Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/127

 CUNEIFORM,] INSCRIPTIONS 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 &quot; sun,&quot; for instance, was called, not only ut or iid (for idii), but also par (for para), tain, lakh, and kids. 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 &quot; corpse &quot; and &quot; death &quot; in Accadian ; but, as bat also signified &quot; a fortress,&quot; the ideograph of &quot; corpse &quot; was inserted within the ideograph of &quot; enclosure,&quot; not because there was any relationship between the ideas of &quot;death&quot; and &quot;fortress,&quot; but to indicate that the character which meant an enclosure was to be interpreted as signifying &quot; a fortress,&quot; and to be pronounced bat. So, too, the usual word for &quot; going &quot; 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 &quot;going.&quot; 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 bo 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 really com 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 suc cessor 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 pre decessors, and in the process of transmission the transfor mation of the old picture-writing into a syllabary was com pleted. 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 pho netic 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 &quot;^, &quot; to conquer,&quot; is followed by the syllable ud, we may infer that it must be pronounced acsud, &quot; I conquered,&quot; 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 them selves. 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; y, c, and k; and d, dh, and t. Tetli is inadequately represented sometimes by d, sometimes by t; and there is but one character for za (st) and tsa (NV). No difference could be drawn between u and yii, 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 exten sive, 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, how ever, dated in the reigns of tho earlier Arsacid princes,