The Historians' History of the World 01

Curiously enough, it was a trilingual inscription that gave the clew, as in the case of the Rosetta stone; though with a very striking difference withal. The trilingual inscription now in question, instead of being a small portable monument, covers the surface of a massive bluff at Behistun, in western Persia. Moreover, all three of its inscriptions are in cuneiform character, and all three are in languages that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, were absolutely unknown. This inscription itself, as a striking monument of unknown import, had been seen by successive generations. Tradition ascribed it, as we learn from Ctesias, through Diodorus, to the fabled Assyrian queen, Semiramis. Tradition is quite at fault in this; but it is only recently that knowledge has availed to set it right. The inscription, as is now known, was really written about the year 515 B.C., at the instance of Darius I, king of Persia, some of whose deeds it recounts in the three chief languages of his widely scattered subjects.

The man who, at the actual risk of life and limb, copied this wonderful inscription, and, through interpreting it, became the veritable “Father of Assyriology,” was the English general, Sir Henry Rawlinson. His feat was another British triumph over the same rivals who had competed for the Rosetta stone; for some French explorers had been sent by their government, some years earlier, expressly to copy this inscription, and had reported that to reach the inscription was impossible. But British courage did not find it so, and in 1835 Rawlinson scaled the dangerous height and made a paper cast of about half the inscription. Diplomatic duties called him away from the task for some years, but in 1848 he returned to it, and completed the copy of all parts of the inscription that have escaped the ravages of time. And now the material was in hand for a new science, which General Rawlinson, assisted by a host of others, soon began to elaborate.

The key to the value of the Behistun inscription lies in the fact that its third language is ancient Persian. It appears that the ancient Persians had adopted the cuneiform character from their western neighbours, the Assyrians, but in so doing had made one of those essential modifications and improvements which are scarcely possible to accomplish except in the transition from one race to another. Instead of building with the arrow-heads a multitude of syllabic characters, including many homophones, as had been, and continued to be, the custom of the Assyrians, the Persians selected a few of these characters, and ascribed to them phonetic values that were almost purely alphabetical. In a word, while retaining the wedge as the basal stroke of their script, they developed an alphabet; making that last wonderful analysis of phonetic sounds which even to this day has escaped the Chinese, which the Egyptians had only partially effected and which the Phœnicians were accredited by the Greeks with having introduced into the western world. In addition to this all-essential step, the Persians had introduced the minor, but highly convenient, custom of separating the words of a sentence from one another by a particular mark, differing in this regard not only from the Assyrians and the Egyptians, but from the early Greek scribes as well.

Thanks to these simplifications, the old Persian language has been practically restored about the beginning of the nineteenth century, through the efforts of the German, Grotefend; and further advances in it were made just at this time by Burnouf in France, and Lassen in Germany, as well as by Rawlinson himself, who largely solved the problem of the Persian alphabet independently. So the Persian portion of the Behistun inscription could at last be partially deciphered. This, in itself, however, would have been no very great aid towards the restoration of the languages of the other portions, had it not chanced fortunately that the inscription is sprinkled with proper names. Now, proper names, generally speaking, are not translated from one language to another, but transliterated as nearly as the genius of the language will permit. It was the fact that the Greek word “Ptolemaios” was transliterated on the Rosetta stone, that gave the first clew to the sounds of the Egyptian characters. Had the upper part of the Rosetta stone been preserved, on which, originally, there were several other names, Young would not have halted where he did in his decipherment.