Chapter VI · DECIPHERMENT OF THE THIRD OR BABYLONIAN COLUMN—HINCKS AND RAWLINSON—A.D. 1846-1851

The task of deciphering the Third or Babylonian Column led to far more important results, and cannot be so briefly summarised. The earliest inscriptions found in Babylonia were observed to consist of two well-marked styles of writing the cuneiform character. One of these styles was to be seen on the Michaux Stone, published in the Collection of Millin. The other occurs on the numerous bricks that were picked up upon the ancient site of Babylon, and on a number of cylinders. But the most remarkable example of this style was found in the long inscription obtained by Sir Harford Jones and published by the East India Company. The first style is by far the simplest, and it is known as the Cursive or New Babylonian; the other is so elaborate that Grotefend called it the ‘Zierschrift’;[709] but it is generally described as the Lapidary or Old Babylonian. All the early scholars were struck by the close similarity of the writing in the third column at Persepolis to the first or simplest form of Babylonian. Münter went a step farther, and pointed out that the similarity extended to the Old Babylonian of the brick inscriptions. In the collection of inscriptions made by Mr. Rich, he thought he discerned three well-marked varieties of writing; but he was able to announce that Grotefend, after a careful comparison, considered that they were all closely related to one another and to the third Persepolitan.[710] It was soon recognised that there are in fact only two varieties of Babylonian, and what Mr. Rich supposed to be a third is due only to the vagaries of the scribe, or, as Rawlinson explained, it ‘arises from the distortion of oblique elongation.’[711] It was long, however, before the identification of the two systems was satisfactorily established. In the fifth volume of the ‘Fundgruben des Orients’ Grotefend demonstrated the essential identity of the third Persepolitan and the simple Babylonian, and in the following volume he illustrated the similarity of the two systems of Babylonian.[712] In 1840 he succeeded in identifying a few lapidary characters with their equivalents in New Babylonian. In his contribution to the subject he endeavoured to render the names of Hystaspes and Darius into the two Babylonian forms.[713] In Hystaspes he seems to have succeeded in only one character—the lapidary sign for ‘as’—but his spelling out of Darius was correct, both in the cursive and lapidary forms.[714] He was able also to recognise that certain inscriptions on vases written in the cursive style reproduced in part the same text as those on the bricks written in the lapidary style. With a little farther study he would have been able, from the material collected in this Table, to draw up a short list of equivalent signs in the two systems. As it was, he left this demonstration to be accomplished by Dr. Hincks in a much more successful manner than it was in his power to attempt. He had observed indeed that certain words in the East India House inscription corresponded to those found on the bricks, and he has collected them together in line 19 of his Table, and placed them word for word below the brick inscription for purposes of comparison.[715] But both are in the same lapidary character, and their juxtaposition served only to show that the same words, and possibly portions of the same sentence, were to be found in each. Grotefend, as we shall soon see, had not the smallest idea of their meaning. It was the good fortune of Dr. Hincks to observe that portions of the text of the East India House inscription are reproduced in a fragmentary inscription written in cursive characters and published by Ker Porter.[716] This, as he says, was ‘a most important discovery, as the equivalence of certain cursive and lapidary characters which bore scarcely any resemblance to one another was thus demonstrated, as well as the equivalence to each other of different lapidary characters which are constantly transcribed by one and the same cursive character.’ By this means he succeeded in drawing up a Table of seventy-six cursive characters, selected from the third Persepolitan column, and placing opposite each its equivalent lapidary sign taken from the East India House inscription.[717]

Hitherto the cuneiform inscriptions known to Europe had been practically limited to the Persepolitan and Babylonian styles of writing. A few examples of different varieties were, however, beginning to crowd upon the bewildered student. Almost the first examples of the Assyrian style were collected by Mr. Rich in 1820, during his visit to Nineveh, and these were subsequently acquired by the British Museum.[718] In 1827, Schulz found about forty inscriptions at Van, written in a very similar character, and these were published in the ‘Journal Asiatique’ of 1840.[719] A prism with a long inscription was discovered at Nineveh in 1830, but it does not seem to have become accessible till purchased by Colonel Taylor in 1846.[720] In 1840, Mr. Layard copied an inscription at Malamir that presented another striking variety. But the first period of great discoveries in Assyria had now approached. In 1843, M. Botta, the French Consul at Mosul, began his excavations in the mound at Khorsabad, and he soon uncovered the remains of a palace. He found the doors adorned with monumental bulls, and the walls decorated with bas-reliefs and inscriptions. He described the result in a series of letters to M. Mohl, which appeared in the ‘Journal Asiatique’ between May 1843 and June 1845. M. Flandin was hastily commissioned to take sketches; but fortunately the task of copying the inscriptions was left entirely to Botta. He faithfully transcribed upwards of two hundred, many of them being, however, exact or slightly varied reproductions of each other. A large collection of sculptures found its way to the Louvre, and the drawings and inscriptions made their appearance in 1849 in the great work ‘Monument de Ninive.’ Like many similar productions in France, it was executed upon such a splendid scale as to place it practically beyond the reach of ordinary students. The inscriptions were, however, afterwards published separately; and M. Botta contributed a valuable essay on the newly found ‘Ecriture Assyrienne’ (1848).[721]

Meanwhile Mr. Layard was rapidly accumulating treasures upon even a greater scale for the British Museum. He began to excavate at Nimrud—the ancient Caleh—in November 1845, and speedily brought to light the remains of three buildings, known as the North-West, Central and South-West Palaces. In the following year he extended his labours to Kouyunjik, a mound on the site of Nineveh, where he unearthed a palace of unusual size, which he found had been erected by the son of the Khorsabad king. He was rewarded by the discovery of the vast treasures now preserved in the British Museum—colossal bulls and lions, winged human figures, and many other symbolical objects; long rows of bas-reliefs depicting battles, sieges and hunting scenes, and large numbers of inscriptions. One of the most important of these was found in the autumn of 1846 on a black obelisk in the central palace of Nimrud. It consists of two hundred and ten lines, and enjoys the distinction of being the first purely Assyrian inscription that was ever deciphered.[722] Of scarcely less importance was the discovery of an inscription upon the pavement where the names and titles of five kings were clearly recorded. Their names could not indeed be read as yet, but sufficient was already known from a comparison with the Persian inscriptions to indicate the genealogical relationship of the unknown sovereign. The Assyrian signs for ‘king,’ ‘son of’ and a few others had been made out, which left no doubt as to the meaning of the document. It began with the father of the founder of the North-West Palace, and ended with the grandson of the builder of the Central Palace. On his return to England, in 1847, Layard wrote an account of ‘Nineveh and its Remains,’ but the work did not appear till 1849. It was followed in the same year by the ‘Monuments of Nineveh,’ which contained drawings of the bas-reliefs and copies of the inscriptions.

Two great collections of Assyrian inscriptions were now in the hands of scholars, who found themselves face to face with the difficult problems they suggested. In England the task was divided between Hincks and Rawlinson; but Mr. Norris, Dr. Birch, and Mr. Layard gave valuable assistance in the publication of documents. Mr. Norris was farther engaged in the study of the Susian texts. In France the work was taken up by Botta, Löwenstern and De Saulcy. M. Oppert does not seem to have turned his attention to this branch of the subject till 1857, when for the first time France was worthily represented. Germany was silent, except for a few contributions made by Grotefend in his declining years that added little to the general progress.

Nothing could at first be more bewildering than the immense number of signs. Grotefend counted only a hundred and thirty different characters in the third Persepolitan column. Mr. Fisher, in 1807, found that the East India House inscription contained two hundred and eighty-seven;[723] and Grotefend, in 1837, estimated that the whole of the Babylonian inscriptions known to him contained about three hundred different signs.[724] But Botta encountered no less than six hundred and forty-two at Khorsabad alone.[725] The unskilled eye will be disposed to agree with Löwenstern that at first sight the Ninevite character presented no analogy with the Persepolitan, or even with the characters on the Babylonian bricks. In his ‘Essai de Déchiffrement’ (1845) he was, however, the first to point out that a large number of them do really correspond to the third Persepolitan; and he based his attempted interpretation partly upon the analogy he had discovered.[726] In his first Essay, of 1846, Hincks also stated his belief that ‘the third Persepolitan agrees in character with the Babylonian and with the Assyrian writing in Schulz’s inscriptions.’[727] Löwenstern afterwards admitted that he would scarcely have recognised the similarity from Schulz’s plates; but it became clearly apparent in the more perfect drawing of Texier.[728] Indeed he was eventually so much struck by the resemblance that he hesitated to classify the Persepolitan with the Babylonian in preference to the Assyrian; in fact, he ultimately persuaded himself that it was nearer the Assyrian. Meanwhile Botta had begun the minute study of the Assyrian character to which later investigators owe more than they are always willing to acknowledge.[729] Those whose fortune it is to occupy the higher pinnacles of knowledge are only too prone to despise the humbler artificers who constructed the scaffolding that enabled them to achieve the ascent. Botta arranged the signs with great care into fifteen classes, according to the number of wedges they contain. The first class included all those with one wedge only; and so on up to the fifteenth class, where we find signs composed of fifteen wedges and upwards: though none appear to exceed eighteen. The result of his classification was to persuade him that the graphic system of Assyria was substantially the same as that found at Persepolis and Babylon. He accepted Rich and Westergaard as the most faithful copyists of the former, and he compared ninety-six of their signs with those at Khorsabad. He found that seventy-two were so similar that their identity could not fail to be recognised at first sight. Fourteen others exhibit a greater difference, but their identity is capable of demonstration. There are therefore eighty-six signs out of ninety-six concerning which no doubt can exist. He thought the difference was not so great as between Gothic and Latin characters. With respect to the writing at Van, he counted a hundred and twelve to a hundred and fifteen characters, and he found that ninety-eight or a hundred were reproduced identically at Khorsabad.[730] When he began to write upon this subject he had only just received a copy of the East India House inscription, and it was some time before he could hazard an opinion as to the relationship of the New Assyrian to the Old Babylonian.[731] The result of a first study of the two hundred and eighty-seven signs in the East India House inscription was the identification of a hundred and seven of the signs with the Assyrian, and a more careful investigation ultimately raised the number to one hundred and seventy-nine.[732] The remaining one hundred and eight have not, he says, any proper equivalent at Khorsabad. He was inclined to attribute a good deal of the diversity to the material and the instrument used. Where, for example, the stone was brittle, as at Van, the engraver showed a disinclination to make the wedges cross, and the chisel would naturally produce a different effect from the impress of a wedge upon soft clay. Much also was, no doubt, due to the individuality of the scribes, who seemed to think they might increase or diminish the number of the wedges according to fancy. Others were simple errors on the part of the original scribe or his copyist, and some may have been intended for abbreviations. He did not believe it possible to establish any fundamental distinctions between any of these styles. Thus he thought the Taylor prism combined the differences peculiar to Nineveh and Babylon so equally that it would be impossible to decide to which class it really belongs. He concluded, therefore, that, notwithstanding considerable apparent variety, there was substantial identity; and that one and the same mode of writing prevailed in Assyria and Babylon, at Van and Persepolis. Indeed he went so far as to suppose that whoever could read a Khorsabad inscription would be able also to read all the others. It is true he could not himself read or pronounce a single word with any degree of certainty;[733] and Rawlinson declared that his special studies afforded him no facility. He could, he says, read the Babylonian of the third column, but he has not ‘yet succeeded in identifying a single name in the tablets of Van or Khorsabad.’[734]

At first indeed Rawlinson was much more impressed by the diversity than by the similarity of the signs, and he described them as ‘constituting varieties of alphabetical formation.’ He divided Babylonian into the writing of the third Persepolitan and that of the bricks and cylinders; the latter he considered was the primitive form ‘which must have embodied the vernacular dialect of Shinar, when the earth was of one language and one speech.’ Assyrian he also divided into two classes, Assyrian proper and Medo-Assyrian or Vannic; but he also distinguished Assyrian proper into two subdivisions, representing the lapidary and the running hand—a specimen of the latter being the Taylor prism. The Elymaean inscriptions he placed in a class apart, ‘as entitled to an independent rank.’ He pointed out that even the third Persepolitan writing is not identical with the cursive Babylonian, and that the variation is sufficient to constitute a serious impediment to study. The writing on the Assyrian cylinders is ‘quite distinct from any variety of character which occurs on similar relics at Babylon’; and he found ‘characters at Van that never occur at Khorsabad and vice versa.’ He cannot, therefore, agree with Botta that they all ‘belong to one single alphabetical system,’ and that the differences are merely ‘varieties of hand.’[735] Farther study, however, led him to alter his opinion, and in 1850 he admits that ‘there is no doubt but that the alphabets of Assyria, of Armenia, of Babylonia, of Susiana and of Elymais are, so far as essentials are concerned, one and the same. There are peculiarities of form, a limitation of usage—but unquestionably the alphabets are “au fond” identical.’ Mr. Layard had also arrived at the same conclusion. In his opinion, the varieties appear to be mere ‘caligraphical distinctions.’[736]

The same important discovery was soon afterwards extended, as we have already related, to include the writing in the second or Susian column of the Persepolitan inscriptions. In 1846, Hincks called attention to the similarity that existed between them. Both the Babylonian and Assyrian modes of writing, he says, ‘agree in principle with the second Persepolitan,’ and he farther observed that where the characters are the same, they have generally the same, or nearly the same, value in all three.[737] It is curious that Botta was quite unable to trace the existence of this resemblance. Writing of the three columns, he says: ‘The elements of the groups are in each quite different, and even when the form agrees the sound is quite different’; and this opinion was shared by Westergaard, who, as we have said, maintained that the various species of cuneiform writing ‘differed from one another in the shape of nearly every letter or group.’[738]

A good deal has been said from the time of Botta downwards as to the similarity of the various styles. There is no doubt that they are sufficiently formidable to require a special training in reading each kind,[739] and the Assyrians themselves found it necessary to make transcriptions from the Babylonian in order to make the writing intelligible. There was a greater diversity in the writing of Babylonian than of Assyrian, in consequence of there being no standard official type in the former as there was in the Assyrian,[740] and consequently a copyist sometimes altogether mistook a sign, and occasionally he was actually unable even to divine its meaning; indeed, so great was the diversity in the manner of writing that the Assyrian scribes made use of Tables of Variants, and in one of these no less than twenty different ways of writing the same sign have been found. On the whole, most students will be inclined to agree with Mr. Budge, who dwells more on the differences than the similarity of the styles.[741]

The demonstration of the similarity of the cuneiform writing of Babylon and Assyria was followed by the more important discovery that the languages expressed by both were the same as that of the third Persepolitan column. The Persian, now deciphered and translated, was thus found to afford a key, not only to the language of the third column, but also to the large collection of inscriptions from Nineveh. Hincks, in a Postscript of June 1846, to which reference will be frequently made, announces that he believes the third Persepolitan ‘agrees, to a great extent at least, in language with the Babylonian inscriptions.’[742] In 1848, Botta endeavoured to establish beyond the possibility of doubt that the Assyrian of Khorsabad likewise agreed with the language of Babylon and Persepolis. He showed that the same grammatical inflexions, the same personal pronouns, the same particles, and very many words agreed in all three languages. With regard to the inscriptions at Van, Botta was at first in doubt, but farther study led him to believe that here the inflexions were not the same.[743] This was subsequently fully recognised by Hincks[744] and by most other scholars. It did not, however, prevent De Saulcy from hazarding a translation of one of them on the supposition that it was written in Semitic.[745] In 1850, Rawlinson agreed that both the Babylonian and Assyrian languages are to be included in a common category; but he added that ‘they can hardly be called identical, inasmuch as each dialect affects the employment of specific verbal roots and certain particular nouns and adjectives.’[746] They are, in fact, distinguished by certain dialectical differences which have been compared in degree to that existing between the dialects of the West and North of England; but other authorities think the differences scarcely amount to provincialism.[747]

The suggestion that the newly-discovered language would turn out to be Semitic was made at an early period of the inquiry. It had not, however, occurred to Grotefend, who described it, in 1837, as Parsi, and in 1840 he had apparently returned to his original opinion that it was Pehlevi, and he expressly rejected a suggestion of Lepsius that the writing might be compared to Phoenician.[748] Before the decipherment of the cuneiform every conceivable hypothesis had been started as to the probable affinities of the Ancient Assyrian language.[749] At length, in 1845, Löwenstern recollected that the Jewish Scriptures place Assur in the same ethnological division as Heber, and he concluded that Assyrian must therefore have been a Semitic speech.[750] In June 1846, Hincks also announced that ‘both Assyrian and Babylonian appear to have much in common with the Semitic languages’;[751] and in the following January he stated emphatically that they ‘exhibit a much greater similarity to the other Semitic languages than I had at first supposed.’ In consequence of this similarity, he now for the first time sets the fashion, afterwards generally adopted, of classifying the signs according to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and he endeavoured for a brief time to assimilate the vowel system to the Semitic method.[752] In a tract written in 1847 Löwenstern dwelt with increasing force upon the Semitic affinities of the language; and he considered that Rawlinson is fundamentally wrong in applying the laws of an Aryan speech ‘to a writing and a language that are Semitic.’[753] It cannot be said that he contributed much towards the proof of his assertion. He was entirely mistaken in the fundamental principle of his comparison, the supposed similarity of the vowel systems of the two languages; but he pointed out the analogy of a few words, such as ‘rabu,’ ‘great,’ to its Hebrew equivalent, and this was the only word which, according to Menant, was then correctly read.[754] In the December previous, Hincks pointed out that the personal pronoun in Assyrian reads ‘a-na-ku,’ but he left it to the learning of his readers to recognise the identity of this word with the Hebrew. This was afterwards done by Botta,[755] who, however, continued on the whole to be doubtful of the Semitic affinities of Assyrian.[756]

In 1849, De Saulcy contributed two memoirs on cuneiform, which seem to have added considerably to the proof.[757] In the first he is said to have shown that the two languages agreed in the feminine termination t and in the relative pronoun ‘sha’; and in the second he identified the particles for ‘and’ and ‘with.’[758] In the following year, Hincks added other forms and words that could be best explained by reference to the Hebrew;[759] and Rawlinson definitely settled the question by an elaborate comparison of its grammatical forms and vocabulary with those of other Semitic languages.[760] Since that time its affinity to the Semitic family has been fully accepted. Rawlinson showed that Babylonian is found in a more primitive state than any other of the Semitic dialects of Asia open to our research. It is held to be the oldest representative of that family yet known, ‘the Ethiopic ranking next in point of antiquity.’[761]

Hincks declared that it bears the same relationship to Semitic as Sanscrit to Aryan, an opinion shared by Mr. Sayce and Professor Haupt. It properly belongs to the northern group, which includes Hebrew, Phoenician, Syriac and Chaldee; but there is some disagreement as to the degree of relationship.[762] Mr. King describes it as ‘closely akin’ to the northern group, while Mr. Pinches considers the differences are often very great, especially in the verbs.[763] Mr. Boscawen finds striking affinities in grammar to Arabic, one of the southern group.[764] It was some time, however, before these opinions prevailed. M. Luzzato, in 1850, still maintained that Assyrian was an Indo-European language;[765] and Holtzmann that it was a Persian dialect mingled with Semitic elements.[766] Botta long remained in doubt, and Hitzig did not hesitate to deny that it is Semitic.[767] So late as 1858 Ewald, the German Hebraist, entirely refused to accept the grammatical forms of Assyrian as Semitic.[768] M. Renan wrote to the same effect in 1859, and he even retained his doubts in the fourth edition of his ‘Langues Sémitiques,’ published in 1863.[769] The recent discoveries were indeed peculiarly unacceptable to M. Renan. Not long before, he had laid down that monotheism was the special ‘note’ of the Semitic races, and he was naturally extremely disconcerted by the unexpected apparition in the Louvre of a profusion of Assyrian gods, according as they were dug up by M. Botta. In 1865 we are still assured that Assyrian, ‘though of the Semitic type, is only distantly connected with known forms of that language.’[770]

It is much easier to determine the grammatical affinity of a language than to read it, and the place of Babylonian in the family of languages was definitely fixed before much progress was made in the work of translation. From the time that Grotefend’s attention was first directed to cuneiform research, he endeavoured to include the second and third columns, no less than the first, within his sphere of inquiry. But he achieved very little success. In his Essay published by Heeren (1824) we find that he had already singled out the groups in the third column that corresponded to Cyrus, Hystaspes, Darius and Xerxes. The Babylonian, unlike the Persian, has no sign to mark the division of the words, and the difficulty attending their separation was at first very great. The process was facilitated when it was recognised that each line begins and ends with a word: that is to say, a word is never divided and carried over from one line to another. In 1837, Grotefend successfully divided eight lines of the Elvend inscription, with only a slight mistake. He also divided the B inscription of Darius nearly correctly: the exception being that at the end of his first line he seems to treat three words as one.[771] Nor was the difficulty confined to the separation of the words only. Some of the signs are so long that they were at first mistaken for two or more letters. Thus the sign for ar in the word for Xerxes was treated by Grotefend as th and r;[772] and Löwenstern divided the sign for gi into r and s, which continued for a long time to be a source of trouble.

In 1840 Grotefend gives a Table to show the transliteration of his four royal names. He reads Cyrus ‘Kho · re · s’ for ‘Ku · ra · as’; Hystaspes ‘Wi · scht · as · p’ for ‘Us · ta · as · pa’; Darius ‘Da · r · ha · a · wesch’ for ‘Da · ri · ya · a · vus’; Xerxes ‘Kh · sch · ah · th · r · sch’ for ‘Hi · si’ar · si.’[773]

We have here sixteen different signs with their values attached; and of these only three (as, da, a) are absolutely correct; though the others give the consonantal values. These values appeared substantially in his tract of 1837, with the addition of ‘wo-hu’ for the signs that read ‘rabu.’[774] Hincks, writing in December 1846, makes the very liberal admission that perhaps Grotefend knew the values of ten cursive characters correctly and of ten others approximately.[775]

It will be seen from the transliteration that he recognised some of the signs as syllabic and some as alphabetical. He also knew there was a single sign for ‘son,’ which, he points out, occurred as a in Darius; and he had found three of the equivalent signs for ‘king.’ It is not improbable that if he had persevered in analysing a larger number of proper names, he might eventually have reached other solid results. Unfortunately, these were not readily accessible. The I inscription, that yielded so much assistance to Burnouf and Lassen, had no Babylonian equivalent; and Westergaard had not yet copied the one at Naksh-i-Rustam. Failing the only true method, he had recourse to another that once more carried him far away to another ‘constellation of Moro.’

There was much speculation as to what could be the signification of a certain inscription found on cylinder seals and ‘holy’ vases, and reproduced with amplification on the bricks collected by Mr. Rich at Babylon. Hager had long ago thrown out the useful suggestion that the brick inscriptions most probably recorded the name of the maker or the builder; but this opinion did not ultimately find favour. It was contended that the inscriptions on the seals and ‘holy’ vases must have a religious import, and were no doubt used as talismans, in accordance with Oriental custom; and nothing could be more natural than that the same mystical formulae should be impressed upon the bricks, in order to banish the evil demons from the precincts of the building. Grotefend accordingly looked about for guidance, and at length found something to suit his purpose in the Zend-Avesta. He collected a number of brick inscriptions together, and placed under them such portions of the inscriptions on seals and ‘holy’ vases as he found to correspond. They are not, however, exactly alike, for in the latter two or more words are omitted from the middle of the sentence. The first legend contains sixteen words and, according to Grotefend, it runs thus: ‘(1) Ich erhebe (2) demüthigst (3) den grossen (4) König (5) Mithras (6) immerdar (7) mit Grösse (8) und mit Stärke (9) an diesem (10) öffentlichen Orte (11) Ja (12) ich erhebe (13) diesen (14) grossen (15) König (16) Mithras.’ The legend taken from the brick of Nebuchadnezzar (line 13) differs slightly from this. The name of the king or god is not the same (words 5 and 16); and the two words ‘öffentlichen Orte,’ ‘ja,’ are also different. At the end, a seventeenth word is added, signifying, as is supposed, ‘sei gnädig.’ Such was the last attempt at translation before the breaking of the new light. The meaning of this inscription is now known to be: ‘(words 1, 2, 3) Nabu-kudur-usur, (4) King (5) of Babylon, (6-10) Restorer of Bit-Saggatu and of Bit-Zida, (11) eldest son (12, 13, 14) of Nabu-pal-usur, (15) King (16) of Babylon, (17) I.’[776]

Löwenstern, in his ‘Essai de Déchiffrement,’ published in 1845, contributed little to the progress of the study. He, however, boldly attempted to pass beyond the guidance of the Persepolitan inscriptions, and to decipher two proper names in an inscription recently found at Khorsabad. The one he selected is engraved over a bas-relief and appears in Botta (Plate 25). The subject evidently referred to the capture of a city, and Löwenstern learned from the Hebrew Scriptures that the Assyrians had only captured four important places. One of these was Asdod, which was taken by Esarhaddon, and the appearance of sea in the bas-relief left no doubt that this was the place referred to. He had thus ingeniously conjectured the names of the city and the conqueror by independent means; and there was little difficulty in fixing the cuneiform groups in which they were to be found. We have already said that Löwenstern observed the close resemblance between the Assyrian and Persepolitan characters; and he at first thought that the similarity extended to the square writing of the Hebrews. It was by comparison with these that he sought to achieve his decipherment. The name of the town consisted of five characters. The first he did not know, but assumed to be a; the second corresponded exactly to the Hebrew ‘shin,’ the third to the Old Persian d; and, pursuing this method, he satisfied himself that he had deciphered ‘Asdoh’ or ‘Asdod.’ Botta afterwards pointed out that the word had been improperly transcribed, and that the first sign, translated a, was simply the determinative of ‘city.’[777] As regards the group that should contain the name of Esarhaddon, Löwenstern thought it consisted of three signs. The first, he erroneously stated, had been ascertained by Grotefend to be r;[778] the second was already known as s in ‘Asdod’; the third bore a remote resemblance to the Hebrew ‘koph’ turned over on its side. It remained to adapt the result, r s k, to the name of Esarhaddon. The matter was simplified by Isaiah, who calls the king in whose reign Asdod was captured Sargon. Another reading of this name is ‘Sarak,’ which is evidently the word in the inscription, the transposition of the r and s being obviously unimportant. It happened, curiously enough, that Löwenstern guessed the name of the Khorsabad king correctly, but his transliteration was entirely at fault. Two years later, Longpérier pointed out that he had omitted the first sign of the name altogether; and Botta protested against the separation of the second sign into two, in order to evolve r and s.[779]

In June 1846 Hincks began the series of contributions to the subject which he continued down to the time of his death, twenty years later. In his first paper he tells us he had just begun to apply himself to the third Persepolitan, which, he says, he found to agree in ‘character and, to a great extent at least, in language with the Babylonian inscriptions, and to the Assyrian writing in Schulz’s inscriptions.’ ‘In both,’ he says, ‘some of the characters represent elementary sounds and some [represent] combinations. In both, two or more characters are used to represent the same sounds. In both, no vowel is omitted; but vowels and consonants are repeated in two consecutive characters.’ He also ‘found it to be a general rule, though it admits of some exceptions, that when a character occurred in two or more alphabets, it had the same value, or nearly so, in all of them.’ Thus the pa of the second Persepolitan is pa in Assyrian, and ba in Babylonian. He claimed to be able to read the names of ‘Babylon’ and ‘Nineveh’ on certain bricks that had been brought from those places.[780]

A few months later he was able to announce that he had ‘made considerable progress in deciphering the Babylonian cursive and also the lapidary character of the East India House inscription.’ He found that the writing in the third Persepolitan column was identical with the former, or cursive, style, and that its title to be called the ‘Babylonian column’ was therefore incontestable.

The only predecessor he will allow to have had in this inquiry is Grotefend, who has discovered, he says, that the Babylonian characters are partly syllabic and partly literal; and that ‘certain lapidary characters correspond to certain cursive ones.’ Grotefend, he adds, may also have discovered the values of about ten cursive characters correctly, and possibly of ten others approximately. But he was not aware that ‘several equivalent characters might be in use to represent the same letter or syllable.’[781] Hincks was, however, more adequately supplied with materials to work with. Besides the Persepolitan inscriptions which he had the advantage to study in the more perfect copies of Westergaard, he had also access to the list of provinces at Naksh-i-Rustam lately copied by the same traveller. The discovery that a clay cylinder published by Porter reproduced in cursive characters a portion of the East India House inscription written in the lapidary style had, as we have already seen, enabled him to compare together seventy-six signs in the two different modes of writing. These he now attempted to classify according to what he considered to be their values. The Table is the first of the kind that appeared, and is consequently of very exceptional interest. His decipherment was based in the usual manner upon a comparison between the proper names in the Babylonian and those in the Persian column. ‘But,’ he says, ‘even more [values] were determined by comparing different modes of writing the same word.’ His success, so far as it goes, is certainly remarkable. He recognises correctly the signs for the three principal vowels, a, i and u (Nos. 1, 4 and 7); a second sign for u, used in the late Babylonian, is also correctly identified. The breathing sign is rendered with approximate correctness by ya (No. 2; cf. King 226), and the two diphthongs ai and ia figure as yu and ya (9 and 3). The list of consonantal sounds is, of course, far from complete; but it is remarkable that in the great majority of cases the signs are presented to us as syllabic. They even include two compound syllables, ‘bar’ and ‘sar.’ They are distributed among twenty-one different sounds: r or er, ra, ru; n, na, nu, ana; ba, bu, bar; ak, ka, ku; ta, da; s, as, us; sa, su, sar, and the signs for the plural. It will be seen that this affords a remarkable anticipation of a later discovery. A careful examination will show that, so far as the consonantal sounds are concerned, there are extremely few errors. Indeed, out of fifty-five signs, we have only found twelve radical mistakes in this respect. On the other hand, he was able to give to many signs their absolutely correct syllabic value. At the time of writing he was of opinion that the distinction between i and u was not observed; and he accordingly classifies together the syllabic ending in either of these vowels. He thought that the same confusion existed among the consonants. He considered that the language did not admit of distinction between r and l, or between b and p, or w and m; nor between the gutturals k, g and kh; nor between the sibilants; and that ch is expressed by s, and j by k. He identified the personal pronoun I—a-na-ku; and he read the name and titles of Nebuchadnezzar in various inscriptions which Grotefend had mistaken for forms of prayer. He saw clearly the ideographic and determinative value of some of the signs, and fixed correctly upon those for ‘and,’ ‘son,’ ‘great,’ ‘earth,’ ‘one,’ ‘house,’ ‘god,’ ‘man’ (two), and another sign for ‘king’ not previously recognised by Grotefend. He also pointed out two signs for the plural. (December 1846.)

In his paper of January 1847 he increases his list of primary signs to ninety-five, and he analyses the remaining characters found in the East India House inscription published by Mr. Fisher in 1807. He thinks he has been able to assign values to a hundred and ninety-nine of these, and to attach them to some one or other of the ninety-five primary values to which, in his opinion, they corresponded. If this attempt had been successful, he would have arrived at the values of the whole of the two hundred and eighty-seven signs in Mr. Fisher’s list, and a few others in addition. But the paper in other respects indicates a retrograde tendency. ‘The language,’ he says, ‘has been brought to exhibit a much greater similarity to the Semitic ones than I had at first supposed.’ He accordingly abandons the ‘transcription of Babylonian words into Roman characters’ and assimilates them to the letters in the Hebrew alphabet.[782] He distributes the signs into classes according as he supposes them to be labials, gutturals, dentals, nasals, linguals and sibilants. He does not attempt to subdivide the classes into surds and sonants, but he separates each class into two divisions, according as he considers that the consonant is followed by e (:sheva) or by a (-pathac). ‘Values different from these are annexed to the characters which admit them.’ In so far as each sign is inseparably attached to one or other vowel the system remains syllabic; but his new table exhibits a strong desire to revert, if possible, to an alphabetical system in correspondence with the Hebrew. His study of the inscriptions at Van enabled him, even at this early date, to give ‘the mode of expressing numbers in cuneatic characters from 1 to 100,000’: a system he farther exemplified in his later paper on the Van inscriptions.

His manipulation of the two hundred and eighty-seven signs induced him to take a much too favourable opinion of his own achievement, for we find him, in the course of the following year (May 1848), announcing that ‘the values of the great majority of the [Babylonian] characters are, in my judgment, already settled beyond the reach of criticism,’[783] a statement which we now know is, in fact ‘beyond the range of criticism.’ By that time he had, however, made the important discovery that Sennacherib and Esarhaddon were the builders of the two palaces at Nineveh. He would not, however, admit that Sargon was the Khorsabad king, a fact that had just been demonstrated with remarkable ingenuity by Longpérier.[784] Hincks suggested that the proper reading was Ni-Shar.

It is worthy of remark that the writings we have just reviewed of Hincks, in 1846-7, were brought to the notice of Continental students by Mohl, in his ‘Rapport’ to the Société Asiatique of 1848.

It is, in fact, in these essays that the first real progress in the decipherment of Babylonian was made. In them Hincks laid the foundation upon which all subsequent work was raised, a work to which he himself contributed no small share.

The year 1847 was especially rich in contributions to the study. It opened with the remarkable paper we have just reviewed; and during its course Rawlinson expounded his views in the ‘Journal of the Asiatic Society,’ Botta in the ‘Journal Asiatique,’ Longpérier in the ‘Revue Archéologique.’ Löwenstern added another Memoir of greater value than the first, and De Saulcy made his appearance in this field of inquiry by a paper communicated to the Académie des Inscriptions, and by two essays that have exposed him to much criticism.

Hincks, as we have seen, had worked exclusively upon the Persepolitan and Babylonian texts; but the great discoveries of Botta and Layard soon diverted attention to the more ample materials that were beginning to pour in from Khorsabad and Nimrud. We have already alluded to the enormous number of different signs that were found to be employed in the Assyrian inscriptions—no less than six hundred and forty-two, according to Botta’s computation. It seemed incredible that they could all convey different shades of sound. Grotefend noticed that even in the third Persepolitan some signs appeared to be interchangeable, and therefore presumably of similar value; and this peculiarity became even more noticeable in Babylonian.[785] Hincks, as we have seen, noticed ‘the equivalence to each other of different lapidary characters, which are constantly transcribed by one and the same cursive character.’ In a paper read before the Académie des Inscriptions in 1845, Botta explained that many Assyrian characters of very different form were frequently substituted for one another, and the inference was that there are several signs to express the same, or nearly the same, sound. Rawlinson’s attention, up to the present, had been almost entirely fixed upon the Persian column of the Behistun inscription, and his version of it appeared early in 1847. He saw that it afforded the ‘only key to the decipherment of the Babylonian alphabet.’[786] We have observed that Grotefend found himself practically limited to four proper names; Löwenstern had only twenty to work upon;[787] while Hincks and De Saulcy, with the addition of the Naksh-i-Rustam inscription, had forty. From the Behistun and other sources now available to Rawlinson, the number gradually rose to ninety-four;[788] and with these before him, he began to apply himself to ‘the determination of the phonetic powers of the characters.’ Among the new names was that of Nebuchadnezzar, which he at once recognised was the same as occurred so frequently on the bricks at Hillah. This discovery was made quite independently of Dr. Hincks; and Layard is inclined to think that, in actual date, the precedence is due to Rawlinson.[789] He was able already (1847) to announce that he had ‘obtained a tolerably extensive alphabet from the orthography of the proper names’; but he adds: ‘I have left the grammar and construction of the language hitherto untouched.’ He had, however, been greatly struck by the number of signs with apparently equivalent sounds.[790] He found it difficult to admit the existence of variants in the same inscription, except such as were caused by slight changes in the writing of the same character. He saw, however, that no such explanation would cover all the difficulties of the case, for some of the substitutes were obviously totally distinct in form. In this case he did not believe that they were ‘legitimately interchangeable.’ He thought the ‘phonetic organisation of the language was so minute and elaborate that although each form was designed to represent a distinct and specific sound, yet the artist was perpetually liable to confound the characters.’ He suggested also that each consonant had a different sign to express the surd and sonant; and in some cases one might be substituted for the other. The ‘vowel-sounds,’ he declared, ‘were inherent’; but it was allowable also to represent them by separate signs; and farther redundant consonants were frequently introduced for the sake of euphony. These opinions were immediately traversed by Löwenstern, in his ‘Exposé des Eléments’ (1847). This tract followed the sudden, though happily transient, conversion of Hincks to the application of the Semitic vowel system to the Babylonian writing. Löwenstern embraced this view with characteristic energy; and it was adopted also by De Saulcy, in whose case it became one of the chief causes of the ultimate failure of his Assyrian studies.

Löwenstern, as we have said, considered that Rawlinson was fundamentally wrong in applying the laws derived from Indo-European languages ‘to a writing and a language that are Semitic.’ He absolutely denied that the vowel is inherent.[791] The signs are simple consonants, and they may be used in connection with any vowel sound. The vowels may or may not be expressed, and the signs for them are to a large extent expressive of any vowel sound. One sign he mentions may convey the sound of hou, a, and ya; another of a or ha, w and ü.[792] The vowels are, he says, by no means limited to the a, i and u of the Sanscrit, but include also the e and o and the diphthong ao. He entirely disagrees with the opinion of Rawlinson that the equivalent signs have any modified value. He compares Assyrian with Egyptian, and regards the signs that are apparently interchangeable as simple ‘homophones.’ He shows the different ways in which the names of the Achaemenian kings are written; and draws the apparently inevitable inference that the different signs have one and the same sound. ‘The variants,’ he says, ‘may be used indifferently without violating the phonetic laws of the language.’[793] He was apparently the first to observe that some signs ‘express different sounds’; and these he calls ‘homotypes.’[794] As was natural, he does not appear to have had any idea of the importance of this discovery. His homotypes seem limited to the signs for vowels, any one of which may express almost any vowel sound, and also aspirates and liquids; and he observed that m and w, and y and i, are each expressed by the same signs.

His present pamphlet indicates how rapidly the study was progressing. He now relies entirely upon the analysis of proper names, in accordance with the suggestion of Longpérier; and he abandons his attempted comparison with the form of the Hebrew letters. He surrenders his reading of ‘Ashdod,’ and suggests ‘No Kaschzar’ in place of it; and he even doubts the identity of Arsak and Sargon. He thinks he has discovered from the Naksh-i-Rustam inscription that the sign he mistook for r is really s, and that his k is certainly n. Accordingly he reads the word s ch(kh) n which somewhat revives his confidence in Sargon.

It is not clear to what extent, if to any, he was indebted to Hincks. His exaggerated Semitism was probably of native growth. He was not yet aware of the age of the Babylonian bricks, as explained by Hincks in 1846: yet he knew the determinative sign for proper names, which apparently was not known to Hincks.[795] Hincks, on the other hand, recognised a sign ‘prefixed non-phonetically to the name Ormuzd, and also used by abbreviation for the word “god.”’ Löwenstern says there is ‘no special sign accompanying the names of the gods.’ He, however, recognised a sign as the monogram for ‘god’; but when he found it in conjunction with the name of ‘Aurmuzd’ he treated it as the initial letter, and gave it the definite phonetic value of a.[796] Such were the difficulties to be overcome before the determinative for ‘god’ was recognised. He observed that a word may be expressed by its first and last signs, an early indication of the phonetic complement.[797] Meanwhile Hincks and Rawlinson announced the discovery already mentioned that the apparent equivalent signs in Persian depended in reality upon the vowel that was associated with the consonantal value. It at once occurred to Longpérier that the great difficulty of the Assyrian homophones might be solved by the application of the same principle. If, he says, there is a separate sign for the consonant m according as it is followed by a, i or u, ‘one can understand how a similar practice, if extended to many consonants, would augment the number of alphabetical signs.’ He warned scholars not to be too ready to accept the existence of homophones, because he observed that ‘according as the work proceeds the number of homophones decreases.’[798]

While these discussions were proceeding, Botta continued his contributions to the ‘Journal Asiatique’ (1847-8), and afterwards published them in a separate ‘Mémoire sur l’Ecriture cunéiforme’ (Paris, 1848). He endeavoured to introduce some degree of order among the profusion of Assyrian signs. He drew up a Table, consisting of a hundred and twenty-five signs that seemed to be most commonly used; and under each of these he arranged the signs which he found were sometimes apparently interchanged for them.[799] In this List of Variants we constantly find six or seven signs—sometimes many more—grouped together as of equivalent value. In view of later discoveries, it will be seen how extremely useful this classification might become, for the signs thus brought together were no doubt usually those that contained the same consonantal values. In the meantime, however, Botta was at a loss to find any reasonable explanation. Like Rawlinson, however, he could not believe that any of them were, as Löwenstern maintained, real homophones, or signs having identical values. They must, he thought, be distinguished from each other by some slight shades of sound that were sufficiently near to be easily confounded.[800] He explained, in anticipation of the discovery so soon afterwards made by Hincks, that ‘it is possible that the language is syllabic—so far, at least, as that each consonant is represented by a different sign, according to the vowel to which it is joined. Thus, for example, there would be one sign for b; others for ba, bi, etc. In Semitic languages the short vowels have little importance, and therefore the syllable ba might be expressed by the sign for b only; by the two signs b and a; and also in certain cases, by the signs that represent b in connection with the other vowels.’ It will be seen that Botta was very far indeed from being the mere painstaking classifier which it was once the fashion to describe him. He and Longpérier were, in fact, the only two Continental scholars, at present occupied with this subject, who were gifted with any real penetration into its difficulties.

Botta succeeded in dividing nearly the whole of the Bull inscription correctly into its words, but the difficulty of this task was still so great that even he occasionally fell into error. He also first pointed out that the sign Löwenstern mistook for two signs was one and indivisible. He detected the determinative sign for ‘country’ that is used in the Khorsabad inscription, and he made the important suggestion that the phonetic value of the sign for ‘king’ is ‘sar.’[801] Longpérier at once connected this word with its Hebrew equivalent, and showed that it is used to express the first syllable in the name of the Khorsabad king ‘Sar-gin.’ He made an attempt to decipher an inscription on the leg of the Khorsabad bull, and he was the first to recognise ‘Assur.’ His translation runs thus: ‘Glorious [is] Sargon, King, great King, King of Kings, King of the country of Assur.’[802] He also showed that ‘great’ might be expressed by one sign only,[803] which added another step to the discovery of the phonetic complement begun by Löwenstern. This short contribution to the ‘Revue Archéologique’ shows that Longpérier possessed to a high degree a true aptitude for these studies; and if he had been able to pursue them, he might have vindicated for France a more favourable position than it was her fortune to obtain. The difficulty in these matters of recognising truth from error was nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the case of the identification of ‘Sargon’ by Longpérier. So far was the correctness of this ingenious suggestion from gaining immediate acceptance, that we find Hincks subsequently conjectures that the name of the father of Sennacherib should be read ‘Ni-Shar.’[804] A later attempt, in 1849, which resulted in ‘Kin-nil-li-n’a’ showed little improvement. Even in 1850 Rawlinson is still so far afield that he translates it ‘Arko-tsin’; and it is not till August 1851 that he accepts ‘Sargina,’ the reading given four years previously by Longpérier.[805] Yet the question was of no little interest, for it really settled the controversy between Hincks and Rawlinson as to the date of the Lower Assyrian dynasty in favour of the former. It was not till Rawlinson read ‘Sennacherib’ in a tablet found by Layard at Kouyunjik that he would acknowledge his error, and admit that there was at last found ‘a tangible starting place for chronology.’ Hincks was satisfied, two years earlier, that he had identified the names of Sennacherib and Esarhaddon.

In June 1849 Hincks read a paper on the Khorsabad inscriptions which shows a great advance upon any contribution yet made to the decipherment of the language. There is evidence in his essay on the Van inscriptions that so early as December 1847 he had practically given up the attempt he made in the previous January to assimilate the Assyrian writing as far as possible to the Hebrew—at least as regards the vowel system.[806] He is now satisfied that the Assyrian maintains a clear distinction between the vowels, and also between the surd and sonant consonants at the beginning of a word, though at the end the two sounds were confounded. He points out that no distinction is made between the sounds of w and m, and, he adds, between l and r; but he afterwards correctly admits the independent existence of these sounds in his Syllabarium.[807] He has also definitely arrived at the conviction that the Assyrian characters are wholly syllabic or ideographic—in a large number of cases they are both. He will not now admit that any of them represents a simple consonant. He has still no doubt that there are many homophones. Many characters appear to have precisely the same values, ‘though much fewer than might be inferred from a mechanical comparison of inscriptions and observance of interchanges.’ He recognises the existence of polyphones, already described by Löwenstern in 1847 as ‘homotypes.’

‘Many characters,’ he says, ‘admit of two or more kindred values, the distinction between which would appear not to have been considered so great as to require different modes of representing them.’ This discovery was so perplexing that he doubted how best to present it to the reader: ‘Whether it is more desirable to give different values to the same character, or to give it one value only, with a warning to the reader that he may, under certain restrictions, substitute another for it at his pleasure.’

But the chief importance of his present essay consists in the light it throws for the first time on the nature of the ideograms. The earliest inquirers leant to the opinion that the language was at least partly monogrammatic, though Grotefend was inclined to regard these signs more in the light of abbreviations. He, however, distinctly pointed out the existence of ideographic characters in the shorter inscriptions at Persepolis. In 1846 (December) Hincks recognised a sign that was used ‘by abbreviation for the word “god”’; and he noticed that ‘besides having a phonetic value, it is used as a non-phonetic initial before the name of Ormuzd.’ In the same essay he gave numerous other instances of the existence of ideographic and non-phonetic determinative signs.[808] In 1849 he added for the first time the true phonetic value (an) for the sign for ‘god’;[809] and in the present essay he shows the various uses to which ideographic signs may be applied. He explains that many phonetic characters also express words; these may be considered as abbreviations, though possibly some ‘originally denoted ideas and thence, in process of time, the initial sounds in the words which express them.’ A second class resemble the mixed signs of the Egyptians: they may represent words by themselves, but they sometimes require the addition of complements. Another class never have complements, nor any phonetic value except in compound nouns, of which the word they represent forms an integral part. The ideograms, however, that give rise to the most interesting speculation are those that have phonetic values, but where the words that denote the ideas they express have no phonetic relationship to the phonetic value of the ideogram. For example, we now know that the phonetic value of the ideogram for ‘god’ is an; but this syllable forms no portion of the Assyrian word for ‘god,’ which is il-u. A glance over any table giving the syllabic values of ideograms will show how extensively this peculiarity prevails; and its recognition soon led Hincks to the important deduction that the writing was borrowed from some other people where the phonetic value of the ideograms was in some sort of agreement with the initial sound of the word they represented.[810] Hincks dwelt on the great difficulty of deciphering a language in which the characters are sometimes used as phonetic syllables and sometimes as ideographs. In each case it was necessary first to determine in which sense it occurred, and, if in the latter, the pronunciation could only be ascertained when it was found spelt out phonetically in some known word. For example, the pronunciation of the ideogram for ‘god’ was fixed by finding that it formed the il-u in ‘Bab-ilu.’ When the pronunciation of the ideogram was known, it afforded, as has been said, in the majority of cases no clue whatever to the syllabic value of the sign, and the transliterator was liable to fall into the error of reading a word ideographically instead of phonetically, just as frequently as to mistake ideograms for phonetics. Compound ideograms were also not infrequent, where two or more were used to express an idea, but without reference to the sound. For example, the word for ‘palace’ is composed of two ideograms, bit and rab, meaning respectively ‘house’ and ‘great’; but Hincks warned the reader that he might fall into a serious error if he were to suppose that they are employed in conjunction phonetically, and that ‘bitrab’ is the pronunciation of the Assyrian word for ‘palace.’[811] He shows that several ideographs may be used as simple determinative suffixes to words which are phonetically complete without them. The determinatives probably all originally represented words, and many of them preserved their phonetic values.[812]

This inquiry into the nature and use of ideograms was the first that had been made, and it formed an important contribution to the knowledge of the language. His attempted transliterations are not of equal value. He rejected the reading of ‘Sargon’ given by Löwenstern, and he does not seem to have heard of the solution of the difficulty proposed the year before by Longpérier.[813] He recognised indeed that the sign for ‘king’ with which the word begins forms an integral portion of the name, but he did not perceive, like Longpérier, that its counterpart is the Hebrew ‘sar’; and he was led by other comparisons to assign the value of ‘kin-nil’ to the ideogram. He knew also that the sign Löwenstern had broken up into two and thought signified r, s formed in fact a single sign, which he pronounced ri or li. These efforts resulted in ‘kin-nil-li-n’a,’ which might seem even less manageable than the r, s, k of Löwenstern. But Hincks was quite equal to the occasion, and, with the customary imaginative faculty of the philologist, he found no difficulty in connecting this person with the Chinzirus of Ptolemy, who, it appears, was a contemporary of Porus. He had already detected that the names of the son and grandson of this prince were Sennacherib and Esarhaddon, the builders of Kouyunjik and the South-West Palace of Nimrud. The first we find he transliterated ‘Sanki’ or ‘Sankin,’ with the possible addition of ‘rav’ or ‘ram’—‘Sankin-rav’: the other came out as ‘Adar-ka-dan.’ He also explains how he arrived at ‘Nabiccudurrayuchur’ for Nebuchadnezzar, and how he fancied he had found ‘Jerusalem’; but these instances only serve to illustrate the great obstacles that had still to be overcome. We have already mentioned the suggestions that were made first by Longpérier and afterwards by Botta with the view of reducing the number of homophones. Hincks confesses he had not seen the essay of the former, and we have not observed that he has acknowledged his obligations to Botta, though he was evidently acquainted with his work, as we see from an unpleasant reference to ‘a mechanical comparison of inscriptions.’ It was, however, upon the principle these writers suggested that Hincks was now about to solve one of the greatest difficulties of the language. The solution is contained in an Appendix to the essay just reviewed, and was sent to press on January 19, 1850, the same day that Major Rawlinson read his first paper to the Asiatic Society. Hincks now explains that there are four distinct vowel sounds in Assyrian, ā, a, i and u; but the difference between the first two was not maintained when they preceded a consonant.[814] He laid down that every sign represented a consonant either preceded or followed by one of these vowels. Therefore, each consonant was represented by seven signs, thus: cā, ca, ci, cu; ac, ic, uc. He thought there were at least fifteen consonants, and that the syllabary was of Indo-European origin, and need not therefore, as he had at first supposed, be adjusted to the Hebrew alphabet. The principle thus announced has been accepted with some modifications. The difference between the long and short a has not been maintained in this connection, and consequently the syllabic representation of each consonant is reduced from seven to six. His statement that the difference between surd and sonant is maintained at the beginning but not at the end of the syllable has also been admitted. We have thus separate signs for ba, bi, bu and pa, pi, pu; but the signs for ap, ip and up answer for both. Hincks’s consonants have been accepted without material change. His y has been omitted and h added; z has been substituted for j. Two signs for k to represent Caph and Koph, and two for t to represent Teth and Tau have been added, where Hincks only had one for each, so that the number of consonants is now raised to seventeen. Not only did Hincks arrive at a correct theory of the simple syllables, but he identified correctly a very large number of the signs corresponding to them. Of the seventy-one he gives in his Table at least fifty-seven are accurate, and possibly even more. He closed the essay with a brief specimen of a translation from the Khorsabad inscription.

This Essay of Hincks exercised a decisive influence upon the future study of Assyrian. It demonstrated that, although the language was Semitic, the mode of writing was not Semitic; and for a time it divided scholars into two opposing camps. Those who followed Hincks maintained that the language was syllabic, and that each sign expressed a consonant associated with an inherent and invariable vowel. Those, on the contrary, who sought to assimilate it to the Hebrew system were of opinion that the signs represent simple consonants that might be preceded or followed by any vowel. We have noted the gradual recognition of the syllabic nature of the Assyrian writing. The earliest opinion was that the signs were both syllabic and alphabetical, and we have seen that Grotefend in his transliteration treated them in this manner. Hincks in his first Essay followed the same method, but he found the vast majority of the signs were syllabic, and his Table shows only four that are purely alphabetical. Then came the discovery that the language itself was Semitic, and the inference naturally followed that the writing was so likewise. Under the influence of this conviction, Hincks drew up his Second Table, showing only the consonantal value of the signs, and leaving them to be associated indifferently with the vowel sounds. But he remained in this opinion for a comparatively short time, and in the end of the same year he had reverted to his original view. The effect of the present essay was to establish the absolute syllabism of the language; and in a paper read shortly afterwards before the British Association ‘On the Language and Mode of Writing of Assyria’ (August 1850), he ‘maintained, in opposition to all other writers, that the characters had all definite syllabic values, there being no consonants, and consequently no necessity or liberty of supplying vowels.’ In this opinion he then stood alone. Rawlinson, in reply, expressed his belief that the signs had a syllabic origin, but that they were ‘subsequently used to express a mere portion of a syllable.’ ‘He could,’ he says, ‘adduce numerous instances where the cuneiform signs were used as bona fide letters.’[815]

In France, the opinion Hincks expounded in his second essay took immediate root. The logical instincts of the French mind clung with desperate tenacity to the conviction that a Semitic language could only be expressed by a Semitic mode of writing. Löwenstern at first (1845) thought that the signs represented some sort of mechanical union of consonant and vowel: that is to say, that there was a fixed portion of the sign to represent the consonantal sound, and a variable portion to indicate the conjunction of the vowel. ‘The signs,’ he said, ‘reproduce in part the same forms differently combined, which suggests a syllabic union in many of the signs.’ But he subsequently became the most thorough-going champion of the alphabetical theory. Botta only just found it ‘possible to conceive that the language was syllabic,’ yet he followed Longpérier in the luminous suggestion already described.[816] Even De Saulcy was haunted by dim fears that, after all, Assyrian might turn out to be syllabic, and the consistency with which he adhered to the opposite or Semitic mode of writing rendered his subsequent studies almost valueless. Rawlinson, as we shall soon see, yielded in time, and his transliteration of the Behistun inscription shows small traces of his early heresy, which he was still ready to defend in August 1850.

Such was the progress already made in decipherment when Rawlinson at length gave to the world some of the results of his labours in the same field. It will be remembered that in the autumn of 1847 he succeeded in taking a copy of the third column of the Behistun inscription. Whatever leisure he could command during the year 1848 and the early part of 1849 he devoted to its study; and when he returned to England in the autumn of that year, he brought the translation home with him. The work of publication was one of great difficulty, in consequence of the multitude of strange characters in many languages that had to be reproduced and corrected; and although Rawlinson remained in England till 1851, he was obliged to leave before it was accomplished. Some Continental writers chose to make this delay a matter of complaint against Rawlinson, whom they accused of deliberately withholding his copies for personal and selfish motives. It would be difficult, however, to mention anyone who was at that time at all likely to profit by their possession. The special qualifications of a decipherer are by no means common, and M. de Saulcy at least gave decisive proof that he did not possess them. M. Oppert, on the other hand, was still absorbed in the Persian and Median versions. But these gentlemen, and those who then shared their feelings, write as though Major Rawlinson had appropriated the rock of Behistun as well as the copy of the inscription that covered it.[817] They seem to forget that if they were prepared to undergo the same sacrifice and overcome the same difficulties, they could in a few weeks procure copies for themselves. What would have been more natural than to give the commission to M. Flandin, whose enterprise in such matters had already been so conspicuously illustrated? Nothing, however, could be farther from their intentions. They had no notion of foregoing the luxury of feeling aggrieved with the English soldier whose energy, like his genius, so far out-soared their own. Rawlinson was, we submit, fully justified in the course he adopted. He had obtained his copy at great personal sacrifice; no one in Europe was so qualified to accomplish the task of decipherment as himself, and the eighteen months he devoted to the task was not excessive. The subsequent delay in publication was incident to the nature of the work itself, for which he was not responsible.

He, however, lost no time in placing the general results at which he had arrived before the public. On January 19 and February 16, 1850, he read papers before the Asiatic Society ‘On the Inscriptions of Assyria and Babylon,’ and these, with a few additional notes, were published in March of that year.

He tells us he had found more than eighty proper names in the trilingual inscriptions, including those in the Behistun; and ‘by a careful comparison of the duplicate forms of writing’ them in the Persian and Babylonian columns he had been able, by means of the former, which were known, to determine the values of about a hundred Babylonian characters. The next step was by a collation of the inscriptions to ascertain ‘the homophones of each known alphabetical power.’ By this means he ‘added nearly fifty characters to those previously known through the Persian key.’ He confessed that his knowledge of the Babylonian characters was at present limited to these one hundred and fifty characters.[818] From the direction of his studies we may infer that these signs were chiefly taken from the trilingual inscriptions; and in that case they would be practically exhaustive; but they would amount to less than one half of those in general use in the Assyrian text.[819] The same process of comparison with the Persian translation enabled him to draw up ‘a list of about two hundred Babylonian words of which we know the sound approximately and the meaning certainly.’ But in addition to these, he was able, by ‘an extensive comparison of similar or cognate phrases, to add about two hundred meanings certainly, and a hundred more, probably, to the vocabulary already obtained through the Babylonian translation.’ He was thus acquainted with the meaning of about five hundred out of a vocabulary which he estimated as containing five thousand words.[820] These words, he explains, ‘are almost all found either in their full integrity or subjected to some slight modification in Assyrian’; and they enabled him ‘to arrive at a pretty correct notion of the general purport of the phrases in which they occur.’ Although his vocabulary was still limited to one-tenth of the vocabulary, it embraced ‘all the most important terms in the language’; and he found it sufficient for the interpretation of the historical inscriptions.

The present Memoir was intended simply as introductory to the subject, and he did not give a list of the one hundred and fifty signs with their values attached. We cannot, therefore, institute a comparison as yet with the Syllabarium already drawn up by Hincks. It is sufficiently clear, however, that he had not, at the time of writing the Memoir, realised the essentially syllabic character of the language. There are, he says, ‘cases where a single alphabetical power appertains to the sign,’ and, he adds, ‘it cannot certainly be maintained that the phonetic portion of the alphabet is altogether syllabic.’ ‘There is,’ he observes, ‘an extensive syllabarium; but at the same time many of the characters can only be explained as single consonants.’ There is no indication that he had as yet apprehended the principle that governs the combination of consonant and vowel, as recently expounded by Hincks, and which is interwoven with the whole structure of the language. Indeed he says distinctly: ‘I have neither adopted, nor do I conceive it possible to adopt, any system with regard to the employment of the vowels in Assyrian and Babylonian.’ In some other respects also he was still behind the great Irish scholar. Hincks, for example, had laid down that the distinction between the consonantal sounds is uniformly maintained; and the truth of this statement has been since confirmed. Rawlinson was, however, still of opinion that ‘the gutturals and sibilants everywhere interchange.’ ‘There is the greatest possible difficulty in distinguishing between k, d, and t. L and v interchange.’ It is evident also that he had still much to learn from his rival on the subject of the ideograms. It may be doubted indeed how far he had as yet apprehended the important place they occupy. ‘The names of the gods,’ he says, ‘are represented by signs which appear in some cases to be arbitrary monograms, but which are more generally either the dominant sound of the name or its initial phonetic power.’ He thought, for example, that the monogram for Bel was simply the letter ‘B,’ an idea that is wholly unfounded. He is of course aware that there are many other ideograms besides those used for the gods, but he gives them no sort of prominence. He, however, attributes an ideographic origin to the syllables. ‘When a sign represents a syllable,’ meaning apparently a compound syllable, ‘I conjecture that the syllable in question may have been the specific name of the object which the sign was supposed to depict; whilst in cases where a single alphabetical power appertains to the sign it would seem as if that power had been the dominant sound in the name of the object.’ But this is a purely academical question. The important point lay in precisely the opposite direction, and attention had been already called to it by Hincks. The peculiarity most necessary to emphasise is that in a vast majority of cases the pronunciation of the ideogram has no relation whatever to the name of the object it represents, nor, when it has a syllabic power, to the phonetic value of the syllable. Rawlinson, however, did good service in the present Memoir by laying down the first rudiments of the grammar, a branch of the subject that Hincks subsequently did much to elucidate; and he was also the first to bring into prominence the polyphonic character of the language. Hincks had indeed remarked that ‘many characters admit of two or more kindred values’; but Rawlinson farther shows that ‘certain characters represent two entirely dissimilar sounds—sounds so dissimilar that they cannot be brought into relation with each other.’ He gives as an example the sign for the vowel a, which also conveys the sound of ‘bar.’

But the great distinction of Rawlinson lay in his unequalled power of translation. Large numbers of Assyrian inscriptions were now before the world. The ‘Monument de Khorsabad’ had appeared in 1848; Layard’s collection followed in 1849, and included the inscription on the Black Obelisk found in 1846. So far only a few words had been made out with more or less of accuracy; but nothing had yet been done in the way of a connected translation. The few lines of the Khorsabad inscription which Hincks attempted in the Addenda to his paper (Feb. 26, 1850) had not as yet appeared.[821] Rawlinson, however, observed that many of the common expressions used at Behistun were adopted almost verbatim from the Assyrian annals; and it was the discovery of these known passages in the Assyrian inscriptions that first encouraged him to undertake their translation. He disclaimed all pretensions to be ‘a complete master of the Assyrian language’; and he still speaks of it as to a great extent unintelligible. ‘The first outwork,’ he says, ‘has been carried in a hitherto impregnable position, and that is all’ Indeed he is so discouraged by the difficulty of the task that he is sometimes disposed ‘to abandon the study altogether in utter despair of arriving at any satisfactory result.’ In consequence of the profusion of ideograms in proper names, he finds that their ‘pronunciation is a matter of exceeding difficulty, nay, as I think, of absolute impossibility’; and it was in this department that he achieved the least success. He, however, passes in review many of the principal inscriptions that were then known, and analyses the contents of each.[822] He begins with the earliest in date, the one taken from the North West Palace at Nineveh, which he ascribes to King Assur-adan-pal—really Assur-natsir-pal. He passes on to the inscription of his successor, whom he calls Temenbar II. (really Salmaneser II.), which covers the Black Obelisk, and it is to it that he devotes the largest share of attention.[823] His analysis, partly a verbal translation and partly a summary, fills no less than seventeen pages, and the achievement cannot fail to elicit unqualified admiration. The unfortunate failure to identify a large proportion of the proper names gives to it an unreal appearance that no doubt strikes the modern student unfavourably and may at first lead him to exaggerate its deficiencies. If, however, he is careful to remember that it is the first attempt of the kind ever made, his feelings will soon turn to astonishment that so much should have been correctly made out of what had hitherto been absolutely unintelligible. He may profitably compare a few passages with a modern version. For example, Temenbar begins: ‘At the commencement of my reign after that I was established on the throne I assembled the chiefs of my people and came down into the plains of Esmes, where I took the city of Haridu, the chief city belonging to Nakharmi.’ A recent translation of the same passage runs: ‘At the beginning of my reign when on the throne of the kingdom I had seated myself in state, my chariots and [my] armies I assembled. Into the depths of the land of Simesi I penetrated; Aridu the strong city of Ninni I captured.’ Again Rawlinson translates: ‘I went out from the city of Nineveh and crossing the Euphrates I attacked and defeated Ahuni, the son of Hateni, in the city of Sitrat, which was situated upon the Euphrates, and which Ahuni had made one of his capitals. Ahuni, the son of Hateni, with his gods and his chief priests, his horses, his sons and his daughters and all his men of war, I brought away to my country of Assyria.’ The modern version says: ‘I departed from Nineveh; the Euphrates I crossed at its flood; I marched against Akhuni, the son of Adini. The country of Shitamrat, a mountain peak on the banks of the Euphrates, he made his stronghold. The peak of the mountain I captured; Akhuni, with his gods, his chariots, his horses, his sons, his daughters and his army, I carried away and to my city of Assur I brought’;[824] and so on through the events of thirty-one years of the reign of the great king. On the other hand, it would be too much to say that even the sense is always preserved. There are, in fact, many and serious divergencies from the correct translation as it now stands, after more than forty years’ continuous study. It is impossible that it could have been otherwise with the means then at hand. The wonder is that so much could have been accomplished with one hundred and fifty imperfectly understood characters; and with only five hundred words arrived at conjecturally out of some six thousand. Rawlinson himself warned the reader that here and there ‘little dependence can be placed on the translation’; and he confesses that sometimes he could not ‘conjecture even the meaning of several passages.’ Notwithstanding his difficulty with the proper names, a host of new ones were now for the first time identified: Amanus; the Hittites; Chaldæans; the rivers Tigris, Euphrates, Belikh; the cities of Borsippa, Tyre, Sidon, Gabal, Caleh. On the other hand, the Akkadians now make their first appearance in modern history as ‘Hekdi,’ ‘which may be connected with the Armenian “Haik.”’ Hazael of Damascus is still concealed as ‘Khazakan of Atesh’ and ‘Jehu the son of Omri’ appears as ‘Yahua the son of Hubiri,’ ‘a prince,’ says the translator, ‘of whose native country I am ignorant.’ He called attention to the name of Yehuda in a Khorsabad inscription in connection with that of Hamath; but he hesitated to identify it with Judah. Indeed at this period he could not bring himself to believe that the son of the Khorsabad king was Sennacherib and his grandson Esarhaddon, as Hincks ventured to assert.[825] The signs for Sargon he transliterated ‘Arko-tsin,’ and those for Sennacherib, ‘Bel — — Adonim-sha’; but Esarhaddon came out almost correct as ‘Assar-Adan.’ He concludes his paper by an analysis of the inscriptions found at Khorsabad, containing the annals of ‘Arko-tsin.’

It was not till the following year, and till after Rawlinson’s return to Persia, that the publication of the third column of the Behistun inscription was completed. It fills the fourteenth volume of the ‘Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,’ and the greater part of it was laid on the table before May 1851.[826] A portion of the expense was defrayed by a Government grant, made at the suggestion of Lord John Russell; and the volume consists of seventeen large plates containing the cuneiform text with transliteration and a Latin translation. Then comes an ‘Indiscriminate List of Babylonian and Assyrian Characters,’ with their phonetic powers, and also such ideographic values as had been ascertained. The list includes two hundred and forty-six principal signs, many of which are followed by others varying in form; and generally representing the different methods of writing found at Persepolis, Babylon and Nineveh. An analysis of the text, extending over a hundred pages, follows, but it has not been carried farther than to the end of the first column. The ‘Memoir on the Babylonian and Assyrian Inscriptions’ is even more incomplete. It covers only sixteen pages, and breaks off in the middle of a sentence, before the analysis of the second sign was concluded. No explanation is given of this abrupt termination.

The discovery of a separate sign for each combination of vowel and consonant, explained by Dr. Hincks in his Appendix of January 1850, no doubt exercised considerable influence on Rawlinson,[827] and we are now in a position to recognise the full effect it produced in the progress of the study. How far Rawlinson independently divined the existence of some such principle is by no means clear, but we have no doubt that when he read his first paper to the Society he was still of opinion that the alphabetical system entered largely into the Assyrian language. ‘Many of the characters,’ he then said, ‘can only be explained as single consonants.’[828] In accordance with this view, when he had occasion to refer to the Assyrian characters, he uniformly gives them purely alphabetical values, although in many cases their correct syllabic values had been already definitely fixed in Hincks’s Essay.[829] Hincks himself pointed this out in one notable case. In 1850, Rawlinson said that the suffix of the third person plural is a simple n; but soon afterwards Hincks showed that the consonantal termination is followed by u. This opinion Rawlinson adopted in 1851, and remarked of the word ‘Yatipsu,’ ‘the termination in u marks, of course, the plural number like the Hebrew.’[830] ‘When,’ says Hincks, ‘the commentary was published [in 1850] no u could be discovered. The sign he now reads su was a simple s.’[831] These facts are not sufficiently accounted for by the explanation Rawlinson gives in his present Memoir. ‘In the articulation kat, for example, which is composed of two characters, ka and at, either one or other of these signs must represent a simple letter rather than a syllable; and as this peculiarity of expression pervades the whole Assyrian alphabet, I think I am justified in still adhering to the statement which I announced last year, that the phonetic signs were in some cases syllabic and in others literal.’[832] However this may be, he now finally abandons the description of the signs as letters, and no simple alphabetical values are to be found in his ‘Indiscriminate List.’ There can be little doubt that the alteration in the method of writing is to be best explained by a corresponding change of opinion.[833] However great may have been his obligation to Hincks, he soon made the discovery his own. He corrects the errors and supplies the deficiencies of his predecessor. He suppresses the twofold signs for a, and limits the regular syllabic combinations to the three vowels a, i and u, which thus yielded six instead of seven values for each of the consonants. Following Hincks, he accepts only fifteen distinct consonantal values, but he prefers to use z and kh in place of the j and g of Hincks, now written z and ḫ. With these he has given one hundred and seven simple syllabic combinations, a much larger number than really exists; but he has no less than seventy-eight correct, out of a possible number that slightly exceeds eighty.[834] He, however, took no account of the signs that indicated the exceptional combinations with the vowel e, which amount to about a dozen. This defect was soon afterwards noticed by Hincks, who, however, signally failed in his attempt to identify them. On the other hand, we are now introduced for the first time to the compound syllables that form so large a portion of the Babylonian signs. These, unlike the simple syllables so successfully treated by Hincks, consist of two consonants separated by a vowel. It is true that a few made their appearance in Hincks’s short translation from the Khorsabad inscription (February 1850), such as ‘sib,’ ‘kun,’ ‘bul’ and ‘gur,’ along with three others that are incorrect.[835] We also learn from a later publication that before the appearance of Rawlinson’s Syllabarium Hincks knew the values of upwards of twenty other compound syllabic signs.[836] But they do not seem to have been made known to the world, and they all, with the exception of five, are now met in the Syllabarium for the first time. Rawlinson gives sixty-eight of these syllables, and no less than fifty are correct. He has been unable to give any phonetic value to sixty out of his two hundred and forty-six principal signs, but in several cases he has determined their ideographic meaning. The distribution of the signs, as explained by Hincks, considerably diminished the number of supposed homophones, and the compound syllables now enumerated tended in the same direction. But Rawlinson dwells with increasing bitterness on the extreme confusion introduced into the language by polyphones. He complains that ‘after years of laborious research he has overcome the difficulty to but a limited extent.’ ‘The meaning of a word,’ he says, ‘may be ascertained from the trilingual inscriptions, or from its occurring in a variety of passages with only one possible signification; but unless its correspondent can be recognised in some Semitic tongue it is often impossible, owing to the employment in it of a polyphone character to fix its orthography; and this uncertainty presses on the student with almost crushing severity.’[837] In addition to this, he had to contend with the difficulty that besets all early decipherers—the inability to distinguish between his own correct and incorrect values, where the latter often cause more confusion than if the sound were still regarded as doubtful. Notwithstanding all these obstacles, his transliteration was sufficient to afford a considerable knowledge of the nature of the language; and to enable the student to recognise the connection of the words that resulted with their Semitic relatives. In the forty years that elapsed between the version we are now considering, and that given by Dr. Bezold, a whole army of scholars has been ceaselessly at work upon the Babylonian and Assyrian inscriptions, and the point they have reached is naturally far in advance of that in which it was placed by the first Essay of Rawlinson. The comparison of a few passages, taken almost at random, will enable the reader to appreciate the position the study had reached in 1851.[838] The first lines of the inscription are rendered thus by Rawlinson, De Saulcy and Bezold.

Paragraph I.

Raw. X Ha Kha ma ni s a melek[839]

De S. A Kh m n s ah sar(?)

Bez. ᵐa ḫa ma ni iš ’ šarru

Raw. (—) (—) x Par sa i melek

De S. sar i ? F(ar) s i sar

Bez. par -sa -a-a šarru

Raw. X Par su X Da ri ya sar melek

De S. ? F(ar) s D r ia s sar

Bez. par su ᵐ da ri i’a muš šarru

Raw. ki ha m i gab bi at t u a ab u a

De S. r a m i t b at t ou a at ou a

Bez. Ki a am i gab bi at tu u a abu u a

Raw. X Vas ta s’ pi abi sa X Vas ta s pi

De S. Is t s p at s Is t s p

Bez. ᵐ uš ta az pi abu ša ᵐ uš ta az pi

Paragraph II.

Raw. X Ar ya ra m n ’a abi sa

De S. ar ia r m n ah at s

Bez. ᵐ ar i’a-ra am na ’ abu ša

Raw. X ar ya ra m n a X Si s pi s

De S. ar ia r m n ah Ch s p s

Bez. ᵐ ar i’a ra am na ’ ᵐ ši i pi iš

Raw. abi sa X si s pi s X Ha kha ma ni s a

De S. at s Ch s p s A kh m n s a

Bez. abu ša ᵐ ši iš pi iš ᵐ a ḫa ma ni iš ’

Raw. X Da ri ya sar melek ki ha m i gab bi

De S. D r ia s sar r a m i ts b

Bez. ᵐ da ri i’a muš šarru ki a am i gab bi

Raw. a n eb(?) bi ha g a

De S. a n k m a d a

Bez. a na lib bi a ga a

Paragraph III.

Raw. ha ga ni ul tu abu t (—)

De S. a d n s t at t Nin

Bez. a ni ni ul tu abu u(?) zeru

Raw. u ni Melik iv? su n

De S. ou n sar i ou n

Bez. ú ni šarru (pl.) šu nu

Raw. X Da ri ya sar melek ki ha m

De S. D r ia s sar r a m

Bez. ᵐ da ri i’a muš šarru ki a am

Raw. i gab bi VIII as eb(?) (—) ya

De S. i ts b VIII B k (kim) Nin ia

Bez. i gab bi VIII ina libbu zeru i’a

Raw. at t u a as pa na t u a melik ut

De S. at t ou a B F n t ou a sar t

Bez. at tu u a ina pa na tu u a šarru tu

Raw. i t ip su

De S. i t kh ou(?)

Bez. i te ip šu

The passage is thus translated by the three scholars:

Raw. ‘[Ego Darius, rex magnus, rex regum, Hystaspis filius Arsamis nepos] Achaemenis rex gentium Persicarum; rex Persidis. Darius rex [ ] dicit: mihi pater meus Hystaspes: pater qui Hystaspis [Arsames: pater qui Arsamis] Ariaramnes: pater qui Ariaramnis Teispes: pater qui Teispis Achaemenes. Darius rex [ ] dicit: ob hanc [rationem nos Achaemenses appellamur ab antiquo oriundi (?)] sumus; ab antiquo stirps noster reges fuere(?) Darius rex [ ] dicit: octo e genere meo ante me regnum egere.’

De S. ‘[Lacune] Akhéménès roi des rois, homme perse, roi du pays de Perse, Darius roi grand, dit: Mes pères, Hystaspe; le père de Hystaspe [lacune] Ariaramnès; le père de Ariaramnàh Chispis: le père de Chispis, Akhéménès Darius, roi grand dit: Pour raison cette [lacune] au temps de nos pères nous avons régné, au temps des pères notre race [furent] leurs rois. Darius roi grand dit: Huit dans l’état de ma race, mes pères dans mon visage [avant moi] la royauté ont pris elle (?) [lacune].’

Bez. ‘[Ich, Darius, der grosse König, der König der Könige, der König der Länder (?)] der Achämenide: König der Schar (?) der Menschen, ein Perser, König von Persien. So spricht Darius der König: Mein Vater [ist] Uštazpi; der Vater des Uštazpi [war Arshâma, der Vater des Arshâma] Ariaramna, der Vater des Ariaramna Šišpiš, der Vater des Šišpiš, [war] Aḫamanis. So spricht Darius der König: Darum [werden wir Achämeniden genannt; von Alters her sind wir erprobt], von Alters her (?) waren unsere Sprossen Könige. So spricht Darius der König: Acht in mitten meiner Familie übten vor mir die Königsherrschaft aus.’

In the August of this year (1851) Rawlinson was able to announce that he had met with an inscription that satisfactorily fixed the date of the Lower Assyrian dynasty. We have said that this was in reality done long before by Longpérier when he identified the Khorsabad king with the Sargon of Isaiah (1847); and by Hincks, who was satisfied that the builders of the later palaces were Sennacherib and Esarhaddon (1849). But we have seen that Rawlinson long refused to recognise these identifications as satisfactorily established. At length, however, he found in a tablet from Khorsabad (Pl. 70 Botta) an account which he acknowledged referred to the capture of Samaria by Sargon in the first year of his reign; and he also succeeded in identifying ‘Omri.’[840] He thought that Sargon, whose identification he acknowledged in his Analysis of the Behistun inscription,[841] was the same personage as Shalmaneser, who figures in the same inscription as the conqueror of Ashdod; and he made out the names of other cities that fell before the arms of that king: ‘Hamath, Beroea, Damascus, Bambyce, Carchemish.’

But the inscription to which he now more particularly drew attention was recently found by Mr. Layard on a colossal bull at the great entrance of the Kouyunjik Palace; and Rawlinson speedily recognised that it contained the Annals of Sennacherib, its founder, and son of Sargon. The annals extend only to the seventh year of the king, but they recount the subjugation of Babylon in the beginning of his reign, and the defeat of Hezekiah and the capture of Jerusalem in his third year. The narrative agrees with what was already known from the Hebrew writings and from Polyhistor. The discovery, in a cuneiform inscription, of the three names Hezekiah, Jerusalem and Judah, and an account of events related in the Book of Kings, naturally stimulated the interest of a wider public than is generally occupied with archæology.[842] From this period dates the great popularity these studies enjoyed for a time, a popularity that culminated more than twenty-five years later by the despatch of George Smith on a mission to the East by the ‘Daily Telegraph.’

A year after the publication of the third column of the Behistun inscription, Hincks read a paper ‘On the Assyrio-Babylonian Phonetic Characters’ (1852), which may be regarded as having closed the early stage of inquiry into the subject.[843] In this essay he contributes no less than a hundred and eighteen new values, of which sixty-eight certainly, and possibly more, are correct. When these are added to the Syllabarium of Rawlinson, upwards of two hundred correct signs, in addition to those for the vowels and diphthongs, were now at the disposal of the decipherer. It had also been proved conclusively that ‘the characters all represent syllables and were originally intended to represent a non-Semitic language.’ In opposition to the system that still found an advocate in De Saulcy, it was shown that ‘instead of the vowels being unrepresented, or only represented by points, as in all Semitic writing that was first applied to a Semitic language, we have in the cuneatic inscriptions every vowel definitely expressed.’ This new Syllabarium demonstrates for the first time how extensively polyphony prevailed. Indeed one of its chief merits consists in the enumeration of the different values expressed by the same sign. This had been done to a slight extent by Rawlinson, who puts the polyphones in an apologetic manner in a separate column, under the heading ‘Phonetic Powers arising from Ideographic Values.’ This excited the contemptuous criticism of De Saulcy, who was still so far from appreciating the true nature of the language that he declared: ‘Either this language was for the Assyrian an inextricable gâchis, or one or other of these values must be chosen.’[844] The present Memoir of Hincks, which must soon after have fallen into his hands, ought to have convinced him that the former alternative is the only one available. Indeed the number of polyphones is so great that the two hundred and fifty-four characters which Hincks now deals with express no less than three hundred and forty-four different values. In the Appendix to the Khorsabad inscription (January 19, 1850) it will be recollected that he gave seventy-one simple syllabic values, of which we found fifty-seven correct. In a lithographed paper, presented to a meeting of the British Association in the course of the same year, he added to their number, so that, with the vowels, his contribution amounted to a hundred. These apparently include the twenty-five (correct) compound syllables already mentioned. In the present Memoir he added a hundred and eighteen new values (sixty-eight correct), so that he claims to have discovered by his own unassisted ingenuity no less than two hundred and eighteen values. He acknowledges that he is indebted to Rawlinson for seventy-seven in addition to these, and he states that they were substantially agreed as to the signification of one hundred and seventy-seven signs.[845] They disagree as to forty-nine; but the disagreement, generally speaking, does not extend to the consonantal value; it arises from the doubt as to whether the sign conveys the value of e or o, as Hincks thought, or of i or u, as Rawlinson maintained. Hincks frankly confesses he received seventy-seven values from Rawlinson after 1850; but Rawlinson has not told us how many values he borrowed from Hincks during that year. The probability is they were extremely few, if any; the transliteration and translation of the inscriptions taken at Behistun and from the Black Obelisk were made before the Appendix was sent to press, and neither could have been accomplished unless Rawlinson had previously drawn up a very comprehensive list for his own use. No doubt he took full advantage of Hincks’s paper to introduce occasional corrections and emendations, and it is to be regretted that he has not gratified our curiosity as to the extent of his obligations.