Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 2.djvu/31

 ASSYRIA

9

ASSYRIA

Babylonia which has come down to us through the Persian, Greek, Latin, and Arabic writers — historians and geographers — has contributed httle or notliing to the advancement of our knowledge of these wonderful countries. The early European travellers in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates valley, such as Benjamin of Tudela (1160), Joiin Eldred (158.3), Anthony Shirley (1599), Pietro della Valle (1614-26), John Cartwright (1610), Gas- pare Balbi (1590), John Otter (17.34), Niebuhr (1765), Beauchamp, Olivier, Hagers, and others at the end of the eighteenth centurj', have left us a rather vague and superficial account of their personal visits and impressions. Later travellers, however, such as Claudius James Rich (1811, 1821-22), J. S. Buckingham (1S16), Sir Robert Ker Porter (1817-20), Captain Robert Mignan (1826-28), G. Baillie-Fraser (1834—35), the Euphrates Expedition under Colonel Chesney (1835-37), James FeUx Jones, Lj-nch, Selby, Colling\vood, Bewsher, and others of the first half of the nineteenth century made a far more searching and scientific study of the Mesopotamian region. But the real founders and pioneers of Assyro-Babvlonian explorations are Emile Botta (1842-45), Sir Henry Austen Layard (1S40-52), Victor Place (1851-55), H. Rassam (1850, 1878-82), Ijoftus (1850), Jules Oppert, Fresnel and Thomas (1851-52), Taylor (1851), Sir Henry Rawhnson, G. Smith, and others who have not only opened, but paved, the way for future researches and explora- tions. The first methodical and scientific explora- tions in Babylonia, however, were inaugurated and most successfully carried out by the intrepid French consul at Bassora and Bagdad, M. de Sarzec, who, from about 1877 until 1899, discovered at Tello some of the earliest and most precious remains and inscriptions of the pre-Semitic and Semitic djmasties of Southern Babylonia. Contemporaneously with de Sarzec there came other explorers, such as Rassam, already mentioned above, who was to continue George Smith's excavations; the American Wolf expedition, under the direction of Dr. Ward, of New York (1884-85); and, above all, the various expedi- tions to Nippur, under Peters, Haj-nes. and Hilprecht, respectively, sent by the University of Pennsylvania (1888-1900). The Turkish Government itself has not altogether stood aloof from this praiseworthy emulation, sending an expedition to Abu Habba, or Sippar, under the direction of the well-known Dominican scholar. Father F. Scheil of Paris, in 1894 and the following years. Several German, French, and American expeditions have later been busily engaged in excavating important mounds and ruins in Babylonia. One of these is the German expedition under Moritz and Koldewey, with the a.ssistance of Dr. Meissner. Delitzsch. and others, at Shurgul, El-Hibba, Al-Kasr, Tell-ibrahim, etc. Tlie expedition of the University of Chicago, under the direction of Dr. Banks, at Bismaya, in South Babylonia, came unfortunately to an early termi- nation.

The L.^nodage and Cuneiform Writing. — .\11 these wonderful archsological researches and dis- coveries would ha\'e been useless and destitute of interest, had not the language of AssjTO-Babylonian inscriptions been deciphered and studied. These inscriptions were all written in a language, and by means of characters, which seemed for a while to defy all human skill and ingenuity. The very ex- istence of such a language had been forgotten, and its writing seemed so capricious and bewildering that the earlier European travellers mistook the characters for fantastic and bizarre ornamental decorations; their dagger- or arrow-headed shape (from which their name of cuneiform) presenting a difficult puzzle. However, the discovery, and tentative decipherment, of the old Persian inscrip-

tions (especially those of Persepolis and of the Behistun rock, not far from Hamadan. in Persia), by Grotefend, Heeren, the Abb^ Saint Martin, Uask, Boumouf, Lassen, Westergaard, de Saulcy, and Rawhnson, all taking place at about the end of the first half of the nineteenth century, opened the way for the decipherment of the AssjTo-Babylonian inscriptions. The principal credit unquestionably belongs to Rawhnson, Norris, J. Oppert, Fox Talbot, and especially to Dr. Hinks of Dublin. The acute and original researches of these scholars were suc- cessfully carried out by other Semitic scholars and hn- guists no less competent, such as E. Schrader and Fred. Delitzsch, in Ciermany; M^nant, Halevy, and Lenormant, in France; Sayce and G. Smith, in England.

The Assyro-Babylonian language belongs to the .so-called Semitic family of languages, and in respect to grammar and lexicography offers no more diffi- culty to the interpreter than either Hebrew, or Aramaic, or Arabic. It is more closely allied to Hebrew and Aramaic than to Arabic and the other dialects of the South-Semitic group. The principal difficulty of Assyrian consists in its extremely com- pheated system of writing. For, unhke all other Semitic dialects, Assyrian is written not alphabet- ically, but either syllabically or ideographically, which means that Assyrian characters represent not consonants, but syllables, open or closed, simple or compound, and ideas or words, such as ka, bar. ilu. zikaru, etc. These same characters may also have both a syllabic and an ideographic value, and nearly always more than one syllabic value and as many as five or six; so that a sign like the following may be read syllabic- ^^.^V ally as ud, ut, u, lu. tarn, bir, par, pir, lah, ^ f lih, hish, and his; and ideographically as ^^" I iimu, "day";' pisu. "white"; Shamask, the Sungod; etc. The shape of these signs is that of a wedge, hence the name cuneiform (from the Latin cuncus, "a wedge"). The wedges, arranged singly or in groups, either are called "ideograms" and stand for complete ideas, or they stand for syllables. In course of time the same ideographic signs came to have also the phonetic value of syllables, without losing, however, their primitive ideographic value, as can be seen from the example quoted above. This naturally caused a great difficulty and embarrassment even to the Assyro-Babylonians themselves, and is still the principal obstacle to the correct and final reading of many cuneiform words and inscriptions. To remedy this great inconvenience, the Assjto- Babylonians themselves placed other characters (called determinatives) before many of these signs in order to determine their use and value in certain particular cases and sentences. Before all names of gods, for example, either a sign meaning "divine being" was prefixed, or a syllabic character (phonetic complement), which indicated the proper phonetic value with which the word in question should end, was added after it. In spite of these and other de\'ices, many signs and collocations of signs have so many possible syllabic values as to render exact- ness in the reading very difficult. There are about five hundred of these different signs used to represent words or syllables. Their origin is still a subject of discussion among scholars. The prevailing theory is that they were originally picture-signs, representing the ideas to be conveyed; but at present only about sixty of these 500 signs can be with certainty traced back to their original picture-meanings.

According to the majority of Assyriologists, the cuneiform system of writing originated with the Sumerians, the primitive non-Semitic inhabitants of Babylonia, from whom it was borrowed by the Semitic Babylonians and Assyrians, and applied to their own language. In the same way the Greeks