These triumphs extended, roughly, over the years 1845-55. In 1857 the British Museum made a test of scholars' ability to decipher the Assyrian tongue. Four men, H. C. Rawlinson, Edward Hincks, Jules Oppert and H. F. Talbot, were given a fine copy of a long historical inscription of Tiglathpileser I (ca. 1107 s.c.), and were requested each to make an independ ent translation of the text and report on their results. At a given time these scholars re ported; and to the one should say, of all concerned, their translations were in sub stantial agreement from first to last. This was the crowning triumph of all in the eyes of other departments of learning. It showed that the riddle had been solved, that the Babylonian Valley would henceforth speak for itself through its multitudes of ancient records.
Furthermore, this triumph of philology suc ceeded in placing in the galaxy of ancient nations some of the most powerful of peoples. Babylonia, Assyria and Elam henceforth became the early home of vigorous nations, well-organ ized governments, conquering armies and world wide rulers. The ruin-covered wastes were suddenly transformed into fertile fields and prosperous cities, occupied by peoples whose influence touched the horizon of civilization in every direction. In short, this triumph of philology opened a door to a new world in southwestern Asia, prior to, and contemporane ous with, the times of the Hebrew kingdom.
Language.— The language in which this new-old material is preserved is the so-called Babylonian-Assyrian wedge-writing. Although the Old Persian is alphabetic, the Babylonian Assyrian is a sign and syllable tongue. Each separate wedge (T ), or each combination of wedges ( ), constitutes a sign. This lan guage was written by pressing the wedges with an instrument into clay or cutting them into stone or metal, for they never appear in relief. The primitive signs were probably rude pic tures, which gradually grew through use into the form of curved and straight lines; these lines soon took on the artistic form of wedges. This evolution is seen in the fact that a large number of the signs possess merely an ideo graphic value; for example, we find a sign for the idea gland* ( ), (.4), "male" ( T ), ( , 'make,' 'fish,' "king,' etc. Some of these signs also possess a syllabic value, as da, ra, la, mat, lak, rid, sun, Pad, etc. Quite a number possess several syl labic values, the context being the reader's only guide as to which should be used in any given case. The reader's troubles are still more aggravated by the fact that the same sign some times has both ideographic and syllabic values. In this, as in the preceding case, the reader's skill must find in the context the reason for the reading which he should adopt.
There are about 600 independent and entirely distinct signs formed by combinations of any where from two to 30 wedges set together at different angles, or paralleled, or inserted within other combinations. But the great difficulties arise when we find that there were almost num berless combinations of anywhere from two to six different ideographic signs to express other and often compound ideas. There are fully 20,000 such combinations known to-day to Assyriologists.
The number of inscriptions, small and large, discovered in Babylonia up to the present, is about 150,000. At Telloh, the French alone found in one library 30,000; and at Nippur the University of Pennsylvania secured 20,000, all large aids in our quest.
This Babylonian-Assyrian language is Se mitic in character, though its soil is thought, by most English, German and French scholars, to be a non-Semitic tongue, the so-called Su merian, in which most of the valuable finds made by the French at Telloh are written, and some of the inscriptions found at Nippur. The Babylonian-Assyrian tongue is a half-sister to the Hebrew of the Old Testament, and has al ready proved its real value in the interpretation of that book. See ASSYRIA.
The People.— The peoples best known to Assyriology are Semites. The primitive inhab itants of Babylonia, the predecessors of the Semitic population of Babylonia and Assyria, were probably a mixture of various nationalities, with the Sumerians in the lead. Whence the Sumerians or Semites came has not been tively ascertained. The Semites were in the land by 4,000 a.c. Side by side they lived and amalgamated in succeeding years. These Su merians were the predecessors and probably for a long time the contemporaries of the Semites, the one-time-supposed inventors of the ideo graphic cuneiform language of those countries. We know, at least, from inscriptions found at Nippur, that the Semitic language was in use in Babylonia as early as the 4th millenium B.C. The population of Babylonia and Assyria in later historic times was Semitic. Their location made them warriors, for they had to be per petually on the defense. The Babylonians culti vated the peaceful arts and were wide awake to the best things of life in their time and day. The Assyrians, on the other hand, built up an engine of warfare, a tremendous military ma chine, that, under powerful leaders, beat down and overthrew nations on every hand. Someone has compared Babylonia and Assyria to Greece and Rome respectively, as fostering and further ing different elements of national life and char acter.