A History of Science, vol 4, Henry Smith Williams [best books to read in life txt] 📗

a thing of words. If the

screeds above be also made of words, only the elect have any way

of proving the fact.

 

Fortunately, however, even the least scholarly observer is left

in no doubt as to the real import of the thing he sees, for an

obliging English label tells us that these three inscriptions are

renderings of the same message, and that this message is a

“decree of the priests of Memphis conferring divine honors on

Ptolemy V. (Epiphenes), King of Egypt, B.C. 195.” The label goes

on to state that the upper inscription (of which, unfortunately,

only part of the last dozen lines or so remains, the slab being

broken) is in “the Egyptian language, in hieroglyphics, or

writing of the priests”; the second inscription “in the same

language is in Demotic, or the writing of the people”; and the

third “the Greek language and character.” Following this is a

brief biography of the Rosetta Stone itself, as follows: “The

stone was found by the French in 1798 among the ruins of Fort

Saint Julien, near the Rosetta mouth of the Nile. It passed into

the hands of the British by the treaty of Alexandria, and was

deposited in the British Museum in the year 1801.” There is a

whole volume of history in that brief inscription—and a bitter

sting thrown in, if the reader chance to be a Frenchman. Yet the

facts involved could scarcely be suggested more modestly. They

are recorded much more bluntly in a graven inscription on the

side of the stone, which reads: “Captured in Egypt by the British

Army, 1801.” No Frenchman could read those words without a

veritable sinking of the heart.

 

The value of the Rosetta Stone depended on the fact that it gave

promise, even when casually inspected, of furnishing a key to the

centuries-old mystery of the hieroglyphics. For two thousand

years the secret of these strange markings had been forgotten.

Nowhere in the world—quite as little in Egypt as elsewhere—had

any man the slightest clew to their meaning; there were those who

even doubted whether these droll picturings really had any

specific meaning, questioning whether they were not rather vague

symbols of esoteric religious import and nothing more. And it was

the Rosetta Stone that gave the answer to these doubters and

restored to the world a lost language and a forgotten literature.

 

The trustees of the museum recognized at once that the problem of

the Rosetta Stone was one on which the scientists of the world

might well exhaust their ingenuity, and promptly published to the

world a carefully lithographed copy of the entire inscription, so

that foreign scholarship had equal opportunity with the British

to try at the riddle. It was an Englishman, however, who first

gained a clew to the solution. This was none other than the

extraordinary Dr. Thomas Young, the demonstrator of the vibratory

nature of light.

 

Young’s specific discoveries were these: (1) That many of the

pictures of the hieroglyphics stand for the names of the objects

actually delineated; (2) that other pictures are sometimes only

symbolic; (3) that plural numbers are represented by repetition;

(4) that numerals are represented by dashes; (5) that

hieroglyphics may read either from the right or from the left,

but always from the direction in which the animal and human

figures face; (6) that proper names are surrounded by a graven

oval ring, making what he called a cartouche; (7) that the

cartouches of the preserved portion of the Rosetta Stone stand

for the name of Ptolemy alone; (8) that the presence of a female

figure after such cartouches in other inscriptions always denotes

the female sex; (9) that within the cartouches the hieroglyphic

symbols have a positively phonetic value, either alphabetic or

syllabic; and (10) that several different characters may have the

same phonetic value.

 

Just what these phonetic values are Young pointed out in the case

of fourteen characters representing nine sounds, six of which are

accepted to-day as correctly representing the letters to which he

ascribed them, and the three others as being correct regarding

their essential or consonant element. It is clear, therefore,

that he was on the right track thus far, and on the very verge of

complete discovery. But, unfortunately, he failed to take the

next step, which would have been to realize that the same

phonetic values which were given to the alphabetic characters

within the cartouches were often ascribed to them also when used

in the general text of an inscription; in other words, that the

use of an alphabet was not confined to proper names. This was the

great secret which Young missed and which his French successor,

Jean Francois Champollion, working on the foundation that Young

had laid, was enabled to ferret out.

 

Young’s initial studies of the Rosetta Stone were made in 1814;

his later publication bore date of 1819. Champollion’s first

announcement of results came in 1822; his second and more

important one in 1824. By this time, through study of the

cartouches of other inscriptions, Champollion had made out almost

the complete alphabet, and the “riddle of the Sphinx” was

practically solved. He proved that the Egyptians had developed a

relatively complete alphabet (mostly neglecting the vowels, as

early Semitic alphabets did also) centuries before the

Phoenicians were heard of in history. What relation this alphabet

bore to the Phoenician we shall have occasion to ask in another

connection; for the moment it suffices to know that those strange

pictures of the Egyptian scroll are really letters.

 

Even this statement, however, must be in a measure modified.

These pictures are letters and something more. Some of them are

purely alphabetical in character and some are symbolic in another

way. Some characters represent syllables. Others stand sometimes

as mere representatives of sounds, and again, in a more extended

sense, as representations of things, such as all hieroglyphics

doubtless were in the beginning. In a word, this is an alphabet,

but not a perfected alphabet, such as modern nations are

accustomed to; hence the enormous complications and difficulties

it presented to the early investigators.

 

Champollion did not live to clear up all these mysteries. His

work was taken up and extended by his pupil Rossellini, and in

particular by Dr. Richard Lepsius in Germany, followed by M.

Bernouf, and by Samuel Birch of the British Museum, and more

recently by such well-known Egyptologists as MM. Maspero and

Mariette and Chabas, in France, Dr. Brugsch, in Germany, and Dr.

E. Wallis Budge, the present head of the Department of Oriental

Antiquities at the British Museum. But the task of later

investigators has been largely one of exhumation and translation

of records rather than of finding methods.

TREASURES FROM NINEVEH

The most casual wanderer in the British Museum can hardly fail to

notice two pairs of massive sculptures, in the one case winged

bulls, in the other winged lions, both human-headed, which guard

the entrance to the Egyptian hall, close to the Rosetta Stone.

Each pair of these weird creatures once guarded an entrance to

the palace of a king in the famous city of Nineveh. As one

stands before them his mind is carried back over some

twenty-seven intervening centuries, to the days when the “Cedar

of Lebanon” was “fair in his greatness” and the scourge of

Israel.

 

The very Sculptures before us, for example, were perhaps seen by

Jonah when he made that famous voyage to Nineveh some seven or

eight hundred years B.C. A little later the Babylonian and the

Mede revolted against Assyrian tyranny and descended upon the

fair city of Nineveh, and almost literally levelled it to the

ground. But these great sculptures, among other things, escaped

destruction, and at once hidden and preserved by the accumulating

debris of the centuries, they stood there age after age, their

very existence quite forgotten. When Xenophon marched past their

site with the ill-starred expedition of the ten thousand, in the

year 400 B.C., he saw only a mound which seemed to mark the site

of some ancient ruin; but the Greek did not suspect that he

looked upon the site of that city which only two centuries before

had been the mistress of the world.

 

So ephemeral is fame! And yet the moral scarcely holds in the

sequel; for we of to-day, in this new, undreamed-of Western

world, behold these mementos of Assyrian greatness fresh from

their twenty-five hundred years of entombment, and with them

records which restore to us the history of that long-forgotten

people in such detail as it was not known to any previous

generation since the fall of Nineveh. For two thousand five

hundred years no one saw these treasures or knew that they

existed. One hundred generations of men came and went without

once pronouncing the name of kings Shalmaneser or Asumazirpal or

Asurbanipal. And to-day, after these centuries of oblivion,

these names are restored to history, and, thanks to the character

of their monuments, are assured a permanency of fame that can

almost defy time itself. It would be nothing strange, but rather

in keeping with their previous mutations of fortune, if the names

of Asurnazirpal and Asurbanipal should be familiar as household

words to future generations that have forgotten the existence of

an Alexander, a Caesar, and a Napoleon. For when Macaulay’s

prospective New Zealander explores the ruins of the British

Museum the records of the ancient Assyrians will presumably still

be there unscathed, to tell their story as they have told it to

our generation, though every manuscript and printed book may have

gone the way of fragile textures.

 

But the past of the Assyrian sculptures is quite necromantic

enough without conjuring for them a necromantic future. The story

of their restoration is like a brilliant romance of history.

Prior to the middle of this century the inquiring student could

learn in an hour or so all that was known in fact and in fable of

the renowned city of Nineveh. He had but to read a few chapters

of the Bible and a few pages of Diodorus to exhaust the important

literature on the subject. If he turned also to the pages of

Herodotus and Xenophon, of Justin and Aelian, these served

chiefly to confirm the suspicion that the Greeks themselves knew

almost nothing more of the history of their famed Oriental

forerunners. The current fables told of a first King Ninus and

his wonderful queen Semiramis; of Sennacherib the conqueror; of

the effeminate Sardanapalus, who neglected the warlike ways of

his ancestors but perished gloriously at the last, with Nineveh

itself, in a self-imposed holocaust. And that was all. How much

of this was history, how much myth, no man could say; and for all

any one suspected to the contrary, no man could ever know. And

to-day the contemporary records of the city are before us in such

profusion as no other nation of antiquity, save Egypt alone, can

at all rival. Whole libraries of Assyrian books are at hand that

were written in the seventh century before our era. These, be it

understood, are the original books themselves, not copies. The

author of that remote time appeals to us directly, hand to eye,

without intermediary transcriber. And there is not a line of any

Hebrew or Greek manuscript of a like age that has been preserved

to us; there is little enough that can match these ancient books

by a thousand years. When one reads Moses or Isaiah, Homer,

Hesiod, or Herodotus, he is but following the

transcription—often unquestionably faulty and probably never in

all parts perfect—of successive copyists of later generations.

The oldest known copy of the Bible, for example, dates probably

from the fourth century A.D., a thousand years or more after the

last Assyrian records were made and read and buried and

forgotten.

 

There was at least one king of Assyria—namely, Asurbanipal,

whose palace