[3] Adelung in Mithridates.
The resemblance of many of the characters on the Babylonian bricks, as well as on the stones of Nineveh, is very great to the characters known in our Bibles as Hebrew, but which are in fact not Hebrew but Chaldee, and were introduced by the Jews subsequent to their Babylonish captivity: the original Hebrew character was that still existing on coins, and nearly approximates in many respects to the Samaritan character. In some MSS. collated by Kennicott, he found the tetragrammaton "Jehovah" written in this ancient character, whilst the rest was Chaldee. The characteristic of the unknown letters is their resemblance to nails, to arrow-heads, and to wedges, from which, indeed, they are commonly designated. In the Chaldee (the Hebrew of our Bibles) this is also strikingly visible, notwithstanding the effect of time in wearing down the arridges: thus, in the oftenest recurring letter, ו, in the left leg of the ת, in ע, in צ, in ט, in נ, in מ, and especially in ש, the cuneiform type is most clearly traceable. One of the unknown characters,
seems almost identical with ש, allowance being made for the cursive form which written characters assume after centuries of use.
The horn is very conspicuous on the heads of men in the Nineveh (Asshur) sculptures, still, as a fashion, retained in Ethiopia (Cush, Abyssinia[4]), the origin of the Chaldeans, through Nimrod the Cushite (Gen. x. 8.), who probably derived their chief sustenance from the river Tigris (Hiddekel). Subsistence from (1) fishing, (2) hunting (e.g. Nimrod), (3) grazing, and (4) agriculture, seems to have succeeded in the order named. The repeated appearance of fish on the same sculptures, is in allusion, doubtless, to the name Nineveh (= fish + habitation); and their worship of the half-man, half-fish (the fabulous mermaid or merman), to which many of the Cetaceæ bear a close resemblance (the sea-horse for example), common with them and the Phœnicians (in the latter tongue named Dagon), is probably allusive, in their symbolic style, to the abstract notion of fecundity, so general an element of veneration in all the known mythological religions of ancient and modern times. See Nahum passim.
[4] Alexander the Great adopted the horns as Jupiter Ammon. See Vincent's Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, and frontispiece. The women of Lebanon have, it appears, retained the fashion. See Pict. Bible on Zech. i. 18.
From an attentive examination of these monuments in the British Museum, it appears highly probable that the writing is from left to right, as in the Ethiopic and Coptic, and in the Indo-European family generally, and is the reverse of all the other Shemitic tongues. This inference is derived from the fact that each line (with few exceptions) ranges with those above and below, as in a printed book, perpendicularly on the left, and breaks off on the right hand, as at the termination of a sentence, whilst some of the characters seem to stretch beyond the usual line of limit to the right, as if the sculptor had made the common error of not having quite space enough for a word not divisible.
The daguerreotype might be advantageously used in copying all the inscriptions yet discovered, of each of which three or four copies should be taken, to obviate mistakes and accidents. These being brought to England and carefully examined by the microscope, should be legibly engraved and stereotyped, and sent to all the linguists of Europe and elsewhere, and copies should also be deposited in all public libraries.
A comparison of the twelve cursive letters in Mr. Layard's Nineveh, vol. ii. p. 166., with Büttner's tables at the end of the first volume of Eichhorn's Einleitung in das Alte Testament (Leipzic, 1803), has led to an unexpected result. The particular table with which the comparison was instituted, is No. II. Class i. Phœnician, col. 2., headed "Palæstinæ in nummis;" any person therefore can verify it. This result is the following reading in the proper Chaldee character:—
רבקלבנו-ושש-דן