CHAPTER IV

Fig. 26.—Alaskan Hunting Life

4.War.—Schoolcraft, who has been already drawn upon for an example (page 53), records the finding of the bark letter copied in Fig. 27. It was fastened to the top of a pole so as to attract the notice of other Indians who might happen to be passing. Beginning on the right of the middle row we have 1, the officer in command, sword in hand; 2, his secretary, and 3, the geologist of the party, indicated by his hammer. Then follow 4, 5, two attachés; 6, the interpreter; and 7, 8, two Chippewa guides. In the top row is 9, 10, a group of seven soldiers, armed with muskets. A prairie hen and tortoise, 11, 12, represent the animals secured for food.

Fig. 27.—Indian ExpeditionFig. 28.—Biography of Indian Chief

Fig. 27.—Indian Expedition

Fig. 28.—Biography of Indian Chief

Fig. 28 gives the biography of Wingemund, a noted Delaware chief. To the left is 1, the tortoise totem of the tribe; then 2, thechief-totem; and 3, the sun, beneath which are ten strokes representing the ten expeditions in which Wingemund took part. On the opposite side are indicated, 4, 5, 6, 7, the prisoners of both sexes taken, and also the killed, these last being drawn as headless. In the centre are the several positions attacked, 8, 9, 10, 11; and the slanting strokes at the bottom denote the number of Wingemund's followers.

Fig. 29.—War-song

Fig. 29 is a war-song. Wings are given to the warrior, 1, to show that he is swift-footed; in 2 he stands under the morning star, and in 3 under the centre of heaven, with his war-club and rattle; in 4, the eagles of carnage are flying round the sky; in 5, the warrior lies slain on the battlefield; while in 6 he appears as a spirit in the sky. The words of the song are as follows:—

1. I wish to have the body of the swiftest bird.2. Every day I look at you; the half of the day I sing my song.3. I throw away my body.4. The birds take a flight in the air.5. Full happy am I to be numbered with the slain.6. The spirits on high repeat my name.

5.Political and Social.—Thefrontispieceis a copy of a petition sent by a group of Indian tribes to the United States Congress for fishing rights in certain small lakes near Lake Superior. The leading clan is represented by Oshcabawis, whose totem is 1, the crane; then follow 2, Waimitligzhig; 3, Ogemagee; and 4, a third, all of the marten totem; 5, Little Elk, of the bear totem; 6, belongs to the manfish totem; 7, to the catfish totem.

From the eye and heart of each of the animals runs a line connecting them with the eye and heart of the crane to show that they are all of one mind, and the eye of the crane has also a line connecting it with the lakes on which the tribes want to fish, while another line runs towards Congress.

Fig. 30 is a copy of a letter found above St. Anthony's Falls in 1820. "It consisted of white birch bark, and the figures had been carefully drawn. 1, Denotes the flag of the Union; 2, the cantonment then recently established at Cold Spring, on the western side of the cliffs; 4 is the symbol of Colonel Leavenworth, the commanding officer, under whose authority a mission of peace had been sent into the Chippewa country; 11 is the symbol of Chakope, the leading Sioux chief, under whose orders the party moved; 8 is the second chief, named Wabedatunka, or, 10, the Black Dog, who has fourteen lodges, 7 is a chief also subordinate to Chakope, with thirteen lodges, and 9 is a bale of goods devoted by the Government to the objects of the peace. The name of 6, whose wigwam is 5, with thirteen subordinate lodges, was not given."

The letter was written to make known the fact that Chakope and his followers, accompanied or supported by the American officer, had come to the spot to make peace with the Chippewa hunters. "The Chippewa chief, Babesacundabee, who found the letter, read off its meaning without doubt or hesitation." (Schoolcraft, vol. i. p. 352.)

Fig. 30.—Letter offering Treaty of Peace

Fig. 31 represents the census roll of an Indian band at Mille Lac, in the territory of Minnesota, sent in to the United States agent by Nagonabe, a Chippewa Indian, during the annuity payments in 1849.

Fig. 31.—Census Roll of an Indian Band

As the Indians were all of the same totem, Nagonabe "designated each family by a sign denoting the common name of the chief. Thus 5 denotes a catfish, and the six strokes indicate that the Catfish's family consisted of six individuals; 8 is a beaver skin; 9, a sun; 13, an eagle; 14, a snake; 22, a buffalo; 34, an axe; 35, the medicine-man, and so on." (Lubbock,Origin of Civilisation, p. 47.)

Fig. 32.—Record of Departure (Innuit)

Fig. 32 supplies a striking example of the cumbersomeness of the pictograph as contrasted with the sound-symbol. It is a copy of a record which an Innuit placed over the door of his dwelling to notify to his friends that he had gone on a journey. The persons thus notified are indicated in 1, 3, 5, 7; 2 is the speaker, who denotes the direction in which he is leaving by his extended left hand; 4 is the gesture sign for "many," and 6 for sleep, the upraising of the left hand showing that he will be some distance away; 8, his intended return is denoted by the right hand being pointed homeward, while the left arm is bent to denote return.

(c)The Ideographic Stage.—As the characters pass from the pictorial to the emblematic or the symbolic, their meaning, obviously, becomes more obscure, save to the initiated. "They do not," as Colonel Mallery remarks, "depict, but suggest objects; do not speak directly through the eye to the intelligence, but presuppose in the mindknowledge of an event or fact which the sign recalls. The symbols of the ark, dove, olive-branch, and rainbow would be wholly meaningless to people unfamiliar with the Mosaic or some similar cosmology, as would be the cross and the crescent to those ignorant of history." And even in pictography, as the same excellent authority observes, "it is very difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between historical and traditional accounts obtained from Indians. The winter counts (i.e.the reckoning of time by winters, and the applying of names instead of numbers to them, as,e.g., 'catching-wild-horses winter,' the device for which was a lasso), while having their chief value as calendars, contain some material that is absolute and verifiable tribal history." The difficulties of interpretation, as the examples given evidence, are in the larger number being "merely mnemonic records, and treated in connection with material objects formerly, and perhaps still, used mnemonically." (Mallery, "On the Pictographs of the North American Indians,"Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1886.)

The signs of advance from the pictorial to the ideographic stage which are to be noted among the Red Indians, are more sharply marked in the hieroglyphs and phonetic characters on the stone monuments and manuscripts found among the relics of the vanished peoples of Mexico and Yucatan.

A number of fatuous theories about the connection of Central American culture with that of the Old World have been broached, from the timewhen Lord Kingsborough published his lavishly-illustrated book to prove that the ancient Mexicans were the descendants of the lost Ten Tribes of Israel to the present day, when Dr. Augustus Le Plongeon brings us his "proofs" that Yucatan was the primitive home of Adam, and avers that he has discovered not only the grave of Abel, but disinterred his heart therefrom, and found the knife wherewith Cain slew him! (Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx, p. 138.) Now, among the certainties which modern research has reached is that of the independent origin and development of civilisation in the New World. Man himself, whether or not descended from a single pair, had his origin in one region, probably the Indo-Malaysian, since there we find his nearest congeners, the anthropoid apes, while the pliocene beds of Java have recently yielded a remarkable corroboration of the theory in the fossil bones which bring man near to the common stem whence the highest animals have diverged. At a period when the general temperature of the globe was milder than now, the ancestors of the existing four leading groups—the Ethiopic, Mongolic, American, and Caucasic—spread themselves over the several zones of the habitable world, the American group migrating from Asia and Europe across the then existing land-connection between those continents and the New World, where those various stages of development which are still to be witnessed from the Arctic regions to CapeHorn were reached. Of these the Mexican plateau affords interesting and valuable material in the chipped flint implements evidencing a Stone Age, and in the marvellous buildings which vie both in their cyclopean dimensions and ornamented features with the palaces, tombs, and temples of Egypt and Assyria, testifying to the relatively high culture of the races that raised them. These peoples, usually grouped together as the ancient Mexicans, are known as Mayas and Aztecs. The duration of the empire or confederation of the Mayas is unknown, but about two hundred years before the Spanish conquest of America they appear to have been invaded and subdued by the Aztecs, whose rule extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific in the countries now forming Mexico and portions of the United States. The remains of the two races are both imperfect and entangled, so that any coherent story is not to be extracted from them. But the evidence points to the Mayas as the intellectually superior race; the Aztecs, who still form the bulk of the population of South Mexico, borrowing largely from them, especially in the matter of the gods. "If written language be a test of intelligence, the Mayas were ahead not only of the Mexican people, but also of the Peruvians. The latter are believed to have made no nearer advance towards writing than the tying of tally-knots on strings, and the Mexicans, while they had invented paper, wrote down their ideas, save in the cases of a few phonetic signs, as children would, by meansof pictures; but the Mayas, like the Egyptians, had proceeded beyond pictures to hieroglyphs, where symbols, more or less arbitrary, stand for words or syllables, and the mind prepares itself to invent an alphabet." (Mercer'sHill Caves of Yucatan, p. 73.) Some of the more remarkable hieroglyphic-bearing monuments of the Mayas have been found in the palace of Palenque, the Spanish name of the old Yucatan capital. They are on stucco slabs above figures some of which show curious correspondence to Egyptian statues, wearing the pleasant but immobile expression of the latter, and decorated with a similar headdress, while in one case (Fig. 33), a cartouche enclosing an inscription is carved on the plinth. The concluding panels of one of the codices form what may be called the Mexican Book of the Dead. It enforces the scheme of duty which precedes by vividly depicting the trial and judgment of the soul after death, and detailing the perils of the journey on the way to Mictlan (Payne, ii. 407).

Fig. 33.—Statue from Palenque

Time and fanaticism have made sad havoc with the manuscripts, and no satisfactory key to their decipherment has been found, only a few words here and there being interpreted. They were executed in bright and varied colours, with a feather pencil, on prepared skins, paper, or rolls of cotton or aloe-fibre cloth, and the pictographic system thuscreated was applied to the purposes of ordinary life, and served as a species of writing. Matters of only passing importance were recorded on fibrous paper made from the leaves of the maguey plant; "records intended to be permanently kept were painted on the prepared skins of animals, those of the deer and bear being more commonly used. These paintings or 'pinturos' are usually executed on both sides of the skin, which was oblong in shape and often of great length, having the ends protected by boards." (Payne'sHistory of the New World called America, vol. ii. p. 404.) These boards are calledanaltees, a word which may be translatedannals. The earlier hieroglyphic characters were executed by priests, who were required to be old men, widowers, and under vows of chastity and seclusion. Such writing was known only to the initiated.

Tradition says that the Aztecs destroyed many of the Maya picture records because they recalled the grandeur of the conquered people. But the Spaniards in their turn destroyed much more. Zumárraga, Bishop of Mexico, and Landa, Bishop of Yucatan, made such bonfires of carvings, statues, paintings on wood, and of priceless picture and hieroglyph writings on native paper and deerskin, that only about half-a-dozen fragments of the Yucatan books have ever been found since. Bishop Landa, probably from knowledge obtained from Maya priests, attempted the framing of a key of interpretation, his aim being the translationof certain religious and devotional writings for the use of converts. In this he indicates a certain number of alphabetic characters, but the key did not work, and Dr. Isaac Taylor draws the conclusion that "the systems of picture-writing which were invented and developed by the tribes of Central America are so obscure, and so little is really known about their history, that they must be regarded rather as literary curiosities than as affording suitable materials for enabling us to arrive at any general conclusions as to the nature of the early stages of the development of the graphic art." (Hist. Alph., i. 24.) Notwithstanding this somewhat sweeping verdict, the Maya-Aztec scripts have value, if only for purposes of comparison. There is preserved in the museum at Mexico a whole series of pictographs exhibiting incidents as varied as the migrations of tribes, the annals of the people, sacrifices to the gods, and the education of children, the tasks set them, the punishments inflicted on them, and the food given them. To the hieroglyph there succeeds the gradually conventionalised sign, of which examples from Red Indian scripts have been given:—the arrow, to denote an enemy; several arrows, several enemies; the direction of the arrow's point, the direction taken by the enemy; a piece of maize cake protruding from the mouth, to denote eating; the symbol for water between the lips, to signify drinking; horizontal lines, with arrow-headed characters on them, to denote the hoed or cultivated ground, some of these ideographs being coloured to correspond with thething suggested; and, as an example of the more abstruse, the extended arms, probably to denote negation,—all marking the advance to phonetic syllabic writing. The names of persons and places are sometimes indicated by symbolic figures;e.g.Chapultepec, or "grasshopper hill," is represented by a hill and a grasshopper; Tzompanco, "the place of skulls," by a skull on a bar between two posts, as enemies' skulls used to be set up; and Macuilxochitl, the "five flowers," by five dots and a flower. Sometimes we find the species of pun known as therebusadopted. A picture is made to stand for the sound of the word, ase.g.among ourselves in guessing games, when a whisk broom and a key stand for "whiskey," or in the series of pictures of an eye, a saw, a boy, a swallow, a goose, and a berry, which stand for the sentence, "I saw a boy swallow a goose-berry." In Abbot Islip's Chapel in Westminster Abbey his name is rebused as an eye and the slip of a tree with the hand apparently of a slipping man hanging to it. In Bishop Oldham's chantry in Exeter Cathedral his name is represented by an owl (Owle-dom, the old spelling of the name); and in St. Saviour's Church the name of Prior Burton is sculptured as a cask with a thistle on it, "burr-tun."

Fig. 34.—Itzcoatl

(d)The Phonetic Stage.—The ancient Mexican script supplies examples of the change from the pictographic to the phonetic stage. The name of one of the kings was Itzcoatl, or "Knife-Snake." In the manuscript known as the Le Tellier Codex this king's name (Fig. 34) is represented by a serpent (coatl) with stone knives (itzli) upon its back. This is mere picture-writing, but in the Vergara Codex we find the rebus form (Fig. 35). "The first syllable,itz, is represented by a weapon armed with blades of obsidian,itz(tli), but the rest of the word,coatl, though it means snake, is written, not by a picture of a snake, but by an earthen pot,co(mitl), and above it the sign of water,a(tl). Here we have real phonetic writing, for the name is not to be read, according to sense, 'knife-kettle-water,' but only according to the sound of the Aztec words, Itz-co-atl." Dr. Tylor adds that there is no sufficient reason to make us doubt that this purely phonetic writing was of native Mexican origin, and that after the Spanish Conquest it was turned to account in a new and curious way. The Spanish missionaries, when embarrassed by the difficulty of getting the converts to remember theirAve MariasandPaternosters, seeing that the words were, of course, mere nonsense to them, were helped out by the Indians themselves, who substituted Aztec words as near in sound as might be to the Latin, and wrote down the pictured equivalents for these words, which enabled them to remember the required formulas. Torquemada and Las Casas have recorded two instances of this device.

Fig. 35.—Rebusof Itzcoatl

Pater nosterwas written by a flag (pantli) and a prickly pear (nochtli), while the sign of water,a(tl) combined with that of aloe,me(tl), made a compound word,ametl,which would mean "water-aloe," but in sound made a very tolerable substitute for Amen. M. Aubin found the beginning of aPaternosterof this kind in the metropolitan library of Mexico (Fig. 36), made with a flag,pan(tli), a stone,te(tl), a prickly pear,noch(tli), and again a stone,te(tl), which would read Pa-te-noch-te, or perhaps Pa-tetl-noch-tetl. After the conquest, when the Spaniards were hard at work introducing their own religion and civilisation among the conquered Mexicans, they found it convenient to allow the old picture-writing still to be used, even in legal documents. It disappeared in time, of course, being superseded in the long run by the alphabet, and it is to this transition period that we owe many, perhaps most, of the picture documents still preserved. "One of the picture-writings in the museum at Mexico is very probably the same that was sent up to Vera Cruz, to Montezuma, with figures of newly-arrived white men, their ships and horses, and their cannon with fire and smoke issuing from their mouths." (Tylor,Anahuac, p. 232.) In the general history of the development of writing, the Mexican script therefore supplies us only with an example of approximation to the phonetic system, its advance to the final alphabetic stage being probably arrested by the subjugation of the Mayas to an intellectually inferior conqueror, who, borrowing much, and contributing nothing of advantage, himself yielded to the superior force of Spain.

Fig. 36.—Paternoster Rebus

THE CHINESE, JAPANESE, AND COREAN SCRIPTS

China, whose inertia is being aroused by foreign "pin-pricks," is the land of arrested developments, and consequently its writing has remained for probably two thousand years at a rudimentary stage, furnishing an interesting object-lesson on the early processes of advance, after the disuse of knotted cords (see p. 43), from theKu-wăn, or "ancient pictures," to theLing-shing, or "pictures and sounds." The language has never got beyond the monosyllabic stage; it has no terminations to denote number, case, tense, mood, or person, the same word without change of form being used as a noun, verb, or other "part of speech," so that a sentence can be construed only by the place of the several words composing it. As Dr. Marshman tersely puts it, "the whole of Chinese grammar depends upon position." For example, while the root-meaning oftais "being great," it may, as a noun, mean "greatness"; as an adjective, "great"; as a verb, "to be great," or "to make great"; and as an adverb, "greatly." And, moreover, not only position, but also tone andgesture, contribute to the interpretation of the spoken language.

Fig. 37.—Chinese Picture-writing and Later Uncial

The characters fall into sixwenor classes:—1,pictorial, giving a picture of the thing itself; 2,indicative,i.e.designed by their form and the relation of their parts to suggest the idea in the mind of their inventor; 3,composite,i.e.made up of two characters, the meanings of which blend in the meanings of the compounds; 4,inverted, or, as the term implies, topsy-turvy; 5,borrowed,i.e.having another meaning attached to them; 6,phonetic,i.e.one part indicating the sense and another part the sound. In Chinese phrase the ideogram is the "mother of meaning" and the phonogram the "mother of sound." The materials used largely determine the form which writing takes, and in the modern or cursive characters which are shown underneath the primitive forms we see the result of use of the rabbit's-hair pencil of the Chinese scribe. Respecting the first class, it suffices to say little, because it explains itself (Fig. 37). The sun was drawn as a circle, the moon as a crescent, a mountain was indicated by three peaks, rain by drops under an arch, and so forth. But, as has been sufficiently shown,such devices carry us a very little way; there is no literature possible under a mere graphic system. The third, or composite class, is the most interesting as supplying the key to the common idea of the character represented. Sometimes the characters indicate a dry humour. A "wife" is denoted by the signs for "female" and "broom," a sort of metonymy for a woman's household work; for a male child the signs "field" and "strength" are used, because he will till the soil. The Chinese, it will be remembered, are a purely agricultural people, and the compound for "profit" is "grain" and "a knife." The characters for "mountain" and "man" signify "hermit"; an "eye" and "water" mean "tears"; and the verb "to listen" is indicated by an ear between two doors. The signs for the noonday sun are the "sun" and "to reign"; "light" as an abstract quality is represented by figures of the sun and moon placed side by side; a "man" and "two" stand for mankind; a couple of women stand for "strife," three for "intrigue," while a "woman under two trees" means "desire" or "covetousness." But the inadequacy of these and the other symbols to supply characters for the demands of a language in which the same sound has to stand for a multitude of ideas gave rise to the phonetic group, whose development from picture-writing more or less ideographic took place many centuries b.c. The primary symbols or combinations of vowels and consonants number about four hundred and fifty. The variations in tonein pronouncing these sounds increase the total of monosyllabic words to be understood by the ear to something over twelve hundred. But the Chinese dictionaries contain above forty thousand words, and it is the symbols for each of these which are provided by the phonetic symbols. These were compound signs, the first character, as shown above, being a phonogram or sound-word, and the second character a determinative,i.e.ideogram or sense-word. They are, as Professor Whitney says, "rather an auxiliary language than a reduction of speech to writing." The sign for "man" has nearly six hundred combinations, all denoting something relating to man; that for "tree" has about nine hundred, to indicate various kinds of trees and wood, things made of wood, and so forth; while, to borrow a concrete example,pe, which means "white," has, with a "tree" prefixed, the meaning of "cypress"; with the sign for "man" it means "elder brother"; with the sign for "manes" it means the vital principle that survives death; and so forth.Chowis the Chinese word for "ship," so a picture of a ship stands for the soundchow. But the wordchowmeans several other things, and the determinative or "key" sign indicates these. "Thus the ship joined with the sign of water stands forchow, 'ripple'; with that of speech forchow, 'loquacity'; with that of fire forchow, 'flickering of flame,' and so on for 'waggon-pole,' 'fluff,' and several other things which have little in common but the name ofchow" (Tylor, p. 102).Although, theoretically, the Chinaman has to make an enormous number of characters before he can write his own language, so that, at the age of twenty-five, a diligent student has barely acquired the same amount of facility in reading and writing which is usually attained by an English child—using the twenty-six characters of his alphabet—at the age of ten; practically some four or five thousand characters suffice for average needs, and the convenience of "a system enabling those who speak mutually unintelligible idioms, to converse together, using the pencil instead of the tongue," caused the abandonment of an attempt to make nearer approach to an alphabetic system which was promoted by the Chinese Government some centuries ago.

In contrast to this, the Japanese, with that pliability which has helped to put them in the van of Oriental peoples, selected, as a result of contact with Buddhism, which came to them by way of China, certain signs from the wilderness of Chinese characters, and constituted these as their alphabet orirofaso called, on the acrologic principle (p. 104), from the names of its first signs, like our alphabet fromalpha,beta. Their language being polysyllabic, involved the result that whatever signs were used must be syllabic, and hence the adoption of a syllabary was easy. But, of course, like all syllabaries, this has the defect of necessitating the use of that larger number of signs with which the alphabet dispenses. The origin of the Japanese syllabaries, of which there are two, dates from theend of the ninth century of our Lord. One, the Hirakana, derived from a cursive form of Chinese called thetsauor "grass" character, contains about three hundred syllabic sound-signs; the other, known as the Katakana, is derived from thekyaior "model" type of the Chinese character, and is the simpler of the two in having only a single character for each of the forty-seven syllabic sounds in the Japanese language. But neither demands detailed treatment here, since with the intrusion of the Roman alphabet among Western imports into Japan its substitution for the cumbrous syllabaries is probably only a matter of brief time, and the Japanese script may then take its place with the Maya and the Aztec as a graphic curiosity.

Chinese is the official script of Corea, but the lower classes use a phonetic alphabet which, in the judgment of some authorities, is derived from a cursive form of the Nâgari script of India, having, so it is thought, been introduced by Buddhist teachers. Both past and present times afford striking examples of the influence of religion in the diffusion of alphabets, missionaries obviously making use of their own alphabet in the translation of their sacred books into the language of their converts. Whatever connection there may have been between Corean and Indian scripts is not, however, traceable, owing to the changes in the former. But in truth we know little about the matter, and there is something to be said in support of an old tradition that King Se-jo, who reigned five hundred years ago, commanded his chiefgrammarian, Song Sammun, to devise an alphabet that should supersede the cumbersome Chinese; whereupon that scholar took the Tibetan characters as foundation, but as those were only consonantal, he turned to the ancient Chinese and transformed six of its simplest radicals into the Corean vowels, naming the vowels and consonants "mother" and "child" respectively. The letters were "bunched together" so as to look like the Chinese characters (Fig. 38), the purpose being "to facilitate the transliteration of the Chinese text in a parallel column." There is a curious tradition, reminding us of the Chinese legend of the origin of writing, that the Corean characters were suggested by the straight and oblique lattice-work of the native doors.

Fig. 38.—Chinese and Tibetan Triglot

CUNEIFORM WRITING

Thus far curiosity alone gives the stimulus to acquaintance with ancient scripts—a feeling of aloofness attending all that we learn of Chinese, Maya, and other systems having no historical connection (for the derivation of Chinese from pre-Babylonian writing is not proved) with those from which our alphabet is probably derived. With the story of these the real interest begins, because within some of them lie the sources of the alphabets of the civilised world, while all of them have borne a share in the preservation of intellectual and spiritual treasures, the loss of which would have arrested the progress of the vigorous sections of mankind.

Dealing first with those of Mesopotamia, a romance, not lacking excitement, gathers round the wedge-shaped or cuneiform characters (Lat.cuneus, "a wedge") inscribed on clay tablets and cylinders, and on the great monuments of Assyria, Babylon, and other Oriental empires of past renown. The very existence of these relics was forgotten for some sixteen hundred years, and when they were unearthed from the rubbish-heaps of centuries, no one dreamed that any serious meaningwas to be attached to the fantastic angular-shaped characters which covered bricks and tablets. In 1621, Pietro della Valle, a Spanish traveller, visited the famous ruins of Persepolis, and he appears to have been the first to suspect that the arrow-headed signs were inscriptions, although he was unable to decipher them. He, however, made the shrewd observation that as the thick end of the supposed letters was never at the right but at the left of the oblique characters, the signs must have been written from left to right.

"Built on a great platform, artificially constructed for the purpose, which commands a wide plain, and has a lofty mountain shaped like an amphitheatre at its rear, the stranger ascends the spot by a magnificent staircase, or pair of staircases, which separate in opposite directions to meet at the summit. Here are the gigantic remains of several palaces, great porticos with winged bulls and reliefs representing, gods and princes. In the live rock of the mountains at the rear tombs have been hewn, evidently to receive the occupants of the palaces, and all the rocks and walls are covered with the cuneiform or arrow-headed inscriptions, consisting of very simple elements, which are nothing but thin wedges and angleswedgesbut with these elements combined in wonderful variety.... But no record of the language or its import had survived, and the ignorant inhabitants of the neighbourhood looked upon the texts with greater awe thanthey did the winged monsters that loomed over the plain. They were to them symbols of magic import, which, if duly pronounced, would unlock the hidden treasures guarded by the lions and the bulls." (Mahaffy'sProlegomena to Ancient History, p. 168.)

The savants of the seventeenth century were not "wiser in their generation" than the rude nomads who pitched their tents under the shadow of the stone monsters. Many years after Della Valle's visit the Oriental scholar, Hyde, in a book on the Ancient Persian Religion, soberly suggested that the signs were designed by some fantastic architect to show into how many combinations the same kind of stroke would enter. It is a wonder that he did not, with equal sobriety, suggest that they were related to the well-known Norman "hatchet-work." And so the guessing went on. One antiquary contended that they were talismanic signs; another that they were mystic formulæ of the priests, or astrological symbols of the old Chaldean star-worshippers; another saw in them a species of revealed digital language wherewith the Creator talked to Adam, whence the primitive speech of mankind was derived; while others conjectured them to be Chinese, or Samaritan, or Runic, or Ogam characters. Most fantastic of all, one ingenious theorist saw in them the action of numberless generations of worms!

But by the middle of the eighteenth century a sane school of investigators had found its leader. A great traveller, CarstenNiebuhr, father of the famous historian of early Rome, was the first to divine the true character of the inscriptions. He agreed with Della Valle that they were written from left to right, and he saw that they were made up of three different sets of characters, each meaning the same thing. But beyond showing, in his careful transcript published in 1764, that one of the three scripts was simpler in character than the others—all, as he assumed, being alphabetic varieties of one language—he could not go. The meaning still remained a mystery. Thirty years later, Münter, a Danish philologist, correctly guessed that the diagonal barwedge, which occurred frequently, was a sign for the separation of words, and, next, he discovered the vowel signs, which, as distinct characters, are absent from the Hebrew and other Semitic languages. This was a great step towards final decipherment. Herodotus (i. 125, &c.) speaks of the Achæmenid dynasty of Persian kings who were the lords of Asia in the sixth and fifth centuriesb.c.The ruins of Persepolis are identified as the remains of their palaces. Of this royal house the famous Darius was a member, and Herodotus tells how that monarch, "having gazed upon the Bosphorus, set up two pillars by it of white stone with characters cut upon them, on the one Assyrian and on the other Hellenic, being the names of all the nations which he was leading with him" (iv. 87). The engraving of the same inscription in two or more different languages (of course necessitated by making their decrees known to the various peoples whom they ruled) was thus shown to be a custom of the Persian kings.

Put upon the quest, a French scholar, M. de Sacy, born at Paris in 1758, copied some inscriptions of the Sassanid dynasty, which reigned in Persiaa.d.226-651. These were written in a known alphabet which is a mixture of Persian and Aramaic, called Pehlevi, and were shown by De Sacy to run in the following form:—"I, (M or W,) king of kings, son of (X,) king of kings, did thus and thus." Then, grouping together the several facts, came Dr. Georg Friedrich Grotefend, to formulate the theory that the Persepolitan inscriptions were written in three languages, and not three alphabets of one language, as Carsten Niebuhr had surmised. The recurrence of certain groups of characters led him to the inference that "the inscriptions were a fixed formula, only differing in the proper names." If these inscriptions began, like those read by De Sacy, with the formula,X, the king of kings, son of D, the king of kings, then it was clear that D was X's father; and, further, that D's father was not a king, because his name was not followed by that title, D being therefore the founder of a royal race. Now, Hystaspes, father of Darius, was not king, but satrap under Cambyses; and, joining his knowledge of history to his skill in philology, Grotefend found the key to the royal name. He lived for thirty years after this discovery, but added nothing to his triumph save "a fortunate guess of the name Nebuchadnezzar in one of theAssyrian inscriptions." Other decipherments followed; but it was reserved for the genius and industry of our countryman, the late Sir Henry Rawlinson, to discover the key whereby the ancient languages of Persia, Babylon, and Assyria can be read, and thus "a chapter of the world's history that had been well-nigh wholly lost made known to mankind." That eminent scholar in no wise exaggerated the importance of his work in claiming that its value in the interpretation of cuneiform writing is almost equal to that of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in the interpretation of the hieroglyphic texts of Egypt (Archæologia, xxxiv. p. 75).

Fig. 39.—Rock Inscription at Behistun

The story of Rawlinson's achievement is warrant of the claim. About sixty years ago, being then a lieutenant, he was sent to Persia to drill the army of the Shah. His interest in Oriental history and antiquities was already keen, and he was glad to find himself in regions rich in materials the obscurity of whose meaning quickened inquiry. Among these was a trilingual inscription, dating from the early part of the sixth centuryb.c., cut on the face of a bare precipitous rock at Behistun, about twenty miles from Kirmanshah, a district abounding in monuments of the past (Fig. 39). At the risk of life and limb he climbed the face of the steep cliff to make copies of such portions of the inscriptions as were accessible with the means at his command, and after a series of efforts, continued at intervals through several years, he finally secured a complete transcript of somuch of the writing as time had left uninjured. The inscription is in three languages—Babylonian, Mede or Scythian, and Persian—arranged in parallel columns containing above one thousand lines. It commemorates "the life and acts of Darius Hystaspes, his conquests, and the nations under his sway." Bas-reliefs portray that monarch, bow in hand, sitting with his feet on the prostrate usurper, Gaumates, while a train ofnine rebel princes, whose names are inscribed above their effigies, stand before the "king of kings," chained together by the neck. Two of the monarch's soldiers are in the rear. Over Gaumates is written: "This is Gaumates, the Magian; he lied; he said, I am Smerdis, son of Cyrus." The same formula occurs over the heads of each of the nine captives. "This is (M); he lied; he said he was king of (N)." The inscription begins with a solemn invocation to Ormuzd, the old Persian god of light and purity, and passes on to detail the claim of Darius to the throne of the Achæmenids and the possessions of the Persian crown. It tells of the defeat of Smerdis, and of the revolt of Susiana, a province lying between Persia and Babylonia. "I sent thither an army, and the rebel Atrina was brought in chains before me; I slew him." The same story is narrated concerning other rebellious subjects. Of one Phraortes, it is told that his nose, ears, and tongue were cut off, and that he was "crucified at Ecbatana, together with his accomplices." Then the inscription proceeds:

"King Darius saith: These countries rebelled against my power. By lies they were separated from me. The men thou seest here deceived my people. My army took them, according to my orders. King Darius saith: Oh, thou that shalt be king hereafter, see that thou art not guilty of deceit. Him that is wicked, judge as he should be judged, and if thou reignest thus thy kingdom will be great. King Darius saith: What I did, I did ever by the grace of Ormuzd. Thou that readest upon this stone my deeds, think not that thou hast been deceived, neither be thou slow to believe them. King Darius saith: Ormuzd bemy witness that I have not spoken these things with lying lips." (Cf.Transactions of Royal Asiatic Society, 1844-46, 1851; alsoLife of Sir Henry Rawlinson, pp. 146, 153, 326.)

As Professor Mahaffy points out, the exact correspondence of this record, "especially in the many proper names it contains, with the names of persons and provinces described by Herodotus, is a convincing proof of the accuracy of the deciphering. It will give some notion of the style of the documents that have been preserved. It will also prove the accuracy of the accounts given by Herodotus and Xenophon of the character of the ancient Persians, in whom an honest love of truth and hatred of lies was the prominent feature—a feature which we justly honour more than any other in a nation, but in which most Oriental nations, and indeed the Greeks also, were woefully deficient." (Prolegomena, p. 186.)

Sir Henry Rawlinson's decipherment of the great inscription of Behistun did perhaps more than aught else to open the long-closed door to the secret of Mesopotamian culture. The Persian inscription is in a language which is the mother-tongue of modern Persian, and its meaning being discovered, the interpretation of the Medic or Scythic, and of the Babylonian, the oldest of the three, followed, while the several characters supplied a valuable object-lesson in the stages of the development of writing from the ideographic through the syllabic, and thence of approach to the alphabetic.

Cuneiform writing appears to have been originally inscribed upon a vegetable substance calledlikhusi, but the abundant clay of the alluvial country afforded material whose convenience and permanence brought it into general use. Upon this the characters were impressed by a reed or square-shaped stylus, the clay-books being afterwards baked or sun-dried. For inscriptions on stone or metal a chisel was used. The writing of the Assyrian scribes is often exceedingly minute, the tablets containing a mass of matter in a tiny space. The work was trying enough to sometimes require the use of a magnifying-glass, and among Sir Austin Layard's discoveries at Nineveh was that of a lathe-turned crystal lens which was probably used for the purpose. Obviously the substances chosen account for the angular form of the characters; as the dyer's hand is "subdued to what it works in," so the nature of the material in which the sculptor seeks to express his conceptions largely determines for him the limits of that expression. Phidias himself could not have produced his Pallas Athene from the stubborn granite of Syene; and, as the outcome of the Egyptian temperament, the sphinxes of the Nile valley might have worn a less relentless look had they been fashioned of the marble of Pentelicus. Much as the abrupt cuneiform character tends, however, to obscure the traces of its derivation, there are sufficing proofs that it is of pictographic origin, although no examples of picture-writing in Mesopotamia corresponding in primitiveness to those already given frombarbaric sources have been discovered. In the linear Babylonian, as it is called, the hieroglyph for "sun" is a diamond-shaped figurewhich later on became, and in the latest cuneiform,. Evidently the earliest sign was a circle, which could not be easily traced on the stone or clay, and hence appears as the angular character shown above. The annexed table, which is a copy of one supplied by Mr. Pinches to Professor Keane, and published in his admirable monograph,Man Past and Present, gives a set of typical examples of the derivation of cuneiform characters from the earliest known pictographs.

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