It is safe to declare that inscriptions are as widely diffused as the art of writing. Even a primitive picture, if painted to convey a mes sage, would constitute an inscription. Hiero glyphics (conventionalized picture writing) constitute the most primitive type of writing, and inscriptions of this sort, in the Maya lan guage, are found in Yucatan. Though prob ably not earlier than the discovery of America, these represent, as regards writing, the same stage of culture as the hieroglyphics of Egypt (4700 ac.). Chinese inscriptions —the Chinese being a highly conventionalized .hieroglyphic script—of 1200 ac. are also extant. The Mayan (and Aztec) system is still very im perfectly understood. Egyptian hieroglyphics were likewise long undeciphered, but in 1822 the Rosetta Stone (q.v.), a trilingual in Greek, demotic Egyptian, and hieroglyphics whereon the names Ptolemy and Cleopatra were of ire quest occurrence, furnished a clue to the glyphics which had been conventionalized, through a syllabary, to a pure phonetic system.
— This means, to invent an instance, that a picture (symbol) representing motion 1...= (to) go] comes to be used for the syllable go in a proper name like Goshen (this step was taken by Aztec hieroglyphics), or in a word like gopher: and that in the last stage the syllable sign go reduces to the letter g. — The decipherment and interpretation of tian inscription belongs to the science Y:agiPeii Egyptology. See Enyrr.
The cuneiform script, invented by the Ao cadians of Chaldza, found its way to the Se mites of Babylonia and Assyria. This was a syllabary, developed from an earlier pictorial system, and such it remained in those coun tries, where not only small objects like seals and cylinders, but whole libraries of clay tablets (reaching back into the 4th millennium s.c.), have been found. These tablets contain genu ine literary works as well as the documents and announcements commonly included under the term inscriptions. The University of Pennsylvania is in possession of some 35,000 cuneiform documents, a collection particularly rich in fourth and second millennium records, and outnumbered only by the British Museum and the Louvre collections. The Tell-el-Am arna Letters are historically among the most noteworthy cuneiform inscriptions. Found by an Egyptian peasant woman in 1887, the collec tion is now split up between the Berlin and British museums, thcough a part remains in Egypt. These tablets contain a correspondence between three kings of Egypt (15th century s.c.) and the rulers of Babylonia, Assyria, Armenia, the states of Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine. Of transcendent importance for the early political history of western Asia, this correspondence is also accounted to confirm the validity of the Hebrew Scriptures as an historical record. It is noteworthy for the
history of culture that the petty chief • of every town could command the services of a scribe able to write a letter in Assyrian — the common correspondence language, it would seem, of all those countries. The sci ence of Semitic Cuneiform belongs to Assy riology (q.v.).
Fortunately the Assyrian syllabary, after being borrowed by the Medic Aryans, was con verted into an alphabetic system. King Darius (521 B.c.) caused an Old Persian (Protomedic) inscription of 413 lines, averaging 6 feet each, with versions in Neo-babyloriian and Neo-ela mitic, to be inscribed on the Great Rock of Behisttm, at a height of 400-500 feet. The same script had been observed on another short in scription found at Persepolis, which evidently contained proper names chiefly. As as 1802 Grotefend allocated the names Darius, Xerxes and Hystaspes to certain script groups in these brief formula, and cortectty isolated nine of the 13 symbols concerned. In course of time the entire Protomedic cuneiform alpha bet was identified and subsequently the more complex Semitic syllabaries were worked out, resulting in the decipherment of the older cuneiform. In the Behistun inscription Da rius, following precedents of Assyrian kings. summed up the history of his accession and reign. Copied in .1614 by Mr. H. C. Rawlin- • son, it has been carefully inspected again (1903) by the American scholar, Mr. A. V. W. Jackson.
Farther west, the Phoenicians, also Semitic, developed, perhaps from Egyptian hieroglyphics, a true alphabet, out of which sprang, on the one hand, the scripts used by the Hebrews, Arabs, Persians and Hindus, and on the other the Greek (and Roman) type. The most not able early inscription in alphabetic Semitic is the Moabite Stone (q.v.) (9th century a.c.), which recounts the victory of Mesha, king of Moab, over Israel. The language used differs but slightly from that of the Hebrew Scrip tures, of the historical validity of which the Moabite Stone, like the Tell-el-Amarna Let ters, is held to be in general confirmatory. [For facsimile, transcript and translation consult Hastings' 'Dictionary of the (III, p. 405 seq.) J. Phcenician-Greek bilinguals from Cyprus, belonging to the 4th century a.c., are extant; also Phcenician-Cypriote, which furnished the key to the Cypriote syllabary. Punic inscrip tions proper are chiefly of the dedicatory sort, and relatively late, all after the Greek period. Aramaic dockets on Assyrian contract tablets (8th century p.c.) form another instance of early alphabetic Semitic.