Of this whole period no trace has been left in the native country. The stream of development there rolled on, and the native energy of Asiatic humanity led to such a gigantic development, that Kham appeared, even to the Semite, only as an impure stranger. Of the two families, the eastern took by far the higher flight, and its most favoured branches attained a much more perfect organic structure in language, art, and science than the western.

In all the other languages belonging to the family of Sem, the pure historical Semitism appears already so perfectly formed, that there would be an immense chasm left between Khamitism and Semitism if the language of the cuneiform inscriptions did not most auspiciously furnish us with the bridge from that most ancient deposit of the ante-Noachian idiom of primitive Asia to historical Semitism. This important fact we are now going to lay before our readers.

B.

THE ANCIENT CHALDEE,

OR THE LANGUAGE OF THE CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS OF BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA, AND ITS DAUGHTERS.

I.

The Language of the Cuneiform Inscriptions of Babylonia.

In the paper read by me at Oxford, in 1847, the question was discussed whether the two great nations, the Babylonians and Assyrians, were Semites or not, and the reasons were assigned which induced me to decide this question in the affirmative. We have now obtained, by the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions, documentary certainty of this fact. It appears also, from these monuments, that, from the fifth to the ninth century B. C. at least, the cuneiform records of Nineveh and of Babylon represent only slightly differing dialects, more with orthographical than any other difference. But I believe, besides, that we are now authorized in recognizing this language as the sacred language of the ancient Chaldeans. We may also call it the ancient Chaldee, in opposition to the vulgar Chaldee which we find in its last stage in the book of Daniel, the Targums, and the Talmud, but which can be traced to a much higher age. From this vulgar language, which is identical, in all essential points, with the Syrian, that of the cuneiform inscriptions differs more widely than the Old High German of the time of Charlemagne differs from the High German of Goethe, and fully as much as ancient from modern Greek. In order to justify these assertions, within the limits and for the principal object of this book, I shall lay before my readers sufficient grammatical and lexicographical facts to enable them to judge for themselves. But, before proceeding to this exposition, I shall first give the outlines of the history of the decipherment of this class of cuneiform inscriptions, and then explain the elements of the method adopted by me, and the historical results which I believe may be deduced from them.

1. Rawlinson and Hincks.

It is generally known that we owe this great and most important discovery to the sagacity and persevering zeal of Colonel Rawlinson, and to the use he has made of his own conquest, the trilingual inscription of Behistun (Bagistana). This inscription contains a recital of the deeds of Darius, by himself, in Persian for the ruling nation and the Medes, who had one language in common; in Aramaic for the inhabitants of conquered Babylonia and Assyria; and (as Rawlinson had most sensibly guessed, and Mr. Norris has since proved) in a Turanian language for the Transoxanian or Scythian populations. This last writing is commonly called the second. Combined with the tablets of Persepolis and Nakshi Rustam, the inscription gives a very considerable number of proper names of persons, countries, and nations. The Persian text having been most satisfactorily deciphered, with the aid of Burnouf's and Lassen's alphabets, corrected and completed by Rawlinson, there was evidently but one safe process in finding out the writing of the third. Enough was known of the second text (generally called the Median by a most unwarranted assumption) to prove that its language was not Semitic; Rawlinson, therefore, most naturally brought the third into connexion with the inscribed bricks and slabs of Nineveh and Babylon, which present the same system, but in a more complicated form.

The proper names, thus identified, amounted to about ninety. It is impossible not to see that this number was sufficient to identify a very considerable number of signs. But these proper names are generally connected with common nouns or verbs (as king, father, son, or, he says, conquered, killed) which could be made out by the signs already deciphered, at least as far as their meaning is concerned. When, by a patient comparison of all the available texts, a sure philological basis had thus been obtained, the investigation of the other words and the grammatical forms was commenced. The Semitic character of the language soon became evident to Colonel Rawlinson. But a great and almost insuperable difficulty presented itself. The number of signs was found far to exceed the range of an alphabet or of a syllabarium. There were thirty-nine Persian signs, all alphabetical, besides a sign of distinction of punctuation, but the Babylonian and Assyrian inscriptions furnished about 250 cha

racters. Of these, Colonel Rawlinson identified about 100 by the alphabet obtained through the proper names; and fifty more by the further analytical process. Of these 250 signs, he concluded that the greatest part must, of course, be ideographic. He was thus thrown upon the hieroglyphical system as the basis of Babylonian writing; a view which I heard Burnouf express in 1838, and which he demonstrated to me upon a brick which contained signs of mixed writing. But Rawlinson did not meet with the facilities of the Egyptian system, which certainly, when once understood, is as simple as it is ingenious. On the contrary, one and the same character was evidently both phonetic and ideographic, and appeared to be even pronounced in more than one way when used ideographically. Almost all the names of gods and kings were found to be written ideographically; and so strangely, too, that, if they had not been more or less known through the Scriptures and the Greek writers, few could have been identified except by mere guesses. Indeed, Sennakherib and Sargina were at first guessed at, the one by Dr. Hincks, the other by Dr. Loewenstein. Lastly, the knowledge that the language was a Semitic one did not furnish so much assistance here as the Coptic did in Egyptological researches. The Coptic and the Old Egyptian must have been, on the whole, one and the same language, that of the same country: but what was the language of Babylonia and of Assyria? Were they the same? were they Hebrew? They certainly were not what is now called Chaldee, the language of Daniel and of the Targums. There were ideographs for king and son, indicated by the context: was king melek or sar? was son ben or bar? or, perhaps, some third word?

The first two chapters of the memoir on the Persian inscriptions at Behistun, written at Bagdad in 1845, and published in 1846, prove that Rawlinson, at that early date, recognized the Semitic character of the third writing and the linguistic identity of the Babylonian and Assyrian monuments. He had found out, moreover, the unsoundness of the Median hypothesis as to the second column, and gave very good reasons for supposing the language to be Scythian and therefore Turanian. As regards the Semitic inscriptions, these chapters bear evidence to the fact that he intended to examine the language, after he had obtained a solid groundwork by a greater number of proper names (p. 29.). This he accomplished by patient investigation of identical or cognate texts. The general results of this method are clearly stated in his lectures delivered in London, in

January and February 1850, by way of a popular introduction to the interpretation of various lists of great historical interest, which he had translated by the help of his key.

Dr. Hincks had already, in 1846 (Transactions of Royal Irish Academy, vol. xxi.), given a list of seventy-six characters of the third order, with their corresponding signs in the Babylonian monuments. In an acute and learned dissertation on the Khorsabad inscriptions, read before the Royal Irish Academy, in June 1849, but printed in 1850, the ingenious author adheres to his Babylonian alphabet, with four, or rather two, exceptions. He acknowledges the identity of all the Assyrian inscriptions with the third order of the Achæmenidian inscriptions, and with the Babylonian texts. The Van inscriptions he believes to belong to an Indo-European idiom. As to the second Achæmenidian column, he attempts to justify the name of Median, and claims for it the character of an Iranian language, although, perhaps, mixed with a Tatar element. Entering, then, into the discussion respecting eight Khorsabad characters, he shows some of them to be ideographic, having also a phonetic value, some to be merely ideographic, and others to represent sometimes, in addition, words with a complement. He recognizes also the existence of phonetic characters, the ideographic value of which has no phonetic relationship with their sound. As an illustration, he quotes the letter I in English, which is used to denote the ninth sound of the alphabet, and read sometimes "one," sometimes. "the first." After adducing instances of these different kinds of signs, he applies his alphabet to the royal names of the Assyrian dynasties; but, as he afterwards himself acknowledges, not very successfully. Nabukodrossor (whose name had already been identified) reads, in his interpretation, Nabie-cudurray-uchar: the builder of the southwest palace at Nimroud Aður-ka-dan, or Aður- k-aður, which he identifies with Assaradinos of the Canon, or Assarhaddon of the Bible. Of the name of his father, who built the palace of Koyunjik, and who must have been Sennakherib, he identifies only the former part as San-ka, or, allowing a plural sign, Sankayi, which might be Sanki, which might be Sankin. As to Sennakherib's father (Sargon), he thinks the true reading would be Ci-k'u-ab- aður, which, however, answers to no name; he therefore attempts to show that it might also be read Kinnil-li-n'ā, or Kinnil-li-n'u, Kinniladan of the Canon (626-604 B. c.), or rather Khinziros of Ptolemy's Canon (696—691). To obviate the chronological difficulties, Dr. Hincks proposes various