Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/50

30 A HISTORY OF ART IN CILALDJ-:A AND ASSYRIA. their groups never lost the phonetic value assigned to them by their first inventors. 1 In the absence of this extended employment all attempts to decipher the wedges would have been condemned to almost certain failure from the first, but as soon as its existence had been placed beyond doubt, there was every reason to count upon success. It allowed the words of a text to be transliterated into phonetic characters, and that being done, to discover their meaning was but an affair of time, patience, and method. We see then, that the system of signs invented by the first inhabitants of Chaldsea had a vogue similar to that which attended the alphabet of the Phoenicians in the Mediterranean basin. For all the peoples of Western Asia it was a powerful agent of progress and civilization. We can understand, therefore, how it was that the wedge, the essential element of all those groups which make up cuneiform writing, became for the Assyrian one of the holy symbols of the divine intelligence. Upon the stone called the Cail Ion MicJiaud, from the name of its discoverer, it is shown standing upon an altar and receiving the prayers and homage of a priest.' 2 It deserved all the respect it received ; thanks to it the Babylonian genius was able to rough out and hand down to posterity the science from which Greece was to profit so largely. And yet, in spite of all the services it had rendered, this form of writing fell into disuse towards the commencement of our era ; it was supplanted even in the country of its origin by alphabets derived from that of the Phoenicians. 3 It had one grave defect : its 1 A list of these languages, and a condensed but lucid explanation of the researches which have led to the more or less complete decipherment of the different groups of texts will be found in the Manuel de P Histoire andenne de V Orient of LENORMANT, 3rd edition, vol. ii. pp. 153, &c. "Several languages we know of five up to the present moment -have given the same phonetic value to these symbols. It is clear, however, that a single nation must have invented the system," OPPERT, Journal Asiatiquc, 1875, p. 474. M. Oppert has given an interesting account of the mode of decipherment in the Introduction and in Chapter I. of the first volume of his Expedition sdentifique de Me^opotainie. - A reproduction of this stone will be found farther on. The detail in question is engraved in LAYARD'S Nineveh and its Remains, vol. ii. p. 181. 3 The latest cuneiform inscription we possess dates from the time of Domitian. It has been published by M. OPPERT, Melanges a" 1 Archeologie egyptienne et assyrienne, vol. i. p. 23 (Vieweg, 1873, 4to.). Some very long ones, from the time of the Seleiicidre and the early Arsacidce, have been discovered.