Vol. XXIII. No. ii.] 



POPULAR SCTETsTCE NEWS. 



161 



extinct birds, including the famous arciioeopteryx of 

 the Solenhofen beds of Bavaria. We must not even 

 attempt the gallery of fossil fish, with its four 

 hundred and fifty genera and twelve hundred and 

 fifty species, although it is the finest collection ever 

 brought together in any Museum. We must, in 

 short, leave the building, and realize as we go that, 

 little as we have seen of the ground floor, we are 

 leaving the regions above stairs totally unexplored. 

 Had, however, time allowed us to mount to the 

 gallery of minerals, the extensive and well-arranged 

 collection would have held us fascinated. 



[Original in The PopuCar Science News,} 

 CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS. 



BY JOSEPH WALLACE. 



The interesting extract from Professor Sayce's 

 address before the Victoria Institute of London, 

 which appeared in the September issue of the Pop- 

 ular Science News, brings to light some impor- 

 tant events in Assyrian history, which the busy 

 world never dreamt of until the present century. 

 Who would believe that Western Asia had schools, 

 colleges, and libraries, philosophers, poets, and 

 scientists, 3,500 years ago, and that many of its 

 cities, like Boston, bore some literary title to distin- 

 guish them from other less favored places ? 



The archicological discoveries in Western Asia 

 are so interesting and instructive, that we are 

 tempted to add something new to the extract in 

 question, and which will carry the student of 

 oriental literature some five hundred years further 

 back. As an instance of the development of litera- 

 ture, we will state that Botta, in 1S43, discovered 

 the palace of the father of Sennacherib at Khorsa- 

 bad. The bas-reliefs of the palace formed a histori- 

 cal encyclopiedia of Assyria, which occupied 5.9SS 

 feet is length and 9,000 feet square of surface. 

 Unfortunately, we only possess fragments of cunei- 

 form writing. Though the tablets which Mr. G. 

 Smith preserved from the library at Nineveh are 

 wanting in precise dates, yet they are invaluable 

 testimony to the Mosaic cosmogony, as they con- 

 tain the Chaldean genesis of creation. 



The fragmentary edition which we now possess is 

 not the original one; it is the work of the epoch of 

 King Assurbanipal (673 — 676 B. C.) One part of 

 the cuneiform inscriptions can be traced anterior to 

 the time of King Urkam or Uruk, who must have 

 lived 2000 B. C. A remarkable work on astrology, 

 composed in the country of Accad, and containing 

 more than seventy tablets, is certainly entitled to 

 the venerable age of 3,800 or 3,900 years, and the 

 poem of Izdubar, the work of a poet of the southern 

 part of Chaldea, goes back to about the same date. 

 The poem is written in the style of an episode, and 

 gives the history of the deluge. The author of the 

 seventy tablets gives a detailed account of creation 

 and the fall of man. Mr. Smith assigns to this 

 work the period which passed between Abraham 

 and Moses, while other learned Assyriologists place 

 it before Abraham. Speaking of Debir, or "Sanc- 

 tuary," Canon Sayce observes ; "We may conclude 

 that the tablets were stored in its chief temple, like 

 the libraries of Assyria and Babylonia." The 

 learned canon, of course, does not state this as a 

 positive fact. If true, we may conclude that it was 

 customary to make duplicate copies, — one for the 

 temple and one for the king's palace. On one of 

 the tablets preserved by Mr. Smith, the following 

 will show we have good reason to add our opinion 

 to the views expressed by Professor Sayce: "First 

 tablet: Enum a elis (formerly that which is above.) 

 Palace of Asurbanipal, king of the nations, king of 

 Assyria, to whom Nebo and Tamet have attentive 

 ears. He has made inquiry with diligent eyes on 



the wisdom of the written tablets which belonged to 

 the kings who had been before me, none had made 

 inquiry of these writings. The wisdom of Nebo, the 

 impressions of the god my master, all good on the 

 tablets, which I have written, I have studied them, 

 I have observed them, and for the instruction of my 

 people I have placed them in my palace." 



Cuneiform inscriptions are the monumental 

 records of the inhabitants of the ancient Assyrian, 

 Babylonian, and Persian empires, and must not be 

 confonnded with the hieroglyphic writings common 

 to Egypt and Palestine. They are also called 

 claviform, cludiform, and arrow-headed inscriptions 

 and sphenograms. This writing is also known as 

 sphenography. All these refer to the elementary 

 characters, of which there are two, — one resembling 

 a wedge, the other an arrow-head; but if we regard 

 the latter as a combination of two wedges, the writ- 

 ing is wholly made up of wedges. 



All the characters were produced by different com- 

 binations and arrangements of these figures, the 

 variations being not much more than the hand- 

 writing of different persons. Some of the most 

 ancient inscriptions do not show the uniformity and 

 neatness of later productions ; the wedge in some is 

 nearly a straight line, and the forms are destitute of 

 curves. This style is called hieratic, and approaches 

 more closely to one of the Egyptian characters, and 

 is chiefly found on rocks, stone slabs, and monuments 

 in Western Persia. A neater and more artistic 

 style is found on vases, urns, gems, seals, bricks, 

 and cylinders. The wedge appears quite large on 

 some, while on others it is so small as to need a 

 magnifying glass to decipher the writing. The 

 small cylinders, or prisms, made of clay, baked in 

 the sun or burnt in kilns, show some very fine 

 inscriptions. 



Most of the cuneiform characters on cylinders, 

 bricks, etc., were found scattered in Western Persia, 

 and from the confines of the Caspian Sea to Egypt. 

 The early discovered ones were written in three dif- 

 ferent languages, although the characteristic wedge 

 entered into the composition of all. In these tri- 

 lingual mscriptions, the one which stands foremost 

 in antiquity and simplicity is the Persian cuneiform 

 writing, the next is the Scythian, and the third is 

 the Assyrian, or Babylonian, which is the most 

 complicated of all, and variously estimated by the 

 learned to contain from six to seven hundred char- 

 acters. 



Cuneiform writing seems to have ceased after the 

 time of Alexander the Great, and for nearly two 

 thousand years it was utterly forgotten. However, 

 it was reserved for the learned of Europe to discover 

 the long-lost, long-forgotten literary treasure, study 

 its characters, and decipher its mysterious writings. 

 This attempt was made before anything was accom- 

 plished on the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, which 

 has four very complicated systems — hieroglyphic, 

 hieratic, demotic, and Coptic. Yet Mariette found 

 while copying the inscriptions along the line of the 

 Suez canal, three cuneiform characters, describing 

 how Darius I., King of Persia, undertook the cut- 

 ting of the canal, but stopped it when almost com- 

 pleted, because he was persuaded that the levels of 

 the Red Sea and Mediterranean varied, and that 

 Egypt would be inundated by opening the canal. 

 Archieologists assign for this that Darius had the 

 cuneiform characters written for the edification of' 

 his Egyptian subjects. 



The deciphering of the characters and interpreta- 

 tion of the cuneiform writing may be considered as 

 complete and satisfactory. It will always be re- 

 garded as one of the greatest achievements of 

 modern scholarship. Like every great discovery 

 and invention, it was marked by accident and sim- 

 ple beginnings. In l6i8, Garcia de Sylva Fuqueroa, 



ambassador of Phillip III. of Spain, while on a visit 

 to the ruins of Persepolis, through idle curiosity 

 copied a small portion of an inscription, and ex- 

 pressed the conviction that it was the writing of 

 some lost language. Pietro Delia Uale, the Italian 

 traveller, was at this time in Persia, and, being on 

 terms of intimacy with the Spanish ambassador, 

 learned that Fuqueroa intended to show the copies 

 to some of the learned oriental scholars of Europe. 

 In 1622 he sent to the eminent Anthanasus Kircher 

 a brick inscribed with sphenograms. From that 

 time on, almost every traveller of note copied or 

 brought to Europe a specimen of these inscriptions. 



Fifty years later, Chardin published some which 

 he copied at Persepolis, but little was accomplished 

 until 1767, when K. Niebuhr, on his return from the 

 east, brought some copies, which he published, and 

 upon these the first successful attempts at decipher- 

 ing were made. Some ridiculed the idea of making 

 anything out of them. Mr. Hyde, an eminent ori- 

 ental scholar, considered them idle fancies of the 

 architect. Witte, of Rostock, thought they were 

 marks of generations of worms ; others supposed 

 them talismanic symbols or the formula of priests; 

 more believed them astronomical signs; not a few 

 considered them Chinese, Cufic, Hebrew, Samari- 

 tan, or Greek signs, and some thought they re- 

 sembled the Runic of Northern Europe. 



Slowly and diligently Niebuhr, Tychson of 

 Rostock, and Munter of Copenhagen, discovered 

 that they contained three alphabets of three diflfer- 

 ent languages. Grotefend, in 1802, made some 

 headway deciphering them. The next advance was 

 made by R. Rask, in 1826, and ten years later two 

 works appeared from Bournouf of France and Las- 

 sen of Germany. Mr. Rich added some valuable 

 copies to the collection; also Westergard, H. C. 

 Rawlinson of England, Rev. E. Hinks of Ireland, 

 and Julius Oppert of France, the latter three achiev- 

 ing the greatest progress ; though widely apart, 

 they almost simultaneouslv discovered the key to 

 the characters and inscriptions, and removed all 

 existing diflSculties in the way of deciphering cunei- 

 form writing. 



«♦♦ 



[Original in The Popular Science iVeics.J 

 CONCERNING CERTAIN ZOOLOGICAL CON- . 



SIDERATIONS AS REFERRING TO THE 



CLASSIFICATION OF MAN. 



BY R. W. SHUFELDT, M. D. 



Ever since the dawn of zoological science and 

 the days when classifiers first sought to array the 

 races of men in orderly groups, has talent of the 

 very highest order been brought to bear upon this 

 subject. Hieroglyphical writings of ancient Egypt 

 depict the characteristic types as they were known 

 to those astute and observing people, and in the 

 latter-day writings of the present century and its 

 predecessor, have the minds of such distinguished 

 taxonomers as Blumenbach, Cuvier, Retzius, Wel- 

 cher. Von Baer, Broca, Davis, Huxley, and a host of 

 others been bent to the classification of existing 

 men. And yet the subject is even now very far 

 from a satisfactory solution, nor is anything like 

 unanimous opinion to be found in the premises. 



In the present article it is the writer's object to 

 briefly allude to a few of the points offered on the 

 part of this difficult problem, but, in so doing, the 

 question as to man's affinity with other existing 

 mammals will not be especially referred to, nor is it 

 my intention to touch upon man's origin in time. 

 Morphological advance is rapidly letting light in 

 on the first-mentioned part of the subject, while as 

 to the latter, our storehouse of facts having reference 

 to it is but meagrely filled. 



We do wish, however, simply to take a glance 

 here at the entire V orld's population of humanity 



