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CHAP. PAGE

PREFACE v

INDEX 215

REVERSE OF A TABLET IN THE HITTITE LANGUAGE FROM BOGHAZ KEUI

MAP--THE EASTERN WORLD IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY B.C. 7

THE TOMB OF DARIUS 16

BLACK OBELISK OF SHAL-MANESER II 21

CHALDAEAN HOUSEHOLD UTENSILS IN TERRA-COTTA 21

THE TELL OF JERABIS 40

THE TUMULUS OF SUSA, AS IT APPEARED TOWARDS THE MIDDLE OF LAST CENTURY 46

HEAD OF ONE OF THE STATUES FROM TELLO 58

VASE OF SILVER, DEDICATED TO NINGIRSU BY ENTENA PATESI OF LAGAS 58

THE TELL OF BORSIPPA, THE PRESENT BIRS-NIMRUD 78

THE SEAL OF SHARGANI-SHAR-ALI : GILGAMES WATERS THE CELESTIAL OX 88

BAS-RELIEF OF NARAM-SIN 88

SITTING STATUE OF GUDEA 122

MAP--THE FIRST ASSYRIAN EMPIRE 135

VIEW OF THE TEMPLE OF UR IN ITS PRESENT STATE, ACCORDING TO LOFTUS 141

THE GARDENS AND HILL OF DHUSPAS OR VAN 163

THE RUINS OF A PALACE OF URARTU AT TOPRAK-KALEH 166

THE RUINS AT BOGHAZ KEUI 174

ONE OF THE PROCESSIONS IN THE RAVINE OF BOGHAZ 176

PREFACE

If what I have written serves no other purpose, I shall be content if it draws attention to the miserably defective state of our archaeological knowledge of Babylonia and Assyria, and to the necessity of scientific excavations being carried on there similar to those inaugurated by Mr. Rhind in Egypt. We have abundance of epigraphic material; it is the more purely archaeological material that is still wanting.

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

THE DECIPHERMENT OF THE CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS

The decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions was the archaeological romance of the nineteenth century. There was no Rosetta stone to offer a clue to their meaning; the very names of the Assyrian kings and of the gods they worshipped had been lost and forgotten; and the characters themselves were but conventional groups of wedges, not pictures of objects and ideas like the hieroglyphs of Egypt. The decipherment started with the guess of a classical scholar who knew no Oriental languages and had never travelled in the East. And yet it is upon this guess that the vast superstructure of cuneiform decipherment has been slowly reared, with its ever-increasing mass of literature in numerous languages, the very existence of some of which had been previously unknown, and with its revelation of a civilized world that had faded out of sight before Greek history began. The ancient East has risen, as it were, from the dead, with its politics and its wars, its law and its trade, its art, its industries and its science. And this revelation of a new world, this resurrection of a dead past, has started from a successful guess. But the guess had been made in accordance with scientific method and had scientific reasons behind it, and it has proved to be the fruitful seed of an overspreading tree.

The existence of the cuneiform script thus became known in Europe, and that was all. It was not until Carsten Niebuhr, the father of the better-known historian, had been sent by the Danish Government on an exploring mission to the East that fairly complete and accurate copies of the inscriptions of Persepolis were at last put into the hands of European scholars. Niebuhr, who sacrificed his sight to the work, returned to Denmark in 1767, and seven years later the first of the three volumes in which the scientific results of his travels were embodied was published at Copenhagen. With the publication of the second volume, which contained his description of the Persepolitan monuments, the attempt to decipher the cuneiform characters began. He himself had noticed that in the first of the three classes or systems of cuneiform writing of which every inscription consisted, only forty-two characters were employed, and he therefore concluded that the system was alphabetic. Another Dane, Bishop M?nter, discovered that the words in it were divided from one another by an oblique wedge, and further showed that the monuments must belong to the age of Cyrus and his successors. One word, which occurs without any variation towards the beginning of each inscription, he correctly inferred to signify "king"; but beyond this he was unable to advance.

Meanwhile, Anquetil-Duperron, with self-sacrificing enthusiasm, had rediscovered the Zend of the later Zoroastrian faith, and de Sacy, with the help of it, had deciphered the Pehlevi inscriptions of the Sassanid kings. It was only the older Persian of the Achaemenian cuneiform inscriptions that still awaited interpretation; and a bridge had been built between it and modern Persian by means of the Zendic texts. In 1802 the guess was made which opened the way to the decipherment of the mysterious wedge-shaped signs. The inspired genius was Grotefend, an accomplished Latinist and a school-master at Frankfort-on-the-Main. He knew no Oriental languages, but his mother-wit and common-sense more than made up for the deficiency. It was clear to him that the three systems of cuneiform represented three different languages, the Persian kings being like a Turkish pasha of to-day, who, when he wishes an edict to be understood, writes it in Turkish and Arabic. It was also clear to him that the first system must be the script of the Persian kings themselves, of which the other two were translations. The preparatory work for reading this had already been done by M?nter; what Grotefend now had to do was to identify and read the names to which the word for "king" was attached.

On comparing the inscriptions together he found that while the word for "king" remained unchanged, the word which accompanied it at the beginning of an inscription varied on different monuments. There were, in fact, two wholly different words, one of which was peculiar to one set of monuments, the other to another set. But he also found that the first of these words followed the other on the second set of monuments, though with a different termination from that which belonged to it when it took the place of the first word. Hence he conjectured that the two words represented the names of two Persian kings, one of whom was the son of the other, the termination of the second name when it followed the first being that of the genitive. It was now necessary to discover who the kings were whose names had thus been found. Fortunately the Achaemenian dynasty was not a long one, and the number of royal names in it was not large. And of these names, Cyrus was too short and Artaxerxes too long for either of the two names which Grotefend had detected. There only remained Darius and Xerxes, and as Xerxes was the son of Darius, the name which characterized the first set of monuments must be Darius.

Burnouf's Memoir on the subject was published in June 1836. In the preceding month his friend and pupil, Professor Lassen of Bonn, had also published a work on "The Old Persian Cuneiform Inscriptions of Persepolis." He and Burnouf had been in frequent correspondence, and his claim to have independently detected the names of the satrapies, and thereby to have fixed the values of the Persian characters, was in consequence fiercely attacked. To the attacks made upon him, however, Lassen never vouchsafed a reply. Whatever his obligations to Burnouf may have been, his own contributions to the decipherment of the inscriptions were numerous and important. He succeeded in fixing the true values of nearly all the letters in the Persian alphabet, in translating the texts, and in proving that the language of them was not Zend, but stood to both Zend and Sanskrit in the relation of a sister.

Meanwhile another scholar, armed with fresh and important material, had entered the field. A young English officer in the East India Company's service, Major Rawlinson by name, was attached to the British Mission in Persia. A happy inspiration led him to attempt the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions. It was in 1835, when he was twenty-five years old, that he first began his work. All that he knew was that Grotefend had discovered in the texts of Persepolis the names of Darius, of Xerxes and of Hystaspes, but cut off as he was in his official position at Kirmanshah on the western frontier of Persia from European libraries, he was unable to procure either the Memoir of the German scholar or the articles to which it had given rise. Like Burnouf, he set himself to decipher the two inscriptions of Hamadan, which he had himself copied with great care. He soon recognized in them the names that had been read by Grotefend, and thus obtained a working alphabet. But his position in Persia soon gave him an advantage which was denied to his fellow-workers in Europe. It was not long before he found an opportunity of copying the great inscription on the sacred rock of Behistun, which had never been copied before. It was by far the longest cuneiform inscription yet discovered, and was filled with proper names, including those of the Persian satrapies. The copying of it, however, cost much time and labour, and was accomplished at actual risk of life, as Major Rawlinson, better known by his later title of Sir Henry Rawlinson, had to be lowered in a basket from the top of the cliff in order to ascertain the exact forms of certain characters.

In the following year Rawlinson moved to Teheran, and there received from Edwin Norris, the Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, the Memoirs of Grotefend and Saint-Martin. In 1837 he finished his copy of the Behistun inscription, and sent a translation of its opening paragraphs to the Royal Asiatic Society. Before, however, his Paper could be published, the works of Lassen and Burnouf reached him, necessitating a revision of his Paper and the postponement of its publication. Then came other causes of delay. He was called away to Afghanistan to perform the onerous and responsible duties of British Agent at Kandahar, and it was not until 1843 that he was once more free to resume his cuneiform studies. A year later he was visited by the Danish Professor, Westergaard, who placed at his disposal the copies he had just made of the inscription on the tomb of Darius at Naksh-i-Rustam and of some shorter inscriptions from Persepolis, and Rawlinson's Memoir was accordingly finished at last and sent to England. Here Norris subjected it to a careful revision, and at his suggestion Rawlinson once more visited Behistun, where he took squeezes and re-examined doubtful characters. In 1847 the first part of the Memoir was published, though the second part, containing the analysis and commentary on the text, did not appear till 1849. The work, however, was well worthy of the time and care that had been bestowed upon it. The task of deciphering the Persian cuneiform texts was virtually accomplished, and the guesses of Grotefend had developed into the discovery of a new alphabet and a new language. The capstone was put to the work by the discovery of Hincks, an Irish clergyman, that the alphabet was not a true one in the modern sense of the word, a vowel-sound being attached in pronunciation to each of the consonants represented in it.

The mystery of the Persian cuneiform texts was thus solved after nearly fifty years of endeavour. A harder task still remained. The Persian texts were accompanied by two other cuneiform transcripts, which, as Grotefend had perceived, must have represented the other two principal languages that were spoken in the Persian Empire. That the third transcript was Babylonian seemed evident from the resemblance of the characters contained in it to those on the bricks and seal-cylinders of Babylonia. Grotefend had already written upon the subject, and had even divined the name of Nebuchadrezzar on certain Babylonian bricks.

But this third species of writing, which we must henceforth term Babylonian or Assyrian, presented extraordinary difficulties. Instead of an alphabet of forty-two letters, the decipherer was confronted by an enormous number of different characters, while no indication was given of the separation of one word from another. Moreover the forms of the characters as found on the Persepolitan monuments differed considerably from those found on the Babylonian monuments, which again differed greatly from each other. On the seal-cylinders, more especially, they assumed the most complicated shapes, between which and the Persepolitan forms it was often impossible to trace any likeness whatever.

Suddenly a discovery was made which furnished an abundance of new material and incited the decipherer to fresh efforts. In 1842 Botta was sent to Mossul as French Consul, and at Mohl's instigation began to excavate on the site of Nineveh. His first essays there not proving very successful, he transferred his workmen further north, to the mound of Khorsabad, and there laid bare the ruins of a large and splendid palace which subsequently turned out to be that of Sargon. In the autumn of 1845 the excavations of Botta were succeeded by those of Layard, first at Nimr?d , and then at K?yunjik or Nineveh, the result being to fill the British Museum with bas-reliefs covered with cuneiform writing and with other relics of Assyrian civilization.

The inscriptions brought to light by Botta were copied and published by him in 1846-50. The sumptuous work which was dedicated to them was followed by a smaller and cheaper edition, and the author gave further help to the student by classifying the characters, which amounted to as many as 642. His work proved conclusively the identity of the script used at Nineveh with that of the third transcripts on the Persian monuments, as well as the substantial agreement of the groups of characters occurring in each.

The Irish scholar Dr. Hincks--one of the most remarkable and acute decipherers that have ever lived--was already at work on the newly-found texts. In 1847 he published a long article on "The Three Kinds of Persepolitan Writing," and, two years later, another "On the Khorsabad Inscriptions." In 1850 he read a Paper before the British Association, summing up his conclusions and announcing the important discovery that the Assyrian characters were syllabic and not alphabetic, as had hitherto been supposed. With this discovery the scientific decipherment of the Assyrian inscriptions actually begins.

The proper names contained in the Persian texts furnished the clue to the reading of the Babylonian transcripts. The values thus obtained for the Babylonian characters made it possible to read many of the words, the meaning of which was fixed by a comparison with the Persian original. It then became clear that Assyrian was a Semitic language, standing in much the same relation to Hebrew that the Old Persian stood to Zend.

Its Semitic origin was proved to demonstration by the French scholar de Saulcy in 1849. Another French scholar, de Longp?rier, had already discovered the name of Sargon in the Khorsabad inscriptions--the first royal Assyrian name that had yet been read. De Saulcy himself subjected the Babylonian transcript of the trilingual inscription of Elwend to a minute analysis, and so carefully was the work performed, and so secure were the foundations upon which it rested, that the translation needs but little revision even to-day. The old belief in the alphabetic nature of the characters, however, still possessed the mind of the decipherer, although in one passage he goes so far as to say, "I am tempted to believe" that the signs are syllabic. But he did not go beyond the temptation to believe, and the discovery was reserved for Hincks.

Rawlinson was now at Bagdad. De Saulcy sent him his Memoirs, and the British scholar had the immense advantage of having in his hands the Babylonian version of the great Behistun inscription, of knowing the country in which the monuments were found, and of possessing copies of inscriptions which had not yet made their way to Europe.

Nevertheless, it is amazing with what rapidity and perspicacity he forced his way through the thick jungle of cuneiform script. In his Memoir on the Persian texts, published in 1847, he already maps out with marvellous fulness and exactitude the different varieties of cuneiform writing. It is his second Memoir, however, which excites in the Assyriologist of to-day the profoundest feelings of surprise and admiration. This consists of notes on the inscriptions of Assyria and Babylonia, and was communicated to the Royal Asiatic Society at the beginning of the year 1850.

He was, moreover, mistaken as to the age of the monument itself, which he assigned to too early an epoch. It was Dr. Hincks who again settled the question, by reading upon it the names of Hazael of Damascus and Jehu of Israel. This was one of the first-fruits of his discovery of the syllabic character of the Assyrian signs. Another was the discovery of the name of Sennacherib, as well as those of Hezekiah and Jerusalem.

Shortly before this Hincks had made another discovery of importance. He had deciphered the names of Nebuchadrezzar and his father on the bricks of Babylon, and had further shown that a cylinder of Nebuchadrezzar brought from Babylon by Sir Robert Ker-Porter, and written in the cuneiform characters met with on the Persian monuments, contained the same text as another cylinder obtained by Sir Harford Jones, and inscribed with characters of the most complex kind. A comparison of the two texts gave him the values of the latter characters, which we now know to represent the archaic Babylonian forms of the cuneiform signs.

But the decipherment of the Assyro-Babylonian script was not yet complete. In 1851 Rawlinson's long-promised Memoir on the Babylonian version of the inscription of Behistun was given to the world, and consisted of the cuneiform text, with translation, grammar and commentary, besides a list of 242 characters. It announced, moreover, two facts about these characters, one of which had already been recognized, while the second was received by the Orientalists with shouts of incredulity. The first fact was that the characters, besides having phonetic values, could also be used ideographically to denote objects and ideas. The second fact was that they were polyphonous, each character possessing more than one phonetic value.

For once the sceptics seemed to have common-sense upon their side. How, it was asked, could a system of writing be read the symbols of which might be pronounced sometimes in one way, sometimes in another? Anything could be made out of anything upon such principles, and a method of interpretation which ended in such a result was pronounced to be self-condemned. Hincks, however, once more entered the field and demonstrated that Rawlinson was right. Hincks was an Egyptologist, and consequently the polyphony of the cuneiform characters was not to him a new and startling phenomenon. It merely showed that they must once have been pictorial--as, indeed, their ideographic use also indicated--and in a picture-writing each picture could necessarily be represented by more than one word, and therefore by more than one phonetic value, when the pronunciation of the word came to be employed phonetically. The picture of a foot, for instance, would denote not only a "foot," but also such ideas as "go," "run," "walk," each of which would become one of its phonetic values with the development of the picture into a conventional syllabic sign.

Excavation was still proceeding on the site of Nineveh. Mr. Hormuzd Rassam, himself a native of Mossul and the active assistant of Layard, was sent in 1852 by the British Museum to complete the work from which Layard had now been called away by diplomatic duties. In 1853 he made a discovery which proved to be of momentous importance for Assyrian decipherment, and without which, in fact, it could never have advanced very far. He discovered the library of Nineveh with its multitudes of closely-written clay tablets, many of them containing long lists of characters, dictionaries and grammars, which have served at once to verify and to extend the knowledge of the script and language that the early decipherers had obtained. Meanwhile a careful survey of the whole country was made at the expense of the East India Company, and the French Government sent out an exploring and excavating expedition to Babylonia under a young and brilliant scholar, Jules Oppert. The results of the mission, which lasted from 1851 to 1854, were embodied in two learned volumes, the first of which appeared in 1863. In these Oppert showed, what Hincks and Rawlinson had already pointed out, that the peculiarities of the Assyrian syllabary were due not only to its pictorial origin but also to the fact that it had been invented by a non-Semitic people. This primitive population of Babylonia, called Akkadian by Hincks, Sumerian by Oppert, had spoken an agglutinative language similar to that of the Turks or Finns, and had been the founders of Babylonian civilization. For these views Oppert found support in the tablets of the library of Nineveh, a large part of which consists of translations from the older language into Semitic Assyrian, as well as of comparative grammars, vocabularies and reading-books in the two languages.

Once more the Semitic scholars protested. There was no end to the extravagant fantasies of the Assyriologists! The learned world was comfortably convinced that none but a Semitic or Aryan people could have been the originators of civilization, and to assert that the Semites had borrowed their culture from a race which seemed to have affinities with Mongols or Tatars was an outrage upon established prejudices. The Semitic philologist was more certain than ever that Assyrian decipherment was the folly of a few "untrained" amateurs, and could safely be disregarded.

The new language which had thus been brought to light was agglutinative. Westergaard had seen in it the language of the Medes, and, like Rawlinson, had connected it with a hypothetical "Scythian" family of speech. The term "Scythian" was retained by Norris, who, however, attempted to show that it was really related to the Finnish dialects. But the excavations made at Susa by Loftus in 1851 put another face on the matter. In 1874, and again more fully in 1883, I pointed out that the inscriptions found at Susa and other ancient Elamite sites were in an older form of the same language as that of the second Achaemenian transcripts, and furthermore that certain inscriptions discovered by Layard in the plain of Mal-Am?r eastward of Susa were in practically the same script and dialect. At the same time I fixed the values of the characters in the Mal-Am?r texts and gave provisional translations of them, with a vocabulary and commentary. Oppert and myself had already been working at the reading of the older Susian inscriptions, a task in which we were followed by Weissbach with a greater measure of success. But the same cause which had retarded the decipherment of the second transcript of the Persian inscriptions--a want of materials--militated against any great advance being made in the decipherment of the older Susian, and it is only since 1897, when the excavations of M. de Morgan at Susa were begun, that the student has been at last provided with the necessary means. Thanks to the brilliant penetration of the French Assyriologist, Dr. Scheil, the outlines of the language of the ancient kingdom of Elam can now be sketched with a fair amount of completeness and accuracy. The name of Neo-Susian has by common consent been conferred upon the language of the second Achaemenian transcripts; perhaps Neo-Elamite would be better. At all events it represents the language of the second capital of the Persian Empire as it was spoken in the age of Darius and his successors, and is a lineal descendant of the old agglutinative language of Elam.

The three systems of cuneiform script, which a hundred years ago seemed so impenetrable in their mystery, have thus, one by one, been forced to yield their secrets. But as each in turn has been deciphered, fresh forms of cuneiform writing and new languages expressed in cuneiform characters have come to light. The first to emerge was that agglutinative language of primitive Chaldaea which so scandalized the philological world and excited such strong distrust of the Assyriologists. The question of the name by which it should be called has been set at rest by the discovery of tablets in which its native designation is made known to us. Some years ago Bezold published a bilingual text in which it is termed "the language of Sumer," and more recently Messerschmidt has edited a bilingual inscription of the Babylonian king Samsu-ditana in which the Semitic "translation" is described as "Akkadian." Oppert is thus shown to have been right in the name which he proposed to give to the language of the inventors of the cuneiform script.

The first analysis of Sumerian grammar was made by myself in 1870, when the general outlines of the language were fixed and the verbal forms read and explained. Three years later Lenormant threw the materials I had collected into a connected and systematic form, one result of which was a controversy started by the Orientalist, Joseph Hal?vy, who maintained that Sumerian was not a language at all, but a cryptograph or secret writing. The answers made by the Assyriologists to this curious theory obliged its author constantly to shift his ground, but at the same time it also obliged them to examine their materials more carefully and to revise conclusions which had been arrived at on insufficient evidence. An important discovery was now made by Haupt, who had already given the first scientific translation of a Sumerian text; he demonstrated the existence of two dialects, one of which is marked by all the phenomena of phonetic decay. This was naturally supposed to indicate a difference of age in the two dialects, the one being the older and the other the later form of the language. Subsequent research, however, has gone to show that the two dialects were really used contemporaneously, the decayed state of that which was called "the woman's language" by the Babylonians being due to the fact that it was spoken in Akkad or Northern Babylonia, where the Semitic element became predominant at a much earlier period than in Sumer or Southern Babylonia.

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