The Greatest Empires & Civilizations of the Ancient East: Egypt, Babylon, The Kings of Israel and Judah, Assyria, Media, Chaldea, Persia, Parthia & Sasanian Empire. George Rawlinson

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      This mode of writing, which has been called without much reason “the hieratic,” and of which we have but a small number of instances, has confirmed a conjecture, originally suggested by the early cuneiform writing itself, that the characters were at first the pictures of objects. In some cases the pictorial representation is very plain and palpable. For instance, the “determinative” of a god—the sign that is, which marks that the name of a god is about to follow, in this early rectilinear writing is an eight-rayed star. The archaic cuneiform keeps closely to this type, merely changing the lines into wedges, thus , while the later cuneiform first unites the oblique wedges in one , and then omits them as unnecessary, retaining only the perpendicular and the horizontal ones . Again, the character representing the word “hand” is, in the rectilinear writing , in the archaic cuneiform , in the later cuneiform . The five lines (afterwards reduced to four) clearly represent the thumb and the four fingers. So the character ordinarily representing “a house” is evidently formed from the original , the ground-plan of a house; and that denoting “the sun” , comes from , through , and , the original being the best representation that straight lines could give of the sun. In the case of ka, “a gate,” we have not the original design; but we may see posts, bars, and hinges in , the ordinary character.

      Another curious example of the pictorial origin of the letters is furnished by the character , which is the French une, the feminine of “one.” This character may be traced up through several known forms to an original picture, which is thus given on a Koyunjik tablet . It has been conjectured that the object here represented is “a sarcophagus.” But the true account seems to be that it is a double-toothed comb, a toilet article peculiar to women, and therefore one which might well be taken to express “a woman,” or more generally the feminine gender. It is worth notice that the emblem is the very one still in use among the Lurs, in the mountains overhanging Babylonia. And it is further remarkable that the phonetic power of the character here spoken of is it (or yat)the ordinary Semitic feminine ending.

      The original writing, it would therefore seem, was a picture-writing as rude as that of the Mexicans. Objects were themselves represented, but coarsely and grotesquely—and, which is especially remarkable, without any curved lines. This would seem to indicate that the system grew up where a hard material, probably stone, was alone used. The cuneiform writing arose when clay took the place of stone as a material. A small tool with a square or triangular point, impressed, by a series of distinct touches, the outline of the old pictured objects on the soft clay of tablets and bricks. In course of time simplifications took place. The less important wedges were omitted. One stroke took the place of two, or sometimes of three. In this way the old form of objects became, in all but a few cases, very indistinct; while generally it was lost altogether.

      Originally each character had, it would seem, the phonetic power of the name borne by the object which it represented. But, as this namee was different in the languages of the different tribes inhabiting the country, the same character came often to have several distinct phonetic values. For instance, the character representing “a house,” had the phonetic values of e, bit, and mal, because those were the words expressive of “a house,” among the Hamitic, Semitic, and Arian populations respectively. Again, characters did not always retain their original phonetic powers, but abbreviated them. Thus the character which originally stood for Assur, “Assyria,” came to have the sound of as, that denoting bil, “a lord,” had in addition the sound of bi, and so on. Under these circumstances it is almost impossible to feel any certainty in regard to the phonetic representation of a single line of these old inscriptions. The meaning of each word may be well known; but the articulate sounds which were in the old times attached to them may be matter almost of conjecture.

      The Chaldaean characters are of three kinds-letters proper, monograms, and determinatives. With regard to the letters proper, there is nothing particular to remark, except that they have almost always a syllabic force. The monograms represent in a brief way, by a wedge or a group of wedges, an entire word, often of two or three syllables, as Nebo, Babil, Merodach, etc. The determinatives mark that the word which they accompany is a word of a certain class, as a god, a man, a country, a town, etc. These last, it is probable, were not sounded at all when the word was read. They served, in some degree, the purpose of our capital letters, in the middle of sentences, but gave more exact notice of the nature of the coming word. Curiously enough, they are retained sometimes, СКАЧАТЬ