The decipherment of cuneiform script
Already by the turn of the seventeeth century, European travellers
in the Near East had begun to notice traces of what appeared
to be writing, but in a totally unknown script. For many years
there was great doubt that this was actually writing at all;
even those who believed it was indeed writing feared that
its secrets could never be unlocked. Although the task of
deciphering this writing, now known as the cuneiform script,
was indeed hard work, it was not impossible. Progress was
slow, however, and the decisive breakthrough did not come
until the turn of the nineteenth century with the work of
a German schoolteacher, Georg Friedrich Grotefend, on Old
Persian inscriptions found at the ancient capital of the Persian
rulers, Persepolis. The names and titles of the famous kings
of Persia, Darius and Xerxes, acted as his key. Over the course
of the next half century, much progress was to be made in
the decipherment of cuneiform.
A British army officer, Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, copied
and published a trilingual (Old Persian, Elamite and Akkadian)
inscription which had been carved into the rock at Behistun,
in Iran. This longer inscription allowed more Old Persian
signs to be identified, and soon the Elamite version was also
deciphered. By this time another language written in cuneiform
script, Urartian (from the area around Lake Van), had also
largely been deciphered.
The Akkadian texts known from Behistun and in ever increasing
numbers from Mesopotamia itself posed a greater challenge;
this form of cuneiform script made use of many more characters,
and deployed them in differing ways. Some represented syllables,
others whole words, others still had a different function;
and not only could one sign be read several different ways,
but also different signs could be used to render the same
sound or word. Despite these obstacles, Akkadian soon yielded
to the efforts of the decipherers, with the Irish and French
scholars Edward Hincks and Jules Oppert leading the way.
A further challenge soon appeared, however. As Akkadian began
to surrender its secrets, it became clear that not all of
the Mesopotamian texts were written in this Semitic language.
For some time afterwards controversy surrounded this apparently
agglutinative language with no recognisable relation to any
other known; was it a real language or just a cryptography
of Akkadian scribes (as argued by the semitist, Joseph Halévy)?
After much heated debate and an avalanche of new textual material
from the French excavations at Al-Hiba, Sumerian was universally
recognised as a language.
In the last years of the nineteenth century examples of another
language written in cuneiform script began to come to notice.
German excavations at the the Anatolian site of Boghazköy
in the early years of the twentieth century unearthed thousands
of tablets written in this language. The language turned out
to be Hittite, the official language of the Hittite empire,
echoes of which empire were already resounding in the other
cuneiform sources.
In the 1930's, a new chapter in cuneiform studies was opened,
following the discovery of texts written in totally different
cuneiform script by a French expedition at the Syrian site
of Ugarit. This system looked similar to the cuneiform long
known from Mesopotamia but functioned very differently; instead
of being logo-syllabic, the Ugaritic script was alphabetic.
The language written in this cuneiform alphabet (of which
there is more than one version) is Semitic and soon the texts,
which included many myths and legends, were rendered comprehensible,
at least more or less.
Although the greater part of the decipherment process has
now been accomplished, many smaller challenges still lie ahead.
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