Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 05.djvu/770

* CTJNDIITAMABCA. 662 CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS. mountain regions, is very fertile, but only a sniall portion is cultivated. The chief crops are corn, wheat, cofi'ee, tobacco, cacao, and sugar. The chief exports are cinchona and tobacco. Bogota, the capital of the State of Cundina- marea, is also the capital of Colombia. Cundina- marca derives its name from an old American goddess, and before the conquest of the land by the Spaniards was one of the chief regions of na- tive civilization, as is proved by numerous re- mains foimd in the State. The population in 1884, exclusive of aborigines, was 537,658. CTTNDURANGO, kfln'du-ran'go (Quiehua, eagle-vine). A vine growing in northern South America, it contains a strong bitter principle, and was at one time claimed to be valuable in the cure of cancer, as a I'emedy for which it was sold in the United States at enormous prices. Subsequently it was found to be worthless for the cure of that disease, although it is still claimed to be valuable as a blood-purifier. It is not recognized in the American pharmacopoeias, although it is still given in the German. CTJNEGONDE, ku'ne-goNd'. The mistress of Candidc. in Voltaire's novel of that name, CUNEIFORM, kn-ne'I-form (from Lat. cti- neus, wedge + fornia, shape) INSCRIPTIONS, Cuneiform writing, one of the oldest sj'stems of the alphabet which is known, originated in Meso- potamia, and spread, through the influence of Babylonia, even to Armenia and to Egypt. The earliest texts in cuneiform writing are at least six thousand years old, and the latest inscrip- tions are dated in the reign of Antiochtis Soter, in the third century B.C. The script receives its name from the peculiar wedge-shaped characters of which it is composed. These consist of combi- nations of the five elements: T-/'< which become in many cases exceedingly com- plex. The difficulty of deciphering the charac- ters is complicated by the fact that many of them are polyphonic, so that one cuneiform group may represent several entirely different combinations of sounds. In addition to their polyphonous character, all the varieties of cunei- form writing, with the exception df the Old Per- sian, are syllabic instead of alphabetic. That is. each character represents not a letter, but an entire syllable, or even a word. Furthermore, there are many ideograms in the script, con- ventionalized characters which do not denote the sounds for which they would naturally be sup- posed to stand, or which have no real phonetic, value whatever. In the same way English pos- sesses certain ideograms, such as lb., which is read pound; viz., pronounced namely; ■$, which is dollar in speech ; 'fffthe head and horns of the bull) as the astroilomical sign for Taurus; and the like. It would seem that originally the cuneiform letters, like the Egyptian, Chinese, and Mexican alphabets, were pictorial, as, for instance, the older form of the character for sun (which may have been regarded as a complete ,^| . On the other hand, it is doubtful whether the entire body of the extremely complex charac- cii'clet of time), which later became ters which make up the bulk of the cuneiform texts can be resolved into such simple elements. The form of the signs was undoubtedly influenced by the material on which the texts were in- scribed. As the Germanic runes, which were carved on wood, are angular in shape and avoid curves, or as the Singhalese, which was written on palm-leaves, has almost no straight lines, which would split the leaf, but is composed of curves, so the cuneiform received its character- istic shape from the suljstance on which it was written. On the soft clay tablets, which were the ordinary writing material of Mesopotamia, the straiglit line was the easiest stroke, while the" triangularly prismatic stylus by its heavy initial touch to the clay formed the peculiar arrow-shaped head of the wedge. These clay bricks, after the writing was finished, were care- fully baked or dried in the sim. A chisel was of course employed for the longer inscriptions which were carved in the rock. The cuneiform text, unlike most other Semitic alphabets, as the Hebrew,' Syriac, and Arabic, runs from left to right. History of DECipnERMEXT. The history of the decipherment of these alphabets is an inter- esting one. Although allusion is plainly made to cuneiform texts by Herodotus, Diodorus, Stra- bo, Plutarch, Arrian, and the epistles ascribed to Thcmistocles, all remembrance of them seems later to have been lost. Early European travel- ers to the East, however, were attracted by the mysterious signs, as early as Josafat Earbaro at the end of the fifteenth century, and especially Pietro della Valla in 1621, who seems to have been the first one to suspect that the inscriptions were something more than simple decorations of the rocks. His views, however, made no lasting impression, and the wildest theories were ofl'ered in explanation of the meaning of the signs. They were supposed to be talismans, or hieratic and astrological fornnilas, or it was thought that they might contain the original language of Eden. They were regarded as Greek by one in- vestigator, while another found them pure Arabic. Gradually, however, the theories became more sober and accurate. The investigation cen- tred from the very first about the most striking of all cuneiform inscriptions, the great trilingual text on the side of Behistun. On this steep mountain, which rises abruptly some seventeen hundred feet above the plain, there is carved at a height of three hundred feet an account of the reign of Darius I. in three languages which we now know to be Old Persian, Babylonian, and New Susian. Beginning with the discovery that the Persian sign denoted the end of a word, and basing investigations on historical data furnished by Herodotus and other classical authors, and on hints as to word-order and style which were gained from Pahlavi (q.v. ) in- scriptions, successive investigations gradually de- ciphered the Old Persian cuneiform writing. It was then a comparatively easy task to solve the Babylonian and New Susian versions, which re- produce almost word for word the Old Persian text. From such a beginning the key has been found, not only to Assyro-Babylonian and New Susian, but to the ]Iitanni inscriptions and the tablets of Van and Cappadocia.