CHAPTER IV.

THE DECIPHERMENT OF THE ASSYRIAN AND BABYLONIAN

INSCRIPTIONS.

It was Niebuhr, as we have seen, whose accurate eye first detected the three different systems of cuneiform writing of which the inscriptions at Persepolis consist, and which we now know to be the Persian, Susian, and Babylonian versions of the same text, which Darius and Xerxes thus made known to the principal "nations and languages" of their empire. It was long, however, before it was discovered that the third of these systems was that of the Babylonians. Pietro della Valle had brought home to Italy bricks from the ruins of Babylon at the beginning of the seventeenth century, but the characters stamped upon these bricks do not seem to have occupied his attention, nor that of Kircher, who received one of these bricks for his museum in Rome. Kaempfer published one of the Babylonian inscriptions at Persepolis in 1712, but so carelessly that no profit was derived from it. The first traveller who remarked the inscriptions on the bricks of Babylon was the Father Emmanuel de Saint Albert, already mentioned in Chapter I., whose report provided

D'Anville with the material for his memoir on the position of Babylon in 1755. Then came Niebuhr, who observed many inscribed clay tablets and bricks among the ruins near Hillah, but did not identify the writing on them with the third system employed at Persepolis. The Abbé Beauchamp (1785) particularly noticed the inscriptions on the bricks of Babylon, and sent some specimens of the bricks to Paris, where they were stored in the National Library, the keeper of which, Millin, published some of the inscriptions, and had plaster casts of them taken and sent to various scholars of Europe.

The East India Company, always an enlightened body, had been aroused by the reports of the recent identification of the ruins of Babylon, and of the inscriptions in unknown characters which had been found among them. Consequently, in a public letter to Bombay, dated October 18th, 1797, they declare that

Being always desirous to lend their assistance to those who may be employed in the elucidation of Oriental antiquities, and being informed that near the town of Hillah, on the River Euphrates, there exist the remains of a very large and magnificent city, supposed to be Babylon; and that the bricks of which those ruins are composed, are remarkable for containing on an indented scroll or label, apparently a distich, in characters totally different from any now made use of in the East;"

they have decided to direct the Governor of Bombay

"to give orders to their resident at Bassorah to procure from thence ten or a dozen of the bricks, and to transmit them, carefully packed up, as early as possible to Bombay, that they might be thence forwarded to them in one of their ships sailing for England."

Here we have the beginning of the taste for collecting Babylonian antiquities in England which has finally brought into existence the unequalled galleries of the Assyrian Department of the British Museum. Hager, in 1801, published the inscription upon these bricks; it contains the name and titles of Nebuchadnezzar :

"I am Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, maintainer of the temples of Bit-Saggil and Bit-Zida; princely son of Nabopolassar, king of Babylon."

But, of course, the inscription was not read or translated till long after. It is found with slight variations on the thousands of bricks dug up among the ruins of Babylon, and employed to build modern houses at Hillah and elsewhere.

It was about this time that André Michaux, a botanist, visited Mesopotamia in pursuit of his studies, and found near the ruins of Ctesiphon a polished piece of grey limestone marble, carved with figures of monstrous animals, and engraved with characters similar to those which had been remarked on the Babylonian bricks, and in some ways resembling those of the now well-known inscriptions at Persepolis. On his return to France, Michaux presented this monument to the Cabinet des Antiques of the National Library, the keeper of which, the learned Millin, published a full account of it in 1802. The Caillou Michaux, as it was called, was henceforth, through its publication, one of the principal examples of the Babylonian writing in Europe; it formed one of the chief problems for Oriental philologists to solve. But

now, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were a certain number of cuneiform inscriptions in every museum of Europe, consisting of inscribed bricks and cylindrical seals of hæmatite or carnelian, with characters engraved upon them.

At the beginning of the present century Münter, Tychsen, and Grotefend were busying themselves with the attempt to decipher the inscriptions at Persepolis, as published by Niebuhr; and it occurred to Lichtenstein to study another monument in cuneiform characters apparently similar to those of Persia. He took the Caillou Michaux as the object of his studies. But Lichtenstein had no definite process to follow, such as that which led his colleagues to fruitful results; he seems to have thought that inspiration might take the place of scientific method. He was like Alastor in the Egyptian temples

"Among the ruined temples there,
Stupendous columns, and wild images

Of more than man, where marble demons watch
The zodiac's brazen mystery, and dead men

Hang their mute thoughts on the mute walls around,

He lingered, poring on memorials

Of the world's youth; through the long burning day
Gazed on those speechless shapes; nor when the moon
Filled the mysterious halls with floating shades

Suspended he that task, but ever gazed

And gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind
Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw

The thrilling secrets of the birth of time.”

Shelley does not tell us what were the results of Alastor's inspired decipherment of the hieroglyphics,

*Shelley, "Alastor," 118-129.