THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
this task, Major (afterward Sir) Henry Rawlinson was trying to reach a solution and in the same way. Quite independently of Grotefend he worked out some of the sign values, and, when later provided with Grotef end's results, far surpassed him in the power to translate Persian inscriptions. He discovered the great rock-cut inscription of Darius at Behistun in Persia, which he copied, laboriously and successfully deciphered, and published in an English translation, nearly complete, in the year 1846.
The decipherment of Persian was followed by a
determined attempt to solve the far more difficult
problem of the Assyro-Babylonian cu-
3. Decipher- neiform script, in which the third in-
ment of scription in these groups of three was written. The first to attempt it was
Babylonian- Assyrian.
Grotefend, who identified the names of the kings, but was unable to go much further. Isidor Loewenstein secured the correct meanings of the signs for " king," " great," and the sign for the plural. He first suggested that Assyrian belonged to the Semitic family and was therefore related to Hebrew, Arabic and Aramean. Far more successful was the Rev. Edward Hincks (q.v.), who, in two papers during 1846 and a third in 1847, determined most of the numerals, assigned correct values to a number of signs, and seemed on the very verge of being able to read a whole text. His rigidly scientific spirit, however, restrained him from such an endeavor, and he worked steadily on with the patient solution of one difficulty at a time. When the immense mass of cuneiform documents which Emil Botta had discovered at Nineveh reached Paris, the hope of deciphering Assyrian increased because of the accession of material, but diminished when Botta pointed out the great difficulty of the problem. He made little effort to decipher or translate, but collated all the inscriptions which they contained and made lists of all the signs which he found, differentiating 642 separate signs. This great number proved that the Assyrian cuneiform script was not alphabetic; some of the characters must be syllabic, some must be ideographs and represent a word or an idea. Botta's discoveries were carried further by Edward Hincks. In a paper read before the Irish Academy on June 25, 1849, he showed that there was a sign for RA, another for RI, and yet another for RU. He proved the sign for AR, and presumably also for IR and UR, though he did not fully define the last two. This represented a great advance in the study of the problem. Rawlinson soon dared to do what Hincks would not, and ventured to translate the great Behistun text. There was needed then only the minute study of the characters until the entire syllabic system with its polyphones and ideographs should yield up its secrets. To this not only Rawlinson, but in even greater degree Hincks, contributed, and also the distinguished French Assyriologist, Jules Oppert. Contemporaneously with the decipherment of Assyrian went forward the decipherment of the Susian, or second language of the groups of three found at Persepolis. In this work the chief leaders were Niels Ludwig Westergaard, Hincks, Felicien Caignart de Saulcy, and
Archibald Henry Sayce. When Persian, Susian, and Assyrian (or Babylonian) had been deciphered, the foundations of the new science of Assyriology had been laid.
The cuneiform method of writing originated among the Sumerians, the earliest known inhabitants of Babylonia. When the Semites
P^.gin entered the land they found in posses-
and Char- . , , , i , i .,
. , - sion a round-headed people, of small
the Script, stature and with black hair, whose origin and racial connections are unknown. A small though learned company of scholars has maintained that the supposed Sumerians had no existence, and that their script, civilization and religion were all originated by Semites. This view has lost support, and can hardly be longer regarded as seriously disputing the current view as stated above. The cuneiform characters were originally a form of picture-writing. At first the pictures represented natural objects; they then became associated with certain words, and were used phonetically to represent the sound of the words without the meaning. In very early times, these rude pictures were scratched on any material that came to hand. Later stone was used for permanent records. But as stone is scarce in Babylonia, the easily worked clay took its place, and the straight lines made by a single pressure on the stylus tended to become wedges. The pictures therefore lost their original character and gradually became groups of wedges which were so thoroughly conventionalized that it is now impossible to determine their origin save in a very few cases. Even to the Assyrians themselves the original form of but very few characters was known, though a few tablets still preserved (cf. TSBA, vi. 454 and Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in British Museum, part v., London, 1898) show that the Assyrians retained a consciousness of the pictorial origin of their script. The Assyrians never developed a consonantal alphabet. They had only a syllabary, with separate signs for the vowels a, i or e, and u. The syllabic signs consisted, in the first instance, of a separate sign for each consonant with each separate vowel, thus, ab, ib, ub, ba, bi, bu, ag, ig, ug, ga, gi, gu, the former serving also for ap, ip, up, etc. In addition to these simple syllables, the script had a large number of compound signs, such as bal, bil, kak, man, kun, etc. There were also very many ideograms, a sign being used as the symbol for a whole idea; thus there was a single sign for ilu, " god," belu, " lord," aplu, " son," duppu, "tablet," umu, "day." Difficulties are further increased by the fact that many signs are polyphonous; a single sign may have several syllabic values, and besides may stand as an ideogram for several ideas. The difficulties were somewhat lessened by the use of signs called determinatives placed before a word to show the class to which it belonged. Robert W. Rogers.
III. Christian Inscriptions: By Christian inscriptions in this article are meant non-literary writings executed or provided by Christians which have some relation to the Christian religion. Christian epigraphy is concerned with inscriptions carved scratched, painted, or stamped on various materials