Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume V.djvu/576

 572 CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS the absence of all curvatures, in consequence of which they were especially fitted for cutting in stone and other hard materials ; and it is true that no direct evidence of the employment of sphenography in any manner except upon stone or clay hardened by heat or materials of a like nature has been found. Grotefend confined his attention to the first or simplest kind of cunei- form writing. He remarked that all the hori- zontal wedges pointed toward the right, all the perpendicular ones downward, and all the ob- lique ones upward toward the right or down- ward toward the right, while the inner angle of the arrowhead always opened toward the right. Hence he concluded that the writing was to be read from left to right. He further concluded that the inscriptions probably be- longed to the age of the Achasmenian kings of Persia; and he determined to compare the names of those kings as given in the Greek his- torians with some of the first words of the in- scriptions. He conjectured that two combina- tions of characters occurring in the inscriptions represented the names of kings who were father and son, and he endeavored to ascertain which of the Greek names of the Persian kings the characters probably represented. They could not be Cyrus and Cambyses, because what he supposed to be the first letters in the names were different. They could not be Cyrus and Artaxerxes, for the first seemed to be too short and the second too long in propor- tion to the characters. The names of Darius and Xerxes were free from these objections. Darius and Xerxes were father and son ; their names commenced with different letters, and they seemed about the right length. In all these conjectures and conclusions he was cor- rect, and the first step in the solution of the problem was made. But he was not able to complete it. He had but a small number of copies of inscriptions ; they were not entirely accurate ; and they did not contain enough ex- amples of the use of some of the letters to de- termine what sounds they represented. Nor did he possess the knowledge necessary to com- plete success. He did not understand Sanskrit, or any of the Iranian languages with which the language of ancient Persia is connected. He however succeeded in determining nearly one third of the letters correctly, and came near to a few others. The next important discovery was made by R. Rask, the celebrated Danish traveller and philologist. In his work on the Zend language (1826) he determined the value of two characters representing m and, which Grotefend had interpreted differently. No further progress was made for the next ten . years. In 1836 two works appeared almost simultaneously by two of the greatest orien- talists of Europe, Eugene Burnouf in France and Christian Lassen in Germany. Each had worked in entire independence of the other. Though the great French scholar made consid- erable advances beyond the results of Grote- fend, his work was in a measure cast in the shade by that of his German contemporary. Lassen's most important discovery was that the short vowel a was in certain conditions to be regarded as inherent in the character representing the consonant, in the same manner as in the Sanskrit alphabet. Although Las- sen's alphabet was not perfect, it was sufficient to enable scholars to undertake the work of investigating the grammatical form and inter- preting the meaning of the language of the in- scriptions. From this time many scholars di- rected their attention to the subject. Beer in Germany and Jacquet in France contributed to the correction of some of Lassen's errors. But as yet the scholars of Europe had not at hand a sufficient number of inscriptions to make much progress. In 1839 the widow of 0. J. Rich, an Englishman who had resided many years in Bagdad, published from manu- scripts left by her husband several additional inscriptions which he had copied with great care. In 1845 N. L. Westergaard of Copen- hagen, one of the most learned orientalists of Europe, returned from a scientific journey in the East, and brought copies of several in- scriptions. He submitted his papers to Lassen, whereby the latter was enabled to correct some of his previous errors, and he published a more accurate alphabet* in the journal of the German oriental society. A. Holtzmann also, in a work published in 1845, corrected some errors in Lassen's last work. But even the al- phabet was not yet entirely understood. It was certain that in some cases three, in others two, different characters represented the same letter; but under what conditions one form was used rather than another was not yet de- termined. Three different persons, widely sep- arated, discovered the key to the difficulty. H. C. Rawlinson of England, of whom we shall hereafter speak more fully, in a note dated at Bagdad, Aug. 25, 1846, the Rev. E. Hincks of Killyleagh in Ireland, in a paper in the transac- tions of the royal Irish academy, dated Oct. 22 of the same year, and Julius Oppert, in a work published in Berlin in 1847, but before the views of Rawlinson and Hincks were known in Germany, all discovered that the use of one or the other form of a consonant depended upon the vowel which followed it. Thus the sound represented by our letter d is indicated in these inscriptions by three different charac- ters, according as it is followed by a or i or u. But the work of Oppert also contained the important discovery that the nasals m and n were often to be pronounced before consonant? although not written. This last discover) completed the deciphering of the cuneiform writing of the first kind, and no essential change in the alphabet has since been made. This alphabet, with its transliteration into Latin letters, is herewith given. It will be observed that some of the consonants vary in form ac- cording to the vowel which follows them, while others have the same form before all the vowels. The cause of this anomaly is not yet known.