BOOKS.

ASSYRIAN INSCRIPTIONS.*

THIS little volume is full of important and interesting matter, and yet it is disappointing, and even vexatious. It is dis- appointing, because a book edited by Dr. Birch, and supplied with its contents by all our great living English Assyriologists, should have given us much which it does not give ; and vexatious, because, with books, as with other things, the existence of an in- different work stands in the way of our getting a good one. If we were to ask the• ordinary student of history who, unable to read the Arrow-headed inscriptions for himself, desires to form a real acquaintance with the subject, what he wants, he would surely ask, not for a little " popular " volume, in a pretty binding, and containing a number of specimen translations of Assyrian texts, but first, for such an account of the processes by which the inscriptions have been read as will enable him to judge for him- self whether the doubts of men like Lewis and Grote have been really met ; and then for such a series of translations as will be not merely curious and amusing, but of practical value and

• Reeords of the Past: being English Translations of the Assyrian and Egyptian Iliontnnents. Published under the sanction of the Society of Biblical Arobteology. Vol. I., Assyrian Texts. London : Barter and Co,

use for the purposes of the history, political, religious, and social, of the great Eastern Monarchies, in themselves and in their rela-

tions to the history of the world. The "List of further Texts for Translation" given by Mr. George Smith at the end of the volume shows what historical treasures are contained in these inscriptions. but of which we cannot hope to see the translations in any number of such toy-books as this. What would not the historical student, who has vainly tried to get a distinct meaning from the accounts of the Assyrian Canons by Sir Henry Rawlinson (in the Athenteum), and by Professors Oppert and Schrader, give for critically edited translations of the three first texts on Mr. Smith's list,—" Eponym Canon ; Historical Canon ; Synchronous His- tory !"—but who will expect them in a volume hite this? The doubts as to the reality of the decipherment of the inscriptions which were implied by Dean Milman and Mr. Grote, when they declined to give any opinion as to the evidence of the four independ- ent versions on which their judgment was invited, have ceased to exist in the minds of those who, even though ignorant of the original texts, have followed the progress of the work, or read the accounts of it in Menant and Schrader; but how few of us there are who have done this, and who do not still want, by way of introduction to the texts, a critical history of the wonderful, yet strictly scientific and completely intelligible process by which not only the characters and the words, but the grammatical structure of a dead and hitherto unknown language have been recovered and brought to light, and the meaning of its records understood! And if so, we may reasonably complain that no one of the scholars whose names appear in this volume should have given us such an account by way of introduction. It is true that Professor Mahaffy, in his Prolegomena of Ancient History, has given a clear account of the deciphering of the Assyrian as well as of the Egyptian inscriptions, which we commend to all who wish for information on the subject ; but we say that we want still to have it treated by one or other of our English Assyriolo- gists themselves, with the completeness which special knowledge can alone give.

Without pretending to such special knowledge, we shall pro- ceed to give a short sketch of the matter, on the authority of the writers we have named, or of what we know of the vast mass of scattered papers. pamphlets, and transactions of learned Societies upon it, for we believe that even to many of the educated readers of the Spectator such an account will not be unacceptable. On the walls of Persepolis, and the rock of Behistun on the Median border of Persia, are columns of cuneiform inscriptions, of which the latter have proved to be the more important, though the former were first copied and examined. Pietro della Valle in 1621 copied a few of the characters at Persepolis; more than a century later the elder Niebuhr brought home and published accurate copies of several of these inscriptions ; and the still more important inscription of Behistun was copied, the copies corrected, and finally, paper casts taken of the whole still distin- guishable writing, by Major (now Sir Henry) Rawlinson, between the years 1835 and 1848,—a most difficult and laborious work, since (as Sir Henry Rawlinson states in the volume before us) there were nearly a thousand lines of cuneiform writing engraved on the face of a precipitous rock, at a height of at least 400 feet above the plain. And from the time of Niebuhr, if not of Pietro della Valle, a process of deciphering these inscriptions has been going on, of which the scientific character—the fact that apparent guesses were really the rapid inductions of intellects trained to the work—is noticeable even in the first humble steps. The shape of the arrow-heads or wedges, and the fact that they were some- times crowded on the right, never on the left end of aline, showed that they were written from left to right ; a diagonal line at in- tervals was seen to separate the words ; a careful comparison of the characters in the three columns in -which they were arranged ascertained that notwithstanding their apparent similarity, from all being composed of the same elements (a long or a short arrow- head or wedge), they were, in fact, different in the several columns. The inscriptions, therefore, were triple in alphabets and probably in language ; and farther, of the three columns in which these were grouped it was observed that the right-hand-one was the longest, and contained only forty-two different characters, while that on the left hand had about four hundred, showing that the one was expressed in alphabetical or phonetic characters, while the other must be partly, at least, ideographic, or, as we popularly call it, hieroglyphic writing, in which the characters express words or parts of words, and not mere sounds. It was then assumed that these were three versions in three languages of the proclamations of some Persian king or kings, just as the Persian kings still issue their proclamations to the different races of their subjects, in Persian,

Turkish, and Arabic, which in fact it has since been found as to two, and probably as to the third, are the very languages of which those ancient ones are the prototypes. Some Armenian inscriptions of the Sassanid dynasty (of the third century A.D.) had now been read by De Sacy, who found that they ran in this form,—" I, M. or N., king of kings,. son of X., king of kings, did so and so." Grotefend (in 1802) pointed out that in the right-hand or phonetic inscription certain groups of characters frequently re- curred in a manner apparently corresponding with that royal formula of the Sassanid.T, as thus :—A word, presumably a proper name, followed by a word immediately repeated, with a terminal variation, and which presumably meant "king of kings," the re- peated word having a genitive plural termination; and then a word presumably "son." Assuming these data, and calling the supposed proper names A, B, C, the arrow-headed formula ran thus :—" A, king of kings, son of B, king of kings, son of C," the " C " not being followed by any word for " king."

This, it was seen, would apply only to Xerxes, Darius, and Hystaspes, the last of whom was not a king. And if these were the real names, the letters which composed them were ascertained. A few years later, the Zend or ancient Persian began to be read by European scholars ; if those characters did really express the ancient Persian for " king " and "son," they were to be read kshayathiya and putra ; the assumed genitive case would be anam, and this supplied two new letters, a and m, which, coupled with those found in the three proper names just mentioned, enabled them to spell Achrnenes," which followed—and in a pedigree of Darius, properly followed—the others. By the letters thus obtained, other words were spelt out and found to be Persian, and intelligibly connected with their context.

And from these beginnings, the meaning of these inscrip- tions and all others in the same character have gradu- ally been made out, by a process which may be compared, in the words of the late Mr. Norris (in a letter on the Assyrian inscriptions in the preface to the first edition of Sir E. Strachey's Hebrew Polities), to "the reading of a Latin his- torical document by an intelligent Italian, who knew no more of Latin than he might have learned through a general study of antiquities, and a comparison with the roots and forms of his own tongue." The language is found to be a cognate of Zend, though not identical with it, and its grammatical structure can be made out ; and the historical information agrees substantially with that of Herodotus.

The Persian version of the inscriptions being thus completely intelligible, it became to the other two what the Greek text on the Rosetta Stone has been to the corresponding Egyptian versions. The second versions of these inscriptions have been read and the language ascertained, but though very interesting to the philo- logist, they have not that interest which belongs to the third, or Assyrian, versions, from the fact that in the character and language of these we have—since the excavations of M. Botta and of Mr. Layard—what may be called an independent Assyrian literature. For deciphering this version of the inscriptions. the first step was to make out the proper names which were found in the places corre- sponding to those in the Persian text. These yielded a certain num- ber of letters. The discovery by Botta and Layard of the inscriptions of the Assyrian kings, which were evidently in the same character and language as those of the third column in these records of the. Persian kings, suggested that the language was a cognate of Hebrew, and on trial it was found that a large number of the words in the Persian text were actually represented by Hebraic equivalents, of which the letters could be made out by the usual processes of decipherment. In the course of this work it was discovered by Dr. Hincks that the characters were syllabic, —that is, that instead of the several syllables of words being written (as in most other languages) by combining the same con- sonant with each of several vowels in succession, each syllable had a letter of its own to represent it,—as though, instead of ab, eb, ob, ub, be, be, bi, by, bu being represented by combinations of h with the five vowels, each of these sounds had a distinct letter to express it. This accounted to some extent for the fact mentioned above that there were about 400 characters, or apparent letters, in the third column, instead of the small number which sufficed—as they would in a modern language —for the Persian text. But beyond this, it was found that many of the words in the Persian column, instead of being rendered by words which could be intelligibly spelt out and read in Hebraic equivalents, were either represented by single signs or else by monstrous groups of letters which spelt nothing. This showed that the mode of writing with which the

decipherers had to do, though partly phonetic, that is, written with alphabetical letters expressing sounds, was also partly ideo- graphic, or written with signs which represent either words or parts of words, as distinct from simple sounds. The letter or sign X is used in English as an ideograph, and will serve here as an illustration. Besides its sound as a letter of the alphabet, X represents, and we at once read it as though it were actually written,—

Ten, in "Number X."

The tenth, in "Leo X." Chris, in "Xmas."

Cross, in "the Xways." Into, in "4 X 6 = 24."

And if we were accustomed habitually to use X with all or any of these meanings, we should have no insuperable difficulty in reading such sentences as "X men atXded ; X man went X; the Xant went X the Xt," as, "Ten men attended ; the tenth man went across ; the tenant went into the tent" We have a few other ideographs, as 1. s. d., which in certain places we read as, of course, "pounds," "shillings," "pence ;" but in these Assyrian inscriptions they form a large and ordinary part of the written language, a sign or character sometimes representing a complete name or names, and sometimes only a syllable or syllables —so that, for instance, there is a sign which means sun, light, day, and sea, and also the sounds ut, tam, par, lab. The meaning of a word wholly or in part written in these ideographic characters might, if it occurred in a trilingual inscription, be ascertained from its equivalent in the Persian text, but this would not enable the decipherer either to spell or pronounce it. But in the trilingual inscriptions there are sentences which occur more than once, while there are several of the unilingual inscriptions recently discovered in the Assyrian ruins of which there is more than one copy ; and it is found that in these, what is evidently the same word is in one place written with ideographic, and in another with phonetic, or alphabetical, letters, so that in the latter cases the word itself can be read, and usually proves to be Hebraic in its form. Thus, for instance, the unintelligible word la-si-ye, found in one place in the Behistun inscription, is in another represented by the Hebraic la-pan-ya, which gives the required sense of "from before ;" and then there are two inscriptions of Sarda- napalus, in one of which the phonetic syllable pan replaces the si of the other, showing that these were, in fact, interchangeable. But this is not all. This, to our notions, ;strangely confused method of writing was not easy to the Assyrians themselves, and in the palace of this same king Sardanapalus (Asurbanipal) tablets have been found which must have been intended for dic- tionaries, and in which the phonetic values of long lists of ideo- graphs are given in opposite columns, to aid the Assyrians in reading their own writings. And thus, by these and other aids, not only the inscriptions with Persian versions, but also those written in Assyrian alone have been gradually de- ciphered and read. We have no space to go into more detail, only we will just mention the curious verifications obtained by the discovery of inscriptions in Egyptian and Cuneiform, or in Cuneiform and Phcenician, which have been separately read by separate scholars from each side and found to agree. As we have said, the reader who does not care to go farther will find an excellent account of these matters in Professor Mahaffy's book.

To turn to the volume before us, it contains translations of the records of the reigns of Sennacherib and other Assyrian kings, as well as of Darius ; the legend of the descent of Ishtar into hell ; the will of Sennacherib ; exorcisms ; and astronomical and contract tablets. The contracts for loans, and for sales of slaves and of houses, are sealed, or signed by nail-marks, with attestations and witnesses' names, and in some cases with Pheenician dockets attached. Of the royal inscriptions, that of Sennacherib is the most interesting. Inferior as the Assyrian civilisation of his time must have been to. that of his Ilebrew contemporaries, it is in- teresting to 'find that he who not unnaturally or unreasonably seemed to the Jewish kings and prophets to be the representative of mere godless force and cruelty, claimed for himself to be "the pious king, the worshipper of the great gods, the protector of the

just, the lover of the righteous," who acknowledged that his king- dom and power were given him by his god. And though his records of his conquests describe them as having been as ruthless as Isaiah's accounts represent them, there is real poetry, too, in the

descriptions, which gives them a human and dignified character :—

" his broad country I swept like a mighty whirlwind.' 'Over

their corn-fields I sowed thistles. He himself—for the fury of my

attack overwhelmed him—lost heart, and like a bird fled away alone, and his place of refuge could not be found.' • I, like the leader-bull, took the front of them. In the mountain valleys and through flooded lands I travelled in my chariot, but in places which, for my chariot, were dangerous, I alighted on my feet, and like a mountain goat among the lofty cliffs I clambered up them. • When my knees took rest upon a mountain rock, I sat down, and water, cold even to freezing, to assuage my thirst, I drank.'"

He describes, too, how he rebuilt and enlarged the city and palace of Nineveh, "a palace of stone and cedar-wood, in the building- style of the land of Syria ;" and he thus contrasts his own mag- nificence with the parsimony of his predecessors

Of all the kings of former days, my fathers who went before me, who reigned before me over Assyria, and governed the city of Bel. and every year without fail augmented its interior rooms, and treasured up in them all their revenues which they received from the four countries, not one among them all, though the central palace was too small to be their royal residence, had the knowledge.-nor the wish, to improve it. As to earing for the health of the city, by bringing streams of water into it, and the finding of new springs, none turned his thoughts to it, nor brought his heart to it. Then I, Sennacherib, king of Assyria, by command of the gods, resolved in my mind to complete this work, and I brought my heart to it."