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betic character. At the commencement of the present century the inquiry was taken up by Tychsen and Münter, two Danish antiquaries, who affirmed several propositions relating to the division of words, and their order of arrangement; in addition to which they endeavoured to prove that a certain group of the arrow-headed characters, which they found frequently repeated, must signify "King."

It would tend to little profit to follow out the various speculative theories by which European scholars have aimed at interpreting the ancient characters found on the site of the first antediluvian city of the world. The stimulus to seek for their interpretation was great; and from the novelty of the subject, and its apparently close connexion with the primeval history of man, the investigation was even more tempting than the hieroglyphical inscriptions of Egypt. The first attempts at this elucidation of the Babylonian records bore a marvellous resemblance to the fanciful and very profitless labours of the earlier hierologists. In 1801, Dr. Hager published his "Dissertation on the Babylonian Inscriptions." The opinion advocated by him was the not very attractive one, that the characters on the bricks were simply the brickmakers' names. Inquiry, however, was roused by the publication of fac-similes of the inscriptions, and discussions on the interpretations thus advanced. Lichtenstein entered with zeal on the inquiry, and maintained the arrow-headed characters to be a variety of the ancient Arabic or Cufic character, still used, with slight variations, in the empire of Marocco. By means of this very arbitrary assumption, he read, to his own satisfaction, versions of passages in the Koran. He then proceeded to form the whole into an alphabet, and to interpret Babylonian and Persepolitan inscriptions, with a facility very much akin to that of some of the earlier translators of the hieroglyphics, and to equally little purpose. Various writers, of great learning and research, have since

devoted themselves to this interesting inquiry. Much zeal has been displayed by intelligent travellers, and by several British ambassadors and resident agents at the Persian and Turkish courts; the latest and the most successful of whom is Major Rawlinson, to whose recent researches we have already referred.

But the great source of general interest, and concentrated devotion to the study and elucidation of the Assyrian inscriptions, has been the discovery of the recent monuments of Nimroud and Khorsabad. The sculptures and inscribed marbles sent by M. Botta to Paris, and by Dr. Layard to the British Museum at London, could not fail to excite a new and lively interest in the study of Assyrian antiquities, the results of which are already of considerable value to the historian and the archæologist. "Two characters," Dr. Layard remarks, “ appear at one time to have been in use amongst the Assyrians. One, the cuneiform, or arrow-headed, as in Egypt, was probably the hieroglyphic, and principally employed for monumental records; the other, the cursive or hieratic, may have been used in documents of a private nature, or for records of public events of minor importance. The nature of the arrow-headed will be hereafter fully described. The cursive resembles the writing of the Phoenicians, Palmyrenes, Babylonians, and Jews; in fact, the character, which, under a few unessential modifications, was common to the nations speaking cognate dialects of one language, variously termed the Semitic, Aramæan, or, more appropriately, Syro-Arabian. There is this great distinction between the cuneiform and cursive,-that while the first was written from left to right, the second, after the fashion of the Hebrew and Arabic, ran from right to left. This striking difference would seem to show that the origin of the two modes of writing was distinct.

“It would be difficult, in the present state of our knowledge, to determine the period of the invention and first

use of written characters in Assyria; nor is there any evidence to prove which of the two forms, the arrow-head or the cursive, is the more ancient, or whether they were introduced at the same time. Pliny declares that it is to the Assyrians we owe the invention of letters, although some have attributed it to the Egyptians, who were said to have been instructed in the art of writing by Mercury; or to the Syrians, who, in the passage in Pliny, are evidently distinguished from the Assyrians, with whom they are, by ancient authors, very frequently confounded. Lucan ascribes their introduction to the Phoenicians, a Syrian people. On monuments and remains purely Syrian, or such as cannot be traced to a foreign people, only one form of character has been discovered, and it so closely resembles the cursive of Assyria, that there appears to be little doubt as to the identity of the origin of the two. If, therefore, the inhabitants of Syria, whether Phoenicians or others, were the inventors of letters, and those letters were such as exist upon the earliest monuments of that country, the cursive character of the Assyrians may have been as ancient as the cuneiform. However that may be, this hieratic character has not yet been found in Assyria on remains of a very early epoch, and it would seem probable that simple perpendicular and horizontal lines preceded rounded forms, being better suited to letters carved on stone tablets or rocks. At Nimroud, the cursive writing was found on part of an alabaster vase, and on fragments of pottery, taken out of the rubbish covering the ruins. On the alabaster vase it accompanied an inscription in the cuneiform character, containing the name of the Khorsabad king, to whose reign it is evident, from several circumstances, the vase must be attributed. It has also been found on Babylonian bricks of the time of Nebuchadnezzar.

"The cuneiform, however, appears to have been the character in general use in Assyria and Babylonia, and at

various periods in Persia, Media, and Armenia. It was not the same in all these countries; the element was the wedge, but the combination of wedges, to form a letter, differed. The cuneiform has been divided into three branches; the Assyrian or Babylonian; the Persian; and a third, which has been named, probably with little regard to accuracy, the Median. To one of these three divisions may be referred all the forms of arrow-headed writing with which we are acquainted; and the three together occur in the trillingual inscriptions, containing the records of the Persian monarchs of the Achæmenian dynasty. These inscriptions are, as it is well known, repeated three times on monuments of this period, in parallel columns or tablets, in a distinct variety of the arrow-headed character; and, as it may be presumed, in a different language.

"The investigation of the Persian branch of the cuneiform has now, through the labours of Rawlinson, Lassen, and others, been brought to a satisfactory conclusion. I presume that there are few unacquainted with the admirable memoirs by Major Rawlinson upon the great inscription at Behistun, published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Some, however, are still inclined to look upon the results of his labours with doubt, and even to consider his translation as little more than an ingenious fiction. That the sudden restoration of a language no longer existing in the same form, and expressed in characters previously unknown, should be regarded with considerable suspicion, is not surprising. But even a superficial examination of the ingenious reasoning of Professor Grotefend, which led to the first steps in the inquiry, the division of words and the discovery of the names of the kings, and an acquaintance with the subsequent discoveries of Rawlinson and other eminent philologists, must at once remove all doubt as to the general accuracy of the results to which they have arrived. There

may undoubtedly be interpretations, and forms of construction open to criticism. They will probably be rejected or amended, when more materials are afforded by the discovery of additional inscriptions, or when those we already possess have been subjected to a still more rigorous philological examination, and have been further compared with known dialects of the same primitive tongue. But as to the general correctness of the translations of the inscriptions of Persepolis and Behistun, there cannot be a question. The materials are in every one's hands. The inscriptions are now accessible, and they scarcely contain a word the meaning of which may not be determined by the aid of dictionaries and vocabularies of the Sanscrit and other early Indo-European languages."

Some of the accidental confirmations of the accuracy of the conclusions which have been arrived at regarding the Assyrian inscriptions, are of the most interesting and satisfactory character, and none more so than those derived from the conjoint occurrence of cuneiform and hieroglyphic inscriptions. In this respect it is exceedingly fortunate that the recent successful exploration of some of the most important sites of ancient Asiatic cities, has not taken place till such a mastery of the inscriptions of Egypt had been acquired, that the hieroglyphical counterparts could be converted into the means of elucidating cuneiform records. Not the least interesting of the more obvious inferences deducible from such double inscriptions, is the evidence thereby afforded of the ancient intercourse maintained between the great empires of Asia and Africa. Dr. Layard has brought from Nimroud beautiful carved ivories, not only characterized by the peculiar features of Egyptian art, but with the hieroglyphic characters, and the royal cartouch, of the Nile monuments. In 1825, Mr. Price, the Assistant-Secretary to Sir Gore Ouseley, Ambassador to the Court of Persia, published a work, entitled "A

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