classes of subjects, would require to be made in Persian, Arabic, and Turkish.
Accordingly, the pompous inscriptions and royal edicts of these ancient monarchs were frequently made in the three languages, and specimens of these were brought to Europe. The difficulty of deciphering them was, however, great, for the inscriptions were all written, though in different languages, in the same cuneiform characters, so that the aid afforded in the case of the Rosetta stone by a Greek translation of the hieroglyphic inscription was not forthcoming.
The ingenuity of a German scholar, Grotefend, furnished the first clue by discovering that certain groups of signs represented the names of known Persian kings, and thus identifying the component signs in the Persian inscription as letters of an alphabet.
A few years later Sir Henry Rawlinson copied, and succeeded in deciphering, a famous inscription engraved by the great Persian monarch, Darius the first, high up in the face of a precipice forming the wall of a narrow defile at Behistan, and giving an historical record of the exploits of his reign. The clue thus afforded was rapidly followed up by a host of scholars, among whom the names of Rawlinson, Burnouf, Lassen, and Oppert were most conspicuous, and before long the text of inscriptions in Persian and Semitic could be read with great certainty. The task was one which required a vast amount of patience and ingenuity, for the cuneiform writing turned out to be one of great complexity, Though phonetic in the main, the characters did not always represent the simple elements of sounds, or letters of an alphabet, but frequently syllables containing one or more consonants united by vowels, and a considerable number were ideographic or conventional representations of ideas, like our numerals 1, 2, 3, which have no relation to spoken sounds.