Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/124

114 INSCRIPTION S 1 I. CUNEIFORM. INSCRIPTIONS in characters sometimes termed cunei form or wedge-shaped, sometimes arrow-headed, have been found throughout a large part of western Asia, in Persia and Babylonia, Assyria and Media, Armenia and Mesopotamia. The names given to the characters are derived from their form, as some of them resemble the points of arrows, though most have the appearance of wedges, thicker at one end than at the other. This appear ance is due to the fact that the characters were originally impressed upon moist clay by a metal stylus, and the form consequently assumed by them was subsequently imitated by the engraver upon stone and metal. The characters were primarily pictorial, but in course of time the outlines of the primitive pictures came to be alone preserved, while the nature of the writing materials caused curves to become angles, and rounded lines straight ones. Varieties of Cuneiform Writing. The original home of the cuneiform system of writing was either Elam or Babylonia, the inventors of the hieroglyphics in which it originated being the ancient Accadian population of Chaldea. It passed from the latter to a number of other nations, undergoing at the same time a variety of modifi cations. Ifc was first borrowed by the Semitic settlers in Babylonia and Assyria, and from them it was handed on to the Turanian tribes of India, the Alarodians of ancient Armenia, and the Aryans of Persia, while the Turanian inhabitants of Elam or Susiania preserved the system as it had been in use among the Accadians of Chaldea. In Babylonia, Assyria, Susiania, and Media the forms of the characters underwent several changes at succes sive periods, the tendency in each case being to simplify the characters by dropping superfluous wedges. In Baby lonia we have to distinguish between the archaic, the linear, the hieratic, and the later forms of the characters. The archaic forms are principally found on bricks and cylinders of the Accadian epoch (before 2000 B.C.), and are the oldest forms of the characters of which we have contemporary specimens. The linear forms were in use at the same time, and are marked off from the archaic forms by being written in continuous lines instead of a series of wedges, and sometimes also by a closer resemblance to the original pictures from which they were derived. The hieratic forms were mainly employed between the over throw of the Accadian power (about 1700 B.C.) and the 8th century B.C., more especially for contracts and similar docu ments. The later forms may be seen on the monuments of Nebuchadnezzar and his successors, a further modification of them being used for the Babylonian transcripts of the Persian cuneiform inscriptions. In Assyria also we may classify the characters as archaic, hieratic, and later (or Ninevite), though the forms they assumed in Assyria were not identical with those used in Babylonia which we have 1 Description of Plate I. 1-4, Cuneiform inscriptions on clay ; 5, Pisistratus inscription, on marble, from Athens (Athenaion, vi. p. 149); 6, 7, inscriptions from Dpdona, bronze (Carapanos, Doclone, pi. xxvii., fig. 1, and pi. xxiii., fig. 5) ; 8, archaic inscription on brown sandstone, from Olympia (Arch. Zeitung, 1879, p. 153) ; 9, inscription on bronze spear-head, from Olympia (Ibid., p. 149); 10, bonstrophedon inscrip tion on base at Athens (C. /. Gr. Alt., i. No. 463); 11, treaty be tween Elis and Henea, on bronze tablet, found at Olympia in 1813, now in British Museum (C. I. G r., No. 11); 12, archaic inscription on base at Athens (C. I. (, r. AtL, i. No. 480); 13, Latin inscription from Pompeii (Zangemeister, Inscript. Pariet. Pomj)., pi. xxiv., fig. 7); 14, Latin inscription (Kitsch!, Prise. Lat. Mon. Epig., pi. xxxviii., fig. d); 15, Latin inscription, tessera (Ibid., pi. ii., fig. ). called by similar names. The hieratic forms were mainly employed in Assyria for ornamental or religious purposes, and may be compared with our own black letter. In Susi ania the archaic forms of the characters lingered to the last, though in the northern part of the country simpli fied forms were in use. In Media a considerable differ ence may be observed between the peculiar forms of many characters in the older inscriptions of Mai-Amir and the forms borne by them in the Protomedic transcripts of the Persian monuments. The Armenian or Vannic characters were the same as those of Assyria, except that where one line or wedge had to be drawn across another, it was broken into two. But this was to prevent the stone from breaking at the point of section. It will be noticed that the cuneiform characters were employed to express very different languages. The Accadian, like the allied dialects of Susiania and primitive Media, was agglutinative, and probably belonged to the Ural-Altaic family of speech; Assyrian and later Baby lonian were Semitic ; Persian was East Aryan ; while the Armenian of Van seems to claim affinity with that Alarodian group of tongues of which Georgian may be regarded as the modern representative. The Origin and Development of the Cuneiform System of Writing. As already stated, the cuneiform characters were in their origin pictorial. In many cases it is possible to restore the primitive hieroglyphics or ideographs by the help of the archaic and linear Babylonian forms, and a fragment of a clay tablet has been discovered on which the pictorial originals of a few characters are given. In order to restore the primitive pictures, it is frequently necessary to turn a character upon its side, from which we may infer that the ideographs were once written vertically like Chinese. Thus ^ IV- the ideograph of "an eye," is plainly a representation of the eye in a vertical position. The primitive pictures denoted either objects or ideas, the latter being represented metaphorically by the picture of one or more objects. "Life," for example, was expressed by the picture of a growing flower, " a month " by placing the numeral xxx. within the circle of the sun, which symbolized the day. But the same picture might denote more than one idea or object. Thus the circle of the sun represented not only " the sun " and " the day," but also "light," "brilliance," and the like; and a pair of legs represented the ideas of "going," " walking," and "running." By combining two or more ideographs together, fresh ideas might be symbolized to an almost infinite extent ; " drink ing," for example, is denoted by placing the three drops which denoted water within the picture of the mouth, "language" by substituting the tongue for the three drops of water, and " a tear " by setting the ideograph of water before that of the eye. Out of this early picture-writing there soon grew a syllabary. Accadian was an agglutinative language, which was already largely affected by phonetic decay, the result being that on the one hand the same word might be used indifferently for noun, verb, and adverb, as in English, while on the other hand the loss of final sounds had reduced a great part of the vocabulary to the condition of mono syllables. Ideographs consequently came to ba associated with the sounds of the words which they primarily or most usually represented, and these words were mostly mono syllabic. Thus the ideograph of " month " (itii) was known as id or it, that of " going " (dun) as du, that of " drinking " as nak, that of a " tear " as ir.