Tiglath-pileser I, which had been found at Kalah Sherghat, were sent to Rawlinson, Hincks, Fox Talbot, and Oppert; they were asked to translate them independently of one another, and send the translations under seal by a given date to the Secretary of the Society. When the translations were opened they were found to be in substantial agreement. This was in 1857, a year which we may therefore regard as closing the first epoch of decipherment.

Sumerian.—The decipherment of the Assyrian texts brought with it the decipherment of the Sumerian texts. The library of Nineveh was stocked with tablets intended to facilitate the study of the old language of Chaldaea. Among them are grammars, vocabularies, and reading-books, as well as interlinear or parallel translations of Sumerian texts in the Semitic language of Babylon and Assyria. Oppert in his Expédition scientifique en Mésopotamie led the way to the use of them in 1859, and the outlines of Sumerian grammar were first sketched by Sayce in 1870, followed by Lenormant in 1873. Since then the labours of Lenormant, Haupt (who demonstrated the existence of two Accado-Sumerian dialects), Hommel, Amiaud, Ball and others, have given us an extensive knowledge of the primitive language of Babylonia.

Vannic.—Northward of Assyria, in Ararat, the modern Armenia, the cuneiform script of Nineveh had been borrowed in the ninth century b.c. As the characters of the script continued to preserve their Assyrian values there was no difficulty in transliterating them, and as early as 1852 Hincks read the names of the kings they had been employed to write, and even used them in determining the values of the characters found at Nineveh. The majority of the inscriptions, which had been copied by Schulz at the cost of his life in 1829, and published in France in 1840, were met with in the neighbourhood of Van; hence the term 'Vannic' which is usually applied to them. The language in which they are written was however utterly unknown, and bore no obvious relationship to any with which we are acquainted; consequently though the texts could be transliterated they could not be translated. More than one attempt was made to decipher them, but to no purpose, until 1882 when Guyard pointed out that the formula with which many of them end corresponds with the imprecation often attached to the Assyrian inscriptions, and Sayce, following up this clue, with the help of the ideographs borrowed from Assyria, finally succeeded in solving the problem. A bilingual text (Assyrian and Vannic), recently discovered by M. de Morgan in the pass of Kelishin in Kurdistan, has verified the correctness of his results, which have been further modified or extended by D. H. Müller, Belck, and Lehmann.

Other Languages.—Yet two more languages written in the cuneiform syllabary have lately been revealed by the cuneiform tablets found at Tel el-Amarna in Upper Egypt. One was the language of Mitanni, the Aram-Naharaim of the Old Testament, in which there is a long letter from the king of Mitanni to the Egyptian Pharaoh. The other language, which is quite distinct from that of Mitanni, was spoken at Arzawa in northern Syria. Both languages are still undeciphered[3].

The origin of the Cuneiform Syllabary.—As we have seen, the pictorial origin of the cuneiform characters was perceived in the early days of Assyrian decipherment, as well as the cause of their polyphony. Their wedge-like forms were due to the use of clay as a writing material. The impression made by the stylus upon it resembled a wedge; curved lines became angles, and after a time the original picture passed into a conventional form. In the course of centuries the characters grew more and more simplified by the omission of unnecessary wedges, the least complicated being those of the official hand of Assyria, and the later Babylonian or Persepolitan script. It must not be supposed, however, that when the system of writing ceased to be pictorial it was already complete. Down to a comparatively late period new characters were invented or old characters combined in a new way, while new phonetic and ideographic values were assigned to the characters which already existed. Though the syllabary is essentially of Sumerian origin there is much in it which is traceable to a Semitic source. Many of the values given to the characters as well as many of their ideographic meanings are Semitic. Moreover the Sumerians and Semites lived in contact with one another long after the adoption of Sumerian culture by the Semitic nomads; consequently not only did the Semites borrow Sumerian words, the Sumerians borrowed Semitic words, more especially in the northern part of the country. The early date at which some of these were borrowed is shown by their having undergone the phonetic changes which distinguished the northern Accado-Sumerian dialect from the southern. False etymologizing also has given rise to new values just as it has given rise to new spellings in English. The Semitic scribes of a later day were as fond of deriving Semitic words from Sumerian as our own etymologists used to be of deriving Teutonic words from Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. Thus the purely Semitic sabattu 'Sabbath,' from sabâtu 'to rest,' is derived from the two Sumerian words sa 'heart' and bat 'to complete,' and interpreted to mean 'a day of rest for the heart.'

Simplification of the Syllabary.—The script used at Susa before the overthrow of the kingdom of Elam was the same as the archaic script of Babylonia. But the Amardian syllabary was a selected one. Not only were the forms of the characters simplified, a comparatively small number of them was employed to each of which one value only was assigned. In the Vannic texts also polyphony was similarly avoided. Characters expressing open syllables like ba and ab were chosen, to which a few more denoting closed syllables and ideographs were added; but in no case was a character allowed to possess more than one value. Large use was further made of the vowels, the syllable ba, for example, being written ba-a, so that the syllabary tended to become an alphabet. This step was taken in Old Persian, where the forms of the letters were often so simplified as to lose all resemblance to their primitive forms. Apart from its alphabet of thirty-six letters Old Persian retained only one syllabic character (t[r.]) and a few ideographs.

The pictorial origin of the syllabary has proved of important assistance in reading the texts. Certain of the ideographs were used as 'determinatives' for indicating the generic character of the word to which they are prefixed or affixed. Thus there is a determinative to denote that the word which follows is the name of a 'city,' and another which shows that the preceding word is a plural. In this way a glance at an Assyrian, an Amardian, or a Vannic text will enable us at once to distinguish the names of men, women, towns, countries, animals, trees, metals, stones, and the like. It is a help which we look for in vain in Phoenician or Hebrew inscriptions.

CHAPTER III

BABYLONIAN AND ASSYRIAN HISTORY

Different States in Babylonia.—More than one kingdom originally existed in Babylonia. Not only were there separate kingdoms in Accad and Sumer, or northern and southern Chaldaea, many of the great cities also once formed separate states. The excavations at Tello, for instance, have revealed the existence of a dynasty which had its seat there, and the ancestral kingdom of Sargon of Accad does not seem to have extended beyond the territory of its chief city. The smaller states were, however, absorbed by the larger ones, and a time came when the whole of Babylonia was united into a single