The Historians' History of the World 01

But fortune, which had been at once so kind, and so tantalising in the case of the Rosetta stone, had dealt more gently with the Behistun inscription; for no fewer than ninety proper names were preserved in the Persian portion, and duplicated, in another character, in the Assyrian inscription. A study of these gave a clew to the sounds of the Assyrian characters. The decipherment of this character, however, even with this aid, proved enormously difficult, for it was soon evident that here it was no longer a question of a nearly perfect alphabet of a few characters, but of a syllabary of several hundred characters, including many homophones, or different forms for representing the same sound. But with the Persian translation for a guide on the one hand, and the Semitic languages, to which family the Assyrian belonged, on the other, the appalling task was gradually accomplished, the leading investigators being General Rawlinson, Professor Hincks, and Mr. Fox Talbot, in England; Professor Jules Oppert in Paris; and Professor Eberhard Schrader in Germany; though a host of other scholars soon entered the field.

This great linguistic feat was accomplished about the middle of the century. But so great a feat was it, that many scholars of the highest standing, including Ernest Renan in France, and Sir George Cornwall Lewis in England, declined at first to accept the results, contending that the Assyriologists had merely deceived themselves by creating an arbitrary language. The matter was put to the test in 1855, at the suggestion of Mr. Fox Talbot, when four scholars, one being Mr. Talbot himself, and the others General Rawlinson, Professor Hincks, and Professor Oppert, laid before the Royal Asiatic Society their independent translations of an hitherto untranslated Assyrian text. A committee of the society, including England’s greatest historian of the century, George Grote, broke the seals of the four translations, and reported that they found them unequivocally in accord as regards their main purport, and even surprisingly uniform as regards the phraseology of certain passages; in short, as closely similar as translations from the obscure texts of any difficult language ever are. This decision gave the work of Assyriologists an official status, so to say, and the reliability of their method has never since been in question.

Thus it has come about that these inscribed bricks from the palace of Asshurbanapal, which, when the first of them was discovered, were as meaningless as so many blank slabs, have been made to deliver up their message. And a marvellous message it is, as we have already seen.

Merely to have satisfied a vague curiosity as to the past traditions, however, would be but a small measure of the intellectual work which the oriental antiquities have had a large share in accomplishing. Their message has been one of truly world-historic import. Thanks to these monuments from Egypt and Mesopotamia, the student of human civilisation has to-day a sweep of view that hitherto has been utterly withheld from him. Until the crypts by the Nile and the earth mounds by the Tigris and Euphrates gave up their secrets, absolutely nothing was known to scholarship of the main sweep of civilisation more anciently than about the sixth century B.C. Beyond that all was myth, fable, unauthenticated tradition. And now the indubitable monuments of civilisation carry us back over a period at least three times as great. Archbishop Usher’s famed Chronology, which so long dominated the ideas of men, is swept away, and we learn from evidence graven in stone and baked indelibly in bricks that in the year 4004 B.C., which our Bible margins still point out as the year of Creation, vast communities of people, in widely separated portions of the earth, had attained a high degree of civilisation. In the year when the proverbial first man wandered naked in Eden, the actual man lived with thousands of his fellow-men in vast cities, where he built houses and temples, erected wonderful monuments, practised such arts as glass-making, sculpture, and painting, and recorded his thoughts in written words. And from that day to this stretches the thread of civilisation, unbroken by any universal flood or other cataclysm.