Inscribed Cylinders.
1. Terra-cotta cyliniler, con- taining the annals of the reign of Sargon, king of Assyria, about the year B.C. 721.— From Khorsa- bad.
2. Hexagonal terra - cotta, containing annals of the first eight years of the reign of 'Sennacherib (B.C. 102 to 694), with an account of the expedition against Hezekiah. — From Kuyunjik.
NINEVEH
130
NINEVEH
some believed to be the original form of all other cursive writing used in Western Asia, including the Hebrew, appears to have been occasionally employed in Assyria, probably for documents written on parchment or papy- rus, or perhaps leather skins. The Assyrian cuneiform character was of the same class as the Babylonian, only differing from it in the less complicated nature of its forms. Although the primary elements in the later Per- sian and so-called Median cuneiform were the same, yet their combination and the value of the letters were quite distinct. The latter, indeed, is but a form of the Assyr- ian. Herodotus terms all cuneiform writing the "Assyr- ian writing" (Herod, iv, 87). This character may have been derived from some more ancient form of liiero- glyphic writing ; but if so, all traces of such origin have disappeared. The Assyrian and Babylonian alphabet (if the term may be applied to above 200 signs) is of the most complicated, imperfect, and arbitrary nature — some characters being phonetic, others syllabic, others ideo- graphic— the same character being frequently used in- differently. This constitutes one of the principal diffi- culties in the process of decipherment. The investiga- tion first commenced by Grotefend (Heeren, Asiatic Nations, vol. ii, App. 2) has since been carried on with much success by Lassen and Westergaard in Germany, by MM. Osennouf and Oppert in France, and by Sir H. Rawlinson, Dr. Hincks, Mr. Norris, and Mr. Fox Talbot in England (see papers by these last-named gentlemen in the Journals of the Royal Asiatic Society, in the Transactions of the Royal Irish A cademy, in the Jour- nal of Sacred Literature, and in the Athenauni). Al- though considerable doubt may still reasonably prevail as to the interpretation of details, as to grammatical construction, and especially as to the rendering of proper names, sufficient progress has been made to enable the student to ascertain with some degree of confidence the general meaning and contents of an inscription. The people of Nineveh, as we have seen above, spoke a She- mitic dialect, connected with the Hebrew and with the so-called Chaldee of the books of Daniel and Ezra. This agrees with the testimony of the O. T. But it is as- serted that there existed in Assyria, as well as in Baby- lonia, a more ancient tongue belonging to a Turanian or Scythic race, who are supposed to have inhabited the plains watered by the Tigris and Euphrates long before the rise of the Assyrian empire, and from whom the Assyrians derived their civilization and the greater part of their mythology. It was retained for sacred purposes by the conquering race, as the Latin was re- tained after the fall of the Koman empire in the Catholic Church. In fragments of vocabularies discovered in the record-chamber at Kuyunjik words in the two lan- guages are placed in parallel columns, while a centre column contains a monographic or ideographic sign rep- resenting lioth. A large number of Turanian words or roots are further supposed to have existed in the Assyr- ian tongue, and tablets apparently in that language have been discovered in the ruins. The monumental inscriptions occur on detached steliB and obelisks, of which there are several specimens in the British Mu- seum from the Assyrian ruins, and one in the Berlin Museum discovered in the island of Cyprus; on the colossal human-headed lions and bulls, upon [)arts not occupied by sculpture, as between the legs; on the sculptured slabs, generally in bands between two bass- reliefs, to which they seem to refer; and, as in Persia and Armenia, carved on the face of rocks in the hill- coimtry. At Nimrud the same inscription is carved on nearly every slab in the north-west palace, and gener- ally repeated on the back, and even carried across the sculptured colossal figures. The Assyrian inscrijitions usually contain tlic chronicles of the king who built or restored tlie edifice in which they are found, records of his wars and expeditions into distant countries, of the amount of tribute and spoil taken from conquered tribes, of the building of temples and palaces, and invocations to the gods of iVssyria. Frequently every stone and
kiln-burned briclc used in the building bears the name and titles of the king, and generally those of his father and grandfather are added. These inscribed bricks are of the greatest value in restoring the royal dynasties. The longest inscription on stone, that from the north- west palace of Nineveh containing the records of Sar- danapahis II, has 325 lines; that on the black obelisk has 210. The most important hitherto discovered in connection with Biblical history is that upon a pair of colossal human-headed buUs from Kuyunjik, now in the British Museum, containing the records of Sennacherib, and describing, among other events, his wars with Hez- ekiah. It is accompanied bj' a series of bass-reliefs be- lieved to represent the siege and capture of Lachish (see Layard, Nin. and Bah. p. 148-153).
A long list might be given of Biblical names occur- ring in the Assyrian inscriptions {id. p. G26). Those of three Jewish kings have been read: Jehu, son of Khumri (Omri), on the black obelisk (see Layard, Nin- eveh and Babylon, p. 613) ; INIenahem on a slab from the south-west palace, Nimrud, now in the British Mu- seum (id. p. 617) ; and Hezekiah in the Kuyunjik rec- ords. The most important inscribed tcrra-cotta cylin- ders are those from Kalah Sherghat, with the annals of a king, whose name is believed to read Tiglath-Pileser — not the same mentioned in the 2d book of Kings, but an earlier monarch, who is supposed to have reigned about B.C. 1110 (Rawlinson, Herod, i, 457); those from Khorsabad containing the annals of Sargon ; those from Kuyunjik, especially one known as Bellino's cylinder, with the chronicles of Sennacherib; that from Nebbi Yiinus with the records of Esarhaddon, and the frag- ments of three cylinders with those of his son. The longest inscription on a cylinder is of 820 lines. Such cylinders and inscribed slabs were generally buried be- neath the foundations of great public buildings. Many fragments of cylinders and a vast collection of inscribed clay tablets, many in perfect preservation, and some bearing the impressions of seals, were discovered in a