A History of Science Volume IV Part 15

Young's initial studies of the Rosetta Stone were made in 1814; his later publication bore date of 1819. Champollion's first announcement of results came in 1822; his second and more important one in 1824. By this time, through study of the cartouches of other inscriptions, Champollion had made out almost the complete alphabet, and the "riddle of the Sphinx" was practically solved. He proved that the Egyptians had developed a relatively complete alphabet (mostly neglecting the vowels, as early Semitic alphabets did also) centuries before the Phoenicians were heard of in history. What relation this alphabet bore to the Phoenician we shall have occasion to ask in another connection; for the moment it suffices to know that those strange pictures of the Egyptian scroll are really letters.

Even this statement, however, must be in a measure modified. These pictures are letters and something more. Some of them are purely alphabetical in character and some are symbolic in another way.

Some characters represent syllables. Others stand sometimes as mere representatives of sounds, and again, in a more extended sense, as representations of things, such as all hieroglyphics doubtless were in the beginning. In a word, this is an alphabet, but not a perfected alphabet, such as modern nations are accustomed to; hence the enormous complications and difficulties it presented to the early investigators.

Champollion did not live to clear up all these mysteries. His work was taken up and extended by his pupil Rossellini, and in particular by Dr.

Richard Lepsius in Germany, followed by M. Bernouf, and by Samuel Birch of the British Museum, and more recently by such well-known Egyptologists as MM. Maspero and Mariette and Chabas, in France, Dr.

Brugsch, in Germany, and Dr. E. Wallis Budge, the present head of the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum. But the task of later investigators has been largely one of exhumation and translation of records rather than of finding methods.

TREASURES FROM NINEVEH

The most casual wanderer in the British Museum can hardly fail to notice two pairs of ma.s.sive sculptures, in the one case winged bulls, in the other winged lions, both human-headed, which guard the entrance to the Egyptian hall, close to the Rosetta Stone. Each pair of these weird creatures once guarded an entrance to the palace of a king in the famous city of Nineveh. As one stands before them his mind is carried back over some twenty-seven intervening centuries, to the days when the "Cedar of Lebanon" was "fair in his greatness" and the scourge of Israel.

The very Sculptures before us, for example, were perhaps seen by Jonah when he made that famous voyage to Nineveh some seven or eight hundred years B.C. A little later the Babylonian and the Mede revolted against a.s.syrian tyranny and descended upon the fair city of Nineveh, and almost literally levelled it to the ground. But these great sculptures, among other things, escaped destruction, and at once hidden and preserved by the acc.u.mulating debris of the centuries, they stood there age after age, their very existence quite forgotten. When Xenophon marched past their site with the ill-starred expedition of the ten thousand, in the year 400 B.C., he saw only a mound which seemed to mark the site of some ancient ruin; but the Greek did not suspect that he looked upon the site of that city which only two centuries before had been the mistress of the world.

So ephemeral is fame! And yet the moral scarcely holds in the sequel; for we of to-day, in this new, undreamed-of Western world, behold these mementos of a.s.syrian greatness fresh from their twenty-five hundred years of entombment, and with them records which restore to us the history of that long-forgotten people in such detail as it was not known to any previous generation since the fall of Nineveh. For two thousand five hundred years no one saw these treasures or knew that they existed.

One hundred generations of men came and went without once p.r.o.nouncing the name of kings Shalmaneser or Asumazirpal or Asurbanipal. And to-day, after these centuries of oblivion, these names are restored to history, and, thanks to the character of their monuments, are a.s.sured a permanency of fame that can almost defy time itself. It would be nothing strange, but rather in keeping with their previous mutations of fortune, if the names of Asurn.a.z.irpal and Asurbanipal should be familiar as household words to future generations that have forgotten the existence of an Alexander, a Caesar, and a Napoleon. For when Macaulay's prospective New Zealander explores the ruins of the British Museum the records of the ancient a.s.syrians will presumably still be there unscathed, to tell their story as they have told it to our generation, though every ma.n.u.script and printed book may have gone the way of fragile textures.

But the past of the a.s.syrian sculptures is quite necromantic enough without conjuring for them a necromantic future. The story of their restoration is like a brilliant romance of history. Prior to the middle of this century the inquiring student could learn in an hour or so all that was known in fact and in fable of the renowned city of Nineveh. He had but to read a few chapters of the Bible and a few pages of Diodorus to exhaust the important literature on the subject. If he turned also to the pages of Herodotus and Xenophon, of Justin and Aelian, these served chiefly to confirm the suspicion that the Greeks themselves knew almost nothing more of the history of their famed Oriental forerunners. The current fables told of a first King Ninus and his wonderful queen Semiramis; of Sennacherib the conqueror; of the effeminate Sardanapalus, who neglected the warlike ways of his ancestors but perished gloriously at the last, with Nineveh itself, in a self-imposed holocaust. And that was all. How much of this was history, how much myth, no man could say; and for all any one suspected to the contrary, no man could ever know.

And to-day the contemporary records of the city are before us in such profusion as no other nation of antiquity, save Egypt alone, can at all rival. Whole libraries of a.s.syrian books are at hand that were written in the seventh century before our era. These, be it understood, are the original books themselves, not copies. The author of that remote time appeals to us directly, hand to eye, without intermediary transcriber.

And there is not a line of any Hebrew or Greek ma.n.u.script of a like age that has been preserved to us; there is little enough that can match these ancient books by a thousand years. When one reads Moses or Isaiah, Homer, Hesiod, or Herodotus, he is but following the transcription--often unquestionably faulty and probably never in all parts perfect--of successive copyists of later generations. The oldest known copy of the Bible, for example, dates probably from the fourth century A.D., a thousand years or more after the last a.s.syrian records were made and read and buried and forgotten.

There was at least one king of a.s.syria--namely, Asurbanipal, whose palace boasted a library of some ten thousand volumes--a library, if you please, in which the books were numbered and shelved systematically, and cla.s.sified and cared for by an official librarian. If you would see some of the doc.u.ments of this marvellous library you have but to step past the winged lions of Asurn.a.z.irpal and enter the a.s.syrian hall just around the corner from the Rosetta Stone. Indeed, the great slabs of stone from which the lions themselves are carved are in a sense books, inasmuch as there are written records inscribed on their surface. A glance reveals the strange characters in which these records are written, graven neatly in straight lines across the stone, and looking to casual inspection like nothing so much as random flights of arrow-heads. The resemblance is so striking that this is sometimes called the arrow-head character, though it is more generally known as the wedge or cuneiform character.

The inscriptions on the flanks of the lions are, however, only makeshift books. But the veritable books are no farther away than the next room beyond the hall of Asurn.a.z.irpal. They occupy part of a series of cases placed down the centre of this room. Perhaps it is not too much to speak of this collection as the most extraordinary set of doc.u.ments of all the rare treasures of the British Museum, for it includes not books alone, but public and private letters, business announcements, marriage contracts--in a word, all the species of written records that enter into the every-day life of an intelligent and cultured community.

But by what miracle have such doc.u.ments been preserved through all these centuries? A glance makes the secret evident. It is simply a case of time-defying materials. Each one of these a.s.syrian doc.u.ments appears to be, and in reality is, nothing more or less than an inscribed fragment of brick, having much the color and texture of a weathered terra-cotta tile of modern manufacture. These slabs are usually oval or oblong in shape, and from two or three to six or eight inches in length and an inch or so in thickness. Each of them was originally a portion of brick-clay, on which the scribe indented the flights of arrowheads with some sharp-cornered instrument, after which the doc.u.ment was made permanent by baking. They are somewhat fragile, of course, as all bricks are, and many of them have been more or less crumbled in the destruction of the palace at Nineveh; but to the ravages of mere time they are as nearly invulnerable as almost anything in nature. Hence it is that these records of a remote civilization have been preserved to us, while the similar records of such later civilizations as the Grecian have utterly perished, much as the flint implements of the cave-dweller come to us unchanged, while the iron implements of a far more recent age have crumbled away.

HOW THE RECORDS WERE READ

After all, then, granted the choice of materials, there is nothing so very extraordinary in the mere fact of preservation of these ancient records. To be sure, it is vastly to the credit of nineteenth-century enterprise to have searched them out and brought them back to light.

But the real marvel in connection with them is the fact that nineteenth-century scholarship should have given us, not the material doc.u.ments themselves, but a knowledge of their actual contents. The flight of arrow-heads on wall or slab or tiny brick have surely a meaning; but how shall we guess that meaning? These must be words; but what words? The hieroglyphics of the Egyptians were mysterious enough in all conscience; yet, after all, their symbols have a certain suggestiveness, whereas there is nothing that seems to promise a mental leverage in the unbroken succession of these cuneiform dashes. Yet the a.s.syrian scholar of to-day can interpret these strange records almost as readily and as surely as the cla.s.sical scholar interprets a Greek ma.n.u.script. And this evidences one of the greatest triumphs of nineteenth-century scholarship, for within almost two thousand years no man has lived, prior to our century, to whom these strange inscriptions would not have been as meaningless as they are to the most casual stroller who looks on them with vague wonderment here in the museum to-day. For the a.s.syrian language, like the Egyptian, was veritably a dead language; not, like Greek and Latin, merely pa.s.sed from practical every-day use to the closet of the scholar, but utterly and absolutely forgotten by all the world. Such being the case, it is nothing less than marvellous that it should have been restored.

It is but fair to add that this restoration probably never would have been effected, with a.s.syrian or with Egyptian, had the language in dying left no cognate successor; for the powers of modern linguistry, though great, are not actually miraculous. But, fortunately, a language once developed is not blotted out in toto; it merely outlives its usefulness and is gradually supplanted, its successor retaining many traces of its origin. So, just as Latin, for example, has its living representatives in Italian and the other Romance tongues, the language of a.s.syria is represented by cognate Semitic languages. As it chances, however, these have been of aid rather in the later stages of a.s.syrian study than at the very outset; and the first clew to the message of the cuneiform writing came through a slightly different channel.

Curiously enough, it was a trilingual inscription that gave the clew, as in the case of the Rosetta Stone, though with very striking difference withal. The trilingual inscription now in question, instead of being a small, portable monument, covers the surface of a ma.s.sive bluff at Behistun in western Persia. Moreover, all three of its inscriptions are in cuneiform characters, and all three are in languages that at the beginning of our 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 a.s.syrian queen Semiramis. Tradition was 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 actual risk of life and limb copied this wonderful inscription, and through interpreting it became the veritable "father of a.s.syriology," 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 strange record, and had reported that it was impossible to reach the inscription. 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 himself soon, a.s.sisted by a host of others, proceeded to elaborate.

The key to the value of this unique 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 neighbors, the a.s.syrians, 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-head a mult.i.tude of syllabic characters, including many h.o.m.ophones, as had been and continued to be the custom with the a.s.syrians, the Persians selected a few of these characters and ascribed to them phonetic values that were almost purely alphabetic. In a word, while retaining the wedge as the basal stroke of their script, they developed an alphabet, making the last wonderful a.n.a.lysis of phonetic sounds which even to this day has escaped the Chinese, which the Egyptians had only partially effected, and which the Phoenicians were accredited by the Greeks with having introduced to 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 a.s.syrians and Egyptians, but from the early Greek scribes as well.

Thanks to these simplifications, the old Persian language had 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 Renouf, in France, and by La.s.sen, 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 be at least 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 Ptolemaics 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.

But fortune, which had been at once so kind and so tantalizing in the case of the Rosetta Stone, had dealt more gently with the Behistun inscriptions; for no fewer than ninety proper names were preserved in the Persian portion and duplicated, in another character, in the a.s.syrian inscription. A study of these gave a clew to the sounds of the a.s.syrian 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 h.o.m.ophones, 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 a.s.syrian 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 Julian Schrader, in Germany, though a host of other scholars soon entered the field.

This great linguistic feat was accomplished about the middle of the nineteenth century. But so great a feat was it that many scholars of the highest standing, including Joseph Erneste Renan, in France, and Sir G.

Cornewall Lewis, in England, declined at first to accept the results, contending that the a.s.syriologists had merely deceived themselves by creating an arbitrary language. The matter was put to a 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 interpretations of a hitherto untranslated a.s.syrian 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 pa.s.sages--in short, as closely similar as translations from the obscure texts of any difficult language ever are. This decision gave the work of the a.s.syriologists official status, and the reliability of their method has never since been in question. Henceforth a.s.syriology was an established science.

APPENDIX

REFERENCE-LIST

CHAPTER I. MODERN DEVELOPMENT OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES

(1) Robert Boyle, Philosophical Works (3 vols.). London, 1738.

CHAPTER II. THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN CHEMISTRY

(1) For a complete account of the controversy called the "Water Controversy," see The Life of the Hon. Henry Cavendish, by George Wilson, M.D., F.R.S.E. London, 1850.

(2) Henry Cavendish, in Phil. Trans. for 1784, P. 119.

(3) Lives of the Philosophers of the Time of George III., by Henry, Lord Brougham, F.R.S., p. 106. London, 1855.

(4) Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, by Joseph Priestley (3 vols.). Birmingham, 790, vol. II, pp. 103-107.

(5) Lectures on Experimental Philosophy, by Joseph Priestley, lecture IV., pp. 18, ig. J. Johnson, London, 1794.

(6) Translated from Scheele's Om Brunsten, eller Magnesia, och dess Egenakaper. Stockholm, 1774, and published as Alembic Club Reprints, No.

13, 1897, p. 6.

(7) According to some writers this was discovered by Berzelius.

(8) Histoire de la Chimie, par Ferdinand Hoefer. Paris, 1869, Vol. CL, p. 289.

(9) Elements of Chemistry, by Anton Laurent Lavoisier, translated by Robert Kerr, p. 8. London and Edinburgh, 1790.

(10) Ibid., pp. 414-416.

CHAPTER III. CHEMISTRY SINCE THE TIME OF DALTON

(1) Sir Humphry Davy, in Phil. Trans., Vol. VIII.

CHAPTER IV. ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

(1) Baas, History of Medicine, p. 692.

(2) Based on Thomas H. Huxley's Presidential Address to the British a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Science, 1870.

(3) Essays on Digestion, by James Carson. London, 1834, p. 6.

(4) Ibid., p. 7.