DECIPHERMENT Old Persian,---Niebuhr drew up an alphabet of one class of inscriptions (that contained in the first column), consisting of 42 characters (whereas there are in fact only 32), and considered this kind of writing Persian.
The number of correct values assigned was gradually increased, many names were correctly ascertained, and the division of words rendered certain by the recognition of the fact that a diagonal wedge was used as a word-divider. In 1837, Rawlinson sent his decipherments of the Persian rock-inscriptions at Elvend and Bisitun (Behistun) to the Royal Asiatic Society, and, with the final revision of his work in 1846, the main part of the Old Persian inscriptions of the Achaemenian period became intelligi ble and the period of decipherment in that branch ended.
The sense of the inscriptions in the two languages that precede Old Persian in these trilingual inscriptions was known from the decipherment of the Old Persian; and it was not difficult to identify certain series of characters in them with the proper names given in the Old Persian. The simpler writing of the two was that in the second column. This writing is not alpha betic, but the majority of the signs are syllabic; thus there are signs representing sha, shi, situ, and ish which represent the series of simple syllables composed of the consonant sh and a vowel, while other signs represent syllables compounded of two con sonants and a vowel; e.g., man, pan, par. A few signs signify words in themselves and are therefore called ideograms; divine names are marked by prefixing a sign not intended to be sounded, and a perpendicular or a horizontal stroke marks nouns of dif ferent kinds. The second column inscriptions were not therefore difficult to arrange into words, and the sense of the words was accurately known in most cases. Rawlinson with his translation of the Old Persian version of the Bisitun inscription was able to supply certain passages broken in the third column, from the intact second column. By 1890 the main ascertainable facts were finally decided. The inscriptions found at Susa during spasmodic excavations, and afterwards by the great French expedition, finally proved that the language of the second column of the Achae menian inscription was the latest form of the tongue spoken by the people of Elam, and in 1897, Hiising gave it the name New Elamite. The history of the language covers some 2,000 years, and the decipherment of the earlier stages is mainly due to the text publications of the French Expedition by Father Scheil. Unfortunately the sense of these earlier inscriptions can only be approximately decided. The language is classed in the amorphous group generally called "Caucasian." Babylonian.—The language of the third column of the Achaemenian inscriptions was Babylonian ; the characters em ployed being those on bricks and other objects from the site of Babylon. The decipherment of this language was accomplished when in 1851 Rawlinson published 112 lines of the Babylonian version of the Bisitun inscription, with a transcription, and a nearly complete translation. In this Memoir I5o signs were assigned values, and certain of these had more than one phonetic value. The language was unquestionably Semitic, and the words could be frequently compared with Hebrew and Arabic ; the characters were in part ideograms, in part syllables (individual signs being occasionally' polyphonous), and in part used to denote the character of a word, such as a personal name, a profession, a bird and so forth. The language was called by universal consent, Assyrian, since the bulk of the inscriptions then published came from Assyria. Subsequent studies have resulted in a slight change in the nomenclature. Moat of the Assyrian royal inscriptions use, as a literary language, the classical Babylonian Semitic lan guage, called by themselves Akkadian. But the Assyrians spoke, and sometimes wrote a language distinct from, but closely related to, Akkadian, and the term Assyrian is now best reserved fo• that distinctive language, while the Babylonian tongue is termed Akkadian.
A certain number of inscriptions from Babylonia, especially those of early date, proved to be in a language which was not a Semitic language, to which the name Sumerian is now given. Cuneiform writing was actually invented by the people who spoke Sumerian. The decipherment of this language offered no particular difficulties so far as the characters and phonetic values were concerned, as these were obtained from the Semitic texts and vocabularies. But the language itself is peculiar in structure and cannot at present be allocated to ar.y known family with certainty; the interpretation of unilingual texts from Baby lonia in the early period is not often in doubt so far as the main sense goes, but in detail there are still considerable uncertainties.
Cuneiform inscriptions exist in Armenia in the neighbourhood of Lake Wan and over a very wide area, from Erzerum in the north to the neighbourhood of Lake Urmia in the south. These inscriptions are not all in the Akkadian em ployed by Assyrian kings, but in another language, which had a nominative case that ended in—s, and an accusative in—n; the kings' names were in certain cases unquestionably those given by Assyrian inscriptions as kings of Urartu. For the most part the texts are records of buildings and of the construction of canals and other means of irrigation. Modern scholars are inclined to consider this language one of a group known as "Caucasian" to which family Georgian belongs. Various names have been applied to it; "Vannic," since the kingdom in which it was spoken cen tered round Lake Wan or Van, "Chaldian," because the mention of "Chaldian gods" in the inscriptions may show that the people called themselves "Chaldians," and the Greek writers mention XaXBcoi in this area, and "Urartaean" because the kingdom was called Urartu by the Assyrians.
The fragments of clay tablets found at various sites in the neighbourhood of Boghaz Keui at the end of the 19th century bore texts in a language clearly similar to, or the same as, that in which a king of Arzawa wrote about 138o B.C. to the Pharaoh of Egypt, Amenhotep IV., the heretic Akhnaton. At Boghaz Keui in 1907 a great archive of tablets was unearthed written in various languages, including Akkadian. These Akka dian documents made it clear that Boghaz Keui was the capital of those kings of the Hittites who were engaged in great wars with Egypt in the 14th and i3th centuries B.C. ; the library dis covered included a certain number of vocabularies, which gave the meaning of the native "Hittite" words in Akkadian. This basis would not have been sufficient to decipher the language, had not the scribes who wrote Hittite texts used both Sumerian and Akkadian words as "ideograms" ; that is, they wrote foreign words in cuneiform, but pronounced them in their own language. The meaning of sentences being approximately certain, words in the Hittite language can be ascertained to have certain approxi mate senses. Hrozny showed that in certain remarkable respects the verb conjugations and the noun declensions corresponded to the centum languages of the Indo-European group. But the vocabulary of the Hittites has for the most part no relation to Indo-European; only a few roots can be equated with Indo Germanic. Whether the Hittite written in cuneiform is the same language as that expressed in pictographic script commonly called "Hittite" because it also was used at Boghaz Keui, is not known.
Cuneiform was widely employed all over Western Asia in the second millennium B.C. Palestinian, Syrian and Phoenician princes wrote to their Egyptian overlord on cunei form tablets, and sometimes explained isolated Babylonian words by the native "Canaanite" words, which are closely related to Hebrew. One tablet contains Egyptian words spelt phonetically and explained by Babylonian words. On Hittite tablets of a magical and religious character incantations and spells are often given in languages of Asia Minor other than Hittite, designated as the "Luvian," "Bala" and other unknown names. One of these languages is called "Hurrian," and was spoken by a people whose political power centred about the valley of the Khabur. This language is only dialectically distinguishable from that in which the letter of Dushratta, the king of Mitanni, to the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV. is couched. Now this language was probably the speech of the Subaraeans, for the names of men called "Suba raean" demonstrably contain the same elements. The exact interpretation of the Subaraean and Hurrian languages is not yet possible owing to the paucity of material.
The earliest was picto graphic, and the simplest objects were truly drawn; a head, foot, sledge, man in a hut, various kinds of pot, reeds, can all be clearly distinguished. The only extant tablet with the pictographic signs upon it is made of stone, which offers no difficulty for drawing such pictures, and may date from about 3,50o B.C. on an approxi mate estimate. The only other writing material in Babylonia, where this pictographic writing seems to have originated, is clay. The clay was specially selected, and the shape made in the earliest times resembled that of a square cushion with rounded corners. Though wet clay will take lines from a fine point, it is impossible to draw objects in full detail successfully, and clay tablets in scribed shortly after the date of the pictographic tablet show con ventional linear forms of the signs which sometimes leave the nature of the original picture in doubt. These linear forms were immediately adopted for use on stone; but they cannot have been in use long on clay because an easier method was at hand. In stead of drawing the point of the stilus across the surface, the point was pressed in, and a sharp edge depressed in the required direction, with the effect that the head of the line assumed a slightly triangular shape, so that I became r and — became
This characteristic, the wedge-shape, from which the writing re ceived its name cuneiform, became inseparable from the writing and was copied by the masons in stone inscriptions. Hence through this development the human foot came to be represented by The earliest writing was in columns read downwards, and from right to left, and this custom was retained in certain cases till the reign of Hammurabi ; but the custom of writing horizontally from left to right, which entailed turning the signs on one side, was introduced before 260o B.c., and was universal later. This re sulted in the picture of a man's head facing right
becoming a recumbent head The exact method of the scribes in writing on clay tablets is not known, and the explanation which follows is conjectural. In shaping the clay the thumb and fingers were used on less impor tant documents, but marks were never left on finely made tablets. The shape of the tablets varied in different periods, the square tablets being succeeded by long rectangular shapes; the large tablets used in the third millennium were abandoned for general use, but are occasionally found in use for long literary texts. The building inscriptions which were placed as records in the founda tions of temples and palaces by kings were generally written on hollow barrel cylinders. The Assyrians who added to the account of the building a long preamble containing the military exploits of the reign, also used a prism shape, with four to ten sides, which was inscribed down the length. These cylinders and prisms always had a fine clay surface put over a rough core.
The stilus was in general made of a reed, and the fibre marks may be seen in roughly written business documents. It has been claimed that a very early bone object found at Kish is a stilus. In the very finest writing some hard material must have been employed, possibly even metal. The point of the instrument was perhaps formed by cutting a square stem obliquely. The stilus was held in the right hand, and the kinds of wedges required were obtained by a manipulation with the 'the the different edges being used. The blunt edge of the stilus was round, and in the earliest times circles and semi-circles were made by it to indicate numerals. An unexplained difficulty is that tablets are inscribed on obverse and reverse. When the tablet was turned, in such a way that the bottom of the obverse became top of the reverse, the inscribed surface, still wet, would be likely to suffer from any pressure, but this was avoided by some unknown means. Some of the finest tablets from Ashur banipal's library, and some prisms, are pierced with round holes; the exact purpose is not known.
The development in power of expression accompanied the change in methods of writing. The pictograph, besides denoting the object depicted, had indicated allied ideas; thus the picture of the human foot could also mean "to stand" or "to go" and other verbs of motion. The sign thus came to have the sound of these words associated with it. These sounds were later used as syllabic values, and used to write words not capable of being expressed by a single sign. Another development was the use of compound signs; "food" in "mouth" formed the picture sign "to eat." The polyphony of the signs was both increased and reduced by the assumption of a single form by signs originally distinct, and by the distinction into different forms of a single sign. When the cuneiform signs were adopted for the expression of the Semitic language, still more syllabic values were added to various signs, since the Semitic words for various picture signs were some times treated as syllabic values. Even so it is not possible to give a full account of the origin of all values.
The syllabary evolved by this process consisted of some thou sands of signs, but in practice the number necessary could be, and was very considerably reduced. The almost endless "ideo grams" were used by the learned scribes for writing documents only intended for their own eyes; to simplify the reading of them an elaborate system of phonetic complements was introduced. Commercial documents and more especially letters, were written with simple syllables, and for this purpose about i 5o common signs and ideograms sufficed. In this form the writing was bor rowed by other countries.
The two main schools of cuneiform were both derived from the particular style of writing of the Sumerian scribes of the 3rd dynasty of Ur about 2300-215o B.C. At that time the writing was introduced into Assyria. In the North, a tendency to make the signs square in appearance developed about 2000 B.C., and thence forward the Assyrian forms of signs are markedly different in many cases from the Babylonian. In both cases simplification took place, but the Babylonian preferred a cursive form.
In Elam, cuneiform was adopted at a very early period and was used at the same time as an indigenous form of writing in the third millennium. In the second millennium cuneiform signs were written in cursive forms peculiar to the country; when exactly the peculiar forms and limited number of signs used in the second column of the Achaemenian inscriptions were adopted is not known, the date may approximately be the 7th or early 6th cen tury. The Persian cuneiform was a separate invention, based only on the use of wedges. Some scholars affirm that the Persian alphabet must have been known before the time of Darius I., the Great, but there is no definite proof of this. All the inscriptions in this cuneiform alphabet extant are royal, and there is no liter ary or commercial document so written extant; it is to be doubted whether it was ever used except for monumental purposes. The one example of a clay tablet was intended for the use of masons.
The objects delineated in the early pictographic script prove that its originators were in habitants of the marsh lands at the head of the Persian gulf. From there it spread to Elam at the end of the 4th millennium. It was first used to express a Semitic language at some time after 3000 B.C., and was regularly so used from 2500 B.C. onwards. It was introduced into Assyria and Asia Minor about 230o B.C. Between 1500-120o B.C. there were cuneiform scribes in several Hittite towns in Asia Minor, in nearly every important city in Syria and Palestine and at the Egyptian court. About the same time the Assyrians introduced it into their provinces east of Tigris, at such places as Arrapha, for ordinary use; the earlier examples of cunei form writing in the Zagros range, which date from about 28o0 B.C., onwards, are confined to royal monumental inscriptions. The kings of Van borrowed Assyrian cuneiform about the 9th century B.C. for their own monuments and clay tablets prove that it was in ordinary use. In the time of the Assyrian empire, 800-600 B.C., cuneiform was used in all the provinces of Western Asia. The Achaemenian kings continued and developed the prac tice of writing in their home lands, and the Seleucid dynasty which followed them had royal inscriptions written in it, and encouraged Greeks to study early cuneiform documents, for there are tablets which give translations of the cuneiform signs into Greek characters.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Rogers, History of Babylonia and Assyria 6th ed., Bibliography.-Rogers, History of Babylonia and Assyria 6th ed., vol. i (1915) ; E. A. W. Budge, Rise and Progress of Assyriology, 1925.
