The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 01

by Unknown

But all along we have followed the story of these strange books, taking for granted their meaning as interpreted on the labels, and ignoring for the moment the great marvel about them, which is not that we have the material documents themselves, but that we have a knowledge of their actual contents. The flights of arrow-heads on wall, on slab, or tiny brick have surely a meaning; but how has any one guessed that meaning? These must be words—but what words? The hieroglyphics of the Egyptians were mysterious in all conscience; yet, after all, their symbols have a certain suggestiveness, whereas there is nothing that seems to promise a mental leverage in the unbroken succession of these cuneiform dashes. Yet the Assyrian scholar of to-day can interpret these strange records almost as readily and as surely as the classical scholar interprets a Greek manuscript. And this evidences one of the greatest triumphs of nineteenth-century scholarship; for, since almost two thousand years, no man has lived, previous to our century, to whom these strange inscriptions would not have been as meaningless as they are to the most casual stroller who looks on them with vague wonderment here in the museum to-day. For the Assyrian language, like the Egyptian, was veritably a dead language; not, like Greek and Latin, merely passed from practical everyday use to the closet of the scholar, but utterly and absolutely forgotten by all the world. Such being the case, it is nothing less than marvellous that it should have been restored.

It is but fair to add that this restoration probably never would have been effected with Assyrian or with Egyptian had the language, in dying, left no cognate successor; for the powers of modern linguistry, though great, are not actually miraculous. But, fortunately, a language once developed is not blotted out in toto; it merely outlives its usefulness and is gradually supplanted, its successor retaining many traces of its origin. So, just as Latin, for example, has its living representatives in Italian and the other Romance tongues, the language of Assyria is represented by cognate Semitic languages. As it chances, however, these have been of aid rather in the later stages of Assyrian study than at the very outset; for the first clew to the message of the cuneiform writing came through a slightly different channel.

Curiously enough, it was a trilingual inscription that gave the clew, as in the case of the Rosetta stone; though with a very striking difference withal. The trilingual inscription now in question, instead of being a small portable monument, covers the surface of a massive bluff at Behistun, in western Persia. Moreover, all three of its inscriptions are in cuneiform character, and all three are in languages that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, were absolutely unknown. This inscription itself, as a striking monument of unknown import, had been seen by successive generations. Tradition ascribed it, as we learn from Ctesias, through Diodorus, to the fabled Assyrian queen, Semiramis. Tradition is quite at fault in this; but it is only recently that knowledge has availed to set it right. The inscription, as is now known, was really written about the year 515 B.C., at the instance of Darius I, king of Persia, some of whose deeds it recounts in the three chief languages of his widely scattered subjects.

The man who, at the actual risk of life and limb, copied this wonderful inscription, and, through interpreting it, became the veritable “Father of Assyriology,” was the English general, Sir Henry Rawlinson. His feat was another British triumph over the same rivals who had competed for the Rosetta stone; for some French explorers had been sent by their government, some years earlier, expressly to copy this inscription, and had reported that to reach the inscription was impossible. But British courage did not find it so, and in 1835 Rawlinson scaled the dangerous height and made a paper cast of about half the inscription. Diplomatic duties called him away from the task for some years, but in 1848 he returned to it, and completed the copy of all parts of the inscription that have escaped the ravages of time. And now the material was in hand for a new science, which General Rawlinson, assisted by a host of others, soon began to elaborate.

The key to the value of the Behistun inscription lies in the fact that its third language is ancient Persian. It appears that the ancient Persians had adopted the cuneiform character from their western neighbours, the Assyrians, but in so doing had made one of those essential modifications and improvements which are scarcely possible to accomplish except in the transition from one race to another. Instead of building with the arrow-heads a multitude of syllabic characters, including many homophones, as had been, and continued to be, the custom of the Assyrians, the Persians selected a few of these characters, and ascribed to them phonetic values that were almost purely alphabetical. In a word, while retaining the wedge as the basal stroke of their script, they developed an alphabet; making that last wonderful analysis of phonetic sounds which even to this day has escaped the Chinese, which the Egyptians had only partially effected and which the Phœnicians were accredited by the Greeks with having introduced into the western world. In addition to this all-essential step, the Persians had introduced the minor, but highly convenient, custom of separating the words of a sentence from one another by a particular mark, differing in this regard not only from the Assyrians and the Egyptians, but from the early Greek scribes as well.

Thanks to these simplifications, the old Persian language has been practically restored about the beginning of the nineteenth century, through the efforts of the German, Grotefend; and further advances in it were made just at this time by Burnouf in France, and Lassen in Germany, as well as by Rawlinson himself, who largely solved the problem of the Persian alphabet independently. So the Persian portion of the Behistun inscription could at last be partially deciphered. This, in itself, however, would have been no very great aid towards the restoration of the languages of the other portions, had it not chanced fortunately that the inscription is sprinkled with proper names. Now, proper names, generally speaking, are not translated from one language to another, but transliterated as nearly as the genius of the language will permit. It was the fact that the Greek word “Ptolemaios” was transliterated on the Rosetta stone, that gave the first clew to the sounds of the Egyptian characters. Had the upper part of the Rosetta stone been preserved, on which, originally, there were several other names, Young would not have halted where he did in his decipherment.

But fortune, which had been at once so kind, and so tantalising in the case of the Rosetta stone, had dealt more gently with the Behistun inscription; for no fewer than ninety proper names were preserved in the Persian portion, and duplicated, in another character, in the Assyrian inscription. A study of these gave a clew to the sounds of the Assyrian characters. The decipherment of this character, however, even with this aid, proved enormously difficult, for it was soon evident that here it was no longer a question of a nearly perfect alphabet of a few characters, but of a syllabary of several hundred characters, including many homophones, or different forms for representing the same sound. But with the Persian translation for a guide on the one hand, and the Semitic languages, to which family the Assyrian belonged, on the other, the appalling task was gradually accomplished, the leading investigators being General Rawlinson, Professor Hincks, and Mr. Fox Talbot, in England; Professor Jules Oppert in Paris; and Professor Eberhard Schrader in Germany; though a host of other scholars soon entered the field.

This great linguistic feat was accomplished about the middle of the century. But so great a feat was it, that many scholars of the highest standing, including Ernest Renan in France, and Sir George Cornwall Lewis in England, declined at first to accept the results, contending that the Assyriologists had merely deceived themselves by creating an arbitrary language. The matter was put to the test in 1855, at the suggestion of Mr. Fox Talbot, when four scholars, one being Mr. Talbot himself, and the others General Rawlinson, Professor Hincks, and Professor Oppert, laid before the Royal Asiatic Society their independent translations of an hitherto untranslated Assyrian text. A committee of the society, including England’s greatest historian of the century, George Grote, broke the seals of the four translations, and reported that they found them unequivocally in accord as regards their main purport, and even surprisingly uniform as regards the phraseology of certain passages; in short, as closely similar as translations from the obscure texts of any difficult language ever are. This decision gave the work of Assyriologists an official status, so to say, and the reliability of their method has never since been in question.

Thus it has come about that these inscribed bricks from the palace of Asshurbanapal, which, when the first of them was discovered, were as meaningless as so many blank slabs, have been made to deliver up their message. And a marvellous message it is, as we have already seen.

Merely to have satisfied a vague curiosity as to the past traditions, however, would be but a small measure of the intellectual work which the oriental antiquities have had a large share in accomplishing. Their message has been one of truly world-historic import. Thanks to these monuments from Egypt and Mesopotamia, the student of human civilisation has to-day a sweep of view that hitherto has been utterly withheld from him. Until the crypts by the Nile and the earth mounds by the Tigris and Euphrates gave up their secrets, absolutely nothing was known to scholarship of the main sweep of civilisation more anciently than about the sixth century B.C. Beyond that all was myth, fable, unauthenticated tradition. And now the indubitable monuments of civilisation carry us back over a period at least three times as great. Archbishop Usher’s famed Chronology, which so long dominated the ideas of men, is swept away, and we learn from evidence graven in stone and baked indelibly in bricks that in the year 4004 B.C., which our Bible margins still point out as the year of Creation, vast communities of people, in widely separated portions of the earth, had attained a high degree of civilisation. In the year when the proverbial first man wandered naked in Eden, the actual man lived with thousands of his fellow-men in vast cities, where he built houses and temples, erected wonderful monuments, practised such arts as glass-making, sculpture, and painting, and recorded his thoughts in written words. And from that day to this stretches the thread of civilisation, unbroken by any universal flood or other cataclysm.