THE ASSYRIAN LANGUAGE
THE LANGUAGE AND CUNEIFORM WRITING
All these wonderful archaeological researches and discoveries would have been useless and destitute of interest, had not the language of Assyro-Babylonian inscriptions been deciphered and studied. These inscriptions were all written in a language, and by means of characters, which seemed for a while to defy all human skill and ingenuity. The very existence of such a language had been forgotten, and its writing seemed so capricious and bewildering that the earlier European travellers mistook the characters for fantastic and bizarre ornamental decorations; their dagger- or arrow-headed shape (from which their name of cuneiform) presenting a difficult puzzle. However, the discovery, and tentative decipherment, of the old Persian inscriptions (especially those of Persepolis and of the Behistun rock, not far from Hamadan, in Persia), by Grotefend, Heeren, the Abbe Saint Martin, Rask, Bournouf, Lassen, Westergaard, de Saulcy, and Rawlinson, all taking place at about the end of the first half of the nineteenth century, opened the way for the decipherment of the Assyro-Babylonian inscriptions. The principal credit unquestionably belongs to Rawlinson, Norris, J. Oppert, Fox Talbot, and especially to Dr. Hinks of Dublin. The acute and original researches of these scholars were successfully carried out by other Semitic scholars and linguists no less competent, such as E. Schrader and Fred. Delitzsch, in Germany; Ménant, Halévy, and Lenormant, in France; Sayce and G. Smith, in England.
The Assyro-Babylonian language belongs to the Semitic family of languages, and in respect to grammar and lexicography offers no more difficulty to the interpreter than either Hebrew or Aramaic, or Arabic. It is more closely allied to Hebrew and Aramaic than to Arabic and the other dialects of the South-Semitic group. The principal difficulty of Assyrian Consists in its extremely complicated system of writing. For, unlike all other Semitic dialects, Assyrian is written not alphabetically, but either syllabically or ideographically, which means that Assyrian characters represent not consonants, but syllables, open or closed, simple or compound, and ideas or words, such as ka, bar, ilu, zikara, etc. These same characters may also have both a syllabic and an ideographic value, nearly always more than one syllabic value and as many as five or six; so that a sign like the following (=|) may be read syllabically as ud, ut, u, tu, tam, bir, par, pir, lah, lih, hish, and his; ideographically as umu, "day"; pisu "white"; Shamash, the Sungod; etc. The shape of these signs is that of a wedge, hence the name cuneiform (from the Latin cuneus, "a wedge"). The wedges, arranged singly or in-groups, either are called "ideograms" and stand for complete ideas, or then stand for syllables. In course of time the same ideographic signs came to have also the phonetic value of syllables, without losing however, their primitive ideographic value, as can be seen from the example quoted above. This naturally caused a great difficulty and embarrassment even to the Assyro-Babylonians themselves and is still the principal obstacle to the correct and final reading of many cuneiform words and inscriptions. To remedy this great inconvenience, the Assyro-Babylonians themselves placed other characters (called determinatives) before many of these signs in order to determine their use and value in certain particular cases and sentences. Before all names of gods, for example, either a sign meaning "devine being" was prefixed, or a syllabic character (phonetic complement), which indicated the proper phonetic value with which the word in question should end, was added after it. In spite of these and other devices, many signs and collocations of signs have so many possible syllabic values as to render exactness in the reading very difficult. There are about five hundred of these different signs used to represent words or syllables. Their origin is still a subject of discussion among scholars. The prevailing theory is that they were originally picture-signs, representing the ideas to be conveyed; but at present only about sixty of these 500 signs can be with certainty traced back to their original picture-meanings.
According to the majority of Assyriologists, the cuneiform system of writing originated with the Sumerians, the primitive non-Semitic inhabitants of Babylonia, from whom it was borrowed by the Semitic Babylonians and Assyrians, and applied to their own language. In the same way the Greeks adopted the Semetic Phoenician alphabet, and the Germans adopted the Latin. The Semitic language of Babylonia and Assyria was, therefore, written in Sumerian characters, just as Hebrew can be written in English letters, or Turkish in Armenian, or Arabic in Syriac (Karshuni). This same cuneiform system of writing was afterwards adopted by the Medians, Persians, Mitannians, Cappadocians, ancient Armenians, and others. Hence five or six dlfferent styles of cuneiforrn writings may be distinguished. The "Persian" style, which is a direct, but simplified, derivative of the Babylonian, was introduced in the times of the Achaemenians. "Instead of a combination of as many as ten and fifteen wedges to make one sign, we have in the Persian style never more than five, and frequently only three; and instead of writing words by syllables, sounds alone were employed, and the syllabary of several hundred signs reduced to forty-two, while the ideographic style was fractionally abolished." The second style of cuneiform generally known as "Median", or "Susian", is, again, a slight modification of the "Persian".
Besides these two, there is a third language (spoken in the northwestern district of Mesopotamia between the Euphrates and the Orontes), known as 'Mitanni', the exact status of which has not been clearly ascertained, but which has been adapted to cuneiform characters. A fourth variety, found on tablets from Cappadocia, represents again modification of the ordinary writing met with in Babylonia. In the inscriptions of Mitanni, the writing is a mixture of ideographs and syllables, just as in Mesopotamia, while the so-called 'Cappadocian' tablets are written in a corrupt Babylonian, corresponding in degree to the ' corrupt ' forms that the signs take on. In Mesopotamia itself quite a number of signs exist, some due to local influences, others the result of changes that took place in the course of time. In the oldest period known, that is, from 4000 to 3000 B.C., the writing is linear rather than wedge-shaped. The linear writing is the modification that the original pictures underwent in being adapted for engraving on stone; the wedges are the modification natural to the use of clay, though when once the wedges became the standard method, the greater frequency with which clay, as against stone came to be used led to an imitation of the wedges by those who cut out the characters on stone. In consequence, there developed two varieties of wedge-writing: the one that may be termed lapidary, used for the stone inscriptions, the official historical records, and such legal documents as were prepared with especial care; the other cursive, occurring only on legal and commercial clay tablets, and becoming more frequent as we approach the latest period of Babylonian writing, which extends to within a few decades of our era. In Assyria, finally, a special variety of cuneiform developed that is easily distinguished from the Babylonian by its greater neatness and the more vertical position of its wedges.
(Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, Boston, 1898, p. 20).
The material on which the Assyro-Babylonians wrote their inscriptions was sometimes stone or metal, but usually clay of a fine quality most abundant in Babylonia, whence the use spread all over Western Asia.
The clay was very carefully prepared, sometimes ground to an exceeding fineness, moistened, and moulded into various forms, ordinarily into a tablet whose average size is about six by two and one-half inches in superficial area by one inch in thickness, its sides curving slightly outwards. On the surface thus prepared, and while still soft, the characters were impressed with a stylus, the writing often standing in columns, and carried over upon the back and sides of the tablet. The clay was quite frequently moulded also into cones and barrel-shaped cylinders, having from six to ten sides on which writing could be inscribed. These tablets were then dried in the sun, or baked in a furnace -- a process which rendered the writing practically indestructible, unless the tablet itself was shattered.
(G.S. Goodspeed, History of the Babylonians and Assyrians, p. 28).
Unlike all other Semitic systems of writing (except the Ethiopic, which is an adaptation of the Greek), that of the Assyro-Babylonians generally runs from left to right in horizontal lines, although in some very early inscriptions the lines run vertically from top to bottom like the Chinese. These two facts evidence the non-Semitic origin of the cuneiform system of writing.
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