CUNEIFORM WRITING

Thus far curiosity alone gives the stimulus to acquaintance with ancient scripts—a feeling of aloofness attending all that we learn of Chinese, Maya, and other systems having no historical connection (for the derivation of Chinese from pre-Babylonian writing is not proved) with those from which our alphabet is probably derived. With the story of these the real interest begins, because within some of them lie the sources of the alphabets of the civilised world, while all of them have borne a share in the preservation of intellectual and spiritual treasures, the loss of which would have arrested the progress of the vigorous sections of mankind.

Dealing first with those of Mesopotamia, a romance, not lacking excitement, gathers round the wedge-shaped or cuneiform characters (Lat. cuneus, "a wedge") inscribed on clay tablets and cylinders, and on the great monuments of Assyria, Babylon, and other Oriental empires of past renown. The very existence of these relics was forgotten for some sixteen hundred years, and when they were unearthed from the rubbish-heaps of centuries, no one dreamed that any serious meaning was to be attached to the fantastic angular-shaped characters which covered bricks and tablets. In 1621, Pietro della Valle, a Spanish traveller, visited the famous ruins of Persepolis, and he appears to have been the first to suspect that the arrow-headed signs were inscriptions, although he was unable to decipher them. He, however, made the shrewd observation that as the thick end of the supposed letters was never at the right but at the left of the oblique characters, the signs must have been written from left to right.

"Built on a great platform, artificially constructed for the purpose, which commands a wide plain, and has a lofty mountain shaped like an amphitheatre at its rear, the stranger ascends the spot by a magnificent staircase, or pair of staircases, which separate in opposite directions to meet at the summit. Here are the gigantic remains of several palaces, great porticos with winged bulls and reliefs representing, gods and princes. In the live rock of the mountains at the rear tombs have been hewn, evidently to receive the occupants of the palaces, and all the rocks and walls are covered with the cuneiform or arrow-headed inscriptions, consisting of very simple elements, which are nothing but thin wedges and angles wedges but with these elements combined in wonderful variety.... But no record of the language or its import had survived, and the ignorant inhabitants of the neighbourhood looked upon the texts with greater awe than they did the winged monsters that loomed over the plain. They were to them symbols of magic import, which, if duly pronounced, would unlock the hidden treasures guarded by the lions and the bulls." (Mahaffy's Prolegomena to Ancient History, p. 168.)

The savants of the seventeenth century were not "wiser in their generation" than the rude nomads who pitched their tents under the shadow of the stone monsters. Many years after Della Valle's visit the Oriental scholar, Hyde, in a book on the Ancient Persian Religion, soberly suggested that the signs were designed by some fantastic architect to show into how many combinations the same kind of stroke would enter. It is a wonder that he did not, with equal sobriety, suggest that they were related to the well-known Norman "hatchet-work." And so the guessing went on. One antiquary contended that they were talismanic signs; another that they were mystic formulÆ of the priests, or astrological symbols of the old Chaldean star-worshippers; another saw in them a species of revealed digital language wherewith the Creator talked to Adam, whence the primitive speech of mankind was derived; while others conjectured them to be Chinese, or Samaritan, or Runic, or Ogam characters. Most fantastic of all, one ingenious theorist saw in them the action of numberless generations of worms!

But by the middle of the eighteenth century a sane school of investigators had found its leader. A great traveller, Carsten Niebuhr, father of the famous historian of early Rome, was the first to divine the true character of the inscriptions. He agreed with Della Valle that they were written from left to right, and he saw that they were made up of three different sets of characters, each meaning the same thing. But beyond showing, in his careful transcript published in 1764, that one of the three scripts was simpler in character than the others—all, as he assumed, being alphabetic varieties of one language—he could not go. The meaning still remained a mystery. Thirty years later, MÜnter, a Danish philologist, correctly guessed that the diagonal bar wedge, which occurred frequently, was a sign for the separation of words, and, next, he discovered the vowel signs, which, as distinct characters, are absent from the Hebrew and other Semitic languages. This was a great step towards final decipherment. Herodotus (i. 125, &c.) speaks of the AchÆmenid dynasty of Persian kings who were the lords of Asia in the sixth and fifth centuries b.c. The ruins of Persepolis are identified as the remains of their palaces. Of this royal house the famous Darius was a member, and Herodotus tells how that monarch, "having gazed upon the Bosphorus, set up two pillars by it of white stone with characters cut upon them, on the one Assyrian and on the other Hellenic, being the names of all the nations which he was leading with him" (iv. 87). The engraving of the same inscription in two or more different languages (of course necessitated by making their decrees known to the various peoples whom they ruled) was thus shown to be a custom of the Persian kings.

Put upon the quest, a French scholar, M. de Sacy, born at Paris in 1758, copied some inscriptions of the Sassanid dynasty, which reigned in Persia a.d. 226-651. These were written in a known alphabet which is a mixture of Persian and Aramaic, called Pehlevi, and were shown by De Sacy to run in the following form:—"I, (M or W,) king of kings, son of (X,) king of kings, did thus and thus." Then, grouping together the several facts, came Dr. Georg Friedrich Grotefend, to formulate the theory that the Persepolitan inscriptions were written in three languages, and not three alphabets of one language, as Carsten Niebuhr had surmised. The recurrence of certain groups of characters led him to the inference that "the inscriptions were a fixed formula, only differing in the proper names." If these inscriptions began, like those read by De Sacy, with the formula, X, the king of kings, son of D, the king of kings, then it was clear that D was X's father; and, further, that D's father was not a king, because his name was not followed by that title, D being therefore the founder of a royal race. Now, Hystaspes, father of Darius, was not king, but satrap under Cambyses; and, joining his knowledge of history to his skill in philology, Grotefend found the key to the royal name. He lived for thirty years after this discovery, but added nothing to his triumph save "a fortunate guess of the name Nebuchadnezzar in one of the Assyrian inscriptions." Other decipherments followed; but it was reserved for the genius and industry of our countryman, the late Sir Henry Rawlinson, to discover the key whereby the ancient languages of Persia, Babylon, and Assyria can be read, and thus "a chapter of the world's history that had been well-nigh wholly lost made known to mankind." That eminent scholar in no wise exaggerated the importance of his work in claiming that its value in the interpretation of cuneiform writing is almost equal to that of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in the interpretation of the hieroglyphic texts of Egypt (ArchÆologia, xxxiv. p. 75).

The story of Rawlinson's achievement is warrant of the claim. About sixty years ago, being then a lieutenant, he was sent to Persia to drill the army of the Shah. His interest in Oriental history and antiquities was already keen, and he was glad to find himself in regions rich in materials the obscurity of whose meaning quickened inquiry. Among these was a trilingual inscription, dating from the early part of the sixth century b.c., cut on the face of a bare precipitous rock at Behistun, about twenty miles from Kirmanshah, a district abounding in monuments of the past (Fig. 39). At the risk of life and limb he climbed the face of the steep cliff to make copies of such portions of the inscriptions as were accessible with the means at his command, and after a series of efforts, continued at intervals through several years, he finally secured a complete transcript of so much of the writing as time had left uninjured. The inscription is in three languages—Babylonian, Mede or Scythian, and Persian—arranged in parallel columns containing above one thousand lines. It commemorates "the life and acts of Darius Hystaspes, his conquests, and the nations under his sway." Bas-reliefs portray that monarch, bow in hand, sitting with his feet on the prostrate usurper, Gaumates, while a train of nine rebel princes, whose names are inscribed above their effigies, stand before the "king of kings," chained together by the neck. Two of the monarch's soldiers are in the rear. Over Gaumates is written: "This is Gaumates, the Magian; he lied; he said, I am Smerdis, son of Cyrus." The same formula occurs over the heads of each of the nine captives. "This is (M); he lied; he said he was king of (N)." The inscription begins with a solemn invocation to Ormuzd, the old Persian god of light and purity, and passes on to detail the claim of Darius to the throne of the AchÆmenids and the possessions of the Persian crown. It tells of the defeat of Smerdis, and of the revolt of Susiana, a province lying between Persia and Babylonia. "I sent thither an army, and the rebel Atrina was brought in chains before me; I slew him." The same story is narrated concerning other rebellious subjects. Of one Phraortes, it is told that his nose, ears, and tongue were cut off, and that he was "crucified at Ecbatana, together with his accomplices." Then the inscription proceeds:

"King Darius saith: These countries rebelled against my power. By lies they were separated from me. The men thou seest here deceived my people. My army took them, according to my orders. King Darius saith: Oh, thou that shalt be king hereafter, see that thou art not guilty of deceit. Him that is wicked, judge as he should be judged, and if thou reignest thus thy kingdom will be great. King Darius saith: What I did, I did ever by the grace of Ormuzd. Thou that readest upon this stone my deeds, think not that thou hast been deceived, neither be thou slow to believe them. King Darius saith: Ormuzd be my witness that I have not spoken these things with lying lips." (Cf. Transactions of Royal Asiatic Society, 1844-46, 1851; also Life of Sir Henry Rawlinson, pp. 146, 153, 326.)

As Professor Mahaffy points out, the exact correspondence of this record, "especially in the many proper names it contains, with the names of persons and provinces described by Herodotus, is a convincing proof of the accuracy of the deciphering. It will give some notion of the style of the documents that have been preserved. It will also prove the accuracy of the accounts given by Herodotus and Xenophon of the character of the ancient Persians, in whom an honest love of truth and hatred of lies was the prominent feature—a feature which we justly honour more than any other in a nation, but in which most Oriental nations, and indeed the Greeks also, were woefully deficient." (Prolegomena, p. 186.)

Sir Henry Rawlinson's decipherment of the great inscription of Behistun did perhaps more than aught else to open the long-closed door to the secret of Mesopotamian culture. The Persian inscription is in a language which is the mother-tongue of modern Persian, and its meaning being discovered, the interpretation of the Medic or Scythic, and of the Babylonian, the oldest of the three, followed, while the several characters supplied a valuable object-lesson in the stages of the development of writing from the ideographic through the syllabic, and thence of approach to the alphabetic.

Cuneiform writing appears to have been originally inscribed upon a vegetable substance called likhusi, but the abundant clay of the alluvial country afforded material whose convenience and permanence brought it into general use. Upon this the characters were impressed by a reed or square-shaped stylus, the clay-books being afterwards baked or sun-dried. For inscriptions on stone or metal a chisel was used. The writing of the Assyrian scribes is often exceedingly minute, the tablets containing a mass of matter in a tiny space. The work was trying enough to sometimes require the use of a magnifying-glass, and among Sir Austin Layard's discoveries at Nineveh was that of a lathe-turned crystal lens which was probably used for the purpose. Obviously the substances chosen account for the angular form of the characters; as the dyer's hand is "subdued to what it works in," so the nature of the material in which the sculptor seeks to express his conceptions largely determines for him the limits of that expression. Phidias himself could not have produced his Pallas Athene from the stubborn granite of Syene; and, as the outcome of the Egyptian temperament, the sphinxes of the Nile valley might have worn a less relentless look had they been fashioned of the marble of Pentelicus. Much as the abrupt cuneiform character tends, however, to obscure the traces of its derivation, there are sufficing proofs that it is of pictographic origin, although no examples of picture-writing in Mesopotamia corresponding in primitiveness to those already given from barbaric sources have been discovered. In the linear Babylonian, as it is called, the hieroglyph for "sun" is a diamond-shaped figure _ which later on became _, and in the latest cuneiform, _. Evidently the earliest sign was a circle, which could not be easily traced on the stone or clay, and hence appears as the angular character shown above. The annexed table, which is a copy of one supplied by Mr. Pinches to Professor Keane, and published in his admirable monograph, Man Past and Present, gives a set of typical examples of the derivation of cuneiform characters from the earliest known pictographs.

As an illustration bearing upon the specimens set forth in the table we have the ideogram of Nineveh _. The archaic form of this character _ proves that it was compounded of the ideographic picture of a house, enclosing the ideogram of the fish _, thus preserving record of the instructive fact that imperial Nineveh was at first, as its name implies (nun, "fish," is the name of the fourteenth letter of the Semitic alphabet), a collection of fishermen's huts (cf. Taylor, i. 41). The frequent mixture of old and new forms in cuneiform writings and the different values sometimes given to the same sign, have increased the difficult task of interpretation. As in the earlier stages of other languages, determinatives were used; e.g. all names of men were preceded by a single upright wedge, of countries by three horizontal wedges, and so on. But in the examples given in the table, the gradual conventionalising of the signs is seen, as in that for "ox," wherein the modification of the head and horns of the animal into the phonogram is obvious, while the Behistun inscription exhibits well-defined stages of approach to simplification. The cumbrous cuneiform which fills the third column has five hundred symbols, ideograms, phonograms, and homophones; the Medic, which occupies the second column, is written in ninety-six pure syllabic signs; while the Persian tells the same story in thirty-six alphabetic signs, four only of the primitive ideograms being retained. This survival of use of ideograms, it may be noticed in passing, has illustration among ourselves in many ways. As certain parts of the body, e.g. hand, foot, bosom (in Anglo-Saxon fÆthem, i.e. "fathom," or the space of both arms extended), and forearm (Latin ulna, Anglo-Saxon eln, whence "ell"), became and remain standards of measurement, so it is with certain modes of reckoning. The digits, I, II, III, IIII (Latin digitus, "a finger") are unquestionably pictures of fingers, and Grotefend contends with good reason that V is a picture of the four fingers closed and the thumb extended, while X would represent the two hands, IV the subtraction and VI the addition of a finger. The use of a primitive decimal notation is widespread among barbaric peoples. In chess problems the several pieces are pictorially represented; in the planetary signs, ? is the caduceus or wand of Mercury; ? is the mirror of Venus, while the entomologist, in cataloguing his specimens, uses these symbols for the male and female respectively. In ? we have the shield and spear of Mars; in ? , the sign for Jupiter, the arm wields a thunderbolt; and the mower's scythe ? is the symbol of Saturn (connected with Latin sero, satum, "to sow"), the god of agriculture. The signs of the Zodiac, which were mapped out by the old Chaldeans, supply a still more cogent example. In the form in which they are depicted on the ancient temple of Denderah, in Egypt, there may be traced evidence of their primitive pictorial character, a character still recognised in the headings of the months in our almanacks (cf. Whitaker's), and to be detected in current symbols. For example, the curved horns of the ram survive in ? , the sign for Aries; the head and horns of the bull in ? , the sign for Taurus; the arrow and a portion of the bow in ? , the sign for Sagittarius; while, as Dr. Taylor points out, "the curious symbol _ is found to preserve the whole outline of Capricornus, the small circle being the head of the goat, with the forelegs below, and the body and tail extending to the left." Then in such entries in the almanack as " _ rises 4h. 25m.," " _ 11h. 54m.," " _ 10th 9.32 morn.," " _ 3420" in tables of the configuration of Jupiter's satellites, as also in the symbols for money, weights, measures, and so forth, the not wholly dispensed with picture-writing may be detected. The well-nigh vanished trade signs doubtless served a useful purpose as pictographs in guiding the illiterate to the shops of which they were in quest; and here and there the barber's pole with its spiral bandages reminds us of the phlebotomy of the past; the golden balls of the great financiers of Florence hang out from pawnbrokers' shops their delusive signal to the thriftless; while the "grasshopper" of Messrs. Martin, the "leather bottell" of Messrs. Hoare, and other remnants of goldsmiths' trade signs, remind us how many of these swung before the shops of Cheape and Lombard Street in olden time.

To return to the cuneiform. It will be remembered that in the case of the monosyllabic Chinese, with its dictionary of forty thousand words, the symbols of these are compounds of phonograms or sound-words with determinatives as keys to the precise meaning to be attached to the phonograms. Now the languages of the ancient peoples of the Euphrates valley are polysyllabic, and hence arose the necessity for signs denoting full syllables, both complex, "in which several consonants may be distinguished, or simple syllables composed of only one consonant and one vowel or vice versÂ." (Maspero's Dawn of Civilization, p. 728.) And among the libraries of Babylon there were discovered a number of little grammatical documents on bricks, called syllabaria, where a list of characters is given, with the phonetic sign explained in simple syllables at one side, and, when used ideographically, at the other. When a syllabary had thus been adopted, the grouping into words was effected by combining the syllables. "But a polysyllabic language did not lend itself so readily as the Chinese monosyllabic to syllabism," and HalÉvy explains how the difficulty was met. It was met, at least in some degree, by the adoption of the principle of Acrology (Greek akron, "extreme" = at the top or start), i.e. by the choice of a name from the likeness which it suggested between the form of the letter and some familiar thing whose name began with the letter in question. This re-naming of letters by a word beginning with them occurred in the Egyptian, Russian, Runic, and other alphabets. For example, in Russian, the letter b is not called beta but buki, "a beech," while d has lost the old name of delta and acquired that of dobro, "an oak." In the Runic letters of our forefathers b is named beorc or "birch," and th "thorn," while the acrologic system comes nearer home to us in the old nursery rhymes: "A was an Archer, who shot at a frog; B was a Butcher, who had a big dog," &c.

Now this advance to syllabism had been effected, long before the Babylonians appear on the scene, by the older inhabitants of Mesopotamia, the Akkadians, or, more correctly, the Akkado-Sumerians, the Akkadians being settled on the highlands, and the Sumerians on the plains, of that region. The racial affinities of either are not determined, some ethnologists holding that they are of Finno-Turkic origin, others that they belong to the Tatar-Mongolic branch. Neither is it known at what period they immigrated into Chaldea, since at the dawn of history they are already merged in the Semitic conquering race. Some thousands of years b.c. Chaldea had been invaded by the people afterwards known as Babylonians, whose primitive home, in common with that of other Semites, as the Hebrews, Phoenicians, &c., is conjectured to have been in South Arabia. The Babylonians, mixing their blood with that of the subject peoples, settled as agriculturists on the rich alluvial lowlands, while an offshoot from them, the Assyrians, occupied the mountainous and wooded country to the north of the great rivers, keeping their Semitic purity of descent. These "Romans of the East," as they have been called, were soldiers and merchants, strong in the conviction that "trade follows the flag," and hence embarking in many an aggressive enterprise to beat the Phoenician and other rivals in commerce. But, resting on the sword alone, the Assyrian empire perished by the sword.

As for the Akkadians (using this term to include the pre-Semite inhabitants), they had passed the barbaric stage when they invaded Chaldea. They knew the use of metals: they were skilful architects, and; what was of importance in the marshy districts where dams and canals were indispensable, good engineers; their laws mark an advanced social organisation; their writing, as has been seen, had become syllabic; and their literature, besides recording the details of their daily life, supplies the key to a religion which profoundly influenced the Babylonians, and, through them, the Hebrews, ultimately affecting the whole of Christendom. That religion was a blend of higher and lower ideas. At base it was Shamanistic. Natural phenomena—sun, moon, stars, the earth, and so forth—were worshipped, but, as in all religions, that which touches man more closely in his affairs and relations has the firmer hold, and hence there was an active belief in magic, with its allied apparatus of charms, spells, and incantations. Side by side with formulÆ embodying superstitions common to barbaric folk all the world over, we find penitential psalms, appeals to the great gods, and spiritual utterances, some of which are on a plane with Hebrew sacred poetry. All this body of literature, secular and sacred, made up the vast store of books in the libraries whose interpretation is one of the brilliant successes of modern scholarship, and whose contents bring home to us the priceless value of the art of writing to mankind.

Up to a recent date, the oldest known example of cuneiform writing was supplied by a porphyry cylinder seal of the Semite king, Sargon I., who flourished 3800 b.c. (Fig. 40). It bears this inscription:—"Sargon, King of the city of Akkad, to the Sun-god (Sarnas) in the city of Sippara I approached." It is this same king concerning whom a myth, which may have been the origin of the myth about the infant Moses in the bulrushes, is recorded on a tablet preserved, together with the seal, in the British Museum.

Fig. 40.—Cylinder Seal of Sargon I.