VHI. Race and Language. — Sprung from Asshur, the Assyrians were a Shemitic race, whatever may have been the original connection of Nineveh with the Cush- ite Nimrod. Herodotus (vii, G3) says of them, " By the Greeks they were called Sj'rians, and by the barbarians Assyrians." This blunder has been repeated even by Niebuhr and others. But the names are quite distinct, Syria being "l^liJ, or Tyre, as it is given in English, and Assyria being "^liJX, a very different word. In fact Asshur means the country, an Assyrian, the national
divinity, or the town; the determinative >^T before
it showing when it signifies the god. The Assyrians were thus allied to the Phoenicians, Syrians, northern Arabs, and Jews, and they were not unlike the latter in general physiognomy, except that they were apparentlj' more robust in limb and heavier in feature. The tongues of these races are similar, too, in structure. The ele- mentary shape of the letter is the wedge Y, of various forms, and placed in all directions — upright, horizontal, diagonal. The alphabet is syllabic in structure — the vowels representing the sounds A, I, and U, and the ma- jority of the sixteen consonants producing each six syl- lables, either as they precede or follow the vowel. Each simple vowel sound may also combine with two conso- nants, but the number of such double combinations is limited to 150. This alphabet, so far as ascertained, has at the utmost 250 different characters. Another set of characters is called determinative, and is prefixed to
certain names; thus? shows that the next word is a
man's name. So, too, the plural is marked by yJT , and
the dual by J |. The difference between an ideographic
ind a phonetic sign may be illustrated in this way: If we write the phrase "Ivan I," the / in Ivan has its usual power as a vowel-sound ; but the / after it has no sound, it merely carries with it or represents the idea of first. The tongue itself is Shemitic, allied to Hebrew, Phoenician, and Chaldee. Thus its conjunction U, and, is the Heb. 1, vau, and, as in Hebrew, hi signifies " if." Its first personal pronoun is anakii, Heb. anoJd, "iSbX; its second is atta, Heb. ilPN ; ahu is " father," Heb. 2X ; VII.— I
naJiar is "a river," Heb. ""inS, etc. The numerals are very similar to those in Hebrew. Feminine nouns end in it or ai, like Hebrew nouns in ith. Possessive pronouns are represented by suffixes, much the same as those in Hebrew. UJ is the relative, as often in the later Biblical and in the rabbinical Hebrew. The interrogative, as in Hebrew, is (T2. As in Aramaic, there is no prepositive article — the "emphatic state" is used instead of it. By a process which Oppert calls " mimmation," and which applies to indeclinable words, the letter m plays an im- portant part, as in the analogous forms in Hebrew C^T^, "daily;" D2n, "for nought." Nouns are formed as in Hebrew by prefixing O, and such nouns signify instrument, action, or state; and in the formation of nouns proper 3 is also used, as in the names Nimrod, Nisroch, Nergal, Nineveh, etc. The conjugations are five principal, four of which correspond to hd, niphal, jnel, and hiphil, and the others are tVie same as the well-known Clialdee forms. The verb is conjugated by the aid, as in Hebrew, of pronominal suffixes, and it has no tenses. The roots are generally biliteral, the He- brew ones being usually triliteral, as mit, to die, Heb. rial's; rib, to dwell, Heb. 31^'^. The proper names are all but universally Shemitic, and not Aryan or Medo- Persic; and they are commonly significant. Asshur, the name of the primal god, is found in many of them ; and there occur such terms as shamas, meaning ser- vant; tiglath, adoration, and viutaggil, adoring — a par- ticipial form from the same root ; pal is son, allied to the Aramaic bar ; sar is king, ris is head, Heb. ONI, etc.
The ruins of Nineveh have furnished a vast collec- tion of inscriptions partly carved on marble or stone slabs, and partly impressed upon bricks, and upon clay cylinders, or six-sided and eight-sided prisms, barrels, and tablets, which, used for the purpose when still moist, were afterwards baked in a fur- nace or kiln. The employment of prepared clay for writing on is apparently an old custom. Jose- phus (.1 nf. i, 2, 3) records the tra- dition that Seth and his family in- scribed on two pillars of brick and stone the wisdom of their age — ■ especially aofiav ntpi ro ovpdvia — astronomy. It was natural that Ezekiel, in the land of captivity, should be thus commanded: "Take thee a tile, and lay it before thee, and portraj' upon it the cit}-, even Jerusalem" (Ezek. iv, 1). Refer- ence to the Baljylonian custom of writing on bricks (coctilihus luter- culis) is found in Pliny {liist. Nat, lib. vii, s. 57). The cylinders are hollow, and appear, from the hole pierced through them, to have been mounted so as to turn round, and to present their several sides to the reader. The character employed was the arrow-headed or cuneiform — so called from each letter being formed by marks or elements resembling an arrow-head or a wedge. This mode of writing, believed bjf some to be of Turanian or Scythic origin, prevailed throughout the provinces comprised in the Assyrian, Babylonian, and the eastern portion of the ancient Per- sian empires, from the earliest times to which any known record belongs, or at least twenty centuries before the Christian sera, down to the period of the conquests of Al- exander; after which epoch, although occasionally em- ployed, it seems to have graduall}' fallen into disuse. It never extended into Syria, Arabia, or Asia Minor, al- though it was adopted in Armenia. A cursive writing resembling the ancient Syrian and Phoenician, and by