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library, if you please, in which the books were numbered and
shelved systematically, and classified and cared for by an
official librarian. If you would see some of the documents of
this marvellous library you have but to step past the winged
lions of Asurnazirpal and enter the Assyrian hall just around the
corner from the Rosetta Stone. Indeed, the great slabs of stone
from which the lions themselves are carved are in a sense books,
inasmuch as there are written records inscribed on their surface.
A glance reveals the strange characters in which these records
are written, graven neatly in straight lines across the stone,
and looking to casual inspection like nothing so much as random
flights of arrowheads. The resemblance is so striking that this
is sometimes called the arrowhead character, though it is more
generally known as the wedge or cuneiform character. The
inscriptions on the flanks of the lions are, however, only
makeshift books. But the veritable books are no farther away
than the next room beyond the hall of Asurnazirpal. They occupy
part of a series of cases placed down the centre of this room.
Perhaps it is not too much to speak of this collection as the
most extraordinary set of documents of all the rare treasures of
the British Museum, for it includes not books alone, but public
and private letters, business announcements, marriage
contracts—in a word, all the species of written records that
enter into the every-day life of an intelligent and cultured
community.
But by what miracle have such documents been preserved through
all these centuries? A glance makes the secret evident. It is
simply a case of time-defying materials. Each one of these
Assyrian documents appears to be, and in reality is, nothing more
or less than an inscribed fragment of brick, having much the
color and texture of a weathered terra-cotta tile of modern
manufacture. These slabs are usually oval or oblong in shape,
and from two or three to six or eight inches in length and an
inch or so in thickness. Each of them was originally a portion
of brick-clay, on which the scribe indented the flights of
arrowheads with some sharp-cornered instrument, after which the
document was made permanent by baking. They are somewhat fragile,
of course, as all bricks are, and many of them have been more or
less crumbled in the destruction of the palace at Nineveh; but to
the ravages of mere time they are as nearly invulnerable as
almost anything in nature. Hence it is that these records of a
remote civilization have been preserved to us, while the similar
records of such later civilizations as the Grecian have utterly
perished, much as the flint implements of the cave-dweller come
to us unchanged, while the iron implements of a far more recent
age have crumbled away.
HOW THE RECORDS WERE READAfter all, then, granted the choice of materials, there is
nothing so very extraordinary in the mere fact of preservation of
these ancient records. To be sure, it is vastly to the credit of
nineteenth-century enterprise to have searched them out and
brought them back to light. But the real marvel in connection
with them is the fact that nineteenth-century scholarship should
have given us, not the material documents themselves, but a
knowledge of their actual contents. The flight of arrowheads on
wall or slab or tiny brick have surely a meaning; but how shall
we guess that meaning? These must be words; but what words? The
hieroglyphics of the Egyptians were mysterious enough 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
within almost two thousand years no man has lived, prior 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
every-day 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; and 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 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
characters, and all three are in languages that at the beginning
of our 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 was 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 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 strange record, and had reported that it
was impossible to reach the inscription. 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
himself soon, assisted by a host of others, proceeded to
elaborate.
The key to the value of this unique 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 neighbors, 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 arrowhead a multitude of
syllabic characters, including many homophones, as had been and
continued to be the custom with the Assyrians, the Persians
selected a few of these characters and ascribed to them phonetic
values that were almost purely alphabetic. In a word, while
retaining the wedge as the basal stroke of their script, they
developed an alphabet, making the 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
Phoenicians were accredited by the Greeks with having introduced
to 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 Egyptians, but from the early Greek scribes as
well.
Thanks to these simplifications, the old Persian language had
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 Renouf, in France,
and by 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 be at
least 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
Ptolemaics 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 tantalizing in
the case of the Rosetta Stone, had dealt more gently with the
Behistun inscriptions; 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 Julian Schrader, in Germany, though a host of other
scholars soon entered the field.
This great linguistic feat was accomplished about the middle of
the nineteenth century. But so great a feat was it that many
scholars of the highest standing, including Joseph Erneste Renan,
in France, and Sir G. Cornewall 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 a 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
interpretations of a 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
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