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

boasted a library of some ten thousand volumes—a

library, if you please, in which the books were numbered and

shelved systematically, and classified and cared for by an

official librarian. If you would see some of the documents of

this marvellous library you have but to step past the winged

lions of Asurnazirpal and enter the Assyrian hall just around the

corner from the Rosetta Stone. Indeed, the great slabs of stone

from which the lions themselves are carved are in a sense books,

inasmuch as there are written records inscribed on their surface.

A glance reveals the strange characters in which these records

are written, graven neatly in straight lines across the stone,

and looking to casual inspection like nothing so much as random

flights of arrowheads. The resemblance is so striking that this

is sometimes called the arrowhead character, though it is more

generally known as the wedge or cuneiform character. The

inscriptions on the flanks of the lions are, however, only

makeshift books. But the veritable books are no farther away

than the next room beyond the hall of Asurnazirpal. They occupy

part of a series of cases placed down the centre of this room.

Perhaps it is not too much to speak of this collection as the

most extraordinary set of documents of all the rare treasures of

the British Museum, for it includes not books alone, but public

and private letters, business announcements, marriage

contracts—in a word, all the species of written records that

enter into the every-day life of an intelligent and cultured

community.

 

But by what miracle have such documents been preserved through

all these centuries? A glance makes the secret evident. It is

simply a case of time-defying materials. Each one of these

Assyrian documents appears to be, and in reality is, nothing more

or less than an inscribed fragment of brick, having much the

color and texture of a weathered terra-cotta tile of modern

manufacture. These slabs are usually oval or oblong in shape,

and from two or three to six or eight inches in length and an

inch or so in thickness. Each of them was originally a portion

of brick-clay, on which the scribe indented the flights of

arrowheads with some sharp-cornered instrument, after which the

document was made permanent by baking. They are somewhat fragile,

of course, as all bricks are, and many of them have been more or

less crumbled in the destruction of the palace at Nineveh; but to

the ravages of mere time they are as nearly invulnerable as

almost anything in nature. Hence it is that these records of a

remote civilization have been preserved to us, while the similar

records of such later civilizations as the Grecian have utterly

perished, much as the flint implements of the cave-dweller come

to us unchanged, while the iron implements of a far more recent

age have crumbled away.

HOW THE RECORDS WERE READ

After all, then, granted the choice of materials, there is

nothing so very extraordinary in the mere fact of preservation of

these ancient records. To be sure, it is vastly to the credit of

nineteenth-century enterprise to have searched them out and

brought them back to light. But the real marvel in connection

with them is the fact that nineteenth-century scholarship should

have given us, not the material documents themselves, but a

knowledge of their actual contents. The flight of arrowheads on

wall or slab or tiny brick have surely a meaning; but how shall

we guess that meaning? These must be words; but what words? The

hieroglyphics of the Egyptians were mysterious enough in all

conscience; yet, after all, their symbols have a certain

suggestiveness, whereas there is nothing that seems to promise a

mental leverage in the unbroken succession of these cuneiform

dashes. Yet the Assyrian scholar of to-day can interpret these

strange records almost as readily and as surely as the classical

scholar interprets a Greek manuscript. And this evidences one of

the greatest triumphs of nineteenth-century scholarship, for

within almost two thousand years no man has lived, prior to our

century, to whom these strange inscriptions would not have been

as meaningless as they are to the most casual stroller who looks

on them with vague wonderment here in the museum to-day. For the

Assyrian language, like the Egyptian, was veritably a dead

language; not, like Greek and Latin, merely passed from practical

every-day use to the closet of the scholar, but utterly and

absolutely forgotten by all the world. Such being the case, it is

nothing less than marvellous that it should have been restored.

 

It is but fair to add that this restoration probably never would

have been effected, with Assyrian or with Egyptian, had the

language in dying left no cognate successor; for the powers of

modern linguistry, though great, are not actually miraculous.

But, fortunately, a language once developed is not blotted out in

toto; it merely outlives its usefulness and is gradually

supplanted, its successor retaining many traces of its origin.

So, just as Latin, for example, has its living representatives in

Italian and the other Romance tongues, the language of Assyria is

represented by cognate Semitic languages. As it chances, however,

these have been of aid rather in the later stages of Assyrian

study than at the very outset; and the first clew to the message

of the cuneiform writing came through a slightly different

channel.

 

Curiously enough, it was a trilingual inscription that gave the

clew, as in the case of the Rosetta Stone, though with very

striking difference withal. The trilingual inscription now in

question, instead of being a small, portable monument, covers the

surface of a massive bluff at Behistun in western Persia.

Moreover, all three of its inscriptions are in cuneiform

characters, and all three are in languages that at the beginning

of our century were absolutely unknown. This inscription itself,

as a striking monument of unknown import, had been seen by

successive generations. Tradition ascribed it, as we learn from

Ctesias, through Diodorus, to the fabled Assyrian queen

Semiramis. Tradition was quite at fault in this; but it is only

recently that knowledge has availed to set it right. The

inscription, as is now known, was really written about the year

515 B.C., at the instance of Darius I., King of Persia, some of

whose deeds it recounts in the three chief languages of his

widely scattered subjects.

 

The man who at actual risk of life and limb copied this wonderful

inscription, and through interpreting it became the veritable

“father of Assyriology,” was the English general Sir Henry

Rawlinson. His feat was another British triumph over the same

rivals who had competed for the Rosetta Stone; for some French

explorers had been sent by their government, some years earlier,

expressly to copy this strange record, and had reported that it

was impossible to reach the inscription. But British courage did

not find it so, and in 1835 Rawlinson scaled the dangerous height

and made a paper cast of about half the inscription. Diplomatic

duties called him away from the task for some years, but in 1848

he returned to it and completed the copy of all parts of the

inscription that have escaped the ravages of time. And now the

material was in hand for a new science, which General Rawlinson

himself soon, assisted by a host of others, proceeded to

elaborate.

 

The key to the value of this unique inscription lies in the fact

that its third language is ancient Persian. It appears that the

ancient Persians had adopted the cuneiform character from their

western neighbors, the Assyrians, but in so doing had made one of

those essential modifications and improvements which are scarcely

possible to accomplish except in the transition from one race to

another. Instead of building with the arrowhead a multitude of

syllabic characters, including many homophones, as had been and

continued to be the custom with the Assyrians, the Persians

selected a few of these characters and ascribed to them phonetic

values that were almost purely alphabetic. In a word, while

retaining the wedge as the basal stroke of their script, they

developed an alphabet, making the last wonderful analysis of

phonetic sounds which even to this day has escaped the Chinese,

which the Egyptians had only partially effected, and which the

Phoenicians were accredited by the Greeks with having introduced

to the Western world. In addition to this all-essential step, the

Persians had introduced the minor but highly convenient custom of

separating the words of a sentence from one another by a

particular mark, differing in this regard not only from the

Assyrians and Egyptians, but from the early Greek scribes as

well.

 

Thanks to these simplifications, the old Persian language had

been practically restored about the beginning of the nineteenth

century, through the efforts of the German Grotefend, and further

advances in it were made just at this time by Renouf, in France,

and by Lassen, in Germany, as well as by Rawlinson himself, who

largely solved the problem of the Persian alphabet independently.

So the Persian portion of the Behistun inscription could be at

least partially deciphered. This in itself, however, would have

been no very great aid towards the restoration of the languages

of the other portions had it not chanced, fortunately, that the

inscription is sprinkled with proper names. Now proper names,

generally speaking, are not translated from one language to

another, but transliterated as nearly as the genius of the

language will permit. It was the fact that the Greek word

Ptolemaics was transliterated on the Rosetta Stone that gave the

first clew to the sounds of the Egyptian characters. Had the

upper part of the Rosetta Stone been preserved, on which,

originally, there were several other names, Young would not have

halted where he did in his decipherment.

 

But fortune, which had been at once so kind and so tantalizing in

the case of the Rosetta Stone, had dealt more gently with the

Behistun inscriptions; for no fewer than ninety proper names were

preserved in the Persian portion and duplicated, in another

character, in the Assyrian inscription. A study of these gave a

clew to the sounds of the Assyrian characters. The decipherment

of this character, however, even with this aid, proved enormously

difficult, for it was soon evident that here it was no longer a

question of a nearly perfect alphabet of a few characters, but of

a syllabary of several hundred characters, including many

homophones, or different forms for representing the same sound.

But with the Persian translation for a guide on the one hand, and

the Semitic languages, to which family the Assyrian belonged, on

the other, the appalling task was gradually accomplished, the

leading investigators being General Rawlinson, Professor Hincks,

and Mr. Fox-Talbot, in England, Professor Jules Oppert, in Paris,

and Professor Julian Schrader, in Germany, though a host of other

scholars soon entered the field.

 

This great linguistic feat was accomplished about the middle of

the nineteenth century. But so great a feat was it that many

scholars of the highest standing, including Joseph Erneste Renan,

in France, and Sir G. Cornewall Lewis, in England, declined at

first to accept the results, contending that the Assyriologists

had merely deceived themselves by creating an arbitrary language.

The matter was put to a test in 1855 at the suggestion of Mr.

Fox-Talbot, when four scholars, one being Mr. Talbot himself and

the others General Rawlinson, Professor Hincks, and Professor

Oppert, laid before the Royal Asiatic Society their independent

interpretations of a hitherto untranslated Assyrian text. A

committee of the society, including England’s greatest historian

of the century, George Grote, broke the seals of the four

translations, and reported that they found them unequivocally in

accord as regards their main purport, and even surprisingly

uniform as regards the phraseology of certain passages—in short,

as closely similar as translations from the obscure texts of any

difficult