311 



CUNEIFORM. 



CUNEIFORM. 



342 



visible. Some of the most fragile and ill-baked records that may 

 hardly be touched without damage, have nevertheless reached us quite 

 perfect ; while others much harder have been so rubbed as to be half 

 unintelligible. The barrels and prisms have, iu many instances, been 

 found in excellent condition, and even when broken are complete and 

 easily mended ; but most unfortunately the slabs, with the exception 

 of the very smallest, are all broken in pieces with obvious design, so 

 that not one is entire, and although the fragments have been carefully 

 looked over, and all those cemented which were found to fit, yet 

 scarcely a single specimen has been completed. Further research will 

 probably bring to light many missing fragments, but the work cannot 

 be trusted to those who have not made some study of the language, 

 and these are more congenially employed in reading what is before 

 them, than in the tedious labour of searching through heaps of dusty 

 fragments, often finding nothing after hours of toil. 



The first notices of cuneiform inscriptions, so far as the writer is 

 cognisant, were brought to Europe by Pietro della Valle about 250 

 years ago; and towards the close of the 17th century, Ta vernier 

 and Kjernpfer published some imperfect specimens, which were 

 1". illowed by those of Chardin a few years afterwards. The first publi- 

 cation of a connected inscription was made by Le Brun or Bruyn, at 

 Amsterdam in 1714; in the compartment numbered 131 of a large 

 plate in his second volume at page 272, he gives in the three languages 

 the inscription of Xerxes, marked C by Lassen, and 17 by Rawlinson, 

 who has translated it at page 337 of his 'Memoir.' In 132 he has 

 RawUnson's No. 2, a very short inscription of Darius ; but the com- 

 mencing letters of each line are omitted : in 133 he gave some un- 

 connected lines from more than one inscription, some in each of the 

 three languages, but all imperfect ; and in 134, the window inscription 

 of Darius which had also been printed by Ksempfer and Chardin. Most 

 of these engravings of Le Brun may now be readily understood, 

 although they contained many errors which would have sadly misled a 

 decipherer. The first really good copies of the Achemamian momi- 

 were published by Niebuhr a century ago, and these consti- 

 tuted the basis of all the investigations made with a view to decipher- 

 ments up to the time when Colonel Rawlinson copied the great Behis- 

 tun inscription, now twenty-five years ago, giving an impulse to the 

 study of these monuments, which has resulted in such brilliant 

 success. Niebuhr's copies were before the world half a century before 

 any reasonable attempt was made to ascertain their tenor ; and it is 

 somewhat amusing now to run over the guesses made by really learned 

 men : the most moderate believed they were mere ornaments carved 

 at the caprice of the architect ; one savant decided that they were 

 charms or talismans ; another read in them passages from the Koran ; 

 a third found great mysteries connected with magic and astrology. 

 The first step made in the right direction was by Professor Grotefend, 

 of Hanover, who collated a series of names, which there was good 

 reason to believe to be those of the Achamienian kings of Persia, 

 (irotefend thus identified the names of Darius, Xerxes, and Hystaspes, 

 ami the substantives, " king " and " aon ;" and if he had possessed a 

 competent knowledge of Sanscrit, he would in all probability have 

 carried his decipherments, in a very short time, to the point which was 

 not reached by the united efforts of Burnout' and Laasen till 1836. As 

 an instance of sagacity defeated by want of knowledge, we may men- 

 tion that the word " son," in Sanscrit puira, was read bun, because he 

 was told told that the term buns was current with this meaning in 

 India. Hunt was the Bengalee mode of pronouncing the Sanscrit 

 ranta, "a family ;" the wrong application of n was for a long time a 

 source of error, and it was not till 1838 and 1839, that Rawlinson and 

 Lassen discovered the true rending of putra. Some twenty years after 

 land's first step, Mons. St. Martin made an advance in reading 

 the name of Hystaspes Vihtapa, which Grotefend had mad' 

 tax/tri. A more important step was made by Rask three years after, in 

 a pamphlet printed at Copenhagen in 1826 ; he made known the nasals 

 m and n, showed the accusative case ending in n, and the genitive 

 plural in anam ; and it would seem, might have enabled a good .Sanscrit 

 scholar to read everything which the Achemaonians had left behind 

 ; but so slow was the progress made, perhaps from the little 

 confidence felt by scholars in what had boen already discovered, that 

 nothing of value was made known for ten years after this, when 

 Burnouf and Lassen independently published their readings of one of 

 N'i.l.uhr's inscriptions, pi. xxxi., containing the enumeration of the 

 Satrapies of the Persian empire ; a list of twenty-three names, which 

 are among those given by Herodotus ; this list had already in 1832 been 

 imperfectly rendered by Grotefend. In 1838, two years subsequent 

 to those important publications, Col. Rawlinson sent from Teheran 

 to the Royal Asiatic Society his first communication on the inscrip 

 "f Behistun, a great part of which he had copied with much 

 difficulty and some danger. This communication, which was dated 

 January 1, 1838, contained a transcript in Roman characters, with a 

 translation, of the commencing paragraphs of that inscription, and every 

 letter WM read as now admitted by the common consent of all who 

 havi! studied the subject. This was a promising essay, which was 

 followed li\ d. i. ills on the alphabet, and a precis of the contents of the 

 inscription of Behistun. But the Affghan war compelled Col. Raw- 

 linson to leave the scene of his peaceful labours, and nothing from him 

 red in print until eight years afterwards, except very brief 

 notices in the ' Athemviim ' and ' Literary Gazette,' and in the annual 



' Reports of the Royal Asiatic Society's Proceedings.' * At length, in 

 the. year 1846, the Royal Asiatic Society issued a volume containing 

 the whole of the Behistun inscription, iu fac-simile, together with a 

 very complete analysis and literal translation, accompanied by copies 

 and versions of all the Persian inscriptions which were then known to 

 exist ; to which very few additions have been made since. This volume 

 contains also a general history of the discovery and decipherment, and 

 a detailed memoir on the alphabet. While the work was yet printing, 

 ,1 letter was read from Col. Rawlinsou, dated at Bagdad, August 2tith, 

 containing an additional chapter, in which the colonel communicated 

 his discovery of inherent vowels in the letters of the alphabet, the 

 effect of which was to bring the grammatical forms of the ancient 

 Persian into the closest analogy with those of Zeud and Sanscrit, and to 

 remove the many anomalies attending the mode of transcription hitherto 

 adopted. This was an important discovery for the philologist, though 

 it added little, if anything, to the intelligence of the inscriptions ; and 

 it is a curious fact, that the same discovery was made simultaneously 

 by the Rev. Dr. Hincks, of Killyleagh, in Ireland ; a gentleman who 

 has distinguished himself by very great acumen in all the varieties of 

 cuneiform writing. This volume exhausted the subject of the Persian 

 writing, and satisfied the learned that the decipherment rested on a 

 secure foundation. The inscriptions were republished iu the following 

 year at Leipzig, by Professor Beufey, with Col. Rawlinson's versions 

 translated into German, accompanied by a vocabulary ; together with 

 an introduction, in which the learned professor expresses himself with 

 warm commendation of the sagacity and learning displayed by Col. 

 Rawlinson in this valuable work. There remained now the second or 

 Scythian kind, and the far more important Babylonian, which was to 

 lead us to an understanding of the very ancient and not then discovered 

 literature of Assyria. 



It may be of some interest to show what is the historical result of 

 these discoveries in the easiest and first found, but chronologically the 

 latest cuneiform alphabet. We proceed to do it very briefly. The oldest 

 inscription is one of Cyrus, repeated four times on the ruined pillars of 

 PasargadiB ; it says simply, " I am Cyrus, the Achenucuian." Darius 

 has one still shorter, without the epithet, and seven of various lenjrtlis 

 from half a dozen to sixty lines, besides the important monument of 

 Behistun. All those of any length contain invocations to Ormuzd, and 

 two have lists of the provinces of Persia, the latest of which in date, 

 engraved on thfe tomb of Darius, included a number of names omitted 

 in the former ; probably recent annexations. ( )f Xerxes, the son of 

 Darius, there are eight inscriptions, the longest having thirty lines, 

 all of similar purport to the smaller monuments of Darius. One of 

 Artaxerxes Mnemon was discovered at Susa after the publication of 

 Col. Rawlinson's memoir. It contained five long lines, but it was 

 imperfect. In this monument the king records the placing of the 

 statues of Anaitis and Mithra in the temple of Ormuzd, and he invokes 

 the protection of the three deities. A much longer inscription of 

 thirty-five lines was erected by Artaxerxes Ochus, who, after the usual 

 invocation to Ormuzd, details his pedigree up to Arshama the father 

 of Hystaspes. It is curious that this inscription, as well as that of 

 Miicinon, is full of gross errors of grammar, showing that the language 

 had greatly deteriorated in the course of a century and a half, or what 

 some may think more probable, that the language of the inscriptions 

 was already a learned language in the earlier times of the monarchy, 

 and that the study of it had not been kept up. The writer is inclined 

 to believe that the old Median language had been affected by the 

 1 1 conquest; the verbal forms are not much damaged, but cases 

 and declensions are in hopeless confusion. The difference between the 

 styles of Darius and Artaxerxes, is as great as that found between the 

 Anglo-Saxon of the llth century, and the language of the century 

 following the Norman conquest. A smaller inscription of Artaxerxes 

 was also found at Susa, and another is in the Treasury of St. Mark, at 

 Venice, on a vase, where it is repeated in Seythic and Babylonian, and 

 also in regular Egyptian hieroglyphics. 



The great inscription of Behistun deserves a separate notice. Its 

 position is 300 feet from the foot of the rock, where it could not luxe 

 been engraved without scaffolding ; the face of the stone was carefully 

 smoothed, and in unsound or defective places other pieces were artist- 

 ically laid in, and fastened with molten lead; so nicely is this done, 

 that according to Col. Rawlinson, " very careful scrutiny is required 

 at present to detect the artifice." The engraving is executed in letters 

 above an inch long, with au elegance and uniformity almost unequalled, 

 and the whole surface was afterwards covered with a siliceous glaze of 

 extraordinary hardness, very much of which remains on the rock, while 

 portions that have become detached are still found in masses on the 

 ledge at the foot. 



Darius begins his inscription by tracing up his genealogy to the 

 eponym of his family, and then enumerates the 23 provinces of his 

 empire. He recapitulates the murder of Smerdis by his brother 

 Cambyses, the death of Cambyses, the insurrection of Guinata (the 

 Cometes of Justin), his death, and his own accession to the throne. 

 We have in this the narrative of Herodotus, without the romantic 

 stories detailed by the credulous or imaginative Greek. The first care 



* See ' Athena-urn,' April 14, 1838, No. 546, p. 275 ; Dec. 12, 1838, No. 582, 

 p. 91S ; ' Literary Gazette,' Dec. 22, 1838, No. 1144, p. 809 ; and Asiatic Society's 

 'Annual Reports,' May, 1838, p. ix., and May, 1840, p. 9. 



