Cuneiform Writing
The manner in which the ancient cuneiform writing of Babylonia and Assyria was deciphered and restored to the world of science and letters may be regarded as a great triumph…
From: 3500 B.C.E. To: 1916 C.E.
Location: Hillah, Iraq; Nineveh, Iraq
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Myths & Legends of Babylonia & Assyria by Lewis Spence, 1916.
Cuneiform Writing
The manner in which the ancient cuneiform writing of Babylonia and Assyria was deciphered and restored to the world of science and letters may be regarded as a great triumph of human reason.
The name ‘cuneiform' is most appropriate, for each character or sign is composed of a wedge or combination of wedges. It is written, as most Oriental languages, from left to right. The cuneiform script was first noticed by a European at such a relatively early period as the year a.d. 1470, when Josaphat Barbaro, a Venetian traveller, observed it cut on the platform of Rachmet in Persia. Another Italian, Pietro della Valle, passing that way in 1621, copied a few of the signs, which he sent back to Italy, and Sir John Chardin accurately reproduced an inscription found at Persepolis in 1711. It was obvious that three separate languages were written in this script, and these have since been found to be Persian, Babylonian, and Susian.
In 1765 Niebuhr visited Persepolis, and in less than a month copied all the texts there, which were then ready for decipherment. Returning to Denmark he occupied himself with studying what he had set down at Persepolis, and divided the smaller inscriptions into three classes, which he described as Classes I, II, and III instead of into three languages. Discovering that Class I embraced only forty-two signs, he set these in order, and but little subsequent addition has had to be made to them. Deciding that the language of the signs was written in alphabetic characters, he found himself obliged to call a halt. But two other scholars were more fortunate than he. Tychsen hit upon a certain diagonal sign as that employed to separate words, and correctly identified the alphabetic signs for ‘a,' 'd,' 'u,' and 's'
Münter of Copenhagen was more careful to verify his historical data than Tychsen had been, and was able to identify distinctly the authors of the inscriptions before him. He, too, independently identified the oblique wedge as a separative of words, and hit upon the significance of the sign for the letter 'b,' But after these achievements it seemed as if little more could be done. It must be remembered that up to this time no such assistance was vouchsafed the searchers as in the case of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, where a Greek inscription had been found side by side with an Egyptian one.
Grotefend
But a man of the greatest natural ingenuity was resolved to combat the difficulty presented by the cuneiform script. Georg Grotefend took up the task in the early years of the nineteenth century. Beginning with the assumption that the inscriptions represented three languages, and that one of these was ancient Persian, he took two of the inscriptions which he understood to be Persian, and placing them side by side found that certain signs were of frequent recurrence. This indicated to him the possibility that their contents were similar.
A certain word appeared very frequently in the inscriptions, but it seemed to have two forms, a longer and a shorter, and this Grotefend, adopting a suggestion of Münter's, took to mean 'king' in the short form and 'kings' in the longer, the juxtaposition of the two signs thus being taken to signify 'king of kings.' In both the inscriptions studied by Grotefend he found that this expression ‘king of kings’ was followed by the same word, which he took to mean 'great.' But there were no definite facts to support these hypotheses. Turning to certain Sassanian inscriptions which had recently been deciphered, he found that the expression ‘great king, king of kings' inevitably occurred, and this strengthened his opinion that it was present in the inscriptions he studied.
If this was so, thought he, the two texts under his observation must have been set up by two different kings, for the names were not the same at the beginning. Moreover the name with which text No. I began appears in the third line of text No. II, following the word supposed to be 'king,' and another which might mean 'son.' Grotefend thus concluded that in the two inscriptions he had the names of a triad of rulers, son, father, and grandfather. Applying to the list of the Achsenenian dynasty in the attempt to find three names which would suit the conditions, he selected those of Xerxes, Darius, and Hystaspes.
Supposing the name at the beginning of inscription I to be Darius, he thus considered himself to be justified in translating text I as "Darius, great king, king of kings, son of Hystaspes," and text II as "Xerxes, great king, king of kings, son of Darius." Considering that the Persian spelling of Darius would be Darheush, he applied the letters of that name to the letters of the cuneiform script. Subsequent investigation has shown that the name should have been read Daryavush, but Grotefend at least succeeded in discovering the letters for ‘d,' 'a,' 'r,' and 'sh.'
But this was practically the end of Grotefend's discoveries. Burnouf, by a careful study of Persian geographical names, managed to decipher a large number of the characters of the Persian alphabet, and Professor Lassen of Bonn, by similar means, achieved a like end. These two independent achievements raised a fierce controversy as to priority of discovery, but Lassen's system was the more perfect, as he found out that the ancient Persian signs were not entirely alphabetic but were partially syllabic—that is, that certain signs represented syllables instead of letters. This meant that Grotefend's system, which had been almost vowelless, was now to a great extent filled in with the necessary vowels.
Rawlinson
At this juncture a certain Major Henry Rawlinson, a servant of the East India Company, with a good knowledge of Persian, went to Persia for the purpose of assisting to organize the native army there. He was far away from books, and when he began to copy certain cuneiform texts it was because of deep personal interest. He was quite unaware of the strenuous toil which had been lavished upon them in Europe and worked quite independently of all assistance. The strange thing is that he laboured almost on the same lines as Grotefend had done.
He saw almost at once that he had three languages to deal with, and being a man of great natural gifts he soon grouped the signs in a correct manner. Strangely enough he applied the very same names—those of Hystaspes, Darius, and Xerxes—to the texts as Grotefend had done, and found them answer in the same manner. Turning his attention to the inscription of Darius at Behistun, high up in the face of the living wall of rock there, Rawlinson succeeded in copying part of it at great personal risk. In 1838 he forwarded his translation of the first two paragraphs of the Persian text, containing the genealogy of Darius, to the Royal Asiatic Society of London. The feat made a tremendous sensation, and he was supplied with all the principal works on the subject and much correspondence from European scholars.
He was, however, patience personified, and would not publish a work he had written on the subject because he thought it better to wait until he had verified his conclusions and perhaps made fresh discoveries. But in 1840 he was despatched to Afghanistan on a political mission and did not return to Bagdad for three years, and it was not until 1846 that he published a series of memoirs in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, in which he gave to the world a translation of the Persian text at Behistun. Itwas a marvellous achievement, for, unlike those who had been labouring on the subject in Europe, he was ignorant of the languages allied to Persian, yet he had surpassed all other scholars in his results.
But the deciphering of the second and third languages had yet to be attacked. In 1844 Westergaard, working on the lines of Grotefend, attacked the second language. He selected the names of Darius, Hystaspes, and Xerxes, and compared them with their equivalents in the Persian texts. By this means he discovered a number of signs and by their aid attempted to spell out the syllables or words. Judging the writing to be partly alphabetic and partly syllabic, he gave the name Median to the language. Morris, who had Rawlinson's copy of the second transcription of the Behistun text to work upon, deciphered nearly all of it. Shortly after this the language was named Susian.
The deciphering of the third of the three languages found at Persepolis was attacked by Lowenstern, and by the Rev. Edward Hinks, an Irish clergyman. This language was Assyrian purely. Hinks was fearful of making blunders, and whilst he was engaged in assuring himself that every step he took was not a false one, Longpricer published in 1847 a translation of the entire text. He was only able to read it by analogy with the other texts he could not provide the forms of the Assyrian words themselves. But Rawlinson once more came to the aid of the study, and it was shown that a large number of signs were ideographic. This paved the way for a band of others who by their united efforts succeeded in unravelling the complicated script.
Origin of Cuneiform
This peculiar system of writing originated in Babylonia, its inventors being the Sumerian or non Semitic people who inhabited that country before its settlement by the Babylonians. It was developed from picture-writing, and indeed some of the more highly significant of the pictorial signs can still be faintly traced in their cuneiform equivalents.
This early picture-writing was inscribed on stone, but eventually soft clay was adopted as a medium for the script, and it was found that straight lines impressed upon this medium tended to the shape of a wedge. The pictures therefore lost their original character and came to be mere conventional groups of wedges. The plural was represented by doubling the sign, and a term might be intensified by the addition of a certain stroke: thus the sign for 'house,' if four small strokes were added to it, would mean ‘great house,' and so forth.
The script was badly suited to the Assyrian language, as it had not been originally designed for a Semitic tongue. It consists of simple syllables made up of a vowel by itself or a vowel and a consonant, ideograms or signs which express an entire word, and closed syllables such as bit or hal. Again, many of the signs have more than one syllabic value, and they may be used as ideograms as well as phonetically. As in the Egyptian script, determinatives are employed to indicate the class to which the word belongs: thus, a certain sign is placed before the names of persons, another before territorial names, and a third before the names of gods and sacred beings. The date of the epoch in which this writing first began to be used was probably about 4500 B.C. and it persisted until the first century b.c. The Assyrians employed it from about 1500 b.c. until about the beginning of the sixth century b.c. This ancient form of writing was thus used first by the Sumerians, then by their Babylonian and Assyrian conquerors, then by those Persians who finally overthrew the Babylonian and Assyrian empire.
The Sacred Literature of Babylonia
The literature which this peculiar and individual script has brought down to us is chiefly religious, magical, epical, and legendary. The last three categories are dealt with elsewhere, so that it only falls here to consider the first class, the religious writings. These are usually composed in Semitic Babylonian without any trace of Akkadian influence, and it cannot be said that they display any especial natural eloquence or literary distinction. In an address to the sun-god, which begins nobly enough with a high apostrophe to the golden luminary of day, we find ourselves descending gradually into an atmosphere of almost ludicrous dullness.
The person praying desires the sun-god to free him from the commonplace cares of family and domestic annoyances, enumerating spells against all of his relatives in order that they may not place their 'ban' upon him.
In another, written in Akkadian, the penitent addresses Gubarra, Merodach, and other gods, desiring that they direct their eyes kindly upon him and that his supplication may reach them. Strangely enough the prayer fervently pleads that its utterance may do good to the gods! that it may let their hearts rest, their livers be quieted, and gladden them like a father and a mother who have begotten children.
This is not so strange when we come to consider the nature of these hymns, many of which come perilously near the border-line of pure magic—that is, they closely resemble spells. We find, too, that those which invoke the older deities such as Gibi the fire-god, are more magical in their trend than those addressed to the later gods when a higher sense of religious feeling had probably been evolved. Indeed, it does not seem too much to say that some of these early hymns may have served the purpose of later incantations. Most of those 'magical' hymns appear to have emanated from that extremely ancient seat of religion, Eridu, and are probably relics of the time when as yet magic and religion were scarcely differentiated in the priestly or the popular mind.
Hymn to Adat
A fine hymn to Adar describes the rumbling of the storm in the abyss, the 'voice' of the god:
The terror of the splendour of Anu in the midst of heaven.
The gods, it is said, urge Adar on, he descends like the deluge, the champion of the gods swoops down upon the hostile land. Nusku, the messenger of Mul-lil, receives Adar in the temple and addresses words of praise to him:
Thy chariot is as a voice of thunder.
To the lifting of thy hands is the shadow turned.
The spirits of the earth, the great gods, return to the winds.
Many of the hymns assist us to a better understanding of the precise nature of the gods, defining as they do their duties and offices and even occasionally describing their appearance. Thus in a hymn to Nebo we note that he is alluded to as "the supreme messenger who binds all things together," "the scribe of all that has a name," "the lifter up of the stylus supreme," "director of the world," "possessor of the reed of augury," "traverser of strange lands," "opener of wells," "fructifier of the corn," and "the god without whom the irrigated land and the canal are unwatered." It is from such texts that the mythologist is enabled to piece together the true significance of many of the deities of ancient peoples.
A hymn to Nusku in his character of fire-god is also descriptive and picturesque. He is alluded to as "wise prince, the flame of heaven," "he who hurls down terror, whose clothing is splendour," “the forceful fire-god," "the exalter of the mountain peaks," and "the uplifter of the torch, the enlightener of darkness."
Such descriptive hymns are the most valuable assets possible in the hands of the judicious student of myth or comparative religion.
From Myths & Legends of Babylonia & Assyria by Lewis Spence, 1916.
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