In Babylonia, Assyria, Susiania, and Media the forms of the characters underwent several changes at successive periods, the tendency in each case being to simplify the characters by dropping superfluous wedges. In Babylonia we have to distinguish between the archaic, the linear, the hieratic, and the later forms of the characters. The archaic forms are principally found on bricks and cylinders of the Accadian epoch (before 2000 b,c.), and are the oldest forms of the characters of which we have contemporary specimens. The linear forms were in use at the same time, and are marked off from the archaic forms by being written in continuous lines instead of a series of wedges, and sometimes also by a closer resemblance to the original pictures from which they were derived. The hieratic forms were mainly employed between the overthrow of the Accadian power (about 1700 b.c.) and the 8th century b,c., more especially for contracts and similar documents. The later forms may be seen on the monuments of Nebuchadnezzar and his successors, a further modification of them being used for the Babylonian transcripts of the Persian cuneiform inscriptions. In Assyria also we may classify the characters as archaic, hieratic, and later (or Ninevite), though the forms they assumed in Assyria were not identical with those used in Babylonia which we have called by similar names. The hieratic forms were mainly employed in Assyria for ornamental or religious purposes, and may be compared with our own black letter. In Susiania the archaic forms of the characters lingered to the last, though in the northern part of the country simplified forms were in use. In Media a considerable difference may be observed between the peculiar forms of many characters in the older inscriptions of Mai-Amir and the forms borne by them in the Protomedic transcripts of the Persian monuments. The Armenian or Vannic characters were the same as those of Assyria, except that where one line or wedge had to be drawn across another, it was broken into two. But this was to prevent the stone from breaking at the point of section.
It will be noticed that the cuneiform characters were employed to express very different languages. The Accadian, like the allied dialects of Susiania and primitive Media, was agglutinative, and probably belonged to the Ural-Altaic family of speech; Assyrian and later Babylonian were Semitic; Persian was East Aryan; while the Armenian of Van seems to claim affinity with that Alarodian group of tongues of which Georgian may be regarded as the modern representative.
The Origin and Development of the Cuneiform System of Writing.— As already stated, the cuneiform characters were in their origin pictorial. In many cases it is possible to restore the primitive hieroglyphics or ideographs by the help of the archaic and linear Babylonian forms, and a fragment of a clay tablet has been discovered on which the pictorial originals of a few characters are given. In order to restore the primitive pictures, it is frequently necessary to turn a character upon its side, from which we may infer that the ideographs were once written vertically like Chinese. Thus <( J>- j the ideograph of “an eye,” is plainly a representation of the eye in a vertical position.
The primitive pictures denoted either objects or ideas, the latter being represented metaphorically by the picture of one or more objects. “Life,” for example, was expressed by the picture of a growing flower, “a month” by placing the numeral xxx. within the circle of the sun, which symbolized the day. But the same picture might denote more than one idea or object. Thus the circle of the sun represented not only “the sun” and “the day,” but also “light,” “brilliance,” and the like; and a pair of legs represented the ideas of “going,” “w·alking,” and “running.” By combining two or more ideographs together, fresh ideas might be symbolized to an almost infinite extent; “drinking,” for example, is denoted by placing the three drops which denoted water within the picture of the mouth, “language” by substituting the tongue for the three drops of water, and “a tear” by setting the ideograph of water before that of the eye.
Out of this early picture-writing there soon grew a syllabary. Accadian was an agglutinative language, which was already largely affected by phonetic decay, the result being that on the one hand the same word might be used indifferently for noun, verb, and adverb, as in English, while on the other hand the loss of final sounds had reduced a great part of the vocabulary to the condition of monosyllables. Ideographs consequently came to be associated with the sounds of the words which they primarily or most usually represented, and these words were mostly monosyllabic. Thus the ideograph of “month” (itii) was known as id or it, that of “going” (dun) as du, that of “drinking” as nak, that of a “tear” as ir.
But the same object or idea was frequently expressed by more than one name, while each of the ideas represented by a single sign was naturally denoted by a different word. Hence the same ideograph, or character, as we may now term it, had varying pronunciations assigned to it according to its meaning and use; the ideograph of the “sun,” for instance, was called, not only ut or ud (for utu), but also par (for para), tarn, lakh, and khis. Thus the ideographs, as soon as they came to appeal to the ear as well as to the eye, were necessarily polyphonous.
A further step in advance was now taken. An ideograph continued to represent the pronunciation of the word for which it originally stood even when it no longer represented the word itself; that is to say, the pronunciation of the word it denoted became attached to it as a mere phonetic value. This important innovation, which amounted to a change of the old picture-writing into a syllabary, must have taken place at an early period in its history. Though native proper names, which were always significant, could be written ideographically, it was necessary to find some other way of denoting foreign proper names, which had no meaning in Accadian. The pronouns, moreover, must have been a difficulty from the first, and the fact that these are invariably represented in Accadian, not by ideographs, but by characters used phonetically, indicates a very early date for the employment of the characters to represent syllabic sounds as well as ideas. This is borne out by the existence of several compound characters, in which the second element denotes only the pronunciation of the words for which they stand. The picture of a corpse, for example, had the phonetic value of bat, since bat, meant “corpse” and “death” in Accadian; but, as bat also signified “a fortress,” the ideograph of “corpse” was inserted within the ideograph of “enclosure,” not because there was any relationship between the ideas of “death” and “fortress,” but to indicate that the character which meant an enclosure was to be interpreted as signifying “a fortress,” and to be pronounced bat. So, too, the usual word for “going” was dun or du ; but there was another word ara or ra with the same meaning, and when the latter was intended to be read the fact was pointed out by attaching the character which had the phonetic value of ra to the ideograph which expressed the idea of “going.”
While the characters could thus be used as mere phonetic symbols, some few of them could be employed, on the other hand, for the language of the eye only. These were the determinative prefixes and affixes, such as the eight-rayed star, which represented a deity, or the shaded circle, which denoted a country or place. Their original use seems to have been to mark out those groups of characters which had to be read phonetically, and not as ideographs.
Like the lexicographers of China, the lexicographers of Accad attempted to classify and arrange the characters of their syllabary. Every character received a name of its own, so that literary works could be copied from dictation. A list of primary characters was first drawn up, each of which was named from the object it originally represented. The remaining characters were regarded as compounds, and divided into two classes. The first class consisted of characters which differed from the primary ones in having extra wedges, the second class of those that were reallycom-pounds. This classification of the syllabary must have been completed at a very remote date, since the analysis of many of the compound characters can only be explained by the forms they bear in archaic Babylonian, and in some cases even the archaic Babylonian forms are not sufficiently primitive. We may gather from this some idea of the epoch to which the invention of the cuneiform system of writing reaches back.
The Transmission of the Cuneiform Characters.— As far back as the second millennium b.c. Semitic tribes were in possession of a part of Chaldea. Duigi, the son and successor of the first Accadian monarch of whom we have contemporaneous record, has left us an inscription in which the cuneiform system of writing is adapted to the expression of a Semitic language. By the 17th century b.c. the Accadian language seems to have been wholly superseded by Semitic Babylonian and its northern dialect Assyrian. Along with other elements of civilization, the Semites received the cuneiform system of writing from their predecessors, and in the process of transmission the transformation of the old picture-writing into a syllabary was completed. The Accadian words represented by the characters when used as ideographs became phonetic values, and, since the same ideograph usually represented several different words, almost every character was polyphonous. It is true that some of these Accadian words, and even some of the phonetic values borne by the characters in Accadian, were rejected by the Semites, but on the other hand new phonetic values attached themselves to a few of the characters derived from the Semitic pronunciation of the latter when employed ideographically. For the Semites continued to use the characters on occasions ideographically as well as syllabically.
A greater extension was also given to the employment of determinative prefixes; the name of an individual, for instance, is always preceded by an upright wedge, the names of a country and a city by the ideographs which stand for these two ideas. The reader was assisted towards knowing when a character was used as an ideograph by the employment of phonetic complements, that is to say, characters which denoted the last syllable of the word intended to be read. Thus, when the ideograph , “to conquer,” is followed by the syllable ud, we may infer that it must be pronounced αcsud, “I conquered,” or some other person of the past tense of the same verb.
The real difficulty the cuneiform syllabary offers to the decipherer is not the polyphony of the characters, but one which would not have been felt by the Assyrians themselves. Accadian and Assyrian phonology did not always agree, and in borrowing the Accadian system of writing the Assyrians had to adapt the sounds of their own language, as best they could, to the phonetic symbols of another. Consequently no distinction in writing is made between final b and p’> g, c, and k∙, and d, dh, and t. Teth is inadequately represented sometimes by d, sometimes by i; and there is but one character for za (χ∣) and tsa (Ktf). No difference could be drawn between u and yu, and i and yi, while the representative of the consonantal ayin has to stand also for the diphthong e.
The Assyrians continued to follow the example of the Babylonians in writing on clay, but they also made use of papyrus and stone. This literature on clay is very extensive, and embraces every branch of study known at the time. For an account of it see Babylonia, vol. iii. p. 191.
The learned court of Assur-bani-pal in the 7th century b.c. amused itself with essays in Accadian composition, the extinct language of primitive Babylonia standing in much the same relation to the Assyrians that Latin does to us. But literary Assyrian itself was fast becoming an artificial dialect. The Aramaean alphabet was introduced into Nineveh at least as early as the 8th century b.c., and, though Nebuchadnezzar and his successors continued to employ the cuneiform syllabary, the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus was a blow from which the old mode of writing never recovered. The literary dialect and the characters in which it was inscribed were more and more disused, and finally disappeared altogether. Commercial tablets, however, dated in the reigns of the earlier Arsacid princes, have been found written in cuneiform, and if M. Oppert’s identification is correct, a deed of sale, now in the Zurich museum, and written in cuneiform characters, is dated in the fifth year of Pacorus, the contemporary of Domitian.
The Assyrian syllabary was borrowed by the Armenians and Minnians of Lake Van in the reign of a certain king named Lutipri in the 9th century b.c. The characters both in form and use are identical with those of Nineveh, except that the Armenians rejected the polyphony of the Assyrian syllabary, and with one or two exceptions used each sign with one phonetic value only.
After the occupation of Armenia by the Aryans, the use of the cuneiform character seems to have been discontinued, and no “Vannic” or Armenian cuneiform inscriptions are known to exist of later date than the 7th century b.c.
The example set by the Armenians seems to have been soon followed by their Turanian neighbours in Media. The earliest specimens of the so-called Protomedic (or Amardian) syllabary are to be found in the inscriptions of Mai-Amir and Sherif Khan. The syllabary of Nineveh appears to have been again the source from which the new script was borrowed. As among the Armenians, polyphony was rejected, a few ideographs only were used, and a selected number of characters employed. The Protomedic transcripts of the Persian inscriptions are written in this syllabary. In Susiania or Elam the archaic Babylonian form of cuneiform continued in use up to the last.
It was reserved for the Aryans of Persia to discover the ultimate capabilities of the cuneiform system of writing by reducing its characters to an alphabet of forty letters. These were divided into two classes, those with an inherent vowel a, and those which were followed by u and i. At the same time all superfluous wedges were thrown away, and the forms of the characters thus simplified as much as their pronunciation. Dr Oppert has pointed out the principle upon which the formation of this new alphabet was carried out. Some one meaning was selected among those a character might bear when used as an ideograph, and this was rendered by its Persian equivalent. The initial sound of the latter was the alphabetic value henceforth represented by the character. Thus “time of life,” 'Zaya in Persian, was contracted into and made to represent ⅛ (a, w). A few ideographs were retained along with the alphabetic characters. The Persian cuneiform alphabet, called “Assyrian letters” by Herodotus, seems to have been invented in the early part of the reign of Darius, and, being confined to monumental purposes, soon fell into disuse.
Possibly the reduction of the cuneiform syllabary into an alphabet was suggested by a previous acquaintance with alphabetic writing. In the Persian inscriptions the words are divided from one another by an oblique wedge. A similar division of words is found in one or two Assyrian inscriptions.
See Menant, Le Syllabaire Assyrien, 1861-73; Sayce, Lectures upon the Assyrian Language and Syllabary, 1877. (A. ¾ S.)
II. Semitic.
An account has already been given (see Alphabet) of the derivation of the Phoenician alphabet from the hieratic alphabet of the Egyptian papyri of the middle empire. No early monuments written in it have as yet been found; the first known examples belong to a time when the alphabet had been widely spread and a literature had long existed. At this time we find the alphabet divided into two branches, the Phoenician and the Aramaean, the first being again subdivided into archaic and Sidonian. The last two are chiefly distinguished by the form of the φ f which is angular in the first and rounded in the second.
The earliest inscription in the Phoenician alphabet known to us is the stele of Mesha, king of Moab, found at Dhibân and belonging to the 9th century b.c. In this Mesha relates that after the death of Ahab his god Chemosh enabled him to shake off the yoke of. Israel, to drive the Gadites out of Ataroth, and to fortify Kir-hareseth, Aroer, Horonaim, Dibon, and other places. The language of the inscription differs only dialectically from Hebrew.
To the same form of the alphabet belong most of the Phoenician inscriptions on the engraved gems brought of late years from Assyria and Babylonia, among which may be mentioned a cone with the image of a “golden calf” and the names Shemaiah and Azariah (innrø p 1Π ,, ycκ⅛Ι. The Aramaic legends on the bilingual lion-weights of Nimrud, which date from the reign of Tiglath-Pileser II. (745-727 b.c. ) downwards, also belong to the same form of the alphabet. With these inscriptions may be classed the Phoenician inscription on a bowl lately restored by M. Clermont Ganneau, which mentions a King Hiram, and had been brought with other merchandise from Phoenicia to Cyprus, where it was found. Of later date are the graffiti scratched on the legs of the colossi at Abu-Simbel in Nubia by Phoenician travellers or mercenaries.
The most important monument of the Sidonian period of the Phoenician alphabet is the sarcophagus of Eshmun’azar, son of Tabnith (1 Tennes), “king of the Sidonians,” which is probably of the Gth century b.c. It may, however, be later. The inscription upon it states that Eshmun’azar had restored the ruined temples of Sidon, and prays the gods to preserve to that city the possession of “Dor, Joppa, and the rich cornlands in the plain of Sharon.” Other noteworthy monuments of the same period are the so-called “Second Sidonian Inscription,” which records the installation of a subordinate “king of Sidon” by a “king of the Sidonians” of Phoenicia; the inscriptions from Citium in Cyprus of King Pumyathon and his father Melecyathon in the 4th century b.c., as well as the bilingual Phoenician-Greek and Phoenician-Cypriote inscriptions from the same island, the Phoenician-Cypriote inscription of Melecyathon having furnished Mr George Smith with the key to the Cypriote syllabary; together with six inscriptions from Athens and two from Malta; and the three inscriptions found by M. Renan at Umm’-el-Awâmid on the Phoenician coast.
The numerous dedicatory inscriptions found on the site of Carthage are written in what is termed the Punic development of the Sidonian alphabet; all apparently belong to the Greek period. The most important Punic inscription is the tariff of sacrifices found at Marseilles in 1845, an abridged edition of which was discovered on the site of Carthage by Mr Davis in 1860. The regulations contained in it have a striking analogy to many of those of Leviticus. Its date, however, cannot be very early, since it makes no mention of human sacrifices. The Punic alphabet was the source of those of Numidia and Boetica, where inscriptions have been found.
The series of Aramaean inscriptions begins...
