Cuneiform
A name given to the form of writing whose characters resemble a wedge (
cuneus). The French equivalent is tête-à-clou; the German, keilformig; and in English, the terms “cuneatic” and
“arrow-headed” are sometimes used as synonyms. This species of writing was
employed by the ancient Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Armenians, Elamites, and Persians,
who have left us specimens of it upon clay, stone, metal, and glass, either moulded (as in the
clay) or cut and chiselled (as upon the other substances). The use of the cuneiform characters
dates from a period not later than B.C. 3800, and was continued until a century or so after
the beginning of the Christian era. The oldest specimen now known to exist is an inscription
upon a bit of porphyry assigned to the time of Sargon of Agadé. The latest example
is preserved at Munich, and is as late as A.D. 80.
It is only in the present century that scholars have been able to decipher the cuneatic
characters, and to interpret satisfactorily the inscriptions that contain them. It was, in
fact, many years before any one conceived the notion that the curious arrow-headed marks on
the vast ruins of Persepolis and other parts of Persia had anything to do with language at
all. It was in 1618 that an inkling of the truth first entered the mind of Garcia de Silva
Figuëroa, an ambassador of Philip III. of Spain. In that year he visited
Persepolis, and, becoming imbued with a belief that the arrow-heads were some form of writing,
had a portion of one inscription copied. This he carried back to Europe, where it attracted
the attention of other savants. In 1674, the French traveller Chardin, after visiting
Persepolis, published copies of three sets of inscriptions, with an account of the curious
characters as observed by him, pronouncing them to be writing and not hieroglyphs, but
expressing his conviction that no one would ever be able to decipher them. More than a century
later
(in 1782), a French botanist named Michaux sent to Paris a stone which he
had found at Bagdad covered with cuneiforms. By this time the curiosity of the learned had
become awakened, and the mystery surrounding these inscriptions excited the interest of the
ablest scholars of Europe, who gradually accumulated a large number of specimens of the
cuneiform, as other travellers brought back from the East valuable materials for study. It was
long, however, before anything beyond mere conjecture was attained; and many varied and
conflicting theories were put forward. The characters were said to be only fanciful designs of
the Oriental architects and devoid of meaning. Again, they were explained (by Witte of
Rostock) as due to the work of many generations of worms. Others explained them as the writing
of the Guebres. Still others viewed them as charms, cabalistic signs, or astrological
formulæ. Lichtenstein thought that he had found in them certain passages from the
Korân written in Kufic. Kaempfer hesitated whether to explain them as Chinese or as
modifications of the Hebrew. Other scholars pronounced them Runes, Oghams, Old Greek, or
Samaritan.
The first light on this apparently insoluble problem was due to the acute researches of
Karsten Niebuhr, who, without professing to read or interpret the inscriptions, proved the
existence in them of three distinct varieties of cuneiform alphabet, instead of the single one
that had been assumed before his time. The threefold inscriptions at Persepolis he then
rightly explained as transcriptions of the same matter in the three alphabets. This brilliant
discovery was developed by Tychsen of Rostock
(1798) and Münter of
Copenhagen
(1800), whose labours cleared the way for the magnificent success of
Georg Friedrich
Grotefend (q.v.), who, on
September 7th, 1802, presented to the Academy of Göttingen the first cuneiform
alphabet with its phonetic equivalents. It may be observed that this date and meeting are
doubly important in the history of language-study, for then was also presented the first
reading of the Egyptian hieroglyphs by Heyne. Twenty years later, St. Martin demonstrated a
part of the flexional system; and Burnouf, Lassen, Westergaard, Beer, Jacques, and finally Sir
Henry Rawlinson followed, each with his contributions towards a more perfect understanding of
the characters and of the language which they embodied. Rawlinson, it may be remarked, was the
first to read and publish the 1000 or more lines of the great Behistun inscription. (See the
Journal of the Asiatic Society for 1846.)
Inscriptions in the Persian cuneiform are usually in three parallel columns, being the same
text translated into three languages and alphabets: Persian, Median (also called Scythic and
New Susian), and Babylonian—these being the three great peoples under the dominion
of the Achaemenian kings, who thus promulgated their decrees in three languages.
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Black Obelisk with Cuneiform Inscriptions. (British Museum.)
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1.
Babylonian. This is the most ancient and most important of the three varieties of
cuneiform. With it are inscribed tablets and cylinders, giving a vast amount of information
on history, archæology, law, government, and mythology.
2.
Scythic. The Scythic cuneiform is never found alone (with one exception), and represents an
alphabet of some 100 characters. The language which they embody is an Ugro-Finnic dialect, of
which little as yet is known.
3.
Persian. The Persian cuneiform, which always stands first in the trilingual inscriptions,
is the most recent of the three, and consists of some 44 characters. It is characterized by
an oblique stroke which divides its words, and the wedges of which it is composed never cross
one another. The language of the Persian cuneiform is cognate with the Avestan, and is the
parent tongue of the modern Persian. This character was used in the period from B.C. 570-370.
In it is written the great inscription of Darius Hystaspis at Behistun, containing a
genealogical record, a description of the extent of his dominions, a list of the great events
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The Name Darius (Dâryavas) in Cuneiform Characters.
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of his reign, with prayers to Ormuzd and the spirits. Most of these inscriptions have
been found at
Persepolis (q.v.), Behistun,
Naksh-i-Rustam, and Hamadan.
The cuneiform characters were originally pictures of the objects which they stood for
(ideographs), like the Egyptian hieroglyphics and the earlier characters in Chinese; but as
time went on the forms were modified and simplified so as to lose their pictorial character,
though a few still suggest the primitive design.
At first they were drawn in outline on a vegetable substance (
likhusi), but a little later on clay, to the difficulties of which are due the first
modification in the original shapes of the letters. The subsequent use of stone and metal
carried this modification still further. An archaic revival, however, set in during the age
of Assurbani-pal, when it became customary to use once more the most ancient characters. The
signs, originally ideographic, became subsequently phonetic, denoting each a syllable. The
cuneiform syllabary contains in all some 2000 signs—ideographic, syllabic, or
purely phonetic—being sometimes used in one way and sometimes in another.
The characters were inscribed upon stone, glass, and metal with a chisel; and upon clay
with a sharp-pointed stylus having three unequal faces— the largest for the outer
and thickest wedges of the letters, the medium-sized for the medium
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Archaic Cuneiform Character for “Fish.”
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strokes, and the smallest for the finer lines. The Babylonian clay tablets or
“bricks” are in size from one inch upward, pillow-shaped, and covered
with characters often so minute as to be difficult to read without a magnifying glass. (See
illustration on page 179.) After the inscriptions had been made, the tablet was dried in the
sun and then enclosed in a case on which the inscription was duplicated. These are styled
“case-tablets.” Tablets were also used by the Assyrians, especially by
the literary classes; but the records of this people were very often carved upon the stone
panels of their palaces and on colossal human-headed bulls. Cuneiforms have been found,
likewise, on amethyst, jasper, and onyx.
Bibliography.—The bibliography of the subject is very
extensive. The following standard works are selected out of a great number: Lassen and
Westergaard, Ueber die Keilinschriften (1845); Hincks,
On
the First and Second Kinds of Persepolitan Writing, in the
Trans. of
the Royal Iranian Society (1846);
Rawlinson, Commentary on the
Cuneiform Inscriptions of Babylon and Assyria (1850);
Grotefend,
Die Keilinschriften aus Behistun (1854);
Ménant,
Inscriptions Assyriennes (1859); id.
Les
Écritures Cunéiformes (1864);
Oppert, La
Grande Inscription de Khorsabad (1866); De
Gobineau,
Traité des Écritures Cunéiformes
(1864); Spiegel,
Die Altpersischen Keilinschriften (2d ed.
1881);
Ewald, Geschichtliche Folge der semitischen Sprachen
(1871);
Schrader, Die Assyrisch-Babylonischen Keilinschriften
(1872); G.
Smith, Phonetic Values of Cuneiform Characters
(1871);
Sayce, Assyrian Grammar (1872);
Norriś, Assyrian Dictionary (1871);
Botta,
Mémoire sur l'Ecriture Cunéiforme Assyrienne
(1848);
Oppert, Les Inscriptions Assyriennes (1862);
Manant, Recueil d'Alphabets (1860);
Delattre, Les
Inscriptions Historiques de Ninive et de Babylone (1879);
Taylor,
The Alphabet (1883); Amiaud and
Scheil, Les Inscriptions
de Salmanasar II. (1890);
Brunnon, Classified List of Compound
Cuneiform Ideographs (1889); Bezold,
The Tell-el-Amarna
Tables (with autotype facsimiles)
(1892); and the
Assyriologische
Bibliothek, edited by Delitzsch and Paul Haupt.
